Ok, so you're saying that for users who don't give a fuck about vendor lock, linux really has no point?
Most people would not mind paying more, if they can use the PC as reliably as they use the VCR. The reason why most common consumers use Windows is because, they are familiar with it at work, so they buy the same thing for their home. They seem to reason, "ok I use this machine at work and have built some level of expertise. Same machine at home, I can handle it. If there is a problem, I can ask collegues or the help desk at work."
The windows monopoly is sustained by giving huge discounts to big businesses. Companies the size of Home Depot or GE or Pepsi pay a flat fee and get unlimited use licenses. They pay slightly less than what it would cost them to switch to Linux/Sun whatever.
The medium and small businesses are forced to be compatible with the big companies. And all the employees get familiarity with Windows. That is why most people buy Windows on their own. Right now the big companies don't really care about vendor lock and as long as Pepsi is sure that Coca Cola is spending the same level as itself, they would not rock the boat and fight on other turfs.
And investing to achieve vendor lock, has a longer pay back period than a year or two. That is 8 quarters. No CEO/CFO/CIO is going to make a sustained effort over that many quarters. For all he knows, it is the next guy on his seat that is going to see the cost savings. But all it would take is for a couple of companies to make a switch and show a little profit. All other companies would hedge their bets, and eventually behave like a herd. Much like they were asking, "What is our India strategy" in the context of out sourcing, they would stampede like herds with "What is our Linux strategy?". When other systems come into the work place, it will find its way to homes too.
Most people buy windows pre installed. But anyone who had gone through a full install of Windows knows how difficult it is. When Redmond releases the next version and calls it an upgrade some chumps try to buy the install disks and attempt upgrading their machines. Or more frequently, a virus or something hits and they only thing that will really eradicate it is to format the hard disk and reinstall the OS. Even with a restore disk specifically created for that machine, many of the prompts during the restore process and install process are arcane and most users can't do anything other than accept the defaults. So why people harp on "Linux is difficult to install?", compare Linux install to windows install. Or compare pre installed Linux to pre installed Windows.
Another disappointing thing about the article is that it positions Linux as a "cheap" alternative. The main point of Linux is not that it is cheap, it could be or it might not be. The real power of Linux is avoiding the vendor lock.
I scanned the article, but the usual estimate height/weight of the dinosaur is missing. Would some one please dig up the info and post it. (Height in number of school buses or stories high, and weight in number of baby elephants or the good old standby libraries of congress).
Have they already announced a Fatwa against this science dude? It is just a matter of time you know...
What is good for GM is good for America
on
The 700MHz Question
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Our congress is the best legislature in the world that money can buy. They will only take care of corporate interests. Occasionally that line might benefit consumers, citizens and America in general. But that is mostly side effect.
Just yesterday Newt Gingrich came on the George Stephenopolos(sp?) show and claimed that 70% of Americans support reduction in corporate taxes, 60% support abolition of capital gains tax etc etc. That would be alright if he is genuinely a fiscal conservative sincerely trying to reduce the size of the government. But he opened with "New Orleans is still a mess,..." What? It is somehow the Govt's job to allow people sandwiched between Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi and the lake to build homes below sea level and keep pumping out water and spend couple of billion dollars in the levy system?
If Republicans would not take on people's unrealistic expectations from Govt what right they have to complain about Tax and Spend Democrats?
Until Google -- or someone else -- stops screwing around with second-rate DHTML clones of WordPad, and builds MS Office-equivalent (and interoperable) collaboration tools for OpenOffice, Microsoft has nothing to fear from Google in this area.
People are messing with "second-rate DHTML clones" as you call them because, they don't want to sink tons of money in Ms-Office replacement, only to see MS move the goal posts, change the file formats. Their code would become useless then. Till somehow MS gets nailed into making one inter-operable file format there will not be a straight competition for Ms-Office. The ODF document standard is one thing that could help. If Google web-tools gain a critical mass that forces a significant percentage of Ms-Office users to save to Office97 by default or odf by default, it would create a
market for people willing to write tools as powerful as Ms-Office. As long as MSFT can play games with apis, gui, file formats and keep making interoperability impossible, you will not find anyone willing to invest what it takes to compete with Ms-Office.
Are they trying to share DLLs between installed MS-Office software and the Web based spreadsheet and word tools? Given their track record this is typically the kind of thing they will do. They preload MS-Office DLLs during boot to create the impression of instant-on MS-Office compared to OpenOffice. (They don't have try this hard to beat OpenOffice in launch time, but that is a different issue). They might tunnel behind the browser and security and everything so that the web based tool can give you faster response time. They don't have to stream in code to execute in the browser and they don't have to send changes back to the server to rerender the page being edited.
I could easily imagine a development team pitching this idea to the pointy haired bosses. "We have this huge installed base of DLLs and megabytes of code already in the client's machine. We beat them in the download time! We execute complex code in their machine, we beat Google in refresh time! yay!! yay!!!" Of course, such a thing would violate all security protocols, and create thousands of security holes, but they won't care. It would not work in any platform other than Windows and they won't care. It might not work in FireFox and they would go, "yeah! that will kill FF"
Anyway this is all speculation, but I don't see why they would demand pre installed Ms-Office to allow a web based tool to work.
Are they trying to share DLLs between installed MS-Office software and the Web based spreadsheet and word tools? Given their track record this is typically the kind of thing they will do. They preload MS-Office DLLs during boot to create the impression of instant-on MS-Office compared to OpenOffice. (They don't have try this hard to beat OpenOffice in launch time, but that is a different issue). They might tunnel behind the browser and security and everything so that the web based tool can give you faster response time. They don't have to stream in code to execute in the browser and they don't have to send changes back to the server to rerender the page being edited.
I could easily imagine a development team pitching this idea to the pointy haired bosses. "We have this huge installed base of DLLs and megabytes of code already in the client's machine. We beat them in the download time! We execute complex code in their machine, we beat Google in refresh time! yay!! yay!!!" Of course, such a thing would violate all security protocols, and create thousands of security holes, but they won't care. It would not work in any platform other than Windows and they won't care. It might not work in FireFox and they would go, "yeah! that will kill FF"
Anyway this is all speculation, but I don't see why they would demand pre installed Ms-Office to allow a web based tool to work.
The sites could show one content to Googlebot and another to normal visitors. Google has to test with a different agent string and if the contents differ, they just have to junk the whole domain. I am sure they already do.
The Society for the prevention of cruelty to Animals vehemantly condemns subjecting animals to needless cruelty in the name of scientific experiments. Release Schrodinger's Cat Now!
They are going to create a huge grassroots information and education campaign against this. They believe the security should intelligently designed and should not depend on random chance of security people and the bad guys coming together.
What is more galling is that the entire patent application was punched up by grunts in Bangalore. Would very much like to see a headline like, "IBM replaces CEO with Muniyandi Appannakaruppandi Joshi, a graduate of Aiyyappa Institute of Mangagement Sciences (second class, registered with Govt of India), for one tenth of the salary."
I felt as though millions of voices cried out in terror and they were silenced. Somehow I thought it came from the incinerator that handled the ballots on Florida. But...
..the allegations that their users claimed Vista is a pile of manure, the representative said "We wouldn't term it manure, we'd say it has very strong properties, promotes groth and has fertilizing capabilities."
Though that is what the rep claimed, independent testing showed that only odor has been inherited and rest of the beneficial aspects of manure have not been found in Vista.
It will work out OK for Microsoft. Reminds of on old joke.
Guy goes to an astrologer and he looks at the horoscope, does lots of calculations and says,
"Jupiter is in the same House as Saturn. And Saturn will stay in that House for 7.5 years.
All through that 7.5 years, you will have misery and misfortune. Your wife will leave you.
Your son will usurp your house and throw you out. You will lose all your wealth and fall sick.
You will be miserable for 7.5 years."
The guy, visibly disturbed asks, "What happens after 7.5 years when Saturn moves out of the House of Jupiter?"
The astrologer shrugged and said, "You will be used to the misery."
Same way, in three years the miserable performance of Vista will be defined to be industry standard fast tracked and approved by ISO and users will use 4GB of RAM to browse the internet.
The stealth "upgrade" will make XP quite unstable. And MS will just say, XP has been end-of-lifed and Vista upgrade will fix the problems. Then Wall Street will get comfortable numbers about Vista sales. Things will continue as normal.
If you want lower taxes, fight for lower taxes across the board. There is no reason to tax the brick and mortar establishments and give a blank check to the internet companies.
Why should the mom-and-pop diner that ekes out a living by selling coffee and donuts be forced to comply with the onerous burden of collecting and remitting taxes on every cup of joe they sell while the multi-billion dollar sale companies like Amazon get a free ride?
Long time ago it was considered too difficult for small internet start ups to follow the complex local taxes and exempt categories for all the 25,000 taxing jurisdictions in the country. That argument is no longer valid. The internet companies should be able to calculate the local tax and exempt categories based on the deliver address. Or they can float an internet startup to provide the service to other companies.
Fight for lower taxes across the board, fight for better spending efficiency by the government. Slashdot readers are tech savvy people who can avoid sales taxes by ordering online. If you fight to keep the special treatment of internet companies over brick-and-mortar companies, you are no better than the vested special interests that you often criticize.
I don't know if China would really beat us in the back to the moon race, but if it does, it would have a very positive impact on America. After the end of cold war, America has become somewhat lethargic. If this serves to unify behind some kind of scientific goal, it would really be great.
The article is sorely lacking in details. There was a vulnerability report earlier about PDF files that open external links. At that time slashdot discussions were very critical of adding javascript kind of functionality and opening external links and invoking the browser from pdf reader. A plain and simple document reader/renderer has no need for all these hooks that allow for bells and whistles. It was alleged every bell and every whistle could be a potential attack vector. Well, presently I have disable javascript, external links etc in my pdf reader. Hope it is enough plug the hole.
Slashdot Mirror
Just wondering if Google will index the data base and show in the search results?
Most people would not mind paying more, if they can use the PC as reliably as they use the VCR. The reason why most common consumers use Windows is because, they are familiar with it at work, so they buy the same thing for their home. They seem to reason, "ok I use this machine at work and have built some level of expertise. Same machine at home, I can handle it. If there is a problem, I can ask collegues or the help desk at work."
The windows monopoly is sustained by giving huge discounts to big businesses. Companies the size of Home Depot or GE or Pepsi pay a flat fee and get unlimited use licenses. They pay slightly less than what it would cost them to switch to Linux/Sun whatever. The medium and small businesses are forced to be compatible with the big companies. And all the employees get familiarity with Windows. That is why most people buy Windows on their own. Right now the big companies don't really care about vendor lock and as long as Pepsi is sure that Coca Cola is spending the same level as itself, they would not rock the boat and fight on other turfs.
And investing to achieve vendor lock, has a longer pay back period than a year or two. That is 8 quarters. No CEO/CFO/CIO is going to make a sustained effort over that many quarters. For all he knows, it is the next guy on his seat that is going to see the cost savings. But all it would take is for a couple of companies to make a switch and show a little profit. All other companies would hedge their bets, and eventually behave like a herd. Much like they were asking, "What is our India strategy" in the context of out sourcing, they would stampede like herds with "What is our Linux strategy?". When other systems come into the work place, it will find its way to homes too.
Another disappointing thing about the article is that it positions Linux as a "cheap" alternative. The main point of Linux is not that it is cheap, it could be or it might not be. The real power of Linux is avoiding the vendor lock.
I scanned the article, but the usual estimate height/weight of the dinosaur is missing. Would some one please dig up the info and post it. (Height in number of school buses or stories high, and weight in number of baby elephants or the good old standby libraries of congress).
Every time the scientists dig up a fossil, they add two more "missing links" to the Creationists databases.
Even the simple garden snail has hundreds of "teeth". Reference.
Have they already announced a Fatwa against this science dude? It is just a matter of time you know...
Just yesterday Newt Gingrich came on the George Stephenopolos(sp?) show and claimed that 70% of Americans support reduction in corporate taxes, 60% support abolition of capital gains tax etc etc. That would be alright if he is genuinely a fiscal conservative sincerely trying to reduce the size of the government. But he opened with "New Orleans is still a mess, ..." What? It is somehow the Govt's job to allow people sandwiched between Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi and the lake to build homes below sea level and keep pumping out water and spend couple of billion dollars in the levy system?
If Republicans would not take on people's unrealistic expectations from Govt what right they have to complain about Tax and Spend Democrats?
People are messing with "second-rate DHTML clones" as you call them because, they don't want to sink tons of money in Ms-Office replacement, only to see MS move the goal posts, change the file formats. Their code would become useless then. Till somehow MS gets nailed into making one inter-operable file format there will not be a straight competition for Ms-Office. The ODF document standard is one thing that could help. If Google web-tools gain a critical mass that forces a significant percentage of Ms-Office users to save to Office97 by default or odf by default, it would create a market for people willing to write tools as powerful as Ms-Office. As long as MSFT can play games with apis, gui, file formats and keep making interoperability impossible, you will not find anyone willing to invest what it takes to compete with Ms-Office.
I could easily imagine a development team pitching this idea to the pointy haired bosses. "We have this huge installed base of DLLs and megabytes of code already in the client's machine. We beat them in the download time! We execute complex code in their machine, we beat Google in refresh time! yay!! yay!!!" Of course, such a thing would violate all security protocols, and create thousands of security holes, but they won't care. It would not work in any platform other than Windows and they won't care. It might not work in FireFox and they would go, "yeah! that will kill FF"
Anyway this is all speculation, but I don't see why they would demand pre installed Ms-Office to allow a web based tool to work.
I could easily imagine a development team pitching this idea to the pointy haired bosses. "We have this huge installed base of DLLs and megabytes of code already in the client's machine. We beat them in the download time! We execute complex code in their machine, we beat Google in refresh time! yay!! yay!!!" Of course, such a thing would violate all security protocols, and create thousands of security holes, but they won't care. It would not work in any platform other than Windows and they won't care. It might not work in FireFox and they would go, "yeah! that will kill FF"
Anyway this is all speculation, but I don't see why they would demand pre installed Ms-Office to allow a web based tool to work.
The sites could show one content to Googlebot and another to normal visitors. Google has to test with a different agent string and if the contents differ, they just have to junk the whole domain. I am sure they already do.
The Society for the prevention of cruelty to Animals vehemantly condemns subjecting animals to needless cruelty in the name of scientific experiments. Release Schrodinger's Cat Now!
They are going to create a huge grassroots information and education campaign against this. They believe the security should intelligently designed and should not depend on random chance of security people and the bad guys coming together.
What is more galling is that the entire patent application was punched up by grunts in Bangalore. Would very much like to see a headline like, "IBM replaces CEO with Muniyandi Appannakaruppandi Joshi, a graduate of Aiyyappa Institute of Mangagement Sciences (second class, registered with Govt of India), for one tenth of the salary."
I felt as though millions of voices cried out in terror and they were silenced. Somehow I thought it came from the incinerator that handled the ballots on Florida. But ...
Though that is what the rep claimed, independent testing showed that only odor has been inherited and rest of the beneficial aspects of manure have not been found in Vista.
No it is just 3 months according to Excel2007
Guy goes to an astrologer and he looks at the horoscope, does lots of calculations and says, "Jupiter is in the same House as Saturn. And Saturn will stay in that House for 7.5 years. All through that 7.5 years, you will have misery and misfortune. Your wife will leave you. Your son will usurp your house and throw you out. You will lose all your wealth and fall sick. You will be miserable for 7.5 years."
The guy, visibly disturbed asks, "What happens after 7.5 years when Saturn moves out of the House of Jupiter?"
The astrologer shrugged and said, "You will be used to the misery."
Same way, in three years the miserable performance of Vista will be defined to be industry standard fast tracked and approved by ISO and users will use 4GB of RAM to browse the internet.
The stealth "upgrade" will make XP quite unstable. And MS will just say, XP has been end-of-lifed and Vista upgrade will fix the problems. Then Wall Street will get comfortable numbers about Vista sales. Things will continue as normal.
His question is more likely to be "Where/What is the Constitution?".
yes, I realized after posting. Will be eating crow for lunch today.
Why should the mom-and-pop diner that ekes out a living by selling coffee and donuts be forced to comply with the onerous burden of collecting and remitting taxes on every cup of joe they sell while the multi-billion dollar sale companies like Amazon get a free ride?
Long time ago it was considered too difficult for small internet start ups to follow the complex local taxes and exempt categories for all the 25,000 taxing jurisdictions in the country. That argument is no longer valid. The internet companies should be able to calculate the local tax and exempt categories based on the deliver address. Or they can float an internet startup to provide the service to other companies.
Fight for lower taxes across the board, fight for better spending efficiency by the government. Slashdot readers are tech savvy people who can avoid sales taxes by ordering online. If you fight to keep the special treatment of internet companies over brick-and-mortar companies, you are no better than the vested special interests that you often criticize.
I don't know if China would really beat us in the back to the moon race, but if it does, it would have a very positive impact on America. After the end of cold war, America has become somewhat lethargic. If this serves to unify behind some kind of scientific goal, it would really be great.
The article is sorely lacking in details. There was a vulnerability report earlier about PDF files that open external links. At that time slashdot discussions were very critical of adding javascript kind of functionality and opening external links and invoking the browser from pdf reader. A plain and simple document reader/renderer has no need for all these hooks that allow for bells and whistles. It was alleged every bell and every whistle could be a potential attack vector. Well, presently I have disable javascript, external links etc in my pdf reader. Hope it is enough plug the hole.