Alas, the lessons of the political season are so soon forgotten!
Did it not occur to you that Ballmer's words are directed towards an audience in the government, courts, the press, congress and the new administration to support their earlier claim that Linux is a real competitor and that their so-called monopoly was precariously in danger of being overturned by the rapid changes in the IT field? (You know - the changes in IT - the ones that result from MSInnovation to Windows, etc. that Redmond alone should be allowed to continue to do, just like Sun alone should be able to do to Java?)
Ballmer's announcement thus serves that purpose primarily, and only secondarily as a trumpet charge for a FUD barrage. (Expect: "If Linux wasn't such a threat then we wouldn't have mounted such a campaign!")
In reality, the inertia of the installed base of Win16, Win32 programs and the MS lock on the definition of.doc,.xls and.ppt as well as the unavoidable, Win9x-came-pre-installed-on-MyComputer upgrade path to backward incompatibility and need for future purchases of MSware can pretty much be manipulated at will to provided the proper balance between a revenue cash cow and the appearance of proper competition for the benefit of Ballmer's intended audience.
Expect the big guns not to be brought out until the DOJ annoyance has been either settled or safely litigated into an interminable appeals process.
Sheesh, as if it weren't bad enough that they've already bought stakes in both Apple and Corel to keep some well behaved toy competitors!
(Apologies for the geeky differentiator - English description did not fit in the short/. title.)
The reason software still sucks, by in large, has been the lack of market competition in this arena. If users could choose between A and B versions of software based on how much less they sucked than the other, then we'd see less suckiness.
Unfortunately, there haven't been enough viable alternatives in the software market. These days, software marketers are pretty much hosed unless they support Win32 because that's what runs on My PC ®. The Mac flash in the pan is effectively gone, and Linux desktop use can no more overcome the inertia of the installed base any more than WinME or Whistler will. There, suckiness has been measured practically by how many problems are encountered installing and using the latest software on a hoary old Win95 box. Backward compatibility is the paramount measure of suckiness. That immediately shows how important standards are in this business.
There is a desperate need for a slowly growing pyramid of standardization, with just a fringe of featuritis that gets encompassed by a growing set of standards. And, if any company locks up the standards and charges a toll to create barriers to market entry, then we can't get the best level of competition based on suckiness, any more than you can get competition in your local electric or phone provider. The higher levels of the pyramid cannot be built best on opaque stones that turn out to have insuffcient strength for an unforeseen future application.
IMHO, the real revolution in less sucky software won't arrive until higher level software components become standardized and free, from the lowest to the penultimate level.
Where I live (just south of Houston), I can't get cablemodem access and I can't get DSL.
Exactly!!!!
I'm in the same boat. I live on the fringe of a large metropolitan area in a semi-rural area on a 2 acre lot. I'm about 1/2 mile from the cable provider (so I get DSS TV) and my local telco is not in any big hurry to wire up my CO for DSL since it is a much better investment for them to go for the higher population density areas first.
Therefore, for your market, look to the fringe where they are not.
The key hurdle for me and most other consumers is cost. If wireless net access gives me significantly more speed than ~33kb/56kb and does not cost more than say $60/month, then I'm game. But, so far as I can tell, the charges for wireless net access are higher than that, putting it out of my reach and limiting your market size.
High bw and reasonably low latency (hard, I know) would be a real boon for me - I'd start looking into using VoIP for long distance
Hey! We're the other site in the world that actually uses FrameMaker. All of our management and beancounting types just use Word, but everyone here that got accustomed to Frame on Suns found that Word sucked by comparison. We do heavy technical report writing, a niche market that Word does not address as well as Frame.
My biggest pet peeve with Word has been the default keyboard mappings - my fingers have been hardwired to use various emacs-like motion commands for ctrl-a, ctrl-f, etc. AFAIK, you cannot remap the key functions for Word to be something you like (while the converse is true - a Word user could get Emacs keys rebound to be more word-like if they wished).
The big problem has been that the chasm between Linux and old Sun hardware (where we run Frame now) is too great. We may be migrating to Linux soon, but it looks as if we'll just use StarOffice for WYSIWYG document processing, or run VMWare with Word, while die-hards techies like me will cling to TeX and variants for the ultimate beauty of mathematics typesetting, bravely withstanding the ferocious cold blasts of programming and debugging that are required to get what you want from TeX.
I keep looking to see if DocBook has progressed to the point where one can do reasonable jobs on mathematics typesetting for hardcopy and include various graphics formats. Likewise I keep holding out for an solid universal format like XML for my documents. My wishlist concurs with yours - perhaps someone with a need and a brain can get OpenOffice to address technical typesetting issues better and help out on XML export of the files.
My TeX files from 10+ years ago are still of value, while binary proprietary word processing formats from 10 years ago are about as useful as an election run by Floridians.
Too bad Adobe has dropped Frame for Linux from our perspective. We would have been a site that actually would have paid money for Frame on Linux, though I know that they need enough of a customer base to justify the effort. Still, we're talking about a couple hundred seats at several hundred US$ per seat, although the floating license might trim that down somewhat. It's lost revenue that Adobe won't see because of this decision. Beats me why they bought Frame in the first place.
Most of the RISC/UNIX camp are already in 64 bit land, having just emerged from several years of teething pains.
Check out:
Solaris 2.[78] on UltraSPARC II (v9)
IRIX 6.[45] on MIPS 10K, 12K
AIX 4.3 on Power3+
Tru64 on Alpha 21264
HP/UX 11 on PA-RISC 8000
Linux on Alpha, SPARC64
In many cases the chip hardware has reached 64 bit before the OS has. Most of this development has been below the radar in the mainstream press because the solutions are not Wintel.
Extrapolating the story here suggests the Transmeta approach of using VLIW to emulate lower bit width processors can help to compensate for the slow rate of change in OS.
Also, it suggests there might be practical merit in the AMD K8 approach of abusing 64 bits for double 32 bit processing.
The kernel is as fast as it's going to get...
I know the kernel does a good job with speed. However, it is NEVER fast enough. There is always some more tuning that can be done, somewhere.
Suppose, for the sake of argument that I'm a dolt that wants to run Linux fast.
Either that, or I'm too lazy or have too many other things going past due that I cannot afford to spend days poring over documentation to get up to speed about tuning Linux for my particular piece of hardware and set of applications. My time costs more than the hardware does.
How about a compile time option to run with profiling?
Let the kernel measure how many httpd's get spawned for your 4 high speed NICs under typical loadings for a week, or, alternately, how much interactive response you need for a framebuffer using DRI if you happen to be using your system for desktop abuse. Then, let the kernel be recompiled with this information.
The kernel developers are doing a fantastic job, but it's always bothered me that many of contentious algorithms (eg, picking the process to kill on OOM, a recent example of where heuristics enter the arguments) can't be tailored more to the particulars of the situation.
Perhaps kernel modules can accomplish the same effect without the need to resort to recompilation. The key thing is that the algorithms and settings should be
dynamic
lean
appropriate.
By in large, though, I've been pretty happy with Linux development. The improved NFS performance was my biggest gripe until lately.
. . . The great thing about Exchange is that the mail stays on the server,
That is most definitely a mixed blessing.
Pro: Usual PC users are accustomed to "shutting off their PC at night.", so having the mailbox sit on a nominal 24x7 server is great. Also, many PC users were first introduced to the internet via an ISP over a 28k modem with intermittent connections, so having mailboxes sit elsewhere than their PC seems natural. (Me, OTOH, got my first email in the 1980's on a minicomputer up all the time, the same machine did both the MTA and the MUA.) The first few months after our Exchange rollout there were a few hiccoughs in availability, but no more than you would realistically expect from an MS enterprise solution. They were annoying but not unbearable for the users. To be fair, things have been running pretty smoothly since then.
Con: (1) Our several thousand corporate users (who dumbly send...ummm...those ".doc" RFC- compliant, IETF-approved, standard attachments to each other in megadroves alongside the famous ".ppt" and ".xls" standardized formats of legendary openness, vendor-neutrality, cross-platform interoperability, zero cost and other Good Things:) are constantly bumping up against disk space limits in their mailbox areas and subsequent headaches with moving to local folders, etc. in a way that does not cause munging of Read/Unread status, disappearing folders, etc.
Con: (2) Laptop RoadWarriors find that plain Outlook takes too long to download and update. The running joke is to dial-in to the corporate Exchange server before dinner, eat, then come back to your hotel room after dinner to look at your daily email. And, heaven help you if the connection gets disrupted at any point. Outlook Express alleviates the download time problem to some extent, but still suffers from corrupted state/locking issues if the connection is interrupted. This kind of remote locking and status updating is, IMHO, an unsolved problem, so any implementation will suffer from it - the holy grail will be to minimize it to the point where it is practically invisible. Perhaps O2K has come close to this?
For convenience in routing and for quick and dirty filtering of viri (eg, with Perl), we kept our one ancient UNIX SMTP machine on the outer end that easily handles the load, with most users mailboxes sitting on a farm of Exchange servers inside away from the hostile internet at large.
Exchange is a reasonable solution for PC users, better than many of the older technologies. And, it makes an effort to accomodate Mac users, too. UNIX users can talk to it via any IMAP MUA if they wish, or use fetchmail if they don't care to have their mail sitting in some foreign format on a foreign machine.
I recall our comparison and evaluation process from 2 years ago showed Exchange to be neck and neck and just a hair above Domino at the time. Since both products have improved since then, you should really evaluate both of those for your needs.
I think Tet's point involves price as well as performance.
Basically, if your lottery tickets were priced based on the number of tickets sold, that you would know exactly if you were getting your money's worth of probability.
Like, for example, the multi-state Powerball jackpot with a 1:8e7 chance of winning, with maybe another factor of 3 or 4 thrown in for the annuity boondoggle effect of the prize that is defined as trickled over 20 years - It's not worth paying for a $1 chance unless the jackpot gets in the 2e8 territory.
IIRC, there were actually investment clubs (in Oz?) that would wait for jackpots to get sufficiently high and then run out an purchase a copy of every number.
With processors, I suspect your best performance ratio will lie in the low end. A friend of mine advocates buying the leading edge system for your new computer, but delayed 6 months from the time they were defined as leading edge.
Next month I may replace my 200 MHz K6 with an 800 MHz Duron, but spend more of my upgrade budget on a new graphics card than the motherboard and CPU combined.
So, after two decades have gone by, my earliest lessons that CPU's are the holiest parts of computers have become obsolete, I take your advice and walk from this piddly sandpile.
There's a lot of good sense in Gartner's projections, which, being their projections, probably err a little on the conservative and hedging side of things.
I think the growing importance of the server appliance market is right on the mark.
Since hardware is getting so cheap, what you'll find is increasing appeal for the low software cost barriers of Linux based solutions. And, since Linux is advancing on the multiple fronts of
embedded
real time
enterprise(big SMP)
these solutions will become more ubiquitous on a faster time scale, IMHO.
Indeed, Linux will tunnel thru the mid-range server market to the high end (witness the economical clustering technologies that compensate for Linux current lack of extreme SMP scalability) to eat the lucrative high end business before the conservatives in the mid-range start waking up to the advantages Linux solutions hold for them, too (especially if MS starts charging subscription rates to bring in revenue). The current market divisions of hi/med/lo for Unix/W2K/Linux will cause both the first and the second to disappear, in that order.
I'd say the GPL would work just fine in the same fashion that has been stable (so far) for Linux.
Namely, GPL the source so any and all improvements, random variations are held up for public scrutiny for suitability, then assign a benevolent dictator (Gosling?) without a vested financial interest to retain the trademark.
Let Sun and the other players (including the divisive embedded Java market) assign a few people and some money for them to develop things as they best see fit from a pure technical perspective at "java.org".
If they really decide it's in the best interest of Java® to have libraries like
import java.win32api.*;
then, by all means, let them!
Be brave and put it all on the table! To insure you succeed financially from this, let your best people have 1-2 year internships over in the Marketing Free Zone. When they return, they'll drive your business in ways you can't imagine now.
It's got to be possible to do something like this given the recent hubbub surrounding the GNOME Foundation (although the jury's still out on the longer term health of that particular initiative.)
Thanks for that tip. It looks very much like what would be useful to have.
The question of this topic is one thing I've always wanted to know. But there are two other things.
Is it too expensive to legally set up multiple shell accounts scattered all over to assist in playing shell games (apologies for the pun) about point of origin, destination. Perhaps GNUtella or Freeserve can accomplish the same purpose. If so, I'd like to know.
Social engineering. After you setup your nice email account without a trace of contamination to make it ultra private and secure, it seems pretty much impossible to exchange messages with your security/privacy-oblivious friends and family, who have reflexes that cause them to prepend Nice names for that Nice relative, eg,
"'Christopher Robbin III from Peoria'" <frzx@dhp.com>
which kind of puts a damper on delusions of net grandeur.
One of my friends maintains that democracy fails when
the voters figure out they can vote themselves benefits.
We're pretty well on that track now, given that both major party candidates are using artificially rosy economic projections in combination with plans for increased spending and/or decreased taxes when, last I heard, we still have a US$5,000,000,000,000.00 debt hangover from which to recover.
BTW, the whole premise of hoping to hear news from non-voters suddenly acquiring a fervent desire to express themselves appears fundamentally flawed.
At least this election year, the 2 major party candidates are so close in the race that we can at least hope for them to more adventurously pursue the remainder of the electorate. That will be entertaining, at least, even if the result will still be depressing in the end.
My lecture notes were usually better than the scrawl up on the board.
With a better version, I ought to be able to getter more money for them:).
Seriously, though, I think the same line should be drawn on this as should be drawn on MP3 distribution - distribution for free is OK. If you charge for the copy, then you'd better have a licensing arrangment with the copyright.
Maybe all this confusion and controversy would clear up by a change of nomenclature -- it's no longer "Copyright" but rather Copycharge®
Copycharge ® is a registered trademark of 4of12. All charges reserved!
It was an amazing tour to discover the wildlife and jungle that exists in this market.
What with large carriers contracting out the marketing of their service with a wink and a nudge to slimier subcontractors that slither in tight spaces faster than monthly phone bills come out with your new long distance carrier on it.
Note, interestingly, that while the slimey subcontractor is supposed to take the fall for the slam, that some big company is who your new long distance carrier happens to be. They both win, and your finger ends up pointing at a ghost.
Basically, despite the hullabaloo about requiring verification, Joe Blow can call up the phone company and say that he is an authorized party on, oh, say, your phone number, just giving some other number to call for verification and a physical mailing address of a nephew-in-law where he can respond/ignore snail mail for Joe Blow.
He requests a change of service on your number, the local phone carrier and the long distance companies call for verification to the number that Joe Blow gave them (not your number - the one being slammed!), they change the service, and they mail Joe Blow a check for the number of subscribers he's changed, he dissolves his verification phone number and disappears completely after cashing the check. This can happen within the inside of the 1 month billing cycle that your phone bill is produced, so that by the time you find out something is awry, it's too late!
[This feels like a bad security announcement:) You kidz out there shouldn't try this at home - professional sleazeballs only!]
If you call your state regulatory commission, guess how many voice mails you get to leave before the overworked underpaid bureaucrat gets back to you? Plus, with the telecoms boom, guess whether the state regulatory commission or a commercial outfit will pay better and give better benies? And, given the lobbying by the rich telcos, guess whether such regulatory commissions will ever be sufficiently staffed?
The only thing I can recommend is that you tell your phone company you want a PIC freeze on your service. That will slow down the most egregious slamming, with the negligible cost that if you really do want to change your long distance service you'll have to jump through a few more hoops.
Hardware OpenGL for Linux: Only Half the Solution
on
3dfx Does OpenGL
·
· Score: 2
From the standpoint of the technical computing market, the more industry support for OpenGL hardware in Linux, the better our options.
Between developments like this and some improvement in x86 memory bandwidth, you could start to see develop a tsunami of engineering desktop workstation choices migrate from the low volume, high end, high dollar RISC chips onto a more commoditized x86/Linux basis.
So far, those 2 items have kept many workplaces in the camps of Sun, SGI, HP, IBM and DEC(Compaq) where
> What are the reasons to use Crusoe over Intel and AMD? Its not power useage
Oh, I don't know, but I think power consumption is an issue. And, since you asked, here are:
REAL Benchmark Criteria for Laptop Computers:
When you walk the full circuit of DFW airport with your laptop, how deep are the welts left where the carrying strap indents your shoulder?
While you wait for the connecting flight and "do work", how many minutes can you go before you need to move the laptop around to keep your lap from getting scorched?
For the typical excessively delayed connecting flights, how long will that baby run without an umbilical AC power cord? Will you need to go to the high priced Gift/News shop due to premature battery death?
The Crusoe might not beat the latest flat-out performance figures of the conventional high speed x86 chip offerrings by companies with R&D budgets orders of magnitude larger than Transmeta, but it does address some REAL benchmarks.
Thanks. I have long been fond both of UNIX and that quirky style of the Socialist Realism artwork - it's almost as funny as some of the modern corporate advertising imagery such as high tech, slim, withit, blonde HP power lady skipping over the floor polishing machine, no doubt working hard after hours and Getting Things Done (years before Carly Fiorina arrived); or the man with the Jeep and cell phone in the woods Being Individualistic but Getting Business Done on His Own Terms.
All that aside, as a UNIX user I've always noticed the peculiar skirmishes going on between two other camps of computer users: Wintel and Mac. LOTS of people would use Windows, of course, but the Wintel crowd was heavy on beancounters, people wearing suits that are NOT fashionable but rather purchased for large amounts of dollars and meant to portend power. Those folks didn't seem to have a very well-developed sense of humor. We don't know why it is ubiquitous, but then, so is television.
The Mac crowd was heavy on artists and academics, freethinkers that love birds and sushi, sometimes dressing in black shirts with the top button buttonned. Often, though, they didn't care much about clothes except as another decorative expression. We know the Mac users are in the minority and they know they're in the minority, and we never know if they'll be doomed two years from now. It reminds us of lovers standing in the breeze on the bow of the Titanic.
UNIX has had a mythos from long ago. As a student in the late 1970's, strolling along a corridor in a physics building (Caltech had more than one physics building, but only one humanities building), I could see where some graduate student had plastered a printout with the word "Unix" on it, very much as a Statement. Just as now, in my large scale workplace, some of the Mac users don't have plain drab just the nametext nameplates next to their doors - they have an identifying colored rainbow apple next to the name text.
No, I don't think the US has any particularly good reputation for welcoming foreigners.
The same xenophobia about "them damfurrineers taking jobs away from redblooded Mericans" exists here as it does in the UK, with its National Front, in France, where similar parties prey upon fears of the Algerians, and in Germany, where there is unease over the Turkish Gastarbeiters, and in Japan, where the few Koreans allowed in bounce against glass walls all the time.
Despite the heavy influx of immigrants into American in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the only welcoming arms were the ideals scratched on the statue of liberty. Russian Jews fleeing pogroms 1900, the Italians in 1920s (Sacco and Venzetti, anyone?), even the Irish Catholics back in the 1840s all faced considerable discrimination way back before modern times.
I agree that the INS bureaucratic foot dragging has to stop as part of any plan to increase H1Bs. It's not just the decent thing to do, but it happens to be intelligent and make sense, as well. Not only does the expanding IT field get qualified people (that would otherwise be the best tractor fixers in their home countries) to help it grow, but, for a change, America gets a little more diverse culture injected into it, which can only help given our usual blinders to what's happening in the rest of the world. If we're so short-sighted to not go out and learn about the rest of the world, then let some of the rest of the world come to us and teach us that we don't know everything and not everyone thinks like US.
I didn't really start to appreciate the value of the international news section of newspapers until I spent a few months abroad, where the only American news was located in that section of the paper!
P.S. I know that foreign accents are sometimes difficult to understand, but I've always found the effort to understand someone is worth it. If you've ever tried to pluck words from a memorized vocabulary of less than 1K words in a foreign country in hard RealTime to people with confused scowls on their faces you'll cut them some slack.
I agree that Joe Sixpack will probably just get a Duron for Christmas since it's advertised to go more Megahurts (see the Register)than Intel and will be cheaper and more available.
Personally, it's really nice to see some competition out there in hardware land, but the corporate buyers at my workplace don't worry as much about
MHz (a forgeable performance metric)
my tasks/unit time (a better metric)
the initial price
so much as the demonstrated reliability and trouble-free operation over the past 3 years. What those buyers are worried more about is how much it will cost to maintain that box over the next 3 years, i.e., how many visits required by a support tech.
That basically means, in x86 Windoze compatible land, that you get Dells with Intel chips, expensive RDRAM notwithstanding, since they have historically been rated as the most reliable.
I love the Athlon and would like to get a NICE DDR Thunderbird system so it wouldn't be so starved for memory. By NICE, I mean with redundantly extravagant cooling fans with quiet ball bearings and a large Ultra160 disk with high MTBF and low noise/heat.
But Guess What?!? All the OEMs see AMD and think,
"Hmmm...what kind of cheap 5hit components can I throw together and make a profit selling?"
The only alternative is to build your own Athlon system. But I think it shows where there are gaps in marketplace based on building a solid AMD based system. Until someone puts together solid AMD-based systems for 3 years running, or gets Dell to abandon its Intel-only policy, there won't be the penetration and competition in the corporate marketplace to give those buyers a real choice and reasonable prices.
All the performance leading technology that the K7 or K8 can muster won't change this reality.
Make some clear rules, then let the markets adjust accordingly.
Corporations run amorally - and I don't mean that in a negative way - they are run to provide maximum return to their shareholders. Period. Every action and expenditure should be directed to that end or management is not doing its job.
That said, in the current political environment there is some incentive for large corporations to appear as somewhat concerned about issues that are not obviously related to making a profit. Eg, oil companies with glossy advertisements showing tropical rainforests and how their exploration is sensitive, etc. They're concerned about their public image in an political context where public opinion affects their profitability. In some cases, there are actual monies spent on things (more than advertising) such as United Way contributions, etc. Probably not as much expenditure in the long term general weal as we would like, but some nonetheless.
The key is making and implementing intelligent rules so that corporations can then adjust accordingly. If you don't like gasoline sinking into the groundwater and ruining life for your grandchildren, then make rules so there is a current cost associated with so polluting a common resource. If you don't want kids in India shoved into factories at age 6 making rugs for $0.25/day instead of going to school, then make the right rules in India so that such short-term profitable decisions will go in the direction that you perceive to be better. If you don't like the cultural homogenezation of Walmart or McDonald's, then patronize the more expensive MomNPop stores, or make the B2B price posting rules such that MomNPop collectives can get negotiate some of same good deals that the Walmart wholesale buyer can get (even if the distribution costs for MomNPop are still high).
If you're really adventurous, try boosting the inheritance tax to make a government pension plan one of the largest stockholders, then let Joe Sixpack vote for the representative that trades-off clean air for EPS as he sees fit.
You won't have an easy time pushing rules through that cause short term costs to increase for corporations to promote your favorite long-term benefit.
IIRC, various corporate interests were quite dead set against the government creating the Grand Canyon National Park back in the first part of this century, though it's regarded as pretty safely set now and you'd be hard-pressed to find much of the public in favor of opening it up to rampant development.
Today's wild progressive ideas (copyright and patent law changes, anyone?) will eventually be hashed out so that in 50 years they'll be regarded as an ordinary part of the cultural landscape and taken for granted.
I have to wonder if the release of RSA into the public domain has anything to do with this development I saw headlined at Securityportal about another (um, proprietary, too) encryption algorithm, NTRUE
I would love it if a new legal finding was made that US Patent Law had to be reinterpreted because the original specification had a faded decimal point - that the intent was to provide patents for 1.7 years instead of 17 years.
By and large, it's true that small and mid sized businesses can get by OK buying a supposed "turnkey" GUI installable system from MS.
As your enterprise scales up in size, though, the complexities get to be too much for Joe Boss that has already bought-in to the Colorized Interlocking Puzzle (TM) at the small scale.
The real pain only begins at the enterprise, where IT knows they have to have Word and Excel running (on Windows due to the Puzzle Principle) because that's what every secretary learned to use and every office manager knows how to run. The support and integration costs of the CIP (TM) (see box for illustration) are enormous - but large enterprises figure they don't have any choice to buying hugely expensive site licences for each and every Puzzle Piece.)
Since most of MS revenue comes out of corporate IT buying, (motivated by the fear of Bad BallSquishing Things happening if you don't buy all your puzzle pieces from Redmond) the CIP paradigm has turned into a fantastic cash cow for MS.
The key irony to this revenue generating dream cow is that when MS uses their own CIP-ware, they, too, must have to contend with the technical (not financial, alas) issues of pieces that don't quite fit. (eg, upgrading your server to 2K and ADS no-going-back dilemma, Office 11 won't run on 3.1, etc.) This is your little revenge on MS Marketing for building-in backward incompatibilities that force you to upgrade.
Fortunately, the risk takers of IT (and at MS, evidently) have been able to figure out how to get some of benefits of software commoditization offered by *nix without paying the tollbooth at MS for what amounts to standard services by selectively buying/downloading gray rubber pieces like SAMBA from *nix.
Pardon the digression, but this is where Bill G. hit the nail right on his thumb about how
...if cars were computers they'd be getting 2000 miles per gallon and cost 5 cents if they followed the same trends established in the computer industry
He carefully lumped software along for the ride where hardware deserved the credit and provided all the muscle for the 2000 mpg figure of merit.
People are just beginning to realize that maybe they can get the same kind of commoditization from opensource software and nonproprietary standards.
But, this is not to say that Linux/Unix has the problem solved at the enterprise level either, by any means. It has a way to go before managing 2000 desktops on 50 subnets with different departmental software requirements gets to be reasonable. The NIS path of Solaris works OK for smaller groups, but I'd like to see a hierarchal scaleable LDAP based scheme for larger setups that not only takes care of user authentication, and other NIS stuff, but also makes a reasonable stab at software updating. It's a difficult problem that SMS shows has yet to be completely solved. Plus, most Linux users are cowboys that resist riding in externally-administered corrals, so there is real long way to go on the desktop...
The ailment of disconnection that you describe in our democracy doesn't have much to do with technology.
The state of affairs is now just as it was decades or centuries earlier -- the important voices of influence, as measured by wealth, will connect up with political candidates that want, or need access to that wealth, and simply because those candidates can have an impact on how much of that wealth the established can retain in a new political environment.
The fact that technology makes it possible for Joe Politician in California to talk with Jon the Homeless Person in New Hampshire for 2 hours via live video streaming does not mean that it will happen, any more than Grover Cleveland went into bars to ask average Americans what the real problems were and how they though they might be fixed for hours on end. It didn't happen then and it's not happenning now.
You're quite aware that most "interactions" and town meetings these days have pretty strict choreography for the candidates (Nod; look concerned, identify with Underdog against some Big Bad Them, roll up that shirt sleeve, etc.), so that the real issues raised by people get only lip service.
Most people don't care about politics because the politicians simply aren't genuinely interested in hearing them. It suffices for their campaigns to do some heavy-handed drift-net style political TV advertisement that gets enough of the easy votes on emotional push-buttons rather than talking and listening one-on-one to people with thorny issues that, to resolve, would require making decisions against the grain of some backer.
Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan are patent evidence that we will continue to get the accomplished TV actors that we deserve. Whether the actors that we elect also happen to have brains, guts, temper, or principles behind the facade will not be made explicitly known to you or I. It's too risky to their campaigns to market them as anything short of being full of guts, full of compassion, full of brains, etc. So you must guess.
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Alas, the lessons of the political season are so soon forgotten!
Did it not occur to you that Ballmer's words are directed towards an audience in the government, courts, the press, congress and the new administration to support their earlier claim that Linux is a real competitor and that their so-called monopoly was precariously in danger of being overturned by the rapid changes in the IT field? (You know - the changes in IT - the ones that result from MSInnovation to Windows, etc. that Redmond alone should be allowed to continue to do, just like Sun alone should be able to do to Java?)
Ballmer's announcement thus serves that purpose primarily, and only secondarily as a trumpet charge for a FUD barrage. (Expect: "If Linux wasn't such a threat then we wouldn't have mounted such a campaign!")
In reality, the inertia of the installed base of Win16, Win32 programs and the MS lock on the definition of .doc, .xls and .ppt as well as the unavoidable, Win9x-came-pre-installed-on-MyComputer upgrade path to backward incompatibility and need for future purchases of MSware can pretty much be manipulated at will to provided the proper balance between a revenue cash cow and the appearance of proper competition for the benefit of Ballmer's intended audience.
Expect the big guns not to be brought out until the DOJ annoyance has been either settled or safely litigated into an interminable appeals process.
Sheesh, as if it weren't bad enough that they've already bought stakes in both Apple and Corel to keep some well behaved toy competitors!
[I've said this before when the US patent system has been the topic of a posting.]
The length of time for patent protection of inventions should be shortened from 17 years to 17 months.
On 2nd thought, with the ridiculousness factor increasing so fast, perhaps the time protection should be shortened to 17 seconds.
I hate it when this crap happens.
The question then is this
People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either of them being made.
The reason software still sucks, by in large, has been the lack of market competition in this arena. If users could choose between A and B versions of software based on how much less they sucked than the other, then we'd see less suckiness.
Unfortunately, there haven't been enough viable alternatives in the software market. These days, software marketers are pretty much hosed unless they support Win32 because that's what runs on My PC ®. The Mac flash in the pan is effectively gone, and Linux desktop use can no more overcome the inertia of the installed base any more than WinME or Whistler will. There, suckiness has been measured practically by how many problems are encountered installing and using the latest software on a hoary old Win95 box. Backward compatibility is the paramount measure of suckiness. That immediately shows how important standards are in this business.
There is a desperate need for a slowly growing pyramid of standardization, with just a fringe of featuritis that gets encompassed by a growing set of standards. And, if any company locks up the standards and charges a toll to create barriers to market entry, then we can't get the best level of competition based on suckiness, any more than you can get competition in your local electric or phone provider. The higher levels of the pyramid cannot be built best on opaque stones that turn out to have insuffcient strength for an unforeseen future application.
IMHO, the real revolution in less sucky software won't arrive until higher level software components become standardized and free, from the lowest to the penultimate level.
Where I live (just south of Houston), I can't get cablemodem access and I can't get DSL.
Exactly!!!!
I'm in the same boat. I live on the fringe of a large metropolitan area in a semi-rural area on a 2 acre lot. I'm about 1/2 mile from the cable provider (so I get DSS TV) and my local telco is not in any big hurry to wire up my CO for DSL since it is a much better investment for them to go for the higher population density areas first.
Therefore, for your market, look to the fringe where they are not.
The key hurdle for me and most other consumers is cost. If wireless net access gives me significantly more speed than ~33kb/56kb and does not cost more than say $60/month, then I'm game. But, so far as I can tell, the charges for wireless net access are higher than that, putting it out of my reach and limiting your market size.
High bw and reasonably low latency (hard, I know) would be a real boon for me - I'd start looking into using VoIP for long distance
Hey! We're the other site in the world that actually uses FrameMaker. All of our management and beancounting types just use Word, but everyone here that got accustomed to Frame on Suns found that Word sucked by comparison. We do heavy technical report writing, a niche market that Word does not address as well as Frame.
My biggest pet peeve with Word has been the default keyboard mappings - my fingers have been hardwired to use various emacs-like motion commands for ctrl-a, ctrl-f, etc. AFAIK, you cannot remap the key functions for Word to be something you like (while the converse is true - a Word user could get Emacs keys rebound to be more word-like if they wished).
The big problem has been that the chasm between Linux and old Sun hardware (where we run Frame now) is too great. We may be migrating to Linux soon, but it looks as if we'll just use StarOffice for WYSIWYG document processing, or run VMWare with Word, while die-hards techies like me will cling to TeX and variants for the ultimate beauty of mathematics typesetting, bravely withstanding the ferocious cold blasts of programming and debugging that are required to get what you want from TeX.
I keep looking to see if DocBook has progressed to the point where one can do reasonable jobs on mathematics typesetting for hardcopy and include various graphics formats. Likewise I keep holding out for an solid universal format like XML for my documents. My wishlist concurs with yours - perhaps someone with a need and a brain can get OpenOffice to address technical typesetting issues better and help out on XML export of the files.
My TeX files from 10+ years ago are still of value, while binary proprietary word processing formats from 10 years ago are about as useful as an election run by Floridians.
Too bad Adobe has dropped Frame for Linux from our perspective. We would have been a site that actually would have paid money for Frame on Linux, though I know that they need enough of a customer base to justify the effort. Still, we're talking about a couple hundred seats at several hundred US$ per seat, although the floating license might trim that down somewhat. It's lost revenue that Adobe won't see because of this decision. Beats me why they bought Frame in the first place.
Most of the RISC/UNIX camp are already in 64 bit land, having just emerged from several years of teething pains.
Check out:
In many cases the chip hardware has reached 64 bit before the OS has. Most of this development has been below the radar in the mainstream press because the solutions are not Wintel.
Extrapolating the story here suggests the Transmeta approach of using VLIW to emulate lower bit width processors can help to compensate for the slow rate of change in OS.
Also, it suggests there might be practical merit in the AMD K8 approach of abusing 64 bits for double 32 bit processing.
The kernel is as fast as it's going to get...
I know the kernel does a good job with speed. However, it is NEVER fast enough. There is always some more tuning that can be done, somewhere.
Suppose, for the sake of argument that I'm a dolt that wants to run Linux fast.
Either that, or I'm too lazy or have too many other things going past due that I cannot afford to spend days poring over documentation to get up to speed about tuning Linux for my particular piece of hardware and set of applications. My time costs more than the hardware does.
How about a compile time option to run with profiling?
Let the kernel measure how many httpd's get spawned for your 4 high speed NICs under typical loadings for a week, or, alternately, how much interactive response you need for a framebuffer using DRI if you happen to be using your system for desktop abuse. Then, let the kernel be recompiled with this information.
The kernel developers are doing a fantastic job, but it's always bothered me that many of contentious algorithms (eg, picking the process to kill on OOM, a recent example of where heuristics enter the arguments) can't be tailored more to the particulars of the situation.
Perhaps kernel modules can accomplish the same effect without the need to resort to recompilation. The key thing is that the algorithms and settings should be
By in large, though, I've been pretty happy with Linux development. The improved NFS performance was my biggest gripe until lately.
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The great thing about Exchange is that the mail stays on the server,
That is most definitely a mixed blessing.
Pro: Usual PC users are accustomed to "shutting off their PC at night.", so having the mailbox sit on a nominal 24x7 server is great. Also, many PC users were first introduced to the internet via an ISP over a 28k modem with intermittent connections, so having mailboxes sit elsewhere than their PC seems natural. (Me, OTOH, got my first email in the 1980's on a minicomputer up all the time, the same machine did both the MTA and the MUA.) The first few months after our Exchange rollout there were a few hiccoughs in availability, but no more than you would realistically expect from an MS enterprise solution. They were annoying but not unbearable for the users. To be fair, things have been running pretty smoothly since then.
Con: (1) Our several thousand corporate users (who dumbly send...ummm...those ".doc" RFC- compliant, IETF-approved, standard attachments to each other in megadroves alongside the famous ".ppt" and ".xls" standardized formats of legendary openness, vendor-neutrality, cross-platform interoperability, zero cost and other Good Things:) are constantly bumping up against disk space limits in their mailbox areas and subsequent headaches with moving to local folders, etc. in a way that does not cause munging of Read/Unread status, disappearing folders, etc.
Con: (2) Laptop RoadWarriors find that plain Outlook takes too long to download and update. The running joke is to dial-in to the corporate Exchange server before dinner, eat, then come back to your hotel room after dinner to look at your daily email. And, heaven help you if the connection gets disrupted at any point. Outlook Express alleviates the download time problem to some extent, but still suffers from corrupted state/locking issues if the connection is interrupted. This kind of remote locking and status updating is, IMHO, an unsolved problem, so any implementation will suffer from it - the holy grail will be to minimize it to the point where it is practically invisible. Perhaps O2K has come close to this?
For convenience in routing and for quick and dirty filtering of viri (eg, with Perl), we kept our one ancient UNIX SMTP machine on the outer end that easily handles the load, with most users mailboxes sitting on a farm of Exchange servers inside away from the hostile internet at large.
Exchange is a reasonable solution for PC users, better than many of the older technologies. And, it makes an effort to accomodate Mac users, too. UNIX users can talk to it via any IMAP MUA if they wish, or use fetchmail if they don't care to have their mail sitting in some foreign format on a foreign machine.
I recall our comparison and evaluation process from 2 years ago showed Exchange to be neck and neck and just a hair above Domino at the time. Since both products have improved since then, you should really evaluate both of those for your needs.
HTH.
I think Tet's point involves price as well as performance.
Basically, if your lottery tickets were priced based on the number of tickets sold, that you would know exactly if you were getting your money's worth of probability.
Like, for example, the multi-state Powerball jackpot with a 1:8e7 chance of winning, with maybe another factor of 3 or 4 thrown in for the annuity boondoggle effect of the prize that is defined as trickled over 20 years - It's not worth paying for a $1 chance unless the jackpot gets in the 2e8 territory.
IIRC, there were actually investment clubs (in Oz?) that would wait for jackpots to get sufficiently high and then run out an purchase a copy of every number.
With processors, I suspect your best performance ratio will lie in the low end. A friend of mine advocates buying the leading edge system for your new computer, but delayed 6 months from the time they were defined as leading edge.
Next month I may replace my 200 MHz K6 with an 800 MHz Duron, but spend more of my upgrade budget on a new graphics card than the motherboard and CPU combined.
So, after two decades have gone by, my earliest lessons that CPU's are the holiest parts of computers have become obsolete, I take your advice and walk from this piddly sandpile.
There's a lot of good sense in Gartner's projections, which, being their projections, probably err a little on the conservative and hedging side of things.
I think the growing importance of the server appliance market is right on the mark.
Since hardware is getting so cheap, what you'll find is increasing appeal for the low software cost barriers of Linux based solutions. And, since Linux is advancing on the multiple fronts of
- embedded
- real time
- enterprise(big SMP)
these solutions will become more ubiquitous on a faster time scale, IMHO.Indeed, Linux will tunnel thru the mid-range server market to the high end (witness the economical clustering technologies that compensate for Linux current lack of extreme SMP scalability) to eat the lucrative high end business before the conservatives in the mid-range start waking up to the advantages Linux solutions hold for them, too (especially if MS starts charging subscription rates to bring in revenue). The current market divisions of hi/med/lo for Unix/W2K/Linux will cause both the first and the second to disappear, in that order.
I'd say the GPL would work just fine in the same fashion that has been stable (so far) for Linux.
Namely, GPL the source so any and all improvements, random variations are held up for public scrutiny for suitability, then assign a benevolent dictator (Gosling?) without a vested financial interest to retain the trademark.Let Sun and the other players (including the divisive embedded Java market) assign a few people and some money for them to develop things as they best see fit from a pure technical perspective at "java.org".
If they really decide it's in the best interest of Java® to have libraries like
then, by all means, let them!Be brave and put it all on the table! To insure you succeed financially from this, let your best people have 1-2 year internships over in the Marketing Free Zone. When they return, they'll drive your business in ways you can't imagine now.
It's got to be possible to do something like this given the recent hubbub surrounding the GNOME Foundation (although the jury's still out on the longer term health of that particular initiative.)
Cool.
Thanks for that tip. It looks very much like what would be useful to have.
The question of this topic is one thing I've always wanted to know. But there are two other things.
- Is it too expensive to legally set up multiple shell accounts scattered all over to assist in playing shell games (apologies for the pun) about point of origin, destination. Perhaps GNUtella or Freeserve can accomplish the same purpose. If so, I'd like to know.
- Social engineering. After you setup your nice email account without a trace of contamination to make it ultra private and secure, it seems pretty much impossible to exchange messages with your security/privacy-oblivious friends and family, who have reflexes that cause them to prepend Nice names for that Nice relative, eg,
which kind of puts a damper on delusions of net grandeur.One of my friends maintains that democracy fails when
We're pretty well on that track now, given that both major party candidates are using artificially rosy economic projections in combination with plans for increased spending and/or decreased taxes when, last I heard, we still have a US$5,000,000,000,000.00 debt hangover from which to recover.
BTW, the whole premise of hoping to hear news from non-voters suddenly acquiring a fervent desire to express themselves appears fundamentally flawed.
At least this election year, the 2 major party candidates are so close in the race that we can at least hope for them to more adventurously pursue the remainder of the electorate. That will be entertaining, at least, even if the result will still be depressing in the end.
Hmmmm...
My lecture notes were usually better than the scrawl up on the board.
With a better version, I ought to be able to getter more money for them:).
Seriously, though, I think the same line should be drawn on this as should be drawn on MP3 distribution - distribution for free is OK. If you charge for the copy, then you'd better have a licensing arrangment with the copyright.
Maybe all this confusion and controversy would clear up by a change of nomenclature -- it's no longer "Copyright" but rather Copycharge®
Copycharge ® is a registered trademark of 4of12. All charges reserved!
It was an amazing tour to discover the wildlife and jungle that exists in this market.
What with large carriers contracting out the marketing of their service with a wink and a nudge to slimier subcontractors that slither in tight spaces faster than monthly phone bills come out with your new long distance carrier on it.
Note, interestingly, that while the slimey subcontractor is supposed to take the fall for the slam, that some big company is who your new long distance carrier happens to be. They both win, and your finger ends up pointing at a ghost.
Basically, despite the hullabaloo about requiring verification, Joe Blow can call up the phone company and say that he is an authorized party on, oh, say, your phone number, just giving some other number to call for verification and a physical mailing address of a nephew-in-law where he can respond/ignore snail mail for Joe Blow.
He requests a change of service on your number, the local phone carrier and the long distance companies call for verification to the number that Joe Blow gave them (not your number - the one being slammed!), they change the service, and they mail Joe Blow a check for the number of subscribers he's changed, he dissolves his verification phone number and disappears completely after cashing the check. This can happen within the inside of the 1 month billing cycle that your phone bill is produced, so that by the time you find out something is awry, it's too late!
[This feels like a bad security announcement:) You kidz out there shouldn't try this at home - professional sleazeballs only!]
If you call your state regulatory commission, guess how many voice mails you get to leave before the overworked underpaid bureaucrat gets back to you? Plus, with the telecoms boom, guess whether the state regulatory commission or a commercial outfit will pay better and give better benies? And, given the lobbying by the rich telcos, guess whether such regulatory commissions will ever be sufficiently staffed?
The only thing I can recommend is that you tell your phone company you want a PIC freeze on your service. That will slow down the most egregious slamming, with the negligible cost that if you really do want to change your long distance service you'll have to jump through a few more hoops.
From the standpoint of the technical computing market, the more industry support for OpenGL hardware in Linux, the better our options.
Between developments like this and some improvement in x86 memory bandwidth, you could start to see develop a tsunami of engineering desktop workstation choices migrate from the low volume, high end, high dollar RISC chips onto a more commoditized x86/Linux basis.
So far, those 2 items have kept many workplaces in the camps of Sun, SGI, HP, IBM and DEC(Compaq) where
remains as true as ever.Oh, I don't know, but I think power consumption is an issue. And, since you asked, here are:
REAL Benchmark Criteria for Laptop Computers:
The Crusoe might not beat the latest flat-out performance figures of the conventional high speed x86 chip offerrings by companies with R&D budgets orders of magnitude larger than Transmeta, but it does address some REAL benchmarks.
Da. UNIX vill make kountry stronk.
Thanks. I have long been fond both of UNIX and that quirky style of the Socialist Realism artwork - it's almost as funny as some of the modern corporate advertising imagery such as high tech, slim, withit, blonde HP power lady skipping over the floor polishing machine, no doubt working hard after hours and Getting Things Done (years before Carly Fiorina arrived); or the man with the Jeep and cell phone in the woods Being Individualistic but Getting Business Done on His Own Terms.
All that aside, as a UNIX user I've always noticed the peculiar skirmishes going on between two other camps of computer users: Wintel and Mac. LOTS of people would use Windows, of course, but the Wintel crowd was heavy on beancounters, people wearing suits that are NOT fashionable but rather purchased for large amounts of dollars and meant to portend power. Those folks didn't seem to have a very well-developed sense of humor. We don't know why it is ubiquitous, but then, so is television.
The Mac crowd was heavy on artists and academics, freethinkers that love birds and sushi, sometimes dressing in black shirts with the top button buttonned. Often, though, they didn't care much about clothes except as another decorative expression. We know the Mac users are in the minority and they know they're in the minority, and we never know if they'll be doomed two years from now. It reminds us of lovers standing in the breeze on the bow of the Titanic.UNIX has had a mythos from long ago. As a student in the late 1970's, strolling along a corridor in a physics building (Caltech had more than one physics building, but only one humanities building), I could see where some graduate student had plastered a printout with the word "Unix" on it, very much as a Statement. Just as now, in my large scale workplace, some of the Mac users don't have plain drab just the nametext nameplates next to their doors - they have an identifying colored rainbow apple next to the name text.
The myths live on.
No, I don't think the US has any particularly good reputation for welcoming foreigners.
The same xenophobia about "them damfurrineers taking jobs away from redblooded Mericans" exists here as it does in the UK, with its National Front, in France, where similar parties prey upon fears of the Algerians, and in Germany, where there is unease over the Turkish Gastarbeiters, and in Japan, where the few Koreans allowed in bounce against glass walls all the time.
Despite the heavy influx of immigrants into American in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the only welcoming arms were the ideals scratched on the statue of liberty. Russian Jews fleeing pogroms 1900, the Italians in 1920s (Sacco and Venzetti, anyone?), even the Irish Catholics back in the 1840s all faced considerable discrimination way back before modern times.
I agree that the INS bureaucratic foot dragging has to stop as part of any plan to increase H1Bs. It's not just the decent thing to do, but it happens to be intelligent and make sense, as well. Not only does the expanding IT field get qualified people (that would otherwise be the best tractor fixers in their home countries) to help it grow, but, for a change, America gets a little more diverse culture injected into it, which can only help given our usual blinders to what's happening in the rest of the world. If we're so short-sighted to not go out and learn about the rest of the world, then let some of the rest of the world come to us and teach us that we don't know everything and not everyone thinks like US.
I didn't really start to appreciate the value of the international news section of newspapers until I spent a few months abroad, where the only American news was located in that section of the paper!
P.S. I know that foreign accents are sometimes difficult to understand, but I've always found the effort to understand someone is worth it. If you've ever tried to pluck words from a memorized vocabulary of less than 1K words in a foreign country in hard RealTime to people with confused scowls on their faces you'll cut them some slack.
End O Diatribe.
I agree that Joe Sixpack will probably just get a Duron for Christmas since it's advertised to go more Megahurts (see the Register)than Intel and will be cheaper and more available.
Personally, it's really nice to see some competition out there in hardware land, but the corporate buyers at my workplace don't worry as much about
- MHz (a forgeable performance metric)
- my tasks/unit time (a better metric)
- the initial price
so much as the demonstrated reliability and trouble-free operation over the past 3 years. What those buyers are worried more about is how much it will cost to maintain that box over the next 3 years, i.e., how many visits required by a support tech.That basically means, in x86 Windoze compatible land, that you get Dells with Intel chips, expensive RDRAM notwithstanding, since they have historically been rated as the most reliable.
I love the Athlon and would like to get a NICE DDR Thunderbird system so it wouldn't be so starved for memory. By NICE, I mean with redundantly extravagant cooling fans with quiet ball bearings and a large Ultra160 disk with high MTBF and low noise/heat.
But Guess What?!? All the OEMs see AMD and think,
The only alternative is to build your own Athlon system. But I think it shows where there are gaps in marketplace based on building a solid AMD based system. Until someone puts together solid AMD-based systems for 3 years running, or gets Dell to abandon its Intel-only policy, there won't be the penetration and competition in the corporate marketplace to give those buyers a real choice and reasonable prices.
All the performance leading technology that the K7 or K8 can muster won't change this reality.
I agree, somewhat.
Make some clear rules, then let the markets adjust accordingly.
Corporations run amorally - and I don't mean that in a negative way - they are run to provide maximum return to their shareholders. Period. Every action and expenditure should be directed to that end or management is not doing its job.
That said, in the current political environment there is some incentive for large corporations to appear as somewhat concerned about issues that are not obviously related to making a profit. Eg, oil companies with glossy advertisements showing tropical rainforests and how their exploration is sensitive, etc. They're concerned about their public image in an political context where public opinion affects their profitability. In some cases, there are actual monies spent on things (more than advertising) such as United Way contributions, etc. Probably not as much expenditure in the long term general weal as we would like, but some nonetheless.
The key is making and implementing intelligent rules so that corporations can then adjust accordingly. If you don't like gasoline sinking into the groundwater and ruining life for your grandchildren, then make rules so there is a current cost associated with so polluting a common resource. If you don't want kids in India shoved into factories at age 6 making rugs for $0.25/day instead of going to school, then make the right rules in India so that such short-term profitable decisions will go in the direction that you perceive to be better. If you don't like the cultural homogenezation of Walmart or McDonald's, then patronize the more expensive MomNPop stores, or make the B2B price posting rules such that MomNPop collectives can get negotiate some of same good deals that the Walmart wholesale buyer can get (even if the distribution costs for MomNPop are still high).
If you're really adventurous, try boosting the inheritance tax to make a government pension plan one of the largest stockholders, then let Joe Sixpack vote for the representative that trades-off clean air for EPS as he sees fit.
You won't have an easy time pushing rules through that cause short term costs to increase for corporations to promote your favorite long-term benefit.
IIRC, various corporate interests were quite dead set against the government creating the Grand Canyon National Park back in the first part of this century, though it's regarded as pretty safely set now and you'd be hard-pressed to find much of the public in favor of opening it up to rampant development.
Today's wild progressive ideas (copyright and patent law changes, anyone?) will eventually be hashed out so that in 50 years they'll be regarded as an ordinary part of the cultural landscape and taken for granted.
I have to wonder if the release of RSA into the public domain has anything to do with this development I saw headlined at Securityportal about another (um, proprietary, too) encryption algorithm, NTRUE
I would love it if a new legal finding was made that US Patent Law had to be reinterpreted because the original specification had a faded decimal point - that the intent was to provide patents for 1.7 years instead of 17 years.
By and large, it's true that small and mid sized businesses can get by OK buying a supposed "turnkey" GUI installable system from MS.
As your enterprise scales up in size, though, the complexities get to be too much for Joe Boss that has already bought-in to the Colorized Interlocking Puzzle (TM) at the small scale.
The real pain only begins at the enterprise, where IT knows they have to have Word and Excel running (on Windows due to the Puzzle Principle) because that's what every secretary learned to use and every office manager knows how to run. The support and integration costs of the CIP (TM) (see box for illustration) are enormous - but large enterprises figure they don't have any choice to buying hugely expensive site licences for each and every Puzzle Piece.)
Since most of MS revenue comes out of corporate IT buying, (motivated by the fear of Bad BallSquishing Things happening if you don't buy all your puzzle pieces from Redmond) the CIP paradigm has turned into a fantastic cash cow for MS.
The key irony to this revenue generating dream cow is that when MS uses their own CIP-ware, they, too, must have to contend with the technical (not financial, alas) issues of pieces that don't quite fit. (eg, upgrading your server to 2K and ADS no-going-back dilemma, Office 11 won't run on 3.1, etc.) This is your little revenge on MS Marketing for building-in backward incompatibilities that force you to upgrade.
Fortunately, the risk takers of IT (and at MS, evidently) have been able to figure out how to get some of benefits of software commoditization offered by *nix without paying the tollbooth at MS for what amounts to standard services by selectively buying/downloading gray rubber pieces like SAMBA from *nix.
Pardon the digression, but this is where Bill G. hit the nail right on his thumb about how
He carefully lumped software along for the ride where hardware deserved the credit and provided all the muscle for the 2000 mpg figure of merit.People are just beginning to realize that maybe they can get the same kind of commoditization from opensource software and nonproprietary standards.
But, this is not to say that Linux/Unix has the problem solved at the enterprise level either, by any means. It has a way to go before managing 2000 desktops on 50 subnets with different departmental software requirements gets to be reasonable. The NIS path of Solaris works OK for smaller groups, but I'd like to see a hierarchal scaleable LDAP based scheme for larger setups that not only takes care of user authentication, and other NIS stuff, but also makes a reasonable stab at software updating. It's a difficult problem that SMS shows has yet to be completely solved. Plus, most Linux users are cowboys that resist riding in externally-administered corrals, so there is real long way to go on the desktop...
The ailment of disconnection that you describe in our democracy doesn't have much to do with technology.
The state of affairs is now just as it was decades or centuries earlier -- the important voices of influence, as measured by wealth, will connect up with political candidates that want, or need access to that wealth, and simply because those candidates can have an impact on how much of that wealth the established can retain in a new political environment.
The fact that technology makes it possible for Joe Politician in California to talk with Jon the Homeless Person in New Hampshire for 2 hours via live video streaming does not mean that it will happen, any more than Grover Cleveland went into bars to ask average Americans what the real problems were and how they though they might be fixed for hours on end. It didn't happen then and it's not happenning now.
You're quite aware that most "interactions" and town meetings these days have pretty strict choreography for the candidates (Nod; look concerned, identify with Underdog against some Big Bad Them, roll up that shirt sleeve, etc.), so that the real issues raised by people get only lip service.
Most people don't care about politics because the politicians simply aren't genuinely interested in hearing them. It suffices for their campaigns to do some heavy-handed drift-net style political TV advertisement that gets enough of the easy votes on emotional push-buttons rather than talking and listening one-on-one to people with thorny issues that, to resolve, would require making decisions against the grain of some backer.
Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan are patent evidence that we will continue to get the accomplished TV actors that we deserve. Whether the actors that we elect also happen to have brains, guts, temper, or principles behind the facade will not be made explicitly known to you or I. It's too risky to their campaigns to market them as anything short of being full of guts, full of compassion, full of brains, etc. So you must guess.
Go back to sleep, it's only a nightmare.