They have zero interest in forcing you or anyone else outside the government to use any given format.
... unless you are a government contractor, buy or sell to the government, or need a service from the government, or in any other way have to exchange documents with a government entity. That probably covers most of the businesses.
Engineering, and many of the apps that I mention do this. The higher precision you want, the more time it takes. There is no reason (other than popularity of Windows) for those apps to be Windows based, but they are, and that's how it is. A few are available for various Unices and Linux, but most are not. Given the cost of an average package ($10-15K) the cost of the OS, even if it has to be Vista Ultimate Whatever, is lost in the noise. A single training package for one employee will cost far more.
Here is an example of a stronger codependence. Autodesk Inventor is a parametric CAD, which means that the model is defined (and redefined) by some numbers. A sphere would be defined by its radius, for example; a cube - by its side, etc. So where is the information stored? Either in each part independently (which doesn't work if you build a large assembly) or... in a common Excel spreadsheet. And not just in a.xls file that it reads - no, you must have an instance of MS Excel open, and AI communicates to it using COM. Try to port that to Linux...
Discussions on/. are MMORPGs expressed in text form:-)
Sounds like fairly specialised stuff then, and not the kind of thing that would be run by the vast majority of corporate "grunts". On windows?
All of the specialized apps except one are for Windows. The one (Eagle CAD) is for Linux, but we don't use it any more (it's too simple for our needs.) Well, let me count who is locked in and who isn't./me counting... Here is the result. 75% of our employees need a program that is available for Windows only. 25% can use Mac with Office and IE (if IE works - required for access to some government web sites, nothing else works.)
Some of our CADs may exist for Linux. For example, Xilinx ISE is available for Linux. But it has limitations; for example, MIG does not work on Linux, and we must have it. I have no idea if Linux native apps will work on Mac, under X or whatever. I don't even plan to try; games with a multi-thousand dollar tools are not something I am interested in, and the tools themselves are so fragile I'd have to be mad to even consider the possibility of trying it on an unsupported platform.
So what's the alternative? Now that Ubuntu is effectively productising Linux I suppose that's a possibility.
As soon as Win32 API for Linux is ready (in other words, WINE is out of alpha and into 1.x releases) then I will personally upgrade all our desktops to Ubuntu (or whatever other distribution is the best at the moment.) However considering that WINE development already took longer than MS needed to write Windows in the first place, I am unsure that I will live long enough to see it released.
The mental jump to the fact we have souls, there is some type of after-life, etc, I believe is not too much of a leap, especially if you're in a society that pushes these ideas.
If you were a computer, your software and its data could be called your soul. If someone were to smash the hardware, your software (your soul) could be:
lost instantly and forever
backed up and resumed in a virtual machine (on a Paradise 3000 Mainframe)
Is there a way for you to find out what really happens? Not without detailed schematics of the hardware, which may or may not have the hot backup capabilities.
I think you are correct. We do not need to invent a new gene, violating Occam's Razor in the process. Humans are one of very few species (the only one known to us, so far) that employs reasoning and is capable of highly abstract thinking. These capabilities allow humans to seek and hope for pleasant scenarios, such as eternal life etc.
If you can think, you simply *must* think about what happens to your thought pattern after your body dies. These thoughts are logical, and unavoidable. Since there is no apparent method of physical verification, a number of theories (a.k.a. religions) were proposed. A number of people choose to lean toward one theory or another because of their personal or cultural preferences.
Belief in a religious theory results in reduction of fear of death. This is good and pleasant, and because of that religions continue to exist. To be an atheist one must make quite hard choices for himself, such as to acknowledge the finality of death and total loss of identity. Many people fear that and embrace a religion to get comfort.
The corporate I work far has all it's business apps written in Java. Theoretically there's nothing to stop them switching to OSX.
The company I work for uses 3rd party apps which are not written in Java; they are written by ISVs, in highly optimized C and C++, and they still may take hours to run a simulation. There are no Mac versions, and we wouldn't be rebuying such an expensive software for Mac anyway. So while your company might be OK, my company can't just move to another OS. I'm sure there are hundreds of businesses that fall into one camp or another. A car mechanic down the street runs his DOS-based billing database (FoxPro likely) and would be totally lost if I suggest that he moves to Mac. Even Windows XP may be not an option for him, who knows how old his stuff is.
Besides, on unrelated note, as some posters already said - with Macs we would lock ourselves into Apple ecology even more than with any Windows lock-in that people talk about. With Macs you have to buy from only one vendor, and pay whatever that vendor wants. That is not acceptable with hardware (you do have choices already,) and is barely acceptable with software (you may have a choice occasionally.)
Have you tried OWA recently? I realise it's not the argument I was making but it works extremely well.
I had to Google for OWA, and I discovered that it stands for some Microsoft Webmail. No, I never used it, and we don't have many MS servers (nor Exchange), and it would be a nice day when we have none. We use SquirrelMail, and it is adequate for a traveling employee - but not as convenient as our current Thunderbird clients are.
I suppose an interesting question would be if you just want email/browsing/office and access to some apps through a browser, why not use something like a Mac Mini?
Because first you need to find a computer user who "just wants email/browsing/office and access to some apps through a browser". Among home users this excludes games; among corporate users this excludes most of business software that is out there (assuming MS Office for Mac is procured and tested for compatibility.) Training of the employees is a problem as well. Myself, I have an old PowerBook 5300ce somewhere, and it still works, but when I tried to use it the experience was far from intuitive. That was with MacOS 9.x IIRC, I can't say if the modern OSX is more Windows-like (to appease the Windows users.)
In other words, nobody is interested in the limited choice that you offer. But you are not the first to offer it; a number of "thin computing" companies, starting with Sun, tried to promote this concept. They all failed so far, because hardly any modern app (like Outlook 2007) can run in a browser. In a pinch you can use Webmail, but it is light years behind the native, local code. If you own a computer you might as well use it to its full potential.
i meant: "why would kazaa waste bandwidth putting a locally resolved address into protocol payload?" reading further into the deposition, it sounds like that's really what kazaa is doing.
There is another post closer to the end of the comments, it explains more about FastTrack. Basically, if the IP addresses match and are public then you open your connection to that host:port without further ado. If the IP addresses differ then you take the public one (which is in your IP envelope that you received) and try to open that address:host in hope that the NAT will forward it to the right box. It's called "firewall penetration" and there are some more ways to do it, all completely legitimate and intended to keep the devices on the private network functioning - things like VoIP phones, for example, use STUN protocol.
though the defense lawyer didn't seem to pick up on that detail
Direct physical evidence will outweigh the indirect one. They seized the computer of the accused, and it's clean. IMO, there isn't much to base a trial on. I think the lawyers are simply going through the motions to get their pay.
To me it's crystal clear that they observed someone's Kazaa traffic, but when they snatched the HDD it was some other computer. The reason for that is not some outlandish NAT or Kazaa hack, but simply an IP address confusion (either a true collision, or a wrong DHCP log at Verizon - not that they care.)
Computer forensic "expert" tries to claim he's ignorant of NAT
Not so. He was very careful with his words in presence of a lawyer who has no clue and posesses selective hearing skills. More than once the lawyer tried to put his words into witness's mouth, but the witness resisted, rightly.
Most P2P systems are probably on 192.168.1.0/24 -- why waste precious bandwidth sharing that useless detail?
That's the only IP address they are sure about, and it's a part of the protocol already. The peer will have to compare this one (provided by the source) and the IP source address on the packet and determine the type of firewall / NAT that may be involved, and do what is right.
saying that clicking through an install wizard and refering to it as "having the knowledge and skills necessary to quickly and deftly solve problems", does not instill a whole lot of confidence.
So how do you bypass the legalese when installing.msi-packaged 3rd party software on Windows?
The question IN FULL is why they are using an office suite as a software development environment and application platform. 99% of the applications "written" in excel would have been far better developed as a standalone application and excel offers no functionality whatsoever over roviding the same functionality in a web app.
To clarify my earlier response: because Excel and Word were explicitly marketed and sold as scripting platforms for businesses to write their little applications in. Remember the MS Office logo - a puzzle? That's how they specifically marketed the thing, for ease of mixing and matching. MS Office does many things, and it would be amazingly expensive to redo even some of them that you need in a standalone application.
Furthermore, if we look at state of APIs around 1995 - when most of those VB apps got written - back there we had nothing at all that would be able to create and maintain a document or a spreadsheet. For example, your business wants a document generator that creates standard letters, and you want five combo boxes for various options. It would be not easy to create a document that does this right; it's possible through the RTF, but then you'd need to open the file in Word anyway (to print) so why not to generate it right there?
Word and Excel are platforms for building applications. Feel free to call them bad, stupid, ugly and limited, since they are. But they are also powerful - you can do a lot of office automation with them, and it would cost much more (like 100x more) to write a comparable app in C++ or some other language. These automation functions were standard, available and easy to use.
Specious, irrelevant argument. If a company wants/needs this, they can contract for it.
A requirement to spend money on a contractor, as opposed to using a free product, is hardly irrelevant. It makes F/OSS software more expensive!
Uh, read the question again. He's not asking why companies use closed office suites. He's asking why they use office suites.
What should they use then? Write their own clone of Excel, for one specific purpose? Have you given any thought whatsoever to what it would take and how much it will cost to maintain?
Sometimes this eliminates the possibility of using some kind of cutesy UI metaphor that can only be accomplished with javascript, or flash, or something else, but a well-written web application can ALWAYS degrade to using standard HTML.
It often requires to have a duplicate set of code that does the same thing completely differently. The cost of development goes up. Who is going to pay for that? We are talking about businesses here, not artists or scientists who may be legitimately perfectionists.
I've never understood why companies base so many important applications off stuff like MS Office, or IE, or other apps that they don't have any control over.
Most companies have no control over OO or Firefox either. Companies do not have people who are capable of fetching (CVS, SVN etc.) a year old tree of FF and compiling it and using it and supporting it and being responsible that it works on each and every desktop. A single person doesn't even have enough bandwidth to do that. Companies just buy the stuff they need, and in this particular aspect IE and FF look very much the same.
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to design applications in an environment that isn't as likely to stop working?
Yes, a LAMP would make sense, for example. But in many cases it is easier to put something together by dragging and dropping. IIS is plugged into the whole MSVC,.NET and ASP and SQL infrastructure already. LAMP requires work to get there, if only because there may be fewer documentation or fewer programmers who know the tools. The imagined "support" is another issue - many companies fear using s/w without support, even though the support in many cases is worthless and is never invoked.
We can't change to OO.o, because we have a critical business app written in Excel. Why do companies continually use office suites and specific web browsers as development platforms?
In this case it's easy to answer. Excel was released between 1985 (Mac) and 1987 (PC). OpenOffice did not exist in any meaningful form until what, 2005? I know that StarOffice was around for some time, but hardly anyone dared to use it, and it was much worse than MS Office anyway. Even today's OpenOffice is said to be worse than MS Office in many aspects, but aside from that it's easy to see why a program that had 20 years as an uncontested market leader has entrenched here and there.
Just code them to work with standard HTML/CSS/JS and you won't have all these upgrade problems.
Much of the code is written using libraries and standard pieces which may not work with a newer browser - for example, because your SDK was designed some years before the IE7. And if you upgrade the SDK it will break your other code in many places... it truly makes sense to just not upgrade and be happy.
Many vendors offer subscription for updates, and I have it at work for Autodesk's products and for other tools. Some tools are sold only on subscription basis. And once you are in, you receive updates and new releases as soon as they are ready. I can understand if you are reluctant to upgrade your techs to a new release, but generally it works - Autodesk in particular is quite meticulous in testing; Xilinx, OTOH...
Yes, he says something about that - but that's incorrect. Dell, last time I checked, does not sell high end computers for less than you can put one together. I compared about 2 months ago, and parts cost about $750, whereas the prebuilt box is at least $1200 - and that is assuming that I like each and every part that is in it (which is !likely.)
My $750 includes T6600 and 2 GB of RAM - fact, because I type this on such a box, and I just checked. My video card ($80, included in the price) is NVidia GeForce 7300 GT, which I selected mostly because of dual DVI. Dell, OTOH, offers for $809 a P-4 3GHz system (Dell Precision Workstation 390), and once you start "customizing" to make it usable the price climbs quite high.
I can understand if the GGP does not want to risk it if s/he is unfamiliar with the hardware. But price-wise, you can definitely buy a box in pieces for half the price of what Dell or HP will charge you. Besides, you will get a universal system that can be upgraded or repaired, as opposed to custom boards, rails and other stuff that major box makers just love to put in.
What stops you from buying the parts and building any box you like? And if somehow a trip to Fry's (or your local equivalent) is too scary, I'm sure you can find a few/.ters who will help you for a moderate fee, certainly for less than you'd have to pay to Dell.
Quite possible. There is only one OS to pay for, and unlimited number of junk apps to preload... a few dollars here and a few dollars there, and it all suddenly makes sense.
I don't know for a fact what they use in F-22, but chances are good that most of those real-time systems use one of several commercial RTOSes - QNX, VxWorks, Nucleus, and a few others. eCos, OTOH, need not apply.
The reason for using a commercial RTOS is... reliability. You want code that was heavily tested before. And if you write your own RTOS you will have to debug very mysterious problems for years. Better to grab code that already went through all that, and flew to Mars too. If you follow this link you will see that the good debugging capabilities of the VxWorks allowed the programmers to patch their bug remotely. A homegrown RTOS would be unlikely to have such a debugging interface just because it's out of scope; you'd need to bring the device into the lab and plug some JTAG cable in to reflash the board.
I have no problem being accused of being in the "dotcom" business. Do you?
Yes, I do - because for one successful dot-com we had a thousand who burned through piles of cash, delivered nothing and disappeared from the scene. How many we have left, ones that survived? A handful - Amazon, Ebay, Paypal, Google (though Google was not a classical dot-com.) The success of those few is heavily offset by the losses incurred by the rest of the crowd. I would rather be a professional russian roulette player, the odds are better:-)
In any case, if CitizenRe has any products to show, I will have a look at them. Until then, it's just words, and words are cheap.
It's funny to me that you seem to be all about open-source and interested in disruptive technology that allows the "little guy" to have a competitive advantage in the software industry, or at least the ability to play on a level field, but you have such animosity towards those of us who are moving this vision forward in the solar industry with Citizenre, where every homeowner can recieve a system at_no_cost
I just don't like vaporware, it hurts everyone. CitizenRe's major achievement so far is not in the area of technology, but in area of psychological warfare, with all classical signs of a repackaged dot-com. Their numbers don't make sense, their production facilities haven't been started in construction, their hardware haven't been seen by anyone, their investors are not known (if they exist...) - and everything is "secret". When a company claims to have too many secrets I start suspecting that it has one more, master secret - that it has none of the other secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, some methods run on clusters already. It costs extra licenses, though.
Engineering, and many of the apps that I mention do this. The higher precision you want, the more time it takes. There is no reason (other than popularity of Windows) for those apps to be Windows based, but they are, and that's how it is. A few are available for various Unices and Linux, but most are not. Given the cost of an average package ($10-15K) the cost of the OS, even if it has to be Vista Ultimate Whatever, is lost in the noise. A single training package for one employee will cost far more.
Here is an example of a stronger codependence. Autodesk Inventor is a parametric CAD, which means that the model is defined (and redefined) by some numbers. A sphere would be defined by its radius, for example; a cube - by its side, etc. So where is the information stored? Either in each part independently (which doesn't work if you build a large assembly) or ... in a common Excel spreadsheet. And not just in a .xls file that it reads - no, you must have an instance of MS Excel open, and AI communicates to it using COM. Try to port that to Linux...
Sounds like fairly specialised stuff then, and not the kind of thing that would be run by the vast majority of corporate "grunts". On windows?
All of the specialized apps except one are for Windows. The one (Eagle CAD) is for Linux, but we don't use it any more (it's too simple for our needs.) Well, let me count who is locked in and who isn't. /me counting... Here is the result. 75% of our employees need a program that is available for Windows only. 25% can use Mac with Office and IE (if IE works - required for access to some government web sites, nothing else works.)
Some of our CADs may exist for Linux. For example, Xilinx ISE is available for Linux. But it has limitations; for example, MIG does not work on Linux, and we must have it. I have no idea if Linux native apps will work on Mac, under X or whatever. I don't even plan to try; games with a multi-thousand dollar tools are not something I am interested in, and the tools themselves are so fragile I'd have to be mad to even consider the possibility of trying it on an unsupported platform.
So what's the alternative? Now that Ubuntu is effectively productising Linux I suppose that's a possibility.
As soon as Win32 API for Linux is ready (in other words, WINE is out of alpha and into 1.x releases) then I will personally upgrade all our desktops to Ubuntu (or whatever other distribution is the best at the moment.) However considering that WINE development already took longer than MS needed to write Windows in the first place, I am unsure that I will live long enough to see it released.
If you were a computer, your software and its data could be called your soul. If someone were to smash the hardware, your software (your soul) could be:
Is there a way for you to find out what really happens? Not without detailed schematics of the hardware, which may or may not have the hot backup capabilities.
You really see no difference between a) dying and b) living forever in a paradise?
If you can think, you simply *must* think about what happens to your thought pattern after your body dies. These thoughts are logical, and unavoidable. Since there is no apparent method of physical verification, a number of theories (a.k.a. religions) were proposed. A number of people choose to lean toward one theory or another because of their personal or cultural preferences.
Belief in a religious theory results in reduction of fear of death. This is good and pleasant, and because of that religions continue to exist. To be an atheist one must make quite hard choices for himself, such as to acknowledge the finality of death and total loss of identity. Many people fear that and embrace a religion to get comfort.
Please read his post again - the PowerBook belongs to his gf. Or ... did you mean HER ??? :-)
The company I work for uses 3rd party apps which are not written in Java; they are written by ISVs, in highly optimized C and C++, and they still may take hours to run a simulation. There are no Mac versions, and we wouldn't be rebuying such an expensive software for Mac anyway. So while your company might be OK, my company can't just move to another OS. I'm sure there are hundreds of businesses that fall into one camp or another. A car mechanic down the street runs his DOS-based billing database (FoxPro likely) and would be totally lost if I suggest that he moves to Mac. Even Windows XP may be not an option for him, who knows how old his stuff is.
Besides, on unrelated note, as some posters already said - with Macs we would lock ourselves into Apple ecology even more than with any Windows lock-in that people talk about. With Macs you have to buy from only one vendor, and pay whatever that vendor wants. That is not acceptable with hardware (you do have choices already,) and is barely acceptable with software (you may have a choice occasionally.)
Have you tried OWA recently? I realise it's not the argument I was making but it works extremely well.
I had to Google for OWA, and I discovered that it stands for some Microsoft Webmail. No, I never used it, and we don't have many MS servers (nor Exchange), and it would be a nice day when we have none. We use SquirrelMail, and it is adequate for a traveling employee - but not as convenient as our current Thunderbird clients are.
Because first you need to find a computer user who "just wants email/browsing/office and access to some apps through a browser". Among home users this excludes games; among corporate users this excludes most of business software that is out there (assuming MS Office for Mac is procured and tested for compatibility.) Training of the employees is a problem as well. Myself, I have an old PowerBook 5300ce somewhere, and it still works, but when I tried to use it the experience was far from intuitive. That was with MacOS 9.x IIRC, I can't say if the modern OSX is more Windows-like (to appease the Windows users.)
In other words, nobody is interested in the limited choice that you offer. But you are not the first to offer it; a number of "thin computing" companies, starting with Sun, tried to promote this concept. They all failed so far, because hardly any modern app (like Outlook 2007) can run in a browser. In a pinch you can use Webmail, but it is light years behind the native, local code. If you own a computer you might as well use it to its full potential.
There is another post closer to the end of the comments, it explains more about FastTrack. Basically, if the IP addresses match and are public then you open your connection to that host:port without further ado. If the IP addresses differ then you take the public one (which is in your IP envelope that you received) and try to open that address:host in hope that the NAT will forward it to the right box. It's called "firewall penetration" and there are some more ways to do it, all completely legitimate and intended to keep the devices on the private network functioning - things like VoIP phones, for example, use STUN protocol.
though the defense lawyer didn't seem to pick up on that detail
Direct physical evidence will outweigh the indirect one. They seized the computer of the accused, and it's clean. IMO, there isn't much to base a trial on. I think the lawyers are simply going through the motions to get their pay.
To me it's crystal clear that they observed someone's Kazaa traffic, but when they snatched the HDD it was some other computer. The reason for that is not some outlandish NAT or Kazaa hack, but simply an IP address confusion (either a true collision, or a wrong DHCP log at Verizon - not that they care.)
Not so. He was very careful with his words in presence of a lawyer who has no clue and posesses selective hearing skills. More than once the lawyer tried to put his words into witness's mouth, but the witness resisted, rightly.
Most P2P systems are probably on 192.168.1.0/24 -- why waste precious bandwidth sharing that useless detail?
That's the only IP address they are sure about, and it's a part of the protocol already. The peer will have to compare this one (provided by the source) and the IP source address on the packet and determine the type of firewall / NAT that may be involved, and do what is right.
So how do you bypass the legalese when installing .msi-packaged 3rd party software on Windows?
To clarify my earlier response: because Excel and Word were explicitly marketed and sold as scripting platforms for businesses to write their little applications in. Remember the MS Office logo - a puzzle? That's how they specifically marketed the thing, for ease of mixing and matching. MS Office does many things, and it would be amazingly expensive to redo even some of them that you need in a standalone application.
Furthermore, if we look at state of APIs around 1995 - when most of those VB apps got written - back there we had nothing at all that would be able to create and maintain a document or a spreadsheet. For example, your business wants a document generator that creates standard letters, and you want five combo boxes for various options. It would be not easy to create a document that does this right; it's possible through the RTF, but then you'd need to open the file in Word anyway (to print) so why not to generate it right there?
Word and Excel are platforms for building applications. Feel free to call them bad, stupid, ugly and limited, since they are. But they are also powerful - you can do a lot of office automation with them, and it would cost much more (like 100x more) to write a comparable app in C++ or some other language. These automation functions were standard, available and easy to use.
A requirement to spend money on a contractor, as opposed to using a free product, is hardly irrelevant. It makes F/OSS software more expensive!
Uh, read the question again. He's not asking why companies use closed office suites. He's asking why they use office suites.
What should they use then? Write their own clone of Excel, for one specific purpose? Have you given any thought whatsoever to what it would take and how much it will cost to maintain?
Sometimes this eliminates the possibility of using some kind of cutesy UI metaphor that can only be accomplished with javascript, or flash, or something else, but a well-written web application can ALWAYS degrade to using standard HTML.
It often requires to have a duplicate set of code that does the same thing completely differently. The cost of development goes up. Who is going to pay for that? We are talking about businesses here, not artists or scientists who may be legitimately perfectionists.
Most companies have no control over OO or Firefox either. Companies do not have people who are capable of fetching (CVS, SVN etc.) a year old tree of FF and compiling it and using it and supporting it and being responsible that it works on each and every desktop. A single person doesn't even have enough bandwidth to do that. Companies just buy the stuff they need, and in this particular aspect IE and FF look very much the same.
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to design applications in an environment that isn't as likely to stop working?
Yes, a LAMP would make sense, for example. But in many cases it is easier to put something together by dragging and dropping. IIS is plugged into the whole MSVC, .NET and ASP and SQL infrastructure already. LAMP requires work to get there, if only because there may be fewer documentation or fewer programmers who know the tools. The imagined "support" is another issue - many companies fear using s/w without support, even though the support in many cases is worthless and is never invoked.
We can't change to OO.o, because we have a critical business app written in Excel. Why do companies continually use office suites and specific web browsers as development platforms?
In this case it's easy to answer. Excel was released between 1985 (Mac) and 1987 (PC). OpenOffice did not exist in any meaningful form until what, 2005? I know that StarOffice was around for some time, but hardly anyone dared to use it, and it was much worse than MS Office anyway. Even today's OpenOffice is said to be worse than MS Office in many aspects, but aside from that it's easy to see why a program that had 20 years as an uncontested market leader has entrenched here and there.
Just code them to work with standard HTML/CSS/JS and you won't have all these upgrade problems.
Much of the code is written using libraries and standard pieces which may not work with a newer browser - for example, because your SDK was designed some years before the IE7. And if you upgrade the SDK it will break your other code in many places... it truly makes sense to just not upgrade and be happy.
Many vendors offer subscription for updates, and I have it at work for Autodesk's products and for other tools. Some tools are sold only on subscription basis. And once you are in, you receive updates and new releases as soon as they are ready. I can understand if you are reluctant to upgrade your techs to a new release, but generally it works - Autodesk in particular is quite meticulous in testing; Xilinx, OTOH...
My $750 includes T6600 and 2 GB of RAM - fact, because I type this on such a box, and I just checked. My video card ($80, included in the price) is NVidia GeForce 7300 GT, which I selected mostly because of dual DVI. Dell, OTOH, offers for $809 a P-4 3GHz system (Dell Precision Workstation 390), and once you start "customizing" to make it usable the price climbs quite high.
I can understand if the GGP does not want to risk it if s/he is unfamiliar with the hardware. But price-wise, you can definitely buy a box in pieces for half the price of what Dell or HP will charge you. Besides, you will get a universal system that can be upgraded or repaired, as opposed to custom boards, rails and other stuff that major box makers just love to put in.
What stops you from buying the parts and building any box you like? And if somehow a trip to Fry's (or your local equivalent) is too scary, I'm sure you can find a few /.ters who will help you for a moderate fee, certainly for less than you'd have to pay to Dell.
Quite possible. There is only one OS to pay for, and unlimited number of junk apps to preload... a few dollars here and a few dollars there, and it all suddenly makes sense.
The reason for using a commercial RTOS is ... reliability. You want code that was heavily tested before. And if you write your own RTOS you will have to debug very mysterious problems for years. Better to grab code that already went through all that, and flew to Mars too. If you follow this link you will see that the good debugging capabilities of the VxWorks allowed the programmers to patch their bug remotely. A homegrown RTOS would be unlikely to have such a debugging interface just because it's out of scope; you'd need to bring the device into the lab and plug some JTAG cable in to reflash the board.
Just use a large mirror. I don't think Koran has any rules against occasional bending of the vectors of our 3D space.
Yes, I do - because for one successful dot-com we had a thousand who burned through piles of cash, delivered nothing and disappeared from the scene. How many we have left, ones that survived? A handful - Amazon, Ebay, Paypal, Google (though Google was not a classical dot-com.) The success of those few is heavily offset by the losses incurred by the rest of the crowd. I would rather be a professional russian roulette player, the odds are better :-)
In any case, if CitizenRe has any products to show, I will have a look at them. Until then, it's just words, and words are cheap.
I just don't like vaporware, it hurts everyone. CitizenRe's major achievement so far is not in the area of technology, but in area of psychological warfare, with all classical signs of a repackaged dot-com. Their numbers don't make sense, their production facilities haven't been started in construction, their hardware haven't been seen by anyone, their investors are not known (if they exist...) - and everything is "secret". When a company claims to have too many secrets I start suspecting that it has one more, master secret - that it has none of the other secrets.