Sad that your comment is modded as funny. In fact what you say is insightful and probably will turn out to be true. It amazes me how most people in this forum refuse to give Microsoft credit for anything they do or have done, but they are more than willing to heap blame upon them. I believe that *overall* Microsoft has in fact been a positive force in the industry. This doesn't mean everything they have done worked out for the "common good", but I think the scale tips in that direction. And don't forget that they continue to spend lots of R&D dollars both on product development and pure research. You would think a technical audience like/. would appreciate that. To me it smacks mostly of envy and jealousy. Can't we all just get along?
Actually, there are MUCH CHEAPER ways to protect yourself from other people/companies patenting stuff out from under you that going through the expense and aggravation of patenting it -- just release it to the public domain by publishing it in some journal. Of course you have to be *a little* careful as somebody *could* have a patent already in the works and you would be announcing to the world that you are using that technology - the timing of their disclosure and your article could be problematic.
I think that Microsoft "preferred customer" claim is widely overstated. I know everyone *wants* to believe that evil MS holds a gun to the heads of the various systems vendors, but in reality how much leverage do they really have. I have heard OEM license numbers as low as $30 for XP Home. It retails for $99 - so the total spread is $70. I know margins are tight, but will $70 (assuming the mfg ends up paying retail, which is unlikely) really make that much difference? And realistically the difference between being a preferred customer and just another run-of-the-mill OEM is probably more like $20 per license. So, I'm sure it will make a difference at the ultra-lowend of the market, but that is not where Dell plays. And Microsoft is too smart to threaten to cut these guys off if they dare offer bundled Linux.
No, the real reasons Dell doesn't bundle Linux are because a) the market is too small and b) the support costs would be too high.
The company will buy Linux-related patents and offer royalty-free licenses to companies and individuals that agreed not to assert their own patents, the paper said.
I wonder what this new company's policy is relative to individuals and companies that *DO NOT* agree "not to assert" their own patents [ed note: this sentence should be taken out and shot]. Note that 2 of the "investors" are IBM and Philips - two companies with massive patent portfolios. Do they, by virtue of being investors in this group get special privileges relative to the formed company's patent holdings? Or, are they waiving their current patent rights (I seriously doubt it)? Interesting...
I think that you are not allowed to say "Microsoft" and "invented" in the same sentence around these parts. The approved verbs are: copied, stole, lifted, ripped off, mangled, swiped, embraced-and-extended
99 times out of a hundred (probably even more often than that) there are a few good tracks and a bunch of fill on a CD. If your assertion was correct that a CD was intended to be a complete "work of art", what are the odds they would all have from 10-15 songs and consume 45-60 minutes? To me a song is an artistic unit. Only in very rare cases (at least in "popular" music genres like rock, pop, country, rap, hip-hop) is an album intended to be consumed in its totality.
not to buy CDs. Like I needed more reasons. They are already too expensive and they force me to buy tracks I don't want just to get the 1 or 2 I want. I know Sony *thinks* they are *adding value* which will incent me to buy CDs, but obviously they miscalculated.
If only someone would offer a digital download service with CD quality content.
Actually history is replete with examples of the unintended consequences of government policies. Side affects from the patent system is what we are discussing in this thread. I wonder how many people know why it is that in the US we get our health insurance from our employer... turns out FDR instituted broad wage and price controls during WWII. Companies, in order to attract and keep the best workers started offering health insurance. The idea spread (everyone had to do it to compete) and now we are stuck with this silly system where if you change jobs you might have to change doctors. And if you are between jobs, when you need health insurance the most, you don't have it.
Government is a blunt instrument. It should be used sparingly to "solve" problems because, more often than not it creates bigger ones than it set out to fix. My sig says it all.
Funny, I did the opposite. I was developing for an embedded Linux device and it frustrated me to have to return to the 80's for my development environment. So, I wrote a hardware abstraction layer and wrote a simple simulator for Windows. Then I used Visual Studio for all my development, debugging, etc. This worked very well and dramatically accelerated my productivity. Of course I didn't have a gui (just a simple "tui") to deal with, but the application did use multimedia and internet communications - my abstraction layer wrapped these two interfaces.
It always amazes me when a company that ought to know better introduces a compromised product. Usually the reasoning goes something like this... "we don't want to cannibilize product X". The problem with this attitude is that it assumes your competitors cannot come out with a better product - only you, in your infinite wisdom and knowledge know what is best, and until you deign to produce it, well then the unwashed masses will just have to suffer. Fortunately we live in a capitalistic society and competitors are more than happy to exploit that arrogance. It happens time and time again, and it looks like this is what might happen here. Already Sprint has introduced a music service with phones having a 1000 song capacity (even more with larger storage cards). There will be many others. Arrogance almost always leads to lost opportunities, and ultimately to irrelevance.
I like the fact that they are trying things -- learning -- seeing what "sticks". Who knows, they may stumble across some use-model that nobody had thought of. Of course there are those who think this is just part of an elaborate evil plan to get all of our money, but I don't give them that much credit.
But then again, the point may be to simply capitalize on the millions of people out there who forget to do things.
Actually, I have a PVR and very frequently folks will be talking "around the water cooler" about some show they saw last night that was really good - of course I hadn't recorded it because I didn't know about it until it was too late. I don't know how often this happens, but that would be ONE USE for this thing.
Actually, the term Production Prototype *usually* means the first version actually built by manufacturing (as opposed to a hand-built version by R&D)... so this suggests to me that they are pretty far along - they actually have a manufacturing facility in place, people trained, material lists finalized, procurement contracts, etc. Of course they could just be *calling* it a production proto...
Basically, it means that any Free/Open Source software project that is even remotely interesting has been packaged. I haven't had to build any package from source in years...
So if I read this right, this amazingly easy installation procedure (which is pitched as a strength of FOSS) does not have any dependency on the Free/Open Source development model because the installation packages are binary. Further, while it is true that the user is relieved from having to figure out which packages work with his/her system, there is a significant burden on the application developers and/or packagers to support every Tom-Dick-and-Harry distribution. Just the testing alone (which I would bet does not get done on the lesser-known distros) is a massive undertaking.
So in the end I remain unconvinced that the Linux world is even in the same ballpark as Windows when it comes to ease of use, installation-wise, for the end users. And further, the direction the Linux world is taking is to be more Windows like (binary install packages, software manager, uninstallers). The main difference is Microsoft relieves the application developers from the burden of having to build installers for umpteen platforms - typically they only have to build 1. And the average Windows user doesn't have to worry about picking the wrong distro
Here are some anticipated user reactions:
How come you can get the CDtoasterExtreme package and I can't?
What do you mean if I want that application I have to install a new operating system? But then I lose some of the applications I already have?
I subscribe to the notion of a binary installation. However, until the Linux world can harmonize on a SINGLE package that runs on ALL Linux distros they will be far behind the Windows world in this regard.
Unfortunately the granularity of performance between the various system configurations is too fine. Ading to that is the fact that simply swapping out a video board can make 1 game play much better and another play worse.
I do think that the recent trend towards companies offering "gaming rigs" and "extreme gaming rigs" does somewhat address this issue however. Unfortunately the gaming machines are all very expensive (always over $1000 and usually over $2000). So, it is very tempting to buy the $600 "value" box and hope for the best, or maybe add a new video board and hope it plays your favorite games well.
In the end none of this probably matters much. The gamers know enough about the box internals to figure out what will work for them. And the hot gaming rigs are bought by parents and grandparents who don't know any better.
No, more likely they would be wealthy from licensing their patents. Either that or companies would have ignored the patents and gone ahead with products, forcing them to spend everything they had in a desperate and likely unsuccessful attempt to defend their patent rights.
I'm sure they were looking for more than 30% given their 90+% on the desktop. And no doubt they never anticipated the arrival of Linux. I think the big advantage Windows enjoyed in the datacenter market was cost (mostly of cheap hardware) and Linux obviously benefits from the low cost hardware as well. In the long run I expect Linux and Windows to split the datacenter market and all the big iron guys will fade away.
The notion that something as essential to a 21st century economy as the operating system of the most common general purpose computers should be the property and trade secret of a single corporation boggles the mind.
Funny, in most places on this board I read that the operating system is becoming irrelevant - browsers will be the *new* operating systems and $oogle will be the dominant company when that happens. How can it be "essential" and irrelevant at the same time?
Actually you might not have read your reference since it refers to a *past* event. The post I was questioning said (in a definitive way) what Microsoft would *no doubt* do in the future. I figured the poster must have been privy to some specification from Microsoft stating this was their intention since the prediction was made with such certainty. To my eye, the reference you provided suggests the opposite will happen since they got wacked around so much for that type of behavior in the past.
The same ad depicts a scene in which a computer user has painted himself into a corner with purple paint. Sun's servers are manufactured in a shade of purple similar to that in the ad.
Sun responded to the campaign in a statement. "Sun still does not see Microsoft as a real threat in the datacenter market where reliability, availability, serviceability and security are key," the company said. "As for Unix being 'inflexible,' 'expensive,' and 'complex,' we feel those are terms much better suited to the closed and proprietary world of Windows."
Well, if the target was Sun as the article suggested, it seems to me things worked out just dandy from Microsoft's perspective. I would venture to say that Microsoft's market penetration in datacenters has grown quite a bit since 2002, while I'm equally certain Sun's has faded.
And exactly how is the Firefox API more open than the IE API? True, we have access to the source code, but exploiting that degree of freedom would only lead to splintering and incompatibilities. If we (rightly) restrict ourselves to the available, published and supported APIs please explain where Firefox has an advantage. I see quite a few plugins and add-ons for IE. In fact, an argument can be made that the IE API is *too* open, which has enabled many exploits.
Regarding the web-based OS: A web browser *MUST* be limited in what it exposes to application developers or else developers of malware will exploit them. Think about it -- much of the power of a PC comes from applications interacting - sharing data in the file system -- having access to the *SAME* data in the file system. Do you want any random web page to have access to your files? No, the only way to prevent that is to lock down the APIs, thus crippling the very applications you think $oogle is contemplating.
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Sad that your comment is modded as funny. In fact what you say is insightful and probably will turn out to be true. It amazes me how most people in this forum refuse to give Microsoft credit for anything they do or have done, but they are more than willing to heap blame upon them. I believe that *overall* Microsoft has in fact been a positive force in the industry. This doesn't mean everything they have done worked out for the "common good", but I think the scale tips in that direction. And don't forget that they continue to spend lots of R&D dollars both on product development and pure research. You would think a technical audience like /. would appreciate that. To me it smacks mostly of envy and jealousy. Can't we all just get along?
Actually, there are MUCH CHEAPER ways to protect yourself from other people/companies patenting stuff out from under you that going through the expense and aggravation of patenting it -- just release it to the public domain by publishing it in some journal. Of course you have to be *a little* careful as somebody *could* have a patent already in the works and you would be announcing to the world that you are using that technology - the timing of their disclosure and your article could be problematic.
I think that Microsoft "preferred customer" claim is widely overstated. I know everyone *wants* to believe that evil MS holds a gun to the heads of the various systems vendors, but in reality how much leverage do they really have. I have heard OEM license numbers as low as $30 for XP Home. It retails for $99 - so the total spread is $70. I know margins are tight, but will $70 (assuming the mfg ends up paying retail, which is unlikely) really make that much difference? And realistically the difference between being a preferred customer and just another run-of-the-mill OEM is probably more like $20 per license. So, I'm sure it will make a difference at the ultra-lowend of the market, but that is not where Dell plays. And Microsoft is too smart to threaten to cut these guys off if they dare offer bundled Linux.
No, the real reasons Dell doesn't bundle Linux are because a) the market is too small and b) the support costs would be too high.
The company will buy Linux-related patents and offer royalty-free licenses to companies and individuals that agreed not to assert their own patents, the paper said.
...
I wonder what this new company's policy is relative to individuals and companies that *DO NOT* agree "not to assert" their own patents [ed note: this sentence should be taken out and shot]. Note that 2 of the "investors" are IBM and Philips - two companies with massive patent portfolios. Do they, by virtue of being investors in this group get special privileges relative to the formed company's patent holdings? Or, are they waiving their current patent rights (I seriously doubt it)? Interesting
I think that you are not allowed to say "Microsoft" and "invented" in the same sentence around these parts. The approved verbs are: copied, stole, lifted, ripped off, mangled, swiped, embraced-and-extended
99 times out of a hundred (probably even more often than that) there are a few good tracks and a bunch of fill on a CD. If your assertion was correct that a CD was intended to be a complete "work of art", what are the odds they would all have from 10-15 songs and consume 45-60 minutes? To me a song is an artistic unit. Only in very rare cases (at least in "popular" music genres like rock, pop, country, rap, hip-hop) is an album intended to be consumed in its totality.
not to buy CDs. Like I needed more reasons. They are already too expensive and they force me to buy tracks I don't want just to get the 1 or 2 I want. I know Sony *thinks* they are *adding value* which will incent me to buy CDs, but obviously they miscalculated.
If only someone would offer a digital download service with CD quality content.
Actually history is replete with examples of the unintended consequences of government policies. Side affects from the patent system is what we are discussing in this thread. I wonder how many people know why it is that in the US we get our health insurance from our employer ... turns out FDR instituted broad wage and price controls during WWII. Companies, in order to attract and keep the best workers started offering health insurance. The idea spread (everyone had to do it to compete) and now we are stuck with this silly system where if you change jobs you might have to change doctors. And if you are between jobs, when you need health insurance the most, you don't have it.
Government is a blunt instrument. It should be used sparingly to "solve" problems because, more often than not it creates bigger ones than it set out to fix. My sig says it all.
Funny, I did the opposite. I was developing for an embedded Linux device and it frustrated me to have to return to the 80's for my development environment. So, I wrote a hardware abstraction layer and wrote a simple simulator for Windows. Then I used Visual Studio for all my development, debugging, etc. This worked very well and dramatically accelerated my productivity. Of course I didn't have a gui (just a simple "tui") to deal with, but the application did use multimedia and internet communications - my abstraction layer wrapped these two interfaces.
It always amazes me when a company that ought to know better introduces a compromised product. Usually the reasoning goes something like this ... "we don't want to cannibilize product X". The problem with this attitude is that it assumes your competitors cannot come out with a better product - only you, in your infinite wisdom and knowledge know what is best, and until you deign to produce it, well then the unwashed masses will just have to suffer. Fortunately we live in a capitalistic society and competitors are more than happy to exploit that arrogance. It happens time and time again, and it looks like this is what might happen here. Already Sprint has introduced a music service with phones having a 1000 song capacity (even more with larger storage cards). There will be many others. Arrogance almost always leads to lost opportunities, and ultimately to irrelevance.
I like the fact that they are trying things -- learning -- seeing what "sticks". Who knows, they may stumble across some use-model that nobody had thought of. Of course there are those who think this is just part of an elaborate evil plan to get all of our money, but I don't give them that much credit.
But then again, the point may be to simply capitalize on the millions of people out there who forget to do things.
Actually, I have a PVR and very frequently folks will be talking "around the water cooler" about some show they saw last night that was really good - of course I hadn't recorded it because I didn't know about it until it was too late. I don't know how often this happens, but that would be ONE USE for this thing.
Actually, the term Production Prototype *usually* means the first version actually built by manufacturing (as opposed to a hand-built version by R&D) ... so this suggests to me that they are pretty far along - they actually have a manufacturing facility in place, people trained, material lists finalized, procurement contracts, etc. Of course they could just be *calling* it a production proto ...
Basically, it means that any Free/Open Source software project that is even remotely interesting has been packaged. I haven't had to build any package from source in years ...
So if I read this right, this amazingly easy installation procedure (which is pitched as a strength of FOSS) does not have any dependency on the Free/Open Source development model because the installation packages are binary. Further, while it is true that the user is relieved from having to figure out which packages work with his/her system, there is a significant burden on the application developers and/or packagers to support every Tom-Dick-and-Harry distribution. Just the testing alone (which I would bet does not get done on the lesser-known distros) is a massive undertaking.
So in the end I remain unconvinced that the Linux world is even in the same ballpark as Windows when it comes to ease of use, installation-wise, for the end users. And further, the direction the Linux world is taking is to be more Windows like (binary install packages, software manager, uninstallers). The main difference is Microsoft relieves the application developers from the burden of having to build installers for umpteen platforms - typically they only have to build 1. And the average Windows user doesn't have to worry about picking the wrong distro
Here are some anticipated user reactions:
How come you can get the CDtoasterExtreme package and I can't?
What do you mean if I want that application I have to install a new operating system? But then I lose some of the applications I already have?
I subscribe to the notion of a binary installation. However, until the Linux world can harmonize on a SINGLE package that runs on ALL Linux distros they will be far behind the Windows world in this regard.
Those guys at $oogle are making Microsoft look like amateurs when it comes to world domination!
Unfortunately the granularity of performance between the various system configurations is too fine. Ading to that is the fact that simply swapping out a video board can make 1 game play much better and another play worse.
I do think that the recent trend towards companies offering "gaming rigs" and "extreme gaming rigs" does somewhat address this issue however. Unfortunately the gaming machines are all very expensive (always over $1000 and usually over $2000). So, it is very tempting to buy the $600 "value" box and hope for the best, or maybe add a new video board and hope it plays your favorite games well.
In the end none of this probably matters much. The gamers know enough about the box internals to figure out what will work for them. And the hot gaming rigs are bought by parents and grandparents who don't know any better.
No, more likely they would be wealthy from licensing their patents. Either that or companies would have ignored the patents and gone ahead with products, forcing them to spend everything they had in a desperate and likely unsuccessful attempt to defend their patent rights.
I'm sure they were looking for more than 30% given their 90+% on the desktop. And no doubt they never anticipated the arrival of Linux. I think the big advantage Windows enjoyed in the datacenter market was cost (mostly of cheap hardware) and Linux obviously benefits from the low cost hardware as well. In the long run I expect Linux and Windows to split the datacenter market and all the big iron guys will fade away.
The notion that something as essential to a 21st century economy as the operating system of the most common general purpose computers should be the property and trade secret of a single corporation boggles the mind.
Funny, in most places on this board I read that the operating system is becoming irrelevant - browsers will be the *new* operating systems and $oogle will be the dominant company when that happens. How can it be "essential" and irrelevant at the same time?
... the government would recoup its annual $2 billion appropriation to the program and US consumers would save $80-120 billion each year
Whenever the government says it is going to save consumers money, hold onto your wallets!
Maybe this is true in the circles you travel in, but I'm afraid the facts are a little different. Here is an exerpt:
, 289142,sid3_gci968400,00.html
According to a recent TechTarget survey of IT professionals, 30% said that Windows already dominates their data center.
From here:
http://search400.techtarget.com/originalContent/0
You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
So the CIA, the FBI and the US Military are going to store their critical super secret information on $oogle's servers? Yeah, that'll happen.
Actually you might not have read your reference since it refers to a *past* event. The post I was questioning said (in a definitive way) what Microsoft would *no doubt* do in the future. I figured the poster must have been privy to some specification from Microsoft stating this was their intention since the prediction was made with such certainty. To my eye, the reference you provided suggests the opposite will happen since they got wacked around so much for that type of behavior in the past.
From the article:
The same ad depicts a scene in which a computer user has painted himself into a corner with purple paint. Sun's servers are manufactured in a shade of purple similar to that in the ad.
Sun responded to the campaign in a statement. "Sun still does not see Microsoft as a real threat in the datacenter market where reliability, availability, serviceability and security are key," the company said. "As for Unix being 'inflexible,' 'expensive,' and 'complex,' we feel those are terms much better suited to the closed and proprietary world of Windows."
Well, if the target was Sun as the article suggested, it seems to me things worked out just dandy from Microsoft's perspective. I would venture to say that Microsoft's market penetration in datacenters has grown quite a bit since 2002, while I'm equally certain Sun's has faded.
And exactly how is the Firefox API more open than the IE API? True, we have access to the source code, but exploiting that degree of freedom would only lead to splintering and incompatibilities. If we (rightly) restrict ourselves to the available, published and supported APIs please explain where Firefox has an advantage. I see quite a few plugins and add-ons for IE. In fact, an argument can be made that the IE API is *too* open, which has enabled many exploits.
Regarding the web-based OS: A web browser *MUST* be limited in what it exposes to application developers or else developers of malware will exploit them. Think about it -- much of the power of a PC comes from applications interacting - sharing data in the file system -- having access to the *SAME* data in the file system. Do you want any random web page to have access to your files? No, the only way to prevent that is to lock down the APIs, thus crippling the very applications you think $oogle is contemplating.