> Hey, I hate these ad's as much as anybody, but I hate the alternative even more.
But the alternative is not only ``pay sites".
Let me admit something: X10 has what appears to be a cool product. Something that I'll admit I would probably buy. However it is an example of a good idea that is being killed by their marketroids.
I've looked at their site a couple of times, but it is so packed with ads & over-sized jpegs that I can't easily find answers to my questions. (One of which is ``how much for a trial kit?" And what would I get for my money?) All of these garish ads are merely reinforcing my disinclination NOT to visit their lousy site.
Which is the long & short of this issue: build a web site that easily provides the information your customers want, & keep your ads simple. If the product looks interesting, I'm happy to take a moment, click on it, & see where it leads. But if the ad is the computer equivalent of grabbing me by my lapels & scremaing in the face, then I'll feel obliged to give the company the computer equivalent of kicking 'em in the groin in order to continue with my life.
Geoff
Re:anti-bsd posts up 75% on slashdot!!!!!
on
USENIX Reports
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· Score: 2
You must be hanging with the wrong kind of people.
The Linux users' group in Portland, OR many years ago renamed itself to the ``Portland Linux/UNIX Group", & the mailing list has carried threads about other flavors of UNIX like Solaris, AIX as well as *BSD since then. (We don't get as many posts about *BSD because, I guess, there are older, more established lists that can answer those kinds of questions faster.
And my ISP has ran on FreeBSD for the last few years -- & if I had a problem with his choice of UNIX flavor, I wouldn't still be using my shell account there on a regular basis.
> What, anything to discredit someone who isn't on the Open Source team?
Nope. The original post had an offensively condesending tone, e.g. the title ``Petty petty petty". The original poster was not stating that there was more worthwhile targets for our energies, but that we shouldn't concern ourselves about what Microsoft is doing. My response remains, ``We all rise to fight the evil we think we can defeat."
If the original poster *truly* felt that we should battle these other -- & I'll concede, more immediately important goals -- why didn't she/he offer ways we can contribute to these struggles? I suspect that the posters intent was to silence criticism of Microsoft whether justified or not.
> I can see modding down the original post (Offtopic, perhaps?) but modding up that "you sound like you're from a cult" drivel?
If it makes you feel better, this is the first karma point I've gotten for any of my posts in about a month or two. And I gave up long before that trying to understand how people awarded them; sending email about possible issues to Cowboy Neal doesn't even result in a form letter acknowledging he even reads his email. So I merely look for reponses to whatever I post.
> These Microsoft issues are just so petty. Even if they aren't beaten on technical merits (which they will, one day, like all
> technology companies), even if they dominate, their evil is just so minor and petty compared to true abuse in the world.
We all rise to fight the evil we think we can defeat. Some of us take on an even more powerful evil. (All of you who dream of going deep-sea fishing against Cthulhu raise your hands.;-)
> Open your eyes, people... there are just so many things in the world which are far more deserving of your rage. If you want to
> work on Linux, if you want to beat Microsoft, hey, go ahead, but the way so many Slashdotters obsess about this like Gates is
> the next Hitler is just sick.
Your logic sounds suspciously familiar . . . say, weren't you one of the sock puppets that used to defend Hubbard's pathetic little cult on alt.religion.scientology? Or have Microsoft apologists exhausted all of their fresh ideas, & have come to the point that they sound like every other group of cult apologists?
> What it boils down to is, "in case of conflict between two countries' laws, the most severe one takes precedence".
True. Until this treaty was noised about, the rule of the Internet was that the country or nation with the most liberal or free laws in practice prevailed. This proposed treaty will turn the whole matter on its head.
>This is absolutely insane, and will only contribute to widespread contempt of the very concept of Law.
I wish it were as simple as that.
For about ten years now, the Internet has been a valuable tool for investigating what some people want to keep hid, & sharing information despite censorship. Now the (literally) Barons of Big Business have noticed this, & want to tie us back to the soil of our national regulations. (Who else would be pressuring so hard for this kind of screwy logic in applying laws?)
Too bad RMS did not propose a way we, the average folk, might apply pressure against this fettering proposal.
If you stop for a moment, & analyze his arguments, he's just trying to get everyone to the left of Patrick Buchanan (which has to be 90% of the readers of/.) angry & respond.
> Let Amazon have any privacy rule they want. Let them sell
> their information to every advertiser in the world. But let the consumer choose if he wants to buy Amazon products and give
> his information to Amazon. If he doesn't like the idea of advertisers calling him up then he's free to shop at bn.com. It's
> called capitalism, gentlemen.
Notice how shallow is reasoning actually is: as a for instance, he ducks the question why is it a good thing to trade privacy for convenience? Accepting this argument would logically lead to arguming for the imagined right of people to sell themselves into slavery. Which -- last I heard -- everyone here on/. was opposed to.
Let's not feed this troll. Move along -- there's nothing to see.
Geoff
Re:Is the shakeup for financial reasons ?
on
Mandrake Shakeup
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· Score: 2
> Nowhere in the article does it mention why Mandrake did the shakeup.
Note: one of the weaknesses of any online community is the fact many believe themselves to be poorly connected & that everyone else either knows -- or doesn't know -- what they have heard. That is why I haven't shared the following bit of news.
At the last PLUG (==Portland Linux/UNIX Group) meeting (3 May 2001), one of the members mentioned that he had just been laid off from Mandrake, shortly after returning from a business trip to Vietnam. In effect, about 3 weeks ago Mandrake was cutting back headcount of their US division.
This latest move merely has brought to wider attention convulsions already going on in their company.
Personal note: it's going to be hard to find work as a Linux guy when so many Linux experts are already out of work.
Geoff
Re:better *hardware* not better wince
on
Palm In Trouble?
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· Score: 2
> Now, admittedly, prolly most WinCE machines have better *hardware* than most PalmOS systems.
I wonder if this is the reason for most of WinCE device sales:
1) J. Random Nerd buys WinCE machine.
2) Nerd then purges existing OS, installs Linux.
3) Nerd shows off accomplishment to friends, thus earning geek points.
4) WinCE manufacturer reports sale to Microsoft, who thinks they are on the right track, & look for another VP to wage unwinnable PR war on the GPL.
Jimmy & Yves both had potential as characters: Yves as the mysterious agent-for-hire who actually knew the stuff that the Gunmen only wildly speculated about, & Jimmy as the average guy who was not as smart as the 3 title characters, but had more common sense.
However, none of them had characters that were well-thought out or more than one-dimensional. (What was the real difference between Frohickey & Langley -- besides the fact one was older than the other? And we saw little of Byer's geek quotent in the series -- he was just the guy who wore a suit & stood around.)
Oh well, another source for geek trivia, & we know some script kiddies will be mining the show for K-rad k3wl handles.
Geoff
I'm Still Trying to Understand . . .
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 2
How this guy Mundie's proclamations are a new threat to people creating software under the GPL license. Take for example this statement:
> What is at issue with the GPL? In a nutshell, it debases the currency of the ideas and labor that
> transform great ideas into great products.
Yeah, it's an eloquent statement, precisely states Microsoft's take on GPL, yet it fails to explain just how the GPL ``debases" creativity. Is this because the programmer does not get paid for his work? Mundie never says this; we have to read between the lines, & look back to Bill Gates' own adolescent 70's rant about software ``piracy". Otherwise, we are free to assume this is due to any cause -- for example, Mundie holds this true because programmers who release code under GPL are under the mind control of SMERSH, unlike Microsoft programmers, all of whom dutifully wear tinfoil hats.
Mundie is a third-string player in this continuing struggle between Microsoft & GPL'd software. The first string was Gates & Ballmer, neither of whom made much of a serious impression. Next were a series of VPs, of whom the only one who sticks in my mind was Allchin, & that was mostly for his brain dead McCarthy-like statement about GPL'd software. All of them had their shot, found themselves in a no-win situation, & delegated the problem to someone lower in the MS food chain.
Now comes Mundie, a guy with a couple of failed computer companies under his belt, & the protegee of former Microsoft VP Nathan Myhrvold -- who was responsible for Microsoft almost missing the importance of the Internet & left Microsoft shortly afterwards. Mundie repeats the same arguments Microsoft has already stated, perhaps hoping that if you repeat something enough times, people will start to beleive it.
So when Mundie realises that his 15 minutes are up & he failed to sway opinion, who will he delegate this problem to? A junior programmer? Any direct employees left in the cafeteria or on the janitorial staff? Someone from HR?
Sorry, the problem of access to what the laws say is a problem as old as the Romans: the plebians constantly were in agitation over the fact that -- until the Middle Republic, the laws were not written down, & unless you knew the proper legal formulas, one could not legally sell or buy real property or chattel, sue for injuries, defend oneself form lawsuits & all that other good stuff.
So who knew what the law was for all of this? They were the patrician class, also known as the ruling class.
Another example is land law in the UK. Until the 19th century, British law required a landowner to prove title back to the days of the Norman Conquest -- simply to provide work for solicitors, who made their living researching titles & keeping copies of medieval deeds.
If I knew Continental Eurpoean history bette,r I could probably cite a few examples from there, also.
Knowledge of the law was a privilege that the ruling classes have fought to keep ahold of. And one reason why a degree in law has been an advantage in promoting oneself into the upper middle class, at minimum.
> What truely bothers me is that, with so much at stake, to what lengths will AOL/M$
> go to win? And, where will the battle be fought?
One thing that stuck out of this memo was the projection that 5-10 new computers will be sold in the Christmas 2001 season. Which is a figure I just can't understand: last figures I heard from Gertner & similar ilk was that 5 million total desktop computers would be sold in 2001; & unless a new ``killer application" came out for the Windows platform (i.e., something that makes Joe End User want to buy a new & improved computer running either Win 2K or Win ME), I doubt we'll see much more than 5 million in 2002 either.
Computers are, at last, plenty fast for Joe End User: why should he or she fix something that ain't broken? Even if Microsoft releases Windows XP in time for Xmas 2001, its sales will mostly be at the cost of existing Win 98, ME, NT & 2K sales.
Add to this the fact that there are about 22 milliion AOL users out there, & several million Earthlink users. If MS releases a product that keeps them from easily connecting to their established accounts & circles fo friends, how much of an incentive will they have to upgrade?
If AOL starts a FUD campaign about XP, it will kill XP sales, & force Microsoft to support the other four flavors of Windows for another year or two, which eat all of the R & D that went into this failed product. And when you consider both Win ME & 2K were received with underwhelming interest, MS will have spent serious money on R & D for several years in a row without any increased profits to show for it.
Hmm. Could AOL be turning the consumer Internet into a Vietnam for Microsoft?
There are a number of smart people at Microsoft -- well, smart marketers, & at least as many as at AOL -- so expect Microsoft to unleash their own PR counteroffensive. Which will be as effective as AOL's. And it will get bloody & costly for two companies whose business models are built on perpetual growth. It could turn into a bloodbath on either side, much like the ignomious battles of World War I where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost just to gain a few hundred yards.
(Yes, I can be a little apocalyptic sometimes. But the idea of Microsoft & AOL beating each other to death while more enlightened businesses step in & steal their markets appeals to me.)
In a nutshell, corporate users of software came out strongly against this bill, & the sponsor of the bill was nowhere to be seen. Only three people spoke for it -- Ray Nimmer, who helped write the bill, John Woodard an Intel lawyer, & Jim Craven of the Americna Electronics Association -- & they appeared to be going thru the motions.
I would guess that the best the backers of UCITA in Oregon can hope for is that the bill dies in committee, people forget about it, so they can reitnroduce the bill in 2003. But with other corporations aware of this grab at their own profit margins, I doubt it will pass even in then.
> If Microsoft was so ignorant of the Internet, then why was it a node on Usenet in 1981?
I said *Gates* not Microsoft. Gates was dismissive of the Internet until his public announcement that MS would start targetting the Internet in December of 1995.
In answer to your question, MS had a Usenet node in 1981 probably because their sysadmin wanted access to help maintain their Vax. This doesn't mean that Gates had a clue about the Internet until almost too late: rumor is Gates heavily relied on Nathan Myhrvold for technological advice, & Myhrvold told him to ignore the 'Net. (That's probably why Myhrvold left shortly after the start of the MS offensive to embrace, extend & extinguish the 'Net.)
Your point still does not answer why someone would treat Gates' opinion as fact -- especially when Mundie offers no further proof that Gates was truly insightful about Internet business -- & not just lucky.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this part added in a much more recent edition of Gates' book? Even in 1995, Gates
> viewed the Internet and the World Wide Web as nonentities.
Probably. Gates did not acknowledge that the Internet was worth his attention until December of that year.
What is more chilling is that Mundie quotes the opinion of a businessman as if it were undisputeable fact -- Mundie states that we've just been thru the popping of a speculative bubble, & to prove it he quotes Gates from 1995, as if the man were a genius or a prophet.
Just how well Gates understands the Internet is a matter still open to debate. But by quoting him in this manner, Mundie provokes us to ask just how much of a cult of personality exists at Microsoft. And if this cult will handicap Microsoft from understanding how the industry is actually changing.
> What I'm thinking of, is wouldn't it be possible to create a minimalist compression algorithm that tended to not affect the file size,
> but might deviate it in either direction by about 1% ?(enough to cover the overhead of the decompressor).
All purely random strings of numbers (e.g. pi, e or the square root of 2), tend to have short strings of digits that repeat randomly. I believe this behavior is called ``clustering."
Assuming a large enough file, say 3MB in size, we could find up to 26 strings of two or more digits that repeat enough times so that the compressor would be a series of substitution commands. For example:
s/a/311/g
s/b/47/g
s/c/9724/g
...
etc.
That comes out to an average of 10 characters per line (including end-of-line character), add another 20 characters for overhead, & the decompressing script could be kept to less than 300 characters. As long as each substitution applied to more than 3 places in the original, then there would be net decrease in total file. And since we are looking at the 26 most common strings of digits, this inductively should be possible.
>NO. Time to come up with something original. Penis birds have gone the way of the dodo.. or really have gone the way of
> Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, All your * are belong to us, goatse.cx, and *BSD.
Hmmm . . . goatse.cx . . . now I know what happened to www.godhatesfags.com. I guess when the rent is due, some people are willing to compromise their morals faster than others.
It was a step up for the reverend anyhoo, if you ask me!
> Why the hell are you posting articles like this? As far as I can see it's just a blatent advert for their book. You've
> even put "not any time soon" in the intro.
I found this article interesting not for the insights it allegedly provides for Oracle's relationship to Open Source, but for how Tim O'Reilly apparently is trying to sell the suits on Open Source.
O'Reilly appears to be attempting to act an ambassador between the hacker community, & the suits. Look how he involved himself in the Amazon 1-click contraversy, on one hand decrying the abuse of the patent system, while on the other providing Jeff Bezos a face-saving way out of this mess. Likewise, he has hired Larry Wall, who maintains the Perl programming language, as a full-time person.
It would appear that the subtext of this article is that O'Reilly is attempting to persuade Ellison to play nicely with Open Source, to act like a Renaissance prince & patronise Open Source. And if Ellison fails to get from this suggestion the ego strokes needed to make this work, then at least the idea is planted like a seed in the minds of other software moguls.
And if this seed falls on fallow ground? Worst case is that O'Reilly gets to write an ``I told you so" article when these proprietary companies slip into Chapter 11.
My wife answered the phone the other day, & it was a telemarketer for Qwest.
Telemarketer: We'd like to offer you this new service that will help you block unwanted calls from telemarketers.
My Wife: Will it block sales calls from the phone company?
TM: Uh no.
My Wife: We're not interested. [hangs up]
Geoff
Re:I remember something like that...
on
Linux Anecdotes
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· Score: 2
> Whoever moderated that funny doesn't have a heart. The poor guy suffered thru that experience, it's not nice to laugh at his
> mistakes.
If he posted that story here, he's asking us to laugh WITH him. Which I hope all of us are.
It beats the alternative: ``You're very angry about what just happened with your computer? Great, take this gun, go up into that clock tower & start shooting people. With any luck, you'll reduce the number of calls to tech support asking where the `Any' key is."
Not to advocate violence. Of course. Except against the humor-impaired.
Well, I watched one company in this situation go down -- whose business was in telecom equipment. Its customers were major internaitonal players: TeleDanmark, Deutsche Telecomm, Cable & Wireless.
About three months after the business was sold, & the hard assets were auctioned off (I heard it was a rushed affair, & assets went for pennies on the dollar), one of the former employees was back in business working with these customers. The story I heard was that he got his hands on the source code, was able to hire a number of staff whom he thought were talented, & sold support for this legacy product.
I'm not sure just how he got ahold of the source code: whether he (or a fellow coworker) started to implement an unofficial backup archive at his home, or he approached the major creditor, cut a deal & they made sure certain records were not deleted.
Sometimes a product *can* survive the death of a company. Maybe there's hope for WordPerfect yet!
> The biggest problems are late payers and line hogs. We solved this problems with a little program that would look to see if
> the modems were filling up and/or if people had multiple connections who weren't supposed to. If the modems did fill up,
> it'd clear connections by bumping off people who owed us more than 2.5 months [which was basically to rule out
> prorated amounts + setup fee]. If it didn't get enough from that, it would bump off people who had been on more than 6hrs
> straight.
>
> We'd have people calling us at 7pm, begging us come down to the office to drop off their payment as they just got
> dumped 4 times in a row, only to check their mail to find the 'this wouldn't have happened if you paid your bill' message.
[F/X: this reader chuckling]
My long-term ISP, whom I've been with since late 1992, has always enforced a pay-in-advance policy. You forget to pay a bill, & he disables your account. One reason he can afford to keep in business. (The other is that he does all of his support via email -- that keeps the bottom 10% who waste 90% of his time away.)
If I ran an ISP, there would be no way in hell I'd let someone ride for free for two & ahalf months. Maybe a month if they positively swore each time they called the check was in the mail. Unfortunately, I know of at least one ISP who took a year to close accounts. (I know this because I was given use of this account until the ISP closed it -- & the original owner told them to close the account.)
The only reason people got away with this kind of crap was that ISPs were trying to build marketshare. Either that, or the owners truly were bad businessmen.
Back in 1996, when I worked for an ISP, the vast majority of them here in Portland were running at a loss, with the resulting problems (late paychecks, making due with obsolete or underspecced equipement, etc.). But the owners held in there, betting on the day that they became ``big enough" to either be profitable -- or could sell out to one of the nationals & get their own paycheck.
In short, unless one was running an ISP as a hobby, the present day of reckoning was bound to come.
Add to this the fact most competitive local exchange carriers (or CLECS) are likewise bleeding red ink -- & all of the telco suppliers like Lucent were depending on increasing their revenues by selling to these ISPs, CLECS & DSL providers (sometimes at give-away rates), & it's obvious that we haven't seen the bottom of the crash in this market.
My hope is that 10 years from now, we aren't right back to where we started circa 1980: one beauracratic corporation providing access to 80% of the US, & several equally unresponsive smaller ones servicing the remainder of the market.
> Basically, internal politics at intel played an important role. Intel is a very large company with many divisions, and some of
> them get along about as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.
Whether or not these are Randal's actual words, this is much the case: Intel is a place where the concept of a team rarely extends beyond the people who report to your immediate boss, & sometimes not even that far. (A very effective way to ensure one's continued future at Chipzilla is to eliminate your competition.) A screw-your-neighbor mentallity I have not seen in other workplaces.
And now for an OT question: is this Heidi Wall, whom the pseudo-Randall talks so much about, Larry Wall's daughter?
Slashdot Mirror
> Hey, I hate these ad's as much as anybody, but I hate the alternative even more.
But the alternative is not only ``pay sites".
Let me admit something: X10 has what appears to be a cool product. Something that I'll admit I would probably buy. However it is an example of a good idea that is being killed by their marketroids.
I've looked at their site a couple of times, but it is so packed with ads & over-sized jpegs that I can't easily find answers to my questions. (One of which is ``how much for a trial kit?" And what would I get for my money?) All of these garish ads are merely reinforcing my disinclination NOT to visit their lousy site.
Which is the long & short of this issue: build a web site that easily provides the information your customers want, & keep your ads simple. If the product looks interesting, I'm happy to take a moment, click on it, & see where it leads. But if the ad is the computer equivalent of grabbing me by my lapels & scremaing in the face, then I'll feel obliged to give the company the computer equivalent of kicking 'em in the groin in order to continue with my life.
Geoff
You must be hanging with the wrong kind of people.
The Linux users' group in Portland, OR many years ago renamed itself to the ``Portland Linux/UNIX Group", & the mailing list has carried threads about other flavors of UNIX like Solaris, AIX as well as *BSD since then. (We don't get as many posts about *BSD because, I guess, there are older, more established lists that can answer those kinds of questions faster.
And my ISP has ran on FreeBSD for the last few years -- & if I had a problem with his choice of UNIX flavor, I wouldn't still be using my shell account there on a regular basis.
Geoff
> What, anything to discredit someone who isn't on the Open Source team?
Nope. The original post had an offensively condesending tone, e.g. the title ``Petty petty petty". The original poster was not stating that there was more worthwhile targets for our energies, but that we shouldn't concern ourselves about what Microsoft is doing. My response remains, ``We all rise to fight the evil we think we can defeat."
If the original poster *truly* felt that we should battle these other -- & I'll concede, more immediately important goals -- why didn't she/he offer ways we can contribute to these struggles? I suspect that the posters intent was to silence criticism of Microsoft whether justified or not.
> I can see modding down the original post (Offtopic, perhaps?) but modding up that "you sound like you're from a cult" drivel?
If it makes you feel better, this is the first karma point I've gotten for any of my posts in about a month or two. And I gave up long before that trying to understand how people awarded them; sending email about possible issues to Cowboy Neal doesn't even result in a form letter acknowledging he even reads his email. So I merely look for reponses to whatever I post.
Geoff
> These Microsoft issues are just so petty. Even if they aren't beaten on technical merits (which they will, one day, like all
;-)
> technology companies), even if they dominate, their evil is just so minor and petty compared to true abuse in the world.
We all rise to fight the evil we think we can defeat. Some of us take on an even more powerful evil. (All of you who dream of going deep-sea fishing against Cthulhu raise your hands.
> Open your eyes, people... there are just so many things in the world which are far more deserving of your rage. If you want to
> work on Linux, if you want to beat Microsoft, hey, go ahead, but the way so many Slashdotters obsess about this like Gates is
> the next Hitler is just sick.
Your logic sounds suspciously familiar . . . say, weren't you one of the sock puppets that used to defend Hubbard's pathetic little cult on alt.religion.scientology? Or have Microsoft apologists exhausted all of their fresh ideas, & have come to the point that they sound like every other group of cult apologists?
Geoff
> What it boils down to is, "in case of conflict between two countries' laws, the most severe one takes precedence".
True. Until this treaty was noised about, the rule of the Internet was that the country or nation with the most liberal or free laws in practice prevailed. This proposed treaty will turn the whole matter on its head.
>This is absolutely insane, and will only contribute to widespread contempt of the very concept of Law.
I wish it were as simple as that.
For about ten years now, the Internet has been a valuable tool for investigating what some people want to keep hid, & sharing information despite censorship. Now the (literally) Barons of Big Business have noticed this, & want to tie us back to the soil of our national regulations. (Who else would be pressuring so hard for this kind of screwy logic in applying laws?)
Too bad RMS did not propose a way we, the average folk, might apply pressure against this fettering proposal.
Geoff
If you stop for a moment, & analyze his arguments, he's just trying to get everyone to the left of Patrick Buchanan (which has to be 90% of the readers of /.) angry & respond.
/. was opposed to.
> Let Amazon have any privacy rule they want. Let them sell
> their information to every advertiser in the world. But let the consumer choose if he wants to buy Amazon products and give
> his information to Amazon. If he doesn't like the idea of advertisers calling him up then he's free to shop at bn.com. It's
> called capitalism, gentlemen.
Notice how shallow is reasoning actually is: as a for instance, he ducks the question why is it a good thing to trade privacy for convenience? Accepting this argument would logically lead to arguming for the imagined right of people to sell themselves into slavery. Which -- last I heard -- everyone here on
Let's not feed this troll. Move along -- there's nothing to see.
Geoff
> Nowhere in the article does it mention why Mandrake did the shakeup.
Note: one of the weaknesses of any online community is the fact many believe themselves to be poorly connected & that everyone else either knows -- or doesn't know -- what they have heard. That is why I haven't shared the following bit of news.
At the last PLUG (==Portland Linux/UNIX Group) meeting (3 May 2001), one of the members mentioned that he had just been laid off from Mandrake, shortly after returning from a business trip to Vietnam. In effect, about 3 weeks ago Mandrake was cutting back headcount of their US division.
This latest move merely has brought to wider attention convulsions already going on in their company.
Personal note: it's going to be hard to find work as a Linux guy when so many Linux experts are already out of work.
Geoff
> Now, admittedly, prolly most WinCE machines have better *hardware* than most PalmOS systems.
I wonder if this is the reason for most of WinCE device sales:
1) J. Random Nerd buys WinCE machine.
2) Nerd then purges existing OS, installs Linux.
3) Nerd shows off accomplishment to friends, thus earning geek points.
4) WinCE manufacturer reports sale to Microsoft, who thinks they are on the right track, & look for another VP to wage unwinnable PR war on the GPL.
Geoff
Jimmy & Yves both had potential as characters: Yves as the mysterious agent-for-hire who actually knew the stuff that the Gunmen only wildly speculated about, & Jimmy as the average guy who was not as smart as the 3 title characters, but had more common sense.
However, none of them had characters that were well-thought out or more than one-dimensional. (What was the real difference between Frohickey & Langley -- besides the fact one was older than the other? And we saw little of Byer's geek quotent in the series -- he was just the guy who wore a suit & stood around.)
Oh well, another source for geek trivia, & we know some script kiddies will be mining the show for K-rad k3wl handles.
Geoff
How this guy Mundie's proclamations are a new threat to people creating software under the GPL license. Take for example this statement:
> What is at issue with the GPL? In a nutshell, it debases the currency of the ideas and labor that
> transform great ideas into great products.
Yeah, it's an eloquent statement, precisely states Microsoft's take on GPL, yet it fails to explain just how the GPL ``debases" creativity. Is this because the programmer does not get paid for his work? Mundie never says this; we have to read between the lines, & look back to Bill Gates' own adolescent 70's rant about software ``piracy". Otherwise, we are free to assume this is due to any cause -- for example, Mundie holds this true because programmers who release code under GPL are under the mind control of SMERSH, unlike Microsoft programmers, all of whom dutifully wear tinfoil hats.
Mundie is a third-string player in this continuing struggle between Microsoft & GPL'd software. The first string was Gates & Ballmer, neither of whom made much of a serious impression. Next were a series of VPs, of whom the only one who sticks in my mind was Allchin, & that was mostly for his brain dead McCarthy-like statement about GPL'd software. All of them had their shot, found themselves in a no-win situation, & delegated the problem to someone lower in the MS food chain.
Now comes Mundie, a guy with a couple of failed computer companies under his belt, & the protegee of former Microsoft VP Nathan Myhrvold -- who was responsible for Microsoft almost missing the importance of the Internet & left Microsoft shortly afterwards. Mundie repeats the same arguments Microsoft has already stated, perhaps hoping that if you repeat something enough times, people will start to beleive it.
So when Mundie realises that his 15 minutes are up & he failed to sway opinion, who will he delegate this problem to? A junior programmer? Any direct employees left in the cafeteria or on the janitorial staff? Someone from HR?
Geoff
Sorry, the problem of access to what the laws say is a problem as old as the Romans: the plebians constantly were in agitation over the fact that -- until the Middle Republic, the laws were not written down, & unless you knew the proper legal formulas, one could not legally sell or buy real property or chattel, sue for injuries, defend oneself form lawsuits & all that other good stuff.
So who knew what the law was for all of this? They were the patrician class, also known as the ruling class.
Another example is land law in the UK. Until the 19th century, British law required a landowner to prove title back to the days of the Norman Conquest -- simply to provide work for solicitors, who made their living researching titles & keeping copies of medieval deeds.
If I knew Continental Eurpoean history bette,r I could probably cite a few examples from there, also.
Knowledge of the law was a privilege that the ruling classes have fought to keep ahold of. And one reason why a degree in law has been an advantage in promoting oneself into the upper middle class, at minimum.
Geoff
> What truely bothers me is that, with so much at stake, to what lengths will AOL/M$
> go to win? And, where will the battle be fought?
One thing that stuck out of this memo was the projection that 5-10 new computers will be sold in the Christmas 2001 season. Which is a figure I just can't understand: last figures I heard from Gertner & similar ilk was that 5 million total desktop computers would be sold in 2001; & unless a new ``killer application" came out for the Windows platform (i.e., something that makes Joe End User want to buy a new & improved computer running either Win 2K or Win ME), I doubt we'll see much more than 5 million in 2002 either.
Computers are, at last, plenty fast for Joe End User: why should he or she fix something that ain't broken? Even if Microsoft releases Windows XP in time for Xmas 2001, its sales will mostly be at the cost of existing Win 98, ME, NT & 2K sales.
Add to this the fact that there are about 22 milliion AOL users out there, & several million Earthlink users. If MS releases a product that keeps them from easily connecting to their established accounts & circles fo friends, how much of an incentive will they have to upgrade?
If AOL starts a FUD campaign about XP, it will kill XP sales, & force Microsoft to support the other four flavors of Windows for another year or two, which eat all of the R & D that went into this failed product. And when you consider both Win ME & 2K were received with underwhelming interest, MS will have spent serious money on R & D for several years in a row without any increased profits to show for it.
Hmm. Could AOL be turning the consumer Internet into a Vietnam for Microsoft?
There are a number of smart people at Microsoft -- well, smart marketers, & at least as many as at AOL -- so expect Microsoft to unleash their own PR counteroffensive. Which will be as effective as AOL's. And it will get bloody & costly for two companies whose business models are built on perpetual growth. It could turn into a bloodbath on either side, much like the ignomious battles of World War I where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost just to gain a few hundred yards.
(Yes, I can be a little apocalyptic sometimes. But the idea of Microsoft & AOL beating each other to death while more enlightened businesses step in & steal their markets appeals to me.)
Geoff
18 April of this year the Oregon State Judiciary Committe held a hearing about UCITA (HB 3910) which I attended.
I've published the details elsewhere on the Web. See the PLUG mailing list or here for details.
In a nutshell, corporate users of software came out strongly against this bill, & the sponsor of the bill was nowhere to be seen. Only three people spoke for it -- Ray Nimmer, who helped write the bill, John Woodard an Intel lawyer, & Jim Craven of the Americna Electronics Association -- & they appeared to be going thru the motions.
I would guess that the best the backers of UCITA in Oregon can hope for is that the bill dies in committee, people forget about it, so they can reitnroduce the bill in 2003. But with other corporations aware of this grab at their own profit margins, I doubt it will pass even in then.
Geoff
> If Microsoft was so ignorant of the Internet, then why was it a node on Usenet in 1981?
I said *Gates* not Microsoft. Gates was dismissive of the Internet until his public announcement that MS would start targetting the Internet in December of 1995.
In answer to your question, MS had a Usenet node in 1981 probably because their sysadmin wanted access to help maintain their Vax. This doesn't mean that Gates had a clue about the Internet until almost too late: rumor is Gates heavily relied on Nathan Myhrvold for technological advice, & Myhrvold told him to ignore the 'Net. (That's probably why Myhrvold left shortly after the start of the MS offensive to embrace, extend & extinguish the 'Net.)
Your point still does not answer why someone would treat Gates' opinion as fact -- especially when Mundie offers no further proof that Gates was truly insightful about Internet business -- & not just lucky.
Geoff
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this part added in a much more recent edition of Gates' book? Even in 1995, Gates
> viewed the Internet and the World Wide Web as nonentities.
Probably. Gates did not acknowledge that the Internet was worth his attention until December of that year.
What is more chilling is that Mundie quotes the opinion of a businessman as if it were undisputeable fact -- Mundie states that we've just been thru the popping of a speculative bubble, & to prove it he quotes Gates from 1995, as if the man were a genius or a prophet.
Just how well Gates understands the Internet is a matter still open to debate. But by quoting him in this manner, Mundie provokes us to ask just how much of a cult of personality exists at Microsoft. And if this cult will handicap Microsoft from understanding how the industry is actually changing.
Geoff
> What I'm thinking of, is wouldn't it be possible to create a minimalist compression algorithm that tended to not affect the file size,
> but might deviate it in either direction by about 1% ?(enough to cover the overhead of the decompressor).
All purely random strings of numbers (e.g. pi, e or the square root of 2), tend to have short strings of digits that repeat randomly. I believe this behavior is called ``clustering."
Assuming a large enough file, say 3MB in size, we could find up to 26 strings of two or more digits that repeat enough times so that the compressor would be a series of substitution commands. For example:
s/a/311/g
s/b/47/g
s/c/9724/g
...
etc.
That comes out to an average of 10 characters per line (including end-of-line character), add another 20 characters for overhead, & the decompressing script could be kept to less than 300 characters. As long as each substitution applied to more than 3 places in the original, then there would be net decrease in total file. And since we are looking at the 26 most common strings of digits, this inductively should be possible.
Hmm. I seem to have reinvented pkzip.
Geoff
>NO. Time to come up with something original. Penis birds have gone the way of the dodo.. or really have gone the way of
> Natalie Portman, Hot Grits, All your * are belong to us, goatse.cx, and *BSD.
Hmmm . . . goatse.cx . . . now I know what happened to www.godhatesfags.com. I guess when the rent is due, some people are willing to compromise their morals faster than others.
It was a step up for the reverend anyhoo, if you ask me!
Geoff
> Why the hell are you posting articles like this? As far as I can see it's just a blatent advert for their book. You've
> even put "not any time soon" in the intro.
I found this article interesting not for the insights it allegedly provides for Oracle's relationship to Open Source, but for how Tim O'Reilly apparently is trying to sell the suits on Open Source.
O'Reilly appears to be attempting to act an ambassador between the hacker community, & the suits. Look how he involved himself in the Amazon 1-click contraversy, on one hand decrying the abuse of the patent system, while on the other providing Jeff Bezos a face-saving way out of this mess. Likewise, he has hired Larry Wall, who maintains the Perl programming language, as a full-time person.
It would appear that the subtext of this article is that O'Reilly is attempting to persuade Ellison to play nicely with Open Source, to act like a Renaissance prince & patronise Open Source. And if Ellison fails to get from this suggestion the ego strokes needed to make this work, then at least the idea is planted like a seed in the minds of other software moguls.
And if this seed falls on fallow ground? Worst case is that O'Reilly gets to write an ``I told you so" article when these proprietary companies slip into Chapter 11.
Geoff
My wife answered the phone the other day, & it was a telemarketer for Qwest.
Telemarketer: We'd like to offer you this new service that will help you block unwanted calls from telemarketers.
My Wife: Will it block sales calls from the phone company?
TM: Uh no.
My Wife: We're not interested. [hangs up]
Geoff
> Whoever moderated that funny doesn't have a heart. The poor guy suffered thru that experience, it's not nice to laugh at his
> mistakes.
If he posted that story here, he's asking us to laugh WITH him. Which I hope all of us are.
It beats the alternative: ``You're very angry about what just happened with your computer? Great, take this gun, go up into that clock tower & start shooting people. With any luck, you'll reduce the number of calls to tech support asking where the `Any' key is."
Not to advocate violence. Of course. Except against the humor-impaired.
Geoff
[theoretical scenario snipped]
Well, I watched one company in this situation go down -- whose business was in telecom equipment. Its customers were major internaitonal players: TeleDanmark, Deutsche Telecomm, Cable & Wireless.
About three months after the business was sold, & the hard assets were auctioned off (I heard it was a rushed affair, & assets went for pennies on the dollar), one of the former employees was back in business working with these customers. The story I heard was that he got his hands on the source code, was able to hire a number of staff whom he thought were talented, & sold support for this legacy product.
I'm not sure just how he got ahold of the source code: whether he (or a fellow coworker) started to implement an unofficial backup archive at his home, or he approached the major creditor, cut a deal & they made sure certain records were not deleted.
Sometimes a product *can* survive the death of a company. Maybe there's hope for WordPerfect yet!
Geoff
You mean like this:
One honest day's work: $200.--
One microbrew: $1.--, plus deposit
One connection to the Internet: $7.--/month
Reading a 'Net story about another corporation full of overpaid, underbrained dweebs make fools of themselves: priceless.
Geoff
> The biggest problems are late payers and line hogs. We solved this problems with a little program that would look to see if
> the modems were filling up and/or if people had multiple connections who weren't supposed to. If the modems did fill up,
> it'd clear connections by bumping off people who owed us more than 2.5 months [which was basically to rule out
> prorated amounts + setup fee]. If it didn't get enough from that, it would bump off people who had been on more than 6hrs
> straight.
>
> We'd have people calling us at 7pm, begging us come down to the office to drop off their payment as they just got
> dumped 4 times in a row, only to check their mail to find the 'this wouldn't have happened if you paid your bill' message.
[F/X: this reader chuckling]
My long-term ISP, whom I've been with since late 1992, has always enforced a pay-in-advance policy. You forget to pay a bill, & he disables your account. One reason he can afford to keep in business. (The other is that he does all of his support via email -- that keeps the bottom 10% who waste 90% of his time away.)
If I ran an ISP, there would be no way in hell I'd let someone ride for free for two & ahalf months. Maybe a month if they positively swore each time they called the check was in the mail. Unfortunately, I know of at least one ISP who took a year to close accounts. (I know this because I was given use of this account until the ISP closed it -- & the original owner told them to close the account.)
The only reason people got away with this kind of crap was that ISPs were trying to build marketshare. Either that, or the owners truly were bad businessmen.
Geoff
Back in 1996, when I worked for an ISP, the vast majority of them here in Portland were running at a loss, with the resulting problems (late paychecks, making due with obsolete or underspecced equipement, etc.). But the owners held in there, betting on the day that they became ``big enough" to either be profitable -- or could sell out to one of the nationals & get their own paycheck.
In short, unless one was running an ISP as a hobby, the present day of reckoning was bound to come.
Add to this the fact most competitive local exchange carriers (or CLECS) are likewise bleeding red ink -- & all of the telco suppliers like Lucent were depending on increasing their revenues by selling to these ISPs, CLECS & DSL providers (sometimes at give-away rates), & it's obvious that we haven't seen the bottom of the crash in this market.
My hope is that 10 years from now, we aren't right back to where we started circa 1980: one beauracratic corporation providing access to 80% of the US, & several equally unresponsive smaller ones servicing the remainder of the market.
Geoff
> Basically, internal politics at intel played an important role. Intel is a very large company with many divisions, and some of
> them get along about as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.
Whether or not these are Randal's actual words, this is much the case: Intel is a place where the concept of a team rarely extends beyond the people who report to your immediate boss, & sometimes not even that far. (A very effective way to ensure one's continued future at Chipzilla is to eliminate your competition.) A screw-your-neighbor mentallity I have not seen in other workplaces.
And now for an OT question: is this Heidi Wall, whom the pseudo-Randall talks so much about, Larry Wall's daughter?
Geoff