Microsoft has made our bed, and now we all must sleep in it (ick).
You can keep the bed lice to yourself. I normally use OpenOffice.org and on occasion I'll sometimes fire up koffice. Not "all" of us must sleep on that crusty, dirty old Microsoft mattress.
since open source is not going to appeal to the large majority of the business world (although it does to me)
Actually didn't the open source movement begin to gain momentum in the 1980s directly due to enterprise business needs, e.g., vendor refuses to fix bugs, so enterprise developed their own solution instead? Did that not lead directly to the GPL? I seem to vaguely recall reading Stallman's account of that issue.
Anyway, Open Source and freedom to vendor lock DOES matter as more and more companies get fed up with being married to Microsoft's software, with their data being held captive, and yet although they paid big money for licenses and support, they receive no warranty, and when a Microsoft-issued patch screws up a system to the point where Microsoft's solution is "reformat and restore, don't restore the system state though, recreate all accounts then restore your data, oh and by the way, you'll have to reattach each mailbox to the new accounts. Thank you for calling Microsoft and have a wonderful day." Oh, and oops, sorry, the ISINTEG steps recommended in the internal Q-article they faxed you deleted all of your attachments and broke all links in group calendaring.
Once that happens to an enterprise, Open Source starts looking attractive because: Gee, what is so bad about Open Source with no warranty and no official support when [proprietary vendor] charges big money and yet offers support only for pay, lousy maintenance tools, supply misinformation which horked our data (Oops, they should have recommended ESEUTIL first), data is stored in a proprietary format, and they disclaim all warranties and liability? Open Source looks like the ideal solution in that case, because worst case, because you have the source, you can hire a couple of good seasoned developers and dbas to retrieve the data for you.
Small players like Daimler-Chrysler and AutoZone have switched, more Massachusetts companies are switching ever since the ODF proposals hit the news ("What's Open Office? It's a free office suite originally developed for Linux? What's this Linux? Oh, and there's free email servers too?"). It's not like a gold rush or anything but it is a phenomenon which is gaining momentum, in companies ranging from mom&pop to fortune 100 companies, especially since Linux has really matured in recent years.
Some people just hate Creative because they didn't admit to nor did they solve the SMP bug (a race condition resulting in a hard lock) in their sound card drivers (they flat-out any such defect existed) until SMT was announced by Intel, at which point they finally admitted to the defect and scrambled to get a fix out. Interestingly, Compaq identified and introduced a partial fix in their drivers for their OEM products based on Creative's cards. It's not so much a matter of loving Steve Jobs, but hating Creative Labs.
Isn't a separate suit independent of the first? Apple had no obligation to notify Creative of their multitude of infringements since those infringements are independent of the infringment they are alleging against Apple. They are not "evidence" in the original suit, Apple is just firing back with the nuclear strike since discussions with Creative failed to result in a sensible resolution.
It has DRM to ensure that you learn that Fair Use no longer applies in today's economy. Think of the poor starving movie and record execs! Oh the horror! They might have slum it with only ONE Gulfstream and TWO swimming pools each this year because of eeeebil, eeebil pirates!!
He may have said it (no one can really confirm it, at least no one will confirm it), but given the constraints of IBM's design it and taken within context it was a perfectly reasonable claim. I'd say why IBM put that constraint in place but AC (#15360828) already covered it quite well. IBM should have organized it differently, but really - no matter what they chose as a solution would eventually end up as legacy baggage if the platform lasted, and they really did not expect the IBM PC design to exist today pretty much as it did then.
People in small to mid-sized businesses (e.g., companies below the Fortune 500 mark) were only beginning to dip their toes into computing, some with Commodore PET/CBM platforms, others with the Apple II (er, sorry, Apple ][;)) line, and a few here and there with Atari or Trash-80 computers. IBM's choosing a very expandable, relatively open design really caught businesses' attentions and computing became practical, and so that 640K joke today, while funny, is rooted in the x86 architecture hanging on about two decades and many CPU generations longer than IBM or anyone else ever expected it would.
Fwiw, the minimum was 4MB, but you could force it to run in 2MB. You might be able to get it to run in 1MB if you configure the swap file manually (I never tried, and don't have any machines old enough to take the 30-pin or 72-pin SIMMs I have hanging around).
The Constitution has been an endangered species since April 9, 1865, or possibly even much earlier than that, with the first "executive order" issued by a president of The united States.
Not quite. Google's response would be to light up the thousands upon thousands of dark fiber they've bought and introduce their own broadband service. Imagine it: "Want truly fast broadband at a symmetric 7mbps with no discrimination based on what sites you're trying to access? Choose GoogleDSL - faster than your Verizon/SBC/Ma Bell DSL or Comcast/TW/Rogers/Cox/Adelphia cable modem, for about the same price."
I've seen horrendous Notes implementations, and some very nice ones.
Like VB apps (or any other platform for that matter) Notes applications are only as good as the architect who designed it.
I hate working with Notes on the implementation side, but a well-designed Notes app can be a pleasant environment to work in. Notes email, however. . . ugh!
Wow, Celestia has been ported to Windows? Wow, Microsoft Windows might just be about ready to be a desktop replacement OS for Linux!;) (I kid, I kid, just taking the typical Linux comment and flipping it head-over-heels)
Seriously though I knew about the open source CD (I give copies to clients looking to save money) but the other compilations look great. I had no idea that so many of those projects were cross-compiled to Windows.:)
It's an ad for a local discount furniture store (I'm in the Boston area)
Let me guess: Bob's Discount Furniture with the owner saying "at THEIR store? I doubt it!" in a Kennedy-style masshole accent? Yeah, those have got to rank with the most annoying advertisements ever.
At least the Jordan's advertisements are interesting and amusing - or used to be.
They've done a very good job of ensuring that I will never visit their stores, simply because their ads annoy me so much.
Agreed.
Can we add the annoying flooring/carpeting advertisements to this list too? When one of the big players featured their kid in their ad, it was a little annoying but cute - but within a couple of weeks EVERY flooring company in the Boston and South Shore area threw their kids in the ads (or rented kids) and one resorted to featuring his dog (I don't know - maybe he's gay or he couldn't get laid to save his life so he doesn't have kids to exploit for the ad?). They've been getting increasingly more annoying, to the point where if I were in the market for new carpeting or woodgrain floors, I absolutely would not patronize any of these companies who jumped on the "let's use our cute kid to sell flooring so we can act like a mom&pop outfit" bandwagon.
Bring back interesting, creative advertisements, disregarding political correctness. Take outpost.com's ads for example (if you remember them), VW's car bomber ad, the original trunk monkey ad (before it became generic stock video footage for any old car dealer who wanted to jump on that bandwagon). When trying to sell your product you have to make people to WANT to see your advertisements, not annoy the hell out of them so they turn to timeshifting with a VCR or MythTV DVR just so they can skip your painfully annoying ads. Some advertising agencies excel at creating ads which are memorable and serve as entertainment, creating a permanent positive imprint on viewers' minds with your brand name, and others excel at driving potential customers AWAY from doing business with you, to the point where they'll spend twice as much with your competitors because they've come to hate your guts and wish that you'd just drop dead.
As I acknowledged soon after posting and re-reading the article (and subsequently TFA). Why it was modded TROLL I have no fucking clue, other than people are mis-using mod points. I was in error (resulting from skimming) and I fucking admitted it before some wackjob wasted mod points marking my post a troll instead of putting those points to better use by modding up an on-target post. Oh well, such is life on/.
Linux is gaining market share, Apple has come to commodity hardware (Intel) and Unix in general is becoming more widely accepted as not only a solution for cheaper and more reliable enterprise computing but as a solution for the endless of buggy patches to Windows vulnerabilities.
Now that Microsoft is scared, they're proclaiming the PC era is dead? Somehow I doubt it. I suspect Gates is trying to evangelize devices where WinCE (er, sorry, Windows Mobile) is the ideal solution, for multiple reasons:
1, The devices are typically proprietary, and what better solution for those devices than WinCE or some other embeddable Microsoft Windows platform?
2. The devices are disposable. People typically upgrade cellular phones biannually or annually, and cellphone providers are constantly looking at ways to upgrade their networks to fuel more upgrades and more contract extensions. Why wouldn't Microsoft want their Windows Mobile Smartphone platform to become the dominant player, instead of that eebil tool of the commie debil Linux hoopla?
3. Microsoft has seen their growth explosion come to an end - they can only go down from where they are. They have been trying increasingly harder to turn customers on to a subscription software model (because deep down, everyone knows when you buy commodity software off the shelf. you OWN it, not license it). By evangelizing subscriptions, then first right of sale will suddenly no longer apply, so the market for used Windows (and other Microsoft software) licenses shall have vanished, because then it will be true thanks to what is now a "rental" that the customer owns nothing but the CPU, RAM, and screen.
The PC is far from dead. Want to sync your MP3 collection with your phone, PDA, iPod, and car's head unit? What will you use? Yep, your trusty old desktop PC. Want a truly flexible PVR that doesn't think you're gay if you happen to tune into Chasing Amy one night? Yep, you'll want a MythTV (or Windows Media ) HTPC with a free program guide, no phoning home to big brother for $15.00 a month (or whatever that ripoff Tivo costs).
I mean, really! Was the demo to show off the technology and the HiDef resolution, or was it to showcase the underlying media technology? If the former, and the story is indeed accurate, then shame on Sony. Ah hell, based on the rootkit, their membership in the RIAA and MPAA, attempted hijacking and elimination of Fair Use rights and right if first sale, it's clear that Sony has no shame.
If it is the latter and they were using a small amount of Blu-Ray-encoded/resolution files on DVD-R media with a custom build designed to recognize Blu-Ray content on a DVD due to what could be a scarcity of notebook form-factor Blu-Ray drives for the demo, then there isn't so much of a problem, except that if that were the case Sony should qualify the demo with "by the way, this is our software technology demo, using DVD-R media for this demo, blah blah blah" just to avoid the negative PR fiasco that you see here.
I care, but unfortunately certain browser developers don't give a rat's ass, so attempting to get a page to render perfectly in ALL major browsers without being ultra-conservative and without having to rely on browser hacks like quirks mode or conditional comments is not an easy task.
Furthermore, manyopensourceprojects generate HTML output that is so far from compliant that it's easier to just give up and rely on quirks and conditional comments to make things work, in comparison to spending the many man-weeks it would take to fix rendering problem of the various modules and plugins one would often use in conjunction with those projects.
Why not send all of Congress and federal justices along with Bush, and start over with a clean slate while you're at it? They want the moon? Let's give them the moon, on a one-way trip.:)
One can dream. . .
Re:Moon Base Bush is pie in the sky
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually NASA has a lot more to offer than just ISS. They also conduct experiments in aircraft technology. Even if we were to abandon space "exploration" (read: taxpayer expenditures) altogether, NASA would still have a very good reason to exist. I for one do not wish for aviation technology to stagnate - especially technology available to general aviation.
I don't know about you, but I would not want to be flying an aircraft through turbulent weather with decreased throughput to the controls, especially on a pure fly-by-wireless aircraft. Heck, even pure fly-by-wire aircraft are scary enough - with standard substandard airline maintenance one lightning strike could be all it takes to render an aircraft ballistic.
That is true at time of manufacture, but what about airlines which cut corners, betting that the FAA won't conduct a random inspection of an aircraft between the time their tech conducts a "quick fix" to the broken unit (where the patch requires the cage to be disloged just a bit) just to meet their flight schedule and the next scheduled overhaul? Sure, FAA regs would require that the tech instead ground the plane and wait for the FAA-approved components arrive, but given the reality of what airlines have been caught doing after the fact (e.g., after an airliner crashes) I would not want to trust a pure fly-by-wireless system.
Slashdot Mirror
You can keep the bed lice to yourself. I normally use OpenOffice.org and on occasion I'll sometimes fire up koffice. Not "all" of us must sleep on that crusty, dirty old Microsoft mattress.
Actually didn't the open source movement begin to gain momentum in the 1980s directly due to enterprise business needs, e.g., vendor refuses to fix bugs, so enterprise developed their own solution instead? Did that not lead directly to the GPL? I seem to vaguely recall reading Stallman's account of that issue.
Anyway, Open Source and freedom to vendor lock DOES matter as more and more companies get fed up with being married to Microsoft's software, with their data being held captive, and yet although they paid big money for licenses and support, they receive no warranty, and when a Microsoft-issued patch screws up a system to the point where Microsoft's solution is "reformat and restore, don't restore the system state though, recreate all accounts then restore your data, oh and by the way, you'll have to reattach each mailbox to the new accounts. Thank you for calling Microsoft and have a wonderful day." Oh, and oops, sorry, the ISINTEG steps recommended in the internal Q-article they faxed you deleted all of your attachments and broke all links in group calendaring.
Once that happens to an enterprise, Open Source starts looking attractive because: Gee, what is so bad about Open Source with no warranty and no official support when [proprietary vendor] charges big money and yet offers support only for pay, lousy maintenance tools, supply misinformation which horked our data (Oops, they should have recommended ESEUTIL first), data is stored in a proprietary format, and they disclaim all warranties and liability? Open Source looks like the ideal solution in that case, because worst case, because you have the source, you can hire a couple of good seasoned developers and dbas to retrieve the data for you.
Small players like Daimler-Chrysler and AutoZone have switched, more Massachusetts companies are switching ever since the ODF proposals hit the news ("What's Open Office? It's a free office suite originally developed for Linux? What's this Linux? Oh, and there's free email servers too?"). It's not like a gold rush or anything but it is a phenomenon which is gaining momentum, in companies ranging from mom&pop to fortune 100 companies, especially since Linux has really matured in recent years.
Some people just hate Creative because they didn't admit to nor did they solve the SMP bug (a race condition resulting in a hard lock) in their sound card drivers (they flat-out any such defect existed) until SMT was announced by Intel, at which point they finally admitted to the defect and scrambled to get a fix out. Interestingly, Compaq identified and introduced a partial fix in their drivers for their OEM products based on Creative's cards. It's not so much a matter of loving Steve Jobs, but hating Creative Labs.
Isn't a separate suit independent of the first? Apple had no obligation to notify Creative of their multitude of infringements since those infringements are independent of the infringment they are alleging against Apple. They are not "evidence" in the original suit, Apple is just firing back with the nuclear strike since discussions with Creative failed to result in a sensible resolution.
Apple is still using some PowerPC chips. http://www.apple.com/powermac/
Have you actually tried ReactOS? Running a really old version of wine is less of a hassle to get running well.
It has DRM to ensure that you learn that Fair Use no longer applies in today's economy. Think of the poor starving movie and record execs! Oh the horror! They might have slum it with only ONE Gulfstream and TWO swimming pools each this year because of eeeebil, eeebil pirates!!
He may have said it (no one can really confirm it, at least no one will confirm it), but given the constraints of IBM's design it and taken within context it was a perfectly reasonable claim. I'd say why IBM put that constraint in place but AC (#15360828) already covered it quite well. IBM should have organized it differently, but really - no matter what they chose as a solution would eventually end up as legacy baggage if the platform lasted, and they really did not expect the IBM PC design to exist today pretty much as it did then.
;)) line, and a few here and there with Atari or Trash-80 computers. IBM's choosing a very expandable, relatively open design really caught businesses' attentions and computing became practical, and so that 640K joke today, while funny, is rooted in the x86 architecture hanging on about two decades and many CPU generations longer than IBM or anyone else ever expected it would.
People in small to mid-sized businesses (e.g., companies below the Fortune 500 mark) were only beginning to dip their toes into computing, some with Commodore PET/CBM platforms, others with the Apple II (er, sorry, Apple ][
Fwiw, the minimum was 4MB, but you could force it to run in 2MB. You might be able to get it to run in 1MB if you configure the swap file manually (I never tried, and don't have any machines old enough to take the 30-pin or 72-pin SIMMs I have hanging around).
The Constitution has been an endangered species since April 9, 1865, or possibly even much earlier than that, with the first "executive order" issued by a president of The united States.
Not quite. Google's response would be to light up the thousands upon thousands of dark fiber they've bought and introduce their own broadband service. Imagine it: "Want truly fast broadband at a symmetric 7mbps with no discrimination based on what sites you're trying to access? Choose GoogleDSL - faster than your Verizon/SBC/Ma Bell DSL or Comcast/TW/Rogers/Cox/Adelphia cable modem, for about the same price."
I've seen horrendous Notes implementations, and some very nice ones.
Like VB apps (or any other platform for that matter) Notes applications are only as good as the architect who designed it.
I hate working with Notes on the implementation side, but a well-designed Notes app can be a pleasant environment to work in. Notes email, however. . . ugh!
Wow, Celestia has been ported to Windows? Wow, Microsoft Windows might just be about ready to be a desktop replacement OS for Linux! ;) (I kid, I kid, just taking the typical Linux comment and flipping it head-over-heels)
:)
Seriously though I knew about the open source CD (I give copies to clients looking to save money) but the other compilations look great. I had no idea that so many of those projects were cross-compiled to Windows.
Nothing new there.
Let me guess: Bob's Discount Furniture with the owner saying "at THEIR store? I doubt it!" in a Kennedy-style masshole accent? Yeah, those have got to rank with the most annoying advertisements ever.
At least the Jordan's advertisements are interesting and amusing - or used to be.
Agreed.
Can we add the annoying flooring/carpeting advertisements to this list too? When one of the big players featured their kid in their ad, it was a little annoying but cute - but within a couple of weeks EVERY flooring company in the Boston and South Shore area threw their kids in the ads (or rented kids) and one resorted to featuring his dog (I don't know - maybe he's gay or he couldn't get laid to save his life so he doesn't have kids to exploit for the ad?). They've been getting increasingly more annoying, to the point where if I were in the market for new carpeting or woodgrain floors, I absolutely would not patronize any of these companies who jumped on the "let's use our cute kid to sell flooring so we can act like a mom&pop outfit" bandwagon.
Bring back interesting, creative advertisements, disregarding political correctness. Take outpost.com's ads for example (if you remember them), VW's car bomber ad, the original trunk monkey ad (before it became generic stock video footage for any old car dealer who wanted to jump on that bandwagon). When trying to sell your product you have to make people to WANT to see your advertisements, not annoy the hell out of them so they turn to timeshifting with a VCR or MythTV DVR just so they can skip your painfully annoying ads. Some advertising agencies excel at creating ads which are memorable and serve as entertainment, creating a permanent positive imprint on viewers' minds with your brand name, and others excel at driving potential customers AWAY from doing business with you, to the point where they'll spend twice as much with your competitors because they've come to hate your guts and wish that you'd just drop dead.
As I acknowledged soon after posting and re-reading the article (and subsequently TFA). Why it was modded TROLL I have no fucking clue, other than people are mis-using mod points. I was in error (resulting from skimming) and I fucking admitted it before some wackjob wasted mod points marking my post a troll instead of putting those points to better use by modding up an on-target post. Oh well, such is life on /.
Oops, mis-read. I thought it was Gates who was proclaiming the PC dead. I see it's the WSJ who did. Sorry! Should RTFS more closely.
Linux is gaining market share, Apple has come to commodity hardware (Intel) and Unix in general is becoming more widely accepted as not only a solution for cheaper and more reliable enterprise computing but as a solution for the endless of buggy patches to Windows vulnerabilities.
Now that Microsoft is scared, they're proclaiming the PC era is dead? Somehow I doubt it. I suspect Gates is trying to evangelize devices where WinCE (er, sorry, Windows Mobile) is the ideal solution, for multiple reasons:
1, The devices are typically proprietary, and what better solution for those devices than WinCE or some other embeddable Microsoft Windows platform?
2. The devices are disposable. People typically upgrade cellular phones biannually or annually, and cellphone providers are constantly looking at ways to upgrade their networks to fuel more upgrades and more contract extensions. Why wouldn't Microsoft want their Windows Mobile Smartphone platform to become the dominant player, instead of that eebil tool of the commie debil Linux hoopla?
3. Microsoft has seen their growth explosion come to an end - they can only go down from where they are. They have been trying increasingly harder to turn customers on to a subscription software model (because deep down, everyone knows when you buy commodity software off the shelf. you OWN it, not license it). By evangelizing subscriptions, then first right of sale will suddenly no longer apply, so the market for used Windows (and other Microsoft software) licenses shall have vanished, because then it will be true thanks to what is now a "rental" that the customer owns nothing but the CPU, RAM, and screen.
The PC is far from dead. Want to sync your MP3 collection with your phone, PDA, iPod, and car's head unit? What will you use? Yep, your trusty old desktop PC. Want a truly flexible PVR that doesn't think you're gay if you happen to tune into Chasing Amy one night? Yep, you'll want a MythTV (or Windows Media ) HTPC with a free program guide, no phoning home to big brother for $15.00 a month (or whatever that ripoff Tivo costs).
I mean, really! Was the demo to show off the technology and the HiDef resolution, or was it to showcase the underlying media technology? If the former, and the story is indeed accurate, then shame on Sony. Ah hell, based on the rootkit, their membership in the RIAA and MPAA, attempted hijacking and elimination of Fair Use rights and right if first sale, it's clear that Sony has no shame.
If it is the latter and they were using a small amount of Blu-Ray-encoded/resolution files on DVD-R media with a custom build designed to recognize Blu-Ray content on a DVD due to what could be a scarcity of notebook form-factor Blu-Ray drives for the demo, then there isn't so much of a problem, except that if that were the case Sony should qualify the demo with "by the way, this is our software technology demo, using DVD-R media for this demo, blah blah blah" just to avoid the negative PR fiasco that you see here.
Actually we won't, because we've traded our first, second, and fourth amendment rights away in exchange for a little temporary safety.
I care, but unfortunately certain browser developers don't give a rat's ass, so attempting to get a page to render perfectly in ALL major browsers without being ultra-conservative and without having to rely on browser hacks like quirks mode or conditional comments is not an easy task.
Furthermore, many open source projects generate HTML output that is so far from compliant that it's easier to just give up and rely on quirks and conditional comments to make things work, in comparison to spending the many man-weeks it would take to fix rendering problem of the various modules and plugins one would often use in conjunction with those projects.
Why not send all of Congress and federal justices along with Bush, and start over with a clean slate while you're at it? They want the moon? Let's give them the moon, on a one-way trip. :)
One can dream. . .
Actually NASA has a lot more to offer than just ISS. They also conduct experiments in aircraft technology. Even if we were to abandon space "exploration" (read: taxpayer expenditures) altogether, NASA would still have a very good reason to exist. I for one do not wish for aviation technology to stagnate - especially technology available to general aviation.
I don't know about you, but I would not want to be flying an aircraft through turbulent weather with decreased throughput to the controls, especially on a pure fly-by-wireless aircraft. Heck, even pure fly-by-wire aircraft are scary enough - with standard substandard airline maintenance one lightning strike could be all it takes to render an aircraft ballistic.
That is true at time of manufacture, but what about airlines which cut corners, betting that the FAA won't conduct a random inspection of an aircraft between the time their tech conducts a "quick fix" to the broken unit (where the patch requires the cage to be disloged just a bit) just to meet their flight schedule and the next scheduled overhaul? Sure, FAA regs would require that the tech instead ground the plane and wait for the FAA-approved components arrive, but given the reality of what airlines have been caught doing after the fact (e.g., after an airliner crashes) I would not want to trust a pure fly-by-wireless system.