I've also learned that the business people know as little as the rest of us about where things are going. Thir guesses are never right. They might make some good guesses about what market will do well
The problem is information overload. The correct projections about the future are lost in a sea of incorrect projections, wishful thinking, emotion and hype.
Like this year. I know that tablets will be a big thing.
Someday.
The roadside's littered with businesses that tried to introduce products based on good ideas that were too many years before the right time.
I love it, too, when well-meaning relatives annotate their email address books to help provide a detailed handle on exactly to whom the email addresses really belong. Not to mention filling the message with plain text details of their lives and yours.
As Joey the teen script kiddie looks in horror at the email headers, Aunt Agatha has completely blown his coveted stealth email address...
To: '"Joseph Wayne Smallpecker, Des Moine Iowa"' <h4Xor31337@x5.cx>
(plain text describing Joey in detail to the Feds. Is he still getting a C in shop class at Fred MacMurray High School?
Aunt Agatha is happy with her sweater she got for her birthday. Her poodle is not feeling well.)
I'd send a nice general "cover" letter to the company in question that used your GPL'd code as the basis for their extended code.
I'd thank them for recognizing and adhering to licensing restrictions, in this case the GPL. I'd mention that you, too, want to adhere to all licensing restrictions. Thus, if they incorporated others works that are bound by other specific licenses besides the GPL to make clear to you exactly which parts of the code are restricted in non-GPL ways.
If they don't have the time to mark other's code, at the very least they could mark code which is unambiguously "yours+their extensions".
Be prepared at any time in the future to remove chunks of code from the GPL project if some third party presents irrefutable evidence that such code is under their copyright and that they do not wish to distribute their code that way. Kinda like old RSA code used to be.
Someone may argue that you didn't properly adhere to the licensing agreements for that code, but that's where you have to be able to demonstrate that you made a good faith effort to adhere to all of the restrictions that you knew about. If the company did not inform you of those restrictions and you asked them to do so, then it will be more difficult to fault you. After all, it is that company that made agreements with the other licensors, NDAs, etc. and it is their responsibility to adhere to those agreements when giving code over to you.
OK, I'll come out of the woodwork like every other worm that's lived, loved and hated X for years.
I think X was ahead of its time with the network view of a server accepting requests.
In hindsight, no fault of the original developers, the problem is now that it was implemented before the advent of newer standards in network communications such as http and XML. Yes, the existing infrastructure works like a draft horse. But it would have a better future if it didn't do things its own way but relied on other standards, even if those standards were later in coming.
And, honestly, X didn't flow smoothly into vector based (PostScript) and 3D systems (OpenGL) except as "extensions" that are obviously afterthoughts. Sun's NeWS didn't win. And OpenGL applications under XGL behave differently than pure X applications.
It would be nice if a new frame buffer device manager would be written that incorporates some of those ideas and yet retains the network awareness of X, which I think is one of its strengths.
A well-designed successor to X should be layerable either below X or above X during a transition.
As the story at the Register points out, any other business with ventures losing money like Xbox and MSN would kill them off as clearly bad business decisions.
A company willing and able to sustain hundreds of millions of dollars poured down a holes that are peripherally related to their core business of PC software, for years at a time, is crazy.
A company willing and able to do that against large, established business like AOL/Time Warner and Sony is downright scary.
A normal business, run to increase profits, would look at the margins on Office and Windows and simply jack up their prices. It's an iron-clad guarantee to increase profits at MSFT. There is virtually zero
price elasticity of demand for Windows and Office and MSFT management owes it to their shareholders to optimize profits by taking advantage of their stranglehold on the market.
Well that decision certainly is short-sighted. Obviously the publishers that stand to make money from the absence of the free Pubscience web site got a receptive audience in the current U.S. administration. If you don't like it and you live in the U.S., then you have the right to vote for a different administartion next time.
There's a growing discrepancy between the costs of providing information over the internet and what has traditionally been charged to libraries for access to research journals. Ask your librarian sometime what some of those journal subscriptions run; many are over $1000 per year.
If the government won't act as a way for citizens to pool their resources to obtain a valuable service at a low price, then perhaps it would be a good idea for people to pool contributions to purchase a co-located server on a fat pipe somewhere and start stocking it with searchable research papers.
As far as that goes, many of the big publishing houses have gotten free professional reviewers for the journal articles, merely because the university tenure process has been critically linked to how many articles a researchers publishes in those journals.
If the free site could get enough "expert anonymous moderators" to help rank articles and enough good content to be noticed, things would start to take off by themselves.
That's the important part. Federal reserve notes are not backed by gold anymore; they have no inherent value. They only have value to the degree I trust that I can submit those pieces of paper to another party for valuable goods.
I'm usually cavalier about verifying the authenticity of paper money. A quick 2 second inspection does it. And it doesn't require submission to a certifying authority to check its authenticity.
I think it's possible to verify a string of bits as digital cash with a certifying authority to give it value. But you're correct, because my drug dealer won't recognize that my string of bits has value unless it has been checked with a third party, thereby blowing anonymity on the transaction.
I'd still like to believe that it's possible that the web of trust need not disclose the entire chain of identities in previous transactions to verify the value of a bitstring in a given transaction. But I can't prove it, and the fact that the bitstring must change with each transaction so that it cannot be re-used is a formidable problem.
Consider that our current system of meatspace cash makes it possible for two complete strangers to conduct a transaction without either compromising their anonymity.
I don't trust the drug dealer and he doesn't trust me. But both of us trust that some other entity will take the currency in trade for valuable goods.
With digital cash I expect that I'll have to prove my identity for some transactions (just like cashing my paycheck at the bank).
But I'd like to have the existing protection of anonymity for transactions if I want it: I've lately become uncomfortable buying books with a credit card.
Too many schemes for digital cash are concocted to use technology to trace every transaction, when it's clear that many people don't want that.
I'd go so far as to venture that if the digital e-cash was too traceable, that the price of small, scarce commodities like gold and platinum would increase as they became used as an alternate, anonymity-preserving medium of exchange.
Good advice to consider the overall timeframe for costs and when savings will be realized.
There are some costs that are harder to measure. Costs of unreliability, people futzing with unfamiliar or non-intuitive software, etc.
I think probably the single largest impediment to Linux adoption currently is not that the applications aren't there, it's training costs to get users up to speed with the alternatives, and it's investment in legacy "standards" - someone's got a pile of old Excel spreadsheets with important information in them.
A lot of people get overly excited at the outset: "Linux is free, reliable, open source and Microsoft charges me every which way to Sunday for stuff with bugs and security holes - no brainer dude!"
Well, training costs and investment in existing systems are real.
If I were you, I'd suggest a small prototype deployment to give you a better handle on how much the training costs will be, since they depend on your users and your mix of applications. Some users and apps will take to Linux like a duck to water, but others will bump up against stumbling blocks that might not have foreseen.
You can win with Linux (my organization is), but it's not a brainless transition.
They seem to be desperately out of tune with their users in the server market
It's because they don't compete in a normal market anymore.
When you essentially own a marketplace, such as they do with desktop PC operating systems, then you can make a lot more decisions that your customers don't like but have to accept because the alternatives have disappeared or are considered too drastic (MacOS, Linux, etc.).
Actually, the competition they seem to be desperately out of tune with their users in the server markethey've endured trying to enter the server market has been good for them and their customers: each revision of NT was compared with UNIX. Early revs were laughable, but MS had a target to aim towards in terms of reliability and scalability. Finally, with Win2K they have something where they don't get laughed out of the room anymore. I doubt whether it would have been as a good product as it is without the competition.
They face a more serious threat in the future with their server operating systems. If they strongly leverage their desktop dominance in Windows and Office, then they can insure their servers are the only brand that works in a networked environment.
But if services are standardized and commoditized, which is what customers really like for their effects on price and quality (as in the PC hardware market), then open source flavors of UNIX will have already eaten their server marketplace for breakfast when they finally trot out some shiny chrome-plated Blackcomb.NET product that "does everything and more".
It has a legacy stretching back further than TeX and is used for man page formatting on tty devices.
You can format the output to higher resolution devices if you wish. There's even some work afoot to make it output html, which I think has a lot of potential for helping me to stop worrying about my MANPATH
Is Oracle being reasonable about the cost of supporting old software, or are they doing an MS-style push of their customers into an upgrade many feel they don't need?
using high-end nVidia cards...and all told, the advantages of using Linux just far outweighs the advantages of using SGI hardware.
That's my experience, too.
The price/performance ratio of Lintel is hard to beat.
I think it depends on your price point and tolerance and desire for reliability.
For seriously high-end stuff, go with the SGI. But if you're budget's not unlimited and you're willing to suffer some hiccups once in a while, you owe it to yourself to see what the "low end" can offer these days. It's not too shabby and beats out a lot of the older SGI hardware.
As others have said, you have to demonstrate, to your market, some genuine value added for your product. (OK, sometimes you can get away with perceived value added, but you'd better sell the business not too far down the road.)
An excellent product is a good start, but is insufficient to guarantee business success.
Admit to your limits of expertise: go out and pay for some good marketing expertise.
Ideally, you would have surveyed the marketplace prior to developing your product.
You would have a much better idea who it is exactly that would buy your product. If it's techno Linux geeks in mid-level IT, then you'd find out what they read and what pushes their buttons. If it's people like yourself, then you have a leg up understanding them. But you also run a higher risk of deluding yourself.
A friend in business once told me that you need more than just a vague warm and fuzzy feeling about your market. You need to have names and phone numbers of actual people you've talked with about your product and who would be willing to lay down cash to get it if you made it.
I don't know that elected people necessarily have any incentivwe to protect my rights to privacy or to anything else.
That's because most voters haven't yet had a direct first-hand experience with loss of privacy apart from mild examples of direct marketing.
A growing minority have had some experience with stalkers, so I'd count on those people to value privacy more than the public at large.
The Federal Reserve board is not elected either, but they have an immense impact on my life. Given what I've seen of politics, I'm not really sure I'd want monetary policy in the hands of politicians. Their record with fiscal policy has not been all that great.
A cynical friend once told me that
"Democracies work great until the voters figure out they can vote themselves benefits."
While I'd rather live under a system with elections and representative government, they're not a cure-all. Benevolent dictatorship can work wonderfully until it's time to change the reins of power.
Yes, from one perspective, you could say operating systems are irrelevent.
That's presupposing that whatever operating system is in place provides the needed infrastructure for managing processes and scheduling hardware access in a reasonable way. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, MacOS, Linux or OS/2.
By the same token, my travels from home to work depend on my car, not on the roads.
And it's true that what my body contacts is the car, not the road (motorcyclists sometimes have it rougher, I suppose).
If the roads are well-maintained, plowed in the winter and other cars obey the traffic laws, I'd almost begin to believe that cars were more important and roads were irrelevant.
But if my super highway developed a large pothole, that illusion would disappear quickly.
Likewise, if the owner of the road decided to erect a toll booth and exact some money from me for use of the road, I'd begin to appreciate the importance of roads.
Operating systems: only when they work right do you not notice them.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarification.
I've seen "keiretsu" previously.
I've sometimes confused keiretsu with another Japanese word, "karoshi", which might just as well apply:)
I've also learned that the business people know as little as the rest of us about where things are going. Thir guesses are never right. They might make some good guesses about what market will do well
The problem is information overload. The correct projections about the future are lost in a sea of incorrect projections, wishful thinking, emotion and hype.
Like this year. I know that tablets will be a big thing.
Someday.
The roadside's littered with businesses that tried to introduce products based on good ideas that were too many years before the right time.
Yep.
I love it, too, when well-meaning relatives annotate their email address books to help provide a detailed handle on exactly to whom the email addresses really belong. Not to mention filling the message with plain text details of their lives and yours.
As Joey the teen script kiddie looks in horror at the email headers, Aunt Agatha has completely blown his coveted stealth email address...
To: '"Joseph Wayne Smallpecker, Des Moine Iowa"' <h4Xor31337@x5.cx>
(plain text describing Joey in detail to the Feds.
Is he still getting a C in shop class at Fred MacMurray High School?
Aunt Agatha is happy with her sweater she got for her birthday.
Her poodle is not feeling well.)
I find where bandwidth has been increasing to where it is not the major practical limit to my computing.
More and more, I find that latency is what limits my experience, be it on the network, to a disk array, or to the main memory from the CPU.
P.S. I enjoyed your portrayal of the talk show host on Columbo!
White Commanche, OTOH, I didn't finish seeing - sorry.
<ianal>
I'd send a nice general "cover" letter to the company in question that used your GPL'd code as the basis for their extended code.
I'd thank them for recognizing and adhering to licensing restrictions, in this case the GPL. I'd mention that you, too, want to adhere to all licensing restrictions. Thus, if they incorporated others works that are bound by other specific licenses besides the GPL to make clear to you exactly which parts of the code are restricted in non-GPL ways.
If they don't have the time to mark other's code, at the very least they could mark code which is unambiguously "yours+their extensions".
Be prepared at any time in the future to remove chunks of code from the GPL project if some third party presents irrefutable evidence that such code is under their copyright and that they do not wish to distribute their code that way. Kinda like old RSA code used to be.
Someone may argue that you didn't properly adhere to the licensing agreements for that code, but that's where you have to be able to demonstrate that you made a good faith effort to adhere to all of the restrictions that you knew about. If the company did not inform you of those restrictions and you asked them to do so, then it will be more difficult to fault you. After all, it is that company that made agreements with the other licensors, NDAs, etc. and it is their responsibility to adhere to those agreements when giving code over to you.
</ianal>OK, I'll come out of the woodwork like every other worm that's lived, loved and hated X for years.
I think X was ahead of its time with the network view of a server accepting requests.
In hindsight, no fault of the original developers, the problem is now that it was implemented before the advent of newer standards in network communications such as http and XML. Yes, the existing infrastructure works like a draft horse. But it would have a better future if it didn't do things its own way but relied on other standards, even if those standards were later in coming.
And, honestly, X didn't flow smoothly into vector based (PostScript) and 3D systems (OpenGL) except as "extensions" that are obviously afterthoughts. Sun's NeWS didn't win. And OpenGL applications under XGL behave differently than pure X applications.
It would be nice if a new frame buffer device manager would be written that incorporates some of those ideas and yet retains the network awareness of X, which I think is one of its strengths.
A well-designed successor to X should be layerable either below X or above X during a transition.
As the story at the Register points out, any other business with ventures losing money like Xbox and MSN would kill them off as clearly bad business decisions.
A company willing and able to sustain hundreds of millions of dollars poured down a holes that are peripherally related to their core business of PC software, for years at a time, is crazy.
A company willing and able to do that against large, established business like AOL/Time Warner and Sony is downright scary.
A normal business, run to increase profits, would look at the margins on Office and Windows and simply jack up their prices. It's an iron-clad guarantee to increase profits at MSFT. There is virtually zero price elasticity of demand for Windows and Office and MSFT management owes it to their shareholders to optimize profits by taking advantage of their stranglehold on the market.
[Note: I don't own any MSFT.]
Well that decision certainly is short-sighted. Obviously the publishers that stand to make money from the absence of the free Pubscience web site got a receptive audience in the current U.S. administration. If you don't like it and you live in the U.S., then you have the right to vote for a different administartion next time.
There's a growing discrepancy between the costs of providing information over the internet and what has traditionally been charged to libraries for access to research journals. Ask your librarian sometime what some of those journal subscriptions run; many are over $1000 per year.
If the government won't act as a way for citizens to pool their resources to obtain a valuable service at a low price, then perhaps it would be a good idea for people to pool contributions to purchase a co-located server on a fat pipe somewhere and start stocking it with searchable research papers.
As far as that goes, many of the big publishing houses have gotten free professional reviewers for the journal articles, merely because the university tenure process has been critically linked to how many articles a researchers publishes in those journals.
If the free site could get enough "expert anonymous moderators" to help rank articles and enough good content to be noticed, things would start to take off by themselves.
Ah, so that's why all this talk of Serial ATA. Makes sense now...thanks for taking the time to explain.
My practical experience is that most bottlenecks I see these days are related to latency more than bandwidth.
It has inherent and verifiable value.
That's the important part. Federal reserve notes are not backed by gold anymore; they have no inherent value. They only have value to the degree I trust that I can submit those pieces of paper to another party for valuable goods.
I'm usually cavalier about verifying the authenticity of paper money. A quick 2 second inspection does it. And it doesn't require submission to a certifying authority to check its authenticity.
I think it's possible to verify a string of bits as digital cash with a certifying authority to give it value. But you're correct, because my drug dealer won't recognize that my string of bits has value unless it has been checked with a third party, thereby blowing anonymity on the transaction.
I'd still like to believe that it's possible that the web of trust need not disclose the entire chain of identities in previous transactions to verify the value of a bitstring in a given transaction. But I can't prove it, and the fact that the bitstring must change with each transaction so that it cannot be re-used is a formidable problem.
Looks like a fun science fair project for those dads out there with kids."
Editors modification: those responsible dads
Otherwise, our publication will be sued when the inevitable mishap occurs.
You know the one, that starts innocently like
You can't be both totally anonymous and trusted.
A good point.
Consider that our current system of meatspace cash makes it possible for two complete strangers to conduct a transaction without either compromising their anonymity.
I don't trust the drug dealer and he doesn't trust me. But both of us trust that some other entity will take the currency in trade for valuable goods.
With digital cash I expect that I'll have to prove my identity for some transactions (just like cashing my paycheck at the bank).
But I'd like to have the existing protection of anonymity for transactions if I want it: I've lately become uncomfortable buying books with a credit card.
Too many schemes for digital cash are concocted to use technology to trace every transaction, when it's clear that many people don't want that.
I'd go so far as to venture that if the digital e-cash was too traceable, that the price of small, scarce commodities like gold and platinum would increase as they became used as an alternate, anonymity-preserving medium of exchange.
Good advice to consider the overall timeframe for costs and when savings will be realized.
There are some costs that are harder to measure. Costs of unreliability, people futzing with unfamiliar or non-intuitive software, etc.
I think probably the single largest impediment to Linux adoption currently is not that the applications aren't there, it's training costs to get users up to speed with the alternatives, and it's investment in legacy "standards" - someone's got a pile of old Excel spreadsheets with important information in them.
A lot of people get overly excited at the outset: "Linux is free, reliable, open source and Microsoft charges me every which way to Sunday for stuff with bugs and security holes - no brainer dude!"
Well, training costs and investment in existing systems are real.
If I were you, I'd suggest a small prototype deployment to give you a better handle on how much the training costs will be, since they depend on your users and your mix of applications. Some users and apps will take to Linux like a duck to water, but others will bump up against stumbling blocks that might not have foreseen.
You can win with Linux (my organization is), but it's not a brainless transition.
They seem to be desperately out of tune with their users in the server market
It's because they don't compete in a normal market anymore.
When you essentially own a marketplace, such as they do with desktop PC operating systems, then you can make a lot more decisions that your customers don't like but have to accept because the alternatives have disappeared or are considered too drastic (MacOS, Linux, etc.).
Actually, the competition they seem to be desperately out of tune with their users in the server markethey've endured trying to enter the server market has been good for them and their customers: each revision of NT was compared with UNIX. Early revs were laughable, but MS had a target to aim towards in terms of reliability and scalability. Finally, with Win2K they have something where they don't get laughed out of the room anymore. I doubt whether it would have been as a good product as it is without the competition.
They face a more serious threat in the future with their server operating systems. If they strongly leverage their desktop dominance in Windows and Office, then they can insure their servers are the only brand that works in a networked environment.
But if services are standardized and commoditized, which is what customers really like for their effects on price and quality (as in the PC hardware market), then open source flavors of UNIX will have already eaten their server marketplace for breakfast when they finally trot out some shiny chrome-plated Blackcomb .NET product that "does everything and more".
has what you need.
It has a legacy stretching back further than TeX and is used for man page formatting on tty devices.
You can format the output to higher resolution devices if you wish. There's even some work afoot to make it output html, which I think has a lot of potential for helping me to stop worrying about my MANPATH
Yes, those things are cool.
I'm not DB expert, so I'm curious:
What about this 10.7 desupport problem?
Is Oracle being reasonable about the cost of supporting old software, or are they doing an MS-style push of their customers into an upgrade many feel they don't need?
stating:
using high-end nVidia cards
That's my experience, too.
The price/performance ratio of Lintel is hard to beat.
I think it depends on your price point and tolerance and desire for reliability.
For seriously high-end stuff, go with the SGI. But if you're budget's not unlimited and you're willing to suffer some hiccups once in a while, you owe it to yourself to see what the "low end" can offer these days. It's not too shabby and beats out a lot of the older SGI hardware.
Ahem!
Great work with that new supercluster! You guys are doing great, getting the most teraflops for your dollar!
Ummm...since you don't need it anymore...would you mind letting me have that ASCI White machine?
it better be damn good.
Yes, indeed.
As others have said, you have to demonstrate, to your market, some genuine value added for your product. (OK, sometimes you can get away with perceived value added, but you'd better sell the business not too far down the road.)
An excellent product is a good start, but is insufficient to guarantee business success.
Admit to your limits of expertise: go out and pay for some good marketing expertise.
Ideally, you would have surveyed the marketplace prior to developing your product. You would have a much better idea who it is exactly that would buy your product. If it's techno Linux geeks in mid-level IT, then you'd find out what they read and what pushes their buttons. If it's people like yourself, then you have a leg up understanding them. But you also run a higher risk of deluding yourself.
A friend in business once told me that you need more than just a vague warm and fuzzy feeling about your market. You need to have names and phone numbers of actual people you've talked with about your product and who would be willing to lay down cash to get it if you made it.
Impressive! I've coded sloppy, but don't think I've yet programmed an algorithm that was exponentially bad like
but I will admit to coding occasionally to singularities likeremembering slashdot.org to 66.35.250.150
What?
You mean 66.35.250.150 is Slashdot and not Pee Wee's Playhouse?
I don't know that elected people necessarily have any incentivwe to protect my rights to privacy or to anything else.
That's because most voters haven't yet had a direct first-hand experience with loss of privacy apart from mild examples of direct marketing.
A growing minority have had some experience with stalkers, so I'd count on those people to value privacy more than the public at large.
The Federal Reserve board is not elected either, but they have an immense impact on my life. Given what I've seen of politics, I'm not really sure I'd want monetary policy in the hands of politicians. Their record with fiscal policy has not been all that great.
A cynical friend once told me that
While I'd rather live under a system with elections and representative government, they're not a cure-all. Benevolent dictatorship can work wonderfully until it's time to change the reins of power.
Yes, from one perspective, you could say operating systems are irrelevent.
That's presupposing that whatever operating system is in place provides the needed infrastructure for managing processes and scheduling hardware access in a reasonable way. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, MacOS, Linux or OS/2.
By the same token, my travels from home to work depend on my car, not on the roads.
And it's true that what my body contacts is the car, not the road (motorcyclists sometimes have it rougher, I suppose).
If the roads are well-maintained, plowed in the winter and other cars obey the traffic laws, I'd almost begin to believe that cars were more important and roads were irrelevant.
But if my super highway developed a large pothole, that illusion would disappear quickly.
Likewise, if the owner of the road decided to erect a toll booth and exact some money from me for use of the road, I'd begin to appreciate the importance of roads.
Operating systems: only when they work right do you not notice them.