because of some MS 'warning message' on how
(possibly) harmful java is to your computer
I remember reading the lengthy legal boilerplate license that came with Java and remarking about the qualifications that Sun would not be held responsible and did not recommend that it should be used to control nuclear power plants, flying aircraft or medical life-support equipment.
It was buried alongside the more typical disclaimers, etc.
The funny thing was, that when MS was distributing Java (and not liking it one bit, as you might recall), they showcased that particular snippet from Sun's license. Maybe they figured it would scare off the Aunt Mabel users of the world from toying with the dangers of Java and unprotected sex, but I found it funny as hell.
...IBM is huge enough to tell Microsoft where to go...
No.
If you read the responses carefully, you'll note they take the same basic tack as Dell does on Linux.
That is, and I paraphrase,
"we are reacting to market evidence that shows increasing use of Linux in the server space".
IMHO, that is about as strong a statement of support you could expect under the circumstances.
IBM, and everyone else for that matter, would love nothing more than to be out from under the thumb of Microsoft. But, the reality is that IBM sells a heck of lot of hardware that is pre-installed with MS software (just as does Dell and a few other OEMs). IBM's relationship with Microsoft depends on them not angering them beyond a certain point. IBM can go further than any other large company in this regard, since they derive plenty of revenue from other OS's and service contracts.
Dell is much more beholden to Redmond, so you find its support of Linux tempered even further than IBM's. Interviews with Dell executives have them making statements about
not seeing too much demand for Linux on the desktop
Linux servers taking business away from Sun UNIX boxes instead of W2K server boxes.(sure to warm BillG's heart)
You would not see even this degree of courage if it weren't for the anti-trust pressure that is being applied to MS over the last few years.
IBM's support of Linux means a lot to me. I think it really has helped them to slough off the image of being a ponderous dinosaur and tuned into the cutting edge of innovation. Their participation in open source projects is a different and a refreshing approach compared to what I was accustomed to get from them as few as 5 years ago. Back then, the IBM attitude was a lot more like the MS attitude is now: "we're the best, we know better, and when we release "blah" it will be the Better True IBM Way."
The only problem was that, whatever it was that was released, it was needlessly complicated and departed so much from the standard that it required users to surmount needless learning curves (whaddya mean I hafta look fer stuff in/usr/lpp/bin?) Kind of like kerberos and active directory authentication, if you know what I mean.
IBM's tempered response to some of these questions I chalk up to the reality of business conditions more than anything else.
Now, a more appropriate question is whether we could approach the scale of Earth-impacting solar energy with our own heat producing energy sources like fusion, fission and fossil fuels. I admit I have no idea of their relative magnitude.
I would have had no idea of their relative magnitude, either, except that I'm a Slashdot Reader.
The recent solar car race article included references that suggests solar energy flux is of the order of 1 kW/m2. With a radius around 6.3e6 meters, the cross sectional capture is around 1.2e14 m2, suggesting the solar input radiation is around 1.2e17 Watts. (Which also could suggest why CO2 emissions that affect solar gains and losses don't have to do much to cause an observable effect on the planet's temperature. But I digress.)
All the recent hubbub surrounding the California electrical generation capacity crunch has bandied about figures for big power plants that generate, oh, like 5 GigaWatts. Looks like there's a factor of about 1e8 before terrestrial generation gets anywhere close to Sol's warmth.
Given those magnitudes, I doubt man-made heat generation would be a problem. It is much more likely the problem would turn out to be some much more prosaic, like worrying about liquid Lithium being in short supply, or finding a way to deal with the irradiated equipment and byproducts of fusion reaction.
This could be one of the biggest news stories in the history of software development.
I doubt it. There are too many more plausible reasons for this move that make sense from a business perspective, which is the only one that matters here.
For one thing, Microsoft could effectively use the goodwill from helping the Mono implementation; it would help in MS's effort to market.NET to skeptical IT folks that have been embraced and extended into some fairly expensive agreements in the past and who have noted that low end Unix servers cost considerably less than their MS solutions.
Not only that, but this gesture helps to assuage the concerns of the legal army that is quite ready to assume that.NET is merely another chapter in the same long book that included the Netscape Air Supply Cutoff.
You'll see some apparent grudging admissions that MS seems to be playing fair from some quarters. That concept will get just enough air time to put off a harsher remedy for a while. Any delay, even for a matter of days, is good for MS' bottom line.
For another thing, I think Miguel, bless his heart, has a lot more technical ability and great innovative ideas than he has common sense or legal ability. He could very easily end up implementing what turns out to be a subset of.NET, being embraced and extended to the point where Mono is merely an academic exercise and a toy. The analogy of Mono and.NET would be like this: because Linux, *BSD and Windows all run on the common platform of the x86 instruction set has not meant that they enjoy equal footing in the desktop PC OS marketplace. Alternatively, Mono might just replicate that part of.NET that MS is willing to be commoditized, like TCP/IP. MS is really only interested in charging for applications that run on it. An underlying Mono implementation will work with some MS applications, as long as it connects up to Passport and exchanges valid tokens. You'll be able to get valid tokens for Linux by paying for them.
Finally, Miguel cannot afford the kind of legal talent he will need if Mono is too good and represents a real threat to Microsoft's revenue stream.
Watch closely how the licensing for Mono is structured, whether strict GPL, LGPL, or BSD, Artistic. This will be the first point of contention that matters.
a. They cannot, despite sustained efforts, control prices of desktop operating systems or application level software.
A great proportion of the lucrative revenue stream for Microsoft comes about through enterprise licensing agreements. Large corporations (pick *any* one near you) have to standardize on their platforms to contain the costs of support. Guess which standard they "pick"? Believe me, if Microsoft raised the price of Office by 20%, we might not like it, but we'd pay. The alternatives are not considered worthy competitors, mainly because they are not considered "standard". Read any classified ads for receptionists, secretaries, bookkeepers and see how many of those advertisements demand skills of any software besides Microsoft's.
b. They cannot, despite sustained efforts, control the course of the industry.
It may be true that they haven't controlled every aspect of the IT business completely, but they have come closer than anyone since IBM of the 1960s.
Microsoft defines the standard for PC software. If you expect to develop anything in that environment, then you'd better damn well pay attention to the next release of Windows and keep your MSDN subscription payments up.
Dell, Compaq and Gateway have simply made a business decision that it is more profitable to accept terms from Redmond than to develop an OS and, through marketing, be able to displace the incredible installed base of Windows. Such a course of action would be a suicidal last resort.
As far as most people are concerned, "Windows came with My Computer" and any thought of replacing it falls into the same category as replacing the power supply. It's technically difficult and there's no reason to do so.
....W I N D O W S I S T H E S T A N D A R D .
and I don't care how stable Linux is and if it's given away for free. If it doesn't run Office and won't run all the ShrinkWrap software I bought from Egghead over the past 10 years and if I have to do something technical to install it, then I, as an average consumer, am not interested in it. I'd rather continue bleeding money at a small rate to a monopoly than to undergo the transition from Windows.
In summary, if you had spent the last 15 years in a PC software house developing an office productivity application, then I think you would have automatically acquired a genuine appreciation for the state of the competitive landscape with Microsoft.
I live in New Mexico, and I'm more ashamed than ever to have Patricia Madrid as my state Attorney General.
and what applications are those? I'm really interested in knowing with better evidence than "well, I think..."
Unfortunately, "I think" you'll just get vague estimates because your question is not sufficiently specific to provide the kind of answer that you demand.
That is, exactly what application will you run and under exactly what kinds of circumstances?
The hardware performance depends on so many variables (CPU speed, cache hits, main memory size, main memory BW and main memory latency, network card, disk controller, disks) that different applications will be limited by different parts of the hardware.
Worse, the same application could be limited by different parts of the hardware depending on the tasks demanded of it.
As a friend of mine used to say to difficult questions like this
My workplace had to endure such an ass for a number of years who was, unfortunately, in such a highly-placed position of influence that he made many peoples lives miserable.
Being broad-minded, though, I feel bad if I don't weigh all the evidence of people types fairly.
I have to admit being aggravated on occasion with the opposite kind. Instead of the KnowJackBuzzwordSpewer, I am referring to the MostProficientClintEastwoodOfProgrammers.
That is, an excellent programmer that can't communicate worth beans.
Me: Hey! I'm having a problem with this particular code (that you wrote) and this is what it's doing. Do you know what's going on with it?
Based on Microsoft's development model for previous products, such as Win and WinNT, you can reliably predict that "the application" will suck badly until finally it has acquired version 3. status.
Your statement is evidence of precisely the problem that besets us constantly, viz.
The U.S. has largely remained reluctant to address science through politics no matter how serious the issues.
Special interests from the fringes of the spectrum have been all too willing to impose their political views on their interpretations of science.
In this country we could use more of people willing to apply sound scientific principles to influence their political views.
Usually, it suffices for many to sample filtered "facts" to support hypotheses that make them most comfortable, ignoring the rest and refusing to consider more facts to support alternative hypotheses.
Global warming is still somewhat contentious from a scientific vantage point, with much suggestive evidence indicating that it is a real man-made phenomena, but without the kind of ironclad proof that we would all like to have.
In that sense, I think the issue is akin to where we were in the 1960's, evaluating health risks from cigarette smoking. Statistical evidence was piling up to a considerable weight, while the Tobacco Institute kept holding out for a demonstrated biochemical pathway that remained elusive for a while longer.
Working on government dollars, I really feel for NASA's plight.
Despite their desire to "Just Do Good Space Science", their money originates from a political process that is subject to the kind of vicissitudes that would make your stomach feel like its been stapled to a pig carcass in the hot sun. The higher ups in NASA that have to deal with congressional funding authorities are worth every penny you pay them.
I recall many bright idealistic astronomers and physicists from school that I wish could really contribute to the agenda of what they get to work on at NASA.
Imagine getting the ideas of what to do from the bottom up instead of the top down. What a concept!
I know, I know, the public wants bread and circus, so we'll just end up funding whatever contributes to those ends (emotion-ridden manned missions with entertainment value), but allow me to fantasize for a few seconds...
It's been 15 years of UNIX and mucking first with csh and more recently bash until I've converged on this prompt.
PS1="[${green}\h ${cyan}\w${white}]\n\t ${yellow}\! ${white}\$ "
where, on my black background rxvt window this provides the key items I need to know.
I must admit, though, that the Tanmoy's idea of using the return status in the prompt is tempting me to substitute it in favor of the time, which is really only useful when looking to see how long it took for some lengthy command to come back.
Anyone remember the reasons for the enclosing brackets? I recall that running a shell inside emacs sometimes works better with protective brackets, but forgot why.
P.S. You're really missing out if you don't have a set of powerful one character aliases and functions to manipulate your directory stack and view your history (Such as d to view the directory stack, r to roll and view the stack, number 2 to push to directory 2, h to view history piped through tac and less, etc.)!
I stopped studying physics after my sophomore year, so I'm a qualified dilettante in the area.
From what little I recall, however, the holy grail at that time was to discover a Grand Unified Field Theory so that a single equation describes not just electricity and magnetism (Maxwell's contribution), but also gravity and the weak and strong forces, incorporating relativistically correct space time.
Is this still the standing problem, or has the question shifted over the past couple of decades?
Yes, the easy transparent micropayment system is what is needed.
Why micro?
Because, as an earlier story on/. indicated, we are deluged with information. It's so plentiful that it has become cheap. We can't provide any of it, no matter its worth, with anywhere near the amount of attention that we used to give to carefully prepared, researched and edited print media. Like many, I have acquired a built-in prejudice to paying a lot of money for anything I see on a computer screen.
The other missing ingredient, of course, is some semblance of privacy and anonymity.
With all the marketing efforts to track individual users so as to create the ultimate profile, I'm suspicious of any commercially developed system (MS Passport, anyone?).
Given the potential profits from owning such as system (and charging tolls, just like for the win32 API), and being tempted from marketers willing to pay for detailed profile information, such a system would probably not provide the degree of anonymity that I would like.
If I want to read alt.goat Premium Add-free, then I'd like to read it in the privacy of my own outhouse without the world knowing every click I make and when I make it.
To that end, it would be ideal to be able to go down to the local convenience store in a trench coat and sunglasses and purchase a little card that contains a special URL and activation code that provides an e-cash account good for purchases on the Internet. Then, my purchases are my own business and no one else's.
Just last week an LWN editorial came out in favor of innovation for the Open Source community. There is an obvious opportunity here to develop a system for secure, anonymous micropayments over the web.
if it has an original name, that name will become synonymous with the software's function.
Very much so.
Part of the entire problem has been that names of commonly used applications have become so standardized and entrenched in the minds of casual users that they have gone the way of Dry Ice®, Band Aid® and Kleenex®. It's just that while those took decades to permeate the popular lexicon, the names of computer applications have been appropriated by popular language in a much faster time.
Honestly, how often have you heard generic computer users say to one another words like
...so I got an Outlook attachment from Bob in marketing that I couldn't open in Powerpoint and had to use Excel instead. I think if he saved it in Word2000 or let me open it from Explorer this wouldn't have happened...
where both parties to the conversation completely and implicitly understand that
Outlook == email application
Bob in marketing == dolt who opens all the.vbs viri that flood our inboxes so often
Powerpoint == presentation software
Excel == spreadsheet software
Word2000 == document processing software
Explorer == web browser application
MS == redundant, feel-good prefix
Indeed, if you were to use the generic terms for these specific standard applications, they would probably cause more confusion than clarity because they are used so infrequently.
Face it, in corporate and consumer IT, the use of trademarked application names to describe an application is preferred. Those names have migrated into the into the public domain as the most descriptive terms for their respective applications. Their de facto usage will inevitably be sanctioned by the creaking wheels of justice by about 2018, decades after peak usage.
The use of trademarked names for common applications can only be only a source of great delight to those lucky enough to own them. What better way to insure brand loyalty than to possess the name of a standard?
This really is only a reflection of the deeper underlying problem. That is, your "standards" are Owned.
If MS is selling authentication services, what are the open source equivalents?
Surely someone somewhere in GPL land has written some code that let's you do what their passport software does. If so let's hear about it!
A good point.
Some authentication services surely do exist, but not to the same level of centralization as in the Hailstorm model.
The nature of most open source and free software is such that the concept of a secure infrastruture for collecting charges for renting software is alien, almost anathema.
Authentication mechanisms to secure private communication are reasonably well-developed (PGP, GPG) and it looks as if Freenet may expand on this somewhat, but the glaring absence of monetary transactions for software use has guaranteed that such services will be slower to arrive in the world of free and open software.
That said, I don't look to MS Hailstorm authentication as anything I want to use. They're really playing with dynamite with this thing.
Like many others roaming the wild and wooly internet, I'd just as soon be able to adopt a secure pseudonym at will, rather than have every damn site know my real name, address, SSN, and how much Jack Daniels and hemorrhoid cream I bought last month.
I can guarantee you that if
everyone's information was in one net connected database eventually someone would learn to steal that information from
everyone (the only trick would be to steal the information slowly enough so that Microsoft wouldn't notice).
Yeah, I'm thinking about all those handy-dandy little kiosks that run some variant of Windows with some browser that is all set up for traveling fools like myself to look at our email back home. Yes, indeed, that https and SSL insures traffic is invisible between 2 points, but there's little to insure that my starting point is not the real authentication widget, but rather some trojan harvesting my authentication for later fun. (Or that the trojan makes me feel better by displaying the https URL where it invisibly proxies my session over to some 3733t 0\/\/n3d z0mbi3 box.
I wonder if the unidirectional control freaks at MS who are implementing all this authentication with unswerving attention to insuring that Joe User is a paying licensed software renter have given any thought to my concerns.
That is, is this friendly-looking screen what it looks like?
Before I authenticate against a self-described authority, I want to know that authority is authentic in a way that I trust. A generic Windows screen confirming that all the rent payments have been kept up on this software won't convince me that it's trustworthy.
On the same issue - has anyone developed a challenge/response program that one could run like xdm/gdm/kdm that users could interact with securely to see if they were talking to a known system prior to entering a passwd?
After contending with, shall we say, less than ideal, "drivers" on the road, I've often thought it would be beneficial to have unmarked cars roving around with trained observers from the local motor vehicle authority doing real time grading of current driver's license holders.
Gleefully do I think of the consequences of such grading on my pet peeves, such as Joe Turtle slowing down at 0.1 nano-gees in the leftmost fastlane on a crowded boulevard to make an illegal left turn where there is No Fscking Left Turn Bay, while 15 cars pile up behind him. Joe, take 10 demerits and an increased insurance rate for driving in a manner to decrease safety and to decrease the overall efficiency of traffic flow.
Oh, and Patsy GottaGetThereNow who speeds past you, slips in just ahead of you in the nick of time so she can immediately and drastically slow down just barely in time to make a sharp right, treating you and your vehicle to extra braking and acceleration, when she could just as well have pulled in behind you and performed the same maneuver saving you the hassle at the cost of 15 picoseconds of her precious time. Five demerits, Patsy!
How similar is a Description library to a Decryption library?
It's natural you would miss this subtle technological point, but it's importance cannot be overstated.
The exciting fundamental breakthrough from France, even more earth-shattering than croissants, is that you can view Britney Spears latest pirated home videos (seen advertised the world over via email) using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
It's definitely a sad situation where the law is so frequently violated, because it tends to promote a casual attitude toward the law, albeit in a specific instance.
However, if I am generally permitted to modify my respect for the law in that particular instance, then why not another (such as $FAVORITE_VICTIMLESS_CRIME), and another ?
Conversely, why not make a whole slew of arbitrary laws and give the police complete discretion to arrest anyone they deemed fit?
I recall reading once in Car & Driver (a forum where speed limits are roundly thumped and criticized as infernal impediments to spirited driving) that some kind of study had been conducted (perhaps by the U.S. Department of Transportation?) indicating that the "best" speed limit was one which 80% of the drivers obeyed naturally.
BTW, commercial vehicles have lived under the yoke of GPS monitoring for some years. I once saw a setup in a dark room with a bunch of servers and a projection screen showing a map of the city with locations of passenger delivery vans equipped with GPS and radio transmitters. If any driver lingered too long on an unscheduled stop, the Powers That Be would know.
However, I think such monitoring evokes a love-hate relationship with the long-haul trucking industry, since greater fundamental efficiency is achieved by speeding (not to mention other less than legal behaviors, such as use of amphetamine and driving more than 16 hours/day.) I haven't heard of any GPS equipped truckers being turned in for speeding as a result of this monitoring.
my first question with new hardware purchases is always, "does it work with linux?"
Ditto.
Just now I'm anguishing over the choice of which laptop computer to buy, much to the puzzlement of my W2K-using co-workers.
They don't appreciate all my fuss over which winmodem card in a Dell laptop has linux drivers available.
This is my first laptop purchase. I am surprised to find that most folks have no idea what brand of components are in a laptop, so trying to find out if a particular one has a Lucent winmodem (sounds semi-supported) versus a 3com (sounds unsupported) is a challenge.
I may end up getting an IBM, since they seem to be making a little bit more of an effort to support Linux on their hardware than the other big name laptop vendors, AFAICT.
At this point I've pretty much conceded that it will be impossible to get a brand name laptop without paying for a pre-installed Windows that I won't use. But I won't settle for a modem that I can't use under Linux.
I would really be interested to see a full chart, showing static and dynamic web page performance of different OS+revision/httpserver+revision just so we can see what kind of progress has been made in this area over the past several years.
Yes, even entries with asterisks indicating heavy customization and tuning, like Ingo Molnar's tux server, would be interesting.
Probably, though, this is the kind of information that only gets into white papers that sell for $2500 apiece on tightly-controlled distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
because of some MS 'warning message' on how (possibly) harmful java is to your computer
I remember reading the lengthy legal boilerplate license that came with Java and remarking about the qualifications that Sun would not be held responsible and did not recommend that it should be used to control nuclear power plants, flying aircraft or medical life-support equipment.
It was buried alongside the more typical disclaimers, etc.
The funny thing was, that when MS was distributing Java (and not liking it one bit, as you might recall), they showcased that particular snippet from Sun's license. Maybe they figured it would scare off the Aunt Mabel users of the world from toying with the dangers of Java and unprotected sex, but I found it funny as hell.
No.
If you read the responses carefully, you'll note they take the same basic tack as Dell does on Linux.
That is, and I paraphrase,
IMHO, that is about as strong a statement of support you could expect under the circumstances.
IBM, and everyone else for that matter, would love nothing more than to be out from under the thumb of Microsoft. But, the reality is that IBM sells a heck of lot of hardware that is pre-installed with MS software (just as does Dell and a few other OEMs). IBM's relationship with Microsoft depends on them not angering them beyond a certain point. IBM can go further than any other large company in this regard, since they derive plenty of revenue from other OS's and service contracts.
Dell is much more beholden to Redmond, so you find its support of Linux tempered even further than IBM's. Interviews with Dell executives have them making statements about
You would not see even this degree of courage if it weren't for the anti-trust pressure that is being applied to MS over the last few years.
IBM's support of Linux means a lot to me. I think it really has helped them to slough off the image of being a ponderous dinosaur and tuned into the cutting edge of innovation. Their participation in open source projects is a different and a refreshing approach compared to what I was accustomed to get from them as few as 5 years ago. Back then, the IBM attitude was a lot more like the MS attitude is now: "we're the best, we know better, and when we release "blah" it will be the Better True IBM Way."
The only problem was that, whatever it was that was released, it was needlessly complicated and departed so much from the standard that it required users to surmount needless learning curves (whaddya mean I hafta look fer stuff in /usr/lpp/bin?) Kind of like kerberos and active directory authentication, if you know what I mean.
IBM's tempered response to some of these questions I chalk up to the reality of business conditions more than anything else.
Now, a more appropriate question is whether we could approach the scale of Earth-impacting solar energy with our own heat producing energy sources like fusion, fission and fossil fuels. I admit I have no idea of their relative magnitude.
I would have had no idea of their relative magnitude, either, except that I'm a Slashdot Reader.
The recent solar car race article included references that suggests solar energy flux is of the order of 1 kW/m2. With a radius around 6.3e6 meters, the cross sectional capture is around 1.2e14 m2, suggesting the solar input radiation is around 1.2e17 Watts. (Which also could suggest why CO2 emissions that affect solar gains and losses don't have to do much to cause an observable effect on the planet's temperature. But I digress.)
All the recent hubbub surrounding the California electrical generation capacity crunch has bandied about figures for big power plants that generate, oh, like 5 GigaWatts. Looks like there's a factor of about 1e8 before terrestrial generation gets anywhere close to Sol's warmth.
Given those magnitudes, I doubt man-made heat generation would be a problem. It is much more likely the problem would turn out to be some much more prosaic, like worrying about liquid Lithium being in short supply, or finding a way to deal with the irradiated equipment and byproducts of fusion reaction.
I doubt it. There are too many more plausible reasons for this move that make sense from a business perspective, which is the only one that matters here.
For one thing, Microsoft could effectively use the goodwill from helping the Mono implementation; it would help in MS's effort to market .NET to skeptical IT folks that have been embraced and extended into some fairly expensive agreements in the past and who have noted that low end Unix servers cost considerably less than their MS solutions.
Not only that, but this gesture helps to assuage the concerns of the legal army that is quite ready to assume that .NET is merely another chapter in the same long book that included the Netscape Air Supply Cutoff.
You'll see some apparent grudging admissions that MS seems to be playing fair from some quarters. That concept will get just enough air time to put off a harsher remedy for a while. Any delay, even for a matter of days, is good for MS' bottom line.
For another thing, I think Miguel, bless his heart, has a lot more technical ability and great innovative ideas than he has common sense or legal ability. He could very easily end up implementing what turns out to be a subset of .NET, being embraced and extended to the point where Mono is merely an academic exercise and a toy. The analogy of Mono and .NET would be like this: because Linux, *BSD and Windows all run on the common platform of the x86 instruction set has not meant that they enjoy equal footing in the desktop PC OS marketplace. Alternatively, Mono might just replicate that part of .NET that MS is willing to be commoditized, like TCP/IP. MS is really only interested in charging for applications that run on it. An underlying Mono implementation will work with some MS applications, as long as it connects up to Passport and exchanges valid tokens. You'll be able to get valid tokens for Linux by paying for them.
Finally, Miguel cannot afford the kind of legal talent he will need if Mono is too good and represents a real threat to Microsoft's revenue stream.
Watch closely how the licensing for Mono is structured, whether strict GPL, LGPL, or BSD, Artistic. This will be the first point of contention that matters.
You need to re-examine your premises.
a. They cannot, despite sustained efforts, control prices of desktop operating systems or application level software.A great proportion of the lucrative revenue stream for Microsoft comes about through enterprise licensing agreements. Large corporations (pick *any* one near you) have to standardize on their platforms to contain the costs of support. Guess which standard they "pick"? Believe me, if Microsoft raised the price of Office by 20%, we might not like it, but we'd pay. The alternatives are not considered worthy competitors, mainly because they are not considered "standard". Read any classified ads for receptionists, secretaries, bookkeepers and see how many of those advertisements demand skills of any software besides Microsoft's.
b. They cannot, despite sustained efforts, control the course of the industry.It may be true that they haven't controlled every aspect of the IT business completely, but they have come closer than anyone since IBM of the 1960s.
Microsoft defines the standard for PC software. If you expect to develop anything in that environment, then you'd better damn well pay attention to the next release of Windows and keep your MSDN subscription payments up.
Dell, Compaq and Gateway have simply made a business decision that it is more profitable to accept terms from Redmond than to develop an OS and, through marketing, be able to displace the incredible installed base of Windows. Such a course of action would be a suicidal last resort.
As far as most people are concerned, "Windows came with My Computer" and any thought of replacing it falls into the same category as replacing the power supply. It's technically difficult and there's no reason to do so.
and I don't care how stable Linux is and if it's given away for free. If it doesn't run Office and won't run all the ShrinkWrap software I bought from Egghead over the past 10 years and if I have to do something technical to install it, then I, as an average consumer, am not interested in it. I'd rather continue bleeding money at a small rate to a monopoly than to undergo the transition from Windows.In summary, if you had spent the last 15 years in a PC software house developing an office productivity application, then I think you would have automatically acquired a genuine appreciation for the state of the competitive landscape with Microsoft.
I live in New Mexico, and I'm more ashamed than ever to have Patricia Madrid as my state Attorney General.
and what applications are those? I'm really interested in knowing with better evidence than "well, I think..."
Unfortunately, "I think" you'll just get vague estimates because your question is not sufficiently specific to provide the kind of answer that you demand.
That is, exactly what application will you run and under exactly what kinds of circumstances?
The hardware performance depends on so many variables (CPU speed, cache hits, main memory size, main memory BW and main memory latency, network card, disk controller, disks) that different applications will be limited by different parts of the hardware.
Worse, the same application could be limited by different parts of the hardware depending on the tasks demanded of it.
As a friend of mine used to say to difficult questions like this
Inquring monkeys want to know!
I live near the Mother Road, so I'll keep a look out for .
I hear you.
My workplace had to endure such an ass for a number of years who was, unfortunately, in such a highly-placed position of influence that he made many peoples lives miserable.
Being broad-minded, though, I feel bad if I don't weigh all the evidence of people types fairly.
I have to admit being aggravated on occasion with the opposite kind. Instead of the KnowJackBuzzwordSpewer, I am referring to the MostProficientClintEastwoodOfProgrammers.
That is, an excellent programmer that can't communicate worth beans.
mind you I'm sure everything will get worked out
I'm surprised at all of you!
Based on Microsoft's development model for previous products, such as Win and WinNT, you can reliably predict that "the application" will suck badly until finally it has acquired version 3. status.
Sheesh, it isn't like this is rocket science!
Your statement is evidence of precisely the problem that besets us constantly, viz.
Special interests from the fringes of the spectrum have been all too willing to impose their political views on their interpretations of science.
In this country we could use more of people willing to apply sound scientific principles to influence their political views.
Usually, it suffices for many to sample filtered "facts" to support hypotheses that make them most comfortable, ignoring the rest and refusing to consider more facts to support alternative hypotheses.
Global warming is still somewhat contentious from a scientific vantage point, with much suggestive evidence indicating that it is a real man-made phenomena, but without the kind of ironclad proof that we would all like to have.
In that sense, I think the issue is akin to where we were in the 1960's, evaluating health risks from cigarette smoking. Statistical evidence was piling up to a considerable weight, while the Tobacco Institute kept holding out for a demonstrated biochemical pathway that remained elusive for a while longer.
Working on government dollars, I really feel for NASA's plight.
Despite their desire to "Just Do Good Space Science", their money originates from a political process that is subject to the kind of vicissitudes that would make your stomach feel like its been stapled to a pig carcass in the hot sun. The higher ups in NASA that have to deal with congressional funding authorities are worth every penny you pay them.
I recall many bright idealistic astronomers and physicists from school that I wish could really contribute to the agenda of what they get to work on at NASA.
Imagine getting the ideas of what to do from the bottom up instead of the top down. What a concept!
I know, I know, the public wants bread and circus, so we'll just end up funding whatever contributes to those ends (emotion-ridden manned missions with entertainment value), but allow me to fantasize for a few seconds...
Yeah, I like brevity, but I have a 2 liner.
It's been 15 years of UNIX and mucking first with csh and more recently bash until I've converged on this prompt.
PS1="[${green}\h ${cyan}\w${white}]\n\t ${yellow}\! ${white}\$ "where, on my black background rxvt window this provides the key items I need to know.
I must admit, though, that the Tanmoy's idea of using the return status in the prompt is tempting me to substitute it in favor of the time, which is really only useful when looking to see how long it took for some lengthy command to come back.
Anyone remember the reasons for the enclosing brackets? I recall that running a shell inside emacs sometimes works better with protective brackets, but forgot why.
P.S. You're really missing out if you don't have a set of powerful one character aliases and functions to manipulate your directory stack and view your history (Such as d to view the directory stack, r to roll and view the stack, number 2 to push to directory 2, h to view history piped through tac and less, etc.)!
I stopped studying physics after my sophomore year, so I'm a qualified dilettante in the area.
From what little I recall, however, the holy grail at that time was to discover a Grand Unified Field Theory so that a single equation describes not just electricity and magnetism (Maxwell's contribution), but also gravity and the weak and strong forces, incorporating relativistically correct space time.
Is this still the standing problem, or has the question shifted over the past couple of decades?
Yes, the easy transparent micropayment system is what is needed.
Why micro?
Because, as an earlier story on /. indicated, we are deluged with information. It's so plentiful that it has become cheap. We can't provide any of it, no matter its worth, with anywhere near the amount of attention that we used to give to carefully prepared, researched and edited print media. Like many, I have acquired a built-in prejudice to paying a lot of money for anything I see on a computer screen.
The other missing ingredient, of course, is some semblance of privacy and anonymity.
With all the marketing efforts to track individual users so as to create the ultimate profile, I'm suspicious of any commercially developed system (MS Passport, anyone?).
Given the potential profits from owning such as system (and charging tolls, just like for the win32 API), and being tempted from marketers willing to pay for detailed profile information, such a system would probably not provide the degree of anonymity that I would like.
If I want to read alt.goat Premium Add-free, then I'd like to read it in the privacy of my own outhouse without the world knowing every click I make and when I make it.
To that end, it would be ideal to be able to go down to the local convenience store in a trench coat and sunglasses and purchase a little card that contains a special URL and activation code that provides an e-cash account good for purchases on the Internet. Then, my purchases are my own business and no one else's.
Just last week an LWN editorial came out in favor of innovation for the Open Source community. There is an obvious opportunity here to develop a system for secure, anonymous micropayments over the web.
We need true ecash.
Damn, and I've just gotten rid of my slide rule, pocket protector and flood pants to pay for a white leisure suit, gold chains, and disco lessons!
I'm a true geek, always out of phase with current fashion...
if it has an original name, that name will become synonymous with the software's function.
Very much so.
Part of the entire problem has been that names of commonly used applications have become so standardized and entrenched in the minds of casual users that they have gone the way of Dry Ice®, Band Aid® and Kleenex®. It's just that while those took decades to permeate the popular lexicon, the names of computer applications have been appropriated by popular language in a much faster time.
Honestly, how often have you heard generic computer users say to one another words like
where both parties to the conversation completely and implicitly understand that- Outlook == email application
- Bob in marketing == dolt who opens all the
.vbs viri that flood our inboxes so often
- Powerpoint == presentation software
- Excel == spreadsheet software
- Word2000 == document processing software
- Explorer == web browser application
- MS == redundant, feel-good prefix
Indeed, if you were to use the generic terms for these specific standard applications, they would probably cause more confusion than clarity because they are used so infrequently.Face it, in corporate and consumer IT, the use of trademarked application names to describe an application is preferred. Those names have migrated into the into the public domain as the most descriptive terms for their respective applications. Their de facto usage will inevitably be sanctioned by the creaking wheels of justice by about 2018, decades after peak usage.
The use of trademarked names for common applications can only be only a source of great delight to those lucky enough to own them. What better way to insure brand loyalty than to possess the name of a standard?
This really is only a reflection of the deeper underlying problem. That is, your "standards" are Owned.
Hope you enjoy paying for them.
If MS is selling authentication services, what are the open source equivalents?
Surely someone somewhere in GPL land has written some code that let's you do what their passport software does. If so let's hear about it!
A good point.
Some authentication services surely do exist, but not to the same level of centralization as in the Hailstorm model.
The nature of most open source and free software is such that the concept of a secure infrastruture for collecting charges for renting software is alien, almost anathema.
Authentication mechanisms to secure private communication are reasonably well-developed (PGP, GPG) and it looks as if Freenet may expand on this somewhat, but the glaring absence of monetary transactions for software use has guaranteed that such services will be slower to arrive in the world of free and open software.
That said, I don't look to MS Hailstorm authentication as anything I want to use. They're really playing with dynamite with this thing.
Like many others roaming the wild and wooly internet, I'd just as soon be able to adopt a secure pseudonym at will, rather than have every damn site know my real name, address, SSN, and how much Jack Daniels and hemorrhoid cream I bought last month.
I can guarantee you that if everyone's information was in one net connected database eventually someone would learn to steal that information from everyone (the only trick would be to steal the information slowly enough so that Microsoft wouldn't notice).
Yeah, I'm thinking about all those handy-dandy little kiosks that run some variant of Windows with some browser that is all set up for traveling fools like myself to look at our email back home. Yes, indeed, that https and SSL insures traffic is invisible between 2 points, but there's little to insure that my starting point is not the real authentication widget, but rather some trojan harvesting my authentication for later fun. (Or that the trojan makes me feel better by displaying the https URL where it invisibly proxies my session over to some 3733t 0\/\/n3d z0mbi3 box.
I wonder if the unidirectional control freaks at MS who are implementing all this authentication with unswerving attention to insuring that Joe User is a paying licensed software renter have given any thought to my concerns.
That is, is this friendly-looking screen what it looks like?
Before I authenticate against a self-described authority, I want to know that authority is authentic in a way that I trust. A generic Windows screen confirming that all the rent payments have been kept up on this software won't convince me that it's trustworthy.
On the same issue - has anyone developed a challenge/response program that one could run like xdm/gdm/kdm that users could interact with securely to see if they were talking to a known system prior to entering a passwd?
You hit resonance with that gripe.
After contending with, shall we say, less than ideal, "drivers" on the road, I've often thought it would be beneficial to have unmarked cars roving around with trained observers from the local motor vehicle authority doing real time grading of current driver's license holders.
Gleefully do I think of the consequences of such grading on my pet peeves, such as Joe Turtle slowing down at 0.1 nano-gees in the leftmost fastlane on a crowded boulevard to make an illegal left turn where there is No Fscking Left Turn Bay, while 15 cars pile up behind him. Joe, take 10 demerits and an increased insurance rate for driving in a manner to decrease safety and to decrease the overall efficiency of traffic flow.
Oh, and Patsy GottaGetThereNow who speeds past you, slips in just ahead of you in the nick of time so she can immediately and drastically slow down just barely in time to make a sharp right, treating you and your vehicle to extra braking and acceleration, when she could just as well have pulled in behind you and performed the same maneuver saving you the hassle at the cost of 15 picoseconds of her precious time. Five demerits, Patsy!
So why don't you just allow the previous story today on the same topic to bubble up on the main headline list?
You know the one .
How similar is a Description library to a Decryption library?
It's natural you would miss this subtle technological point, but it's importance cannot be overstated.
The exciting fundamental breakthrough from France, even more earth-shattering than croissants, is that you can view Britney Spears latest pirated home videos (seen advertised the world over via email) using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
I hope this helps to clarify matters.
It's definitely a sad situation where the law is so frequently violated, because it tends to promote a casual attitude toward the law, albeit in a specific instance.
However, if I am generally permitted to modify my respect for the law in that particular instance, then why not another (such as $FAVORITE_VICTIMLESS_CRIME), and another ?
Conversely, why not make a whole slew of arbitrary laws and give the police complete discretion to arrest anyone they deemed fit?
I recall reading once in Car & Driver (a forum where speed limits are roundly thumped and criticized as infernal impediments to spirited driving) that some kind of study had been conducted (perhaps by the U.S. Department of Transportation?) indicating that the "best" speed limit was one which 80% of the drivers obeyed naturally.
BTW, commercial vehicles have lived under the yoke of GPS monitoring for some years. I once saw a setup in a dark room with a bunch of servers and a projection screen showing a map of the city with locations of passenger delivery vans equipped with GPS and radio transmitters. If any driver lingered too long on an unscheduled stop, the Powers That Be would know.
However, I think such monitoring evokes a love-hate relationship with the long-haul trucking industry, since greater fundamental efficiency is achieved by speeding (not to mention other less than legal behaviors, such as use of amphetamine and driving more than 16 hours/day.) I haven't heard of any GPS equipped truckers being turned in for speeding as a result of this monitoring.
Yes, my death wish is the command of the IT news community, as this report about the blazing speed of Tux 2.0 appeared recently.
my first question with new hardware purchases is always, "does it work with linux?"
Ditto.
Just now I'm anguishing over the choice of which laptop computer to buy, much to the puzzlement of my W2K-using co-workers.
They don't appreciate all my fuss over which winmodem card in a Dell laptop has linux drivers available.
This is my first laptop purchase. I am surprised to find that most folks have no idea what brand of components are in a laptop, so trying to find out if a particular one has a Lucent winmodem (sounds semi-supported) versus a 3com (sounds unsupported) is a challenge.
I may end up getting an IBM, since they seem to be making a little bit more of an effort to support Linux on their hardware than the other big name laptop vendors, AFAICT.
At this point I've pretty much conceded that it will be impossible to get a brand name laptop without paying for a pre-installed Windows that I won't use. But I won't settle for a modem that I can't use under Linux.
I would really be interested to see a full chart, showing static and dynamic web page performance of different OS+revision/httpserver+revision just so we can see what kind of progress has been made in this area over the past several years.
Yes, even entries with asterisks indicating heavy customization and tuning, like Ingo Molnar's tux server, would be interesting.
Probably, though, this is the kind of information that only gets into white papers that sell for $2500 apiece on tightly-controlled distribution.