Microsoft sells products, and feels their bottom line is being threatened.
Big time.
They've enjoyed the fruits of a monopoly market dominance for so long that what has built up is this: an incredibly large disparity between what they charge customers and what the true value-added really is.
How many corporate IT departments have shelled out exhorbitant site license fees for Office year after year after year and for what kind of really useful improvements since Word 6?
The existing market is not stable. Buyers would jump at an exit door, if only they could find one that isn't blocked by MS proprietary lock-ins. If your workplace is like mine, all your personnel are trained to use and to produce.doc,.xls and.ppt files. There is not another option. The pressure builds.
If I were as scared as Ballmer is about damming up millions of users with my locks, I'd make outrageous troll statements, too. I'd even eat a worm! Even if Ballmer's statements are patently ridiculous, he can create enough confusion to buy time. That time is valuable, probably worth millions of dollars per day in revenue gained or lost. Not to mention the added satisfaction of effectively slashdotting slashdot as righteous indignant programmers fume and vent on each other.
On a different note, aside from all this political posturing to the general media, who are generally clueless, I've always been amused by MS' spin towards the developer demographics in those glossy magazine ads. Recall that developer mindshare is an important ingredient to MS long term success and, having shafted many of the older "partners" (by making them offers they can't refuse) they have to recruit new members.
You know the ads I'm talking about, the ones that intimate that, as a Visual <argv> Developer, you are the He-Man Goto Guru Code Jock that everyone respects in your company, that gets paid well, that groupies swoon for,....
There ain't no substitute for the power and control of Source Code. Well do both MS and Richard Stallman know that. They fear a GPL that dictates the public shall own the Source evermore. And that public Source base has been growing ominously large of late.
I expect to be viewing my wall-hanging, flatscreen, OLED digital HDTV with that low-cost, too-cheap-to-be-metered, last mile broadband feed to my home Soon®!
Practically, MS' vision of ubiquitous toll booths, all authenticating off MS (probably for micropayments) will have to overcome some significant issues.
Joe Sixpack at Home.
Does he really need to have his network up and authenticating this much? to get things done? Does he mind it?
John Sysadmin behind a Corporate Firewall.
Does he trust all this traffic to microsoft.com?
Bob Salesman on the Road.
When he's touching up his presentation on a laptop and needs a feature that requires a connection for authentication, will he get peeved?
In short, "The World as a LAN" won't be here for a while yet.
And, while we're on the issue of practical issues, I don't suppose the DLL-hell situation is guaranteed to improve any with them living all over the world.
Meanwhile, of course, there's the paranoid contingent like myself, that disconnects the phone jack from my DSS satellite TV receiver - I want my connection to them to be guaranteed "read only". (If you didn't go over the box yourself, you can't know that it is free from data collectors, microphones, etc.)
There is an incredible potential range of power and of flexibility that can be unleased through networked computers, much of it yet to be explored.
In terms of size and influence, Microsoft is emerging onto the same playing field as many national governments of the world (They're probably into the top 20, anyway). The key difference between a large democratically elected national government (like that of the U.S., U.K., Japan, Australia, etc.) and a corporation, of course, that corporations don't provide their customers with the same extensive kinds of guarantees on their exact limits of power they exercise over the citizenry.
In corporations, the executive branch rules essentially unhindered, with intermittent high level oversight from a pseudo-legislative board of directors that primarily represents the stockholders. The stockholders generally adhere to different guiding principles than what you might find in an enumeration of citizen's rights. Generally, the more limited the customer's rights, the better. Shareholder return is the primary objective.
Computer security incidents will likely continue in the future and, in a.NET world, there will probably be some newsmaking doozies that will awaken many people as to what all the potential ramifications are of the brave new world.
Where do you see a new form of currency here? Do you consider tickets of all kinds, calling cards, or special rate telephone
numbers as new froms of currency as well?
If I am able to exchange these cards for a large number of goods and services with a large number of people, then it would qualify as a currency, IMHO.
Calling cards are restricted in what they can ultimately be used to obtain. Probably a bum on the street would not be able to obtain the same value as ordinary currency if he wished to exchange a telephone calling card for an alcoholic beverage, for example. So, no, I wouldn't regard such nominal use restricted telephone calling cards as a currency.
Whether micromoney achieves the kind of impact on the economy that I am hypothesizing depends on two factors:
Universal Recognition of Value: Who accepts such micromoney without substantially discounting its value?
Volume of Use: How much value resides in such cards relative to conventional government issued currency, gold reserves, etc.
Re:Uh... what's wrong with a distributed root, the
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IETF vs. ICANN
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· Score: 5
Mr connerbd,
You are hereby notified to cease and desist from any further such posts.
As you must be aware, any more discussion of distributed root servers would violate your Windows XP NDA.
Without going into particulars, your public disclosure could jeopardize critical intellectual property that would subject you to immediate and severe litigation that would cause your molars to disintegrate.
I am referring, of course, to the new Windows XP name server cache, which is meant to enhance the end user experience with increases in efficiency by caching frequently desired URLs, including advanced aliasing, such as
aol.com -> msn.com
that provides a richer experience and the innovation that our customers have come to expect. Of course the same product includes our advanced Pr0nKiller/anti-terrorist MShopping Cart that will be pre-announced by our Chief Software Architect.
If this product proves popular, then this new form of currency could begin to impact the economy and some yet-to-be-quantified measure of the money supply.
Like banks of the 19th century that issued their own currency, I suspect that private organizations issuing electronic cash might eventually be regulated out of existence if the governments decided to preserve greater control over the money supply. Or, more probably, they would be subject to requirements such as having sufficient reserves to cover draws on electronic cash that they have issued.
So, then, would measures of the money supply that included micromoney or ecash constitute M6?
I got the impression that the ZX10 was the next level up in performance from the 550.
For the 550: how does it compare in, say, SPECglperf numbers against the top of the line workstations like SGI/MIPS/Irix, HP/PA-RISC, IBM, Sun, etc? Linux support for consumer cards like nvidea is OK, but what about things like FireGL and oxygen hardware?
I'd like to see top end performance, but with a low price so that $/SPECglperf for my machine is the best it can be.
We're looking at an HP Linux system with fx5 and fx10 graphics cards that look pretty fast. I was thinking that, if history is any guide, SGI could provide the fastest OpenGL graphics solution. In this case, though, we'd like the low price, too, instead of shelling out big bucks for some RealityEngine or whatever the MIPS solution is that they offer.
The part that pisses me off is that it only gets reported because microsoft is, in fact, making money hand over fist. And Open
Source is not. Bear in mind, it's not losing money, bad ideas lose money, Open source just doesnt have the phenomenal returns that selling an OS for 500 bucks and office software for 400 bucks does. Linux IS making money, but just because people who sit on stock commitees dont get to line their pockets with our efforts, as they do with buying into M$, they would rather bash
Open Source as much as they can.
There is a key distinction to be made regarding open source software here.
It is true that there are no phenomenal returns to be made selling free software akin to the kind of profits made by a monopoly on an increasingly essential service (I use my computer more than my telephone and television combined - that has some interesting implications.)
However, there are certainly profits to be made by those smart enough to figure out they can use open source to the benefit of their business. Those businesses have an advantage over their inertia-bound competitors that, in the larger scheme of things, will see them succeed more often, all the marketing drivel from Redmond notwithstanding.
As an aside, does anyone remember the Ted Rall cartoon from a few years back about "tieing" that resulted in
"Works best with MS House!
I really think the key event for open source success will be the release of a very low cost appliance. Consumers want convenience at a low cost; no hassles. Such an appliance can be built (Hint: It's not the Xbox.)
>And, I imagine based on your answers, it's possible for someone running Unix to pay more then someone else running NT.
If software costs are any indication, I have generally come to expect to pay more for Unix {hardware,software,personnel} due to the niche market effect and the economies of scale that favor the virtual lock on the marketplace enjoyed by win32.
Indeed, give that:
Outfits running, say, a Sun E10000 with 64 processors are big sites with big budgets for top of the line hardware.
And, behind their Web server somewhere is a database whose value, if compromised, would be much larger than that of the database behind the typical NT web server.
I would expect UNIX insurance to cost more, even if other statistics indicated that, for whatever reasons, they were compromised less often than an NT box.
Those big UNIX boxes hide more behind them; they simply have more to lose.
Linux, OTOH, (and OpenBSD even more so) would remain the most affordable to insure since they're used by small outfits characterized by:
Extreme cost consciousness
High technical expertise
and, as a strong correlation of the first, probably a not-so-valuable database hiding behind a formidable phalanx of protection that is all out of proportion to the value of what they're protecting (kinda like the ratio between the Russian military and Russia:).
I can think of no reason to submit to MSFT "culture" in adopting words like "service pack".
Yeah, I was annoyed when popular lexicon stole the Windows out of my usage of the term, as in:
"X Windows"
or, when nontechnical folks, finding I was a programmer, would ask me if I programmed in "VisualSeePlusPlus" instead of:
"C++"
The best defense being a good offense, I propose a counter attack!
Volley One: The next Linux kernel release will not be named "2.4.6".
Rather, it shall be named
Linux 2002 Professional Enterprise Enhanced.NET Business Productivity Extreme Suite XP Next Generation for Large Data Centers Whose Budgets Are Controlled by PHBs with Unenviable Small Phalli®
The ruling only seems to confirm the wisdom of my choice at the time Amazon's privacy policy was revised.
And that decision is this:
I will do no more business with Amazon.com.
Previously, my wife and I probably bought about $500/year of merchandise from them, but not any more.
While most consumers blithely choose to be oblivious of corporate intrusions into their privacy, my small decision is meant, however infinitesimally, to promote the respect of my privacy in businesses that want to collect my money.
(A thousand pardons for this possible offtopic troll, but, I could not resist the venue. It seemed relevent given some of the talk about the strength of SGI's sputtering revenue stream.)
Call me a lazy slob, but I've got email files stretching back for 10 years now that still sit on disk.
They're just plain old ASCII files with RFC-822 headers. The binary attachments that have grown popular in the last 5 years or so are probably getting rusty, I'll admit.
I figured out a while back that it was less hassle to just let my disk use grow than to back things up on tapes. Let's see, what the heck is on this old 8mm Exabyte cartride, where's the tape drive (if it's still even around - the 1/4" QIC drives went the way of the 1600 bpi reels), where's the temporary staging area on disk tthat
I can put everything, so I can finally run a grep or glimpse to find whatever it was that I was looking for about 4 hours ago...
The upshot is that my disk usage demands have grown over time. So, while a 20 MB user area on a 200 MB disk was fine in 1986, I now need about 1000 times as much to feel comfortable. Moore's Law gave a doubling time of 18 months for CPU speed, IIRC, so my disk usage is running right on the same schedule.
Exatrapoliting, in 2015, I'll feel comfortable with a 20 TB user area...
Granted, some email messages haven't been accessed in years, so having millisecond latency and 1e2 MB/sec BW to get to them is wasteful in some sense, but, staging my data with hierarchal storage systems is too inconvenient.
If only you could buy "disks" in a full spectrum of sizes and seek times and BW for any given amount of money, the situation would be a lot better.
So, if I can plonk down $100 for a 20 GB disk with IDE ATA-100 performance, then I would ideally be able to get a 200 GB random access device with roughly "IDE/10" performance for $100.
Hmmm...those email messages have probably run around the spindle about 2.5e9 times by now...
I don't mean to drift too far off topic, but your comment reminds me of something my wife told me a while back about expert witnesses, etc.
It's not just that juries cannot do extra curricular investigation, nor can they consider any evidence that was not brought out during the trial.
As a member of a jury, you cannot bring in your own special expert knowledge into deliberation!
Say you could do your own calculations in your head about what the probability is of a gun going off that hits the floor expelling a bullet that hits an individual 20 feet away, and that your estimate of the facts conflicts with what you and the rest of the jury heard from the expert witness on the stand. If that becomes known, it is grounds for declaring a mistrial.
Practically, this isn't much of a problem.
Lots of readers here probably have too much education and too much of an ability to sift between emotion and fact (oh--wait--this is/.) to get themselves past disqualification from most jury selection. For that reason, it's not an issue that would come up often in our current justice system.
But, I found it interesting, and I thought you might like to know...
My guess was to resolve two questions with this deviated course observation.
What is causing the course deviation?
Where is all the unaccounted dark matter in the universe?
If the course deviations get large enough they could point to the missing matter (assuming it is distributed inhomogeneously), if that is in fact, the cause of it all.
Far from being an amateur astronomer, I'm still aspiring to achieve full-fledged diletante status.
Actually, from what I've heard, there is no such directive at Microsoft. Employees can use whatever they like, as long as they don't sacrifice the ability to work with their teammates.
Whoa!
That's pretty damn progressive thinking!
What's with it with that behemoth megacorp?
Are they finding it necessary to create a nice working environment or something?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
I think Python will take off eventually, based on my first hand experience.
The simple syntax and powerful features of this scripting language make it an excellent choice as a first language. Last summer I got my 11 year old nephew playing with some simple programming concepts using Python.
The generality and power of the language made it my first choice a year ago when I had to come up with a "mortgage recalculator" to figure out what payments would pay off the balance for certain interest rates in various time frames. Years ago I would have done that in C, Fortran, or HP-25.
I'd love to use this language as the high level wrapper for some projects at work, but we're heavily into C++ frameworks and I don't feel up to the level where I could SWIG my way into Python.
At any rate, I think Perl has the advantage of being first and an initially better regex capability. In that way, some of the thunder for scripting language audience share for Python was lost to Perl. This may be a reason that Tcl hasn't really caught on too much, either.
In scientific circles. that handle numerical data for simulations and visualization more than text, you'll find a lot more fans of Python. The growth limiter there has been that any algorithm requiring extreme efficiency taxes a scripting language, forcing one into a multi-language environment, such as Python on top and C down below. Fortunately, with all the modules for Numerical Python, etc. becoming available this bottleneck is becoming less of an impediment and I think you'll start to see increasing usage.
I'd bet that by now most NASA folks have a love hate relationship with manned missions.
They love manned missions for their ability to inspire enough people to get grassroots support from the public and from Congress to actually get enough money to do something.
But, the cost of these missions is a *lot more* than what you'd need for sending a robot in place and there's the risk of a Challenger-like incident to depress everybody.
I'd like to see funding increase for heavy use of increasingly sophisticated automated probes and remote+robotic construction to the moon, to Mars, etc.
Then, as we get some kind of remote infrastructure built up, go for sending a human, once you can reduce the complexities of providing a habitable environment into smaller pieces that can be done remotely and automatically. Eg, get an electric power generation capability first, then see if you can get a climate-controlled, pressurized environment sustained for a while, grow plants, etc.
I cannot know what great things we'll discover by doing these things, but I do know there will be amazing discoveries.
If you ask me to sell the unknown to a Congressman badgered by HereAndNow demands for funding, then I am at a loss.
This is a lose-lose proposition for your shop if you go anywhere near the fool that did not choose to become your client.
Most of these erstwhile would-have-been clients will think any or all of the below:
[Broken in zero times.] You are a damned suspicious looking "hacker", especially if you know how to break into my crown jewels.
[Broken in once.] You were probably responsible!
[Broken in once.] Your sour grapes probably made you post the vulnerability to a bunch of script kiddies who are making my life a living hell.
[Broken in several times.] I'm tired and spent too damn much money down this sinkhole and I don't want to hear about my bad choices in the past. Go away.
I think the best you can hope for here is to simply provide good brochures about how you're ready to do a good job, backed up with general references to all kinds of material on your web site about how careful you are to protect your clients' interests, testimonials from other clients about how rock-solid, high-performing etc. the work is that you've done for them. You can throw in examples of unnamed slapdash site builders who have exposed unnamed customers to all kinds of costs and liabilities in various ways using well known loopholes. Be sure to link to external references on those vulnerabilities, and keep your description stiff, formal and technical, giving your shop an air of authority and respectibility (eg, using tiny red gothic script on black pages to describe security vulnerabilities is not recommended).
I think that there are a lot of computer security firms that must walk this tightrope all the time, of having to balance business interests with
"what I know I could do to prove my point to these bozos..."
The moral highground is always where you want to be seen.
Yes, some of the toughest problems in the open source world require you to climb an Everest scale learning curve. Mozilla and OpenOffice come to mind. Those two are attempting to Be-all Do-all Doo-dad of the variety one has come to expect from a Large software vendor.
That said, however, Waldo's performance analysis of ld.so for KDE app startup is valuable. The details and guts of the problem have been exposed to the light; it brings a potential solution that much closer to reality. It helps to focus attention where it needs to be.
Finally, it poses a specific challenge to be addressed. Source code for all relevent pieces are open for all to see.
Anyone that addresses this challenge effectively will be recognized for the accomplishment. Over time, this C++ VFT address issue will become more important.
(Since I'm not root, I'll see if I can get my local overworked sysadmins to consider enriching my life this way and unburdening me of all this build/install by hand...
P.S. The web page gets extra credit in my book for its author's first name.
Re:you've fallen for MS strategy
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Mozilla 0.9 Out
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The other advantage Microsoft enjoys in this regard, besides being able to hire 50% of the most highly paid C++ developers in the world, is that whatever path they beat down through the forest of complexity becomes The Standard.
Meanwhile, Mozilla's Shoot for the Moon in terms of cool features, rendering speed, stability, cross platform portability, low memory footprint have produced a Procrustean bed that is taking about as long to implement as you might expect. (And here I though my company held a lock on this kind of development model. Many the local ego has been comforted with a retort of
"Well, when my Vaporware is done it will beat the pants off your ugly Bugware!")
Absolute conformance to the latest complicated W3C standards just sets the high bar at 32 feet instead of just 28 feet for the Mozilla programmers.
I really admire the great effort that's gone into Mozilla thus far. There are really some impressive designs, ideas and programming in that pile of code. I only hope that their slow steady progress eventually wins out, even after all the spectators get tired and go home.
The cool doodads like Mail/News readers, etc. have been beaten like a dead horse by many previous posters as being too peripheral to the mission of a web browser.
My question is this:
Is the reason for clinging to those objectives rooted in AOL's desire to completely mask and own their users' experience, insulating them completely from Windows?
Well, yes, our SPARC boxes sit on a fast LAN so download speed is not an issue (although a 600 MB iso image is likely to be limited by the BW of the source still)
Convenience is the real issue.
All through the early 1990's I would ftp to prep.ai.mit.edu and check to see if there was a new release of gcc or emacs or some other piece of free software that I would build and install.
Now, there are simply too many packages for me to do that. I can't help but compare the rich suite of free software on my Linux box at home to the Solaris server at work and see how much easier it was to install SuSE 7.1 on a 20 GB ATA-100 and have loads more functionality than I do on our Sun LAN. Things like teTeX, ghostscript, gimp, KDE and GNOME, etc. take time to build from scratch.
On a LAN, homogeneity helps.
That being the case, we don't have much incentive to try to keep a zoo of Solaris/SPARC and Linux/SPARC at the same time. It is sufficiently annoying for us to straddle Solaris 2.6 and 8 in the midst of a sea of corporate Wintel desktops.
Also, when looking for binary desktop software, such as Netscape or Acrobat reader, you'll see Linux/x86 a lot more than */SPARC.
The convenience of a plethora of prebuilt open software is compelling. The economics of the Linux/x86 (for which all binary apps are targeted) are another reason that we will probably be moving to Linux/x86 from Solaris/SPARC on our desktops sometime in the next year.
We'll still retain our big Sun servers, but the desktop Solaris solution is not as exciting as it was many years ago. It's the passing of another era.
Also, is there such a thing as "the Corporate Republic"? When you use loaded expressions like that, you sound just as paranoid as Oliver Stone, ranting away about "the Military-Industrual Complex" which he blames for all his little conspiracy theories.
Actually, the term "Military Industrial Complex" was not the invention of Oliver Stone, whose loose theories are well-known and generally regarded in accordance to how well substantiated they are.
Rather, it was a Republican icon from the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower, that warned of the "Military Industrial Complex" in his farewell
address to the nation. Because his position permitted him a great deal more familiarity with such matters, I attribute greater credence to Ike's warning than, say, Katz on the Corporate Republic.
That's not to say that Corporate Republic is a total distortion of the facts, but only that a spokesperson, from a position of authority, knowledge and either recognized neutrality or, better, former advocacy, has yet to utter this expression.
The term coporate republic gained some currency with James K Galbraith in this article, so it gets more credence and respectability than if Katz coined the term.
Nonetheless, its usage is primarily confined to advocates pushing a particular view or position, much like the self-serving code words employed by the government of the PRC (eg, imperialists == America, hegemonists == Russia), or the many colorful appellations that Rush Limbaugh uses to ridicule opponents of his views.
Slashdot Mirror
Big time.
They've enjoyed the fruits of a monopoly market dominance for so long that what has built up is this: an incredibly large disparity between what they charge customers and what the true value-added really is.
How many corporate IT departments have shelled out exhorbitant site license fees for Office year after year after year and for what kind of really useful improvements since Word 6?
The existing market is not stable. Buyers would jump at an exit door, if only they could find one that isn't blocked by MS proprietary lock-ins. If your workplace is like mine, all your personnel are trained to use and to produce .doc, .xls and .ppt files. There is not another option. The pressure builds.
If I were as scared as Ballmer is about damming up millions of users with my locks, I'd make outrageous troll statements, too. I'd even eat a worm! Even if Ballmer's statements are patently ridiculous, he can create enough confusion to buy time. That time is valuable, probably worth millions of dollars per day in revenue gained or lost. Not to mention the added satisfaction of effectively slashdotting slashdot as righteous indignant programmers fume and vent on each other.
On a different note, aside from all this political posturing to the general media, who are generally clueless, I've always been amused by MS' spin towards the developer demographics in those glossy magazine ads. Recall that developer mindshare is an important ingredient to MS long term success and, having shafted many of the older "partners" (by making them offers they can't refuse) they have to recruit new members.
You know the ads I'm talking about, the ones that intimate that, as a Visual <argv> Developer, you are the He-Man Goto Guru Code Jock that everyone respects in your company, that gets paid well, that groupies swoon for, ....
There ain't no substitute for the power and control of Source Code. Well do both MS and Richard Stallman know that. They fear a GPL that dictates the public shall own the Source evermore. And that public Source base has been growing ominously large of late.
Right on!
I expect to be viewing my wall-hanging, flatscreen, OLED digital HDTV with that low-cost, too-cheap-to-be-metered, last mile broadband feed to my home Soon®!
Good observation.
Practically, MS' vision of ubiquitous toll booths, all authenticating off MS (probably for micropayments) will have to overcome some significant issues.
- Joe Sixpack at Home.
- John Sysadmin behind a Corporate Firewall.
- Bob Salesman on the Road.
In short, "The World as a LAN" won't be here for a while yet.And, while we're on the issue of practical issues, I don't suppose the DLL-hell situation is guaranteed to improve any with them living all over the world.
Meanwhile, of course, there's the paranoid contingent like myself, that disconnects the phone jack from my DSS satellite TV receiver - I want my connection to them to be guaranteed "read only". (If you didn't go over the box yourself, you can't know that it is free from data collectors, microphones, etc.)
There is an incredible potential range of power and of flexibility that can be unleased through networked computers, much of it yet to be explored.
In terms of size and influence, Microsoft is emerging onto the same playing field as many national governments of the world (They're probably into the top 20, anyway). The key difference between a large democratically elected national government (like that of the U.S., U.K., Japan, Australia, etc.) and a corporation, of course, that corporations don't provide their customers with the same extensive kinds of guarantees on their exact limits of power they exercise over the citizenry.
In corporations, the executive branch rules essentially unhindered, with intermittent high level oversight from a pseudo-legislative board of directors that primarily represents the stockholders. The stockholders generally adhere to different guiding principles than what you might find in an enumeration of citizen's rights. Generally, the more limited the customer's rights, the better. Shareholder return is the primary objective.
Computer security incidents will likely continue in the future and, in a .NET world, there will probably be some newsmaking doozies that will awaken many people as to what all the potential ramifications are of the brave new world.
It's not all
If I am able to exchange these cards for a large number of goods and services with a large number of people, then it would qualify as a currency, IMHO.
Calling cards are restricted in what they can ultimately be used to obtain. Probably a bum on the street would not be able to obtain the same value as ordinary currency if he wished to exchange a telephone calling card for an alcoholic beverage, for example. So, no, I wouldn't regard such nominal use restricted telephone calling cards as a currency.
Whether micromoney achieves the kind of impact on the economy that I am hypothesizing depends on two factors:
Mr connerbd,
You are hereby notified to cease and desist from any further such posts.
As you must be aware, any more discussion of distributed root servers would violate your Windows XP NDA.
Without going into particulars, your public disclosure could jeopardize critical intellectual property that would subject you to immediate and severe litigation that would cause your molars to disintegrate.
I am referring, of course, to the new Windows XP name server cache, which is meant to enhance the end user experience with increases in efficiency by caching frequently desired URLs, including advanced aliasing, such as
that provides a richer experience and the innovation that our customers have come to expect. Of course the same product includes our advanced Pr0nKiller/anti-terrorist MShopping Cart that will be pre-announced by our Chief Software Architect.Good day.
Sternly,
Geoffrey P. Foggbottom, JD
If this product proves popular, then this new form of currency could begin to impact the economy and some yet-to-be-quantified measure of the money supply.
Like banks of the 19th century that issued their own currency, I suspect that private organizations issuing electronic cash might eventually be regulated out of existence if the governments decided to preserve greater control over the money supply. Or, more probably, they would be subject to requirements such as having sufficient reserves to cover draws on electronic cash that they have issued.
So, then, would measures of the money supply that included micromoney or ecash constitute M6?
I got the impression that the ZX10 was the next level up in performance from the 550.
For the 550: how does it compare in, say, SPECglperf numbers against the top of the line workstations like SGI/MIPS/Irix, HP/PA-RISC, IBM, Sun, etc? Linux support for consumer cards like nvidea is OK, but what about things like FireGL and oxygen hardware?
I'd like to see top end performance, but with a low price so that $/SPECglperf for my machine is the best it can be.
We're looking at an HP Linux system with fx5 and fx10 graphics cards that look pretty fast. I was thinking that, if history is any guide, SGI could provide the fastest OpenGL graphics solution. In this case, though, we'd like the low price, too, instead of shelling out big bucks for some RealityEngine or whatever the MIPS solution is that they offer.
There is a key distinction to be made regarding open source software here.
It is true that there are no phenomenal returns to be made selling free software akin to the kind of profits made by a monopoly on an increasingly essential service (I use my computer more than my telephone and television combined - that has some interesting implications.)
However, there are certainly profits to be made by those smart enough to figure out they can use open source to the benefit of their business. Those businesses have an advantage over their inertia-bound competitors that, in the larger scheme of things, will see them succeed more often, all the marketing drivel from Redmond notwithstanding.
As an aside, does anyone remember the Ted Rall cartoon from a few years back about "tieing" that resulted in
I really think the key event for open source success will be the release of a very low cost appliance. Consumers want convenience at a low cost; no hassles. Such an appliance can be built (Hint: It's not the Xbox.)
While we're on the m'board wishlist, it sure would be nice to have some chipset support both:
- AMD Athlon
- 64 bit PCI
at the same time!Mebbe the same people that are in charge of scheduling SMP Athlon are in charge of scheduling the 64 bit PCI slot.
I'd hate to have to wait until '02 and the *Hammer series to get speedy connections to my peripherals on an AMD system.
>And, I imagine based on your answers, it's possible for someone running Unix to pay more then someone else running NT.
If software costs are any indication, I have generally come to expect to pay more for Unix {hardware,software,personnel} due to the niche market effect and the economies of scale that favor the virtual lock on the marketplace enjoyed by win32.
Indeed, give that:
I would expect UNIX insurance to cost more, even if other statistics indicated that, for whatever reasons, they were compromised less often than an NT box.
Those big UNIX boxes hide more behind them; they simply have more to lose.
Linux, OTOH, (and OpenBSD even more so) would remain the most affordable to insure since they're used by small outfits characterized by:
- Extreme cost consciousness
- High technical expertise
and, as a strong correlation of the first, probably a not-so-valuable database hiding behind a formidable phalanx of protection that is all out of proportion to the value of what they're protecting (kinda like the ratio between the Russian military and Russia:).I can think of no reason to submit to MSFT "culture" in adopting words like "service pack".
Yeah, I was annoyed when popular lexicon stole the Windows out of my usage of the term, as in: or, when nontechnical folks, finding I was a programmer, would ask me if I programmed in "VisualSeePlusPlus" instead of:
The best defense being a good offense, I propose a counter attack!
Volley One: The next Linux kernel release will not be named "2.4.6".
Rather, it shall be named
That should hit home with the target market...no?
The ruling only seems to confirm the wisdom of my choice at the time Amazon's privacy policy was revised.
And that decision is this:
Previously, my wife and I probably bought about $500/year of merchandise from them, but not any more.While most consumers blithely choose to be oblivious of corporate intrusions into their privacy, my small decision is meant, however infinitesimally, to promote the respect of my privacy in businesses that want to collect my money.
(A thousand pardons for this possible offtopic troll, but, I could not resist the venue. It seemed relevent given some of the talk about the strength of SGI's sputtering revenue stream.)
Any word on if/when SGI's ZX10 could run Linux?
We're looking to replace some aging RISC workstations with x86 hardware and Linux, but the last bullet is holding us back from the decision.
Call me a lazy slob, but I've got email files stretching back for 10 years now that still sit on disk.
They're just plain old ASCII files with RFC-822 headers. The binary attachments that have grown popular in the last 5 years or so are probably getting rusty, I'll admit.
I figured out a while back that it was less hassle to just let my disk use grow than to back things up on tapes. Let's see, what the heck is on this old 8mm Exabyte cartride, where's the tape drive (if it's still even around - the 1/4" QIC drives went the way of the 1600 bpi reels), where's the temporary staging area on disk tthat I can put everything, so I can finally run a grep or glimpse to find whatever it was that I was looking for about 4 hours ago...
The upshot is that my disk usage demands have grown over time. So, while a 20 MB user area on a 200 MB disk was fine in 1986, I now need about 1000 times as much to feel comfortable. Moore's Law gave a doubling time of 18 months for CPU speed, IIRC, so my disk usage is running right on the same schedule.
Exatrapoliting, in 2015, I'll feel comfortable with a 20 TB user area...
Granted, some email messages haven't been accessed in years, so having millisecond latency and 1e2 MB/sec BW to get to them is wasteful in some sense, but, staging my data with hierarchal storage systems is too inconvenient.
If only you could buy "disks" in a full spectrum of sizes and seek times and BW for any given amount of money, the situation would be a lot better.
So, if I can plonk down $100 for a 20 GB disk with IDE ATA-100 performance, then I would ideally be able to get a 200 GB random access device with roughly "IDE/10" performance for $100.
Hmmm...those email messages have probably run around the spindle about 2.5e9 times by now...
I don't mean to drift too far off topic, but your comment reminds me of something my wife told me a while back about expert witnesses, etc.
It's not just that juries cannot do extra curricular investigation, nor can they consider any evidence that was not brought out during the trial.
As a member of a jury, you cannot bring in your own special expert knowledge into deliberation!
Say you could do your own calculations in your head about what the probability is of a gun going off that hits the floor expelling a bullet that hits an individual 20 feet away, and that your estimate of the facts conflicts with what you and the rest of the jury heard from the expert witness on the stand. If that becomes known, it is grounds for declaring a mistrial.
Practically, this isn't much of a problem.
Lots of readers here probably have too much education and too much of an ability to sift between emotion and fact (oh--wait--this is /.) to get themselves past disqualification from most jury selection. For that reason, it's not an issue that would come up often in our current justice system.
But, I found it interesting, and I thought you might like to know...
Sounds close.
My guess was to resolve two questions with this deviated course observation.
If the course deviations get large enough they could point to the missing matter (assuming it is distributed inhomogeneously), if that is in fact, the cause of it all.
Far from being an amateur astronomer, I'm still aspiring to achieve full-fledged diletante status.
Whoa!
That's pretty damn progressive thinking!
What's with it with that behemoth megacorp?
Are they finding it necessary to create a nice working environment or something?
I guess after stock values have stopped climbing so consistently that it takes some extra carrots to get bright programmers willing to surgically operate on spaghetti:)
I think Python will take off eventually, based on my first hand experience.
The simple syntax and powerful features of this scripting language make it an excellent choice as a first language. Last summer I got my 11 year old nephew playing with some simple programming concepts using Python.
The generality and power of the language made it my first choice a year ago when I had to come up with a "mortgage recalculator" to figure out what payments would pay off the balance for certain interest rates in various time frames. Years ago I would have done that in C, Fortran, or HP-25.
I'd love to use this language as the high level wrapper for some projects at work, but we're heavily into C++ frameworks and I don't feel up to the level where I could SWIG my way into Python.
At any rate, I think Perl has the advantage of being first and an initially better regex capability. In that way, some of the thunder for scripting language audience share for Python was lost to Perl. This may be a reason that Tcl hasn't really caught on too much, either.
In scientific circles. that handle numerical data for simulations and visualization more than text, you'll find a lot more fans of Python. The growth limiter there has been that any algorithm requiring extreme efficiency taxes a scripting language, forcing one into a multi-language environment, such as Python on top and C down below. Fortunately, with all the modules for Numerical Python, etc. becoming available this bottleneck is becoming less of an impediment and I think you'll start to see increasing usage.
I'd bet that by now most NASA folks have a love hate relationship with manned missions.
They love manned missions for their ability to inspire enough people to get grassroots support from the public and from Congress to actually get enough money to do something.
But, the cost of these missions is a *lot more* than what you'd need for sending a robot in place and there's the risk of a Challenger-like incident to depress everybody.
I'd like to see funding increase for heavy use of increasingly sophisticated automated probes and remote+robotic construction to the moon, to Mars, etc.
Then, as we get some kind of remote infrastructure built up, go for sending a human, once you can reduce the complexities of providing a habitable environment into smaller pieces that can be done remotely and automatically. Eg, get an electric power generation capability first, then see if you can get a climate-controlled, pressurized environment sustained for a while, grow plants, etc.
I cannot know what great things we'll discover by doing these things, but I do know there will be amazing discoveries.
If you ask me to sell the unknown to a Congressman badgered by HereAndNow demands for funding, then I am at a loss.
Dead right on center bull's eye.
This is a lose-lose proposition for your shop if you go anywhere near the fool that did not choose to become your client.
Most of these erstwhile would-have-been clients will think any or all of the below:
I think the best you can hope for here is to simply provide good brochures about how you're ready to do a good job, backed up with general references to all kinds of material on your web site about how careful you are to protect your clients' interests, testimonials from other clients about how rock-solid, high-performing etc. the work is that you've done for them. You can throw in examples of unnamed slapdash site builders who have exposed unnamed customers to all kinds of costs and liabilities in various ways using well known loopholes. Be sure to link to external references on those vulnerabilities, and keep your description stiff, formal and technical, giving your shop an air of authority and respectibility (eg, using tiny red gothic script on black pages to describe security vulnerabilities is not recommended).
I think that there are a lot of computer security firms that must walk this tightrope all the time, of having to balance business interests with
The moral highground is always where you want to be seen.
Yes, some of the toughest problems in the open source world require you to climb an Everest scale learning curve. Mozilla and OpenOffice come to mind. Those two are attempting to Be-all Do-all Doo-dad of the variety one has come to expect from a Large software vendor.
That said, however, Waldo's performance analysis of ld.so for KDE app startup is valuable. The details and guts of the problem have been exposed to the light; it brings a potential solution that much closer to reality. It helps to focus attention where it needs to be.
Finally, it poses a specific challenge to be addressed. Source code for all relevent pieces are open for all to see.
Anyone that addresses this challenge effectively will be recognized for the accomplishment. Over time, this C++ VFT address issue will become more important.
Thanks for the valuable tip!
(Since I'm not root, I'll see if I can get my local overworked sysadmins to consider enriching my life this way and unburdening me of all this build/install by hand...
P.S. The web page gets extra credit in my book for its author's first name.
The other advantage Microsoft enjoys in this regard, besides being able to hire 50% of the most highly paid C++ developers in the world, is that whatever path they beat down through the forest of complexity becomes The Standard.
Meanwhile, Mozilla's Shoot for the Moon in terms of cool features, rendering speed, stability, cross platform portability, low memory footprint have produced a Procrustean bed that is taking about as long to implement as you might expect. (And here I though my company held a lock on this kind of development model. Many the local ego has been comforted with a retort of
Absolute conformance to the latest complicated W3C standards just sets the high bar at 32 feet instead of just 28 feet for the Mozilla programmers.
I really admire the great effort that's gone into Mozilla thus far. There are really some impressive designs, ideas and programming in that pile of code. I only hope that their slow steady progress eventually wins out, even after all the spectators get tired and go home.
The cool doodads like Mail/News readers, etc. have been beaten like a dead horse by many previous posters as being too peripheral to the mission of a web browser.
My question is this:
Well, yes, our SPARC boxes sit on a fast LAN so download speed is not an issue (although a 600 MB iso image is likely to be limited by the BW of the source still)
Convenience is the real issue.
All through the early 1990's I would ftp to prep.ai.mit.edu and check to see if there was a new release of gcc or emacs or some other piece of free software that I would build and install.
Now, there are simply too many packages for me to do that. I can't help but compare the rich suite of free software on my Linux box at home to the Solaris server at work and see how much easier it was to install SuSE 7.1 on a 20 GB ATA-100 and have loads more functionality than I do on our Sun LAN. Things like teTeX, ghostscript, gimp, KDE and GNOME, etc. take time to build from scratch.
On a LAN, homogeneity helps.
That being the case, we don't have much incentive to try to keep a zoo of Solaris/SPARC and Linux/SPARC at the same time. It is sufficiently annoying for us to straddle Solaris 2.6 and 8 in the midst of a sea of corporate Wintel desktops.
Also, when looking for binary desktop software, such as Netscape or Acrobat reader, you'll see Linux/x86 a lot more than */SPARC.
The convenience of a plethora of prebuilt open software is compelling. The economics of the Linux/x86 (for which all binary apps are targeted) are another reason that we will probably be moving to Linux/x86 from Solaris/SPARC on our desktops sometime in the next year.
We'll still retain our big Sun servers, but the desktop Solaris solution is not as exciting as it was many years ago. It's the passing of another era.
Also, is there such a thing as "the Corporate Republic"? When you use loaded expressions like that, you sound just as paranoid as Oliver Stone, ranting away about "the Military-Industrual Complex" which he blames for all his little conspiracy theories.
Actually, the term "Military Industrial Complex" was not the invention of Oliver Stone, whose loose theories are well-known and generally regarded in accordance to how well substantiated they are.
Rather, it was a Republican icon from the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower, that warned of the "Military Industrial Complex" in his farewell address to the nation. Because his position permitted him a great deal more familiarity with such matters, I attribute greater credence to Ike's warning than, say, Katz on the Corporate Republic.
That's not to say that Corporate Republic is a total distortion of the facts, but only that a spokesperson, from a position of authority, knowledge and either recognized neutrality or, better, former advocacy, has yet to utter this expression.
The term coporate republic gained some currency with James K Galbraith in this article, so it gets more credence and respectability than if Katz coined the term.
Nonetheless, its usage is primarily confined to advocates pushing a particular view or position, much like the self-serving code words employed by the government of the PRC (eg, imperialists == America, hegemonists == Russia), or the many colorful appellations that Rush Limbaugh uses to ridicule opponents of his views.