Possibly, but I doubt the viability of an executive strategy like this to work for very long.
Adobe is publicly traded, so "stupid decisions" that compromise the company's long term interests in favor of some adjon should get the executives a good grilling at the next shareholder meeting.
For smaller, privately-held companies the one or two guys at the top should have a majority interest in the company, so "stupid decisions" affect them materially (they would eat their own dogfood) and any "influence" of a larger corporation would have to offset the financial impacts of their "stupid decision".
There are many potential applications of using ZnO transistors that are transparent in the visible spectrum, especially if they can be combined with optoelectronic components that permit emitted or captured light to pass through the electronics.
But from what I recall, Si is also transparent, albeit in the IR band, so the only benefit of going to ZnO is that humans can see through them. Maybe there are other processing advantages to ZnO that permit it to work better with III-V systems?
Not to pick nits, but old style vacuum tubes were largely transparent. So, maybe adding the qualifier of "first solid-state transparent transistor" might be more strictly correct, if it matters to anyone.
At one point I thought there was an idea around to revive vacuum tubes on a micron scale for some applications (displays?).
As the article said, it's a real shame that the standards making body loss the contributions of MS, since their emissaries were regarded well by the rest of the members.
Two things are evident, though.
One, that MS joins standards bodies as part of a public relations and marketing ploy. They find there is some value in being able to use standards as a way to sell their product (eg, the latest "Office does XML"), but their commitment to adhering to standards and to releasing full specifications of their products, which have become de facto standards, is monotonously disappointing.
Second, while the anti-trust investigation by the U.S Department of Justice was underway and the outcome was subject to some chance, their behavior was better. Unfortunately, it seems as if they already know or don't fear the outcome of the EU investigation, or they might make a better effort to uphold standards, which are the essential ingredient for a competitive software marketplace.
At MyCorp the UNIX desktop has moved from Sun to Linux, largely because of the cheaper x86 hardware. Needless to say, FrameMaker users emigrating from Sun are quickly getting an extra reason to be weaned off of Adobe's product because the way they can run it on their Linux box is over the network (mmm, latency) via X from a Sun.
The net outcome will be that more people will use the ubiquitous MS Word, and maybe StarOffice/OpenOffice on Linux, but we'll clearly be buying less Adobe products in the future.
It's got to be strange being an Adobe executive, watching MS eating chunks of your bread and butter business, but having to be nice to them so that you don't get on their shit list when it comes time to get a reasonable head start developing your product for the next version of Windows.
I suppose that higher numbers are better from the perspective of new users comparing products, although the race ahead didn't seem to do Mandrake enough good.
A day shy of April 1 is kind of fishy, though.
Lastly, imagine the chaos that will reign when Redhat releases Red Hat 10.
Yes, it will be "ten", as in the same version as the Apple OS X, also a UNIX.
Oh, but "X" is the windowing system for UNIX, you know, "eks eleven", which is much better than "X10", the same as the clunky old protocol for handling devices around your house. Not Windows, but "X Windows"...
It can be logically argued about exactly where the point of balance should be between full information disclosure about public vulnerabilities and total secrecy.
Like many, I believe that the optimum lies between the two extremes. And I think every situation is different in terms of the trade-offs between the value of public disclosure in warning the public, getting them to take the threat seriously, and the flip sides of inducing needless panic, giving saboteurs a helpful roadmap, etc.
The key issue in my mind is
Who ends up moving the disclosure point and do they have a conflict of interest?
Often it is the government who decides the level of disclosure.
And the problem is a conflict of interest, because sometimes helpful disclosure of information for the public good may make the government, people in the government, or friends of people in the government look bad.
Consequently, you can guess then that the level of disclosure is generally going to be less than the optimum if the government has made bad embarrassing choices in the past, but the level of disclosure may be very high if the government has generally been making good decisions.
India is the world's largest democracy, not the United States of America.
media outlets in different cities and states are typically not as independent as you suggest. Many are owned by a handful of parent corporations and are supported by a very similar cross section of advertisers, subjecting them to similar conforming influential factors.
I agree that the "news" many major Arab dailies dish out are appalling from the standpoint of verifying background facts, sifting through stories for ones to print and to ignore, and weighting editorial opinion.
But, those defects happening there do not by any means imply that U.S. news sources have necessarily reached the pinnacle of journalistic standards for factual, unbiased and independent reporting.
In heavily monitored London, England...the average person is filmed by more than 300 cameras each day.
News Item: Residents of London England are reported to be much more fashionable of late since they became aware of being monitored.
"Yes, I've started combing my hair over my bald spot," said Jack Sprightly, pub owner in the East End.
"I've noticed a lot my customers, too, have started to shave on a more regular basis and to change their clothes before coming over to the pub from working in the garage."
"I'm all in favor of the new surveillance measures if it means `looking smart and proper' for a change."
"Most blokes are in favor of it once they find out the benefits," said Jack. "Many of them haven't had a date in years, but were pleasantly surprised how a few minutes of personal grooming has improved their lot in life."
Given the resounding non-success of the first Itanic chip, HPaq's strategy of not abandoning the PA-RISC architecture until sales of the Itanium 2 machines take off is wise.
Because they're willing to pay a premium for high performance PA-RISC system with loads of processors. Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years. But you're right - if price is the determining decision in the purchase, Lintel is The Way to Go.
Transmeta is putting power consumption first, which is a different angle.
People often speak of CPU power consumption in the same breath as laptops and it's certainly important.
Despite the troubles of RLX and related companies (probably due to the general market downturn more than their specific product), the server market for low power chips will come back.
At some point we'll probably see benchmarks on TPC/kW or Webstones/rack where Transmeta could make a dent.
I was just regurgitating a lesson I saw a couple of years ago where they recommended the bloated date, and said it was preferable to the less descriptive
<date>
2003/03/18
</date>
If you're right about the power of element attributes, then most UNIX config files are only a short distance away from valid XML if the name-value pairs are turned into attributes and the equal sign becomes white space.
I couldn't help but think back to the problem with the Hubble Space Telescope, wherein after the launch they discovered that the mirror had not been properly ground to specification.
As a twist on this, I know people who use XML to describe the syntax of configuration text files that are mostly just full of
name=value
specifications. The text files themselves are left as short, easy to edit by humans, but the computer learns the syntax from the XML.
What would be nice is an emacs mode for automatically shifting between "simple text file mode" and "fully packed in XML air bubbles mode". The former might have fancy highlighting, electric indentation, etc. based on the underlying XML. The latter could show you all the gorey detail, such as dates split up into microscopic elements that can be checked exhaustively in the XML Way for validity.
So statistics are notoriously unreliable for Linux installations since the licensing often doesn't restrict unlimited reproduction nor require registration with a counting authority.
Will someone find it important enough to fund a real Linux deployment census? Will they release that information publicly (either MS or Sun might not)?
Won't anecdotal evidence continue to play the larger role in the success of Linux than measured deployment levels? (Someone said that a major switch by a Fortune 500 company would be a key landmark.)
I agree with the analogy to the groundswell effect that brought the IBM PC into the corporate world in the early 1980s against the IT establishment , who were the last to climb on board in most cases.
So is this any kind of standard WebDAV or just a particular proprietary implementation of similar features in IIS?
I've always been curious about this technology. At one point I even heard talk of a "WebDAV filesystem", but haven't heard of it taking off in any big way yet.
like I would slip up and say, "that is the C-4 enclosed in a linksys router.....damn busted!"
Not a chance you'd slip up there.
I can verify for an absolute certainty that particular router filled with C-4 is installed in my workplace simply by judging by how spectacularly they go down.
I think the most effective CIO's and managers in general have a particularly unfettered view of the world, not swayed by technological buzzwords, nor the need to build ego by spouting them.
Technical knowledge is a real plus for CIOs, but I agree that being able to read people and having good organizational skills are indispensible. Sometimes the former is helpful in the latter, because you can tell if a particular person knows shit or is smoking it. As a matter of fact, I think sometimes it's a wiser CIO that disguises his or her technical ability because they'll get exposed to sides of people that are helpful in the management process.
be better off with simple text files or an in-memory server.
Absolutely.
With the trends in memory pricing and the anecdote of Google's excellent performance being due to keeping so much in memory, I think we'll see the trend to using in-memory db's growing rapidly, whether it be something new, or some increased use of buffer caches in any of the current SQL offerings: Oracle all the way down to MySQL.
Other posters have already suggested that the piece of jewelry be used to store keys for cryptographic purposes. But I have to ask, why use a cumbersome piece of jewelry for that?
I've often thought that mechanical locks and keys have some intrinsic beauty, and they are functional, not requiring electricity, etc.
So why not commission a locksmith to make your and yours a special houselock with exceptionally beautiful keys? Or, if you prefer, car keys?
BTW, about this "must be functional" fetish. Take a piece of advice: don't go compliment your spouse with such gems of flattery as
"Darling, you look especially functional and utilititarian tonight!"
Keyword and search based browsing have really become a big part of my life. I would estimate that more than half the time if I visit a new web page, I got there through Google.
I'd like to see some more creativity in bookmark indexing in my browser (I'm using Moz 1.3) along the lines of
ranks based on rehitting large number of times to that site
intercepting Google entered keywords and then ranking bookmarked pages by number of those keywords contained or the dates visited, date page last updated.
an Amazon.com (others buying this book have bought these other books) feature where "others visiting this page have really like these pages" [I'm sure doubleclick already has this info, but I don't]
In the next ten years I'd like to see SVG blossom as a standard and I'd also like to see some standards take off for 3D (VRML seemed to die) and video scene description, with interactivity.
I think some standards in these areas exist, have been proposed, but I haven't noticed if any are under consideration at W3C. The usual approach seems to be "defer to some plug-in written for the native platform" rather than solidify a web standard.
I love running Mozilla, but I have to say that all the work going into the Mail/News/Calendar efforts don't excite me too much since I've been using Evolution for those tasks.
If work on the basic Gecko HTML renderer and ECMA Script has leveled off, what I'd really like to see is a solid push for robust, cross-platform, standards compliant SVG implementation.
[I know, I know. Being open source, I'm welcome to hack on Moz in any direction I pick. It's just that my progress would be about the same as crossing the Amazonian rainforest with a toenail clipper.]
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly, but I doubt the viability of an executive strategy like this to work for very long.
Adobe is publicly traded, so "stupid decisions" that compromise the company's long term interests in favor of some adjon should get the executives a good grilling at the next shareholder meeting.
For smaller, privately-held companies the one or two guys at the top should have a majority interest in the company, so "stupid decisions" affect them materially (they would eat their own dogfood) and any "influence" of a larger corporation would have to offset the financial impacts of their "stupid decision".
There are many potential applications of using ZnO transistors that are transparent in the visible spectrum, especially if they can be combined with optoelectronic components that permit emitted or captured light to pass through the electronics.
But from what I recall, Si is also transparent, albeit in the IR band, so the only benefit of going to ZnO is that humans can see through them. Maybe there are other processing advantages to ZnO that permit it to work better with III-V systems?
Not to pick nits, but old style vacuum tubes were largely transparent. So, maybe adding the qualifier of "first solid-state transparent transistor" might be more strictly correct, if it matters to anyone.
At one point I thought there was an idea around to revive vacuum tubes on a micron scale for some applications (displays?).
As the article said, it's a real shame that the standards making body loss the contributions of MS, since their emissaries were regarded well by the rest of the members.
Two things are evident, though.
One, that MS joins standards bodies as part of a public relations and marketing ploy. They find there is some value in being able to use standards as a way to sell their product (eg, the latest "Office does XML"), but their commitment to adhering to standards and to releasing full specifications of their products, which have become de facto standards, is monotonously disappointing.
Second, while the anti-trust investigation by the U.S Department of Justice was underway and the outcome was subject to some chance, their behavior was better. Unfortunately, it seems as if they already know or don't fear the outcome of the EU investigation, or they might make a better effort to uphold standards, which are the essential ingredient for a competitive software marketplace.
they move now when UNIX (include MacOS X) is gaining ground
It seems stupid to me for them to make such a proclamation which will only serve to inflame loyal Mac based customers of many years.
It's the same sort of backward move as when they decided to indefinitely discontinue the Linux FrameMaker beta program. [They still support it for the Mac - for now.]
At MyCorp the UNIX desktop has moved from Sun to Linux, largely because of the cheaper x86 hardware. Needless to say, FrameMaker users emigrating from Sun are quickly getting an extra reason to be weaned off of Adobe's product because the way they can run it on their Linux box is over the network (mmm, latency) via X from a Sun.
The net outcome will be that more people will use the ubiquitous MS Word, and maybe StarOffice/OpenOffice on Linux, but we'll clearly be buying less Adobe products in the future.
It's got to be strange being an Adobe executive, watching MS eating chunks of your bread and butter business, but having to be nice to them so that you don't get on their shit list when it comes time to get a reasonable head start developing your product for the next version of Windows.
I suppose that higher numbers are better from the perspective of new users comparing products, although the race ahead didn't seem to do Mandrake enough good.
A day shy of April 1 is kind of fishy, though.
Lastly, imagine the chaos that will reign when Redhat releases Red Hat 10.
Yes, it will be "ten", as in the same version as the Apple OS X, also a UNIX.
Oh, but "X" is the windowing system for UNIX, you know, "eks eleven", which is much better than "X10", the same as the clunky old protocol for handling devices around your house. Not Windows, but "X Windows"...
It'll be like "Who's on First" all over again...
It can be logically argued about exactly where the point of balance should be between full information disclosure about public vulnerabilities and total secrecy.
Like many, I believe that the optimum lies between the two extremes. And I think every situation is different in terms of the trade-offs between the value of public disclosure in warning the public, getting them to take the threat seriously, and the flip sides of inducing needless panic, giving saboteurs a helpful roadmap, etc.
The key issue in my mind is
Often it is the government who decides the level of disclosure.And the problem is a conflict of interest, because sometimes helpful disclosure of information for the public good may make the government, people in the government, or friends of people in the government look bad.
Consequently, you can guess then that the level of disclosure is generally going to be less than the optimum if the government has made bad embarrassing choices in the past, but the level of disclosure may be very high if the government has generally been making good decisions.
Couple things...
I agree that the "news" many major Arab dailies dish out are appalling from the standpoint of verifying background facts, sifting through stories for ones to print and to ignore, and weighting editorial opinion.
But, those defects happening there do not by any means imply that U.S. news sources have necessarily reached the pinnacle of journalistic standards for factual, unbiased and independent reporting.
In heavily monitored London, England...the average person is filmed by more than 300 cameras each day.
News Item: Residents of London England are reported to be much more fashionable of late since they became aware of being monitored.
"Yes, I've started combing my hair over my bald spot," said Jack Sprightly, pub owner in the East End.
"I've noticed a lot my customers, too, have started to shave on a more regular basis and to change their clothes before coming over to the pub from working in the garage."
"I'm all in favor of the new surveillance measures if it means `looking smart and proper' for a change."
"Most blokes are in favor of it once they find out the benefits," said Jack. "Many of them haven't had a date in years, but were pleasantly surprised how a few minutes of personal grooming has improved their lot in life."
What PA-RISC systems?
The ones they've been making for a while and seem like they'll be providing even this year as the new product based on Itanium 2 Madison chips come on line [if Intel provides them].
Given the resounding non-success of the first Itanic chip, HPaq's strategy of not abandoning the PA-RISC architecture until sales of the Itanium 2 machines take off is wise.
why would any new customers buy in to HP-UX?
Because they're willing to pay a premium for high performance PA-RISC system with loads of processors. Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years. But you're right - if price is the determining decision in the purchase, Lintel is The Way to Go.
Transmeta is putting power consumption first, which is a different angle.
People often speak of CPU power consumption in the same breath as laptops and it's certainly important.
Despite the troubles of RLX and related companies (probably due to the general market downturn more than their specific product), the server market for low power chips will come back.
At some point we'll probably see benchmarks on TPC/kW or Webstones/rack where Transmeta could make a dent.
So element attributes are the way to go?
I was just regurgitating a lesson I saw a couple of years ago where they recommended the bloated date, and said it was preferable to the less descriptive
If you're right about the power of element attributes, then most UNIX config files are only a short distance away from valid XML if the name-value pairs are turned into attributes and the equal sign becomes white space.
I couldn't help but think back to the problem with the Hubble Space Telescope, wherein after the launch they discovered that the mirror had not been properly ground to specification.
As a twist on this, I know people who use XML to describe the syntax of configuration text files that are mostly just full of
specifications. The text files themselves are left as short, easy to edit by humans, but the computer learns the syntax from the XML.What would be nice is an emacs mode for automatically shifting between "simple text file mode" and "fully packed in XML air bubbles mode". The former might have fancy highlighting, electric indentation, etc. based on the underlying XML. The latter could show you all the gorey detail, such as dates split up into microscopic elements that can be checked exhaustively in the XML Way for validity.
With the way that the functionality of hardware and software is being exchanged, I'm not surprised to see this.
On the one hand you have Winmodems using cheapo crippled hardware with software performing functions that used to be in hardware.
On the other hand, you have modern network cards ready to offload TCP/IP processing from the OS and to do DMA.
There will be huge rush of "fans" letting RMS know that he is now eligible to join the American Associate of Retired Persons and that "retirement" is a Good Thing, Your Work Here is Done Now, etc.:)
So statistics are notoriously unreliable for Linux installations since the licensing often doesn't restrict unlimited reproduction nor require registration with a counting authority.
Will someone find it important enough to fund a real Linux deployment census? Will they release that information publicly (either MS or Sun might not)?
Won't anecdotal evidence continue to play the larger role in the success of Linux than measured deployment levels? (Someone said that a major switch by a Fortune 500 company would be a key landmark.)
I agree with the analogy to the groundswell effect that brought the IBM PC into the corporate world in the early 1980s against the IT establishment , who were the last to climb on board in most cases.
So is this any kind of standard WebDAV or just a particular proprietary implementation of similar features in IIS?
I've always been curious about this technology. At one point I even heard talk of a "WebDAV filesystem", but haven't heard of it taking off in any big way yet.
like I would slip up and say, "that is the C-4 enclosed in a linksys router.....damn busted!"
Not a chance you'd slip up there.
I can verify for an absolute certainty that particular router filled with C-4 is installed in my workplace simply by judging by how spectacularly they go down.
I think the most effective CIO's and managers in general have a particularly unfettered view of the world, not swayed by technological buzzwords, nor the need to build ego by spouting them.
Technical knowledge is a real plus for CIOs, but I agree that being able to read people and having good organizational skills are indispensible. Sometimes the former is helpful in the latter, because you can tell if a particular person knows shit or is smoking it. As a matter of fact, I think sometimes it's a wiser CIO that disguises his or her technical ability because they'll get exposed to sides of people that are helpful in the management process.
be better off with simple text files or an in-memory server.
Absolutely.
With the trends in memory pricing and the anecdote of Google's excellent performance being due to keeping so much in memory, I think we'll see the trend to using in-memory db's growing rapidly, whether it be something new, or some increased use of buffer caches in any of the current SQL offerings: Oracle all the way down to MySQL.
The general rule of thumb for upgrading it to put it off for as long as you can, and then buy as close to the top of the line as you can afford.
A friend of mine gave me this good advice:
Other posters have already suggested that the piece of jewelry be used to store keys for cryptographic purposes. But I have to ask, why use a cumbersome piece of jewelry for that?
I've often thought that mechanical locks and keys have some intrinsic beauty, and they are functional, not requiring electricity, etc.
So why not commission a locksmith to make your and yours a special houselock with exceptionally beautiful keys? Or, if you prefer, car keys?
BTW, about this "must be functional" fetish. Take a piece of advice: don't go compliment your spouse with such gems of flattery as
Keyword based bookmarks
That sounds like a great idea.
Keyword and search based browsing have really become a big part of my life. I would estimate that more than half the time if I visit a new web page, I got there through Google.
I'd like to see some more creativity in bookmark indexing in my browser (I'm using Moz 1.3) along the lines of
In the next ten years I'd like to see SVG blossom as a standard and I'd also like to see some standards take off for 3D (VRML seemed to die) and video scene description, with interactivity.
I think some standards in these areas exist, have been proposed, but I haven't noticed if any are under consideration at W3C. The usual approach seems to be "defer to some plug-in written for the native platform" rather than solidify a web standard.
I love running Mozilla, but I have to say that all the work going into the Mail/News/Calendar efforts don't excite me too much since I've been using Evolution for those tasks.
If work on the basic Gecko HTML renderer and ECMA Script has leveled off, what I'd really like to see is a solid push for robust, cross-platform, standards compliant SVG implementation.
[I know, I know. Being open source, I'm welcome to hack on Moz in any direction I pick. It's just that my progress would be about the same as crossing the Amazonian rainforest with a toenail clipper.]