Maybe they should have embraced more platforms than just Windows. Every time there has been a story on/. about Liquid Audio, many people bitch about linux or mac support. They should have listened, then they'd (theoretically) have a few more customers.
Like Loki, the games company, you mean? The unpleasant fact is that Slashbots make a lot of noise about free-as-in-speech but their behavior indicates that free-as-in-beer is all they really care about. If it cost more to port to Linux than can be made by paying customers, then it would only accelerate a company's demise.
Ah, you say, but if it was Open Source, it would outlive the company! Sure it would, but what kind of a business model is it when you actively encourage your users to withhold their support and circle like vultures waiting to devour the products you've invested your time and money in?
We are talking about servers here, not end-user applications. On the server side, the UNIX approach has been highly successful: CGI scripts are very widely used.
In this case, the server owner is the end user. Who is what depends on your own viewpoint. For example, from Oracle's perspective I am the end user and they are the supplier, but from my perspective, I have end users to look after and I am the supplier.
And on Microsoft platforms, huge, monolithic, single-program approaches are just a historical bad habit: the platform really didn't use to support anything else.
That's either ignorance or FUD. The majority of modern Win32 programs are assembled from COM(+) type objects, each of which is self-contained and reusable. For example, MSIE has an HTML-rendering object. You can reuse it in your own software if you need HTML rendering (for example, in your online help system). Word and Excel are all COM objects, for example there is a charting object that Excel uses, it does one thing - drawing charts - and requires objects either side of it in the processing pipeline, to supply it with data and to receive its output respectively. This idea of connecting self-contained modules into complete programs didn't originate with Unix, you know.
The sooner people get over it even on Windows, the better for everybody.
The sooner One True OS zealots get off their high horses, the better for everybody.
What worries me is Bush is a spokesman for a group that no one really wants running the world...Big Business. Especially when their business involves oil, which is the cause of most of the worlds international problems....
It's easy to blame "big business" for things, but the fact is that unnaturally big anything - business, unions, protest groups, government, whatever - is generally pretty bad. Big government is by far the worst, because no matter how bad you think Phillip Morris are, they aren't going to send armed men to assault you and steal your stuff if you quit smoking. Try not paying your taxes and see what Big Government does to you.
If knowledge and ability are important, how can you explain George W Bush?
Easy. He has all his thinking done for him by Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, et al. Bush himself is just a spokesman. Same with Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell/Cherie Blair.
What they do not include are estimates of the cost of non-availabilty. Obviously this is difficult to quantify, since it varies according to the application and business. However since we are talking about Linux and Windows in the entreprise one ought to be able to put some kind of estimate or estimates together (this much per hour of down time in a small development shop, this much in a bank). I think one would then see what the real cost of ownership of each platform is.
It doesn't matter as much as you think. What the business cares about is application availability. The OS is irrelevant to them. If you have half a dozen machines in a cluster, it doesn't matter if you have to reboot one of them from time to time. If hiring a monkey to reboot is cheaper than hiring a different kind of monkey to telnet in and take a look, then that's what the business will do.
Because the only way Microsoft will start selling software for Linux is over Bill Gates' cold, dead body.
And he told you this personally, did he?
MS write and have written software for a number of platforms. Office for Mac, MSIE for Solaris, CLR for FreeBSD to name but a few. Bill and Microsoft do what they do because they believe it will generate the most value for their shareholders - if the competitive landscape changes, so will they. Look how fast they changed their Internet strategy, for example.
Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship.
You mean the famine and hardship created by the Communist government, right?
Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members' to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member (typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials (formerly occupied by older family members).
In the West we have learnt that older does not necessarily mean wiser, and have created an economic and political system that values knowledge and ability rather than seniority. By your argument the janitor should be running the company if he simply stayed there for 50 years!
These so call life raft values are:
These values were obsolete in the West in mediaeval times. Incompetent relative over competent stranger? We call that "inbreeding". If China wants to compete, it's got a lot of catching up to do.
I do not care too much about other peoples expenditures when discussing my economy.
Well, you should. If you're going to rely on a product or service, then it's in your own economic best interest to ensure that the provider is viable and will be around for the forseeable future. The cost of switching generally goes up with time, so it's better to try to avoid having to do it by taking preventative measures in the present.
Most open source projects goes live without _any_ budget. All that it takes is time (which is a cost for companies, but not for voluntary workers).
It is a cost for voluntary workers. Open source is paid for by people who have day jobs that subsidize their hobby of writing code - the money has to come from somewhere. If the effort of supporting a release has a material impact on productivity of the day job, then it has a cost, since without that subsidy, the developer can't pay rent, bills, buy groceries, upgrade his machine, etc. It's not as if he's going to make any money from his software when he's giving it away for free!
As for servers and such, put a page on sourceforge, and try to get a few mirrors up and running too (they will come, if the project is attractive).
Indeed; the question really is how to minimize the cost of releasing a piece of software. It'll never be zero, though. How viable is SourceForge as a free-software hosting business? Could they do that without the subsidy of selling products? I very much doubt it. Their hosting is essentially a publicity and marketing expense for them, as I say, the money's got to come from somewhere.
The criminals mindset is self-preservation. If he doesn't know if Joe Blow off the street is carrying a handgun in his jacket or grandma has a pistol in her purse, is he really going to chance robbing the person? Statistics in the book show that in states with concealed handgun laws, the probability is less.
I think every reasonable American knows that the founding fathers designed the second amendment to allow all Americans access to personal firearms. Muzzle loaded, smoothbore, single shot flintlocks. Of course, the idea of giving a person today's concealable automatic ceramic-barreled teflon-round armed killing machines would have been complete anathema even to Patrick Henry, and it is likely that the Supreme Court will get around to upholding a ban on everything but black powder smoothbore, but until then we'll have to tolerate the nutjobs.
Actually, the Founding Fathers intended that citizens have access to the same weapons as the government had. There's nothing in the Constitution that grants the right to keep and bear only obsolete arms.
There are other factors at work as well. For instance, in the UK if somebody gets raped, unless they are trained in martial arts or something, I hate to say it but if the opponent is stronger there isn't much that can be done (as far as I know). In the US, I'd guess the rapist would get a bullet through the head
There was a case recently of a farmer, Tony Martin, who was repeatedly victimized by local criminals. One day, they invaded his property carrying weapons, so he shot one of them. The police eventually arrived and arrested everyone.
The burglar got out of jail before the farmer.
The fact is in the UK today the police have adopted the position that they won't protect you, and they won't allow you to protect yourself. Guns merely level the playing field.
Of course I can illegaly murder someone without too much effort, which is why I'm murder-laws. Murder laws means you can't legally murdur someone, but you can illegaly murder someone. That means the guy murdering me can murder me(since he's willing to break the law), but I murder him (since I am unwilling to break the law).
You can kill in self-defense, tho', which is why your analogy is flawed.
Perhaps the real problem with this question is that to many people feel they have a right to use/abuse a service run by someone else. IRC is a free service run by people who out of their kindness of their hearts run one of the most attacked services on the net. If they then require you to run a tiny little program to make their live easier then so be it.
But does it make their lives easier? Consider: Unix reserves ports up to 1024 for the superuser. The theory was always that you could trust these ports on a remote host, if you trusted the sysadmin, because no ordinary user could bind a process to them. If the sysadmin was an employee of a university or a major corporation, then it was quite reasonable to do so. Barring man-in-the-middle attacks, this system worked quite well. At the time this convention was created, it was considered highly unlikely that you could buy your own Unix host for under $500! You could trust the owners of the machine because machines were expensive, and the owners would take adequate action to ensure that only legitimate users had accounts. The convention also allowed the designers of TCP/IP to cut corners; unlike DECnet they only needed to route by port and IP address, not by the username/process name of the source and destination processes. (That's a seperate rant of mine, how brain-dead the designers of TCP/IP were, and how DECnet is infinitely superior).
Nowadays, identd is useless for confirming the identity of a remote user, since you cannot trust the sysadmin of a remote host any more than you can trust an ordinary user, because in the Linux world, they are most likely one and the same.
The logical successor to identd is PKI, but no-one's quite sure how to make that work seamlessly yet.
Re:Brewing beer since I was 6
on
Do You Homebrew?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Beer is an Aussie thing.
No it's not. There are pubs in London older than your country!
Not true. IBM's biggest revenue generator these days is services.
IBM aren't into services in quite the same way as a pure services firm like Sapient are. A lot of what they do is outsourcing - people buying a load of IBM kit and a 10-year contract for IBM to run it for them. They wouldn't sell nearly as many services as they do if it wasn't for their hardware division.
What's probably worse is that neither his parents nor his sister made him stop. They just let him be a zombie amongst us. I must admit that I was like this about 10 years ago with the first gameboy. In the car especially, but I was 13, he is 26 and no one seems to really care enough to do anything.
Maybe his conversation is incredibly dull? Better that he keep quiet and let people wonder than open his mouth and remove all doubt.
An old friend of mine was a MUD addict. He claimed it to be more addictive than crack. As a result of his MUD playing, he flunked a semester of school, since he wouldn't go to class, study, do his homework, etc.
Hell, an old friend of mine was a staying in bed addict. He claimed he just couldn't be bothered to get up. As a result of sitting on his ass all day, he flunked a semester of school, since he wouldn't go to class, study, do his homework, etc.
Sounds pretty far fetched, but MUDs can be so damn enticing.
So can anything, why the hell is it people expect sympathy for what amounts to no more than the self-inflicted condition of being lazy and dull?
While corperate bribery is pretty damn bad, do not forget that peoples' own 'grassroots' groups (special interest groups) such as the "Christian Colition", NRA, and such are not corperate entities but can hold just as much, if not more sway. How? They do the exact same thing as corperations: hand over large chunks of cash to politicians via donations from members.
I notice you've named only "right wing" special interest groups. Don't forget the UAW and the Sierra Club also buy their influence.
They dont speak for employees, they don't even speak for stock holder, they speak for executives who seek to gain new stock holder and make more money.
If the officers of the business are acting against the best interests of the shareholders, it's the responsibility of the board to take action. That's the law.
Business represent their shareholders to a far greater extent than unions represent their members, since you generally get a choice about whether to buy shares, but you don't get much of a choice about joining a union if you want to work. Ask an actor or a longshoreman or an aircraft mechanic.
Fact is, countries like Norway, which not having as good an average GDP as the US, have a much better income spread. Which citizenry are better off?
Ask me again in 30 years when the North Sea oil starts to run out. Then we'll see whose economic system is actually productive. Without the oil money, the Scandinavian redistribution republics will implode almost overnight.
Just as there is seperation between church and state, there should be seperation of business and state.
Just as the church cannot influence the state and the state cannot influence the church, the state and the economy should be similarly seperated, with no control flowing in either direction. This is essentially the Libertarian position.
But we're talking about two institutions (government and corporations) that are generally considered to be somewhat corrupt and untrustworthy. Then you throw in money. Politicians have power... they want money to get more power.
Trade unions have about as much influence on the Democrats as corporations have on the Republicans. If you want to attack corporations, you'll have to attack unions too, otherwise you'll be revealed and discredited as just being a Democrat with an ideological axe to grind, rather than an objective analyst.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they should have embraced more platforms than just Windows. Every time there has been a story on /. about Liquid Audio, many people bitch about linux or mac support. They should have listened, then they'd (theoretically) have a few more customers.
Like Loki, the games company, you mean? The unpleasant fact is that Slashbots make a lot of noise about free-as-in-speech but their behavior indicates that free-as-in-beer is all they really care about. If it cost more to port to Linux than can be made by paying customers, then it would only accelerate a company's demise.
Ah, you say, but if it was Open Source, it would outlive the company! Sure it would, but what kind of a business model is it when you actively encourage your users to withhold their support and circle like vultures waiting to devour the products you've invested your time and money in?
We are talking about servers here, not end-user applications. On the server side, the UNIX approach has been highly successful: CGI scripts are very widely used.
In this case, the server owner is the end user. Who is what depends on your own viewpoint. For example, from Oracle's perspective I am the end user and they are the supplier, but from my perspective, I have end users to look after and I am the supplier.
And on Microsoft platforms, huge, monolithic, single-program approaches are just a historical bad habit: the platform really didn't use to support anything else.
That's either ignorance or FUD. The majority of modern Win32 programs are assembled from COM(+) type objects, each of which is self-contained and reusable. For example, MSIE has an HTML-rendering object. You can reuse it in your own software if you need HTML rendering (for example, in your online help system). Word and Excel are all COM objects, for example there is a charting object that Excel uses, it does one thing - drawing charts - and requires objects either side of it in the processing pipeline, to supply it with data and to receive its output respectively. This idea of connecting self-contained modules into complete programs didn't originate with Unix, you know.
The sooner people get over it even on Windows, the better for everybody.
The sooner One True OS zealots get off their high horses, the better for everybody.
What worries me is Bush is a spokesman for a group that no one really wants running the world...Big Business. Especially when their business involves oil, which is the cause of most of the worlds international problems....
It's easy to blame "big business" for things, but the fact is that unnaturally big anything - business, unions, protest groups, government, whatever - is generally pretty bad. Big government is by far the worst, because no matter how bad you think Phillip Morris are, they aren't going to send armed men to assault you and steal your stuff if you quit smoking. Try not paying your taxes and see what Big Government does to you.
If knowledge and ability are important, how can you explain George W Bush?
Easy. He has all his thinking done for him by Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, et al. Bush himself is just a spokesman. Same with Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell/Cherie Blair.
What they do not include are estimates of the cost of non-availabilty. Obviously this is difficult to quantify, since it varies according to the application and business. However since we are talking about Linux and Windows in the entreprise one ought to be able to put some kind of estimate or estimates together (this much per hour of down time in a small development shop, this much in a bank). I think one would then see what the real cost of ownership of each platform is.
It doesn't matter as much as you think. What the business cares about is application availability. The OS is irrelevant to them. If you have half a dozen machines in a cluster, it doesn't matter if you have to reboot one of them from time to time. If hiring a monkey to reboot is cheaper than hiring a different kind of monkey to telnet in and take a look, then that's what the business will do.
Because the only way Microsoft will start selling software for Linux is over Bill Gates' cold, dead body.
And he told you this personally, did he?
MS write and have written software for a number of platforms. Office for Mac, MSIE for Solaris, CLR for FreeBSD to name but a few. Bill and Microsoft do what they do because they believe it will generate the most value for their shareholders - if the competitive landscape changes, so will they. Look how fast they changed their Internet strategy, for example.
Though this idea is ancient, the Communist government began to encourage the use of this virtue in times of famine and hardship.
You mean the famine and hardship created by the Communist government, right?
Filial piety in Chinese families enforce the younger family members' respect of older ones. This encourages the younger members' to set priorities that value the importance of the older family member (typically the father, mother, and grandparents). Chinese children, raised under this mentality, carry these priorities over to their workplace where they place their upmost importance upon the boss and senior officials (formerly occupied by older family members).
In the West we have learnt that older does not necessarily mean wiser, and have created an economic and political system that values knowledge and ability rather than seniority. By your argument the janitor should be running the company if he simply stayed there for 50 years!
These so call life raft values are:
These values were obsolete in the West in mediaeval times. Incompetent relative over competent stranger? We call that "inbreeding". If China wants to compete, it's got a lot of catching up to do.
I do not care too much about other peoples expenditures when discussing my economy.
Well, you should. If you're going to rely on a product or service, then it's in your own economic best interest to ensure that the provider is viable and will be around for the forseeable future. The cost of switching generally goes up with time, so it's better to try to avoid having to do it by taking preventative measures in the present.
Most open source projects goes live without _any_ budget. All that it takes is time (which is a cost for companies, but not for voluntary workers).
It is a cost for voluntary workers. Open source is paid for by people who have day jobs that subsidize their hobby of writing code - the money has to come from somewhere. If the effort of supporting a release has a material impact on productivity of the day job, then it has a cost, since without that subsidy, the developer can't pay rent, bills, buy groceries, upgrade his machine, etc. It's not as if he's going to make any money from his software when he's giving it away for free!
As for servers and such, put a page on sourceforge, and try to get a few mirrors up and running too (they will come, if the project is attractive).
Indeed; the question really is how to minimize the cost of releasing a piece of software. It'll never be zero, though. How viable is SourceForge as a free-software hosting business? Could they do that without the subsidy of selling products? I very much doubt it. Their hosting is essentially a publicity and marketing expense for them, as I say, the money's got to come from somewhere.
The criminals mindset is self-preservation. If he doesn't know if Joe Blow off the street is carrying a handgun in his jacket or grandma has a pistol in her purse, is he really going to chance robbing the person? Statistics in the book show that in states with concealed handgun laws, the probability is less.
Not only criminals, but terrorists too!
I think every reasonable American knows that the founding fathers designed the second amendment to allow all Americans access to personal firearms. Muzzle loaded, smoothbore, single shot flintlocks. Of course, the idea of giving a person today's concealable automatic ceramic-barreled teflon-round armed killing machines would have been complete anathema even to Patrick Henry, and it is likely that the Supreme Court will get around to upholding a ban on everything but black powder smoothbore, but until then we'll have to tolerate the nutjobs.
Actually, the Founding Fathers intended that citizens have access to the same weapons as the government had. There's nothing in the Constitution that grants the right to keep and bear only obsolete arms.
There are other factors at work as well. For instance, in the UK if somebody gets raped, unless they are trained in martial arts or something, I hate to say it but if the opponent is stronger there isn't much that can be done (as far as I know). In the US, I'd guess the rapist would get a bullet through the head
There was a case recently of a farmer, Tony Martin, who was repeatedly victimized by local criminals. One day, they invaded his property carrying weapons, so he shot one of them. The police eventually arrived and arrested everyone.
The burglar got out of jail before the farmer.
The fact is in the UK today the police have adopted the position that they won't protect you, and they won't allow you to protect yourself. Guns merely level the playing field.
Of course I can illegaly murder someone without too much effort, which is why I'm murder-laws. Murder laws means you can't legally murdur someone, but you can illegaly murder someone. That means the guy murdering me can murder me(since he's willing to break the law), but I murder him (since I am unwilling to break the law).
You can kill in self-defense, tho', which is why your analogy is flawed.
Perhaps the real problem with this question is that to many people feel they have a right to use/abuse a service run by someone else. IRC is a free service run by people who out of their kindness of their hearts run one of the most attacked services on the net. If they then require you to run a tiny little program to make their live easier then so be it.
But does it make their lives easier? Consider: Unix reserves ports up to 1024 for the superuser. The theory was always that you could trust these ports on a remote host, if you trusted the sysadmin, because no ordinary user could bind a process to them. If the sysadmin was an employee of a university or a major corporation, then it was quite reasonable to do so. Barring man-in-the-middle attacks, this system worked quite well. At the time this convention was created, it was considered highly unlikely that you could buy your own Unix host for under $500! You could trust the owners of the machine because machines were expensive, and the owners would take adequate action to ensure that only legitimate users had accounts. The convention also allowed the designers of TCP/IP to cut corners; unlike DECnet they only needed to route by port and IP address, not by the username/process name of the source and destination processes. (That's a seperate rant of mine, how brain-dead the designers of TCP/IP were, and how DECnet is infinitely superior).
Nowadays, identd is useless for confirming the identity of a remote user, since you cannot trust the sysadmin of a remote host any more than you can trust an ordinary user, because in the Linux world, they are most likely one and the same.
The logical successor to identd is PKI, but no-one's quite sure how to make that work seamlessly yet.
Beer is an Aussie thing.
No it's not. There are pubs in London older than your country!
Not true. IBM's biggest revenue generator these days is services.
IBM aren't into services in quite the same way as a pure services firm like Sapient are. A lot of what they do is outsourcing - people buying a load of IBM kit and a 10-year contract for IBM to run it for them. They wouldn't sell nearly as many services as they do if it wasn't for their hardware division.
What's probably worse is that neither his parents nor his sister made him stop. They just let him be a zombie amongst us. I must admit that I was like this about 10 years ago with the first gameboy. In the car especially, but I was 13, he is 26 and no one seems to really care enough to do anything.
Maybe his conversation is incredibly dull? Better that he keep quiet and let people wonder than open his mouth and remove all doubt.
An old friend of mine was a MUD addict. He claimed it to be more addictive than crack. As a result of his MUD playing, he flunked a semester of school, since he wouldn't go to class, study, do his homework, etc.
Hell, an old friend of mine was a staying in bed addict. He claimed he just couldn't be bothered to get up. As a result of sitting on his ass all day, he flunked a semester of school, since he wouldn't go to class, study, do his homework, etc.
Sounds pretty far fetched, but MUDs can be so damn enticing.
So can anything, why the hell is it people expect sympathy for what amounts to no more than the self-inflicted condition of being lazy and dull?
That's an interesting assumption - given the number of other world leading business live in Scandanavia.
That's true, but those businesses won't be viable if they're picking up the full tab for the lavish "cradle to grave" welfare system.
See what happens to the US when all the non-executive jobs are farmed out to South East Asia and all the corporate profits are tax-free in the Bahamas
Expect Nokia et al to move offshore then also, unless the Scandinavians radically overhaul their tax systems.
While corperate bribery is pretty damn bad, do not forget that peoples' own 'grassroots' groups (special interest groups) such as the "Christian Colition", NRA, and such are not corperate entities but can hold just as much, if not more sway. How? They do the exact same thing as corperations: hand over large chunks of cash to politicians via donations from members.
I notice you've named only "right wing" special interest groups. Don't forget the UAW and the Sierra Club also buy their influence.
The people on slashdot do not all think alike.
:-)
I think we Slashbots mostly agree on Jon Katz and Jarjar Binks
They dont speak for employees, they don't even speak for stock holder, they speak for executives who seek to gain new stock holder and make more money.
If the officers of the business are acting against the best interests of the shareholders, it's the responsibility of the board to take action. That's the law.
Business represent their shareholders to a far greater extent than unions represent their members, since you generally get a choice about whether to buy shares, but you don't get much of a choice about joining a union if you want to work. Ask an actor or a longshoreman or an aircraft mechanic.
Fact is, countries like Norway, which not having as good an average GDP as the US, have a much better income spread. Which citizenry are better off?
Ask me again in 30 years when the North Sea oil starts to run out. Then we'll see whose economic system is actually productive. Without the oil money, the Scandinavian redistribution republics will implode almost overnight.
Just as there is seperation between church and state, there should be seperation of business and state.
Just as the church cannot influence the state and the state cannot influence the church, the state and the economy should be similarly seperated, with no control flowing in either direction. This is essentially the Libertarian position.
But we're talking about two institutions (government and corporations) that are generally considered to be somewhat corrupt and untrustworthy. Then you throw in money. Politicians have power... they want money to get more power.
Trade unions have about as much influence on the Democrats as corporations have on the Republicans. If you want to attack corporations, you'll have to attack unions too, otherwise you'll be revealed and discredited as just being a Democrat with an ideological axe to grind, rather than an objective analyst.