By on May 17, 2007
FUD: was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp. : “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.” [1] The term has also been attributed to veteran Morgan Stanley computer analyst Ulrich Weil, though it had already been used in other contexts as far back as the 1920s. [2] [3]
As Eric S. Raymond writes: “The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.” [4]
By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its wares, regardless of the relative technical merits. This is a recognized phenomenon, epitomized by the traditional axiom of purchasing agents that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment”. The result is that many companies’ IT departments buy software that they know to be technically inferior because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand .
Well Microsoft has recently stated that Linux is in violation of 235 patents.. Personally I just think it is an attempt to extort money out of Canonical and Red Hat. Microsoft is one of those companies that honestly patents anything under the sun. For example they have a patent for tabbed browsing.. Everyone knows that tabbed browsing was made popular by Firefox. Many people have different opinions in matters like this one thing is clear we do need patent reform. Linus recently stated that Microsoft was actually in violation of 532 patens. Linux is hear to stay and Microsoft should come up with a new marketing plan other than FUD and Extortion to deal with Linux. Anyone who has actually used the latest Ubuntu build is well aware of what a slick and efficient operating system it is. One thing is sure it would be ironic if Microsoft went the way of SCO…
Posted in Microsoft | Tagged Linux
By on May 14, 2007
Well everyone knows that Vector graphic layouts is where it is at! Microsoft recently released it’s silverlight project and hot on it’s heals sun just made an announced it’s Java FX adobe recently made an announced the Flex SDK will be open sourced. In my opinion adobe clearly has the advantages here because flash has the tightest integration with multimedia authoring tools and adobe owns some of the best codecs for video period hands down. Not to mention flash has been around longer. I am glad to see the competition heat up this will only make all the products better! I am also ecstatic to see they are all being open sourced! Flash/Flex SDK, Silverlight, and Java FX will all be open source. You may be wondering what makes these products significant. The fact that plug-ins eliminate many of the issues and pitfalls of cross browser scripting (the kind you have when using AJAX). Bandwidth is no longer an issue, and mobile phones becoming more and more like PDA/Laptops. It is now a race to create the ideal programming environment that is both efficient and capable of giving the user interface some eye candy (video, 3D, etc.); it is also essential for this experience to be shared among a number of devices for example a cell phone; Ultra Mobil PC, PC, etc… Microsoft is making an attempt to broaden its’ market by open sourcing silverlight and the Mono project has plans for porting over silverlight to create an open source version of Silverlight for Linux but Microsoft is at a disadvantage here the competitors already have their runtimes working in Linux both Adobe and Sun already have opened their source and currently have runtimes for all operating systems and devices. I do believe the competition is good it will only make the products better in the long term.
By on May 14, 2007
Well it is finally out. I have been working on upgrading my Ubuntu box. I am now using ubuntu to run my home network
I set up Samba and a 400GB share so the four other home computers can link to it. I have also been working on Amaork to setup all my audio files as a iTunes share for the network and I have also been pondering setting up a shortwave radio station so I can transmit my signals to other people (near future). Right now though I have started working on my own customized version of UbuntuStudio that will be on a thumb / dvd live cd! I will include wine, Flash 9, Java, Eclipse, Tomcat, Apache, and Ruby on Rails. I will also be using wine to run some Action Script editors that are tied into Motion Twin. I will also be placing some of my personal files on the OS so other people can examine my code snippets. For all of the video game fans I will also be installing emulators to run PlayStation, N64, SuperNintendo, NES, Sega Master and Genesis! So I will be looking forward to placing it as a download once it is complete I believe it will take me a couple of months to configure it properly
I highly recomend the Ubuntu Studio it is by far the slickest distro built yet.
Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged Linux
Recent Comments