Lyvim Xaphir wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-03-24 at 02:02, Kyle McDonald wrote:
>
>
> Kyle,
>
> This was an excellent read. I've snipped for reasons of brevity but I
> did read the whole deal. Responses below..
>
Glad you liked it :)
>>
>>Now on something totally different. I think this grew from the thread
>>that started with someone complaining that the P4 that they either had
>>or were going to get wouldn't run Win95.
>>
>>I can't believe that this was attributed to some conspiracy between
>>Intel and Microsoft. Yeah right (There are other things they're in bed
>>on -- but this ain't one of them.) It's more likely Intel just not
>>wanting to keep spending the large sum of money it takes to continue
>>the backward compatibilty that Win95 would need. The number of people
>>out there that will decide not to buy a P4 because of this is so small
>>that it doesn't justify the expense. It's Capitalism, not Conspiracy.
>>
>
> <grin> I would have thought that a Sun employee would have been the
> first to jump on the M$ conspiracy bandwagon. lol!
>
You read .signatures huh? or was it the return address.
Yes, while I may not be as religious as some in thinking of MS as the
'great satan' I still dislike them, and their actions quite a bit.
> But, I feel the need to make the point that Capitalism and Conspiracy
> are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary; they tend to enhance and
> complement each other. Eh...to a degree...with the problem of
> diminishing returns for consumer value after that. It's no secret that
> Intel and M$ have been collaborating since the early days. One key
> gamepiece that will ensure M$ profitability is something called planned
> obscelesence. I know I'm not bringing up any points that you are not
> already painfully aware of; I mention them here merely to invite your
> comments on them.
>
You are right Capitalism has greed as one of it's driving forces. And
a by product of Greed can be Conspiracy. 'Planned Obsolesence' while
a direct byprodicut of capitalism isn't really a conspiracy. It's a
'good bussiness' plan. It's not new to Microsoft, or the computer
industry. It's just that the speed of technology makes it more apparent.
Why do you think for the longest time in america, the average car only
lasted about 100,000 miles or 5 years. It wasn't because the car makers
*couldn't* make a car that lasted longer.
In the car industry, the Japanese came along and used 'longer life' as
a key marketing point and today the US car makers have followed suit.
So capitalism when played in an open market will regulate the greed on
it's own.
Microsoft has the advantage of being a monopoly. Intel doesn't really.
Intel used have a guaranteed market for their newer processors. At first
no matter how fast they were, the Spreadsheet, wordprocessor, database
user could always notice the lags when the program was told to do
something. People always wanted 'faster'. Some people have been addicted
to this and even today they always want the 'fastest' available even
just to surf the web. But have you noticed lately how much moeny Intel
has been pumping into research into HIghend sound, video editing, 3D
gracphics, etc. They're trying to make sure that there is constant
stream of new uses for your computer coming down the pike that your
processor can't handle today.
Is that planned obsolesence? I don't think so. I think it's progress.
I mean alot of these things are things we've always wanted. In this
case greed is causing Intel to bring them to us sooner. Even if they
left Video editing to someone else to do (and it took 5years) your
machine still wouldn't have been able to handle it, and you'd need to
upgrade.
To actually make these newe things work Intel does need to make changes
to it's processor architecture. Changes that make backward compatibility
harder to ensure. ALos these changes and new features many times need
many transitors and space on the chips, space that they might not have
if they don't eliminate older technology.
Add to that the fact that the majority of the public has already moved
on, away from older software, and there isn't really a bussiness reason
to keep the older stuff.
The PC industry I feel is totally handicapped by it's desire for
backward compatibility. I think you could have even faster, more stable
software and hardware if the market was willing to start with a new
platform. But as has been shown many times: The market isn't willing.
I mean we only recently got rid of ISA slots, and while PCI has a work
around, we're still limited to 15 IRQ's!!! So we're stuck here with
mediocre stuff.
Now for an example of a real MS-Intel conspiracy:
Remember the CPU serial number thing? MS kept relatively quiet back
when it was first announced. THey let Intel take the brint of the PR
headaches, but I truely believe that Intel only added it to the chips
at MS's request. Stolen computers, Tracking your web surfing... those
were all created to confuse the issue and hide MS's real purpose. One
which I suspected way back then.
That purpose has recently been revealed with MS's new licensing scheme
on XP and Office XP. MS has always wanted a way to enforce it's
licensing scheme. (Note: I don't know how evil this scheme is, the
UNIX, and other high-end computer world has licensed software like
this for years -- ever heard of a HostID on a Sun??) The part that I
don't like the most is how when the PR thing exploded in their face,
they quickly added an option to 'disable' the ID through software.
BIOS vendors quickly added an option to enable/disable it also.
But I suspect now (and I'm not sure why this hasn't been mentioned
before now) that XP reenables it, reads the ID, and disables it again
when it goes to check if it's license is still valid. That's not
exactly on the up and up.
> Greed is not something to be underestimated. We in the technical world
> sometimes tend to assume from a subconscious standpoint that since our
> primary focus is technical excellence, i.e. products and solutions that
> work, that this same focus will be the basis for other organizations and
> movements in the world at large. Unfortunately this is not the case;
> certainly not with Microsoft, and this is true to a lesser degree with
> Intel. The bigger that they have gotten, the more important their
> marketing departments have become, and therefore the more influence that
> the marketing people have had on the engineering people. Money, not
> technical excellence, has become the major driving force behind Intel
> chip architecture.
>
Marketing has always been the driving force in any company that is
successful. Any company that ignores what it's marketing dept. is
telling it the market wants won't last long. Now it's still the
engineering dept's responsibility to design technically excelent
solutions to the problems marketing says the customers want solved.
THe thing engineering needs to keep in mind is that the customers
may not want the same problems solved as the engineers want to solve :)
I think Intel does this well. AMD a little better (It's easier for them
I think - Intel does some of their work for them) Microsoft on the other
hand. Because there isn't much competition to keep the greed in check,
they've noticed how much money there is out there in the 'constant
upgrade' cycle. I think they've fallen into a rut of releasing upgrades
just to release upgrades, and hit a problem similiar to Intels: They
need to invent new things for your computer to do so thet they can
'upgrade' the OS to handle it. In someways Intel has helped MS out here,
by pushing for better sound and video hardware, which has given MS the
opportunity to write software to drive the hardware. But I don't know
that there was an organized conspiracy between them. Intel would have
pushed those technologies in order to sell more CPU's wether MS wrote
the software or not. If MS didn't then someone else would (and many
times did! Only to attract MS's attention and either get bought out
or driven out of bussiness by a competing MS product)
> If you assume that Intel product is purchased mainly because Windows is
> sold with PC's via the M$ tax (and it is), it then becomes important
> that older Windows versions be taken out of the picture, because in
> essence these older versions of windows are supplying functionality that
> is in direct competition with the functionality supplied by Windows XP.
> Planned Obscelesence(sp?) then becomes an important strategy in your
> overall scheme, if that scheme is making money. To that end, strategic
> partnerships with your hardware people can be extremely fruitful.
>
Well, I'll agree that the fact that the latest MS software doesn't
run on some of the old Intel hardware is useful to intel to drive
some customers to upgrade, I don't think it's that big a deal, I mean
we're only just now changing the CPU so it won't run Win95? that's
over 6 years old. While I don't doubt there are many people out there
with Win95 still, I bet there are only a handful who haven't upgraded
their hardware to something newer than what was available 6 or more
years ago. These people are a very small dot on Intels radar.
For MS, I do think that the number of people stuck on Win95 is
a bigger irritation than the number of people stuck on a Pentium
or 486 is for Intel. However I like to think it's less of an irritation
than the people who are choosing Linux instead of Windows! :) And again
I don't think that microsoft needs to collude with Intel to get people
to upgrade... The industry as a whole will get those who are willing to
upgrade todo so soon enough just through the forward progress that it
makes everyday. Creative will release a new soundcard, with drivers only
for XP. ATI a new video card the same way. Etc. Etc.
There are plenty of people out there who are happy with both thier
software *and* their hardware, and these people won't be looking
to upgrade for a while (unless something breaks.) For others it
could be any new piece of HW (not just a CPU) that makes them want
a new OS, or it could be a new OS or Application that makes them
finally break down and buy new hardware. This is the quickly moving
world of technology... You can go on nearly for ever with a fixed
snapshot in time of a working system. (Heck I still have a Commodore 128
that works) It's when you only want to change a peice of that system
that all bets are off.
With Linux this is less pronounced because there are plenty of
knowledgable and vocal people in the Linux Community that own older
hardware, But as a certian hardware becomes less common, and even
more, as more mainstream, already upgraded users come on board,
The Linux distributions will need to focus more time on ensuring
compatibility with the latest HW, and testing older HW *will*
fall through the cracks. It may be less pronounced, but Linux
will start to drive users to upgrade HW just like Windows does
already. Only with linux (at least right now) that upgrade process
is more work. You can't always just walk into a store and buy
the latest replacement for what ever part your having trouble with.
First you need to research which are supported by Linux. Hopefully
with more and more users coming on board more and more HW vendors
will start to support Linux 'out of the box.'
> What do you think? Your perspective as a part of the Sun Microsystems
> team is naturally very important, to me anyway, and I'm looking forward
> to your commentary.
>
Well It's longer than I thought it would be. I don't know that where
I work has much real effect on what I said though. It's more about
who I am. MS definately doesn't play nice, and I'm hoping my faith
in the legal system will turn out to be justified. Either through
this proposed settlement getting thrown out, the 9 states pushing
for a stricter judgement, or possibly from Sun's own lawsuit. MS
needs to be shown that it can't keep operating the way it has been
for too long.
>
>>I don't think people realize how much money, time, and effort, it takes
>>to design, test, support, etc this type of thing. These chips are very
>>complex. The machines they end up a part of are even more so. It takes
>>an extraordinary effort to truely make sure of compatibility.
>>
>
> Yes. And it's unappreciated.
>
Not by me. I admit I don't get to use Linux as much as I'd like.
And I've been bit by a bug here and there that I've put up with
and some I've not reported (shame on me:() but also... I don't
complain about it either. If I couldn't be bothered to report
a bug to the developers, then I don't feel I have any standing
to biitch and moan about it not getting fixed.
>>
>>I don't want to talk anyone out of paying for the Mandrake CD's or
>>sending in a contribution, but it may just be that $50 or $60 bucks
>>spent on a 'testing' Harddrive might actually be a better investment
>>for the linux community as a whole.
>>
>>
-Kyle
>>
>
> With a stable MandrakeSoft, yes; you point is well taken. With them in
> a cash crunch, it is probably better to put the funds towards assisting
> their survival first, and then looking after the community afterwards.
>
> Just my wooden nickel's worth. ;)
>
I aggree. I don't want to see companies close up. People laid off.
Good products go to waste. That's why I said I didn't want to talk
anyone out of sending money Mandrakes way.
On the other hand, there may be more different distributions out
there than the Linux community can afford to support. Not to mention
the complaints recently about the lack of standard ways of doing things
between the different distributions. Maybe some consolidation is what
is needed to make Linux take off. (I'd like to see Mandrake be the one
that some of the others get consolidated into but I don't know if that
can happen.)
I mean how much money and time do we need to invest on multiple install
programs. Multiple package update applications. Multilple CD images
Multiple kernels/driver combinations. I agree that Choice and
competition are a good thing, but it also seems to me that if we want
to make the Linux experience one that attracts and holds more users
from the Windows world, then maybe much of this duplicated effort would
be better spent on other things???
Well now I'm just rambling so I'll shutup now.
-Kyle
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
