Editorial Archive
A
Siliconvalley.com article notes that the application of networking technology in the home can be silly and frivilous, but if applied correctly, could really be beneficial. A refrigerator with a flat panel display on it to check your email in the kitchen is truly silly, but a home that can notify the out of town owner that there's been a power failure can prevent that owner from coming home to a fridge full of rotten food.
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Back in the 1980s, the folks at Digital Equipment had a problem. While their VAX systems were selling like hotcakes, the systems still couldn't deliver the kind of scale found on mainframes. Digital, which had no plans to build big iron, set out to find a way to use existing equipment to increase capacity--a search that led to the development of the VAX cluster and the concept of horizontal scaling." Read the editorial at ZDNews.
We all know about the recent virus that is floating around, the W32.Blaster.Worm. Obviously, this worm was major threat--Symantec raised it from a level 3 to a level 4. You can't help but read about it on sites like osnews.com or Slashdot.com. But I noticed that one thing that seems to be missing a lot of times, at least with this latest worm. People don't want to take the responsibility for updating their computers when the update was available a month ago.
Submitted by Manish Bansal
2003-08-13
Editorial
The word open gets thrown around pretty gratuiously in the tech world, resulting in a lot of confusion. A very detailed
article in The Rational Edge examines the phenomena of open computing, open standards, open source software, and proprietary commercial software, how they differ, and how they're similar.
Misinterpreted. I think that is about the best word around to describe the reactions to my
previous article. Whether it has been misinterpreted due to people only reading what they want to read, due to an unclear choice of words on my behalf, or other factors, I am going to try it again. I will try to explain my position, again. Now, more stable, the code has been rewritten from scratch!
To me, it's a miracle how every tiny article on OSNews.com, or any other tech-site, ends up in people shouting all sorts of nonsense at each other like "Linux is gonna bring back Elvis", "Windows shot president Kennedy", "Linux kept the cold war cold" or "Bill Gates wants to buy the moon and charge people for looking at it". Do these people really know what they are saying, or are they just going with the Open-Source flow?
Update: Rebuttal article
here.
Small business owners now have a software choice. Just a few years ago the only business choice was to either run legitimate or pirated versions of proprietary software. Open source is now in a position to challenge proprietary software on the business and home desktop.
Forrester's Rob Enderle opines that, for all its advantages, the open source OS just isn't ready to power the systems on Starfleet Vessels. Just kidding. What he really says is that however much the geeks love Linux for the freedom it gives them, the customizability isn't always a boon to the average users and the managers who just want things to work with as little tinkering as possible. And the untested intellectual property issues surrounding the GPL and the open source development methods are a potential quagmire. He says large companies need to
consider these issues, religious fanatacism aside. Do you agree?
Update by ELQ:
Counterpoint at NewsFactor.
This entire article is written as a proposal to a coprporation for a new, very unique computing system. Please offer criticism and suggestions to improve the system, and tell me whether you think it could work. What exactly is the "Edge Computing System" And more importantly, why would I want to go to the trouble of developing it? The Edge Computing System is just that, an entire system, not just a new type of computer or new software suite. The Edge is the means by which you can have your personal computer with you at all times.
According to the
Free Software Foundation, free software includes "
the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits... Access to the source code is a precondition for this." While I agree that the principles of the FSF are noble, I also feel that there is an unspoken assumption - an assumption that pods of hobby developers across the world can coordinate on the same scale that directed companies with a budget can. Where free software has an important place in computing, so does closed-source commercial software.
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I was all set to run a column this week about the deplorable lack of even marginally acceptable word processors for Linux -- I even had it all written -- when along came TextMaker and blew that plan out of the water. (I still like the product, even though it has now made more work for me.) But the newfound existence of TextMaker suggests another, similar but broader, question: Why can't the community write something that good?" Read the editorial at LinuxAndMain by Dennis E. Powell.
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If I asked you to name the internet's dominant operating system, you'd probably nominate Linux, Windows or possibly Solaris. My answer would be none of the above. Increasingly, our most value-adding interface layer is Google—and our industry's annals of operating system wars and browser wars are looking ever more like ancient history. It might seem odd to call a Web search engine an operating system, but look at the fundamentals." Read the story at eWeek by Peter Coffee.
Very few IT-companies get as much fanatic anticipation from their customers as Apple does. Lots of words have been written about that, including cheers, rants and advice as to what Apple should do next to make the Macintosh experience even nicer for its fans. Whether it's about product pricing, quality or all in all product range, Apple polarizes its users and those who wish they were. It would be foolish for me to take the same approach as anybody else and give Apple some piece of advice. So that's actually what I'm going to do now.
I'm going to warn you now - this editorial is as much rant as anything else, you have been warned! One of the things that really bugs me in the comments often found in articles is the "my OS can do this better/bst" type stuff, it's not just Windows or Linux Users, it comes from a lot of camps. And puts me in mind of Usenet at times it gets so bad.
Before I get started on my views, I would like to point a few things out. I'm not in high school or college. I'm 35 years old and have been in the computer business a long time. My experience goes all the way back to the hey days of punch cards. I still have a few cards over at my folk's house. I think one of the 'programs' prints out a snoopy. I've worked for several large corporations including IBM and GTE. I'm bringing this up not to brag but to point out that I know a thing or two about computers. Now that that's out of the way, I'll continue.
A KDE developer tipped me off to a
recent thread discussed in the kde-core-devel mailing list regarding
interoperability between KDE and Gnome. OSNews featured an
interview with the usability experts from Gnome and KDE a few days ago and we expected that the spirit of co-operation would continue to get stronger every day. Luckily this is true regarding most of these developers, but not for all of them are sharing it. Here is a commentary on the issue followed by a summary of the long thread.
Submitted by Jared White
2003-02-24
Editorial
Jared White at The Idea Basket explores in this
editorial the dangers and pitfalls of the practice of both propertary and open-source software bundling/integration and then offers some alternative development methodologies that could benefit both users and developers alike.
"The "best" product doesn't always win since, given advantages of predatory pricing and clever marketing strategy, "good enough" is almost always good enough to carry the day. I'm talking, of course, about Microsoft, its software and its business practices, and if you're a fan of BeOS, OS/2 or another innovative software product that ended up mangled on the side of The Road Ahead, you've seen these sentiments expressed before and you've probably expressed them yourself." Editorial at eWeek.
Now that the usual round of end of year regurgitations of the past years IT events has ended we may further indulge ourselves by examining the pundits procastinations for their worthiness, or lack thereof. As ever, we were dished up a list of happenings which the IT scribes believed warranted our special attention. What our computers feel about such matters remains to be seen but some brave souls did manage to come up with various musings on what the future may hold for us, and them, (our computers that is) in this age of technical speculation. Whilst these ritualistic utterings have become a feature of the holiday silly season, why not build on this truly great and ancient tradition and comment on the level of veracity of the scribes from our much beloved land of nerds? They got it all wrong.
Now that the Justice Department and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly are content with the wrist-slapping meted out to Microsoft, few expect any abatement in the company's abuse of its monopoly power. Although many argue that, eventually, the markets themselves will bring about more balanced competition, the markets that Microsoft dominates operate on different economic principles than most others. The last twenty years brought such dramatic technological change that it'll be much harder for competitors to dislodge Microsoft from its perch atop the industry than it was for Microsoft to dethrone IBM a generation ago.
