Re: [colorforth] DOES> How is colorForth different from other Forths?

["Samuel A. Falvo II" <kc5tja@xxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 24 January 2004 02:10 pm, Mark Slicker wrote:
> Are you saying Microsoft would have a greater level of success with a
> goverment break up? How do you support that?

Absolutely.  The operating system vendor would be in competition with 
other OS vendors, but since windows is already the de facto OS of 
choice, they'd hardly have any serious threat of competition (except 
from Linux).  Still, their revenue stream would depend EXCLUSIVELY on 
sales of OS and closely-related products; ergo, competition from Linux, 
BSD, et. al. would necessarily FORCE them to improve their OS and would 
make them more agile to respond to customer requests.  Ditto for the 
Office suite company, and the Visual C++ company, et. al.

Right now, the failures of one department of the company is made up for 
by the overwhelming success of another.  You think the Windows dept. is 
earning Microsoft money right now?  No way.  It is the .NET department, 
and it's "software as a service" and "yearly fee" pricing structure that 
is making the company the most money right now.  Office is probably the 
biggest money maker overall, being available for both Windows and MacOS, 
and $700 for 5-user licenses at nearly every company (literally!) in 
this country.  10- and 20-user licenses are even more expensive, AND, 
they need to be renewed yearly.  Oh, speaking of renewing licenses, 
let's not forget the BSA, Microsoft's gansta thug legal 
department-turned-company.  They regularly rake in more income for 
Microsoft than probably all of Windows sales combined, just from legal 
settlements.  MSDN subscriptions is another source of revenue.  Oh, and 
let's not forget the $1K+ per MCSE test (c'mon, you know you'll pay for 
more than just one test per year if you're truely in the business 
professionally) you'll take to receive your yearly certifications.  
Ergo, Microsoft doesn't give two (*#&$s about whether Windows is good 
quality or not, about whether Word actually addresses the issues 
*ROUTINELY* raised by professional writers year after year after year 
(which it doesn't; just ask a professional writer), etc.  Microsoft 
doesn't care, because it knows that it can just place products wherever, 
and if they fail, that's OK, because .NET or MSDN subscriptions will be 
able to fill the gap.

This isn't rocket science, and anyone with a library card can do the same 
amount of research that I have for my college classes last semester.  
Monopolies suck ass, not only for the customer, but for the company as 
well.  The only thing it doesn't suck for is the CEO and a few members 
of the board.  Everybody else gets royally screwed, and they don't even 
know it.

> This is due to developments beyond their control, a competitior that
> has trancended the Microsoft mode of production. This is not due to
> some unexplained law of monopolistic corporations.

No, this is not true.  Forget for the moment that Linux even exists.  
Forget about BSD.  Forget about MacOS.

Customers are **PISSED** at Microsoft.  These customers are the same ones 
that would normally swear by MS even just two years ago.  They don't 
like the EULA that XP ships with, and they don't like the corporate 
lock-in that is happening.  They don't like the system-supported 
spyware, nor do they like push-advertising on their desktop every 
*#$&ing time they turn on the box.  Windows XP might be oh-so-sweet for 
the cutsie mom-and-pop couple aged 65 or over, who can't tell a mouse 
from a sewing machine pedal.  But for real, honest to goodness users, 
college professors to MIS departments of multi-billion dollar companies 
alike, all are despising Microsoft as I type this.  I also note that 
Microsoft still regularly uses Unix-based servers internal to the 
company for their mission-critical stuff.  Every now and again, news of 
this even leaks out.

Fact is, if Linux hadn't arrived, something else would have taken its 
place, perhaps MacOS.  But evidence is showing that it is immaterial of 
Linux; in fact, 90% of Windows users who are now expressing dissent with 
the philosophy that Microsoft is taking are people who formerly didn't 
even know Linux existed, or if they did, have had such wildly incorrect 
preconceptions about it that they may as well have never had known about 
it.

Note: all of this is based empirically on a combination of collegiate 
research and on real, hands-on, commercial consulting I have undertaken 
over the past 5 years.

> Once people are imersered in this new phenomenon of freely openly
> developed software, and this freely developed software is intergral
> part of production and governace, there will be no going back to one
> company (or two) controlling all furture developments.

People used to be immersed in such an environment before Microsoft came 
along.  Clearly, this utopian view isn't realistic.  Another monopoly 
can come along.  They need only strike the right impulse to purchase, 
then exploit the instinctual human trait of laziness (code to our API, 
and your code will be super-portable!).

> > This suggests that there are important details to discuss.  The
> > thing with ColorForth, MachineForth, and the whole concept of the
> > MISC architecture is that they are *so simple* that there is
> > *nothing* to discuss.  This is a very liberating thing.
>
> Does this mean the end of the colorForth mailing list?

I didn't say there was nothing to discuss (I, for one, purely enjoy the 
philosophy-based discussions).  I said there was nothing *important* to 
discuss.  Performance issues are the only things that can even be 
remotely considered "important," and I can demonstrably prove that 
ColorForth is NOT the fastest programming environment out there.  But 
who here would even care?  It's "fast enough," for nearly everything 
anyone who uses it for, and that is all that is important.  So, even 
performance isn't a direly important issue.

> If this is the case, then how is there a market for any other simple
> electrontic component? This same teenager could just as easily create
> a ram with the same components.

Yes, and I've done that too.  But 64 bits of RAM versus 64MB of RAM 
reveals something important: circuit replication can make building a 
circuit with discrete components tedious and expensive.  Last I checked, 
one needed only one CPU to make a truely useful circuit, and one based 
on MISC concepts will easily be an eye-opener for even the most die-hard 
RISC advocates.

But you took my example the diametrically opposite direction than I had 
intended.  Consider, if a teenager with TTL design experience can design 
and implement an F21 clone with discrete components, who or what is to 
stop, say, Motorola or IBM (whose senior-level engineers often have 
doctorate-level degrees) from embedding these processors in their own 
chips, and not even considering giving Chuck a royalty?  He has been 
working hard to design these chips, and lo and behold, they turn out to 
be the most easily reverse-engineerable design for processors in the 
world.  Chuck won't get a single cent of recompensation for his efforts, 
except for those companies that are truely altruistic.

If Chuck *were* rolling in the cash, he'd at least hire someone to 
renovate his website and maintain a list of current ColorForth events, 
news, articles, etc. if he couldn't find the time to do it himself.

> If existing software artifacts/ideology had no bearing, there would be
> no reluctance to use components which improve performance and lower
> cost.

But would you pay for such components?  Consider: to lower the cost of 
production of a product, you must reduce your expenses: this means 
paying LESS for something.  And you can't get much cheaper than FREE, 
and this is the point of my observation.

>      There is plenty of money to be made by porting
>      code, programming applications and teaching."

Forgive me, but in the context of ColorForth, I disagree with this, based 
on empirical evidence.  Find me *one* company that is paying *one* 
employee, other than Chuck Moore, to code in ColorForth, that is still 
around today.  The one prior company, iTVc, doesn't count, since it's no 
longer in business.

In other contexts, e.g., porting C code, or teaching about APL or Lisp, 
then yes, I agree there is money to be made.

--
Samuel A. Falvo II


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