I recently sat next the Digiums VP of sales on a flight. Personally, I feel Digium is on the cusp of a revolution in telephony, but the company needs some good leadership to capitalize on it. I also just spent two days reinstalling freaking TrixBox which had trouble dealing with the crummy TDM400 card I bought from Digium. The VP of sales seems to think their future is in proprietary software sales, like the deal with 3Com. He also is hyped about some acquisition of some proprietary software front-end to Asterisk, but the whole worlds seems to use TrixBox, and I don't see anyone lining up to switch to a non-free alternative from Digium.
Understanding open-source company strategies is a bit mind-bending, and unfortunately, I don't think Digium's current leadership gets it. They may be missing the real opportunity. Instead of making the software great and easy to use, which would lead to virtually universal adoption, they're doing the opposite, to help sell their services and proprietary solutions. If they were able to understand the value of being the provider of virtually all new telephony systems as an open-source platform, I think they'd bag their current strategy.
Problem is, most people think of open-source ventures as having 0 assets, and being worth 0.
I'm sure the ThinkPads are good machines. They certainly were when IBM made them. Now that IBM has sold their entire desktop and laptop lines to Lenovo (a China based company), Lenovo down-sizes the NC operation more each year, moving jobs to China where labor is cheaper. It's basically a Chinese operation now. I guess that's not really much different from Dell or HP, who also build their machines in China, but Lenovo moved all the other jobs as well.
According to a recent slashdot traarticle, Microsoft paid $355M to Novel in 2007, so I don't see how that translates into a Microsoft tax. For me, it translates into a linux distro that's on the take from Microsoft... no way in hell would I ever install it. First thing I'd do with the Lenovo laptop si wipe the drive. Then again, living here in NC where IBM use to design these laptops, and knowing quite a few out of work IBM-ers, there's no way in hell I'd buy a Lenovo laptop.
I've just shut down the last Windows machine at my house, and now run my silly billrocks.org site on the kids' Ubuntu server. It's kind of funny watching them play webkinz on my main sever in the "childrens' lounge." Anyway, I'm confident that teaching them Linux from day 1 will help them long-term, not hurt. There is one thing, though... got any good advice for parental controls on Firefox running on Ubuntu? It seems the parental controls only work in Windows, so now my kids are dangerously close to learning the truth about the birds and the bees.
"Bob, I need you to vote for Candidate A at the polls tomorrow. Bring your receipt in so we can verify it online, or you're fired."
Give me a break. You can't even fire a person without worrying that they'll file a discrimination suit against you.
"Boss, I just recorded that. You know, I've been feeling about 20% underpaid lately." Even better, do it the next day, and record the conversation when you refuse to hand over your receipt. Ever ask an interview candidate their age, or if they have kids? If you do, you are open to a law-suit. No business man smart enough to be in business is going to force employees to reveal their votes. A bigger non-issue is hard to imagine.
Complexity is the enemy of security, and I agree with your approach. Let me make one addition: Give the user a receipt also, which he can use later to verify his vote.
While this doesn't add any complexity as far as the user is concerned, it can make the election far easier to verify. There would be a tiny bit of complexity under the hood, but so long as the algorithms are fully public, we'd converge on secure ones quickly. Here's my first attempt - by the way, this is a well studied field, so this has all already been done, but it's fun, and this is slashdot:
The receipt at the voting poll would have the vote and voting machine ID in clear text and a sha-256 summary of the vote, voter registration info, and a nonce (fairly large truly random number, say 20 bytes). The machine would also recored who voted at the machine, and this list would also be printed out after the poll closes in random order. The nonce would also be printed in clear-text on the user's copy, so the identity of who voted for who would be lost at the voting machine. If a person is worried that he may be coerced to reveal his vote (a silly concern IMO, but it was listed above), then the user can throw away or even destroy his receipt, thus losing any ability for anyone to reveal it. The entire database of voting results could be put on-line, so anyone could verify that his vote was indeed counted, and that the tallies are correct. With random sampling of voters through a call center, large-scale ballot box stuffing could be found out if we find voters who didn't vote who are recorded as having voted at a particular machine. We could also help them to anonymously verify their own votes on-line, so to help detect any vote tampering. All the software and hardware would be open-source, and verifiable, so hacks like using a pseudo random number generator rather than a real hardware generator could be detected by experts.
Complexity is a problem, but only if it complicates the voting process, and only if it's shrouded in secrecy. An open-source algorithm is clearly the way to go. Why are politicians so brain-dead on this issue?
Just to officially recored the tin-hat conspiracy theory here for posterity...
Republicans control Diebold. Diebold controls election results. If I had that power and were highly dishonest, I'd test it first on my opponent, just to make sure it works ok. I'd see if I could manipulate the Democratic primary in NH, and if I had some success, I'd feel more confident manipulating any race I cared about.
I notice that few of us here offer any real personal information... my e-mail is bill@billrocks.org, and if you bother to reply to a challenge e-mail, I'll read whatever you have to say. Put financial information on-line? Hell no. That'd be plain stupid.
Yes! So... why don't we already do this, given how easy it is? Do we actually pay people money to build these systems, and not bother to put 5 minutes of thought into what we're buying?
Grr... people participating here should know enough about cryptography to know that it's 100% doable to vote anonymously, while allowing anyone to verify that their vote was counted correctly, and allowing anonymous tallies, plus statistical verification. It's just plain simple and stupid. There are good algorithms that have been patented, but here's the one I come up with in 120 seconds or less, after 2 glasses of wine:
- Each voter submits an electronic vote. - They encrypt their private information with a private key, and append this to their vote to form a "voting record". - A public database gathers all the voting records and tallies them. For simplicity, voters are verified vs the voter rolls non-anonymously, and their votes are made anonymous when uploaded to the main database. This is basically how it is done now with paper votes.
Anyone can download the database and add up the votes. Anyone can verify their own vote by looking for the entry with their encrypted personal data. To verify the statistical accuracy of the result, have a call center randomly ask people to verify their own votes, and see if anyone got screwed.
This car isn't designed for US roads, where it would be a menace. It's designed for Indian roads, which I've never seen, but which I suspect are similar to roads in Italy. Imagine a country where the roads are exactly like a huge Target parking lot. This is Italy. The Tata Nano would be perfect.
I found a relevant link. I live 17 miles from a power plant I firmly believe was the motivation for "The Simpsons", and I have two small children. At this distance, I suspect air pollution and stupidity at the plant are bigger health risks to my family.
Here in NC, we poison ourselves in many different ways. I have some old gas in my garage because my boat-mechanic told me to just pour it on the ground when I asked where I could find his recycling bucket. That was 100m from a major reservoir. I got our hunting/fishing state guide and read that it's not safe to eat as much fish as I want from most of our rivers. Even though my electrical power nuclear, the air here is nearly toxic from up-wind coal plants. The funny thing is I'm pretty sure most of us are willing to pay to clean up the place, but it's just not anyone's job to do it.
I wish it were that easy... H0W manny wways kan u spel a worrd? I think the moderation system is designed to deal with this, and the offensive poster was modded down to -1 troll before I ever read it. Even with my settings set to see all the -1 troll posts, slashdot is not nearly as offensive as my spam-box.
I checked your sig link... ssh tunneling is cool, which is what I assume you mean? I spent a couple days last week installing Windows for the first time in years... it was weird, like one of those movies where you go back to high school. Anyway, I installed VirtualBox on a Fedora7 box, and copied over the Windows virtual drive, and booted it up. To control it, I ssh tunneled VNC (which is otherwise very insecure) to my Ubuntu laptop at home. Then, remotely, I installed Cygwin in the virtualized Windows machine so I could essentially run Linux, and port a Linux application to Windows.
It was soooo strange... Using Linux to ssh-tunnel a remote VNC port to view VirtualBox running Windows running Cygwin, all so I could run gcc... and the funny thing is that the virtual XP machine running over all that crud still ran faster than Vista:-)
You must be an irrigation specialist somewhere other than Florida. I suspect GP has a friend there who had a sink hole open up in is yard after dumping water through his lime-rich land. My mother-in-law lost her green-house to such a thing. They just paid someone to bring in tons of dirt and fill the damned hole, and built a new green-house. Now the main house is on more stable soil which was tested before construction, but those tests are only done where the foundation is laid. Your yard isn't checked.
I wish I had a catchy name... "Bill's Law" just wont catch on. Anyway, here's why companies like Intel can both support OLPC with heartfelt charity, while at the same-time underhandedly stealing their market:
A corporation's actions are dictated by the weakest morals of it's leaders.
Corollary: The simplest way to make a corporation good is to have a strong ethical leader. I guarantee that the leaders involved in working with OLPC are honest people. I also guarantee the leaders involved in knee-capping OLPC are dishonest. A strong leader would find one personality for the company, and enforce it on the troops. Weak leaders allow multiple personalities to come forward when convenient.
Its not about the money but about trust, truthfullness, and respecting what she wants.
There's a particular kind of sea bird that nests in the SF Bay Area. To find a mate, the male goes into the bay, and brings back the biggest fish it can catch. Females wait on shore for a particularly good offer from a male who can provide a big fish.
A bit off topic, but I read someone raving about VirutalBox on/. today, and I've been having trouble with vmware on Ubuntu. It only took a day to become a convert.
Oh, come on, now. It's been a good year. The iPhone brought multi-touch displays into the mainstream. Google started the Android project. Hybrids made huge gains with new battery technology. VoIP? How about Skype and the new Asterisk appliance, or even the Free Telephony Project? I see the same list, but somehow I see it in a more positive light, but heck, I'm an optimist. I saw the moon landing, too. I also witnessed the birth of the personal computer, cell phones, and the Internet. Computing power increased a mind boggling amount, memory went from $1M for 64K bytes to $50 for a gigabyte, and of course disk storage went nuts.
As for real revolutions, I don't believe in them. From airplanes to telephones, when I dig into the story of innovation, I find instead a series of incremental improvements. All we've really been missing lately is those OMG moments like a moon landing. I'm jaded too... when a 5-year-old boy gets to see the first moon landing, he expects amazing things for the rest of his life. At 44, I'm still waiting for a comparable moment. When I think about it, I feel let down. The trick is to step back and realize that the revolution has been happening every day, little by little, just without the OMG moments.
I totally agree. I also feel that a company has the responsibility to serve it's market as best it can, and to live and die with that market. IBM is the best mainframe provider ever. No one else comes close. The mainframe market went south, and so did IBM. I see no problem with that, just a great company doing what it's suppose to do. More examples: Sun is the best workstation company ever. DEC was the best minicomputer company ever. Intel is the best microprocessor maker ever, but they're going to find little demand for 10 gigahertz 64 processor CPUs that suck down 10 kilowatts (ok, I want one bad, but I mean in general). If Microsoft serves the desktop software market until the market fades, it will have been a great company.
Investors seem completely ignorant of this. They always want their portfolio companies to reinvent themselves when the market shifts. It's just not good to serve a new market through an old mature company serving an old mature market. New companies that don't come with baggage do it better. Do you think Microsoft can focus on the super-cheap cell phone OS market once it starts eating into Vista profits? I doubt it. What are they going to tell their board: "Our Destop market is down $10B, but we're really happy because our cell phone software market increased 400% to $100M". Investors need to realize that companies have natural life spans dictated by the markets they serve, and to value companies based that way. It kills me to hear people call the leaders of great companies like IBM, DEC, and Sun stupid.
I totally agree. FOSS isn't really any threat to new innovative software. In my experience, we coders prefer to get rich from our work when we can. It's mostly the software which can't be sold for a profit that makes it's way into FOSS land. Microsoft has some value left in Microsoft Office, from what I hear, and still has some edge over Open Office. However, there' no value left in plain old operating systems. It's old mature technology. How do I know? Linux is catching up. When FOSS catches you, it just means you haven't done anything new, innovative, or cool for a while, or that your market segment has matured.
That said, Microsoft doesn't count on OS innovation anymore. They count on their OS monopoly. I think just about everyone is happy with this, from graphics-card companies, to Dell, and Intel. So long as Microsoft provides a gold standard OS at a very low OEM charge, it's worth paying, simply to have a standard. Google wants to sell adds to XP and Vista users, not replace the core OS. There's no natural competition there.
I suspect that FOSS will hurt Microsoft mainly because of Micrsoft's lack of vision. Apple (even though Steve is a huge A-hole) has the smarts to leverage FOSS. FOSS is propping up OS-X, and practically defines Linux. Microsoft has to realize at some point that all those open-source apps have value. The day they decide to fully leverage FOSS for their own gain (like Apple does) will be the day FOSS is no longer a threat to them.
Awesome! I think I'll sit on the sidelines for this class of machine for a bit, but I'll probably eventually get one. I suspect prices will drop to the previously promised $200 range. Anyway, I always install Ubuntu on my Dells, and if I get one of these, I'm going to install the EE PC version of xbuntu. I strongly suspect the main reason these machines are currently in the $400 range is lack of competition. That will change.
I agree... If the thing were $200, or maybe $250, I'd get one. At $400, I feel like I'd rather push for the $612 it takes to get the Dell. I strongly suspect prices in this category will come way down. It probably can be built for $100.
Thanks for the info. I checked pricing, which is really the most revolutionary thing here. At Amazon, they want $399 for these things, with free shipping. Other sites charge for shipping, but lower the price to as low as $350. I compared that to Dell's cheapest offering - currently a 15" Insprion 1520, with 1 gig RAM, 80 gig disk, and DVD player/CD writer. The Dell is a solid machine most people could use as their main computer. I think I'm not that impressed with the value of this new entry. We can do better. This same exact machine for $200 should be doable. I think the $200 range will be a very interesting market, and potentially a big win for Linux, assuming Microsoft continues to screw up and doesn't do the sensible thing and lower their price on cheap machines, and make Vista work well on them.
Wow... you're is waaaaay off topic, but hell, it's slashdot, and this article is already old. The reason is simple. Most Americans opposed to abortion are conservative Christians, which is natural. Anyone who firmly believes that God provides a single cell fertilized egg a whole human sole should be against it. If I believed that, I would be a rabid pro-life guy. The same conservative Christian viewpoint that strongly oppose abortion also read that "an eye for an eye" stuff fairly literally. You killed, and thus should be killed.
I think the world finds such seemingly contradictory viewpoints odd simply because there's no actual American Christian church that officially states the American conservative Christian point of view. However, we do have our own home-grown version of Christianity that many Americans share, which supports the death penalty, while opposing abortion. I can name plenty of similar or worse contradictions in other religions. So long as American conservative Christians don't infringe on freedom of religion here, I've got no problem with them. Lately, though, I feel they've chipped away at religious freedom, and the conservative Christian presidential candidates seem ready to further erode it. They seem anxious to point out how they will run the country based on their religion, and that we're a nation "under God", thus excluding non-Christians. I think Bush has given conservative Christians a taste of what the world is like when run by a true believer, and they like it. It seems very dangerous for religious freedom and tolerance.
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I recently sat next the Digiums VP of sales on a flight. Personally, I feel Digium is on the cusp of a revolution in telephony, but the company needs some good leadership to capitalize on it. I also just spent two days reinstalling freaking TrixBox which had trouble dealing with the crummy TDM400 card I bought from Digium. The VP of sales seems to think their future is in proprietary software sales, like the deal with 3Com. He also is hyped about some acquisition of some proprietary software front-end to Asterisk, but the whole worlds seems to use TrixBox, and I don't see anyone lining up to switch to a non-free alternative from Digium.
Understanding open-source company strategies is a bit mind-bending, and unfortunately, I don't think Digium's current leadership gets it. They may be missing the real opportunity. Instead of making the software great and easy to use, which would lead to virtually universal adoption, they're doing the opposite, to help sell their services and proprietary solutions. If they were able to understand the value of being the provider of virtually all new telephony systems as an open-source platform, I think they'd bag their current strategy.
Problem is, most people think of open-source ventures as having 0 assets, and being worth 0.
I'm sure the ThinkPads are good machines. They certainly were when IBM made them. Now that IBM has sold their entire desktop and laptop lines to Lenovo (a China based company), Lenovo down-sizes the NC operation more each year, moving jobs to China where labor is cheaper. It's basically a Chinese operation now. I guess that's not really much different from Dell or HP, who also build their machines in China, but Lenovo moved all the other jobs as well.
According to a recent slashdot traarticle, Microsoft paid $355M to Novel in 2007, so I don't see how that translates into a Microsoft tax. For me, it translates into a linux distro that's on the take from Microsoft... no way in hell would I ever install it. First thing I'd do with the Lenovo laptop si wipe the drive. Then again, living here in NC where IBM use to design these laptops, and knowing quite a few out of work IBM-ers, there's no way in hell I'd buy a Lenovo laptop.
I've just shut down the last Windows machine at my house, and now run my silly billrocks.org site on the kids' Ubuntu server. It's kind of funny watching them play webkinz on my main sever in the "childrens' lounge." Anyway, I'm confident that teaching them Linux from day 1 will help them long-term, not hurt. There is one thing, though... got any good advice for parental controls on Firefox running on Ubuntu? It seems the parental controls only work in Windows, so now my kids are dangerously close to learning the truth about the birds and the bees.
"Bob, I need you to vote for Candidate A at the polls tomorrow. Bring your receipt in so we can verify it online, or you're fired."
Give me a break. You can't even fire a person without worrying that they'll file a discrimination suit against you.
"Boss, I just recorded that. You know, I've been feeling about 20% underpaid lately." Even better, do it the next day, and record the conversation when you refuse to hand over your receipt. Ever ask an interview candidate their age, or if they have kids? If you do, you are open to a law-suit. No business man smart enough to be in business is going to force employees to reveal their votes. A bigger non-issue is hard to imagine.
Complexity is the enemy of security, and I agree with your approach. Let me make one addition: Give the user a receipt also, which he can use later to verify his vote.
While this doesn't add any complexity as far as the user is concerned, it can make the election far easier to verify. There would be a tiny bit of complexity under the hood, but so long as the algorithms are fully public, we'd converge on secure ones quickly. Here's my first attempt - by the way, this is a well studied field, so this has all already been done, but it's fun, and this is slashdot:
The receipt at the voting poll would have the vote and voting machine ID in clear text and a sha-256 summary of the vote, voter registration info, and a nonce (fairly large truly random number, say 20 bytes). The machine would also recored who voted at the machine, and this list would also be printed out after the poll closes in random order. The nonce would also be printed in clear-text on the user's copy, so the identity of who voted for who would be lost at the voting machine. If a person is worried that he may be coerced to reveal his vote (a silly concern IMO, but it was listed above), then the user can throw away or even destroy his receipt, thus losing any ability for anyone to reveal it. The entire database of voting results could be put on-line, so anyone could verify that his vote was indeed counted, and that the tallies are correct. With random sampling of voters through a call center, large-scale ballot box stuffing could be found out if we find voters who didn't vote who are recorded as having voted at a particular machine. We could also help them to anonymously verify their own votes on-line, so to help detect any vote tampering. All the software and hardware would be open-source, and verifiable, so hacks like using a pseudo random number generator rather than a real hardware generator could be detected by experts.
Complexity is a problem, but only if it complicates the voting process, and only if it's shrouded in secrecy. An open-source algorithm is clearly the way to go. Why are politicians so brain-dead on this issue?
Just to officially recored the tin-hat conspiracy theory here for posterity...
Republicans control Diebold. Diebold controls election results. If I had that power and were highly dishonest, I'd test it first on my opponent, just to make sure it works ok. I'd see if I could manipulate the Democratic primary in NH, and if I had some success, I'd feel more confident manipulating any race I cared about.
I notice that few of us here offer any real personal information... my e-mail is bill@billrocks.org, and if you bother to reply to a challenge e-mail, I'll read whatever you have to say. Put financial information on-line? Hell no. That'd be plain stupid.
Yes! So... why don't we already do this, given how easy it is? Do we actually pay people money to build these systems, and not bother to put 5 minutes of thought into what we're buying?
Grr... people participating here should know enough about cryptography to know that it's 100% doable to vote anonymously, while allowing anyone to verify that their vote was counted correctly, and allowing anonymous tallies, plus statistical verification. It's just plain simple and stupid. There are good algorithms that have been patented, but here's the one I come up with in 120 seconds or less, after 2 glasses of wine:
- Each voter submits an electronic vote.
- They encrypt their private information with a private key, and append this to their vote to form a "voting record".
- A public database gathers all the voting records and tallies them. For simplicity, voters are verified vs the voter rolls non-anonymously, and their votes are made anonymous when uploaded to the main database. This is basically how it is done now with paper votes.
Anyone can download the database and add up the votes. Anyone can verify their own vote by looking for the entry with their encrypted personal data. To verify the statistical accuracy of the result, have a call center randomly ask people to verify their own votes, and see if anyone got screwed.
Ok, I'm a slow typer. It took me five minutes.
This car isn't designed for US roads, where it would be a menace. It's designed for Indian roads, which I've never seen, but which I suspect are similar to roads in Italy. Imagine a country where the roads are exactly like a huge Target parking lot. This is Italy. The Tata Nano would be perfect.
I found a relevant link. I live 17 miles from a power plant I firmly believe was the motivation for "The Simpsons", and I have two small children. At this distance, I suspect air pollution and stupidity at the plant are bigger health risks to my family.
Here in NC, we poison ourselves in many different ways. I have some old gas in my garage because my boat-mechanic told me to just pour it on the ground when I asked where I could find his recycling bucket. That was 100m from a major reservoir. I got our hunting/fishing state guide and read that it's not safe to eat as much fish as I want from most of our rivers. Even though my electrical power nuclear, the air here is nearly toxic from up-wind coal plants. The funny thing is I'm pretty sure most of us are willing to pay to clean up the place, but it's just not anyone's job to do it.
I wish it were that easy... H0W manny wways kan u spel a worrd? I think the moderation system is designed to deal with this, and the offensive poster was modded down to -1 troll before I ever read it. Even with my settings set to see all the -1 troll posts, slashdot is not nearly as offensive as my spam-box.
I checked your sig link... ssh tunneling is cool, which is what I assume you mean? I spent a couple days last week installing Windows for the first time in years... it was weird, like one of those movies where you go back to high school. Anyway, I installed VirtualBox on a Fedora7 box, and copied over the Windows virtual drive, and booted it up. To control it, I ssh tunneled VNC (which is otherwise very insecure) to my Ubuntu laptop at home. Then, remotely, I installed Cygwin in the virtualized Windows machine so I could essentially run Linux, and port a Linux application to Windows.
:-)
It was soooo strange... Using Linux to ssh-tunnel a remote VNC port to view VirtualBox running Windows running Cygwin, all so I could run gcc... and the funny thing is that the virtual XP machine running over all that crud still ran faster than Vista
You must be an irrigation specialist somewhere other than Florida. I suspect GP has a friend there who had a sink hole open up in is yard after dumping water through his lime-rich land. My mother-in-law lost her green-house to such a thing. They just paid someone to bring in tons of dirt and fill the damned hole, and built a new green-house. Now the main house is on more stable soil which was tested before construction, but those tests are only done where the foundation is laid. Your yard isn't checked.
I wish I had a catchy name... "Bill's Law" just wont catch on. Anyway, here's why companies like Intel can both support OLPC with heartfelt charity, while at the same-time underhandedly stealing their market:
A corporation's actions are dictated by the weakest morals of it's leaders.
Corollary: The simplest way to make a corporation good is to have a strong ethical leader. I guarantee that the leaders involved in working with OLPC are honest people. I also guarantee the leaders involved in knee-capping OLPC are dishonest. A strong leader would find one personality for the company, and enforce it on the troops. Weak leaders allow multiple personalities to come forward when convenient.
There's a particular kind of sea bird that nests in the SF Bay Area. To find a mate, the male goes into the bay, and brings back the biggest fish it can catch. Females wait on shore for a particularly good offer from a male who can provide a big fish.
That's what diamonds are... just big fish.
A bit off topic, but I read someone raving about VirutalBox on /. today, and I've been having trouble with vmware on Ubuntu. It only took a day to become a convert.
Oh, come on, now. It's been a good year. The iPhone brought multi-touch displays into the mainstream. Google started the Android project. Hybrids made huge gains with new battery technology. VoIP? How about Skype and the new Asterisk appliance, or even the Free Telephony Project? I see the same list, but somehow I see it in a more positive light, but heck, I'm an optimist. I saw the moon landing, too. I also witnessed the birth of the personal computer, cell phones, and the Internet. Computing power increased a mind boggling amount, memory went from $1M for 64K bytes to $50 for a gigabyte, and of course disk storage went nuts.
As for real revolutions, I don't believe in them. From airplanes to telephones, when I dig into the story of innovation, I find instead a series of incremental improvements. All we've really been missing lately is those OMG moments like a moon landing. I'm jaded too... when a 5-year-old boy gets to see the first moon landing, he expects amazing things for the rest of his life. At 44, I'm still waiting for a comparable moment. When I think about it, I feel let down. The trick is to step back and realize that the revolution has been happening every day, little by little, just without the OMG moments.
I totally agree. I also feel that a company has the responsibility to serve it's market as best it can, and to live and die with that market. IBM is the best mainframe provider ever. No one else comes close. The mainframe market went south, and so did IBM. I see no problem with that, just a great company doing what it's suppose to do. More examples: Sun is the best workstation company ever. DEC was the best minicomputer company ever. Intel is the best microprocessor maker ever, but they're going to find little demand for 10 gigahertz 64 processor CPUs that suck down 10 kilowatts (ok, I want one bad, but I mean in general). If Microsoft serves the desktop software market until the market fades, it will have been a great company.
Investors seem completely ignorant of this. They always want their portfolio companies to reinvent themselves when the market shifts. It's just not good to serve a new market through an old mature company serving an old mature market. New companies that don't come with baggage do it better. Do you think Microsoft can focus on the super-cheap cell phone OS market once it starts eating into Vista profits? I doubt it. What are they going to tell their board: "Our Destop market is down $10B, but we're really happy because our cell phone software market increased 400% to $100M". Investors need to realize that companies have natural life spans dictated by the markets they serve, and to value companies based that way. It kills me to hear people call the leaders of great companies like IBM, DEC, and Sun stupid.
I totally agree. FOSS isn't really any threat to new innovative software. In my experience, we coders prefer to get rich from our work when we can. It's mostly the software which can't be sold for a profit that makes it's way into FOSS land. Microsoft has some value left in Microsoft Office, from what I hear, and still has some edge over Open Office. However, there' no value left in plain old operating systems. It's old mature technology. How do I know? Linux is catching up. When FOSS catches you, it just means you haven't done anything new, innovative, or cool for a while, or that your market segment has matured.
That said, Microsoft doesn't count on OS innovation anymore. They count on their OS monopoly. I think just about everyone is happy with this, from graphics-card companies, to Dell, and Intel. So long as Microsoft provides a gold standard OS at a very low OEM charge, it's worth paying, simply to have a standard. Google wants to sell adds to XP and Vista users, not replace the core OS. There's no natural competition there.
I suspect that FOSS will hurt Microsoft mainly because of Micrsoft's lack of vision. Apple (even though Steve is a huge A-hole) has the smarts to leverage FOSS. FOSS is propping up OS-X, and practically defines Linux. Microsoft has to realize at some point that all those open-source apps have value. The day they decide to fully leverage FOSS for their own gain (like Apple does) will be the day FOSS is no longer a threat to them.
Awesome! I think I'll sit on the sidelines for this class of machine for a bit, but I'll probably eventually get one. I suspect prices will drop to the previously promised $200 range. Anyway, I always install Ubuntu on my Dells, and if I get one of these, I'm going to install the EE PC version of xbuntu. I strongly suspect the main reason these machines are currently in the $400 range is lack of competition. That will change.
I agree... If the thing were $200, or maybe $250, I'd get one. At $400, I feel like I'd rather push for the $612 it takes to get the Dell. I strongly suspect prices in this category will come way down. It probably can be built for $100.
Thanks for the info. I checked pricing, which is really the most revolutionary thing here. At Amazon, they want $399 for these things, with free shipping. Other sites charge for shipping, but lower the price to as low as $350. I compared that to Dell's cheapest offering - currently a 15" Insprion 1520, with 1 gig RAM, 80 gig disk, and DVD player/CD writer. The Dell is a solid machine most people could use as their main computer. I think I'm not that impressed with the value of this new entry. We can do better. This same exact machine for $200 should be doable. I think the $200 range will be a very interesting market, and potentially a big win for Linux, assuming Microsoft continues to screw up and doesn't do the sensible thing and lower their price on cheap machines, and make Vista work well on them.
Wow... you're is waaaaay off topic, but hell, it's slashdot, and this article is already old. The reason is simple. Most Americans opposed to abortion are conservative Christians, which is natural. Anyone who firmly believes that God provides a single cell fertilized egg a whole human sole should be against it. If I believed that, I would be a rabid pro-life guy. The same conservative Christian viewpoint that strongly oppose abortion also read that "an eye for an eye" stuff fairly literally. You killed, and thus should be killed.
I think the world finds such seemingly contradictory viewpoints odd simply because there's no actual American Christian church that officially states the American conservative Christian point of view. However, we do have our own home-grown version of Christianity that many Americans share, which supports the death penalty, while opposing abortion. I can name plenty of similar or worse contradictions in other religions. So long as American conservative Christians don't infringe on freedom of religion here, I've got no problem with them. Lately, though, I feel they've chipped away at religious freedom, and the conservative Christian presidential candidates seem ready to further erode it. They seem anxious to point out how they will run the country based on their religion, and that we're a nation "under God", thus excluding non-Christians. I think Bush has given conservative Christians a taste of what the world is like when run by a true believer, and they like it. It seems very dangerous for religious freedom and tolerance.