Obviously you didn't work for the original AT&T. I was a part of an IBM division that was sold to AT&T in 1999. At the time their management knew their long distance business was failing so they launched a vision for saving the company. They had just completed a stock split and later IPO'd a tracking stock for their wireless division but then their profits hit the toilet followed soon after by their stock price. They abandoned their vision and started selling the company piece by piece. They spun off the wireless division as a separate company (which Cingular later bought) and sold their broadband business to Comcast. Soon after they started almost randomly laying off people. The products developed by my group were outsourced to IBM to be outsourced to India. A few of us became IBM employees, the rest lost their jobs. I think they had to gut the company to the point it wasn't worth any more than SBC could afford to pay and finally SBC bought them. There were rumors for a couple of years that SBC was trying to buy them.
You are correct in the sense that SBC was part of the original AT&T and their wireless division was part of the original AT&T at one time, but the current AT&T is definitely not the original AT&T. I no longer work for them or anything related to them so I have no idea if it is better or worse than before. It wasn't very good even at the time they originally bought our division. At the point they sold me back to IBM, I absolutely hated the company and its management. OTOH, from what I heard, during the "glory years" AT&T was one of the best companies in the world to work for.
Hopefully this means that low-end Nokia phones will finally use Symbian instead of Nokia's own OS. Right now unless you buy one of their high-end phones, you do not get a Symbian-based phone. I did like the one Symbian-based phone I had (6620) although it was a bit bulky.
Now Nokia just needs to work on power consumption and/or batteries so I don't have to continuously charge my phone. I like my 6555, but it drains the battery far too fast (2-3 days) and has a bug that sometimes causes it to drain the battery within 30 minutes after I use the built-in web browser. I remember the good old days when Nokia phones used to go a week or longer without needing to be charged.
Why is it that people keep churning out articles on why language x is better than Java and will someday displace it as the language of choice? Specifically everybody thinks their scripting language of choice is better. Certainly scripting languages have advantages, but I still prefer strongly typed languages for enterprise applications.
I couldn't imagine what our current app would be like to maintain if it was written in Ruby or Python. I'm sure somebody will respond and tell me how much cleaner the code would look and how it would be 1/3 smaller, etc. but smaller isn't necessarily better. Years ago we did away with using line of code counts to evaluate programmer productivity and learned to value quality over quantity. Some companies still consider good design and maintainability to be better than churning out huge amounts of code.
Java certainly isn't perfect but then again neither is any programming language. Personally I enjoy programming in Java, and despite its flaws, there isn't another language I'm really interested in learning right now, except maybe Scala. The only scripting language that has caught my eye is Groovy, mainly because it is basically Java syntax.
I don't see Ulteo as being near as flexible as andLinux. andLinux lets you run apt-get (or aptitude, etc.) to install any other Ubuntu packages you want. Ulteo only has a subset of applications that they allow. From the Ulteo FAQ:
Q: Can I install extra software onto the virtual linux Desktop, or am I only able to use the bundled applications? If so, how?
A: You can already benefit from many other apps by going to the panel, select "Desktop apps" or "Games", and switch to "Edge" mode in "other settings". This will add a 2GB compressed layer with many apps that you can choose from "All apps" in the panel. It will take a little time to download though, and once done you have to restart the VD.
There's more to the FAQ such as warnings to not use too many other packages because it will break future upgrades due to the way they built the system.
In a lot of cases it depends on how good bad the critics think the movie is. If they rate it an "A", it likely isn't worth seeing because the director is playing to the critics not to the audience (SpiderMan is a definite exception to that rule). These days if a movie is nominated for "Best Picture" (or similar awards), I tend to avoid it like the plague because I will probably fall asleep watching it. "Sideways" won several awards, but I hated everything about it. OTOH, "Shakespeare In Love" is one of my favorite movies and it won a bunch of awards. If the critics rate a movie really low most of the time there is a good reason. Even if I think a movie sounds good, if it is rated a "D" or lower, unless somebody tells me otherwise, I will wait until it comes out on DVD and then maybe I will see it. If the movie is rated as average ("B" or "C"), I will ignore the critics and decide for myself because a lot of times they just don't get it. Most critics either don't like or don't understand scifi and they are almost always rated lower than they should be.
Lack of vendor support doesn't mean Linux isn't ready for the masses. It just means the vendors are not ready for Linux. Unfortunately it is the great catch-22. People don't use Linux due to lack of support by manufacturers. Manufacturers do not support Linux because too few people use it. Until the manufacturers are convinced they can make money supporting Linux, they won't support it.
Vendor support has come a long way lately. AMD is producing native drivers for their video cards with regular releases. Many companies like Logitech are not on board yet, but the more Linux gets used on the desktop, the more manufacturers will start producing drivers. It just takes a few before the "me-too" syndrome sets in and then everybody will build drivers for Linux in fear of being left behind.
My one and only question. Have you ever tried to install Windows on a blank hard drive? I don't mean re-installing the OEM version, I mean purchasing any version of Windows as shipped by Microsoft and put on a store shelf. Talk about difficult and time-consuming. It may include a handful of drivers for the most common hardware, the rest you have to search for. Sure they do exist somewhere out there but Microsoft doesn't bundle anything except a handful of specific drivers for devices that existed at the time it was released.
Windows is easy to install only because almost every machine out there comes with the current version bundled with all supporting device drivers. That also means you get a lot of trash you don't want in the form of trial and shareware apps that eat up your system resources and are often difficult to remove. I have longed to remove the OEM version from my machine but I don't want to spend the money or take the time to figure out how to get everything working again.
Linux is difficult to install only because it almost never comes bundled on the machine and most manufacturers do not create the drivers. Most of the machines that are difficult to install are low-end machines with strange devices using undocumented APIs. Name-brand and popular devices are typically well-supported out of the box. Given the obstacles, I'm amazed how easy it is to install Linux on most hardware.
For Linux, many times you just have to wait a while and your hardware will be supported. When we got our new laptop a few months ago, the wireless device was not supported, however, since that time drivers have been created and now it works great.
Call me old-fashioned but I believe teachers should teach, not stand around watching the children play computer games. That isn't teaching, that's babysitting:) In high school (the first place a computer was available when I was growing up) I spent a lot of time playing games on the school computer after hours, but the teachers actually taught their classes and I learned a lot from them. Computers in the classroom were unheard of except in a computer course.
I'm perfectly fine with my children playing video games, especially educational video games, however, I would rather they play at home with me regulating their use. I can go to any local store, buy an educational game (or download something like gCompris), install it on one of my computers and let them play for a while.
I tr to have a good attitude when driving, but there are plenty of drivers that do their best to take that away. The worst ones are the ones I call "road-rage creators". They drive slow in the fast lane and speed up to cut you off when there is an opening and/or somebody tries to pass them. Many times they drive right on the fender of the car beside them (in that person's blind spot) to ensure that nobody gets by. Sometimes an opening appears and you can switch lanes and get by if you really push it (risking your life, somebody else's life and a ticket), but it is so much easier if they just change lanes and let you by.
The previous large company I worked for had standard workstations and standard builds. The problem with this philosophy is that power users (developers, etc.) get the same everything as basic users. The standard builds had a lot of software I never used and didn't want but it was provided just in case somebody needed it. The anti-virus program was set up to run scans on Friday afternoons that hogged all of the resources on my machine. Sometimes we had machines that were incapable of doing what we needed them to do and our immediate management had to jump through hoops to get us something we could work with. The standard process was to lock down all machines, but they got tired of developers constantly needing to install software to do their job so they gave us local admin access if we followed the correct process to request it.
That company was also bad about recycling machines. They would pass a machine on to the next user without re-imaging it so I always wiped the drive before returning a machine (I learned to love DBAN). I seemed to always get the old, worn-out hardware that wasn't sufficient to do my job. I kept talking to my manager but that never seemed to go anywhere. I burned out one 4 year-old laptop with insufficient memory and processing power. That machine went through two hard drives and started to randomly shut itself off before I finally got it replaced with a machine that was a year newer. I finally got a better machine when one person left the company and it was still a year or two older and far less powerful than the one my manager was using. Obviously my managers at that company were out of touch with reality and I took that as a sign that of how much they paid attention to what I was doing and what I needed to do my job.
The one thing I always hated, though was that they never provided backup solutions and their standard answer to fixing problems was to re-image the drive. A manager once had problems with his email client so they re-imaged the machine without backing up the critical data (like they were supposed to do) and he lost everything! When my hard drive failed I lost several days of work then lost another day getting my machine back to the point I could use it again.
At my current company, they have standard hardware (but powerful enough we can use it) on a 2-year refresh policy, a standard build and anti-virus software that runs once a week, but nothing is locked down. My laptop dual-boots Ubuntu and Windows but I have not booted into Windows in months, actually I have a desktop with Windows that I use for that and also run VMWare quite often. I only kept Windows on the box because of things like the fingerprint reader (registering boot fingerprints requires Windows). They still don't provide backup solutions, but I have my own solution (drop backups on a network drive and to an external drive I bought with my own money).
I think in most environments it is necessary to trust your employees to use their machines appropriately. If you are developing confidential software or the machines are shared between multiple people, that is quite a different story. I think a company should set policies as to proper use of a machine and train the employees to use them. Standard hardware and software builds are typically necessary for large corporate environments because there is standard required software and they deal with too many machines to custom-build everything.
I also think that companies need to provide several hardware solutions, not just a one-size-fits-all approach. Employees who travel to client sites to do demos prefer the smallest laptop that will still do the job because they have to carry them everywhere. Developers want the latest, greatest thing on the market because they need the maximum CPU, memory and disk space to do their job effectively. I typically have a bunch of windows open so I want a large screen with the highest pixel count available. Most developers get laptops for portability but use them like desktops so weight isn't an issue. I know several people who never take their machines home. Most people in my office have a second monitor.
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Obviously you didn't work for the original AT&T. I was a part of an IBM division that was sold to AT&T in 1999. At the time their management knew their long distance business was failing so they launched a vision for saving the company. They had just completed a stock split and later IPO'd a tracking stock for their wireless division but then their profits hit the toilet followed soon after by their stock price. They abandoned their vision and started selling the company piece by piece. They spun off the wireless division as a separate company (which Cingular later bought) and sold their broadband business to Comcast. Soon after they started almost randomly laying off people. The products developed by my group were outsourced to IBM to be outsourced to India. A few of us became IBM employees, the rest lost their jobs. I think they had to gut the company to the point it wasn't worth any more than SBC could afford to pay and finally SBC bought them. There were rumors for a couple of years that SBC was trying to buy them.
You are correct in the sense that SBC was part of the original AT&T and their wireless division was part of the original AT&T at one time, but the current AT&T is definitely not the original AT&T. I no longer work for them or anything related to them so I have no idea if it is better or worse than before. It wasn't very good even at the time they originally bought our division. At the point they sold me back to IBM, I absolutely hated the company and its management. OTOH, from what I heard, during the "glory years" AT&T was one of the best companies in the world to work for.
Hopefully this means that low-end Nokia phones will finally use Symbian instead of Nokia's own OS. Right now unless you buy one of their high-end phones, you do not get a Symbian-based phone. I did like the one Symbian-based phone I had (6620) although it was a bit bulky.
Now Nokia just needs to work on power consumption and/or batteries so I don't have to continuously charge my phone. I like my 6555, but it drains the battery far too fast (2-3 days) and has a bug that sometimes causes it to drain the battery within 30 minutes after I use the built-in web browser. I remember the good old days when Nokia phones used to go a week or longer without needing to be charged.
Why is it that people keep churning out articles on why language x is better than Java and will someday displace it as the language of choice? Specifically everybody thinks their scripting language of choice is better. Certainly scripting languages have advantages, but I still prefer strongly typed languages for enterprise applications.
I couldn't imagine what our current app would be like to maintain if it was written in Ruby or Python. I'm sure somebody will respond and tell me how much cleaner the code would look and how it would be 1/3 smaller, etc. but smaller isn't necessarily better. Years ago we did away with using line of code counts to evaluate programmer productivity and learned to value quality over quantity. Some companies still consider good design and maintainability to be better than churning out huge amounts of code.
Java certainly isn't perfect but then again neither is any programming language. Personally I enjoy programming in Java, and despite its flaws, there isn't another language I'm really interested in learning right now, except maybe Scala. The only scripting language that has caught my eye is Groovy, mainly because it is basically Java syntax.
I don't see Ulteo as being near as flexible as andLinux. andLinux lets you run apt-get (or aptitude, etc.) to install any other Ubuntu packages you want. Ulteo only has a subset of applications that they allow. From the Ulteo FAQ:
Q: Can I install extra software onto the virtual linux Desktop, or am I only able to use the bundled applications? If so, how?
A: You can already benefit from many other apps by going to the panel, select "Desktop apps" or "Games", and switch to "Edge" mode in "other settings". This will add a 2GB compressed layer with many apps that you can choose from "All apps" in the panel. It will take a little time to download though, and once done you have to restart the VD.
There's more to the FAQ such as warnings to not use too many other packages because it will break future upgrades due to the way they built the system.
In a lot of cases it depends on how good bad the critics think the movie is. If they rate it an "A", it likely isn't worth seeing because the director is playing to the critics not to the audience (SpiderMan is a definite exception to that rule). These days if a movie is nominated for "Best Picture" (or similar awards), I tend to avoid it like the plague because I will probably fall asleep watching it. "Sideways" won several awards, but I hated everything about it. OTOH, "Shakespeare In Love" is one of my favorite movies and it won a bunch of awards. If the critics rate a movie really low most of the time there is a good reason. Even if I think a movie sounds good, if it is rated a "D" or lower, unless somebody tells me otherwise, I will wait until it comes out on DVD and then maybe I will see it. If the movie is rated as average ("B" or "C"), I will ignore the critics and decide for myself because a lot of times they just don't get it. Most critics either don't like or don't understand scifi and they are almost always rated lower than they should be.
Lack of vendor support doesn't mean Linux isn't ready for the masses. It just means the vendors are not ready for Linux. Unfortunately it is the great catch-22. People don't use Linux due to lack of support by manufacturers. Manufacturers do not support Linux because too few people use it. Until the manufacturers are convinced they can make money supporting Linux, they won't support it.
Vendor support has come a long way lately. AMD is producing native drivers for their video cards with regular releases. Many companies like Logitech are not on board yet, but the more Linux gets used on the desktop, the more manufacturers will start producing drivers. It just takes a few before the "me-too" syndrome sets in and then everybody will build drivers for Linux in fear of being left behind.
My one and only question. Have you ever tried to install Windows on a blank hard drive? I don't mean re-installing the OEM version, I mean purchasing any version of Windows as shipped by Microsoft and put on a store shelf. Talk about difficult and time-consuming. It may include a handful of drivers for the most common hardware, the rest you have to search for. Sure they do exist somewhere out there but Microsoft doesn't bundle anything except a handful of specific drivers for devices that existed at the time it was released.
Windows is easy to install only because almost every machine out there comes with the current version bundled with all supporting device drivers. That also means you get a lot of trash you don't want in the form of trial and shareware apps that eat up your system resources and are often difficult to remove. I have longed to remove the OEM version from my machine but I don't want to spend the money or take the time to figure out how to get everything working again.
Linux is difficult to install only because it almost never comes bundled on the machine and most manufacturers do not create the drivers. Most of the machines that are difficult to install are low-end machines with strange devices using undocumented APIs. Name-brand and popular devices are typically well-supported out of the box. Given the obstacles, I'm amazed how easy it is to install Linux on most hardware.
For Linux, many times you just have to wait a while and your hardware will be supported. When we got our new laptop a few months ago, the wireless device was not supported, however, since that time drivers have been created and now it works great.
Call me old-fashioned but I believe teachers should teach, not stand around watching the children play computer games. That isn't teaching, that's babysitting :) In high school (the first place a computer was available when I was growing up) I spent a lot of time playing games on the school computer after hours, but the teachers actually taught their classes and I learned a lot from them. Computers in the classroom were unheard of except in a computer course.
I'm perfectly fine with my children playing video games, especially educational video games, however, I would rather they play at home with me regulating their use. I can go to any local store, buy an educational game (or download something like gCompris), install it on one of my computers and let them play for a while.
I tr to have a good attitude when driving, but there are plenty of drivers that do their best to take that away. The worst ones are the ones I call "road-rage creators". They drive slow in the fast lane and speed up to cut you off when there is an opening and/or somebody tries to pass them. Many times they drive right on the fender of the car beside them (in that person's blind spot) to ensure that nobody gets by. Sometimes an opening appears and you can switch lanes and get by if you really push it (risking your life, somebody else's life and a ticket), but it is so much easier if they just change lanes and let you by.
I love it when I post and it ignores my paragraph breaks. Sorry about the massive, unreadable paragraph.
The previous large company I worked for had standard workstations and standard builds. The problem with this philosophy is that power users (developers, etc.) get the same everything as basic users. The standard builds had a lot of software I never used and didn't want but it was provided just in case somebody needed it. The anti-virus program was set up to run scans on Friday afternoons that hogged all of the resources on my machine. Sometimes we had machines that were incapable of doing what we needed them to do and our immediate management had to jump through hoops to get us something we could work with. The standard process was to lock down all machines, but they got tired of developers constantly needing to install software to do their job so they gave us local admin access if we followed the correct process to request it. That company was also bad about recycling machines. They would pass a machine on to the next user without re-imaging it so I always wiped the drive before returning a machine (I learned to love DBAN). I seemed to always get the old, worn-out hardware that wasn't sufficient to do my job. I kept talking to my manager but that never seemed to go anywhere. I burned out one 4 year-old laptop with insufficient memory and processing power. That machine went through two hard drives and started to randomly shut itself off before I finally got it replaced with a machine that was a year newer. I finally got a better machine when one person left the company and it was still a year or two older and far less powerful than the one my manager was using. Obviously my managers at that company were out of touch with reality and I took that as a sign that of how much they paid attention to what I was doing and what I needed to do my job. The one thing I always hated, though was that they never provided backup solutions and their standard answer to fixing problems was to re-image the drive. A manager once had problems with his email client so they re-imaged the machine without backing up the critical data (like they were supposed to do) and he lost everything! When my hard drive failed I lost several days of work then lost another day getting my machine back to the point I could use it again. At my current company, they have standard hardware (but powerful enough we can use it) on a 2-year refresh policy, a standard build and anti-virus software that runs once a week, but nothing is locked down. My laptop dual-boots Ubuntu and Windows but I have not booted into Windows in months, actually I have a desktop with Windows that I use for that and also run VMWare quite often. I only kept Windows on the box because of things like the fingerprint reader (registering boot fingerprints requires Windows). They still don't provide backup solutions, but I have my own solution (drop backups on a network drive and to an external drive I bought with my own money). I think in most environments it is necessary to trust your employees to use their machines appropriately. If you are developing confidential software or the machines are shared between multiple people, that is quite a different story. I think a company should set policies as to proper use of a machine and train the employees to use them. Standard hardware and software builds are typically necessary for large corporate environments because there is standard required software and they deal with too many machines to custom-build everything. I also think that companies need to provide several hardware solutions, not just a one-size-fits-all approach. Employees who travel to client sites to do demos prefer the smallest laptop that will still do the job because they have to carry them everywhere. Developers want the latest, greatest thing on the market because they need the maximum CPU, memory and disk space to do their job effectively. I typically have a bunch of windows open so I want a large screen with the highest pixel count available. Most developers get laptops for portability but use them like desktops so weight isn't an issue. I know several people who never take their machines home. Most people in my office have a second monitor.