with the cable frequencies. Had they not seen it, Microsoft could have pumped a few million into promoting this noisy spec to flood the market with devices laying waste to clean cable signals. Then, its IPTV business starts looking a whole lot better. With an end to end tie-in of Microsoft software in the US IPTV( UltimateTV? ) market, Microsoft gets to own the channels like they currently own the PC OEM channels. Doesn't that sound like fun?
it appears you don't quite get what an education is since you believe that being educated on what buttons to click is more important than the concepts of clicking buttons. You would yank your kid from a school which uses Linux? That's just plain idiotic thinking and I'm not falling for it.
As far as diverting attention to other aspects of school budgets and financial waste goes, forget it also. I'm not out to fix other aspects of the school system, just get them from wasting money and resources on tools when there are commodity replacements in the open source market. If anything, I'd go after the poor understanding teachers have of what is a product name is and what a data file is. I get sick when I hear an educator exclaiming, "I'll send you a powerpoint on that."! But then again, it sounds like this is just how you want your kids taught. Not I, not I.
they should have done what Handspring did and build a screw driver right into the device. They could build it into the corner of the battery door or something like that since there's no "pen" needed or provided with the OLPC device.
it shows you how ridiculous the US legal system is in this regard. SCO was able to bring a case against many companies without showing to a judge or jury there was any validity to their claim. How many years did it take for Novell to get this through the courts? 5 years! 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars were spent on this and it was all a smoke and mirror game.
And the tricks Microsoft played in backroom deals to help fund SCO was amazing. They paid SCO $16 million for a UNIX license? Sun, a company who's products are UNIX paid less than Microsoft for a license. $10 million IIRC. And then, we learned of how Microsoft help broker the millions put into SCO by a Canadian investment company and a Canadian bank. These are publicly traded US corporations doing this crap.
I hope Novell has some recourse to burn these companies and burn them well. And maybe AutoZone and Daimler Chrysler can jump in too.
having read the article, I felt it was either thrown together or built from pieces of a larger article. The sections just didn't flow very well and there was no depth to any of it. IMO, this seems to be a poor hack at getting something regarding this news into their content.
Notice that they totally missed that Microsoft had put $15M into SCO for a UNIX license and Sun put in $10 million for their UNIX license. Now, it turns out that SCO does not own UNIX and though they were allowed to sell licenses, they were legally obliged to pay 95% of those fees to Novell. IMO, this is atleast as important to the story since both these companies are still around and still fighting against Linux. Not to mention that Novell has some legal issues to deal with related to those licenses and their validity. As the owner of the product, do they not have the right to void such licenses since they were never paid?
>The problem with Linux right now is software support. Pure and simple.
and what software for K-12 is not supported on Linux?
BTW, Apple did a pretty good job getting school kids familiar with its product. What happened was about a billion dollars in Microsoft marketing of FUD that Apple Mac was dead because Windows 95 made it obsolete. I was there and I had school teachers asking me about Windows PC's "because Apple was going out of business". There were no exploding Macs or anything like it, just millions and millions of Microsofts money going out to the press to spread the FUD. Apple survived by the skin of their teeth and even had to take money from Microsoft and agree to drop Netscape for a Mac version of MS Internet Explorer.
Linux and OSS are a perfect match for K-12. It's inexpensive, completely open for their learning experiences if that is what they want to do, it works. Atleast here in the US, school systems are constantly fighting for their budgets and floundering with expensive support of Microsoft Windows software and their hardware requirements.
but Novell was never paid for these licenses. So, does this make them void/invalid and require new licenses from the company who really owns the product? If so, it would leave those fools who signed up with SCO to be the ones who fight over the carcass instead of making Novell do it.
What this would also be good at would be invalidating Microsoft's and Sun's licenses since those were worth something like $25 million combined and these were directly used to finance SCO's fight against Linux.
to hold up to the 10-day pledge but in the end, if something major holds back a fix, are we all going to bash them for missing the 10-day pledge? I doubt it. After all, we are not talking about Microsoft. These people are trying to do the best job possible and don't have to consider how the browser fix would interfere with some feak'n gumball machine driver that has IE code in it.
But she's right in that they really shouldn't be making statements like that without having discussed this with their team and doing so could be considered a challenge to others. Not something you want to do with a company willing to pay billions just to purchase marketshare let alone how much they'd be willing to put into ads and other FUD should a fix take 241 hours.
Keeping it locked and loaded the next time I cross the street. When another mobile phone using driver turns the corner and starts toward me, there'll be puke on her/his steering wheel and dashboard.
Gotta head over to MakeZine.com to see if there's already a kit for this.
I think all their 3D stuff done with the Mars rovers were Java based and some Java3D. So, in comes Microsoft to purchase the hearts and minds of the management to push out that which the engineers developed originally.
and to think that they were found guilty of anti-competitive tactics based on anti-trust laws yet still allowed to make sweetheart deals like those. Yes, let's rebuild Iraq just like America...:-/
yes, I found that he's been at IU for over 7 years and didn't just jump into the IU Presidents position from the board at ChaCha. And you're right, I was just shooting from the hip since there wasn't enough info in the article to determine otherwise.
BTW, it's just too easy to bash Microsoft and besides, they deserve every bit of it they get. That's a fact and not opinion.:-/
Doesn't that seem like a short cycle. Their reasoning is that the warranty for the PC is 3 years so therefore, a 3 year replacement cycle... Silly me for thinking that just because the warranty is up doesn't mean you should throw it out. I wonder if Microsoft's Software Assurance isn't involved here since that too is a 3 year cycle.
The good news is that he's been at IU for a while and didn't just come over from being on ChaCha's board. Still, seems like he might have financial ties to ChaCha and therefore have a conflict of interest.
It does look like a conflict of interest here but I guess there's none at IU with the balls to go up against the new IU President. Next thing you know, he's going to force everyone to use Windows Vista along with Microsoft Office 2007. Oh, and collect a nice check from Microsoft to go along with his check(s) from ChaCha.
So those poor rural Chinese have a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista-Basic for only a few months salary. How many years salary is it going to cost them for the hardware/computer to run it on? That $199 PC we heard about recently is going to have enough power to run Vista?
And if they really think this is about piracy, think again. Those who are pirating are not going to pay $66 for Windows Vista-Home when for the same price, they can get Windows Vista-Ultimate. The difference between $2-$5 for the pirated versions compared to either $66 or $132 is still HUGE. So it's effectively meaningless in preventing piracy over there.
My guess is that this is all part of the recent deals cut between Microsoft and China and probably includes Microsoft kickbacks for the hardware vendors and gov officials making the deal. As someone else mentioned, it would be better to see the Chinese government cracking down on the piracy. Then, the difference between legally free GNU/Linux and even the $66 WinVista-Basic is still too large for most and GNU/Linux wins.
hey, I'm all for GNU/Linux gaining marketshare but the reality is that close to ALL new computers come with Windows Vista. It took over 2 years for XP to make any kind of corporate incursion but it did and did so because of pre-loads and the fact that they couldn't get Windows 2000 without headaches.
And I've been telling everyone all along that Vista is not going to add anything to Microsofts bottom line since they got licensing fees for Windows XP and they're going to get licensing fees for Windows Vista. And when you are racking in billions at around an 80% profit margin, who the hell cares if there's no growth, it still means billions in profits.
So the bottom line is that Windows Vista, because of forced OEM pre-loading, will eventually gain marketshare. There are just way too many lemmings out there who'll just take what's shoved in front of them. Corporations will find that they can't get support contracts while running Windows XP or some other forced licensing tie-in will slowly grow Windows Vista marketshare.
I don't like it, but that is they way it happens and how it has happened over and over again. I do hope that Linux on the desktop will start slowing growth in Windows desktop marketshare like it seriously slowed down server growth and prevented domination there. Stopping growth on the desktop will start the fall and I agree, Vista will help.
FYI, Vista is selling via pre-loads and it'll keep selling this way until the public+dog are beat into submission and accept it. This is how Windows 2000 and Windows XP grew market share and eventually gained acceptance. No matter what the EULA changes ment to the users rights or lack of.
that was my thought but for the NAS, he could get an old Buffalo LinkStation to act as that NAS host. By plugging in his USB drive into the NAS, he can format the USB drive ext2/ext3 and everybody sees it as an SMB filesystem device. All those hardware devices he mentioned have a network interface so this makes the best solution IMO.
I can believe IBM wanted control of the OS. Even in their dealings with Microsoft, they got the source code and put their name on it( IBM PC DOS ). It was very very lucky that Microsoft kept the rights to sell their own version( MS DOS ) and that Phoenix clean-room reverse engineered the IBM BIOS. Those two events are what allowed Microsoft to leverage the operating system IBM made popular and then turn around and use that control to eventually crush and control most of the software market for close to 20 years.
If Microsoft sold fast food, they'd still be quite wealthy. What, with all those customers barfing up the McMicrosft product and then turning right around and purchasing more. And every 6 months or so, a McMicrosoft executive would put out PR statements claiming the next new product would be the best McMicrosoft product yet. Reality would show it would still come up as often, just for different reasons and again, customers turned around and got back in line for more servings of the same.
McMicrosoft, making the world throw up bits and bytes day in and day out while paying billions for the pleasure.;-/
I hadn't heard that DR charged so much and would wonder why IBM would do both deals when one was so outrageously expensive. I had heard that after IBM made the Microsoft/DOS deal, DR and IBM eventually signed a deal but IBM was so pissed at DR that when they actually offered CPM/86, it was as you mentioned, in the $250 range and the PC-DOS stuff was under $100. Hence my comment of the classic "partnership" where even though one becomes a partner, the other can screw over the other with manipulations of retail prices.
BTW, I had CPM/86 running on a Xerox 820 I'd built from scraps in the mid/late 80's. The Xerox 820 had a Z80 on the planar board but also had the ability to take an 8086 add-on board. Each CPU board ran its own OS and shared peripherals with memory and clocks separated. This was my first feel for computer "multi-tasking". Once I got UNIX on my 386/40 machines, anything from Microsoft was a joke and appeared more like putting lipstick on a camel. Windows NT almost won me back but the hardware requirements and lack of performance made it the last time anything from Microsoft came close to being even the slightest bit interesting.
I'd just read a story on how Steve Ballmer said that "the company is tackling disruptive technology changes head-on" and both Steve and Bill were uncharacteristically telling analysts that everything was smelling like roses at Microsoft. Now, seeing this story of what's really MS "Get The Facts, Part Deux" and I'm thinking that the "disruptive technology" Balmer spoke of was probably not Google but more likely was Linux, OSS, and AJAX technologies.
IMO, it appears that Linux and OSS is making enough of a dent into Microsofts expansion plans that they feel they need to put up a site where existing Microsoft customers can "learn" about OSS from Microsoft instead of going off to some Linux distro and learning about it from a direction which will likely lead away from Microsoft software. Good move on Microsofts part but how effective it'll be is questionable. With pre-configured and free virtual machine images available for all kinds of experimentation( http://vmware.com/products/free_virtualization.htm l ) it's a tough battle keeping Windows developers tied only to Windows for next-gen products. So it'll keep some hardcore Microsoft customers but the newer customers can and will easily find Linux and OSS enticing once they learn the ropes. IMO.
BTW, Microsoft normally tries to play down growth and future revenue to the financial analysts so to more easily meet and/or beat expectations. The "everything is smelling like roses" stories are usually reserved for the CEO, CTO, and other PHB style of gatherings. So this seems like the first telling of the story of what's really keeping these guys up at night. And Google is definitely part of that story too.
hmmm, I wonder if there's any profit to be made ratting out known pirates to China's and/or India's BSA equivalent? If they have one that is since IIRC, didn't Microsoft start that organization in the US.
This idea came to mind after reading how Microsoft put the BSA onto various school districts in the US in an attempt to force them into that foolish Microsoft Software Assurance contract. It backfired and a number of school districts switched out from Microsoft Windows to GNU/Linux software instead. The name Ernie Ball comes to mind also.
Slashdot Mirror
with the cable frequencies. Had they not seen it, Microsoft could have pumped a few million into promoting this noisy spec to flood the market with devices laying waste to clean cable signals. Then, its IPTV business starts looking a whole lot better. With an end to end tie-in of Microsoft software in the US IPTV( UltimateTV? ) market, Microsoft gets to own the channels like they currently own the PC OEM channels. Doesn't that sound like fun?
LoB
it appears you don't quite get what an education is since you believe that being educated on what buttons to click is more important than the concepts of clicking buttons. You would yank your kid from a school which uses Linux? That's just plain idiotic thinking and I'm not falling for it.
As far as diverting attention to other aspects of school budgets and financial waste goes, forget it also. I'm not out to fix other aspects of the school system, just get them from wasting money and resources on tools when there are commodity replacements in the open source market. If anything, I'd go after the poor understanding teachers have of what is a product name is and what a data file is. I get sick when I hear an educator exclaiming, "I'll send you a powerpoint on that."! But then again, it sounds like this is just how you want your kids taught. Not I, not I.
LoB
they should have done what Handspring did and build a screw driver right into the device. They could build it into the corner of the battery door or something like that since there's no "pen" needed or provided with the OLPC device.
LoB
it shows you how ridiculous the US legal system is in this regard. SCO was able to bring a case against many companies without showing to a judge or jury there was any validity to their claim. How many years did it take for Novell to get this through the courts? 5 years! 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars were spent on this and it was all a smoke and mirror game.
And the tricks Microsoft played in backroom deals to help fund SCO was amazing. They paid SCO $16 million for a UNIX license? Sun, a company who's products are UNIX paid less than Microsoft for a license. $10 million IIRC. And then, we learned of how Microsoft help broker the millions put into SCO by a Canadian investment company and a Canadian bank. These are publicly traded US corporations doing this crap.
I hope Novell has some recourse to burn these companies and burn them well. And maybe AutoZone and Daimler Chrysler can jump in too.
LoB
having read the article, I felt it was either thrown together or built from pieces of a larger article. The sections just didn't flow very well and there was no depth to any of it. IMO, this seems to be a poor hack at getting something regarding this news into their content.
Notice that they totally missed that Microsoft had put $15M into SCO for a UNIX license and Sun put in $10 million for their UNIX license. Now, it turns out that SCO does not own UNIX and though they were allowed to sell licenses, they were legally obliged to pay 95% of those fees to Novell. IMO, this is atleast as important to the story since both these companies are still around and still fighting against Linux. Not to mention that Novell has some legal issues to deal with related to those licenses and their validity. As the owner of the product, do they not have the right to void such licenses since they were never paid?
LoB
>The problem with Linux right now is software support. Pure and simple.
and what software for K-12 is not supported on Linux?
BTW, Apple did a pretty good job getting school kids familiar with its product. What happened was about a billion dollars in Microsoft marketing of FUD that Apple Mac was dead because Windows 95 made it obsolete. I was there and I had school teachers asking me about Windows PC's "because Apple was going out of business". There were no exploding Macs or anything like it, just millions and millions of Microsofts money going out to the press to spread the FUD. Apple survived by the skin of their teeth and even had to take money from Microsoft and agree to drop Netscape for a Mac version of MS Internet Explorer.
Linux and OSS are a perfect match for K-12. It's inexpensive, completely open for their learning experiences if that is what they want to do, it works. Atleast here in the US, school systems are constantly fighting for their budgets and floundering with expensive support of Microsoft Windows software and their hardware requirements.
LoB
but Novell was never paid for these licenses. So, does this make them void/invalid and require new licenses from the company who really owns the product? If so, it would leave those fools who signed up with SCO to be the ones who fight over the carcass instead of making Novell do it.
What this would also be good at would be invalidating Microsoft's and Sun's licenses since those were worth something like $25 million combined and these were directly used to finance SCO's fight against Linux.
LoB
http://www.eventsounds.com/wav/another.wav
to hold up to the 10-day pledge but in the end, if something major holds back a fix, are we all going to bash them for missing the 10-day pledge? I doubt it. After all, we are not talking about Microsoft. These people are trying to do the best job possible and don't have to consider how the browser fix would interfere with some feak'n gumball machine driver that has IE code in it.
But she's right in that they really shouldn't be making statements like that without having discussed this with their team and doing so could be considered a challenge to others. Not something you want to do with a company willing to pay billions just to purchase marketshare let alone how much they'd be willing to put into ads and other FUD should a fix take 241 hours.
LoB
Keeping it locked and loaded the next time I cross the street. When another mobile phone using driver turns the corner and starts toward me, there'll be puke on her/his steering wheel and dashboard.
Gotta head over to MakeZine.com to see if there's already a kit for this.
LoB
I think all their 3D stuff done with the Mars rovers were Java based and some Java3D. So, in comes Microsoft to purchase the hearts and minds of the management to push out that which the engineers developed originally.
;-/
yup, there's a good chunk of Java and 3D at NASA so it's time for Microsoft to push those silly ideas out:
http://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+java+3d
We've all seen this play out over and over again and after all, isn't it why we just love Microsoft?
LoB
and to think that they were found guilty of anti-competitive tactics based on anti-trust laws yet still allowed to make sweetheart deals like those. Yes, let's rebuild Iraq just like America... :-/
LoB
yes, I found that he's been at IU for over 7 years and didn't just jump into the IU Presidents position from the board at ChaCha. And you're right, I was just shooting from the hip since there wasn't enough info in the article to determine otherwise.
:-/
BTW, it's just too easy to bash Microsoft and besides, they deserve every bit of it they get. That's a fact and not opinion.
LoB
It seems that McRobbie has been at IU for some time now. He even implemented a plan in 2000 to replace all IU computers every 3 years.
http://chronicle.com/free/2000/11/2000112901t.htm
Doesn't that seem like a short cycle. Their reasoning is that the warranty for the PC is 3 years so therefore, a 3 year replacement cycle... Silly me for thinking that just because the warranty is up doesn't mean you should throw it out. I wonder if Microsoft's Software Assurance isn't involved here since that too is a 3 year cycle.
The good news is that he's been at IU for a while and didn't just come over from being on ChaCha's board. Still, seems like he might have financial ties to ChaCha and therefore have a conflict of interest.
LoB
It does look like a conflict of interest here but I guess there's none at IU with the balls to go up against the new IU President. Next thing you know, he's going to force everyone to use Windows Vista along with Microsoft Office 2007. Oh, and collect a nice check from Microsoft to go along with his check(s) from ChaCha.
LoB
So those poor rural Chinese have a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista-Basic for only a few months salary. How many years salary is it going to cost them for the hardware/computer to run it on? That $199 PC we heard about recently is going to have enough power to run Vista?
And if they really think this is about piracy, think again. Those who are pirating are not going to pay $66 for Windows Vista-Home when for the same price, they can get Windows Vista-Ultimate. The difference between $2-$5 for the pirated versions compared to either $66 or $132 is still HUGE. So it's effectively meaningless in preventing piracy over there.
My guess is that this is all part of the recent deals cut between Microsoft and China and probably includes Microsoft kickbacks for the hardware vendors and gov officials making the deal. As someone else mentioned, it would be better to see the Chinese government cracking down on the piracy. Then, the difference between legally free GNU/Linux and even the $66 WinVista-Basic is still too large for most and GNU/Linux wins.
LoB
hey, I'm all for GNU/Linux gaining marketshare but the reality is that close to ALL new computers come with Windows Vista. It took over 2 years for XP to make any kind of corporate incursion but it did and did so because of pre-loads and the fact that they couldn't get Windows 2000 without headaches.
And I've been telling everyone all along that Vista is not going to add anything to Microsofts bottom line since they got licensing fees for Windows XP and they're going to get licensing fees for Windows Vista. And when you are racking in billions at around an 80% profit margin, who the hell cares if there's no growth, it still means billions in profits.
So the bottom line is that Windows Vista, because of forced OEM pre-loading, will eventually gain marketshare. There are just way too many lemmings out there who'll just take what's shoved in front of them. Corporations will find that they can't get support contracts while running Windows XP or some other forced licensing tie-in will slowly grow Windows Vista marketshare.
I don't like it, but that is they way it happens and how it has happened over and over again. I do hope that Linux on the desktop will start slowing growth in Windows desktop marketshare like it seriously slowed down server growth and prevented domination there. Stopping growth on the desktop will start the fall and I agree, Vista will help.
LoB
FYI, Vista is selling via pre-loads and it'll keep selling this way until the public+dog are beat into submission and accept it. This is how Windows 2000 and Windows XP grew market share and eventually gained acceptance. No matter what the EULA changes ment to the users rights or lack of.
LoB
that was my thought but for the NAS, he could get an old Buffalo LinkStation to act as that NAS host. By plugging in his USB drive into the NAS, he can format the USB drive ext2/ext3 and everybody sees it as an SMB filesystem device. All those hardware devices he mentioned have a network interface so this makes the best solution IMO.
LoB
I can believe IBM wanted control of the OS. Even in their dealings with Microsoft, they got the source code and put their name on it( IBM PC DOS ). It was very very lucky that Microsoft kept the rights to sell their own version( MS DOS ) and that Phoenix clean-room reverse engineered the IBM BIOS. Those two events are what allowed Microsoft to leverage the operating system IBM made popular and then turn around and use that control to eventually crush and control most of the software market for close to 20 years.
LoB
If Microsoft sold fast food, they'd still be quite wealthy. What, with all those customers barfing up the McMicrosft product and then turning right around and purchasing more. And every 6 months or so, a McMicrosoft executive would put out PR statements claiming the next new product would be the best McMicrosoft product yet. Reality would show it would still come up as often, just for different reasons and again, customers turned around and got back in line for more servings of the same.
;-/
McMicrosoft, making the world throw up bits and bytes day in and day out while paying billions for the pleasure.
LoB
I hadn't heard that DR charged so much and would wonder why IBM would do both deals when one was so outrageously expensive. I had heard that after IBM made the Microsoft/DOS deal, DR and IBM eventually signed a deal but IBM was so pissed at DR that when they actually offered CPM/86, it was as you mentioned, in the $250 range and the PC-DOS stuff was under $100. Hence my comment of the classic "partnership" where even though one becomes a partner, the other can screw over the other with manipulations of retail prices.
BTW, I had CPM/86 running on a Xerox 820 I'd built from scraps in the mid/late 80's. The Xerox 820 had a Z80 on the planar board but also had the ability to take an 8086 add-on board. Each CPU board ran its own OS and shared peripherals with memory and clocks separated. This was my first feel for computer "multi-tasking". Once I got UNIX on my 386/40 machines, anything from Microsoft was a joke and appeared more like putting lipstick on a camel. Windows NT almost won me back but the hardware requirements and lack of performance made it the last time anything from Microsoft came close to being even the slightest bit interesting.
LoB
There's probably a few million copies going unused by Linux users and let's not forget the 20-30 million or so copies built into IBM OS/2 in the 90s.
But that is really knit-picking and who the hell cares, if Microsoft is going to make a PR statement like "1 billion sold", we can pick it apart.
BTW, doesn't this, "over 1 billion sold" sound familiar? That's rigth, Microsoft Windows is "The McDonalds of Operating Systems".
LoB
I'd just read a story on how Steve Ballmer said that "the company is tackling disruptive technology changes head-on" and both Steve and Bill were uncharacteristically telling analysts that everything was smelling like roses at Microsoft. Now, seeing this story of what's really MS "Get The Facts, Part Deux" and I'm thinking that the "disruptive technology" Balmer spoke of was probably not Google but more likely was Linux, OSS, and AJAX technologies.
m l ) it's a tough battle keeping Windows developers tied only to Windows for next-gen products. So it'll keep some hardcore Microsoft customers but the newer customers can and will easily find Linux and OSS enticing once they learn the ropes. IMO.
IMO, it appears that Linux and OSS is making enough of a dent into Microsofts expansion plans that they feel they need to put up a site where existing Microsoft customers can "learn" about OSS from Microsoft instead of going off to some Linux distro and learning about it from a direction which will likely lead away from Microsoft software. Good move on Microsofts part but how effective it'll be is questionable. With pre-configured and free virtual machine images available for all kinds of experimentation( http://vmware.com/products/free_virtualization.ht
BTW, Microsoft normally tries to play down growth and future revenue to the financial analysts so to more easily meet and/or beat expectations. The "everything is smelling like roses" stories are usually reserved for the CEO, CTO, and other PHB style of gatherings. So this seems like the first telling of the story of what's really keeping these guys up at night. And Google is definitely part of that story too.
LoB
hmmm, I wonder if there's any profit to be made ratting out known pirates to China's and/or India's BSA equivalent? If they have one that is since IIRC, didn't Microsoft start that organization in the US.
This idea came to mind after reading how Microsoft put the BSA onto various school districts in the US in an attempt to force them into that foolish Microsoft Software Assurance contract. It backfired and a number of school districts switched out from Microsoft Windows to GNU/Linux software instead. The name Ernie Ball comes to mind also.
LoB