The "Back-of-the-envelope calculations" sounds like "I really didn't want to give Copland's Linux crap the time-of-day".
Burney didn't take the time to understand the goal.
When I first saw this newsletter, I thought "Maybe they are trying to breath some life into their Linux applications after telling everybody they were going to kill it". But, after reading Burney's comments, he has a much different vision. Their Linux division tries to put a nice spin on it, but it's too transparent. I think Burney would rather Linux just go away.
They're dumping their distribution on someone even less likely to make it profitable (like they did the Netwinder?).
Although they took a great deal of flack from the Linux community, Copland's aim was to broaden Linux into the less technically savvy market. There failure was their inability to partnerwith a name brand OEM (like Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc...) who could address the general desktop user's desire for a shrink-wrapped, pre-installed, integrated system, with one-stop technical support.
They are keeping control of their apps, worsening the dis-integration.
From their announcement...
> The company's expanding vision for Linux includes providing customers with a bundled solution that minimizes the total cost of ownership and eliminates integration issues.
So, they are trying to create integrated Linux solutions?...
> To realize its Linux vision and to increase the value of its Linux equity for both customers and shareholders, Corel is actively pursuing opportunities to allow it to spin off the Linux Distribution element of its Linux division
..integrate by dis-integrating!
> while retaining an interest in the new prospective company. Corel will continue to develop brand name applications for the Linux operating system including WordPerfect Office for Linux and CorelDRAW for Linux.
I.e.: they didn't want to disclose their applications source to their new "partner"... and so their only remaining market will be the few techies who need a GUI word-processor or drawing program.
Java based Corel Draw, the Netwinder, an integrated desktop Linux distribution for non-techies. Three great ideas, all ahead of their time, all fouled up in the execution.
Excerpts from Burney's public statement...
"My belief is that people would be willing to pay, for lack of a better term, for an end-to-end solution."
Right on the money! A soup-to-nuts solution is the only way to un-root the Micro$oft desktop.
"...making the appropriate acquisitions to fill in the holes would have cost us around $300 million."
You don't understand. That knowledge is/was in-house, with those that put together your distribution. Adding and testing server applications would not have been THAT big of a leap. That $300M figure is totally bogus. The only partner you'd have needed was one of the big-name hardware vendors.
"So you end up making 15 calls and they're all pointing at each other"
That's what people do now with Micro$oft. You could have made a single-access-point of service, which could have destroyed the Micro$oft shrink-wrap paradigm.
Businesses spend a great deal on service. Ask Sun or IBM if service sells. For that matter, ask Maytag or Sears.
Large companies accounting, for service, usually charge 10X the wages of those who actively make the products. That's not all spent on Sysadmins and software upgrades, but a large amount is.
Small businesses can't get the service they need. They're left with integrating the software and hardware themselves, often with the help of an over-zealous teenager or someone in Management that has more productive things to do.
That's the niche Corel could have captured.
Service alone, like software alone, doesn't cut it. Soup-to-nuts: hardware (the entire network), software, and service does.
Like Sun, but atop open hardware and software, aimed at small business, legal, and medical.
The current Linux community doesn't need service: we're a "do it ourselves" lot. But, Corel shouldn't have been marketing to us.
"...there's no way [to make money] because you don't control your intellectual property."
It's the service, stupid.
Between the proprietary office apps and the service on an open hardware and software platform, Corel was uniquely positioned to be the first company to give Micro$oft true competition.
As long as you try to compete with Micro$oft on their own turf, you loose. You can make a better product at a better price, but they own the platform. They have, can, and will change the platform at-will to suit their application and competitive needs, leaving Corel always chasing their tail. As long as Corel is "just another Office suite" on the WinDoh's platform, Microsoft wins.
"And Corel wonders why the community never received them with open arms?" (a Quote from the previous slashdot article).
Screw the Linux community: that was not Corel's market. Redhat, SuSE, Debian, etc... can fill our needs. Corel's focus was on the average and business user -- where Linux needs to go.
"And a great thing about.Net is, it's not mutually exclusive with Linux."
Maybe that's what your Micro$oft handlers are telling you. With IE the only browser of relevance,.NET will assure the Microsoft lock-in by forcing out Apache and other servers. In Microsoft's embrace & extend vision, the only way the Web will be browsed is with Microsoft's servers and clients..NET is the strategy to make port 80 theirs. As "hard-ball" (Ballmer) recently said:
"In adopting Internet standards such as XML as part of its.Net initiative, Microsoft will continue to protect any intellectual property that it embeds as objects in XML wrappers. We will have proprietary formats to protect our intellectual property..."
He went on to obfuscate that statement with wanting to maintain "a certain level of interoperability", but he's a known spin-doctor, and we've seen what tricks he's pulled with "interoperability" in the past.
We all credit RMS with creating the GPL & FSF, which provides the majority of code for any Linux/*BSD distribution.
But, RMS is an idealist, with his position too unwavering for the average engineer.
Linus, on the other hand, is thoughtful, easy-going and pragmatic. An engineer's engineer; the one we'd all want for a boss.
That's why we want it referred to as Linux and not GNU/Linux. We need RMS to remind us how far we've straid from his ideals, but we'd rather not show him in public as our standard bearer.
It seems to me that if Microsoft was trying to dodge a bullet from the DOJ, then they should have removed the strings they attached to the $130M investment.
Remember the big.net agreement Corel signed to get the money? The DOJ would be more worried about that agreement than the money.
Is Microsoft going to end the agreement? The article didn't say.
So, I think Microsoft is doing what I did: getting out of Corel stock before they loose any more money.
It must have been appearant to Microsoft that once Corel had announced their "Integrate by Disintegrating" approach to Linux, that they would no longer be potential competition for Microsoft, and, instead, would continue chasing Microsoft's tail like all app vendors that make apps for WinDoh's.
As with all bounty hunters, he's going to hurt someone who's innocent, and as the article said, the current laws favor the corporations.
I don't like the anonymity the internet provides, because too many crooks get away with their crimes. If your machine has ever been cracked, I'm sure you'd agree.
I realize the problem: privacy and anonymity go together: you loose one, you loose both.
I'm currently listening to Pink Floyd's "Dogs" -- where the masters are killed and no law exists and the sheep find themselves constantly terrified by the dogs.
Sounds like the wild west: law enforcement was few and far between. Crooks had their heyday, spurning vigilantism and bounty hunters.
"You better stay home, and do what you're told... stay out of the road if you want to grow old".
Let's hope this is not the future of the internet.
Everybody, except Transmeta, must pay Intel a license fee for x86 clones. That's closed.
"Anybody can write software, but hardware is complex."
Spoken like a true Double-E. Just because software is easier to patch doesn't make it less complex. Just because you've taken your requisite course in FORTRASH and found programs easy to write, does not help you understand the enormous complexity associated with the integration and maintenence of an application that actually does something useful.
Hardware either works or it doesn't work. Nice and simple. Plus, it has analog tolerances: it will continue work in situations outside intended boundries.
Conversely, software embodies complexity theory: it takes on behavior as if at random. Furthermore, every statement in a digital language is fragile (no such thing as an analog tolerance): if it's wrong (no matter how close it is to being right), everything breaks with it. That's why EE's say: "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come around would destroy civilization".
The CPU from Intel and the OS from Microsoft were the closed components after Compaq reverse engineered the bios on the IBM PC.
You may be a bit young to remember the early 80's. The CPU and OS are an order of magnitude more difficult (than the bios) to reverse engineer. Even now, if you make an Intel clone CPU, you have to pay Intel a license fee (except Transmeta, which uses a code-morphing emulator).
"What does Open Hardware have to do with Open Software?"
Open hardware was the PC revolution. Apple got PC's started... but the model was closed, like IBM. IBM ligitimized the PC, but it was still a closed platform. Reverse engineering the IBM bios started the PC revolution. That's when competition was allowed in the hardware components. That's when the prices came down, and the technology grew at a record pace. IBM tried to recapture the the market by creating a closed PS2 bus, and later the OS2 OS, but neither attempt worked.
The Open Software revolution will most likely be similar. A decade from now we'll probably look back on the propriatary software model like we now look back on the proprietary hardware model.
Finally, I don't think you saw the sarcasm in my post. I was trying to say: I want those same "problems" we had with the open hardware PC revolution.
I've been used to getting finincial information through my Fidelity Investment account. When you have an account, they supply good news and stock charting info.
About two months ago, they updated their web site, and whenever I try to get to these pages, I'm greeted with a "browser not supported" message which says: upgrade to Netscape or IE 4.x or better.
I use Netscape 4.x at home, 6.x at work; both under Linux. When I told them I was using the proper version of Netscape, they said they only support the WinDoh's version of Netscape.
It's merely the browser string that their objecting to: they don't even let my browser try to render these pages.
No amount of complaining helps. I'm moving my account.
Then, anybody could make a motherboard or adapter. Competition was fierce. Prices were low. Innovations caused PC's to be outdated the month they were bought. Even IBM couldn't compete.
But, Components from Intel and Microsoft were left closed.
Intel & Microsoft tyranically ruled the PC (open hardware) revolution.
If we open the source on the PC platform, we're going to have another revolution with all these same problems (except, of course, the Microsoft monopoly)!
Hatch is the author of the DMCA. Although the provisions that are killing "fair use" in court (i.e. DeCSS) were basically added by lobbyists, he's done nothing to ammend it.
Look at the problem open hardware caused: Compaq reverse engineerd the IBM bios... then anybody (in a fiercely competitive market) could make motherboards and adapter boards, leaving Microsoft and Intel to tyranically rule the PC platform, leaving behind closed hardware vendors like Apple and Sun.
We'd hate for the software market to become competitive like that, and leave M$ behind.
OpenSSH started with Ylonen's source, the license said:
`This file is part of the ssh software, Copyright (c) 1995 Tatu Ylonen, Finland
COPYING POLICY AND OTHER LEGAL ISSUES
As far as I am concerned, the code I have written for this software can be used freely for any purpose. Any derived versions of this software must be clearly marked as such, and if the derived work is incompatible with the protocol description in the RFC file, it must be called by a name other than "ssh" or "Secure Shell".
...'
He only asks that derivations be marked as such, and use of the name "ssh" is only dependent on compatibility with the RFC.
Don't you remember the/. article a few months ago where M$ claimed to have "invented" a new way to solve their "DLL hell" by "inventing" a way to replace copies of the same file with a link to just one file;)
Anyway, this whole discussion is stupid.
Unix's shared object versioning has always made "DLL hell" not applicable to Unix.
If you're making a logical link to a different version of the library, then you risk the stability of the application (but I do it too).
Shared object versioning allows multiple versions of the same library to all exist in the same directory, and the app to be able to specify which version it was compiled and tested with.
The only problem here is that Oracle didn't include the shared libraries in their app's distribution, in case the needed shared libraries didn't exist in the users system.
No WinDoh's app vendor would be stupid enough not to include all the necessary DLL's, and overwrite them upon app installation, breaking every other program but theirs!
Coincidence that economy dove over M$ antitrust?
on
Pride Before The Fall
·
· Score: 1
"Surely it's not coincidence that the American economy has taken a nosedive just as the Microsoft trial came to fruition."
While I'll agree that the current US administration will (in essence) drop the antitrust case against M$, I disagree that the courts conclusions brought the economy down. If that were true, the economy would have come back the day the Supreme Court decided not to "fast track" the case -- everybody knew at that point that Microsoft would never be stopped.
Fuel prices were on the increase at the same time. That's why the economy flatened.
It's no coincidence that two oil men are in charge of the US one year after the oil companies started putting pressure on the country's oil supplies!
Most every inexperienced programmer comes up with tools for programming that are supposed to be the silver bullet, increase programmer productivity, etc...
They usually cost more time to code and maintain then they ever save. Very few are worth using, and none have been "silver bullets". (I include myself as one of the guilty).
I remember the case of "Apware" (which was Novell's name for it after they bought it; it was originally on the Mac, but I forget it's name there).
Very much like a GUI version of the unix tools. Rather than command line args and stdin/out, you'd graphically plug the tools together to form an application.
Seemingly easy, targeted at the casual user.
Easy as long as it was simple, but couldn't do anything usefull until it became complex.
No savings here. Just another kid with a new programming tool, no easier to code and maintain than the equivalent "C" or shell scripts.
Anyway, in coming to terms with this idea -- it is very different. It's aimed at the user, not the programmer.
We often code GUI front-ends to shell scripts, using Tcl/Tk/Wish, Python, Xforms, or Glade. Having the commands in the shell scripts work together to service a window of widgets isn't a bad idea.
You'd surely want to be able to turn it off (or not enable the feature) for any given command, as well as add persistance (so a given command re-operates the same widget every time it's envoked in a script). Some environmental variables for pulling it all together (command widgets for formatted windows) would be nice too.
It might be easier to make a special shell that monitors the commands in a script and displays a GUI. It would be easier than getting those who support the open source tools to come to an agreement as to how this would work.
please find below the official statement to our
realignment of the US business.
*** SuSE Linux AG realigns its US business
With its subsidiary in Oakland, California, the company has been active in the US market since 1997. In the course of the coming weeks the company will introduce new products to the US market. At the same time, endeavors are made to increase the efficiency and reduce costs. For this reason, SuSE Linux AG has decided to relocate certain tasks such as the technical support from the US to Europe.
"While SuSE remains fully committed to the US market and our US customers, we can be more effective by streamlining our on-site presence in the US and integrating certain functions such as the technical support into our operations in Europe. Here our 100+ staff members already provide expert services to customers in the UK and other English-speaking countries," explains Roland Dyroff, CEO, SuSE Linux AG.
Consequently, the personnel will be reduced by 30 employees. Henceforth 15 staff members will operate in the US, continuing to develop and expand the location in accordance with the strategic orientation of SuSE Linux AG.
"A lean team will handle on-site tasks like sales which are best done in close proximity to the clients in this market. By restructuring our activities in the US we will increase our efficiency and better serve our customers with high-quality Linux products and services," says Roland Dyroff.
Businesses spend a great deal on service. Ask Sun or IBM if service sells.
Large companies accounting, for service, usually charge 10X the wages of those who actively make the products. That's not all spent on Sysadmins and software upgrades, but a large amount is.
Small businesses can't get the service they need. They're left with integrating the software and hardware themselves, often with the help of an over-zealous teenager or someone in Management that has more productive things to do.
That's the niche Corel could have captured.
Service alone, like software alone, doesn't cut it. Soup-to-nuts: hardware (the entire network), software, and service does.
Like Sun, but atop open hardware and software, aimed at small business, legal, and medical.
Dear Mr. Burney...
"My belief is that people would be willing to pay, for lack of a better
term, for an end-to-end solution."
Right on the money! A soup-to-nuts solution is the only way to un-root
the Micro$oft desktop.
"...making the appropriate acquisitions to fill in the holes would have
cost us around $300 million."
You don't understand. That knowledge was in-house, with those that
put together your distribution. Adding and testing server applications
would not have been THAT big of a leap. That $300M figure is totally
bogus. The only partner you'd have needed was one of the big-name hardware
vendors.
"So you end up making 15 calls and they're all pointing at each other.
"
That's what people do now with Micro$oft. You could have made a single-access-point
of service, which would have destroyed the Micro$oft shrink-wrap paradigm.
"...there's no way [to make money] because you don't control your intellectual
property."
It's the service, stupid.
Between the proprietary office apps and the service on an open hardware and
software platform, Corel was uniquely positioned to be the first company
to give Micro$oft true competition.
As long as you try to compete with Micro$oft on their own turf, you loose.
You can make a better product at a better price, but they own the platform.
They have, can, and will change the platform at-will to suit their application
and competitive needs, leaving Corel always chasing their tail. As
long as Corel is "just another Office suite" on the WinDoh's platform, Microsoft
wins.
"And Corel wonders why the community never received them with open arms?"
(a Quote from the slashdot article).
Screw the Linux community: that was not your market. Redhat, SuSE,
Debian, etc... can fill our needs. You were focused on the average
and business user -- where Linux needs to go.
"And a great thing about.Net is, it's not mutually exclusive with Linux."
Maybe that's what your Micro$oft handlers are telling you. With IE
the only browser of relevance,.NET will assure the Microsoft lock-in
by forcing out Apache and other servers. In Microsoft's vision, the
only way the Web will be browsed is with Microsoft's
servers and clients..NET is the strategy to make that reality. As
"hard-ball" (Ballmer) recently said:
"In adopting Internet standards such as XML as part of its.Net
initiative, Microsoft will continue to protect any intellectual property
that it embeds as objects in XML wrappers. We will have proprietary
formats to protect our intellectual property..."
He went on to obfuscate that statement with wanting to maintain "a certain
level of interoperability", but he's a known spin-doctor, and we've
seen what tricks he's pulled with "interoperability" in the past.
I was not on the wrong article. Had you been able to fully read the article, you would have noticed the image referred to (in the slashdot article) at:
Note the key on the PCI slot closest to the edge: the card would have to face backwards. The Tyan board also had 64bit PCI slots -- those look like 32bit connectors -- not server class hardware.
The board looks less densly populated than the Tyan. Either it's a cleaner design -- or maybe this is just a mock-up (so it's okay the slot's welded on backwards).
But, Netscape & Mozilla don't. In Windoze or Linux.
It may be the size of my inbox (which doesn't make a lot of sense, since it only shows the first few messages).
Other people say it works fine, others have the same problem. Even when it does work, it's much harder to use in a non-IE browser; I'm sure that's by design ("embrace & extend"...).
I don't know what the problem is, I gave up debugging Bill's code for him long ago;)
I've got a great deal of experience using UW IMAP (home) and Exchange (work) IMAP servers simultaneously from my Linux client.
The Exchange server won't do secure IMAP.
The Exchange servers web interface only works with IE (it says it works with Netscape 4.x, but it neither works with 4.x or Mozilla).
For all the bad things I've heard of UW IMAP, I've been using it for about 3 years, and am very satisfied. It used to corrupt large mbox files occasionally, but I haven't had that problem in a long time (and that's repairable). It also used to have problems with multiple mail clients referencing the same mail file simultaneously. I haven't seen that problem in a long time.
For me, email is my memory. I have huge email folders that I constantly reference. It provides me with a bread-crumbs trail of all that I've done. It provides an on-line research archive for all the lists I belong to.
Secure IMAP is the best mail interface. My memory works from anywhere!
Without secure IMAP, I can only read work related email from work. Exchange sucks.
Whereas Applixware is just another office suite, Anyware Office (also part of Vistasource) promises a desktop revolution. See:
http://www.anywareoffice.com/
(free demo at that site -- the fastest java you've ever seen!)
With desktop systems getting more complex and unmaintenable for non-techie users, server-side office suites could be the solution.
Small, decentralized, or work-at-home businesses can let the maintenance, backup, upgrades, etc... be in the hands of competent application providers. This allows the desktop machine to be a small PC, thin-client, or NC.
The application provider must be competent. Security is foremost. 24-by-7 support is required.
Microsoft embraced java, which included a license that said nobody but Sun could extend it.
Microsoft extended java (to block out the competition) and effectively killed it.
Sun sued and won... but Java had already been killed.
Microsoft's new extension of Java is.net: a java that only works atop Microsoft OS's.
Warning: Apache is next. With Netscape and Java killed, Microsoft will extend IE to not be compatible with Apache, so everybody will have to buy W2K servers.
This is what the old Justice dept. tried to stop (the new Justtice dept. is in the hands of the crooks).
The Iomega Buz, available for ~$50 on ebay, is the greatest price/performance capture card.
It creates mjpeg (motion jpeg) in the hardware. With it, I can stream realtime video from my 200Mhz server through a 10mbit network. My kids can watch TV/Videos on their LTSP based terminals streaming from the (underpowerd) server (over the underpowered network). The terminals do the mjpeg (avi or movtar) decoding.
There are other capture cards (like the Matrox Marvel G200/G400) that encode in mjpeg -- but they cost a bundle. Hauppauge has a new "PTV" Tivo-like capture card that encodes MPEG2 in the hardware -- no Linux drivers yet.
See http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net for some great mjpeg tools. The Buz is also great for making VCD's
Slashdot Mirror
From the "Three Minutes With Burney" article:
, 00 .asp
.Net is, it's not mutually exclusive with Linux ."
.NET will assure the Microsoft lock-in by forcing out Apache and other servers. In Microsoft's embrace & extend vision, the only way the Web will be browsed is with Microsoft's servers and clients. .NET is the strategy to make port 80 theirs. As "hard-ball" (Ballmer) recently said:
.Net initiative, Microsoft will continue to protect any intellectual property that it embeds as objects in XML wrappers. We will have proprietary formats to protect our intellectual property..."
We did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and making the appropriate acquisitions to fill in the holes would have cost us around $300 million."
--
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,40401
The "Back-of-the-envelope calculations" sounds like "I really didn't want to give Copland's Linux crap the time-of-day".
Burney didn't take the time to understand the goal.
When I first saw this newsletter, I thought "Maybe they are trying to breath some life into their Linux applications after telling everybody they were going to kill it". But, after reading Burney's comments, he has a much different vision. Their Linux division tries to put a nice spin on it, but it's too transparent. I think Burney would rather Linux just go away.
They're dumping their distribution on someone even less likely to make it profitable (like they did the Netwinder?).
Although they took a great deal of flack from the Linux community, Copland's aim was to broaden Linux into the less technically savvy market. There failure was their inability to partnerwith a name brand OEM (like Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc...) who could address the general desktop user's desire for a shrink-wrapped, pre-installed, integrated system, with one-stop technical support.
They are keeping control of their apps, worsening the dis-integration.
From their announcement...
> The company's expanding vision for Linux includes providing customers with a bundled solution that minimizes the total cost of ownership and eliminates integration issues.
So, they are trying to create integrated Linux solutions?...
> To realize its Linux vision and to increase the value of its Linux equity for both customers and shareholders, Corel is actively pursuing opportunities to allow it to spin off the Linux Distribution element of its Linux division
..integrate by dis-integrating!
> while retaining an interest in the new prospective company. Corel will continue to develop brand name applications for the Linux operating system including WordPerfect Office for Linux and CorelDRAW for Linux.
I.e.: they didn't want to disclose their applications source to their new "partner"... and so their only remaining market will be the few techies who need a GUI word-processor or drawing program.
Java based Corel Draw, the Netwinder, an integrated desktop Linux distribution for non-techies. Three great ideas, all ahead of their time, all fouled up in the execution.
Excerpts from Burney's public statement...
"My belief is that people would be willing to pay, for lack of a better term, for an end-to-end solution."
Right on the money! A soup-to-nuts solution is the only way to un-root the Micro$oft desktop.
"...making the appropriate acquisitions to fill in the holes would have cost us around $300 million."
You don't understand. That knowledge is/was in-house, with those that put together your distribution. Adding and testing server applications would not have been THAT big of a leap. That $300M figure is totally bogus. The only partner you'd have needed was one of the big-name hardware vendors.
"So you end up making 15 calls and they're all pointing at each other"
That's what people do now with Micro$oft. You could have made a single-access-point of service, which could have destroyed the Micro$oft shrink-wrap paradigm.
Businesses spend a great deal on service. Ask Sun or IBM if service sells. For that matter, ask Maytag or Sears.
Large companies accounting, for service, usually charge 10X the wages of those who actively make the products. That's not all spent on Sysadmins and software upgrades, but a large amount is.
Small businesses can't get the service they need. They're left with integrating the software and hardware themselves, often with the help of an over-zealous teenager or someone in Management that has more productive things to do.
That's the niche Corel could have captured.
Service alone, like software alone, doesn't cut it. Soup-to-nuts: hardware (the entire network), software, and service does.
Like Sun, but atop open hardware and software, aimed at small business, legal, and medical.
The current Linux community doesn't need service: we're a "do it ourselves" lot. But, Corel shouldn't have been marketing to us.
"...there's no way [to make money] because you don't control your intellectual property."
It's the service, stupid.
Between the proprietary office apps and the service on an open hardware and software platform, Corel was uniquely positioned to be the first company to give Micro$oft true competition.
As long as you try to compete with Micro$oft on their own turf, you loose. You can make a better product at a better price, but they own the platform. They have, can, and will change the platform at-will to suit their application and competitive needs, leaving Corel always chasing their tail. As long as Corel is "just another Office suite" on the WinDoh's platform, Microsoft wins.
"And Corel wonders why the community never received them with open arms?" (a Quote from the previous slashdot article).
Screw the Linux community: that was not Corel's market. Redhat, SuSE, Debian, etc... can fill our needs. Corel's focus was on the average and business user -- where Linux needs to go.
"And a great thing about
Maybe that's what your Micro$oft handlers are telling you. With IE the only browser of relevance,
"In adopting Internet standards such as XML as part of its
He went on to obfuscate that statement with wanting to maintain "a certain level of interoperability", but he's a known spin-doctor, and we've seen what tricks he's pulled with "interoperability" in the past.
We all credit RMS with creating the GPL & FSF, which provides the majority of code for any Linux/*BSD distribution.
But, RMS is an idealist, with his position too unwavering for the average engineer.
Linus, on the other hand, is thoughtful, easy-going and pragmatic. An engineer's engineer; the one we'd all want for a boss.
That's why we want it referred to as Linux and not GNU/Linux. We need RMS to remind us how far we've straid from his ideals, but we'd rather not show him in public as our standard bearer.
For that, we have Linus.
It seems to me that if Microsoft was trying to dodge a bullet from the DOJ, then they should have removed the strings they attached to the $130M investment.
.net agreement Corel signed to get the money? The DOJ would be more worried about that agreement than the money.
Remember the big
Is Microsoft going to end the agreement? The article didn't say.
So, I think Microsoft is doing what I did: getting out of Corel stock before they loose any more money.
It must have been appearant to Microsoft that once Corel had announced their "Integrate by Disintegrating" approach to Linux, that they would no longer be potential competition for Microsoft, and, instead, would continue chasing Microsoft's tail like all app vendors that make apps for WinDoh's.
He's not happy with anything that isn't "GPL", he never has been, and he never will. We expect him to stand at one extreme of the subject.
The rest of us can be more pragmatic, and see the advantages of somewhat open source, and be glad to see more companies moving in that direction.
He's the internet equivalent of a bounty hunter.
Shoot first, trial later (if at all).
As with all bounty hunters, he's going to hurt someone who's innocent, and as the article said, the current laws favor the corporations.
I don't like the anonymity the internet provides, because too many crooks get away with their crimes. If your machine has ever been cracked, I'm sure you'd agree.
I realize the problem: privacy and anonymity go together: you loose one, you loose both.
I'm currently listening to Pink Floyd's "Dogs" -- where the masters are killed and no law exists and the sheep find themselves constantly terrified by the dogs.
Sounds like the wild west: law enforcement was few and far between. Crooks had their heyday, spurning vigilantism and bounty hunters.
"You better stay home, and do what you're told... stay out of the road if you want to grow old".
Let's hope this is not the future of the internet.
"How is hardware closed?"
Everybody, except Transmeta, must pay Intel a license fee for x86 clones. That's closed.
"Anybody can write software, but hardware is complex."
Spoken like a true Double-E. Just because software is easier to patch doesn't make it less complex. Just because you've taken your requisite course in FORTRASH and found programs easy to write, does not help you understand the enormous complexity associated with the integration and maintenence of an application that actually does something useful.
Hardware either works or it doesn't work. Nice and simple. Plus, it has analog tolerances: it will continue work in situations outside intended boundries.
Conversely, software embodies complexity theory: it takes on behavior as if at random. Furthermore, every statement in a digital language is fragile (no such thing as an analog tolerance): if it's wrong (no matter how close it is to being right), everything breaks with it. That's why EE's say: "if builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come around would destroy civilization".
They don't understand complexity at all.
The CPU from Intel and the OS from Microsoft were the closed components after Compaq reverse engineered the bios on the IBM PC.
You may be a bit young to remember the early 80's. The CPU and OS are an order of magnitude more difficult (than the bios) to reverse engineer. Even now, if you make an Intel clone CPU, you have to pay Intel a license fee (except Transmeta, which uses a code-morphing emulator).
"What does Open Hardware have to do with Open Software?"
Open hardware was the PC revolution. Apple got PC's started... but the model was closed, like IBM. IBM ligitimized the PC, but it was still a closed platform. Reverse engineering the IBM bios started the PC revolution. That's when competition was allowed in the hardware components. That's when the prices came down, and the technology grew at a record pace. IBM tried to recapture the the market by creating a closed PS2 bus, and later the OS2 OS, but neither attempt worked.
The Open Software revolution will most likely be similar. A decade from now we'll probably look back on the propriatary software model like we now look back on the proprietary hardware model.
Finally, I don't think you saw the sarcasm in my post. I was trying to say: I want those same "problems" we had with the open hardware PC revolution.
I've been used to getting finincial information through my Fidelity Investment account. When you have an account, they supply good news and stock charting info.
About two months ago, they updated their web site, and whenever I try to get to these pages, I'm greeted with a "browser not supported" message which says: upgrade to Netscape or IE 4.x or better.
I use Netscape 4.x at home, 6.x at work; both under Linux. When I told them I was using the proper version of Netscape, they said they only support the WinDoh's version of Netscape.
It's merely the browser string that their objecting to: they don't even let my browser try to render these pages.
No amount of complaining helps. I'm moving my account.
Compaq reverse engineered the IBM Bios.
Then, anybody could make a motherboard or adapter. Competition was fierce. Prices were low. Innovations caused PC's to be outdated the month they were bought. Even IBM couldn't compete.
But, Components from Intel and Microsoft were left closed.
Intel & Microsoft tyranically ruled the PC (open hardware) revolution.
If we open the source on the PC platform, we're going to have another revolution with all these same problems (except, of course, the Microsoft monopoly)!
Hatch is the author of the DMCA. Although the provisions that are killing "fair use" in court (i.e. DeCSS) were basically added by lobbyists, he's done nothing to ammend it.
Micro$oft is right!
Look at the problem open hardware caused: Compaq reverse engineerd the IBM bios... then anybody (in a fiercely competitive market) could make motherboards and adapter boards, leaving Microsoft and Intel to tyranically rule the PC platform, leaving behind closed hardware vendors like Apple and Sun.
We'd hate for the software market to become competitive like that, and leave M$ behind.
;)
OpenSSH started with Ylonen's source, the license said:
`This file is part of the ssh software, Copyright (c) 1995 Tatu Ylonen, Finland
COPYING POLICY AND OTHER LEGAL ISSUES
As far as I am concerned, the code I have written for this software can be used freely for any purpose. Any derived versions of this software must be clearly marked as such, and if the derived work is incompatible with the protocol description in the RFC file, it must be called by a name other than "ssh" or "Secure Shell".
...'
He only asks that derivations be marked as such, and use of the name "ssh" is only dependent on compatibility with the RFC.
Can he now withdraw the permission he once gave?
Don't you remember the /. article a few months ago where M$ claimed to have "invented" a new way to solve their "DLL hell" by "inventing" a way to replace copies of the same file with a link to just one file ;)
Anyway, this whole discussion is stupid.
Unix's shared object versioning has always made "DLL hell" not applicable to Unix.
If you're making a logical link to a different version of the library, then you risk the stability of the application (but I do it too).
Shared object versioning allows multiple versions of the same library to all exist in the same directory, and the app to be able to specify which version it was compiled and tested with.
The only problem here is that Oracle didn't include the shared libraries in their app's distribution, in case the needed shared libraries didn't exist in the users system.
No WinDoh's app vendor would be stupid enough not to include all the necessary DLL's, and overwrite them upon app installation, breaking every other program but theirs!
"Surely it's not coincidence that the American economy has taken a nosedive just as the Microsoft trial came to fruition."
While I'll agree that the current US administration will (in essence) drop the antitrust case against M$, I disagree that the courts conclusions brought the economy down. If that were true, the economy would have come back the day the Supreme Court decided not to "fast track" the case -- everybody knew at that point that Microsoft would never be stopped.
Fuel prices were on the increase at the same time. That's why the economy flatened.
It's no coincidence that two oil men are in charge of the US one year after the oil companies started putting pressure on the country's oil supplies!
Most every inexperienced programmer comes up with tools for programming that are supposed to be the silver bullet, increase programmer productivity, etc...
They usually cost more time to code and maintain then they ever save. Very few are worth using, and none have been "silver bullets". (I include myself as one of the guilty).
I remember the case of "Apware" (which was Novell's name for it after they bought it; it was originally on the Mac, but I forget it's name there).
Very much like a GUI version of the unix tools. Rather than command line args and stdin/out, you'd graphically plug the tools together to form an application.
Seemingly easy, targeted at the casual user.
Easy as long as it was simple, but couldn't do anything usefull until it became complex.
No savings here. Just another kid with a new programming tool, no easier to code and maintain than the equivalent "C" or shell scripts.
Anyway, in coming to terms with this idea -- it is very different. It's aimed at the user, not the programmer.
We often code GUI front-ends to shell scripts, using Tcl/Tk/Wish, Python, Xforms, or Glade. Having the commands in the shell scripts work together to service a window of widgets isn't a bad idea.
You'd surely want to be able to turn it off (or not enable the feature) for any given command, as well as add persistance (so a given command re-operates the same widget every time it's envoked in a script). Some environmental variables for pulling it all together (command widgets for formatted windows) would be nice too.
It might be easier to make a special shell that monitors the commands in a script and displays a GUI. It would be easier than getting those who support the open source tools to come to an agreement as to how this would work.
Scratch That Itch!
Dear Linux Users,
please find below the official statement to our
realignment of the US business.
*** SuSE Linux AG realigns its US business
With its subsidiary in Oakland, California, the company has been active in the US market since 1997. In the course of the coming weeks the company will introduce new products to the US market. At the same time, endeavors are made to increase the efficiency and reduce costs. For this reason, SuSE Linux AG has decided to relocate certain tasks such as the technical support from the US to Europe.
"While SuSE remains fully committed to the US market and our US customers, we can be more effective by streamlining our on-site presence in the US and integrating certain functions such as the technical support into our operations in Europe. Here our 100+ staff members already provide expert services to customers in the UK and other English-speaking countries," explains Roland Dyroff, CEO, SuSE Linux AG.
Consequently, the personnel will be reduced by 30 employees. Henceforth 15 staff members will operate in the US, continuing to develop and expand the location in accordance with the strategic orientation of SuSE Linux AG.
"A lean team will handle on-site tasks like sales which are best done in close proximity to the clients in this market. By restructuring our activities in the US we will increase our efficiency and better serve our customers with high-quality Linux products and services," says Roland Dyroff.
...
Best regards
Your SuSE-Team
Michaela Finnie
Businesses spend a great deal on service. Ask Sun or IBM if service sells.
Large companies accounting, for service, usually charge 10X the wages of those who actively make the products. That's not all spent on Sysadmins and software upgrades, but a large amount is.
Small businesses can't get the service they need. They're left with integrating the software and hardware themselves, often with the help of an over-zealous teenager or someone in Management that has more productive things to do.
That's the niche Corel could have captured.
Service alone, like software alone, doesn't cut it. Soup-to-nuts: hardware (the entire network), software, and service does.
Like Sun, but atop open hardware and software, aimed at small business, legal, and medical.
Dear Mr. Burney... "My belief is that people would be willing to pay, for lack of a better term, for an end-to-end solution."
.Net is, it's not mutually exclusive with Linux ."
.NET will assure the Microsoft lock-in
by forcing out Apache and other servers. In Microsoft's vision, the
only way the Web will be browsed is with Microsoft's .NET is the strategy to make that reality. As
"hard-ball" (Ballmer) recently said:
.Net
initiative, Microsoft will continue to protect any intellectual property
that it embeds as objects in XML wrappers. We will have proprietary
formats to protect our intellectual property..."
Right on the money! A soup-to-nuts solution is the only way to un-root the Micro$oft desktop.
"...making the appropriate acquisitions to fill in the holes would have cost us around $300 million."
You don't understand. That knowledge was in-house, with those that put together your distribution. Adding and testing server applications would not have been THAT big of a leap. That $300M figure is totally bogus. The only partner you'd have needed was one of the big-name hardware vendors.
"So you end up making 15 calls and they're all pointing at each other. "
That's what people do now with Micro$oft. You could have made a single-access-point of service, which would have destroyed the Micro$oft shrink-wrap paradigm.
"...there's no way [to make money] because you don't control your intellectual property."
It's the service, stupid.
Between the proprietary office apps and the service on an open hardware and software platform, Corel was uniquely positioned to be the first company to give Micro$oft true competition.
As long as you try to compete with Micro$oft on their own turf, you loose. You can make a better product at a better price, but they own the platform. They have, can, and will change the platform at-will to suit their application and competitive needs, leaving Corel always chasing their tail. As long as Corel is "just another Office suite" on the WinDoh's platform, Microsoft wins.
"And Corel wonders why the community never received them with open arms?" (a Quote from the slashdot article).
Screw the Linux community: that was not your market. Redhat, SuSE, Debian, etc... can fill our needs. You were focused on the average and business user -- where Linux needs to go.
"And a great thing about
Maybe that's what your Micro$oft handlers are telling you. With IE the only browser of relevance,
servers and clients.
"In adopting Internet standards such as XML as part of its
He went on to obfuscate that statement with wanting to maintain "a certain level of interoperability", but he's a known spin-doctor, and we've seen what tricks he's pulled with "interoperability" in the past.
Dear articulate coward:
2 00 10124/17.jpg
I was not on the wrong article. Had you been able to fully read the article, you would have noticed the image referred to (in the slashdot article) at:
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/article/
Although I was wrong about which slot was in backwards: the first 5 PCI slots are keyed in the wrong direction.
You should check your information before considering yourself so much better than everyone else.
Note the key on the PCI slot closest to the edge: the card would have to face backwards. The Tyan board also had 64bit PCI slots -- those look like 32bit connectors -- not server class hardware.
The board looks less densly populated than the Tyan. Either it's a cleaner design -- or maybe this is just a mock-up (so it's okay the slot's welded on backwards).
Yes, Opera does work,
;)
But, Netscape & Mozilla don't. In Windoze or Linux.
It may be the size of my inbox (which doesn't make a lot of sense, since it only shows the first few messages).
Other people say it works fine, others have the same problem. Even when it does work, it's much harder to use in a non-IE browser; I'm sure that's by design ("embrace & extend"...).
I don't know what the problem is, I gave up debugging Bill's code for him long ago
I've got a great deal of experience using UW IMAP (home) and Exchange (work) IMAP servers simultaneously from my Linux client.
The Exchange server won't do secure IMAP.
The Exchange servers web interface only works with IE (it says it works with Netscape 4.x, but it neither works with 4.x or Mozilla).
For all the bad things I've heard of UW IMAP, I've been using it for about 3 years, and am very satisfied. It used to corrupt large mbox files occasionally, but I haven't had that problem in a long time (and that's repairable). It also used to have problems with multiple mail clients referencing the same mail file simultaneously. I haven't seen that problem in a long time.
For me, email is my memory. I have huge email folders that I constantly reference. It provides me with a bread-crumbs trail of all that I've done. It provides an on-line research archive for all the lists I belong to.
Secure IMAP is the best mail interface. My memory works from anywhere!
Without secure IMAP, I can only read work related email from work. Exchange sucks.
Whereas Applixware is just another office suite, Anyware Office (also part of Vistasource) promises a desktop revolution. See:
http://www.anywareoffice.com/
(free demo at that site -- the fastest java you've ever seen!)
With desktop systems getting more complex and unmaintenable for non-techie users, server-side office suites could be the solution.
Small, decentralized, or work-at-home businesses can let the maintenance, backup, upgrades, etc... be in the hands of competent application providers. This allows the desktop machine to be a small PC, thin-client, or NC.
The application provider must be competent. Security is foremost. 24-by-7 support is required.
Microsoft embraced java, which included a license that said nobody but Sun could extend it.
.net: a java that only works atop Microsoft OS's.
Microsoft extended java (to block out the competition) and effectively killed it.
Sun sued and won... but Java had already been killed.
Microsoft's new extension of Java is
Warning: Apache is next. With Netscape and Java killed, Microsoft will extend IE to not be compatible with Apache, so everybody will have to buy W2K servers.
This is what the old Justice dept. tried to stop (the new Justtice dept. is in the hands of the crooks).
The Iomega Buz, available for ~$50 on ebay, is the greatest price/performance capture card.
It creates mjpeg (motion jpeg) in the hardware. With it, I can stream realtime video from my 200Mhz server through a 10mbit network. My kids can watch TV/Videos on their LTSP based terminals streaming from the (underpowerd) server (over the underpowered network). The terminals do the mjpeg (avi or movtar) decoding.
There are other capture cards (like the Matrox Marvel G200/G400) that encode in mjpeg -- but they cost a bundle. Hauppauge has a new "PTV" Tivo-like capture card that encodes MPEG2 in the hardware -- no Linux drivers yet.
See http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net for some great mjpeg tools. The Buz is also great for making VCD's
Chris