Agreed that nobody is going to rip out perfectly good infrastructure for no reason, but
HP-UX as part of the POS (point-of-sale) network, another UNIX for the SMART (Systematic Merchendising and Applied Retail Technology) system,
Is there any reason that new stores couldn't use Linux/BSD on cheap Intel hardware in place of proprietary Unix? I bet somebody already has those applications running under Linux, if only for development and testing. And it's not like there's much of a learning curve in going from Unix to Linux.
Windows NT/2000 servers to cache all those ads you see playing on "Wal-Mart TV" in electronics (and throughout hanging TV's in some stores)
A Windows caching server? Another ideal candidate for "let's do what's cheapest". No business logic, just caching. That's easy.
I would be really surprised if it takes 5-6 years for this stuff to happen. It might take 5-6 years (or even longer) to replace everything, but I'd bet large amounts of money that there are a few pilot Linux boxes at Walmart already.
Microsoft would fight this hard. Unless the anti-trust case suddenly developes teeth (yeah, right) it's much safer staying in its niche.
Remember, MS controls the hardware manufacturers and the applications. They could easily drop support for MS-Office on MacOS and punish hardware manufacturers to keep MacOS out.
As it is, Apple is doing Ok. As long as they can keep coming up with neat stuff like the new iMac, they can hold on to their core users and maybe even expand into neat consumerish devices.
If they want to go back to being mainstream, however, then they need something even more radical than MacOS on Intel. At the very least they need to cut their dependance on MS. Perhaps if they joined the OpenOffice initiative that would be a step in the right direction.
If you're looking for hard real-time, then you need a real-time operating system. Try QNX.
Linux is a general purpose operating system, and acheiving the same level of real-time performance as QNX just isn't worth it. These patches demonstrate the level of real-time performance you can get with a general purpose operating system. For a great many applications this is 'good-enough', and it allows developers to stay with their comfortable general-purpose OS where they would otherwise have to switch to something more esoteric.
If you're running a big-ass server, it's probably head-less, anyways - and you won't have any large, interactive processes preempting the kernel for smoothness.
But you will have IO-bound processes coming alive faster once their data is available, often improving throughput. There have been benchmarks floating around that indicate that a lot of typical server workloads benefit from this patch too.
It appears that this is generally a good thing. The only downside is the added complexity.
More than a thousand messages were completely off topic. Some of those were advertisements - known as ``spam,'' - and at least one e-mail contained pornography.
The first thing I thought when I read this: I bet some bastard sent in the goat sex link. Evil.
Does this mean the government has to publish the porn and the spam in the register along with the legitimate comments?
You're half right. They certainly need something to differentiate themselves from IBM at least (HP seems to be drifting aimlessly right now - not much of a threat). The problem for Sun is that Solaris isn't that something. It's a nice Unix, but it's not so much better that that people will base purchasing decisions on it. And what advantages it has now are gradually disappearing.
The question is, what do they do to differentiate themselves? Better management tools perhaps? Focus on the 'appliances' like Cobalt? Either of those would work IMHO.
Anyway, hedging their bets with Linux is the first of two steps. They need Linux in order to stay in the game, but clearly they need something else in order to win. They realize this and I'm sure there will be more announcements to come (or maybe the new Cobalt line is part of the new strategy).
My employer (http://www.nemein.com) sells a web-based solution that's fairly sophisticated. The big thing is that it combines project tracking features and has some nice reporting, as well as a pleasent user interface for inputing hours against different projects
We've installed it at a few clients during development in order to get feedback. We've just gone into a 'feature freeze' so that we can package it up as a 'version 1.0', complete with documentation. I don't know what the price will be for the package, but you might as well include us in your list of candidates. Contact us using the URL I gave you, or I can try to answer questions here.
(Note: the timetracker on the web-site is an early version. The new version is significantly different.)
How you deal with a customer who's considering alternatives is a matter of strategy. You need to evaluation who within the client organization is opposed, what their influence is, and how you can best counter that influence.
My first reaction to this response from Microsoft is that it's the stupidist thing they could possibly have done. They could have just passed this off as a bunch of left wing crazies raising a ruckus, but now the petition is big news and has real cedibility. Bad mistake.
On the other hand, the Microsoft.de guy is obviously much closer to the situation than I am and clearly feels that his response is the correct one. Certainly he's more qualified to judge this than me. Time will tell.
do you really think the technophobes of this era would accept Mems phones over insulin pumps as mainstream?
I don't think I understand what you mean. Surely phones are more mainstream than insulin pumps, no? Or are you saying the phones have to be embedded? I wouldn't make that assumption. An earing and a tie pin could make a nice phone too.
This seems like an interesting but rather fluffy use of it at this time.
Yeah, but this might be a way to make MEMS mainstream. I imagine your insulin pump would be much cheaper if it contained the same technology as a cell-phone.
Most Oracle users don't use it for "moderate database requirements".
Untrue. The vast majority of production databases could run perfectly well and reliably on PostreSQL or mySQL. Take a tour of a large datacenter some day and look at the applicatios that are really there. Sure there's the odd massive mission critical database, but most of them are running small, hacked together apps or are very lightly loaded.
Paying lots of money for database software (and hardware for that matter) is a political thing. Everybody wants their application (and therefore their job) to seem important, so they make-believe that the world will end if there are a few minutes of downtime. It's just not true.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that there are applications that justify the expense of Oracle. But if people actually looked at individual applications and found the best fit for each one, Oracle would be making much less money.
Stop. Please. Now. Ami, you seem like the nicest person from your posts, and I know I tend to have an itchy trigger finger around here, and I really am trying to be a good boy tonight, so please bear with me...
Thanks.. I think. But really you don't need to be a good boy on my account. Being a good boy does earn you a response, however. Bad boys get ignored:-).
Slashdot might never admit it, but there's some decent evidence out there that *gasp* Microsoft actually knows what it's doing.
Indeed, they definately know what they're doing. Thats why I dont buy that they really want to see Mono succeed.
Microsoft makes it's money from Windows and Office. Two monopolies who's days are numbered. They won't go down tomorrow, or even next year, but it is happening. The only way they can survive is to use the next few years to establish themselves in other markets. Even doing that won't give them the same kinds of margins they have now unless they can establish a monopoly.
If Microsoft appears to be pushing Mono then there are few possibilities: 1) it's a PR ploy because they believe that they can pull the rug out later (perhaps using software patents), 2) they really think that they can dominate the market for software services if there's level playing field, 3) they've resigned themselves to becoming just another computer company, comparable to Oracle or Computer Associates, 4) they're idiots.
We've already agreed they're not idiots, so that eliminates #4. #3 seems unlikely, given that it's really to early for them to give up on world domination. They might as well give a shot since they've come this far. That leaves only "PR" and "extreme confidence". Given that they've got $40 billion in the bank, I suppose they have reasons to be confident, but knowing what we do about the level of paranoia within Microsoft I'd say PR is much more likely.
The problem is that people don't buy software to go with their hardware, they buy hardware that runs their software.
For the next few years, at least, MS can push the desktop market wherever it wants. If the next generation of Windows only ran on MIPS, then MIPS would be the next big thing.
On the server side they don't have as much power, but Itanium has been a flop so far. Certainly you don't need Itanium to build a high-end Linux box. If MS ported Windows to some other 64-bit platform then there would be no compelling reason for anybody to support Intel.
If that's really the plan then I say good luck to them. If they don't own the platform then they'll actually have to compete in the services market against some much more established players.
Even I might become an MS customer if I could pick and choose those compenents I liked from MS and use them alongside products from competing companies.
True enough. I knew about most of those, although not all. But this is a little different. It's one thing to support an alternative technology, but Mono is a direct frontal attack. If MS is really reorganising itself around.Net, then contributing to a clone is roughly equivalent to contribuing to Wine.
I don't see how they could be happy about it. If you can substitute Linux (or other Unix) servers for MS-Windows then Microsoft becomes just another software company. They've been fighting that for fifteen years.
With.Net they're gambling that they can out-code all of their competitors (3500 classes?!!) and maintain their monopoly that way. That might even be true if everybody else acts alone, but if a few large companies help with the Open Source implementation then the MS version will become a niche product.
Imagine if a few other large companies joined the effort. If AOL, Oracle, IBM, HP, Intel, and the Open Source companies worked togother on a Free.Net implementation, then the MS version would be marginalized. Nobody would use MS-propietary extensions if it meant shutting out Oracle or AOL users.
I find it somewhat amazing that these two would risk the wrath of Bill. HP I can almost understand, since they're in the Unix business (for now anyway), but Intel would be in big trouble if MS dropped support for Itanic in favour of AMD's Hammer.
The BBC may have only a few channels, but they're actually interesting quality television. I've seen American T.V. and out of the 40 or 50 channels there's less material that's actually interesting to watch.
On top of that, there's a lot of stuff available through cable and sattelite if you really want more channels. Most of the watchable American prime-time shows are available (including some un-watchable shows like Survivor).
Re:At least he's holding his convictions
on
The End of Cyber BS
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· Score: 2
The Web has certainly changed my life. How did you plan your last vacation? I'm looking for a trekking operator in Thailand. Naturally I use the web to do my research.
The interesting consequence, though, is that some excellent tour operator in Thailand who doesn't happen to have a web site will never get my business. Who'd have thought that some guy in remote Northern Thailand needs to be on the web in order to stay in business?
I plan on moving a few times in the next few years (not just different cities, different continents) and I was thinking about this whole DVD/game console mess. Without mod chips it's impractical to invest in these devices.
What's the official line on this? Am I supposed to buy a new console for each continent?
So are you arguing that general-purpose operating systems like Linux and Windows shouldn't be used for games? Not everybody has or wants a dedicated game machine.
There's nothing fundamental about free software that makes gaming impractical, it just comes down to market share. The Linux desktop just doesn't have the market share yet. It'll be a few more years. Loki is a victim of poor timing.
My worry is that other desktop oriented companies - for example Mandrake, Suse, and Ximian - will have the same problem. Too high of a burn rate to hold out for three more years. The only ones left might well be Red Flag Linux. I bet that would make Americans really happy:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed that nobody is going to rip out perfectly good infrastructure for no reason, but
Is there any reason that new stores couldn't use Linux/BSD on cheap Intel hardware in place of proprietary Unix? I bet somebody already has those applications running under Linux, if only for development and testing. And it's not like there's much of a learning curve in going from Unix to Linux.
A Windows caching server? Another ideal candidate for "let's do what's cheapest". No business logic, just caching. That's easy.
I would be really surprised if it takes 5-6 years for this stuff to happen. It might take 5-6 years (or even longer) to replace everything, but I'd bet large amounts of money that there are a few pilot Linux boxes at Walmart already.
Microsoft would fight this hard. Unless the anti-trust case suddenly developes teeth (yeah, right) it's much safer staying in its niche.
Remember, MS controls the hardware manufacturers and the applications. They could easily drop support for MS-Office on MacOS and punish hardware manufacturers to keep MacOS out.
As it is, Apple is doing Ok. As long as they can keep coming up with neat stuff like the new iMac, they can hold on to their core users and maybe even expand into neat consumerish devices.
If they want to go back to being mainstream, however, then they need something even more radical than MacOS on Intel. At the very least they need to cut their dependance on MS. Perhaps if they joined the OpenOffice initiative that would be a step in the right direction.
If you're looking for hard real-time, then you need a real-time operating system. Try QNX.
Linux is a general purpose operating system, and acheiving the same level of real-time performance as QNX just isn't worth it. These patches demonstrate the level of real-time performance you can get with a general purpose operating system. For a great many applications this is 'good-enough', and it allows developers to stay with their comfortable general-purpose OS where they would otherwise have to switch to something more esoteric.
Hey, that site is is pretty cool. This could be a geek match made in heaven. The Haybles thing on the front page is pretty clever too.
But you will have IO-bound processes coming alive faster once their data is available, often improving throughput. There have been benchmarks floating around that indicate that a lot of typical server workloads benefit from this patch too.
It appears that this is generally a good thing. The only downside is the added complexity.
The first thing I thought when I read this: I bet some bastard sent in the goat sex link. Evil.
Does this mean the government has to publish the porn and the spam in the register along with the legitimate comments?
You're half right. They certainly need something to differentiate themselves from IBM at least (HP seems to be drifting aimlessly right now - not much of a threat). The problem for Sun is that Solaris isn't that something. It's a nice Unix, but it's not so much better that that people will base purchasing decisions on it. And what advantages it has now are gradually disappearing.
The question is, what do they do to differentiate themselves? Better management tools perhaps? Focus on the 'appliances' like Cobalt? Either of those would work IMHO.
Anyway, hedging their bets with Linux is the first of two steps. They need Linux in order to stay in the game, but clearly they need something else in order to win. They realize this and I'm sure there will be more announcements to come (or maybe the new Cobalt line is part of the new strategy).
My employer (http://www.nemein.com) sells a web-based solution that's fairly sophisticated. The big thing is that it combines project tracking features and has some nice reporting, as well as a pleasent user interface for inputing hours against different projects
We've installed it at a few clients during development in order to get feedback. We've just gone into a 'feature freeze' so that we can package it up as a 'version 1.0', complete with documentation. I don't know what the price will be for the package, but you might as well include us in your list of candidates. Contact us using the URL I gave you, or I can try to answer questions here.
(Note: the timetracker on the web-site is an early version. The new version is significantly different.)
How you deal with a customer who's considering alternatives is a matter of strategy. You need to evaluation who within the client organization is opposed, what their influence is, and how you can best counter that influence.
My first reaction to this response from Microsoft is that it's the stupidist thing they could possibly have done. They could have just passed this off as a bunch of left wing crazies raising a ruckus, but now the petition is big news and has real cedibility. Bad mistake.
On the other hand, the Microsoft.de guy is obviously much closer to the situation than I am and clearly feels that his response is the correct one. Certainly he's more qualified to judge this than me. Time will tell.
I don't think I understand what you mean. Surely phones are more mainstream than insulin pumps, no? Or are you saying the phones have to be embedded? I wouldn't make that assumption. An earing and a tie pin could make a nice phone too.
Yeah, but this might be a way to make MEMS mainstream. I imagine your insulin pump would be much cheaper if it contained the same technology as a cell-phone.
Untrue. The vast majority of production databases could run perfectly well and reliably on PostreSQL or mySQL. Take a tour of a large datacenter some day and look at the applicatios that are really there. Sure there's the odd massive mission critical database, but most of them are running small, hacked together apps or are very lightly loaded.
Paying lots of money for database software (and hardware for that matter) is a political thing. Everybody wants their application (and therefore their job) to seem important, so they make-believe that the world will end if there are a few minutes of downtime. It's just not true.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that there are applications that justify the expense of Oracle. But if people actually looked at individual applications and found the best fit for each one, Oracle would be making much less money.
Thanks.. I think. But really you don't need to be a good boy on my account. Being a good boy does earn you a response, however. Bad boys get ignored :-).
Indeed, they definately know what they're doing. Thats why I dont buy that they really want to see Mono succeed.
Microsoft makes it's money from Windows and Office. Two monopolies who's days are numbered. They won't go down tomorrow, or even next year, but it is happening. The only way they can survive is to use the next few years to establish themselves in other markets. Even doing that won't give them the same kinds of margins they have now unless they can establish a monopoly.
If Microsoft appears to be pushing Mono then there are few possibilities: 1) it's a PR ploy because they believe that they can pull the rug out later (perhaps using software patents), 2) they really think that they can dominate the market for software services if there's level playing field, 3) they've resigned themselves to becoming just another computer company, comparable to Oracle or Computer Associates, 4) they're idiots.
We've already agreed they're not idiots, so that eliminates #4. #3 seems unlikely, given that it's really to early for them to give up on world domination. They might as well give a shot since they've come this far. That leaves only "PR" and "extreme confidence". Given that they've got $40 billion in the bank, I suppose they have reasons to be confident, but knowing what we do about the level of paranoia within Microsoft I'd say PR is much more likely.
The problem is that people don't buy software to go with their hardware, they buy hardware that runs their software.
For the next few years, at least, MS can push the desktop market wherever it wants. If the next generation of Windows only ran on MIPS, then MIPS would be the next big thing.
On the server side they don't have as much power, but Itanium has been a flop so far. Certainly you don't need Itanium to build a high-end Linux box. If MS ported Windows to some other 64-bit platform then there would be no compelling reason for anybody to support Intel.
If that's really the plan then I say good luck to them. If they don't own the platform then they'll actually have to compete in the services market against some much more established players.
Even I might become an MS customer if I could pick and choose those compenents I liked from MS and use them alongside products from competing companies.
True enough. I knew about most of those, although not all. But this is a little different. It's one thing to support an alternative technology, but Mono is a direct frontal attack. If MS is really reorganising itself around .Net, then contributing to a clone is roughly equivalent to contribuing to Wine.
I don't see how they could be happy about it. If you can substitute Linux (or other Unix) servers for MS-Windows then Microsoft becomes just another software company. They've been fighting that for fifteen years.
With .Net they're gambling that they can out-code all of their competitors (3500 classes?!!) and maintain their monopoly that way. That might even be true if everybody else acts alone, but if a few large companies help with the Open Source implementation then the MS version will become a niche product.
Imagine if a few other large companies joined the effort. If AOL, Oracle, IBM, HP, Intel, and the Open Source companies worked togother on a Free .Net implementation, then the MS version would be marginalized. Nobody would use MS-propietary extensions if it meant shutting out Oracle or AOL users.
is that Intel and HP are contributing to Mono.
I find it somewhat amazing that these two would risk the wrath of Bill. HP I can almost understand, since they're in the Unix business (for now anyway), but Intel would be in big trouble if MS dropped support for Itanic in favour of AMD's Hammer.
The BBC may have only a few channels, but they're actually interesting quality television. I've seen American T.V. and out of the 40 or 50 channels there's less material that's actually interesting to watch.
On top of that, there's a lot of stuff available through cable and sattelite if you really want more channels. Most of the watchable American prime-time shows are available (including some un-watchable shows like Survivor).
The Web has certainly changed my life. How did you plan your last vacation? I'm looking for a trekking operator in Thailand. Naturally I use the web to do my research.
The interesting consequence, though, is that some excellent tour operator in Thailand who doesn't happen to have a web site will never get my business. Who'd have thought that some guy in remote Northern Thailand needs to be on the web in order to stay in business?
That's what I would do, but any DVDs or games I buy abroad won't work in a player I purchase here.
I plan on moving a few times in the next few years (not just different cities, different continents) and I was thinking about this whole DVD/game console mess. Without mod chips it's impractical to invest in these devices.
What's the official line on this? Am I supposed to buy a new console for each continent?
So are you arguing that general-purpose operating systems like Linux and Windows shouldn't be used for games? Not everybody has or wants a dedicated game machine.
There's nothing fundamental about free software that makes gaming impractical, it just comes down to market share. The Linux desktop just doesn't have the market share yet. It'll be a few more years. Loki is a victim of poor timing.
My worry is that other desktop oriented companies - for example Mandrake, Suse, and Ximian - will have the same problem. Too high of a burn rate to hold out for three more years. The only ones left might well be Red Flag Linux. I bet that would make Americans really happy :-).
GNOME controls input and output functions (along with X). That would make it part of the operating system according to the M-W definition.