"Would you like it if someone kept a piece of one of your relatives after they died? Without even asking your permission or letting you know what they were doing?"
Wandering off-topic a bit, this is pretty much the same thing that happened in the Middle Ages to people who were deemed destined for sainthood -- people would dismember their corpses for relics. In some cases, the whole body was systematically chopped up into preserved parts.
The church, IIRC, didn't share your opinion of this practice -- most holy places kept reliquaries with these little bits o' saint (among other things, like Saint Soandso's chamberpot, or the ubiquitous "pieces of the True Cross"). A good reliquary would enhance the prestige of these holy places -- the same sort of logic as a trophy case in a high school, I suppose.
This sort of thing is really fascinating about human nature. We imbue objects with the significance of events or people they were associated with. Why? In some cases -- like Einstein's brain -- there is no more historical evidence to be obtained from it, but there is still that mystical quality.
"Musicians, who are professionally competent in composing music, performing music, and producing music, should ditch their real skills, and go into the t-shirt business?"
It's rather disingenuous of you to quote the original poster out of context so you can build a straw man out of him. You missed the two most important words of his sentence -- "or something".
These are creative individuals, are they not? And by building a following, they are cultivating a lucrative resource -- an audience. Or, put another way, a market. Suggesting that the only way they can exploit that market is to deal through middle men who take 90% of their profits is absurd. Suggesting that the only way to profit from that market is by selling their music per-unit is as absurd as suggesting they are only allowed to sell t-shirts.
One example: a musician named Momus didn't have enough money to produce a CD, so he offered to write a song about anyone who sent him $1000. 35 people took him up on it, enough for him to publish his CD.
Now take the CD out of the equation -- suppose he just asked $1000 a song, and distributed the music online at virtually no cost to him. He's just made $35,000; not the kind of money Metallica is used to, apparently, but enough to live on, and that's with just one revenue stream.
What if he toured, and was constantly putting live recordings on his website for download at micropayment prices? It's more convenient to get them there, because there's always new stuff that collectors don't have yet, and an insignificant price-tag -- say,.25 -- is unnoticeable. But if 100 people download the song, he's made $25 personally, just for rolling tape at a concert. (For which he was paid to perform, BTW.)
Oh, yeah, and if he wanted, he could sell t-shirts, too.
Classical musicians don't have this option; then again, with a minute handful of exceptions, they aren't living directly off recording revenue anyway; they're getting paid for live performances, and indirectly through recording revenue. (The symphonies and such are, however, analogous to artists from a branding standpoint, and can be treated similarly. Perhaps the Boston Symphony needs to release its next Mahler symphony performance direct to the public, online, for five dollars. Perhaps live audio of performances can be had for two bucks a stream.)
I hope this whets your imagination -- the 20th-century masters of marketing (the RIAA among them) have shown us that if you have the attention of a lot of people, you can make money off it. The artists don't need the record companies to exploit that market anymore, and it is in the best interests of all but the very richest -- the carrot-bands that the labels dangle in front of others' eyes to keep them in line -- to cultivate that audience/market directly, and make a decent living off it.
I (and many others, of course) have thought a lot about how it's going to shake out. I think music will end up classified as a service rather than a product, but I could be wrong, and I'm sure I don't know the details.
The one thing we can be sure digital music will not do is kill music. It might kill the music industry, but when there are no more commercial labels or professional artists anymore, whence Napster? In the very worst case, no one can make a living off of performance. But people will continue making music. Probably, they will distribute their music online. I expect they will find others with like interests and form bands and the like. And if they develop a following, they'll find some way to make money on it -- there's always money in an audience.
I don't think the original poster's point was that companies should start major development projects based on what the enthusiasts were doing, just to be "ahead of the curve". He's just looking for customer service, and he sees no reason why the customers most excited about a company's products are the ones the company seems least interested in keeping.
My take on it is that they figure they have to do less to keep you as a customer, because you're already really psyched about their product. Of course, if the companies were more encouraging to the enthusiasts, they might get a competing company's "enthusiasts" to jump ship. And if customers paid attention to the way these companies treated loyal fans, they might be a little leery of committing their business to a company whose level of service varies inversely with how intersted the customer is in the product.
Ah, well. One more reason to get on the clue train.
Heroin is a drug with relatively minor impact in the US. It is, however, sufficiently demonic that when Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey wanted to scare people about pot, he said it was as addictive as heroin.
It's also worth noting that:
Marijuana is classified as a Schedule I (the worst) drug under the law. Non-crack cocaine, IIRC, is Schedule II.
Virtually the only drug that we can effectively test for is marijuana. The fact that we can only test for its use in the last 30 days, rather than it's use on the job, doesn't stop companies from firing people for failing drug tests for pot.
Drug testing has also become a fairly widespread -- and lucrative -- industry since the 80's, when it first emerged.
Marijuana is the basis for most of the drug-related convictions in the US, IIRC, but I don't have stats on that.
"Jeez, does another application framework piss you off that much?? Wow..."
Speaking only for myself, it's not the application framework that pisses me off; it's the fact that my standards-compliant browser was sacrificed at the altar of an application framework that pisses me off.
When did Gecko come out? Maybe a year ago? When was the code in Mozilla fully compliant with CSS2, HTML 4, the most current JS, etc? Months ago? Then why am I waiting for a cross-architecture meta-platform to display my GUI, and mail and news and IRC and God knows what else? If everything's so modular, why couldn't the modules that are useful for web browsing have been shoved in a few basic, proprietary GUIs for Mac, MS, and GTK, then shipped? (Preferrably with a hook to add a JVM.)
The frustration for me is that the initial goal -- a fully standards-compliant browser -- is largely done (and could have been done earlier if Netscape developers hadn't been working on News, Mail, and every other non-web technology under the sun). What we're waiting for is the tweaking of a complex system that none of us, right at this moment, need.
Yes, Mozilla is going to be cool. It may change the way computing works. Right now, computing on Linux works with a crappy web browser, and it could be working on the best web browser out there. Not the best mailer, or newsreader, or application platform -- just the best browser. And that would be good enough for me. If Microsoft released IE for Linux tomorrow, I'd use it, because, more than any other application, I need a modern browser now.
"I don't know what hardware your EE was blaming the lighting on, but on some systems it really does matter."
Fair enough. But in software, we have error handling. In hardware, we have shielding. In both, precautions get short-changed as deadlines approach, or projects go over-budget.
Neither hardware nor software developers are really that much better in this, except that since hardware bugs tend to be so permanent, there are fewer of them (because people care more about them), and the ones that are left are much more annoying (because they won't go away). Pretty much a wash, if you ask me.
"I don't like Windows either but y'all are looking sort of childish making a political statement out of not using it."
Okay, I'm boycotting the movies. No, really. There is one whole person actually willing to admit they're actually boycotting, and it's me. I feel like a minority of one, but there you go.
Anyway, the reason I do has nothing to do with Windows. I simply believe that I should be allowed my rights under existing Fair Use provisions of copyright law. The MPAA doesn't want to permit that, so they're basically trying to rework the law to remove Fair Use, through application of the DMCA. That has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with how I may use property I own.
If we lived in a much, much wierder world, it would be just as easy for the MPAA to only license players that played under Linux, shutting out Windows, Mac, and other OSes. I wouldn't jump for joy at that point; that's just as immoral.
Have you seen what kinds of restrictions some people are asking for on digital books? Same thing. Further, they're wanting to keep you from loaning your book to someone else, or selling it at a digital used-book store. There is no reason the digital medium should allow that, except that publishers want it. The MPAA, should they be successful, will have laid the legal groundwork for that.
Technology should empower the individual, not to strip the individual of rights s/he already has. That's why I'm boycotting the movies.
phil
And make sure they degrade gracefully
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 2
Web browsers have this neat feature -- if they don't understand something in your code, they don't puke; they ignore it. If you use this to your advantage, you have the best of both worlds -- fancy stuff for the JS/Flash/etc.-enabled, and the non-enabled don't know what they're missing.:)
That, combined with the above poster's design sensibilities, are the golden rules, IMO.
"The DMCA effectively creates the conditions for a lively black market, essentially ensuring piracy. And this may be the key to its undoing. We may thus look on software piracy as a moral imperative."
This may be just what they want.
Consider the drug war -- it hasn't stopped the flow of drugs, but it's diminished our privacy, and increased the budgets of law enforcement agencies exponentially. If you, the law enforcement community, were accruing power and money for fighting an enemy without success, would you really be that happy if the "war" (a largely bloodless affair, on your part) went away?
Pirates have been around -- in spades -- since the software companies have begun. It was easier for me, as a 7-year-old and all through school, to get a copy of the latest commercial C64/PC software or a cassette of my favorite band than it ever was to get a joint. Software and media revenues skyrocketed during this time; in fact, there are some who argue the ubiquity of both was essential to the enormous profits both now make, and piracy had a lot to do with that.
The software/media community needs an enemy to "protect" their "rights" against. As long as that enemy exists, they can ask the government to continue to abridge our rights as citizens, exhorting us to take a bullet to get at "the enemy."
I'm reconsidering piracy as a form of social resistance, not because I consider it unethical infringement of corporate rights, but because it seems ineffective, and even serves the companies' interests.
Far better, IMO, to patronize Free software because it's Free, and (once the artists become educated) patronize musicians with a clue that release their recorded music as a loss-leader for concert revenue.
This is one road to resistence, though, for those of us with capital -- buy into corporations, then petition the board to do what we tell them.
When we're a minority, we can argue that "our interests" are also our interests as consumers, citizens of the environment, and ethical human beings. We'd probably get shut out, but if the movement gains enough momentum, suddenly we're not minority public owners anymore.
This wouldn't work on every company, because for some of them, the phrase "publicly traded" is a joke -- they're privately held by other corporations/individuals who bought the stock and will never sell it. OTOH, many of those companies who own companies have a lot of public shares outstanding....
This could work, but it requires a long-term commitment to a cause ("I'm going to make the oil company a supplier of solar and geothermal energy over the course of thirty years!"), intelligent assessment of target companies ("oops, we're 51% owned by ScrewYouCorp Holdings, so bite me"), and risk tolerance, because they might find some way to screw you out of your money, if they try hard enough. (Or the stock could legitimately tank -- a buying opportunity for the People's Holding Company!) OTOH, making a company successfully transition from unethical to ethical business practices might make it more fit in the long run, and result in more profits for you!
Anyway, this is just a thought that's been banging around in my head for a while. I'm interested in reactions. Whaddaya think?
...is the same as the problem with trademarks: dilution.
There's a lot of anti-DMCA, anti-UCITA, anti-MPAA and anti-RIAA sentiment, and a lot of people have called for boycotts. The problem is that no one's organizing anything; there are individuals boycotting all these things (well, the last two, anyway, and the sponsors of the first two), but not in large enough numbers for it to make a difference, and not in a coordinated, public way.
Am I part of the solution? No, I don't guess so. I'm boycotting the MPAA, but I know I'm in a pitifully small minority, and as a result, my actions are doomed to failure. But don't more people care about these issues? Is it just a lack of organization, or publicity, or what?
Are there coordinating organizations for any of these alleged boycotts? Would someone be willing to donate bandwidth and webspace to coordinate one? Until we get organized, we're just going to get trampled on.
Linux's strength is that it isn't going to go away. Even if everyone on Wall Street loses interest right now, and Linux is left with 20 developers who continue to develop it for its own sake, there will still be development. If Corel goes South, we'll never see Draw again. (Which would matter to someone, I suppose.)
It's quite possible Wall Street will grow disenchanted with Linux. If they do, there's still an installed corporate user base that needs support, so it will be around and developed institutionally for a few years while they switch to non-Linux products. After that, it's the hobbyists' OS, and maybe it will stay there for years or decades. But it was a hobbyists' OS before, wasn't it? What stops the same thing from happening again? And again?
You can't rule out world domination until Linux is definitively killed. And until it has languished, undeveloped and years behind the competition, you can't do that. Even then, there's a remote chance someone will come along and turn it back into a viable candidate. So it's practically unkillable.
You can't say that about any commercial closed-source software.
It's probably more accurate to say that the government is an agent of the companies. Certainly, using dollars to buy votes is the most effective way to win elections in America, so money is power over politics, and the only entities able to give virtually unlimited monies to candidates are corporate bodies or the interest groups funded by them.
Incidentally, anyone who doesn't like the above paragraph can help change its truth value by
always voting
rejecting any overmarketed candidate out of hand as corrupt (inasmuch as this is possible)
educating oneself on issues from mainstream, niche and foreign media as well as direct evidence -- IOW, not blindly trusting the media machine run by the same people who back candidates.
Bad analogy. I'm paying a phone bill for the same reason I pay my ISP, not NSI. The analogy holds up if you want a particular phone number; you pay more and get it, but you have to renew it, like vanity plates on a car. That is to say, it's not yours. Of course, the DMV is less draconian than NSI, because they can't just take your plates away "at their sole discretion."
Note that many fewer people have bought custom phone numbers, relative to the number of people with any phone numbers. This would indicate that, whatever NSI thinks, the public had the idea that what they were getting was more valuable than a custom phone number.
Whether one can consider NSI to be preying on this ignorance (since they waited for their service to get ubiquitous before seeking clarification) is an open question....
A lot of people are calling this guy a whiner. In his defense, let's point out that VA is supposed to be good at this sort of thing -- they're a group of Linux professionals who are trading on the fact that they "get" open source. If a closed-source company (say, a graphics or sound card manufacturer) behaved this way with their drivers, wouldn't you get fairly pissed off?
That said, there's another assumption here that doesn't make so much sense -- that VA has total control over the development process. If the software is truly Free, this isn't the case; someone just has to grab the code, put it on CVS and start development independently. Furthermore, the threat of having their sails deflated like this might make VA more responsive to spearheading development.
That's why we have and need the right to fork -- to revive stalled development, and to give people a prestige (dis)incentive to keep development going in the first place.
That's not a headline, but an observation./. has a very complicated moderation scheme in effect. Trolls like this one seem an awfully lot like hackers -- they find creative ways around the moderation system. And they aren't malicious; rather, the way they've found to hack the system is to post stuff that is so entertaining that moderators mod it up, even though it is off-topic.
They've had to get creative because the system is actively hostile to them and to their speech. And that is a good thing too; not only does it keep most visible discussion on-topic and interesting, it makes the filtering process for the best trolls very rigorous, and keeps troll quality (yes, I said that) high. At least, the quality of trolls that get this far are of high quality. (Or maybe the moderators are just high. On life, of course.)
(I even think of it as an artistic commentary of the dynamics of free speech with a low S/N ratio versus controlled (therefore not completely free) speech with a high S/N ratio. But I doubt that argument will go over highly here....)
That's just my little defense of the trolls; they've had to get so entertaining and creative that they deserve a little praise, IMO. Enjoy tearing it to shreds.
phil (hoping he gets a reply from OOG, and, hey, I didn't need my karma anyway)
This is true; organization of data, which widgets to use, etc., determine much of how usable a piece of software is. And the developers do not abdicate responsibility for a good UI when they create skins -- particularly the limited customizations currently available.
(I would like to be able to develop UI's totally independently of the rest of an application. It's nice to pick the most usable frontend, then hook it to the most technically appropriate backend. But that hasn't caught on outside UNIX, and presents some problems of its own -- like differences in functionality between different backends. So we're stuck with the monolithic UI/app, IMO.)
That said, consistency across applications is important, too, not to mention consistency across platforms. It would be nice to present users with a totally consistent working environment in a multi-OS workplace. (And if something X-like takes off someday, that workplace might be just one desktop!)
Besides that, what a widget looks like does have an impact on how comfortable the user is with it. The Motif widget set, for instance, has crummy checkboxes -- it's hard to tell if it's checked or not, and even if you can tell whether it's beveled in or out, it's not nearly as easy to remember which one means "checked" and which one means "unchecked". And how easy is it to tell a checkbox from a radio button, esp. if you're eyesight isn't 20/20?
A pluggable look-and-feel means that tons of different UI presentations can work on the same application -- the underlying UI design doesn't have to, and probably shouldn't, change. (Usually. As I said earlier, people with particular needs from their system -- like coders or graphic designers or digital musicians -- should be able to optimize their environment for their tasks.)
The goal is not to confuse the user with a bajillion UI's (though some of that might happen in the short term). Rather, the idea is for the best cross-application UI standard to emerge. Most GTK themes sensibly eschew the Motif checkboxes, for instance.
Ultimately, the user shouldn't have to worry that a program is less usable because the interface is implemented in a Windows widget set and they're a Mac user, or it's a Motif widget set and they're a Windows user. The app developer shouldn't have to worry about that, either -- and with PLAF's, it becomes possible to make the OS entirely transparent to the user, allowing the decision of OS to be solely based on technical merit, or suitability for a given task.
So, yes, the details of a UI implementation need to be determined through usability testing and good design. But the general user experience -- particularly the parts that remain consistent across apps, like widgets -- can benefit from a free-market approach, while still allowing for innovation, and without requiring a rewrite of every application every time there's a refinement.
And exactly how sensible is it that I have to relearn a UI for every OS I use? Unless we standardize on a single OS (and who wants to do that?), this guarantees the balkanization of UI's for all time.
No one has really capitalized on the power of skins yet -- and they won't, until they become even more ubiquitous. But even so, suck misses the point -- having the UI for an application change across OSes is a bug, not a feature.
Of course, so is having the UI change across applications (unless the user has a good reason for changing it). In addition to giving the user unlimited choice, skins offer us a way to abstract the UI away from everything, including the OS. And the eventual result should be, after a democratic shakedown, a unifying UI standard across all platforms. Eventually, the user could probably not even have to be aware of which OS they're using -- as long as the UI is standard across apps and OSes, it doesn't matter.
The OSes had their chance to buy into this, and they didn't. (Heck, Mac could possibly have stopped this cold if they had freed their UI the way IBM freed the PC architecture. Maybe they would have gone bankrupt, so I don't really fault their decision -- but UI balkanization would probably have been a moot point.)
In fact, it seems to be accepted dogma that you have to totally rearrange your UI every upgrade, or users won't think anything's new. Skins give us the opportunity to stop this silliness. Think Aqua sux? If you had the power that skins and XUL promise, you could reconvert to OS 8 with impunity.
It's not got any kind of centralizing authority, and that probably needs to change. But maybe not yet -- the most advanced stuff out there is XUL, and it's not ubiquitous enough. It might still be time for experimentation on the best way to implement skins, until a broad consensus arises.
Then it will be time to come to a consensus on the most usable interface, independent of the ideal OS for a given application. And that will be that, except for occasional innovations (and perhaps the Next Big Thing(tm), when we finally name a successor to WIMP), and optimizations for the way certain people work. (I expect graphic designers could benefit from a slightly different UI than coders, for instance.)
At least, that's the best-case scenario to suck's worst-case. The truth will probably fall somewhere in the middle, but skins offer real potential to improve usability as much as they do to trash it.
"All of this is just a dressing up of the naive political ideals of the majority of/. readers - that things are changing for the better, that world peace is possible and even round the corner and that technology will make the world a fundamentally better place to live."
Not that I am, personally, a majority of/. readers, but speaking only for myself, I think you're confusing what people want with what people think they're going to get.
Sure, my ideals involve world peace and technology making the world a better place. My ideal is a utopia, and why shouldn't it be? If an ideal universe isn't really damn neat, it isn't ideal, is it?
Do I think we'll get it? Only if we fight for it, hard. One segment of our population -- the powerful part, it would seem -- appears bent on controlling the rest of the population through the one-way conversation Cluetrain decries. They've mostly succeeded; less than 50% of the people in this country participate in the democratic process (one important form of power), convinced they can't make a difference, yet they gleefully buy into the model of conspicuous consumption that drains money (another form of power) from them uncricitally.
I don't think it's naive to want to stop this process, to envision a better way and try to get people to buy into it. Sure, it doesn't "correspond to...reality experienced by people living on the Earth today," but if it did, we wouldn't have to fight to bring it to pass.
We can do it -- the Internet shows that stuff can come in under the radar. Cluetrain even implies that victory is inevitable, but I don't buy that. We shouldn't stop trying, in any case. There's a lot of work to be done; we've barely scratched the surface.
"Secondly, there is the little matter of... da-dum... DMCA."
Very true. The more I think of it, though, the more ammunition this seems to give to the anti-DMCA movement.
The DMCA does not prohibit "anti-piracy" tools in order to prevent obscenity or breaches of national security -- it just prevents the circumvention of schemes used to protect media from being copied. (Or, apparently, viewed, if the scheme used to view might be used to copy, however small that possibility may be.)
However, the publishers of programs that demonstrate how to circumvent copy protection are not, themselves, circumventing it. They are merely informing others of how the protection can be circumvented. As has been proven repeatedly, this is not even particularly biased speech -- it helps the securer to know how their mechanisms are being circumvented, just as it helps people circumvent them. Not much different from someone pointing out a big hole in a prison wall, IMO, or how a home security system might not be all that secure.
(The DMCA would would still seem capable of preventing people from actually using this technology to circumvent protection, and since this still curtails a lot of fair use, the fundamental flaw is still there. Seems to pull a lot of teeth out of it, though.)
Far more interesting, IMO, is its applications in cases like cphack, where the information revealed isn't even particularly useful to ostensible opponents of the technology -- that is, seeing an unencrypted site list from Cyber Patrol doesn't tell me how to get around Cyber Patrol's blocks if I'm running a blocked site. That would be like needing to encrypt my credit report because I might be able to change it -- I can't, and I am, in fact, given the explicit legal right to see it for purposes of oversight.
(It does show consumers how little bearing Mattel's claims to them have on reality, and might make them opponents of Mattel's efforts to keep their site list secret, but that's another story. And it does let kids see the URL's of the sites they can't see -- OTOH, how, exactly, do you teach your child which words not to say in public?)
phil
P.S. -- The law of averages should make it clear that, on a site that only attracts a minority of lawyers as its audience, I am probably not a lawyer if I don't explicitly point it out. So I won't point it out, and anyone who thinks I am a lawyer is making an unreasonable assumption.:)
"The only reason that I can think of, that people love stuff like this, is it's so much more anonymous than even an FTP site."
Are you saying anonymity is not a legitimate feature? I disagree. What if you're living in a police state that prohibits distribution of documents demonstrating its violation of civil rights, or a corporation's suppressing potentially important negative information about a product by suing anyone who hosts a file, regardless of the merits of a case? (From what I gather, though, Gnutella doesn't give total anonymity anyway, so, I suppose that's a moot point.)
Apart from that, however, I like the idea of a decentralized, virtual "library" in which to locate files. I don't need this if I know someone with a copy of a file; OTOH, if I know the filename but can't locate it anywhere (say, an old version of a program that happens to work better with my system), I can check the library.
"...lots of complaints from the 'open-source nazis' that LinDVD is closed source. I don't fscking care! As a dedicated Linux user what I want is CHOICE."
Then you should be aware that the licensing scheme to which the LinDVD project is a party limits choice. Specifically, it limits choice to a set of products authored by people or groups who can pay the license to the MPAA. Whether these people can -- or even want to -- put out a DVD player that gives you the exact choice you want is a complete question mark.
This is the precedent the MPAA is setting -- if you know how to make a DVD player, you better be paying the MPAA money. So the set of developers is restricted. Hence, your choice of players is restricted.
Further, the system restricts choice of development model. Open Source can be used to develop a licensed DVD player if and only if someone ponies up and pays the MPAA (and this is not a token charge -- this privilege is marketed to major multinationals with more money than, say, me and, probably, you). This is unlikely -- not because people are skinflints in the Free Software world, but because the investment of a few million dollars is more than most people can afford. (I don't know the actual fee, but I'm sure it's big -- if it's not a million initially, the residuals/royalties the MPAA surely insists on will drive it up there.) Economic barriers are just as real -- usually more so -- than legal barriers.
This means a likely absence of DVD players that are Free Software. So if your favorite DVD player maker wants to pull the product, you suck it up. You (or someone like you) can't continue the project.
I sincerely hope there is a serious choice for DVD players, for Linux and other platforms. But if the system which LinDVD implicitly endorses is allowed to succeed, you very well may find yourself with a few DVD players that all have some things you utterly loathe about them -- and no choice but to live with it.
From the article, I got the impression that they wanted customers to use their existing mainframes (presumably data warehouses and such) as webservers. At least, that's what I got out of their claims at increasing speed by doing away with webserver-database latency.
Problem with that is, something that takes down one service takes down both of them. I realize mainframes are pretty damn reliable boxes, but if it goes down, do you want it to take your webserver with it?
(I'm assuming the security issues inherent in putting a webserver -- esp. a public one -- directly on one's data warehouse have been hashed out in the course of the VM development. Nonetheless, websites are flypaper for h4x0rz -- that's putting a lot of trust in software.)
Same thing holds for anyone using it to replace 41,000 (yeah, whatever) webservers. One machine fails, 41,000 web servers (and god knows how many sites) out of business. I suppose a redundant mainframe is sufficient insurance -- but how much more appealing is that than buying a comparable number of Suns, and having just a few backup boxes?
Seems like an interesting idea, and it certainly creates options. I don't know if it's the Sun-killer, though; and though it might convince existing users to not buy Sun, I don't know how many new buyers it would attract.
Then again, the closest I got to working on a mainframe was touring a server room with a bunch of AS/400's in it once, so don't think I'm the Delphic Oracle or anything.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Would you like it if someone kept a piece of one of your relatives after they died? Without even asking your permission or letting you know what they were doing?"
Wandering off-topic a bit, this is pretty much the same thing that happened in the Middle Ages to people who were deemed destined for sainthood -- people would dismember their corpses for relics. In some cases, the whole body was systematically chopped up into preserved parts.
The church, IIRC, didn't share your opinion of this practice -- most holy places kept reliquaries with these little bits o' saint (among other things, like Saint Soandso's chamberpot, or the ubiquitous "pieces of the True Cross"). A good reliquary would enhance the prestige of these holy places -- the same sort of logic as a trophy case in a high school, I suppose.
This sort of thing is really fascinating about human nature. We imbue objects with the significance of events or people they were associated with. Why? In some cases -- like Einstein's brain -- there is no more historical evidence to be obtained from it, but there is still that mystical quality.
BTW, don't embalmers remove the brain anyway?
phil
"Musicians, who are professionally competent in composing music, performing music, and producing music, should ditch their real skills, and go into the t-shirt business?"
It's rather disingenuous of you to quote the original poster out of context so you can build a straw man out of him. You missed the two most important words of his sentence -- "or something".
These are creative individuals, are they not? And by building a following, they are cultivating a lucrative resource -- an audience. Or, put another way, a market. Suggesting that the only way they can exploit that market is to deal through middle men who take 90% of their profits is absurd. Suggesting that the only way to profit from that market is by selling their music per-unit is as absurd as suggesting they are only allowed to sell t-shirts.
One example: a musician named Momus didn't have enough money to produce a CD, so he offered to write a song about anyone who sent him $1000. 35 people took him up on it, enough for him to publish his CD.
Now take the CD out of the equation -- suppose he just asked $1000 a song, and distributed the music online at virtually no cost to him. He's just made $35,000; not the kind of money Metallica is used to, apparently, but enough to live on, and that's with just one revenue stream.
What if he toured, and was constantly putting live recordings on his website for download at micropayment prices? It's more convenient to get them there, because there's always new stuff that collectors don't have yet, and an insignificant price-tag -- say, .25 -- is unnoticeable. But if 100 people download the song, he's made $25 personally, just for rolling tape at a concert. (For which he was paid to perform, BTW.)
Oh, yeah, and if he wanted, he could sell t-shirts, too.
Classical musicians don't have this option; then again, with a minute handful of exceptions, they aren't living directly off recording revenue anyway; they're getting paid for live performances, and indirectly through recording revenue. (The symphonies and such are, however, analogous to artists from a branding standpoint, and can be treated similarly. Perhaps the Boston Symphony needs to release its next Mahler symphony performance direct to the public, online, for five dollars. Perhaps live audio of performances can be had for two bucks a stream.)
I hope this whets your imagination -- the 20th-century masters of marketing (the RIAA among them) have shown us that if you have the attention of a lot of people, you can make money off it. The artists don't need the record companies to exploit that market anymore, and it is in the best interests of all but the very richest -- the carrot-bands that the labels dangle in front of others' eyes to keep them in line -- to cultivate that audience/market directly, and make a decent living off it.
phil
I (and many others, of course) have thought a lot about how it's going to shake out. I think music will end up classified as a service rather than a product, but I could be wrong, and I'm sure I don't know the details.
The one thing we can be sure digital music will not do is kill music. It might kill the music industry, but when there are no more commercial labels or professional artists anymore, whence Napster? In the very worst case, no one can make a living off of performance. But people will continue making music. Probably, they will distribute their music online. I expect they will find others with like interests and form bands and the like. And if they develop a following, they'll find some way to make money on it -- there's always money in an audience.
phil
I don't think the original poster's point was that companies should start major development projects based on what the enthusiasts were doing, just to be "ahead of the curve". He's just looking for customer service, and he sees no reason why the customers most excited about a company's products are the ones the company seems least interested in keeping.
My take on it is that they figure they have to do less to keep you as a customer, because you're already really psyched about their product. Of course, if the companies were more encouraging to the enthusiasts, they might get a competing company's "enthusiasts" to jump ship. And if customers paid attention to the way these companies treated loyal fans, they might be a little leery of committing their business to a company whose level of service varies inversely with how intersted the customer is in the product.
Ah, well. One more reason to get on the clue train.
phil
Heroin is a drug with relatively minor impact in the US. It is, however, sufficiently demonic that when Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey wanted to scare people about pot, he said it was as addictive as heroin.
It's also worth noting that:
Marijuana is the basis for most of the drug-related convictions in the US, IIRC, but I don't have stats on that.
phil
"Jeez, does another application framework piss you off that much?? Wow..."
Speaking only for myself, it's not the application framework that pisses me off; it's the fact that my standards-compliant browser was sacrificed at the altar of an application framework that pisses me off.
When did Gecko come out? Maybe a year ago? When was the code in Mozilla fully compliant with CSS2, HTML 4, the most current JS, etc? Months ago? Then why am I waiting for a cross-architecture meta-platform to display my GUI, and mail and news and IRC and God knows what else? If everything's so modular, why couldn't the modules that are useful for web browsing have been shoved in a few basic, proprietary GUIs for Mac, MS, and GTK, then shipped? (Preferrably with a hook to add a JVM.)
The frustration for me is that the initial goal -- a fully standards-compliant browser -- is largely done (and could have been done earlier if Netscape developers hadn't been working on News, Mail, and every other non-web technology under the sun). What we're waiting for is the tweaking of a complex system that none of us, right at this moment, need.
Yes, Mozilla is going to be cool. It may change the way computing works. Right now, computing on Linux works with a crappy web browser, and it could be working on the best web browser out there. Not the best mailer, or newsreader, or application platform -- just the best browser. And that would be good enough for me. If Microsoft released IE for Linux tomorrow, I'd use it, because, more than any other application, I need a modern browser now.
phil
"I don't know what hardware your EE was blaming the lighting on, but on some systems it really does matter."
Fair enough. But in software, we have error handling. In hardware, we have shielding. In both, precautions get short-changed as deadlines approach, or projects go over-budget.
Neither hardware nor software developers are really that much better in this, except that since hardware bugs tend to be so permanent, there are fewer of them (because people care more about them), and the ones that are left are much more annoying (because they won't go away). Pretty much a wash, if you ask me.
phil
"That won't work. MS-FDISK cannot recognise Linux partitions and cannot remove them if on an extended partition."
The course has been renamed:
745: Industrial Magnets in the Enterprise
phil
"I don't like Windows either but y'all are looking sort of childish making a political statement out of not using it."
Okay, I'm boycotting the movies. No, really. There is one whole person actually willing to admit they're actually boycotting, and it's me. I feel like a minority of one, but there you go.
Anyway, the reason I do has nothing to do with Windows. I simply believe that I should be allowed my rights under existing Fair Use provisions of copyright law. The MPAA doesn't want to permit that, so they're basically trying to rework the law to remove Fair Use, through application of the DMCA. That has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with how I may use property I own.
If we lived in a much, much wierder world, it would be just as easy for the MPAA to only license players that played under Linux, shutting out Windows, Mac, and other OSes. I wouldn't jump for joy at that point; that's just as immoral.
Have you seen what kinds of restrictions some people are asking for on digital books? Same thing. Further, they're wanting to keep you from loaning your book to someone else, or selling it at a digital used-book store. There is no reason the digital medium should allow that, except that publishers want it. The MPAA, should they be successful, will have laid the legal groundwork for that.
Technology should empower the individual, not to strip the individual of rights s/he already has. That's why I'm boycotting the movies.
phil
Web browsers have this neat feature -- if they don't understand something in your code, they don't puke; they ignore it. If you use this to your advantage, you have the best of both worlds -- fancy stuff for the JS/Flash/etc.-enabled, and the non-enabled don't know what they're missing. :)
That, combined with the above poster's design sensibilities, are the golden rules, IMO.
phil
"The DMCA effectively creates the conditions for a lively black market, essentially ensuring piracy. And this may be the key to its undoing. We may thus look on software piracy as a moral imperative."
This may be just what they want.
Consider the drug war -- it hasn't stopped the flow of drugs, but it's diminished our privacy, and increased the budgets of law enforcement agencies exponentially. If you, the law enforcement community, were accruing power and money for fighting an enemy without success, would you really be that happy if the "war" (a largely bloodless affair, on your part) went away?
Pirates have been around -- in spades -- since the software companies have begun. It was easier for me, as a 7-year-old and all through school, to get a copy of the latest commercial C64/PC software or a cassette of my favorite band than it ever was to get a joint. Software and media revenues skyrocketed during this time; in fact, there are some who argue the ubiquity of both was essential to the enormous profits both now make, and piracy had a lot to do with that.
The software/media community needs an enemy to "protect" their "rights" against. As long as that enemy exists, they can ask the government to continue to abridge our rights as citizens, exhorting us to take a bullet to get at "the enemy."
I'm reconsidering piracy as a form of social resistance, not because I consider it unethical infringement of corporate rights, but because it seems ineffective, and even serves the companies' interests.
Far better, IMO, to patronize Free software because it's Free, and (once the artists become educated) patronize musicians with a clue that release their recorded music as a loss-leader for concert revenue.
phil
This is one road to resistence, though, for those of us with capital -- buy into corporations, then petition the board to do what we tell them.
When we're a minority, we can argue that "our interests" are also our interests as consumers, citizens of the environment, and ethical human beings. We'd probably get shut out, but if the movement gains enough momentum, suddenly we're not minority public owners anymore.
This wouldn't work on every company, because for some of them, the phrase "publicly traded" is a joke -- they're privately held by other corporations/individuals who bought the stock and will never sell it. OTOH, many of those companies who own companies have a lot of public shares outstanding....
This could work, but it requires a long-term commitment to a cause ("I'm going to make the oil company a supplier of solar and geothermal energy over the course of thirty years!"), intelligent assessment of target companies ("oops, we're 51% owned by ScrewYouCorp Holdings, so bite me"), and risk tolerance, because they might find some way to screw you out of your money, if they try hard enough. (Or the stock could legitimately tank -- a buying opportunity for the People's Holding Company!) OTOH, making a company successfully transition from unethical to ethical business practices might make it more fit in the long run, and result in more profits for you!
Anyway, this is just a thought that's been banging around in my head for a while. I'm interested in reactions. Whaddaya think?
phil
...is the same as the problem with trademarks: dilution.
There's a lot of anti-DMCA, anti-UCITA, anti-MPAA and anti-RIAA sentiment, and a lot of people have called for boycotts. The problem is that no one's organizing anything; there are individuals boycotting all these things (well, the last two, anyway, and the sponsors of the first two), but not in large enough numbers for it to make a difference, and not in a coordinated, public way.
Am I part of the solution? No, I don't guess so. I'm boycotting the MPAA, but I know I'm in a pitifully small minority, and as a result, my actions are doomed to failure. But don't more people care about these issues? Is it just a lack of organization, or publicity, or what?
Are there coordinating organizations for any of these alleged boycotts? Would someone be willing to donate bandwidth and webspace to coordinate one? Until we get organized, we're just going to get trampled on.
phil
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
Linux's strength is that it isn't going to go away. Even if everyone on Wall Street loses interest right now, and Linux is left with 20 developers who continue to develop it for its own sake, there will still be development. If Corel goes South, we'll never see Draw again. (Which would matter to someone, I suppose.)
It's quite possible Wall Street will grow disenchanted with Linux. If they do, there's still an installed corporate user base that needs support, so it will be around and developed institutionally for a few years while they switch to non-Linux products. After that, it's the hobbyists' OS, and maybe it will stay there for years or decades. But it was a hobbyists' OS before, wasn't it? What stops the same thing from happening again? And again?
You can't rule out world domination until Linux is definitively killed. And until it has languished, undeveloped and years behind the competition, you can't do that. Even then, there's a remote chance someone will come along and turn it back into a viable candidate. So it's practically unkillable.
You can't say that about any commercial closed-source software.
phil
It's probably more accurate to say that the government is an agent of the companies. Certainly, using dollars to buy votes is the most effective way to win elections in America, so money is power over politics, and the only entities able to give virtually unlimited monies to candidates are corporate bodies or the interest groups funded by them.
Incidentally, anyone who doesn't like the above paragraph can help change its truth value by
phil
Ever the rabble-rowser...
Bad analogy. I'm paying a phone bill for the same reason I pay my ISP, not NSI. The analogy holds up if you want a particular phone number; you pay more and get it, but you have to renew it, like vanity plates on a car. That is to say, it's not yours. Of course, the DMV is less draconian than NSI, because they can't just take your plates away "at their sole discretion."
Note that many fewer people have bought custom phone numbers, relative to the number of people with any phone numbers. This would indicate that, whatever NSI thinks, the public had the idea that what they were getting was more valuable than a custom phone number.
Whether one can consider NSI to be preying on this ignorance (since they waited for their service to get ubiquitous before seeking clarification) is an open question....
phil
A lot of people are calling this guy a whiner. In his defense, let's point out that VA is supposed to be good at this sort of thing -- they're a group of Linux professionals who are trading on the fact that they "get" open source. If a closed-source company (say, a graphics or sound card manufacturer) behaved this way with their drivers, wouldn't you get fairly pissed off?
That said, there's another assumption here that doesn't make so much sense -- that VA has total control over the development process. If the software is truly Free, this isn't the case; someone just has to grab the code, put it on CVS and start development independently. Furthermore, the threat of having their sails deflated like this might make VA more responsive to spearheading development.
That's why we have and need the right to fork -- to revive stalled development, and to give people a prestige (dis)incentive to keep development going in the first place.
phil
That's not a headline, but an observation. /. has a very complicated moderation scheme in effect. Trolls like this one seem an awfully lot like hackers -- they find creative ways around the moderation system. And they aren't malicious; rather, the way they've found to hack the system is to post stuff that is so entertaining that moderators mod it up, even though it is off-topic.
They've had to get creative because the system is actively hostile to them and to their speech. And that is a good thing too; not only does it keep most visible discussion on-topic and interesting, it makes the filtering process for the best trolls very rigorous, and keeps troll quality (yes, I said that) high. At least, the quality of trolls that get this far are of high quality. (Or maybe the moderators are just high. On life, of course.)
(I even think of it as an artistic commentary of the dynamics of free speech with a low S/N ratio versus controlled (therefore not completely free) speech with a high S/N ratio. But I doubt that argument will go over highly here....)
That's just my little defense of the trolls; they've had to get so entertaining and creative that they deserve a little praise, IMO. Enjoy tearing it to shreds.
phil (hoping he gets a reply from OOG, and, hey, I didn't need my karma anyway)
This is true; organization of data, which widgets to use, etc., determine much of how usable a piece of software is. And the developers do not abdicate responsibility for a good UI when they create skins -- particularly the limited customizations currently available.
(I would like to be able to develop UI's totally independently of the rest of an application. It's nice to pick the most usable frontend, then hook it to the most technically appropriate backend. But that hasn't caught on outside UNIX, and presents some problems of its own -- like differences in functionality between different backends. So we're stuck with the monolithic UI/app, IMO.)
That said, consistency across applications is important, too, not to mention consistency across platforms. It would be nice to present users with a totally consistent working environment in a multi-OS workplace. (And if something X-like takes off someday, that workplace might be just one desktop!)
Besides that, what a widget looks like does have an impact on how comfortable the user is with it. The Motif widget set, for instance, has crummy checkboxes -- it's hard to tell if it's checked or not, and even if you can tell whether it's beveled in or out, it's not nearly as easy to remember which one means "checked" and which one means "unchecked". And how easy is it to tell a checkbox from a radio button, esp. if you're eyesight isn't 20/20?
A pluggable look-and-feel means that tons of different UI presentations can work on the same application -- the underlying UI design doesn't have to, and probably shouldn't, change. (Usually. As I said earlier, people with particular needs from their system -- like coders or graphic designers or digital musicians -- should be able to optimize their environment for their tasks.)
The goal is not to confuse the user with a bajillion UI's (though some of that might happen in the short term). Rather, the idea is for the best cross-application UI standard to emerge. Most GTK themes sensibly eschew the Motif checkboxes, for instance.
Ultimately, the user shouldn't have to worry that a program is less usable because the interface is implemented in a Windows widget set and they're a Mac user, or it's a Motif widget set and they're a Windows user. The app developer shouldn't have to worry about that, either -- and with PLAF's, it becomes possible to make the OS entirely transparent to the user, allowing the decision of OS to be solely based on technical merit, or suitability for a given task.
So, yes, the details of a UI implementation need to be determined through usability testing and good design. But the general user experience -- particularly the parts that remain consistent across apps, like widgets -- can benefit from a free-market approach, while still allowing for innovation, and without requiring a rewrite of every application every time there's a refinement.
phil
And exactly how sensible is it that I have to relearn a UI for every OS I use? Unless we standardize on a single OS (and who wants to do that?), this guarantees the balkanization of UI's for all time.
No one has really capitalized on the power of skins yet -- and they won't, until they become even more ubiquitous. But even so, suck misses the point -- having the UI for an application change across OSes is a bug, not a feature.
Of course, so is having the UI change across applications (unless the user has a good reason for changing it). In addition to giving the user unlimited choice, skins offer us a way to abstract the UI away from everything, including the OS. And the eventual result should be, after a democratic shakedown, a unifying UI standard across all platforms. Eventually, the user could probably not even have to be aware of which OS they're using -- as long as the UI is standard across apps and OSes, it doesn't matter.
The OSes had their chance to buy into this, and they didn't. (Heck, Mac could possibly have stopped this cold if they had freed their UI the way IBM freed the PC architecture. Maybe they would have gone bankrupt, so I don't really fault their decision -- but UI balkanization would probably have been a moot point.)
In fact, it seems to be accepted dogma that you have to totally rearrange your UI every upgrade, or users won't think anything's new. Skins give us the opportunity to stop this silliness. Think Aqua sux? If you had the power that skins and XUL promise, you could reconvert to OS 8 with impunity.
It's not got any kind of centralizing authority, and that probably needs to change. But maybe not yet -- the most advanced stuff out there is XUL, and it's not ubiquitous enough. It might still be time for experimentation on the best way to implement skins, until a broad consensus arises.
Then it will be time to come to a consensus on the most usable interface, independent of the ideal OS for a given application. And that will be that, except for occasional innovations (and perhaps the Next Big Thing(tm), when we finally name a successor to WIMP), and optimizations for the way certain people work. (I expect graphic designers could benefit from a slightly different UI than coders, for instance.)
At least, that's the best-case scenario to suck's worst-case. The truth will probably fall somewhere in the middle, but skins offer real potential to improve usability as much as they do to trash it.
phil
Not that I am, personally, a majority of /. readers, but speaking only for myself, I think you're confusing what people want with what people think they're going to get.
Sure, my ideals involve world peace and technology making the world a better place. My ideal is a utopia, and why shouldn't it be? If an ideal universe isn't really damn neat, it isn't ideal, is it?
Do I think we'll get it? Only if we fight for it, hard. One segment of our population -- the powerful part, it would seem -- appears bent on controlling the rest of the population through the one-way conversation Cluetrain decries. They've mostly succeeded; less than 50% of the people in this country participate in the democratic process (one important form of power), convinced they can't make a difference, yet they gleefully buy into the model of conspicuous consumption that drains money (another form of power) from them uncricitally.
I don't think it's naive to want to stop this process, to envision a better way and try to get people to buy into it. Sure, it doesn't "correspond to...reality experienced by people living on the Earth today," but if it did, we wouldn't have to fight to bring it to pass.
We can do it -- the Internet shows that stuff can come in under the radar. Cluetrain even implies that victory is inevitable, but I don't buy that. We shouldn't stop trying, in any case. There's a lot of work to be done; we've barely scratched the surface.
phil
"Secondly, there is the little matter of... da-dum... DMCA."
Very true. The more I think of it, though, the more ammunition this seems to give to the anti-DMCA movement.
The DMCA does not prohibit "anti-piracy" tools in order to prevent obscenity or breaches of national security -- it just prevents the circumvention of schemes used to protect media from being copied. (Or, apparently, viewed, if the scheme used to view might be used to copy, however small that possibility may be.)
However, the publishers of programs that demonstrate how to circumvent copy protection are not, themselves, circumventing it. They are merely informing others of how the protection can be circumvented. As has been proven repeatedly, this is not even particularly biased speech -- it helps the securer to know how their mechanisms are being circumvented, just as it helps people circumvent them. Not much different from someone pointing out a big hole in a prison wall, IMO, or how a home security system might not be all that secure.
(The DMCA would would still seem capable of preventing people from actually using this technology to circumvent protection, and since this still curtails a lot of fair use, the fundamental flaw is still there. Seems to pull a lot of teeth out of it, though.)
Far more interesting, IMO, is its applications in cases like cphack, where the information revealed isn't even particularly useful to ostensible opponents of the technology -- that is, seeing an unencrypted site list from Cyber Patrol doesn't tell me how to get around Cyber Patrol's blocks if I'm running a blocked site. That would be like needing to encrypt my credit report because I might be able to change it -- I can't, and I am, in fact, given the explicit legal right to see it for purposes of oversight.
(It does show consumers how little bearing Mattel's claims to them have on reality, and might make them opponents of Mattel's efforts to keep their site list secret, but that's another story. And it does let kids see the URL's of the sites they can't see -- OTOH, how, exactly, do you teach your child which words not to say in public?)
phil
P.S. -- The law of averages should make it clear that, on a site that only attracts a minority of lawyers as its audience, I am probably not a lawyer if I don't explicitly point it out. So I won't point it out, and anyone who thinks I am a lawyer is making an unreasonable assumption. :)
"The only reason that I can think of, that people love stuff like this, is it's so much more anonymous than even an FTP site."
Are you saying anonymity is not a legitimate feature? I disagree. What if you're living in a police state that prohibits distribution of documents demonstrating its violation of civil rights, or a corporation's suppressing potentially important negative information about a product by suing anyone who hosts a file, regardless of the merits of a case? (From what I gather, though, Gnutella doesn't give total anonymity anyway, so, I suppose that's a moot point.)
Apart from that, however, I like the idea of a decentralized, virtual "library" in which to locate files. I don't need this if I know someone with a copy of a file; OTOH, if I know the filename but can't locate it anywhere (say, an old version of a program that happens to work better with my system), I can check the library.
phil
"...lots of complaints from the 'open-source nazis' that LinDVD is closed source. I don't fscking care! As a dedicated Linux user what I want is CHOICE."
Then you should be aware that the licensing scheme to which the LinDVD project is a party limits choice. Specifically, it limits choice to a set of products authored by people or groups who can pay the license to the MPAA. Whether these people can -- or even want to -- put out a DVD player that gives you the exact choice you want is a complete question mark.
This is the precedent the MPAA is setting -- if you know how to make a DVD player, you better be paying the MPAA money. So the set of developers is restricted. Hence, your choice of players is restricted.
Further, the system restricts choice of development model. Open Source can be used to develop a licensed DVD player if and only if someone ponies up and pays the MPAA (and this is not a token charge -- this privilege is marketed to major multinationals with more money than, say, me and, probably, you). This is unlikely -- not because people are skinflints in the Free Software world, but because the investment of a few million dollars is more than most people can afford. (I don't know the actual fee, but I'm sure it's big -- if it's not a million initially, the residuals/royalties the MPAA surely insists on will drive it up there.) Economic barriers are just as real -- usually more so -- than legal barriers.
This means a likely absence of DVD players that are Free Software. So if your favorite DVD player maker wants to pull the product, you suck it up. You (or someone like you) can't continue the project.
I sincerely hope there is a serious choice for DVD players, for Linux and other platforms. But if the system which LinDVD implicitly endorses is allowed to succeed, you very well may find yourself with a few DVD players that all have some things you utterly loathe about them -- and no choice but to live with it.
Just thought you should know.
phil
From the article, I got the impression that they wanted customers to use their existing mainframes (presumably data warehouses and such) as webservers. At least, that's what I got out of their claims at increasing speed by doing away with webserver-database latency.
Problem with that is, something that takes down one service takes down both of them. I realize mainframes are pretty damn reliable boxes, but if it goes down, do you want it to take your webserver with it?
(I'm assuming the security issues inherent in putting a webserver -- esp. a public one -- directly on one's data warehouse have been hashed out in the course of the VM development. Nonetheless, websites are flypaper for h4x0rz -- that's putting a lot of trust in software.)
Same thing holds for anyone using it to replace 41,000 (yeah, whatever) webservers. One machine fails, 41,000 web servers (and god knows how many sites) out of business. I suppose a redundant mainframe is sufficient insurance -- but how much more appealing is that than buying a comparable number of Suns, and having just a few backup boxes?
Seems like an interesting idea, and it certainly creates options. I don't know if it's the Sun-killer, though; and though it might convince existing users to not buy Sun, I don't know how many new buyers it would attract.
Then again, the closest I got to working on a mainframe was touring a server room with a bunch of AS/400's in it once, so don't think I'm the Delphic Oracle or anything. :)
phil