05.19.07
Posted in FLOSS, Industry News, Legal Issues at 3:50 by lnxwalt
In ancient times, one of the weapons that soldiers used was the spear. The good thing about a spear is that it gave the ability to repeatedly hurt your enemy (enemies) before the enemy could get into sword range.
Microsoft is looking in its rearview mirror, terrified at the approaching juggernaut that is FLOSS. As more of the market uses FLOSS in place of proprietary software, Microsoft’s market share and profits are limited. Microsoft has been the leading software company for many years, so seeing competitors that are parrying their every thrust must loosen their sphincters. Now they have pulled out the equivalent of the nuclear bomb and said in effect, “We are willing to use this if you continue to threaten our dominance.”
I have read that eventually, it was learned that a sword-bearing soldier could beat a spear-bearing soldier more often than the reverse. That is, the victory comes up-close-and-personal, not from far away. I would caution Microsoft that using patents as weapons instead of building great customer-centric products is not the road to continued success. It is the road to slow death, like the one chosen by the Detroit automakers.
I believe that FLOSS is the future of software. This does not mean that proprietary software will die out. However, I believe that proprietary software is destined to become primarily a niche product. For one thing, the high margins that some software companies (including Microsoft) have received can not continue indefinitely. For another, things like TUR place the user’s interests underneath those of the vendor, which also can not continue indefinitely. Enlightened users will seek software from vendors that are less hostile to their own interests.
The knowledge that this is coming fills many of the proprietary companies with fear.
Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion only. It does not reflect the views of WebConnect Consulting or any employers, relatives, or anyone else.
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05.09.07
Posted in News and Announcements at 4:36 by lnxwalt
I am currently on an assignment in a very foreign state on the Eastern side of the country. I was in a neighboring state for a few months last year, so I am somewhat familiar with this part of the country. However, I spend too much time lost, rather than getting to the worksite and getting my work done.
I am beginning to wonder why so much of the state is under construction and every map has different road names and highway numbers. I’d understand if they were unfriendly and trying to make the experience unpleasant to outsiders. But the locals here do not know me from Adam.
Others that are here for this project have stated similar things about being perpetually lost, so it is not just me. Traditionally, when I go to a state, I begin to take different routes and sort of intentionally get lost, so that I build an internal map that enables me to do things like route around traffic accidents. However, I do not feel that I have ever been quite so lost as I am wandering this area.
It does bring some things to mind:
- Unfamiliar surroundings and the lack of familiar cues which you may unconsciously use to determine the proper interpretation and response to current conditions are behind feeling "lost" when you leave your home zone.
- Generally, while you are out of town, home is the wonderful place where Donna Reed and Father Knows Best get together to produce Leave It To Beaver. After you return, the illusion is shattered once again. I believe that one key to adjusting to being out of town is to understand and accept that it will be different than what you are used to seeing or experiencing. Embrace the unfamiliarity and wrap your explorations with adventure, so that you will enjoy them.
- Do not explore or experiment during busy periods or when you have a deadline to meet. It is not worth the stress of finding that turning left at Avenue J will put you several miles further from your intended destination.
- If you are a goal-oriented person, give yourself learning goals related to the journeys you undertake.
- See the tourist sites if you can, but you must be sure to meet local residents and talk with them about their lives and views. Try out the local foods and beverages, find out what the locals do for fun.
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05.02.07
Posted in Legal Issues, Local News, News and Announcements at 20:22 by lnxwalt
Shortly after CBS’ Don Imus was fired for his remarks, Clear Channel’s Barbara Stanton was suspended for racially-insensitive comments she made on her radio program.
I had heard of neither broadcaster before their respective incidents. Imus was apparently trying to be funny. Coverage of the event refers to him as a “shock jock,” so it may have been his job to generate controversy (and therefore higher ratings).
Stanton, here in the sleepy Victor Valley, could not have been much of a shock jock–that genre would never survive here in the conservative High Desert. Her words came during a serious discussion about the acquisition of the local bank by an out-of-the-area bank. That the words were serious, and that they come so soon after Imus’ experience is disturbing, to say the least.
Unfortunately, besides being out of line in her expression, Ms. Stanton is also misinformed about the responsibilities of the CEO of a publicly-traded bank. Ron Wilson, CEO of DCB had apparently been interviewed on her program recently, without mentioning buyout talks. Well, I am sorry if he has to obey the laws relating to insider information, but there are some things that can not be revealed except under specific conditions.
As a side note, Jonathan Schwartz of Sun has had a running discussion with the SEC about finding a way to publish announcements on Sun’s site at the same time or even before releasing the information to the traditional channels, because most individual investors do not get those announcements until the next day, when they appear in the Wall Street Journal and other financial publications. This gives large institutions a leg up on reacting to any news or announcement. Schwartz believes that a standardized way of displaying that information on the company site would be a better way to reach investors, because they tend to check the site for information anyway.
What is this thing with degrading groups of people because of their ancestry? After several civil rights movements and hundreds of years of progress, is this all the distance we have come?
On the other hand, I favor freedom of expression. If people feel that they can express such sentiments, we will be more likely to know who actually has those sentiments. It makes it a lot easier to understand it when certain things happen.
Mr. Imus, you need some Black friends. Ms. Stanton, you need some Asian friends. I don’t just mean that you know one another. I mean friends to the point that you get upset when you go with them to a conference and the hotel suddenly has no rooms available; to the point where you get angry when everyone at the restaurant has ordered and been served, but your friends are still waiting for someone to come and take their orders; and to the point where you are mad when people start talking with accents and repeating ethnic stereotypes about your friends’ presumed ancestry.
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Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 7:07 by lnxwalt
Erwin’s StarOffice Tango » Locked-in by a potato
One month prior to the expiration of the PBR certificate in December 2004, Europlant ceased maintenance of the variety, even though its registration on the national list was valid until 2009. This means that no one else could take over maintenance of the variety because it was still under PBR at the time — meaning Europlant had the only rights to produce the variety. So Linda was marked for deletion from the German potato market.
PBR, or plant breeder’s rights, appears to be a kind of exclusive rights period, similar in concept to US plant patents. Shortly before PBR expired, when no one else was allowed to cultivate it, the vendor pulled a popular variety of potato off the market.
Now imagine having software that uses vendor-specific file formats or network protocols. Shortly before competitors are able to make a work-alike product, the market-leading vendor is probably going to do a shift in file formats or protocols for no other reason than to block competition, even though the competition is good for the purchaser or end-user.
Smaller businesses especially have little need to spend large sums of money on software applications with generic functionality, such as office application suites. As a user, I have seen almost zero improvement in office software since I purchased WordPerfect Office Professional 7 in 1997. Microsoft had almost caught up in functionality with their Office 2003 product six or seven years later. However, since Microsoft probably has over 90% of office application software purchases (thousands of people download OpenOffice.org and similar zero-price suites, but actual purchases of non-Microsoft products are a fairly small slice of the market up until now), there has been almost no improvement in the product area.
What has happened is that they have become adept at making minor, slightly-incompatible changes in their file formats from version to version, forcing users to purchase upgrades when their existing software still meets their needs. This happens because they do not use an open and cross-platform , vendor-neutral, standardized file format for the products–they could not play those games any more and their prices would have to be reduced.
I found the documentary fascinating because I, probably for the first time, realized that open competition and vendor lock-in are a key issue of the food sector as well and thus everybody should care. Sure, if a vendor takes your favorite potato from the market, you can easily switch to a different potato type because I’m not aware of any “potato addictions”. This is very different for software where vendors oftent ry to lock in customers via proprietary file formats and interfaces, which often make switching to different products costly or even impossible.
This shows clearly why you should never go with a single-vendor solution. You should always insist on multiple vendors’ products and a standardized set of vendor-independent file formats and network protocols to connect them with.
In office software, you should insist that your software comes with built-in support for OpenDocument Format (ODF), the recognized standard formats for office documents. If your vendor cannot or will not support ODF, you can download OpenOffice.org or contact Sun to find a reseller of StarOffice. Your personal or company data may depend upon it.
technorati tags:ODF, lock-in
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Posted in Industry News at 4:06 by lnxwalt
As we discussed on La Voz De La Revoluccion, US News & World Report tells us that Apple’s recent gains are partly due to virtualization, saying, “Bottom line: Which one your base machine is won’t matter as much anymore. Software will run well just about everywhere.”
Even before their new version comes out, Apple is having explosive growth with Mac OS X, which is coming at the expense of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista. People are excited by Mac (and Ubuntu Linux / Linux Mint) in a way that a few ersatz “wow” comments pushed by advertising can not match.
Linux and BSD offer many alternatives for emulation and virtualization. They also run on numerous kinds of hardware. In fact, with some of the newer Linux distributions and versions are so good that few people need to buy Windows any more. (A distribution, or distro, is a separate package of the operating system. It is something like XP Home, XP Pro, Server 2003, and so on, except they are generally offered by different organizations instead of a single company the way that Microsoft Windows is distributed.)
This indicates that people will soon buy a computer with its built-in virtualizer and then obtain multiple operating systems to place within virtualized environments. Soon, you will no longer need to consider the OS when you buy equipment to use with your computer, because it will be designed to plug directly into Parallels or VMWare or Linux VServer or UML or Xen or Virtuozzo/OpenVZ or VirtualBox or Qemu or Plex86/Bochs. I believe that some of these will emphasize direct-connections with hardware, while others will figure out how best to plug into the hardware-based solutions.
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05.01.07
Posted in News and Announcements, Small Business at 5:24 by lnxwalt
I worked in the garden a little bit this evening. I was putting in some more tomatoes to replace the ones that the temperature changes killed, only I could see once I started that a couple of them were not dead–they had new leaves coming up from ground-level. We still have more plants to put in, and one whole corner has more grass on it than any similar-size part of the yard.
In the Western half of the country, you really should read the Sunset Western Garden Book in order to grow a garden or even much of a lawn. It is likely that taking the time to properly prepare the soil before we started the garden would have brought both reduced weed growth and increased crop production.
Weeds–I didn’t know there were that many weeds in all of the High Desert. We pulled and used the hoe and the shovel and still probably left more than half of the weeds still in place. I guess there will be some more weeding tomorrow.
There are times in your life and the life of your business where it seems like your garden is full of weeds, where nothing that you “planted” appears to be coming up. Instead, a whole lot of stuff that you never wanted and never encouraged (or maybe you did at one time and then changed your mind) will be there.
TOUGH.
Being in business is not about picnics on the beach. It is about finding ways to continue to be in business no matter how things appear. Some people don’t make it and have to return to employee life. There is nothing wrong with that except for losing the element of control. As a business owner, you have some part to play in making the crucial decisions that determine whether you stay in business. An employee often has no say over decisions that determine whether he or she will have continued employment. On the other hand, not having that weight of making “important” decisions over your head can mean that you feel like you are in a more secure position.
You need to stick it out if you can, removing all of the unwanted “weeds” and replacing them with the desired “plants.” Not everyone can stick it out, and out of those that can, not everyone will. It is up to you to make it happen.
We’ve been plucking some weeds ourselves. The transition from B2Evolution to Nucleus and Pivot for out other blogs is in progress. The feeds on Feedburner are now pulling off of the new systems, except for “All Our Blogs (minus one),” which is going on hiatus while we get the communities site up and working. Join us in working toward a better future for all of us!
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