Compared to many decades ago when the FCC was formed and for good reason, there's now a lot more ability to precisely control EM radiation and at a lot lower powers. The cost of transmitters and receivers and the advent of digital electronics has changed the situation dramatically.
A lot of convenient devices and applications result from unlicensed spectrum at limited power levels.
Society as a whole stands to benefit if more unlicensed spectrum is made available. Just do it in a way that does not technically (not politically) cause degradation in the licensed uses of the EM spectrum.
You need to learn how to talk to your boss more, listen more, and, after listening, patiently explain with about 2 viewgraphs of bulleted items, the key features of threads and processes, with an even-handed listing of their respective pros and cons.
Then let him make a decision. Tell him your opinion is that pthreads is a better choice for this project, but you'll go with whatever he decides. In turn, express your appreciation for him holding up whatever decision and supporting you whichever way you go.
It wouldn't hurt your case if you explained that you've programmed in pthreads before, are familiar with the pitfalls and have encountered them previously, and think they are outweighed by the advantages. Tell him that only if it's true, though:)
If you really want to test compile on all those exotic UNIX platforms, that's great.
You get extra credit for thinking about cross platform portability, which is closely related to thinking ahead. You'll reap long term rewards in reduced maintenance costs from having less fragile code.
So why not go ahead and buy some of those machines used?
Through `em all together in a room with reliable power and an Ethernet switch and you'll be ready to go. Given that you can get free *NIX flavors on x86 that are good performers, the old boxes are typically quite cheap.
Practically this is helpful in cases where you're running a Linux desktop in a corporate environment.
MyCorp purchases site licenses, which means I get to use Word, though I rarely do on my Linux or Sun box, since it's slow and the user interface aggravates me. But sometimes I can't avoid it, someone sends me a ".doc" attachment in an email. OpenOffice works for most purposes as a valid Word clone, but not in every single instance.
If CodeWeavers can put Office over the network at a reasonable level of interactivity, then there's less reasons to be tied exclusively to Windows desktops in a typical corporation.
After all, what people typically need is a tolerable means for viewing and editing.doc files.
Whether Windows sits underneath ought to be irrelevant.
Are you really implying that if a thief enters my
house and steals a weapon and commits a crime that
*I'm* responsible for his crime?
To reply to this, and to the other poster of hypothetical scenarios prefaced by "someone breaks into my house", the answer is probably no.
OTOH, if you leave your deadly firearm on the passenger seat of an unlocked car and a felon takes it and uses it for unlawful purposes, then I'd be in favor of throwing the book at you for negligence.
The degree to which you must safeguard your weapon must be put to some test of reason by a prudent individuals.
And the test of reasonable protection will depend on just how lethal the weapon is that you own. If you keep your handgun in a locked box in a locked house, great. Reasonable men might agree that's sufficient. But if your collection of 150 Uzi machine guns is stolen from that house, the same people might decide that you were not exercising proper precaution for such a powerful arsenal.
The whole point is that the endemic use of guns in all kinds of crimes in the USA tells me that some people are not being reasonably responsible about their weapons. Gun ownership is a precious right and we should treat it with the seriousness it deserves, certainly more seriously than we do now.
For most people, unsolicited bombardment by advertisements is regarded as "part of life".
It would be really great to change this mindset not only in terms of internet based advertising, but also for telephone direct marketing, bulk mail advertisers, and billboards.
At least with TV and radio there's a transaction of sorts going (not that I want to give credence to Jack Valenti's position that people fast forwarding through commercial messages are "thieves"; it still costs me the inconvenience of fast forwarding, but my cost is less): I get to watch some show I value and suffer some inconvenience of advertising that I suffer.
With billboards, the property owner gets money for placement of the advertisement, but the public gets the mental pollution without gaining any benefit. [I won't buy the argument that being informed of products and services is an inherent benefit: when I want to buy something, I'll research it and find out about it then.]
Sound economic theory can be applied to advertising. Explicitly crediting and charging consumers and producers of advertisements would be a positive step towards making this a reality.
The catch is that getting people to agree that their collective attentions are worth something is a political problem. And the same economic theories that could potentially be applied to advertising are already being applied at the overriding level of what I will call "government services", such as legislation controlling advertising. It is in the financial interest of advertisers to have the public place no value on their attention.
Thus, this good idea will have to wait until the public wakes up.
It's very logical for Microsoft to make Linux software at some point in time.
They're still in the phase where they're fighting tooth and nail to swallow up the server market (as well as the console game, PDA, cell phone, and ISP markets:)
Only when Linux makes more serious inroads into the server market will they commit to a product for Linux. For now, the more profitable strategy is the one they're currently pursuing.
Microsoft's dilemna, though, will be that various free and open source software will fill in the holes of providing MS services on UNIX. SAMBA and Mono, for example. If they released it now, they could own.NET on UNIX, but it would unfavorably leverage against their other strategy of having Windows take over more of the server OS market. The latter strategy puts them more in the drivers seat as far as coming out with new products, calling the shots for upgrade cycles, etc. and is therefore preferable to them at this point in time.
I'd want a jury of my peers. Well, I'm not so sure about that. Some Slashdot posters could be overly creative when it comes to the sentencing phase. There'll be plenty o hot grits but no Natalie Portman.
Seriously, though, it reminds me of the recent Winona Ryder trial. She did indeed get a jury of here peers from what I hear. Celebrity actors working in Hollywood. But I guess they still didn't buy her lawyer's story about the shoplifting being some part of her practising a role.
On the flip side, I understand that jury member s with special knowledge can sometimes cause a mistrial.
Someone with a legal background could clue me into when geeks on juries would work and when they would not.
Gun ownership should demand a great deal of responsibility on the part of those owning firearms.
Practically, though, you don't see people being held accountable when their gun is stolen, used for a crime, found by a kid, etc.
I believe the pro-gun ownership lobby has become too extreme defending the right to own assault weapons and neglected the need to insure that gun owners are more responsible.
They need to listen and understand their own rhetoric about "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Well, how the hell did those irresponsible idiots get a gun in the first place? Qualifications for owning firearms are as woefully inadequate as they are for procreation with consequences that are just as dire.
I'm in favor of an empowered citizenry, with the right to own deadly weapons. But I'm insistent that the greater the risk of the weapon (including the highest levels where government officials control nukes, etc.), the greater the responsibility and accountability needs to be.
The only way to halt TIA is to overwhelmingly convince a lot of people that they would be hurt if TIA were implemented.
However, abuses of TIA by bureaucracies and, indeed, by corporations, are a slow creeping disease that impacts only a small percentage of the population.
The question is: when the abuses grow to the point where a lot of people do disagree with them, will those people have the power to change what they see wrong?
By that time, however, disagreement with TIA will be viewed as "aiding and abetting terrorists" and could be accompanied by suspension of various rights, particularly voting.
People don't seem to care if they get a cure that's worse than the disease.
Do you think I could patent the same technology that the USPTO uses to search patents?
I'd love to have them pay me royalties on the use of "a technology for the search of patents by persons looking through paper or microfilm or computer indexed catalogs of all patents".
Really, though. With all the backlog and what not, what would happen if one of the IT persons at the USPTO came up with an innovative idea for searching patents? Suppose a company did?
[I've been developing a patent searching tool lately that I call grep in case you were wondering.]
The link to the slides includes a nifty detection script that informs me that I don't have Windows Media Player installed as one of the plugins for Mozilla.
Where do I get a free implementation of WMP for Linux?
I'm sure their bottom sure would still be significantly less than 3% even if they did use windows.
Yes I'm a Linux OSS fan. But, yes, you're quite right. An efficiently run organization with Windows can still streamline their operation.
The route of optimum savings with lowest risk is to just get the only decent MS OS (2000) and run it into the ground. [Kind of like new cars - don't buy one every few years - get a really reliable one and run it into the ground.]
A lot of IT departments that aren't brave enough to go wholescale into OSS in 2002 are picking the middle route:
stick with Win2K where it's been setup and working,
dump Software Assurance 6.0,
expand prototyping of Linux servers,
let IT staff become more comfortable with Linux,
in a few years when Linux is an even safer and more proven bet than now, make a larger transition (but probably not an abrupt step function).
You're right, it's sad how easily people will trade rights and freedoms for some perceived security from the government.
From a larger perspective, over many nations, cultures and over the course of history, the kinds of freedoms enjoyed in modern democratic republics are really the exception and not the rule. The rule has been that the government in control will use any means available to keep themselves in power.
Often overlooked, too, when people sacrifice these freedoms to a seemingly trustworthy government is that there is absolutely no guarantee that later governments will respect the same limits that people implicitly assumed would apply.
I dunno about you, but I like comfort in my lacing system.
If you have the highly zig-zaged pattern you can, with little force, end up applying an tourniquet to your foot.
Less sharp angles will keep your foot more comfortable, not to mention giving you more lace with which to hang yourself - I mean, tie knots. Too many shoes come with short laces that can barely support a full bow.
Probably a site where free software is available that wasn't written under the voluntary guidelines for moral computing.
Eg., software for encrypted tunneling would expose Chinese Internet users to all of the filthy and slanderous material that may be found on the Internet at large. Plus, of course, such software would make it exceedingly difficult for the powers that be to monitor what people are viewing and posting.
issue is the "difficulty" of administrering Linux, as compared to Windows.
I've worked with Linux for quite a while and recognize that you can pore over/etc/blah.conf files tweaking all kinds of options to get what it to do what you want. Sometimes it's fun, other times it's a drag and you can end up reading man pages for hours the first time you do something.
But mucking with the Windows registry scares me shitless.
They'll get the terrorists they want, and nobody will know what I've been discussing
Yeah, except that these days they'll profile you into the same category as those sending email to the Cali cartel and to Pakistani ISPs just because you're bothering to use PGP.
Feds: "Better look into this guy concealing traffic with PGP encryption! He's hiding something!" . .
(later) . Feds: "It's OK! After we installed our Scarfo-nabbing keyboard logger on his PC and glommed onto his passphrase we found out he was just describing an over-bed trapeze with his GF."
Islamic extremists will have effectively won their biggest victory when they get the U.S. to abandon precious rights and liberties for a society as repressive as anything the Taliban could dream up.
The value added to your line of business relative the costs of the OS, maintenance, troubleshooting, licensing, training, etc. are what matter.
Benchmarking "costs" is as fraught with assumptions as benchmarking "performance".
Do what works for you.
IMHO, if you're a small business (less than 20 people) owner and no tech savvy people on staff, then Win 2K is probably a reasonable choice. Your secretary will probably know Word and the cheapest local tech support will probably know how to do a full re-install when you're stuck.
But if you get serious about your IT infrastructure and its costs, if your business grows to where IT flakiness is starting to become a hassle, then you owe it to yourself to look seriously at a Linux solution, at the very least for your servers.
MS will claim to grow with your business, but just wants to charge you big bucks in pretty much the same way the old big UNIX vendors were charging for "Enterprise Level" stuff.
Linux will give you a lot for your money. And if you grow really big, then you can look at spending serious money on things like Oracle on a 64-way Sun and you will have already gotten your feet wet with Unix.
I'm running KDE on Linux on dual 2.2GHz Pentium 4s with an nVidia card. It's great.
But I've used Sun workstations from (Sun 3/160) 1985-2001 (Ultra2).
When OpenWindows started to ship with XView and then with CDE, I moved over to use plain old twm, then ctwm and finally fvwm. Avoided CDE all these years. It's only now under Linux that I've conceded to using one of these full-featured desktops because it doesn't feel heavy.
Desktop UNIX is going free and Sun will be wise to change to the times.
Sun still rules in the big server arena, but it could leverage that in making a name for itself in the newly emerging low cost UNIX desktop area, as long as it doesn't get caught up misty-eyed pining for the times when people were willing to shell out $20K for a workstation. Enterprise level integration and management of UNIX LANs running StarOffice, Mozilla and Evolution is a potentially huge market playing to Sun's traditional strengths. (NFS, NIS, etc.)
If Sun doesn't, then we'll have to look to other players that may not be quite as well positioned from some perspectives: HP, IBM, Red Hat, Dell...
Builders don't have to strive for planned obsolescence. It's a natural consequence of using shoddy materials and the cheapest possible labor.
I did all the subcontracting to build my own house. Initial motivation for doing that was to save money and be able to afford a better house than what I would have paid a builder to do for me.
Guess what?
The final cost of the house was about the same as what a builder would have charged me for the same size of house and same general appearance.
What happened was that I didn't cut corners for the sake of bringing the cost down. Polybutylene plumbing? No thanks, I'll go with copper. Top of the line kitchen appliances, the kind that you typically won't find unless you pay twice as much for your house.
If I were going to reside in the house for the median 4 years that most Americans sit in one spot, then my investment in invisible quality would have been a mistake - I could have made more money building something that just "looked nice" rather than something that "is nice". Home buyers just look at what they can see: they can't tell if the slab was too thin, the roofer didn't seal things correctly, or if the framing crew was drunk.
But I plan to live in the house for multiple decades and I don't want to be dealing with lots of house maintenance issues when I'm 75 yeas old.
But face it: most Americans are dumb enough to buy shoddy goods "because it's cheap". The overwhelming success of Walmart is testimony to that.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to many decades ago when the FCC was formed and for good reason, there's now a lot more ability to precisely control EM radiation and at a lot lower powers. The cost of transmitters and receivers and the advent of digital electronics has changed the situation dramatically.
A lot of convenient devices and applications result from unlicensed spectrum at limited power levels.
Society as a whole stands to benefit if more unlicensed spectrum is made available. Just do it in a way that does not technically (not politically) cause degradation in the licensed uses of the EM spectrum.
By all accounts, if your perception is that:
- boss is technically astute
- boss hates pthreads cuz he doesn't understand `em
Then there's inherent contradictions.You need to learn how to talk to your boss more, listen more, and, after listening, patiently explain with about 2 viewgraphs of bulleted items, the key features of threads and processes, with an even-handed listing of their respective pros and cons.
Then let him make a decision. Tell him your opinion is that pthreads is a better choice for this project, but you'll go with whatever he decides. In turn, express your appreciation for him holding up whatever decision and supporting you whichever way you go.
It wouldn't hurt your case if you explained that you've programmed in pthreads before, are familiar with the pitfalls and have encountered them previously, and think they are outweighed by the advantages. Tell him that only if it's true, though:)
If you really want to test compile on all those exotic UNIX platforms, that's great.
You get extra credit for thinking about cross platform portability, which is closely related to thinking ahead. You'll reap long term rewards in reduced maintenance costs from having less fragile code.
So why not go ahead and buy some of those machines used?
Through `em all together in a room with reliable power and an Ethernet switch and you'll be ready to go. Given that you can get free *NIX flavors on x86 that are good performers, the old boxes are typically quite cheap.
Practically this is helpful in cases where you're running a Linux desktop in a corporate environment.
MyCorp purchases site licenses, which means I get to use Word, though I rarely do on my Linux or Sun box, since it's slow and the user interface aggravates me. But sometimes I can't avoid it, someone sends me a ".doc" attachment in an email. OpenOffice works for most purposes as a valid Word clone, but not in every single instance.
If CodeWeavers can put Office over the network at a reasonable level of interactivity, then there's less reasons to be tied exclusively to Windows desktops in a typical corporation.
After all, what people typically need is a tolerable means for viewing and editing .doc files.
Whether Windows sits underneath ought to be irrelevant.
Are you really implying that if a thief enters my house and steals a weapon and commits a crime that *I'm* responsible for his crime?
To reply to this, and to the other poster of hypothetical scenarios prefaced by "someone breaks into my house", the answer is probably no.
OTOH, if you leave your deadly firearm on the passenger seat of an unlocked car and a felon takes it and uses it for unlawful purposes, then I'd be in favor of throwing the book at you for negligence.
The degree to which you must safeguard your weapon must be put to some test of reason by a prudent individuals.
And the test of reasonable protection will depend on just how lethal the weapon is that you own. If you keep your handgun in a locked box in a locked house, great. Reasonable men might agree that's sufficient. But if your collection of 150 Uzi machine guns is stolen from that house, the same people might decide that you were not exercising proper precaution for such a powerful arsenal.
The whole point is that the endemic use of guns in all kinds of crimes in the USA tells me that some people are not being reasonably responsible about their weapons. Gun ownership is a precious right and we should treat it with the seriousness it deserves, certainly more seriously than we do now.
For most people, unsolicited bombardment by advertisements is regarded as "part of life".
It would be really great to change this mindset not only in terms of internet based advertising, but also for telephone direct marketing, bulk mail advertisers, and billboards.
At least with TV and radio there's a transaction of sorts going (not that I want to give credence to Jack Valenti's position that people fast forwarding through commercial messages are "thieves"; it still costs me the inconvenience of fast forwarding, but my cost is less): I get to watch some show I value and suffer some inconvenience of advertising that I suffer.
With billboards, the property owner gets money for placement of the advertisement, but the public gets the mental pollution without gaining any benefit. [I won't buy the argument that being informed of products and services is an inherent benefit: when I want to buy something, I'll research it and find out about it then.]
Sound economic theory can be applied to advertising. Explicitly crediting and charging consumers and producers of advertisements would be a positive step towards making this a reality .
The catch is that getting people to agree that their collective attentions are worth something is a political problem. And the same economic theories that could potentially be applied to advertising are already being applied at the overriding level of what I will call "government services", such as legislation controlling advertising. It is in the financial interest of advertisers to have the public place no value on their attention.
Thus, this good idea will have to wait until the public wakes up.
It's very logical for Microsoft to make Linux software at some point in time.
They're still in the phase where they're fighting tooth and nail to swallow up the server market (as well as the console game, PDA, cell phone, and ISP markets:)
Only when Linux makes more serious inroads into the server market will they commit to a product for Linux. For now, the more profitable strategy is the one they're currently pursuing.
Microsoft's dilemna, though, will be that various free and open source software will fill in the holes of providing MS services on UNIX. SAMBA and Mono, for example. If they released it now, they could own .NET on UNIX, but it would unfavorably leverage against their other strategy of having Windows take over more of the server OS market. The latter strategy puts them more in the drivers seat as far as coming out with new products, calling the shots for upgrade cycles, etc. and is therefore preferable to them at this point in time.
how is one to get a fair trial?
Good point.
I'd want a jury of my peers. Well, I'm not so sure about that. Some Slashdot posters could be overly creative when it comes to the sentencing phase. There'll be plenty o hot grits but no Natalie Portman.
Seriously, though, it reminds me of the recent Winona Ryder trial. She did indeed get a jury of here peers from what I hear. Celebrity actors working in Hollywood. But I guess they still didn't buy her lawyer's story about the shoplifting being some part of her practising a role.
On the flip side, I understand that jury member s with special knowledge can sometimes cause a mistrial.
Someone with a legal background could clue me into when geeks on juries would work and when they would not.
Gun ownership should demand a great deal of responsibility on the part of those owning firearms.
Practically, though, you don't see people being held accountable when their gun is stolen, used for a crime, found by a kid, etc.
I believe the pro-gun ownership lobby has become too extreme defending the right to own assault weapons and neglected the need to insure that gun owners are more responsible.
They need to listen and understand their own rhetoric about "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Well, how the hell did those irresponsible idiots get a gun in the first place? Qualifications for owning firearms are as woefully inadequate as they are for procreation with consequences that are just as dire.
I'm in favor of an empowered citizenry, with the right to own deadly weapons. But I'm insistent that the greater the risk of the weapon (including the highest levels where government officials control nukes, etc.), the greater the responsibility and accountability needs to be.
The only way to halt TIA is to overwhelmingly convince a lot of people that they would be hurt if TIA were implemented.
However, abuses of TIA by bureaucracies and, indeed, by corporations, are a slow creeping disease that impacts only a small percentage of the population.
The question is: when the abuses grow to the point where a lot of people do disagree with them, will those people have the power to change what they see wrong?
By that time, however, disagreement with TIA will be viewed as "aiding and abetting terrorists" and could be accompanied by suspension of various rights, particularly voting.
People don't seem to care if they get a cure that's worse than the disease.
Hmmm...patents on search technology...hmmm...
Do you think I could patent the same technology that the USPTO uses to search patents?
I'd love to have them pay me royalties on the use of "a technology for the search of patents by persons looking through paper or microfilm or computer indexed catalogs of all patents".
Really, though. With all the backlog and what not, what would happen if one of the IT persons at the USPTO came up with an innovative idea for searching patents? Suppose a company did?
[I've been developing a patent searching tool lately that I call grep in case you were wondering.]
The link to the slides includes a nifty detection script that informs me that I don't have Windows Media Player installed as one of the plugins for Mozilla.
Where do I get a free implementation of WMP for Linux?
I'm sure their bottom sure would still be significantly less than 3% even if they did use windows.
Yes I'm a Linux OSS fan. But, yes, you're quite right. An efficiently run organization with Windows can still streamline their operation.
The route of optimum savings with lowest risk is to just get the only decent MS OS (2000) and run it into the ground. [Kind of like new cars - don't buy one every few years - get a really reliable one and run it into the ground.]
A lot of IT departments that aren't brave enough to go wholescale into OSS in 2002 are picking the middle route:
My shoes seem to come with laces that are too long.
Try tucking the long loops under the loose cross lacing near the front of your shoes.
[I can't believe I've regressed to starting a Shoe Tying FAQ...]
You're right, it's sad how easily people will trade rights and freedoms for some perceived security from the government.
From a larger perspective, over many nations, cultures and over the course of history, the kinds of freedoms enjoyed in modern democratic republics are really the exception and not the rule. The rule has been that the government in control will use any means available to keep themselves in power.
Often overlooked, too, when people sacrifice these freedoms to a seemingly trustworthy government is that there is absolutely no guarantee that later governments will respect the same limits that people implicitly assumed would apply.
I dunno about you, but I like comfort in my lacing system.
If you have the highly zig-zaged pattern you can, with little force, end up applying an tourniquet to your foot.
Less sharp angles will keep your foot more comfortable, not to mention giving you more lace with which to hang yourself - I mean, tie knots. Too many shoes come with short laces that can barely support a full bow.
Sourceforge?
Probably a site where free software is available that wasn't written under the voluntary guidelines for moral computing.
Eg., software for encrypted tunneling would expose Chinese Internet users to all of the filthy and slanderous material that may be found on the Internet at large. Plus, of course, such software would make it exceedingly difficult for the powers that be to monitor what people are viewing and posting.
issue is the "difficulty" of administrering Linux, as compared to Windows.
I've worked with Linux for quite a while and recognize that you can pore over /etc/blah.conf files tweaking all kinds of options to get what it to do what you want. Sometimes it's fun, other times it's a drag and you can end up reading man pages for hours the first time you do something.
But mucking with the Windows registry scares me shitless.
Hah!
You bottom-line, industrial types scoff at the bad NASA decision-making, do you?
I challenge you to:
- Replace your Corporate Board of Directors with a Congress full of politicians that dole out your budget and tell you what's cool and what's boring.
- Try to hire good C-level managers without stock option incentives and give them salaries more appropriate for good mid-level industrial managers.
Then, tell me that NASA management has performed poorly.They'll get the terrorists they want, and nobody will know what I've been discussing
Yeah, except that these days they'll profile you into the same category as those sending email to the Cali cartel and to Pakistani ISPs just because you're bothering to use PGP.
Islamic extremists will have effectively won their biggest victory when they get the U.S. to abandon precious rights and liberties for a society as repressive as anything the Taliban could dream up.You're right on.
The value added to your line of business relative the costs of the OS, maintenance, troubleshooting, licensing, training, etc. are what matter.
Benchmarking "costs" is as fraught with assumptions as benchmarking "performance".
Do what works for you.
IMHO, if you're a small business (less than 20 people) owner and no tech savvy people on staff, then Win 2K is probably a reasonable choice. Your secretary will probably know Word and the cheapest local tech support will probably know how to do a full re-install when you're stuck.
But if you get serious about your IT infrastructure and its costs, if your business grows to where IT flakiness is starting to become a hassle, then you owe it to yourself to look seriously at a Linux solution, at the very least for your servers.
MS will claim to grow with your business, but just wants to charge you big bucks in pretty much the same way the old big UNIX vendors were charging for "Enterprise Level" stuff.
Linux will give you a lot for your money. And if you grow really big, then you can look at spending serious money on things like Oracle on a 64-way Sun and you will have already gotten your feet wet with Unix.
It's funny.
I'm running KDE on Linux on dual 2.2GHz Pentium 4s with an nVidia card. It's great.
But I've used Sun workstations from (Sun 3/160) 1985-2001 (Ultra2).
When OpenWindows started to ship with XView and then with CDE, I moved over to use plain old twm, then ctwm and finally fvwm. Avoided CDE all these years. It's only now under Linux that I've conceded to using one of these full-featured desktops because it doesn't feel heavy.
Desktop UNIX is going free and Sun will be wise to change to the times.
Sun still rules in the big server arena, but it could leverage that in making a name for itself in the newly emerging low cost UNIX desktop area, as long as it doesn't get caught up misty-eyed pining for the times when people were willing to shell out $20K for a workstation. Enterprise level integration and management of UNIX LANs running StarOffice, Mozilla and Evolution is a potentially huge market playing to Sun's traditional strengths. (NFS, NIS, etc.)
If Sun doesn't, then we'll have to look to other players that may not be quite as well positioned from some perspectives: HP, IBM, Red Hat, Dell...
Builders don't have to strive for planned obsolescence. It's a natural consequence of using shoddy materials and the cheapest possible labor.
I did all the subcontracting to build my own house. Initial motivation for doing that was to save money and be able to afford a better house than what I would have paid a builder to do for me.
Guess what?
The final cost of the house was about the same as what a builder would have charged me for the same size of house and same general appearance.
What happened was that I didn't cut corners for the sake of bringing the cost down. Polybutylene plumbing? No thanks, I'll go with copper. Top of the line kitchen appliances, the kind that you typically won't find unless you pay twice as much for your house.
If I were going to reside in the house for the median 4 years that most Americans sit in one spot, then my investment in invisible quality would have been a mistake - I could have made more money building something that just "looked nice" rather than something that "is nice". Home buyers just look at what they can see: they can't tell if the slab was too thin, the roofer didn't seal things correctly, or if the framing crew was drunk.
But I plan to live in the house for multiple decades and I don't want to be dealing with lots of house maintenance issues when I'm 75 yeas old.
But face it: most Americans are dumb enough to buy shoddy goods "because it's cheap". The overwhelming success of Walmart is testimony to that.
Bill makes money on his OS, he loses money just about everywhere else (except office)..
I might be mistaken, but I think Office is at least as large a cash cow as Windows.
But you're right - everything else is heavily subsidized until MS gets it right and steamrolls the competition into the ground.
The other ventures are good long term business sense: they're looking for a new cash cow.
This strategy is technically termed "moo-ving over."