When I was but a wee lad, Lego came out with their first Castle Kit - no custom blocks, but a lot of the standard "thin" ones, all in yellow, and a bunch of hinges so the castle could be opened up to see inside.
My friends and I all got one set for Xmas one year, and we quickly determined a game to play with them. The idea was to build a castle that would withstand a Lego siege. You built a castle, and then you built a catapult, all out of Lego. The only non-Lego part allowed was a rubber band to make the catapult work.
We'd then take turns launching Lego bolders against each other's castles from little Lego catapults, ballistae, and even an attempt at a trebuchet.
It taught us all kinds of things: how to build high walls that don't fall down (hint: buttresses), why walls had to interlock, the virtues of flat vs high missile trajectories, the tradeoffs between missile velocity vs missile mass, basic aiming techniques, and the strength of various household objects when subjected to accidental Lego bombardment (brick wall - high; glass lamp - low)
It was great fun until one of us figured out that a solid, interlocked and buttressed tower was pretty well impervious to anything short of a pellet gun, and then our attentions turned elsewhere - shooting each other with pellet guns, as I recall.
"We know that it's the GPL that prevents us from using our usual "embrace, extend, extiguish" strategy to counter Linux. Furthermore, every single new GPLed application adds to the pool of software immune from our influence. So we're going to spread as much fear and disinformation as we possibly can about the nature of the GPL to discourage its use"
They've picked up on the scism between the *BSDs and Linux over the GPL, and they're playing one off against the other. "It's not Open Source we don't like, it's the GPL!" - presto! They get instant allies from the *BSD folks.
Evil evil evil. But clever.
How long before we are faced with a version of "Microsoft BSD"? - enhanced and extended of course. After all, to run Office For BSD, you'll need *this* little kernel patch, and IIS For BSD will need *this* little tweak to the network stack, and oh, init now requires an instance of Actice Directory somewhere before it'll boot and...
Well, you get the picture.
But for the GPL, there goes Linux!
*BSD folks, be careful. It looks like Microsoft has determined their Open Source strategy - and it's YOU! "Embrace, extend, extinguish"; welcome to Phase One.
Here's the issue: when a given program (or set of programs) is touted as being "stable", then I expect it to be stable. If a bug - especially a crash bug - shows up, then I expect the fixed version to be released NOW, because the existance of the crash bug in the "stable" program invalidates it as being "stable".
I don't mind waiting for new features et al, but I do expect to get a feed of the latest bug fixes pretty well as they occur.
The idea that the fix for the "Sawfish constantly crashes" problem that is driving me nuts might have been found, written, and applied a month ago - but is still locked up in CVS instead of being released - is driving me right around the frickin' bend.
The Linux kernel has been really good at this. All the instability goes into the Developmental kernels, and the Stable kernels get nothing but the bugfixes - and those bugfixes are applied in very short order. Alan may like to do a lot of prereleases in between each "official" stable release, but there's a very good chance that if thge bug has been identified, there exists a tarball where it is fixed.
It would be a VERY good thing if, every week, each patch that fixed a bug without otherwise affecting the core functionality could get rolled into a tarball and placed out there for people like me to get their paws on - the bug you fix may well be the one I'm suffering from.
I am a really, really big fan of GNOME. I think it's a beautiful and effective desktop environment - easily my favourite - that the GTK toolkit is fantastic (I've written a couple of GTK apps) and that it is GPLed is equally important, right, and good.
But goddamn, that's been hard to swallow lately....
I've been using the Ximian update service for getting GNOME, because I like the idea of getting regular updates as a tested group of binaries - with a project with as many different components as GNOME, it's tough to do all the "find newest version, ensure no compatibility issues, compile it, debug interactions" busywork yourself. The idea of a central source that would push the latest versions, tested to ensure compatibility with each other, down to my machines on a regular basis is VERY attractive.
But the releases coming out of Ximian have been few and far between, and the last one has resulted in Sawfish crashing more often than any program I have ever used. GNOME for me started off as stable as a rock, and has become increasingly UNSTABLE as time goes on.
It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering dumping the whole thing, a concept that I find personally objectionable, as I strongly support the GPL and don't want to use KDE for that very reason.
Troubleshooting hasn't been very rewarding either, as it seems that even the tarball releases of key components like Sawfish seem to occur at infrequent intervals - even though I've seen indications that the "constant Sawfish crashing" (it hits an assertation that t cannot equal zero, but does) may be a known problem, and may be fixed in CVS. You have a crash problem, fix it, and don't _immediately_ cut a new release? Huh?
GNOME guys, what the hell is going on? Isn't this stuff supposed to get _better_ with time? What ever happened to "release early, release often"? And Ximian, where's the quality control? Where's the rapid release schedule? Where's the communication and feedback?
If I'm a _fan_ and getting this frustrated, what must the rest of the world feel like right now?
While I certainly don't want to disparage efforts to find cures for cancer et all, it's hard not to imagine a better use for spare CPU cycles than SETI, given that the discovery of extraterrestial intelligent life would be the greatest discovery in the history of our species.
It is doubly important in that - short of them showing up and introducing themselves - this is the *only* way we can carry out this research. There is no SETI analogue to the lab rat.
In a perfect world, there would be a 100% survey of the electromagnetic spectrum (and the corresponding analysis) going on continuously and in near real-time. Until then, we've got SETI-at-home.
One of the things that I've really liked about Linux is that it seems to "stretch" old hardware, in so far that you don't need to buy the "processor of the week" in order to run the latest and greatest software.
My P1-233MMX has given yeoman service since I got it in 1997, and it has handled everything I've thrown at it just fine.
But now that I've started doing some video editing, som CAD, and some other heavy lifting on it, it's started feeling "slow", so I've been keeping my eye out for something I can pick up that will last another four years or so. It sounds to me like Athlon SMP is just that. More computing HP than I can possibly use at the moment, and at a price that is comparable to what I paid for my Pentium system in '97.
Go thoughtfully in the knowledge that all interplanetary communication derives from the modulation of radiated energy, and sometimes a planet will be between the source and the destination. Therefore rely not on end-to-end connectivity at any time, for the universe does not work that way.
Neither rely on ample bandwidth, for power is scarce out there and the bit error rates are high. Know too that signal strength drops off by the square of the distance, and there is a lot of distance.
Consider the preciousness of interplanetary communication links, and restrict access to them with all your heart. Protect also the confidentiality of application data or risk losing your customers.
Remember always that launch mass costs money. Think not, then, that you may require all the universe to adopt at once the newest technologies. Be backward compatible.
Never confuse patience with inaction. By waiting for acknowledgement to one message before sending the next, you squander tracking pass time that will never come to you again in this life. Send as much as you can, as early as you can, and meanwhile confidently await responses for as long as they may take to find their way to you.
Therefore be at peace with physics, and expect not to manage the network in closed control loops -- neither in the limiting of congestion nor in the negotiation of connection parameters nor even in on-demand access to transmission bands. Each node must make its own operating choices in its own understanding, for all the others are too far away to ask. Truly the solar system is a large place and each one of us is on his or her own. Deal with it.
That's beautiful... it conveys all the important information, but yet still manages to be literate, and even a little bit inspiring.
Nice to see there are still visionaries in science.
From a Microsoft perspective, every PC nees Windows on it in order to function - thus, any machine sold without Windows must be running an "illegal" copy. The fact that it may not be running Windows at all simply isn't an option.
If they get the names of these horrible people, they can track them down, and get "their" money.
Hardly suprising behaviour from the company that insists they licence their OS to a single physical computer - not even a single running instance of Windows. From their point of view, if you finally trashed your old 486, then you trashed your Windows licence with it, and need to buy a new licence for your new machine - even if your "new" machine is just your "old" machine with a new motherboard, processor, and ATX case.
Sorry Billy me boyo, my "naked PC" runs Linux, and has since 1997.
I've always considered our family Linux machine as being our "information furnace" - the same way the house furnace provides heating services, the computer is the "information furnace"
The problem is the terminals. What I want is:
- a decent sized screen (1024X768 in 17") that doesn't take up much space (so prolly LCD)
- a built-in USB hub, with jacks for keyboard, trackball, and joystick, plus one more for local devices (camera, scanner, printer, or whatever)
- a built-in CDRW drive
- built-in speakers, with audio in and out jacks
- ONE, count 'em, ONE power cord
- ONE, count 'em, ONE wire that routes to the main server
- CHEAP - like about $300 for the whole shebang.
The terminal would be a X real terminal, with no computing power to speak of locally, aside from whatever hardware is needed to make X work. No local hard drive. Just plug it in, and I have access to my main server (I suppose the CDRW would be NFS mounted)
Build this puppy, and the world will beat a path to your door.
It seems some people aren't reading the article very well (on Slashdot? Horrors!)
Here's some key points:
1) All guesses must be correct. If any of the 3 players guess and get it wrong, everybody loses.
2) Guesses are simultanious, not sequential - ie, you write down your guess, and all 3 guesses are passed to the host, who then reads them
3) There are 3 hats, but two colours. This means that out of 12 possible combinations, there are 2 that are "all hats same colour" - so 1/6th of the time. Thus, if you see 2 hats of the same colour, the probability that your hat is the same color is 1/6 - which in turn implies that guessing that your hat is a different colour will be correct 5/6th of the time.
Thus, if you see any two differently-coloured hats, you pass. If you see all hats the same colour, then invert the color you see and guess that. This starts at 5/6ths correct with 3 hats, and gets better for larger numbers of hats not a power of 2.
Railing against "the Linux public representatives" - true or not - is to miss the point. Linux _does not care_ what its public representatives do. I'll grant that if some of our more visible figures were more... marketable... the process might be sped up in certain circles, but that's just a matter of speed. One year or ten years, it really doesn't matter.
Every line of code written for "Linux" is publically available. Every line of code, no matter what the root justification at the time of writing (be it a personal itch scratched, or a problem solved, or a feature added to improve someone's bottom line) becomes part of the common, freely available whole.
As long as there is still one lone hacker coding and publishing, Linux will continue to advance. The rate of advance may ebb and flow, but the net advancement is unstoppable.
MS's past history with competitors that have mounted challenges to their hegemony have either been to tamper with the core product, (to make it either incompatible or irrelevant) or to purchase the competitor outright (and either co-opt the product or bury it) Niether strategy can work against Linux - Linux does not need MS compatibility for the large part, and can react much faster than MS to API changes in the small part. And as for outright purchase... they can join the party, but they cannot extinguish it.
You simply cannot "fight" Linux using the language and tactics of business. It's like trying to drill an oil well with a chicken - it just doesn't work that way.
Dismissing Linux as "the Anti-Microsoft", as if it were just some sort of form of protest or backlash (of which there is undoubtedly a large amount) is also to miss the point. Around here, (Fortune 100 company) Linux is being installed anywhere and everywhere it can. Why? Because it works. It's good enough for the job, and it marks the freedom from reliance on vendors and proprietary code. The fact that there's no license fees to pay is just gravy (nice gravy, but gravy)
IT departments solve problems. They provide services. They don't care about politics, marketing, market share, or whatever. But every single one of them has (many, many times over) seen a key vendor go under, stop support of a key product, or discovered problems that cannot get fixed (for whatever reason) With Linux, you get source - for EVERYTHING. Having the source means never getting caught with your pants down.
Here's a harsh fact - the VAST MAJORITY of coders, admins, and other computer professionals do not write code for sale. Instead, they are employed by other businesses as support personel. They are problem-solvers. And they are adopting Linux like manna from heaven. I see it all around me. Projects that 5 years ago would have had MS as a direct partner are now being developed on Linux without MS ever being told about their missed opportunity for a sale - and if it wasn't for the enormous amount of legacy data (Spreadsheets and documents) produced on MS tools that only work on MS tools, Linux would be all over the desktops here.
Never be a 10% player? Brother, we passed 10% a long time ago. The "idiotic business ideal" is that we EVER paid money for software. Software is a SERVICE, not a "product" - and Linux is a long overdue correction.
It will not be lost on you, however, that the dinosaurs were very successful as long as a certain set of environmental conditions held. Once those conditions were no longer in place, they failed to adapt and died out almost instantly (in evolutionary timescales)
Mammals, while they've been around for less raw time, have demonstrated greater adaptibility - noteably, surviving a few ice ages.
Of course, we have those pesky insects and microbes all over the place that tamper with our Darwinian analogy, but that's niether here nor there.:)
I see it like this: the combination of widespread, high-speed access to the Internet and the return of the concept of software as shared knowledge (instead of for-sale product) is to MS as the asteroid smacking the Yucutan is to the dinosaurs.
The old conditions that encouraged their past success are rapidly disappearing - can they evolve and survive?
You know, I don't think they're _ever_ going to Get It.
- He's barely even started when the first FUD hits "Linux is advertised as free", hinting at vague hidden costs lurking out there to bite the unwary (Gee, like MS Tech Support doesn't soak you per incident)
But he misses that it's Free; that universal access to source code that you are *encouraged* to use elsewhere results in an ever-growing knowledge base - which not only lowers the barriers to (development) entry for those so inclined, but also results in ever-growing numbers of people qualified to provide ad-hoc support - which in turn works against the never-quite-voiced "support costs will kill you" FUDbit.
- He complains about competing desktop standards as being "confusing", but he totally misses that being able to pick, choose, and configure my desktop experience is something I WANT - it makes me more productive. And he also doesn't seem to grasp that this can be done per-user, so that the complexity of the desktop can be adapted to whoever logs in to the machine without disrupting the others.
"Any color you want, as long as it's black" went out with the Model T. Why is MS so intent on reviving it?
- He goes on at length about Linux's lack of a "revenue model", but is completely oblivious that Linux doesn't NEED a revenue model. Linux is NOT about selling software, it's about solving problems.
"Linux is one of our primary competitors" - no, it's NOT! "Competitor" assumes that both parties are struggling over some territory in a shared space. MS is about making money by selling software; Linux is about solving computing problems. If people can use Linux to make money along the way, fine, but the success or failure of Linux is not measured on financial scales.
MS has some very smart people working for it, no question about it. If they were totally incompetant, they wouldn't be where they are today. But the more interviews I see with MS personages, the more I realize that they don't understand the nature of of the beast they're facing. They cannot attack the problem, because they don't comprehend it.
Want to know what the dinosaurs said when they saw the first mammal? Ask a MS rep about Linux.
While I'm a big fan of genetically engineered foods (genetic engineering just being good ol' selective breeding sped up) I'm astounded that the courts found that the farmer has to pay damages for seeds that fell onto his land and grew there.
And in Canada too, normally the Land of Common Sense.
Slashdot Mirror
...I meant "per unit" as in "individual book" not as "book making machine"
.pdf, have the printed version arrive at my door.
I envisioned one of these being set up in my local copy store. E-mail them the
Probably should have been clearer about that...
With the advent of cheap CD-ROMs and .pdf files, it's been damned difficult to get my paws on a real live manual for quite some time.
OK, so call me analog - I like books I can place next to the keyboard and actually read.
If the per-unit price is decent enough, maybe I can start restocking my bookshelves.
When I was but a wee lad, Lego came out with their first Castle Kit - no custom blocks, but a lot of the standard "thin" ones, all in yellow, and a bunch of hinges so the castle could be opened up to see inside.
My friends and I all got one set for Xmas one year, and we quickly determined a game to play with them. The idea was to build a castle that would withstand a Lego siege. You built a castle, and then you built a catapult, all out of Lego. The only non-Lego part allowed was a rubber band to make the catapult work.
We'd then take turns launching Lego bolders against each other's castles from little Lego catapults, ballistae, and even an attempt at a trebuchet.
It taught us all kinds of things: how to build high walls that don't fall down (hint: buttresses), why walls had to interlock, the virtues of flat vs high missile trajectories, the tradeoffs between missile velocity vs missile mass, basic aiming techniques, and the strength of various household objects when subjected to accidental Lego bombardment (brick wall - high; glass lamp - low)
It was great fun until one of us figured out that a solid, interlocked and buttressed tower was pretty well impervious to anything short of a pellet gun, and then our attentions turned elsewhere - shooting each other with pellet guns, as I recall.
Great fun, and a complete engineering education.
That's great! You just made my morning.
"We know that it's the GPL that prevents us from using our usual "embrace, extend, extiguish" strategy to counter Linux. Furthermore, every single new GPLed application adds to the pool of software immune from our influence. So we're going to spread as much fear and disinformation as we possibly can about the nature of the GPL to discourage its use"
The GPL isn't a *VIRUS*, it's an immunization.
Ohhh, those clever Microsoftians....
They've picked up on the scism between the *BSDs and Linux over the GPL, and they're playing one off against the other. "It's not Open Source we don't like, it's the GPL!" - presto! They get instant allies from the *BSD folks.
Evil evil evil. But clever.
How long before we are faced with a version of "Microsoft BSD"? - enhanced and extended of course. After all, to run Office For BSD, you'll need *this* little kernel patch, and IIS For BSD will need *this* little tweak to the network stack, and oh, init now requires an instance of Actice Directory somewhere before it'll boot and...
Well, you get the picture.
But for the GPL, there goes Linux!
*BSD folks, be careful. It looks like Microsoft has determined their Open Source strategy - and it's YOU! "Embrace, extend, extinguish"; welcome to Phase One.
DG
Here's the issue: when a given program (or set of programs) is touted as being "stable", then I expect it to be stable. If a bug - especially a crash bug - shows up, then I expect the fixed version to be released NOW, because the existance of the crash bug in the "stable" program invalidates it as being "stable".
I don't mind waiting for new features et al, but I do expect to get a feed of the latest bug fixes pretty well as they occur.
The idea that the fix for the "Sawfish constantly crashes" problem that is driving me nuts might have been found, written, and applied a month ago - but is still locked up in CVS instead of being released - is driving me right around the frickin' bend.
The Linux kernel has been really good at this. All the instability goes into the Developmental kernels, and the Stable kernels get nothing but the bugfixes - and those bugfixes are applied in very short order. Alan may like to do a lot of prereleases in between each "official" stable release, but there's a very good chance that if thge bug has been identified, there exists a tarball where it is fixed.
It would be a VERY good thing if, every week, each patch that fixed a bug without otherwise affecting the core functionality could get rolled into a tarball and placed out there for people like me to get their paws on - the bug you fix may well be the one I'm suffering from.
I am a really, really big fan of GNOME. I think it's a beautiful and effective desktop environment - easily my favourite - that the GTK toolkit is fantastic (I've written a couple of GTK apps) and that it is GPLed is equally important, right, and good.
But goddamn, that's been hard to swallow lately....
I've been using the Ximian update service for getting GNOME, because I like the idea of getting regular updates as a tested group of binaries - with a project with as many different components as GNOME, it's tough to do all the "find newest version, ensure no compatibility issues, compile it, debug interactions" busywork yourself. The idea of a central source that would push the latest versions, tested to ensure compatibility with each other, down to my machines on a regular basis is VERY attractive.
But the releases coming out of Ximian have been few and far between, and the last one has resulted in Sawfish crashing more often than any program I have ever used. GNOME for me started off as stable as a rock, and has become increasingly UNSTABLE as time goes on.
It's getting to the point where I'm seriously considering dumping the whole thing, a concept that I find personally objectionable, as I strongly support the GPL and don't want to use KDE for that very reason.
Troubleshooting hasn't been very rewarding either, as it seems that even the tarball releases of key components like Sawfish seem to occur at infrequent intervals - even though I've seen indications that the "constant Sawfish crashing" (it hits an assertation that t cannot equal zero, but does) may be a known problem, and may be fixed in CVS. You have a crash problem, fix it, and don't _immediately_ cut a new release? Huh?
GNOME guys, what the hell is going on? Isn't this stuff supposed to get _better_ with time? What ever happened to "release early, release often"? And Ximian, where's the quality control? Where's the rapid release schedule? Where's the communication and feedback?
If I'm a _fan_ and getting this frustrated, what must the rest of the world feel like right now?
Actually, the line is:
"Rommal, you magnifigant bastard! I read your book!"
Equally good would be:
"We're going to grab him by the nose and kick him is the ass!"
"We're going to go through the enemy like shit through a goose!"
"Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make the other poor SOB die for HIS country"
Great movie BTW.
DG
Sounds like someone is replicating the Krone Experiment (from the Clancy-esque thriller novel of the same name)
:)
I'd say more, but I don't want to give away the ending. But trust me, it's on topic.
Not a bad read. Not Great Literature, but a good beach book - if you can find a copy.
While I certainly don't want to disparage efforts to find cures for cancer et all, it's hard not to imagine a better use for spare CPU cycles than SETI, given that the discovery of extraterrestial intelligent life would be the greatest discovery in the history of our species.
It is doubly important in that - short of them showing up and introducing themselves - this is the *only* way we can carry out this research. There is no SETI analogue to the lab rat.
In a perfect world, there would be a 100% survey of the electromagnetic spectrum (and the corresponding analysis) going on continuously and in near real-time. Until then, we've got SETI-at-home.
Why not join in?
One of the things that I've really liked about Linux is that it seems to "stretch" old hardware, in so far that you don't need to buy the "processor of the week" in order to run the latest and greatest software.
My P1-233MMX has given yeoman service since I got it in 1997, and it has handled everything I've thrown at it just fine.
But now that I've started doing some video editing, som CAD, and some other heavy lifting on it, it's started feeling "slow", so I've been keeping my eye out for something I can pick up that will last another four years or so. It sounds to me like Athlon SMP is just that. More computing HP than I can possibly use at the moment, and at a price that is comparable to what I paid for my Pentium system in '97.
AMD, you'll be gettting my ducets.
DG
From the RFC:
That's beautiful... it conveys all the important information, but yet still manages to be literate, and even a little bit inspiring.
Nice to see there are still visionaries in science.
From a Microsoft perspective, every PC nees Windows on it in order to function - thus, any machine sold without Windows must be running an "illegal" copy. The fact that it may not be running Windows at all simply isn't an option.
If they get the names of these horrible people, they can track them down, and get "their" money.
Hardly suprising behaviour from the company that insists they licence their OS to a single physical computer - not even a single running instance of Windows. From their point of view, if you finally trashed your old 486, then you trashed your Windows licence with it, and need to buy a new licence for your new machine - even if your "new" machine is just your "old" machine with a new motherboard, processor, and ATX case.
Sorry Billy me boyo, my "naked PC" runs Linux, and has since 1997.
I've always considered our family Linux machine as being our "information furnace" - the same way the house furnace provides heating services, the computer is the "information furnace"
The problem is the terminals. What I want is:
- a decent sized screen (1024X768 in 17") that doesn't take up much space (so prolly LCD)
- a built-in USB hub, with jacks for keyboard, trackball, and joystick, plus one more for local devices (camera, scanner, printer, or whatever)
- a built-in CDRW drive
- built-in speakers, with audio in and out jacks
- ONE, count 'em, ONE power cord
- ONE, count 'em, ONE wire that routes to the main server
- CHEAP - like about $300 for the whole shebang.
The terminal would be a X real terminal, with no computing power to speak of locally, aside from whatever hardware is needed to make X work. No local hard drive. Just plug it in, and I have access to my main server (I suppose the CDRW would be NFS mounted)
Build this puppy, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Part of the functionality of modules is that you can change core kernel functionality on the fly, no reboot required.
:)
Whaddya think this is, Win95?
Could you provide more detail?
Just curious to know the whole story.
A decent bit of logical deduction, my dear Watson.
;)
Of course, you _could_ have just followed the link to the website in my identity block - but then that would have been cheating.
Oops, how embarrasing. :(
Thanks for catching that.
It seems some people aren't reading the article very well (on Slashdot? Horrors!)
Here's some key points:
1) All guesses must be correct. If any of the 3 players guess and get it wrong, everybody loses.
2) Guesses are simultanious, not sequential - ie, you write down your guess, and all 3 guesses are passed to the host, who then reads them
3) There are 3 hats, but two colours. This means that out of 12 possible combinations, there are 2 that are "all hats same colour" - so 1/6th of the time. Thus, if you see 2 hats of the same colour, the probability that your hat is the same color is 1/6 - which in turn implies that guessing that your hat is a different colour will be correct 5/6th of the time.
Thus, if you see any two differently-coloured hats, you pass. If you see all hats the same colour, then invert the color you see and guess that. This starts at 5/6ths correct with 3 hats, and gets better for larger numbers of hats not a power of 2.
It seems that the star around which that "habitable zone" planet revolves (iota Hor) is 56 light years away.
Think about that for a second - flat out at the speed of light, and it takes you 56 years to get there.
It might as well be on the other side of the universe.
Space travel sucks. Why couldn't Sol be in a nice, tightly packed, globular cluster?
Railing against "the Linux public representatives" - true or not - is to miss the point. Linux _does not care_ what its public representatives do. I'll grant that if some of our more visible figures were more... marketable... the process might be sped up in certain circles, but that's just a matter of speed. One year or ten years, it really doesn't matter.
Every line of code written for "Linux" is publically available. Every line of code, no matter what the root justification at the time of writing (be it a personal itch scratched, or a problem solved, or a feature added to improve someone's bottom line) becomes part of the common, freely available whole.
As long as there is still one lone hacker coding and publishing, Linux will continue to advance. The rate of advance may ebb and flow, but the net advancement is unstoppable.
MS's past history with competitors that have mounted challenges to their hegemony have either been to tamper with the core product, (to make it either incompatible or irrelevant) or to purchase the competitor outright (and either co-opt the product or bury it) Niether strategy can work against Linux - Linux does not need MS compatibility for the large part, and can react much faster than MS to API changes in the small part. And as for outright purchase... they can join the party, but they cannot extinguish it.
You simply cannot "fight" Linux using the language and tactics of business. It's like trying to drill an oil well with a chicken - it just doesn't work that way.
Dismissing Linux as "the Anti-Microsoft", as if it were just some sort of form of protest or backlash (of which there is undoubtedly a large amount) is also to miss the point. Around here, (Fortune 100 company) Linux is being installed anywhere and everywhere it can. Why? Because it works. It's good enough for the job, and it marks the freedom from reliance on vendors and proprietary code. The fact that there's no license fees to pay is just gravy (nice gravy, but gravy)
IT departments solve problems. They provide services. They don't care about politics, marketing, market share, or whatever. But every single one of them has (many, many times over) seen a key vendor go under, stop support of a key product, or discovered problems that cannot get fixed (for whatever reason) With Linux, you get source - for EVERYTHING. Having the source means never getting caught with your pants down.
Here's a harsh fact - the VAST MAJORITY of coders, admins, and other computer professionals do not write code for sale. Instead, they are employed by other businesses as support personel. They are problem-solvers. And they are adopting Linux like manna from heaven. I see it all around me. Projects that 5 years ago would have had MS as a direct partner are now being developed on Linux without MS ever being told about their missed opportunity for a sale - and if it wasn't for the enormous amount of legacy data (Spreadsheets and documents) produced on MS tools that only work on MS tools, Linux would be all over the desktops here.
Never be a 10% player? Brother, we passed 10% a long time ago. The "idiotic business ideal" is that we EVER paid money for software. Software is a SERVICE, not a "product" - and Linux is a long overdue correction.
Thank you - and your comments are well taken.
:)
:)
It will not be lost on you, however, that the dinosaurs were very successful as long as a certain set of environmental conditions held. Once those conditions were no longer in place, they failed to adapt and died out almost instantly (in evolutionary timescales)
Mammals, while they've been around for less raw time, have demonstrated greater adaptibility - noteably, surviving a few ice ages.
Of course, we have those pesky insects and microbes all over the place that tamper with our Darwinian analogy, but that's niether here nor there.
I see it like this: the combination of widespread, high-speed access to the Internet and the return of the concept of software as shared knowledge (instead of for-sale product) is to MS as the asteroid smacking the Yucutan is to the dinosaurs.
The old conditions that encouraged their past success are rapidly disappearing - can they evolve and survive?
We've got ringside seats at least.
You know, I don't think they're _ever_ going to Get It.
- He's barely even started when the first FUD hits "Linux is advertised as free", hinting at vague hidden costs lurking out there to bite the unwary (Gee, like MS Tech Support doesn't soak you per incident)
But he misses that it's Free; that universal access to source code that you are *encouraged* to use elsewhere results in an ever-growing knowledge base - which not only lowers the barriers to (development) entry for those so inclined, but also results in ever-growing numbers of people qualified to provide ad-hoc support - which in turn works against the never-quite-voiced "support costs will kill you" FUDbit.
- He complains about competing desktop standards as being "confusing", but he totally misses that being able to pick, choose, and configure my desktop experience is something I WANT - it makes me more productive. And he also doesn't seem to grasp that this can be done per-user, so that the complexity of the desktop can be adapted to whoever logs in to the machine without disrupting the others.
"Any color you want, as long as it's black" went out with the Model T. Why is MS so intent on reviving it?
- He goes on at length about Linux's lack of a "revenue model", but is completely oblivious that Linux doesn't NEED a revenue model. Linux is NOT about selling software, it's about solving problems.
"Linux is one of our primary competitors" - no, it's NOT! "Competitor" assumes that both parties are struggling over some territory in a shared space. MS is about making money by selling software; Linux is about solving computing problems. If people can use Linux to make money along the way, fine, but the success or failure of Linux is not measured on financial scales.
MS has some very smart people working for it, no question about it. If they were totally incompetant, they wouldn't be where they are today. But the more interviews I see with MS personages, the more I realize that they don't understand the nature of of the beast they're facing. They cannot attack the problem, because they don't comprehend it.
Want to know what the dinosaurs said when they saw the first mammal? Ask a MS rep about Linux.
While I'm a big fan of genetically engineered foods (genetic engineering just being good ol' selective breeding sped up) I'm astounded that the courts found that the farmer has to pay damages for seeds that fell onto his land and grew there.
And in Canada too, normally the Land of Common Sense.
I'm writing my MP about this.