Lifetime support has always meant the lifetime of the company.
In the US that depends upon what state you live in and what their laws are. I was under the impression in NY that lifetime support meant for the lifetime of the product or 5 years.
By your definition if my product dies, gets lost, burned or whatever, if I still have proof of the service agreement and the company is still in business they would have to replace the product?
Re:it is VERY trollish
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 1
I see how dense you are now.
Now that you've finished wanking yourself off about your experience here (the only thing that the mop is really needed to clean about after), please re-read the thread and you will see that the only thing that I was flaming you about is the fact that you can't even read enough to keep a discussion on subject.
In case you are as lazy as you are stupid, this whole thread started with this based on this statement:
And who is going to provide the 1-hour onsite response time that comes with Sun's Platinum service for those flocking to cheap hardware?
Someone responded to this saying:
No one seems to care about the fast response time for on-site maintenance, because HP NEVER meets their contracted maintenance time to begin with.
This is where I stepped in saying that all of the Sun customers that I had worked with have actually cared about this one hour response time.
Are you a contractor? That would really explain the urge that you have to try flaunt yourself instead of keeping on track with the discussion at hand.
Re:it is VERY trollish
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 1
Wow, intuative solution. Leave it to a close minded person to think that just by adding more systems to the mix you can solve all of your downtime problems.
I am staring in awe at the lack of brains behind your comment. You completely missed the point. I wasn't saying that I did have down time with Sun systems. As a matter of fact I have had access to a large number of fortune 500 companies that use Sun systems in their ERP solutions that easily achieve 5 9's uptime with them. Some of them exceed that to 10 minutes down a year.
Of course they don't have one system that runs the ERP solution, they have redundancy built in out the wazoo. They don't pay a lot, but if a processor does go, or if memory does go, Sun will be there in an hour to fix it.
I'm also not by any means saying that Sun is the only way to go. I'm just saying that you shouldn't sit there and talk about how HP never honors their one hour response time when the whole discussion is about Sun.
I think the true irony of your post is what I found on google news this morning:
Motorola To Release Linux and Java-based Phone/PDA
Slashdot - 40 minutes ago
clapton_fan writes "Motorola will release a combination phone / PDA this year in Asia using the Linux operating system and Java software. No US release date set." It also packs a camera, Bluetooth, and a media player. Looks pretty sharp too.
Motorola to launch Linux and Java based phone The Inquirer
Neither Nokia nor MS
So now not only do we have it posted twice on slashdot, but now we have google news second posting of this story pointing to slashdot's second posting of it...perhaps soon google news and slashdot will be making their own stories with recursive links.
Re:it is VERY trollish
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 1
Or if you would like another example, how about the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). This is a Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used by the FAA to handle flow control, redirecting traffic around severe weather and other fun things along those lines. Currently the system is running mostly on HP-UX servers. But people have realized that they are paying far to much for what they get, so they have started replacing these HP Servers with cheap Intel boxes running Red Hat. No one seems to care about the fast response time for on-site maintenance, because HP NEVER meets their contracted maintenance time to begin with. [The FAA pays for 4 hour response time on the HP machines and I can not recall a single instance in the last two years that HP has made the time slot at any site in the nation, occasionally taking MULTIPLE DAYS]. With the cheaper boxes you can simple keep extra spares lying around and swap out as needed, still saving large amounts of money.
I beg to differ with this. I've worked with and for a number of companies that do not want to be down more than 10 minutes a month. I know that people will argue how impossible this is, and I'm not raising this as a point here. The point is that when they're paying Sun what they pay Sun for the 1hr response time, they expect to get it or they're going to take court action against them if they don't. I have not heard of Sun missing that one hour time limit very often.
I'm not denying what you said above about the FAA, I'm not surprised by it either. The whole point of the previous poster's comments are that there are people who want this one hour response time and their not going to put up with a company that promises but does not deliver. I just feel that your comparison of HP and Sun in this case is invalid.
Although it is well known that Java is a performance hog, and these bugs they talk about are real. And it is well know for anyone who has done extensive Java programming that the people who write Java have always put more emphasis on delivering the JDK and JRE's faster and more bug free for windows, I really do not believe that this memo has been sent or will be taken serisously if it has.
I have never directly worked for Sun, but I have worked with them in many ways and they have been using Java in production environments for a long time and I'm certain they will continue to.
They use it in Solaris 8 & 9. No one ever told me this, but it is not difficult to see this, login to a machine running that OS and start up their print manager, looks amazingly like the Java L&F.
If you've ever taken a training class from Sun, the survey that you fill out at the end of the class is a Java application. I worked at a training center for a while and we never had any problems with this application.
Friend of mine that work for Sun talk about where they are using Java internally and it is immense, there is no way that in the forseeable future any of this is going to change. I'm going to talk to them and see if this memo was really sent out.
My wife writes Java GUIs and actually has never ever had any of the problems that they are referring to in this memo. The GUIs she writes runs fine, and they are very complex GUIs, things that do tasks such as controlling telephone switches.
I'm not saying that Java doesn't have some performance problems by any means. I program in Java and I know a lot of peoplel who do and we've discussed these performance problems. I've also written hello world programs that don't take up 9M, but then again I question the validity of the programmer who wrote that program. I know if I write it bad enough, I could write a C program that would allocate 9M of memory and have the only functional thing it does is be to print out "Hello world."
So I guess this could be true, but as someone who has worked with Sun before, I find it very, very hard to believe.
You said: "In seriousness, I REALLY hope such business do not include line items for free software on their bills to the government. (Microsoft's lackeys in Congress could have a field day with that.) Rather, all costs should be related to development, implemenation, etc of solutions...that just happen to utilize free software."
It is fairly well spelled out in the article, "DevIS does not "Sell Open Source." It sells solutions and applications that meet specification laid down by clients. Often, in the case of Federal sites and online database applications, those specs have to do with accessibility and security, but as long as they are met, Gallagher says, no one really needs to care about what's on the back end as long as whatever it is does the job and can be easily maintained after it is built. If the most cost-effective solution is Open Source, great. If not, Gallagher is not dogmatic. He points out repeatedly that Open Source and proprietary applications can coexist on a server and work together without any problems, and that if his clients require a proprietary application for a specific purpose, that's fine with him."
I realize that was an attempt to be funny about the $600 toilet seats, but that shouldn't be taken lightly. I've worked with a lot of people that were defense contractors at some point in their life and they get really touchy when people start saying blanket statements about things like this. Just because a few people/companies were guilty of this doesn't mean that they all are crooked.
Another thing that got me was the article's mention of "older versions of Windows" having BSD code. If I am not mistake, isn't the current NT/XP software still running off of some BSD-based network code?
Forgive my ignorance about the differences between the different releases of ATT UNIX and BSD, but if I remember what I read in W Richard Steve's UNIX Network Programming guide ATT UNIX did not have the concept of on demand networking, instead it had UUCP in it. It was actually BSD that introduced TCP/IP into the UNIX kernel and therefore if SCO actually has a patent on TCP/IP networking, BSD's release of it should be considered prior art making it null and void.
Please forgive me if I'm remembering this incorrectly as I do not have this book at my fingertips right now, but for the claim mentioned about the TCP/IP stack in windows is adopted from BSD then there is no System V philosophy in it.
No offense to Alan Cox because I think that it is an interesting point, but he also picked up a whole lot of mod points because he is Alan Cox.
It was an interesting point, but he was trying to be prolific and whether you think he is right on wrong, he isn't necessarily more interesting than the thousands of other wanna-be philisophical posts on slashdot that are making some prolific statement so that some day they can say, "see I told you so."
So you are correct, people shouldn't mod things as overrated as a matter of an emotional reaction, but people shouldn't be lazy with their mod points and think, "Oh Alan Cox, yeah, I'll mod that one up."
To keep this on subject, yes I think that Alan has an interesting point, but one of the things I've noticed about computer programming types (myself included) is that we tend to over-react to things and bring them to an extreme end. This has been more evident to me as I am a computer programmer that just married a computer programmer. She and I think of the worst possible outcome. We have to, by following the different paths that a problem can follow and choosing the worst possible outcome, you can fix the worst problems first.
This gives us, as computer programmers and interesting view of the world. In other words we tend to view the world in a pessamistic view. Alan has every right to say what he said, and I think that he makes some good points about how things are. Perhaps he has just predicted the demise of the U.S., but I'm still not going to call him a prophet or a fortune teller or whatever.
The fact of the matter is that with a machine in a finite set of rules he most likely has an accurate prediction, however man kind is not necessarily a machine. That means that the people of the US may wake up someday and decide that they are stupid for doing what they're doing and correct the situation.
So like I said, it was an interesting point. The whole point of what I'm saying here is that its just a prediction. He feels that he has history to back himself and maybe he's right. But short of calling him God (which I know some people around here do), he has no definitive way to say that he is 100% correct. An interesting point that may or may not be overrated, may or may not have been modded up to +5 because it was Alan Cox.
Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?
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Inside Ximian
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You said:
* Companies like HP and Sun pay us to perform custom development work, including accessibility improvements and platform ports.
As an honest question (and I'm not trolling here) based on the recent news of Bruce Parens' forced departure from HP and the reasons for a forced departure, does Ximian still do work for HP? By HP's statements it sounds like theynow think that Linux is a passing fad.
I guess if they are getting better at fixing bugs, then that's good. I guess in my mind, since timing is key, they already missed the boat technologically. That doesn't mean that I'm going to ignore them or needlessly flame them, but it does mean that I'm only going to pay attention to them if they have any ground breaking technological break throughs that I can't get anywhere else. Granted if I want to keep getting money in my account for work, I know that I can't ignore them if they continue to nock perfectly good companies off the market with their monopolistic powers, so I will deal with that when I get there.
Do they still make you pay for support when you're reporting a bug?
I don't think that anyone will disagree with you that software is buggy. Yes, its true that you can't determine "how" buggy software is based on percentages, etc (likewise statistics can be twisted in many ways to show the untruth), however based on user experience I'm sure a large amount of people making these complaints are making them for a reason.
For example, here is why I stopped using Windows: in August of 1995 I started taking CS classes. I had just gotten a new system and bought Windows 95. After successfully crashing my system over and over again, I went to the bookstore and bought a copy of a book that contained Slackware. I installed it, went back to my programming and was able to write code without crashing my system. Yes I was an unskilled programmer then and I wrote buggy programs, but the difference is that with one of them, the program just had to die (linux) with the other one, I had to wait for the OS to restart (windows).
Since then I've gained a lot of experience, and the one thing that I keep re-enforcing to myself everytime I even think of going that way is that windows is a waste of money and a waste of time. If you do read through their programmers documentation they do not point out problems in their APIs that they do not intend to fix (for example there are some bugs in the Keyboard driver that have been around since DOS that windows will not fix because they don't want to make something not backwards compatible -- my friend who found that out had to pay $50 even though they are a member of MSDN and even though the bug has been around for years). I don't even have the time to get started on the bugs that persist through VB that M$ has no intention of fixing. They will only fix bugs that bring bad press to the company in national media.
Programmers dislike windows because windows is bug ridden with no chance of being fixed. In other words its hell to program for windows. Its and unenjoyable experience. From a programmers perspective, its not worth betting the company on.
If you really can't figure out why windows sells...its because of marketing. Business people tend to look at what "looks pretty in marketing" not meaning what really looks pretty, but who has the best marketing. Most people know that M$ is the kind of marketing and that is why they are successful. Programmers are not typically given the chance to decide what products will make their company tick -- that's typically left up to the "business analysts" -- people who know nothing about how difficult it will be to actually work around all the bugs that you uncover in a peticular system.
Come watch my system BSOD all day and you'll understand why programmers hate windows. The go hang out with my boss who sends me screen shots of windows explorer instead of just sending me a path name to a file and you'll understand why people are still buying windows.
Re:I never really liked this cartoon
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User Friendly 1.0
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· Score: 2
> It just seems to play off off whatever the
> current geek topic is.. It's sort of like a
> poorly done dilbert.
I read both dilbert and uf. In my opinion there are differences between them. Dilbert is aimed more at making fun of businesses and the stupid things that business do for the sake of business (usually done by showing how smart and geeky engineers are) and UF is aimed at making fun of geeks in good fun.
Although there is some overlap where a dilbert will be all about geeks for the sake of geekiness, it is aimed more at making fun of business (read Scott Adams's books and you'll see this).
Although you have covered the usual industry argument here and make good points, I still feel that these points have some flaws that have helped propagate a heavily Microsoft based industry.
Your big argument here is that nothing should ever change until it is a well proven change. Its the "I'm not going to stick my neck out until someone else does" syndrome. In my brief study of the ways of business, that is a good way to keep you in business, but it will never get you ahead.
For example lets take your argument against MySQL. What sort of application are you looking for MySQL to use? Is/. not a big enough pilot for you? Do an installation of Slashcode and then you'll appreciate what Slashdot has proven for MySQL. I just don't see what more of a pilot you would need than that as proof that it can hold and transact large amouns of data reliably. And before you rip on my background, I currently work in a very successful multi-billion dollar company's ERP department. True they don't use MySQL here, but if they were asking for arguments of a switch, I may point them to Slashdot as an example for MySQL (I don't know if I would ultimately suggest it in the end, but I wouldn't say that it wasn't "tried").
Secondly, the word processor thing. I think that WYSIWYG word processors are the worst piece of crap that I have seen in a long time. I write LaTeX whenever I can. It requires less desktop resources, its a cleaner immplementation to get to the end result (which IMHO is much prettier than any word document I've ever seen from anyone), and I can keep all of my requirements documents, reports, proposals, articles, and letters to granny in source code control. True you can do that with word documents as well, but its a cleaner implementation to try to control content if it is ascii content. In my opinion, if you can get a ~200 page book (Lamport) and write documents that will be produced more consitantly than any of the word processors on the market with a fraction of the resources required, then there is no reason to make that word processesing argument. Tell the people its a job requirement to know how to write LaTeX documents and I'm sure that if they can learn something as convoluted as word, then they can learn something as clean and simple as LaTeX
I realize that I've only hit on points of your argument, but I feel that in this arguement, the general philosophy is to not fear change. The only reason I hit on points is because most people view things as specific examples in points.
I also realize that these are pretty radical ideas that most business people would wet themselves laughing at if I mentioned them, but the only reason that would happen is because they have been given a good formal business education in "using Microsoft at any cost 101" and the more I see the mindlessness behind it, the more I'm sick of it.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be choice by any means. I am definitely in favor of people being able to choose what software they use, I just don't think that people should discount something because of a narrow minded approach of thinking something like "word processors are the only way to create documents" or "we can use something until its been tried, tested, and true -- by a third party -- so there's no risk to us".
The point here is choice. I'm not trying to say that it isn't. The second we loose that choice, we loose inovation. I know I'm walking on shaky ground here, but I highly doubt that Microsoft is as innovative now as they would have to be if they didn't have a monopoly.
I think that there was probably a knee-jerk reaction to post the headlines of this article because if you look at the past, Microsoft was the one not wanting people to have a choice. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and they have had the business taken away by legislation, they are crying like spoiled little babies.
I run a Sun workstation at work. It is running Solaris 9 on it, which is an implementation of SVR4 UNIX® (really licenced UNIX®).
I recently just loaded up the Sun implementation of GNOME 2.0 Beta 1 (meaning Sun's beta 1 of GNOME 2.0). I started metacity running the Gorilla theme.
Ironically most of the people that walk in my office and look at my screen comment off-handedly (and unsolicited), "hmm, looks like a mac." Of course not meaning that I have aqua running on it, just the look and feel of it is similar to that of a mac.
You said, "At my last company, when I complained about Office attachments on the email and intraweb (against agreed-upon policy), the IT guy just gives me an Office CD and winks. When I state I run Linux at home, I get the "it's not my fault is it" (with the look of "you know, if it hurts when you slam the door on your head don't do it" look)."
It sounds like that winky IT guy was just handing you a CD of office, I'm left to believe that this office CD wasn't properly registered so that you could take it home, instead it was probably what he just installed on his own machine at work.
I honestly don't know all of the details of that company's licensing agreement, but it sounds like that something the BSA would be interested in. Perhaps if people started calling the BSA over things like that all of a sudden software that doesn't require you to have paid for the licenses will be look much more attractive.
I'm not saying that I like the BSA in any way, actually I think that they are relatively threatening and intiminating, but this could be used as a good argument for free software.
I'm quite certain that after the onslaught of the BSA, your smug winky IT guy would turn into a twitchy IT guy that doesn't know up from down.
You said, "I think this shows just how far along this idea has gone. None of these people in the room cared a wit about privacy, open source, the ability to compile your own apps, etc. because the vast majority of people don't do even know what they could be missing. All they care about is a golden pill to solve all there security problems."
Let me start out by saying that I agree with this statement. My basis is the fact that I actively do security administration and teach security classes so I've seen my share of people that are involved in corporate/IT security.
The sad part about this is we got into a situation by people looking for the "golden pill" that will solve all of their problems. I guess its not so much a golden pill to solve security problems, but more that people just don't want to care about it. They think if they sit in the closet with their eyes closed no one will be able to see them. We've recently been finding out (over the past couple of years) that all of those people were drastically wrong. Now that we've realized that the suites realized this, they've now decided to do something about that magic subject of "security". However instead of hiring someone who knows what they're doing, they find people who look at Microsoft saying things like "I know we messed up, but we've spent 100M USD to fix it, please trust us -- with no actual proof (can't read the code can you? not like they'd know what they were reading)". Then these suites eat it up like cops with doughnuts and two years later we'll be back into the exact same situation.
The only golden pill for security is knowledge. I tell all of my students that, and I wish that the word would be passed along. I'm not saying that MS is shooting themself in the foot doing this because no one can read the future, we can only speculate. However I think that companies that blindly follow this scheme will be shooting themselves in the foot.
In other words, what MS is attempting to do here is the same thing they've done all along.
Take a perfectly good command standard.
Bastardize it for their own use.
Make it not-backwards compatible.
However this time they really win the game if they're succesfull. This is because if they can really implement this, they actually don't have to do the work of bastardizing the standard interfaces, they've inherintly done it.
What they're trying to do is make it so that a common interface is a MicroSoft interface from the start.
How many antitrust lawsuites do they want brought against them? I guess $30B can buy a lot of lawyers.
Okay, I guess we kind of have to take the guy's word for it, but he may also be trying to get a rise. When I look at the three collages that we've been presented with here, it seems to me that he tried to put the most shocking pictures up front of what we would be most thrown off by (except for the pr0n of course), and then hide all of the pictures of people who may have been searching on things relevant to the talk in the back of the pictures.
As a systems/security administrator, I am not convinced that a large majority of the images snarfed here didn't have at least something to do with subject at hand and could have come from people that were legitamately trying to look up more information on what was being said. After all, what I could make out of the half to three-quarter covered pictures was that they were either typical web-adds or pictures from the O'Reilly web site.
I would want to see all of the pictures to be totally convinced that everyone was doing time-killing browsing.
Say, like an Sun E10000 or Sun E15000 which costs a ton more than that IBM server quoted (for about the same power)...oh yeah, and Sun won't let you buy one unless you order a service contract...meaning, they come with a repair man.
I'm planning on moving to a nation that's 'worse' in many eyes already. I know their aren't any utopias, but hell if I'm not going to look for options. They want to take away my guns, computers, and now my 'inalienable rights'.
I'm guessing its China, but which country are you planning on moving to? I'm honestly curious and really asking this...
Re:anti-bsd posts up 75% on slashdot!!!!!
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USENIX Reports
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· Score: 2
I think that its still important to remember that there are Linux users that are not Linux zealots.
I will say that I am a big Linux supporter, but the reason that I am a big Linux supporter is because Linux has been around for a long time, it is a PC UNIX-like O/S that has enabled me to not see BSODS for a really long time. It has also helped me understand the O/S's that run on high performance computers and thus get better jobs when I had gotten out of school.
I had gone to work for a company after school that used FreeBSD on its build servers, building large data warehouses for web publishing. I programmed for/administered these machines. I like FreeBSD a lot.
I now teach people how to be Solaris admins (in an official, Sun supported way). I like Solaris a lot. Some of the things that Sun Hardware and Solaris does on things like their Starfire machines is out of this world.
The virtual server that I run my web site on (okay there isn't anything to the website, but I've written some cgi's that run on the webserver) is BSDI. I've had an account there for over two years now and the system has gone down once for any noticable amount of time. That's cool.
Now here I am a Solaris instructor, liking Solaris a lot, but not considering myself a SunOS zealot. I just happen to know a lot about it. I still run Linux on my desktop (past 6 years), as I said first because I was sick of BSODs, but now because linux has better device support than any of the other PC based forms of UNIX (and because I'm sick of BSODs). I don't run Linux on my desktop because I want it to take over the world, I run Linux because it runs well. If I ran a local server I would probably run something like FreeBSD, but for now I have no need for that. I run Linux because I want relatively good device support on an O/S that is somewhat similar to what I have to work with every day in my classes and that doesn't crash so often. Typically my system only goes down now when I have to move locations or when I have to upgrade the kernel.
I'm not a linux zealot, I'm not a UNIX zealot, but I refuse to run Windows. ---
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
I'm skeptical about this too, but I still think that we need to take it with a grain of salt. If you think about it in this situation, who has the high paid lawyers, the ex-employee or Microsoft? Who is going to sue if they find out who gave this report, whether it is true or not? Microsoft.
To me it makes complete sense as to why this source seems so fake. I'm not saying that you don't have the right to say what you said, but I still think that there is probably some truth to this, even if its not completely true. ---
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
Slashdot Mirror
good point, I realized that it was a service being provided, not a service contract for hardware. of course that was after I posted.
Lifetime support has always meant the lifetime of the company.
In the US that depends upon what state you live in and what their laws are. I was under the impression in NY that lifetime support meant for the lifetime of the product or 5 years.
By your definition if my product dies, gets lost, burned or whatever, if I still have proof of the service agreement and the company is still in business they would have to replace the product?
I see how dense you are now.
Now that you've finished wanking yourself off about your experience here (the only thing that the mop is really needed to clean about after), please re-read the thread and you will see that the only thing that I was flaming you about is the fact that you can't even read enough to keep a discussion on subject.
In case you are as lazy as you are stupid, this whole thread started with this based on this statement:
And who is going to provide the 1-hour onsite response time that comes with Sun's Platinum service for those flocking to cheap hardware?
Someone responded to this saying:
No one seems to care about the fast response time for on-site maintenance, because HP NEVER meets their contracted maintenance time to begin with.
This is where I stepped in saying that all of the Sun customers that I had worked with have actually cared about this one hour response time.
Are you a contractor? That would really explain the urge that you have to try flaunt yourself instead of keeping on track with the discussion at hand.
Wow, intuative solution. Leave it to a close minded person to think that just by adding more systems to the mix you can solve all of your downtime problems.
I am staring in awe at the lack of brains behind your comment. You completely missed the point. I wasn't saying that I did have down time with Sun systems. As a matter of fact I have had access to a large number of fortune 500 companies that use Sun systems in their ERP solutions that easily achieve 5 9's uptime with them. Some of them exceed that to 10 minutes down a year.
Of course they don't have one system that runs the ERP solution, they have redundancy built in out the wazoo. They don't pay a lot, but if a processor does go, or if memory does go, Sun will be there in an hour to fix it.
I'm also not by any means saying that Sun is the only way to go. I'm just saying that you shouldn't sit there and talk about how HP never honors their one hour response time when the whole discussion is about Sun.
Open your eyes and read before you post.
I think the true irony of your post is what I found on google news this morning:
Motorola To Release Linux and Java-based Phone/PDA
Slashdot - 40 minutes ago
clapton_fan writes "Motorola will release a combination phone / PDA this year in Asia using the Linux operating system and Java software. No US release date set." It also packs a camera, Bluetooth, and a media player. Looks pretty sharp too. Motorola to launch Linux and Java based phone The Inquirer Neither Nokia nor MS
So now not only do we have it posted twice on slashdot, but now we have google news second posting of this story pointing to slashdot's second posting of it...perhaps soon google news and slashdot will be making their own stories with recursive links.
Or if you would like another example, how about the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). This is a Air Traffic Control (ATC) system used by the FAA to handle flow control, redirecting traffic around severe weather and other fun things along those lines. Currently the system is running mostly on HP-UX servers. But people have realized that they are paying far to much for what they get, so they have started replacing these HP Servers with cheap Intel boxes running Red Hat. No one seems to care about the fast response time for on-site maintenance, because HP NEVER meets their contracted maintenance time to begin with. [The FAA pays for 4 hour response time on the HP machines and I can not recall a single instance in the last two years that HP has made the time slot at any site in the nation, occasionally taking MULTIPLE DAYS]. With the cheaper boxes you can simple keep extra spares lying around and swap out as needed, still saving large amounts of money.
I beg to differ with this. I've worked with and for a number of companies that do not want to be down more than 10 minutes a month. I know that people will argue how impossible this is, and I'm not raising this as a point here. The point is that when they're paying Sun what they pay Sun for the 1hr response time, they expect to get it or they're going to take court action against them if they don't. I have not heard of Sun missing that one hour time limit very often.
I'm not denying what you said above about the FAA, I'm not surprised by it either. The whole point of the previous poster's comments are that there are people who want this one hour response time and their not going to put up with a company that promises but does not deliver. I just feel that your comparison of HP and Sun in this case is invalid.
Although it is well known that Java is a performance hog, and these bugs they talk about are real. And it is well know for anyone who has done extensive Java programming that the people who write Java have always put more emphasis on delivering the JDK and JRE's faster and more bug free for windows, I really do not believe that this memo has been sent or will be taken serisously if it has.
I have never directly worked for Sun, but I have worked with them in many ways and they have been using Java in production environments for a long time and I'm certain they will continue to.
They use it in Solaris 8 & 9. No one ever told me this, but it is not difficult to see this, login to a machine running that OS and start up their print manager, looks amazingly like the Java L&F.
If you've ever taken a training class from Sun, the survey that you fill out at the end of the class is a Java application. I worked at a training center for a while and we never had any problems with this application.
Friend of mine that work for Sun talk about where they are using Java internally and it is immense, there is no way that in the forseeable future any of this is going to change. I'm going to talk to them and see if this memo was really sent out.
My wife writes Java GUIs and actually has never ever had any of the problems that they are referring to in this memo. The GUIs she writes runs fine, and they are very complex GUIs, things that do tasks such as controlling telephone switches.
I'm not saying that Java doesn't have some performance problems by any means. I program in Java and I know a lot of peoplel who do and we've discussed these performance problems. I've also written hello world programs that don't take up 9M, but then again I question the validity of the programmer who wrote that program. I know if I write it bad enough, I could write a C program that would allocate 9M of memory and have the only functional thing it does is be to print out "Hello world."
So I guess this could be true, but as someone who has worked with Sun before, I find it very, very hard to believe.
You said: "In seriousness, I REALLY hope such business do not include line items for free software on their bills to the government. (Microsoft's lackeys in Congress could have a field day with that.) Rather, all costs should be related to development, implemenation, etc of solutions...that just happen to utilize free software."
It is fairly well spelled out in the article, "DevIS does not "Sell Open Source." It sells solutions and applications that meet specification laid down by clients. Often, in the case of Federal sites and online database applications, those specs have to do with accessibility and security, but as long as they are met, Gallagher says, no one really needs to care about what's on the back end as long as whatever it is does the job and can be easily maintained after it is built. If the most cost-effective solution is Open Source, great. If not, Gallagher is not dogmatic. He points out repeatedly that Open Source and proprietary applications can coexist on a server and work together without any problems, and that if his clients require a proprietary application for a specific purpose, that's fine with him."
I realize that was an attempt to be funny about the $600 toilet seats, but that shouldn't be taken lightly. I've worked with a lot of people that were defense contractors at some point in their life and they get really touchy when people start saying blanket statements about things like this. Just because a few people/companies were guilty of this doesn't mean that they all are crooked.
Another thing that got me was the article's mention of "older versions of Windows" having BSD code. If I am not mistake, isn't the current NT/XP software still running off of some BSD-based network code?
Forgive my ignorance about the differences between the different releases of ATT UNIX and BSD, but if I remember what I read in W Richard Steve's UNIX Network Programming guide ATT UNIX did not have the concept of on demand networking, instead it had UUCP in it. It was actually BSD that introduced TCP/IP into the UNIX kernel and therefore if SCO actually has a patent on TCP/IP networking, BSD's release of it should be considered prior art making it null and void.
Please forgive me if I'm remembering this incorrectly as I do not have this book at my fingertips right now, but for the claim mentioned about the TCP/IP stack in windows is adopted from BSD then there is no System V philosophy in it.
No offense to Alan Cox because I think that it is an interesting point, but he also picked up a whole lot of mod points because he is Alan Cox.
It was an interesting point, but he was trying to be prolific and whether you think he is right on wrong, he isn't necessarily more interesting than the thousands of other wanna-be philisophical posts on slashdot that are making some prolific statement so that some day they can say, "see I told you so."
So you are correct, people shouldn't mod things as overrated as a matter of an emotional reaction, but people shouldn't be lazy with their mod points and think, "Oh Alan Cox, yeah, I'll mod that one up."
To keep this on subject, yes I think that Alan has an interesting point, but one of the things I've noticed about computer programming types (myself included) is that we tend to over-react to things and bring them to an extreme end. This has been more evident to me as I am a computer programmer that just married a computer programmer. She and I think of the worst possible outcome. We have to, by following the different paths that a problem can follow and choosing the worst possible outcome, you can fix the worst problems first.
This gives us, as computer programmers and interesting view of the world. In other words we tend to view the world in a pessamistic view. Alan has every right to say what he said, and I think that he makes some good points about how things are. Perhaps he has just predicted the demise of the U.S., but I'm still not going to call him a prophet or a fortune teller or whatever.
The fact of the matter is that with a machine in a finite set of rules he most likely has an accurate prediction, however man kind is not necessarily a machine. That means that the people of the US may wake up someday and decide that they are stupid for doing what they're doing and correct the situation.
So like I said, it was an interesting point. The whole point of what I'm saying here is that its just a prediction. He feels that he has history to back himself and maybe he's right. But short of calling him God (which I know some people around here do), he has no definitive way to say that he is 100% correct. An interesting point that may or may not be overrated, may or may not have been modded up to +5 because it was Alan Cox.
You said:
* Companies like HP and Sun pay us to perform custom development work, including accessibility improvements and platform ports.
As an honest question (and I'm not trolling here) based on the recent news of Bruce Parens' forced departure from HP and the reasons for a forced departure, does Ximian still do work for HP? By HP's statements it sounds like they now think that Linux is a passing fad.
I guess if they are getting better at fixing bugs, then that's good. I guess in my mind, since timing is key, they already missed the boat technologically. That doesn't mean that I'm going to ignore them or needlessly flame them, but it does mean that I'm only going to pay attention to them if they have any ground breaking technological break throughs that I can't get anywhere else. Granted if I want to keep getting money in my account for work, I know that I can't ignore them if they continue to nock perfectly good companies off the market with their monopolistic powers, so I will deal with that when I get there.
Do they still make you pay for support when you're reporting a bug?
I don't think that anyone will disagree with you that software is buggy. Yes, its true that you can't determine "how" buggy software is based on percentages, etc (likewise statistics can be twisted in many ways to show the untruth), however based on user experience I'm sure a large amount of people making these complaints are making them for a reason.
For example, here is why I stopped using Windows: in August of 1995 I started taking CS classes. I had just gotten a new system and bought Windows 95. After successfully crashing my system over and over again, I went to the bookstore and bought a copy of a book that contained Slackware. I installed it, went back to my programming and was able to write code without crashing my system. Yes I was an unskilled programmer then and I wrote buggy programs, but the difference is that with one of them, the program just had to die (linux) with the other one, I had to wait for the OS to restart (windows).
Since then I've gained a lot of experience, and the one thing that I keep re-enforcing to myself everytime I even think of going that way is that windows is a waste of money and a waste of time. If you do read through their programmers documentation they do not point out problems in their APIs that they do not intend to fix (for example there are some bugs in the Keyboard driver that have been around since DOS that windows will not fix because they don't want to make something not backwards compatible -- my friend who found that out had to pay $50 even though they are a member of MSDN and even though the bug has been around for years). I don't even have the time to get started on the bugs that persist through VB that M$ has no intention of fixing. They will only fix bugs that bring bad press to the company in national media.
Programmers dislike windows because windows is bug ridden with no chance of being fixed. In other words its hell to program for windows. Its and unenjoyable experience. From a programmers perspective, its not worth betting the company on.
If you really can't figure out why windows sells...its because of marketing. Business people tend to look at what "looks pretty in marketing" not meaning what really looks pretty, but who has the best marketing. Most people know that M$ is the kind of marketing and that is why they are successful. Programmers are not typically given the chance to decide what products will make their company tick -- that's typically left up to the "business analysts" -- people who know nothing about how difficult it will be to actually work around all the bugs that you uncover in a peticular system.
Come watch my system BSOD all day and you'll understand why programmers hate windows. The go hang out with my boss who sends me screen shots of windows explorer instead of just sending me a path name to a file and you'll understand why people are still buying windows.
> It just seems to play off off whatever the
> current geek topic is.. It's sort of like a
> poorly done dilbert.
I read both dilbert and uf. In my opinion there are differences between them. Dilbert is aimed more at making fun of businesses and the stupid things that business do for the sake of business (usually done by showing how smart and geeky engineers are) and UF is aimed at making fun of geeks in good fun.
Although there is some overlap where a dilbert will be all about geeks for the sake of geekiness, it is aimed more at making fun of business (read Scott Adams's books and you'll see this).
Although you have covered the usual industry argument here and make good points, I still feel that these points have some flaws that have helped propagate a heavily Microsoft based industry.
/. not a big enough pilot for you? Do an installation of Slashcode and then you'll appreciate what Slashdot has proven for MySQL. I just don't see what more of a pilot you would need than that as proof that it can hold and transact large amouns of data reliably. And before you rip on my background, I currently work in a very successful multi-billion dollar company's ERP department. True they don't use MySQL here, but if they were asking for arguments of a switch, I may point them to Slashdot as an example for MySQL (I don't know if I would ultimately suggest it in the end, but I wouldn't say that it wasn't "tried").
Your big argument here is that nothing should ever change until it is a well proven change. Its the "I'm not going to stick my neck out until someone else does" syndrome. In my brief study of the ways of business, that is a good way to keep you in business, but it will never get you ahead.
For example lets take your argument against MySQL. What sort of application are you looking for MySQL to use? Is
Secondly, the word processor thing. I think that WYSIWYG word processors are the worst piece of crap that I have seen in a long time. I write LaTeX whenever I can. It requires less desktop resources, its a cleaner immplementation to get to the end result (which IMHO is much prettier than any word document I've ever seen from anyone), and I can keep all of my requirements documents, reports, proposals, articles, and letters to granny in source code control. True you can do that with word documents as well, but its a cleaner implementation to try to control content if it is ascii content. In my opinion, if you can get a ~200 page book (Lamport) and write documents that will be produced more consitantly than any of the word processors on the market with a fraction of the resources required, then there is no reason to make that word processesing argument. Tell the people its a job requirement to know how to write LaTeX documents and I'm sure that if they can learn something as convoluted as word, then they can learn something as clean and simple as LaTeX
I realize that I've only hit on points of your argument, but I feel that in this arguement, the general philosophy is to not fear change. The only reason I hit on points is because most people view things as specific examples in points.
I also realize that these are pretty radical ideas that most business people would wet themselves laughing at if I mentioned them, but the only reason that would happen is because they have been given a good formal business education in "using Microsoft at any cost 101" and the more I see the mindlessness behind it, the more I'm sick of it.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be choice by any means. I am definitely in favor of people being able to choose what software they use, I just don't think that people should discount something because of a narrow minded approach of thinking something like "word processors are the only way to create documents" or "we can use something until its been tried, tested, and true -- by a third party -- so there's no risk to us".
The point here is choice. I'm not trying to say that it isn't. The second we loose that choice, we loose inovation. I know I'm walking on shaky ground here, but I highly doubt that Microsoft is as innovative now as they would have to be if they didn't have a monopoly.
I think that there was probably a knee-jerk reaction to post the headlines of this article because if you look at the past, Microsoft was the one not wanting people to have a choice. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and they have had the business taken away by legislation, they are crying like spoiled little babies.
I run a Sun workstation at work. It is running Solaris 9 on it, which is an implementation of SVR4 UNIX® (really licenced UNIX®).
I recently just loaded up the Sun implementation of GNOME 2.0 Beta 1 (meaning Sun's beta 1 of GNOME 2.0). I started metacity running the Gorilla theme.
Ironically most of the people that walk in my office and look at my screen comment off-handedly (and unsolicited), "hmm, looks like a mac." Of course not meaning that I have aqua running on it, just the look and feel of it is similar to that of a mac.
You said, "At my last company, when I complained about Office attachments on the email and intraweb (against agreed-upon policy), the IT guy just gives me an Office CD and winks. When I state I run Linux at home, I get the "it's not my fault is it" (with the look of "you know, if it hurts when you slam the door on your head don't do it" look)."
It sounds like that winky IT guy was just handing you a CD of office, I'm left to believe that this office CD wasn't properly registered so that you could take it home, instead it was probably what he just installed on his own machine at work.
I honestly don't know all of the details of that company's licensing agreement, but it sounds like that something the BSA would be interested in. Perhaps if people started calling the BSA over things like that all of a sudden software that doesn't require you to have paid for the licenses will be look much more attractive.
I'm not saying that I like the BSA in any way, actually I think that they are relatively threatening and intiminating, but this could be used as a good argument for free software.
I'm quite certain that after the onslaught of the BSA, your smug winky IT guy would turn into a twitchy IT guy that doesn't know up from down.
You said, "I think this shows just how far along this idea has gone. None of these people in the room cared a wit about privacy, open source, the ability to compile your own apps, etc. because the vast majority of people don't do even know what they could be missing. All they care about is a golden pill to solve all there security problems."
Let me start out by saying that I agree with this statement. My basis is the fact that I actively do security administration and teach security classes so I've seen my share of people that are involved in corporate/IT security.
The sad part about this is we got into a situation by people looking for the "golden pill" that will solve all of their problems. I guess its not so much a golden pill to solve security problems, but more that people just don't want to care about it. They think if they sit in the closet with their eyes closed no one will be able to see them. We've recently been finding out (over the past couple of years) that all of those people were drastically wrong. Now that we've realized that the suites realized this, they've now decided to do something about that magic subject of "security". However instead of hiring someone who knows what they're doing, they find people who look at Microsoft saying things like "I know we messed up, but we've spent 100M USD to fix it, please trust us -- with no actual proof (can't read the code can you? not like they'd know what they were reading)". Then these suites eat it up like cops with doughnuts and two years later we'll be back into the exact same situation.
The only golden pill for security is knowledge. I tell all of my students that, and I wish that the word would be passed along. I'm not saying that MS is shooting themself in the foot doing this because no one can read the future, we can only speculate. However I think that companies that blindly follow this scheme will be shooting themselves in the foot.
However this time they really win the game if they're succesfull. This is because if they can really implement this, they actually don't have to do the work of bastardizing the standard interfaces, they've inherintly done it.
What they're trying to do is make it so that a common interface is a MicroSoft interface from the start.
How many antitrust lawsuites do they want brought against them? I guess $30B can buy a lot of lawyers.
I'm not entirely convinced by this article.
Okay, I guess we kind of have to take the guy's word for it, but he may also be trying to get a rise. When I look at the three collages that we've been presented with here, it seems to me that he tried to put the most shocking pictures up front of what we would be most thrown off by (except for the pr0n of course), and then hide all of the pictures of people who may have been searching on things relevant to the talk in the back of the pictures.
As a systems/security administrator, I am not convinced that a large majority of the images snarfed here didn't have at least something to do with subject at hand and could have come from people that were legitamately trying to look up more information on what was being said. After all, what I could make out of the half to three-quarter covered pictures was that they were either typical web-adds or pictures from the O'Reilly web site.
I would want to see all of the pictures to be totally convinced that everyone was doing time-killing browsing.
Say, like an Sun E10000 or Sun E15000 which costs a ton more than that IBM server quoted (for about the same power)...oh yeah, and Sun won't let you buy one unless you order a service contract...meaning, they come with a repair man.
I'm planning on moving to a nation that's 'worse' in many eyes already. I know their aren't any utopias, but hell if I'm not going to look for options. They want to take away my guns, computers, and now my 'inalienable rights'.
I'm guessing its China, but which country are you planning on moving to? I'm honestly curious and really asking this...
I think that its still important to remember that there are Linux users that are not Linux zealots.
I will say that I am a big Linux supporter, but the reason that I am a big Linux supporter is because Linux has been around for a long time, it is a PC UNIX-like O/S that has enabled me to not see BSODS for a really long time. It has also helped me understand the O/S's that run on high performance computers and thus get better jobs when I had gotten out of school.
I had gone to work for a company after school that used FreeBSD on its build servers, building large data warehouses for web publishing. I programmed for/administered these machines. I like FreeBSD a lot.
I now teach people how to be Solaris admins (in an official, Sun supported way). I like Solaris a lot. Some of the things that Sun Hardware and Solaris does on things like their Starfire machines is out of this world.
The virtual server that I run my web site on (okay there isn't anything to the website, but I've written some cgi's that run on the webserver) is BSDI. I've had an account there for over two years now and the system has gone down once for any noticable amount of time. That's cool.
Now here I am a Solaris instructor, liking Solaris a lot, but not considering myself a SunOS zealot. I just happen to know a lot about it. I still run Linux on my desktop (past 6 years), as I said first because I was sick of BSODs, but now because linux has better device support than any of the other PC based forms of UNIX (and because I'm sick of BSODs). I don't run Linux on my desktop because I want it to take over the world, I run Linux because it runs well. If I ran a local server I would probably run something like FreeBSD, but for now I have no need for that. I run Linux because I want relatively good device support on an O/S that is somewhat similar to what I have to work with every day in my classes and that doesn't crash so often. Typically my system only goes down now when I have to move locations or when I have to upgrade the kernel.
I'm not a linux zealot, I'm not a UNIX zealot, but I refuse to run Windows.
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"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
I'm skeptical about this too, but I still think that we need to take it with a grain of salt. If you think about it in this situation, who has the high paid lawyers, the ex-employee or Microsoft? Who is going to sue if they find out who gave this report, whether it is true or not? Microsoft.
To me it makes complete sense as to why this source seems so fake. I'm not saying that you don't have the right to say what you said, but I still think that there is probably some truth to this, even if its not completely true.
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"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."
I could be completely off base here, but from what I understand both FreeNet and Everything are both places to store stuff, as in whatever you want.
Besides the fact that Everything is centralized and FreeNet is not, are there any other fundamental differences between the two?
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"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."