MS Office is more than just Word & Excel. If your school or company uses Outlook with an Exchange server, Office becomes a total work environment. We used to use Thunderbird where I work, but when they switched us to Exchange, I realized Outlook was the real cement that ties us to MS Office. Now the intergration between Office 2003 & IE 6 is even more complete when you use Outlook - so I gave up on Firefox too.
In terms of total functionality and usefulness, I am completely happy with Office 2003. I don't like the alternatives. I don't even like Office 2004 on the Mac. For me to switch to anything else means I loose in overall user satisfaction.
Sorry, but I hope my school never tries to save money by going to OOo.
However, if you don't have Outlook/Exchange, and just use Office for Word & Excel, I'm not sure if it matters.
One last vote for audiobooks: I like Tom Bombadil more now. When I read and reread the Hobbit, I'd skip Tom's singing. On the Audiobook, his rambling songs come alive. Storytelling's basis in oral tradition itself can be lost in books.
This is definitely true. Listening to audiobooks makes it perfectly clear that fiction is storytelling, especially oral storytelling. I suddenly understood that good writing is really writers who have this storytelling ability.
Why are we trying to cram all this stuff into our lives? When you multitask your entertainment, all it does is take some of the pleasure out of it. I'd rather *read* a single book in two months and really take it in than squeeze 8 of them into the little gaps of time during the day.
Actually, I'm reading more and loving it more. There's a lot of wasted time in the day, why not use it? To tell the truth, my eyes and back made it hard to read for long periods of time, so I've been reading less as I got older. Then a couple years ago I discovered Audible.com and suddenly I'm enjoying books again. Not only that, I'm reading kinds of books I'd never would have bought before. Selection is limited, so I'm willing to try new genres and authors. I always hated fantasy books, but listening to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials has made me a convert.
Don't worry, I still spend plenty of time naval gazing. I'm a great daydreamer.
Actually, you memorize different things from listening than reading. My favorite books I'll listen and read.
I just finished listened to a full-cast audio version Have Space Suit-Will Travel, a favorite childhood book of mine that I have probably read 10-12 times during my 52 years. On the audio version I heard things I don't ever remember reading. I know I read it, but I just didn't store it.
So, if you love a book, it's best to both read and listen to them.
Listening, at least for me, is a far better experience than reading. As a reader I tended to speed read, anxious to get to know what happens next. As a listener, you have to hear everything at a natural pace. Once I got into audio books I suddenly discovered so much about the nature of fiction that I had missed from just reading. A good book read by a good reader magnifies POV and characterization. Plus every word of description seems so much more vivid.
I've gotten to the point where I don't like to read fiction, but listen. But I'm very picky. I can't stand abridged books, and the reader must be good. Some readers are fantastic - and full cast audio to me is a better experience than seeing a good movie made from the book.
I can't recommend audio books too highly.
BTW, the best books I've listened to lately are Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIAL trilogy, composed of THE GOLDEN COMPASS, THE SUBTLE KNIFE and THE AMBER SPYGLASS. Just fantastic.
> Well, when you "steal" software or music, > you've taken something, but it's not like > you're depriving someone else the privilege > of using it.
Rationalize all you want. But you are ultimately destroying jobs, which hurts lots of people. It's more than the big bad record company or the struggling artist. It's truckers, cashiers, store owners, warehousemen, and so on.
Civilization is based on laws, codes of conducts, ethics, morals, etc. By law it is stealing. Just because the likelihood of you being prosecuted is nil, technically you could be. That's why it's stealing. But it's more than just the law. It's a matter of honor and respect for other people.
Artists of all types have always had a hard time of making a living by being creative. What you are staying by stealing their work is: my personal interests are more important than anything else, more important than civilization, more important than jobs, more important than some struggling creative person to make a living off of their talent.
> Which newsletter is it you subcribe to, > and how may I subscribe, so that I too, > may know the future?
Jesus, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Just look at trends. You already know the world is going digital, thus in the old goods and services economics, some goods are becoming intangible, but they still need to be for sale.
If some kind of Star Trek replicator was invented so we could copy a Mercedes as easily as a Nellie Furtado CD, we'd still need to sell them. Our world is based on jobs. Anything that destroys jobs is bad for the world.
Is it so hard to see the trend that stealing digital copies of music, movies, books, etc will hurt the economy, and destroy jobs?
I find all this glee surrounding stealing very odd. And be honest, people are stealing, even the older generation has gotten into the act. I'm 50, and I see all kinds of people just copying CDs right and left. No one wants to buy them anymore.
And I think it's a kind of gutless thievery. People will rationalize this because they aren't stealing anything tangible. But future economics will be based on the intangible.
This shows that ethics is directly related to what people can get away with. People are more than willing to steal if it's easy, but they don't have the balls to steal the CD player to play their stolen CDs in.
Can you give us some specifics about the "mindboggling stuff?" Has a Russian writer come with something equal to THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY? Or the space opera of E.E. Smith? Or created a literary movement like cyberpunk? I was hoping to hear about some specific ideas, like Heinlein's ORPHANS OF THE SKY, where he comes up with the idea of a generational space ship and the crew forget they are passengers? Are there Russian novels equal to HYPERION or FIRE UPON THE DEEP, which are immense in scope and richness of ideas?
I was hoping that someone who reads Russian would tell us about a science fictional idea that we've never heard about in the west.
I think the real reason why space exploration isn't popular is because it's not linked to sex. Congress will fund anything you can link to family and children and the protection of the family. That's because voters are mostly concerned with their own interests, and preserving themselves and their family come first.
Security, food supplies, health, jobs and any other program that closely fit the needs of people and their families will get funded. Things that seem to help other people's families are less supported, but are more important than financing things like space travel or particle physics.
I think Clarke and Kubrick and other science fiction writers failed to understand that. In the sixties science fiction was closely related to space exploration. Few people read science fiction compared to today. The history of rocketry and space exploration coincided with people interested in science fiction, but after the Apollo years, that changed. Starting with Star Wars, science fiction became a major force in the entertainment industry and was no longer linked to the space enthusiasts.
If you met a science fiction fan in the sixities it was almost a given they would also be a space exploration fanatic. That isn't true today.
Science fiction saturates our culture with TV shows, movies, video games, roll playing games, comics, graphic novels, etc. If space exploration is such a major artistic motif, why doesn't the space program get a lot of public support?
We'll, see. I have big hopes for Chinese space efforts. If their leaders think it is political valuable, things will happen. And I think the Chinese would like to use space exploration as a way to prove they are an important nation in the 21st century.
Like I said, I've been waiting for us to leave low earth orbit for thirty years. Space enthusiasts always talk about what will happen in 5 years or ten years, but then nothing happens. Maybe if the Chinese do something, the U.S. and other nations will feel compelled to compete.
The only reason we went to the moon in the first place was to compete with the Russians. Kennedy was not a pro-space person, but an anti-communist.
It's too bad space exploration couldn't be accomplished like the development open source code. If you could find 5 million people willing to contribute $1,000 a year, you could have a space program with a $5 billion dollar annual budget. The trouble is finding 5 million people who have a passion to see space exploration happen.
The progression of computer science evolution has far outstripped Clarke and Kubrick's imaginations. They only imagined an intelligent machine without going into the details. The details of computers have been developing at a wild pace since the sixties, which science fiction failed to predict.
Clarke's and Kubrick's real failure was not seeing how quickly space exploration would die. In 1968 it would be natural to predict that mankind would be traveling to Jupiter by 2001. What was unnatural to imagine was mankind would visit the moon, and then never leave low earth orbit for three decades. And there is no real reason to assume we'll leave low earth orbit for three more decades.
If they had predicted that in 1968 I would have been blown away by their power of their wisdom.
At the time I was positive that mankind would reach Mars in the 80's. Humanity's lack of real interest in space exploration has been my lifelong disappointment.
And, even though I love science fiction, the older I get the more I realize that science fiction is no more than fantasy. The gravity of the mundane keep us tied to this planet.
Our science fiction based site, which I would think would be computer neutral, showed.2-.3 percent usage by Linux. Some days Solaris would beat Linux. The site I manage at work is one for a College of Education, and it also has similar Linux stats. That should be neutral too.
If some could find out the stats for CNN.com or Amazon.com, those would also be good neutral samples with a big pool of stats.
The real test would correlate web stats over time against the development of KDE. I think as KDE succeeds, Linux stats should go up.
I do have a FireWire port, but it's on a WinXP home machine. If iTunes was ported to Windows, then they'd have a much great potential market to sell to. FireWire is extremely nice. I don't like using Macs, even though I have a G4 at work, but you have to admire Apple's styling and engineering ability.
If I was in the market for a MP3 player and iTunes was available on Windows. I'd really consider this product.
BIG SPOILERS - don't read until after seeing the movie.
The ending has all the answers. I think the ending should have been the beginning, and then have all the movie shown in retrospect as the AIs of the far future try to put the puzzle all together. Like the book CITY by Clifford Simak.
There were some very cool ideas in the ending, especially the concept that our beings belong to a time and place, and thus they can't be reproduced. This is why I've always thought an afterlife can't exist. Our personalities exist in relation to the details of the time and space in which we live. Without the familiar, we'd go insane.
Also, I've always pictured AI/robots being our descendants. I think the far future AIs know that David is too strongly programmed for one purpose, and they can not overcome that programming. So they provide him a merciful ending.
But that says something about us too. I think one reason why mankind hasn't rushed out to explore space is because the programming really isn't there in our genes to be space explorers. Oh, there are individuals that want it, but the drive doesn't exist in the crowd. The amount of money we've spent on Stealth bombers and fighters could have let us colonize the Moon or Mars. The technology, money and resources are there, just not the will.
If you look at the movie you start seeing that all the beings, expect the far future AIs, are severely limited by their programming. We don't see enough of the far future AIs to know about them, but we have to assume that it is a limitation that they have overcome.
You obviously know nothing about libraries, nor databases. Creating a good library system would take years of work. It's much better to buy a canned system, or hopefully a OSS system designed for the job.
This is a fascinating programming task and I was glad to discover the references Slashdot linked to on this subject.
I've never been happy with card catalogs and their electronic descendants or with web based search engines. Knowledge exploration needs a lot of work, and these kinds of tools will lead to interesting results.
If I was young and had lots of time, this would be a really challenging project to work on. Designing a schema to organize knowledge is a really cool task.
I think the issue of whether or not Deckard is a replicant is an after thought. Obviously Ridley Scott wanted viewers to think that because he added the scenes to make it an issue. But, it takes away from the rest of the movie.
Like you said, the issue is with Roy Batty. Roy becomes the equal of humans when he chooses not to kill Deckard. Neither Deckard or Rachael show as much development, they are like Pris and Leon.
As a secondary story, having a human fall in love with an android is another issue, but if Deckard is a replicant, then that is cancelled out.
The reason I think having Deckard be a replicant is an after thought is nothing else in the movie supports it.
The book was much more consistant. Androids are beings without compasion or empathy. They will kill humans, animals or other androids. I think they were PKD's metaphor for humans without souls, and thus deserving of death from his viewpoint.
Columbia House has a CD club that doesn't require you to send back the damn cards, and you can order online. It's great. Plus the prices are very low, but they always change. This month it's buy 1 at full price ($16.98) get two free. Shipping and handling and tax add another $3 per CD. I usually always get what I want for under $10 total, sometimes $8-9. They recently had a sale on box sets and I got several 3-4 discs sets for $29.95 plus S&H + tax. Not bad. It's called Play. And their selection is growing.
I'm so used to the cheap prices I won't buy CDs in stores anymore.
Ads I don't want, but if they were selling website placements, that might be different.
Right now, you get page after page of useless sites. If the better sites paid for position, maybe I would find what I wanted quicker.
There are times when I want high quality commercial sites. Take for instance Star Wars. Do you want every page where someone is daydreaming about seeing the next episode, or do you want some sites with quality info?
Someone needs to come up with some way to rank the quality of sites returned in search engines. If someone was paying, they are also betting they have a better than average site.
I tried the LinuxPPC disk on a number of machines before it hit me to start the Mac with extensions off. It did start on one machine without doing so.
It's a beautiful demo. Can't wait to get KDE for my Intel machines. Just waiting for SUSE 6.1..., and now I've added LinuxPPC 5.0 to my list of things to buy.
Visual Basic may have its problems, but for corporate programming it is hard to find a substitute. I've evaluated Linux solutions and haven't found the right combination of tools.
VB in combination with a bunch of other tools like SQL Server, IIS, COM, MTS, ADO and ASP allow you to develop n-tier systems. I haven't found that kind of integration in the software tools for Linux. Linux now needs tools that are mature and scalable.
Slashdot Mirror
MS Office is more than just Word & Excel. If your school or company uses Outlook with an Exchange server, Office becomes a total work environment. We used to use Thunderbird where I work, but when they switched us to Exchange, I realized Outlook was the real cement that ties us to MS Office. Now the intergration between Office 2003 & IE 6 is even more complete when you use Outlook - so I gave up on Firefox too.
In terms of total functionality and usefulness, I am completely happy with Office 2003. I don't like the alternatives. I don't even like Office 2004 on the Mac. For me to switch to anything else means I loose in overall user satisfaction.
Sorry, but I hope my school never tries to save money by going to OOo.
However, if you don't have Outlook/Exchange, and just use Office for Word & Excel, I'm not sure if it matters.
This is definitely true. Listening to audiobooks makes it perfectly clear that fiction is storytelling, especially oral storytelling. I suddenly understood that good writing is really writers who have this storytelling ability.
Actually, I'm reading more and loving it more. There's a lot of wasted time in the day, why not use it? To tell the truth, my eyes and back made it hard to read for long periods of time, so I've been reading less as I got older. Then a couple years ago I discovered Audible.com and suddenly I'm enjoying books again. Not only that, I'm reading kinds of books I'd never would have bought before. Selection is limited, so I'm willing to try new genres and authors. I always hated fantasy books, but listening to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials has made me a convert.
Don't worry, I still spend plenty of time naval gazing. I'm a great daydreamer.
Actually, you memorize different things from listening than reading. My favorite books I'll listen and read.
I just finished listened to a full-cast audio version Have Space Suit-Will Travel, a favorite childhood book of mine that I have probably read 10-12 times during my 52 years. On the audio version I heard things I don't ever remember reading. I know I read it, but I just didn't store it.
So, if you love a book, it's best to both read and listen to them.
Listening, at least for me, is a far better experience than reading. As a reader I tended to speed read, anxious to get to know what happens next. As a listener, you have to hear everything at a natural pace. Once I got into audio books I suddenly discovered so much about the nature of fiction that I had missed from just reading. A good book read by a good reader magnifies POV and characterization. Plus every word of description seems so much more vivid.
I've gotten to the point where I don't like to read fiction, but listen. But I'm very picky. I can't stand abridged books, and the reader must be good. Some readers are fantastic - and full cast audio to me is a better experience than seeing a good movie made from the book.
I can't recommend audio books too highly.
BTW, the best books I've listened to lately are Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIAL trilogy, composed of THE GOLDEN COMPASS, THE SUBTLE KNIFE and THE AMBER SPYGLASS. Just fantastic.
> Well, when you "steal" software or music,
> you've taken something, but it's not like
> you're depriving someone else the privilege
> of using it.
Rationalize all you want. But you are ultimately destroying jobs, which hurts lots of people. It's more than the big bad record company or the struggling artist. It's truckers, cashiers, store owners, warehousemen, and so on.
Civilization is based on laws, codes of conducts, ethics, morals, etc. By law it is stealing. Just because the likelihood of you being prosecuted is nil, technically you could be. That's why it's stealing. But it's more than just the law. It's a matter of honor and respect for other people.
Artists of all types have always had a hard time of making a living by being creative. What you are staying by stealing their work is: my personal interests are more important than anything else, more important than civilization, more important than jobs, more important than some struggling creative person to make a living off of their talent.
I think that shows a lack of honor.
Jim Harris
> Which newsletter is it you subcribe to,
> and how may I subscribe, so that I too,
> may know the future?
Jesus, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Just look at trends. You already know the world is going digital, thus in the old goods and services economics, some goods are becoming intangible, but they still need to be for sale.
If some kind of Star Trek replicator was invented so we could copy a Mercedes as easily as a Nellie Furtado CD, we'd still need to sell them. Our world is based on jobs. Anything that destroys jobs is bad for the world.
Is it so hard to see the trend that stealing digital copies of music, movies, books, etc will hurt the economy, and destroy jobs?
Jim Harris
I find all this glee surrounding stealing very odd. And be honest, people are stealing, even the older generation has gotten into the act. I'm 50, and I see all kinds of people just copying CDs right and left. No one wants to buy them anymore.
And I think it's a kind of gutless thievery. People will rationalize this because they aren't stealing anything tangible. But future economics will be based on the intangible.
This shows that ethics is directly related to what people can get away with. People are more than willing to steal if it's easy, but they don't have the balls to steal the CD player to play their stolen CDs in.
Jim Harris
Can you give us some specifics about the "mindboggling stuff?" Has a Russian writer come with something equal to THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY? Or the space opera of E.E. Smith? Or created a literary movement like cyberpunk? I was hoping to hear about some specific ideas, like Heinlein's ORPHANS OF THE SKY, where he comes up with the idea of a generational space ship and the crew forget they are passengers? Are there Russian novels equal to HYPERION or FIRE UPON THE DEEP, which are immense in scope and richness of ideas?
I was hoping that someone who reads Russian would tell us about a science fictional idea that we've never heard about in the west.
I think the real reason why space exploration isn't popular is because it's not linked to sex. Congress will fund anything you can link to family and children and the protection of the family. That's because voters are mostly concerned with their own interests, and preserving themselves and their family come first.
Security, food supplies, health, jobs and any other program that closely fit the needs of people and their families will get funded. Things that seem to help other people's families are less supported, but are more important than financing things like space travel or particle physics.
I think Clarke and Kubrick and other science fiction writers failed to understand that. In the sixties science fiction was closely related to space exploration. Few people read science fiction compared to today. The history of rocketry and space exploration coincided with people interested in science fiction, but after the Apollo years, that changed. Starting with Star Wars, science fiction became a major force in the entertainment industry and was no longer linked to the space enthusiasts.
If you met a science fiction fan in the sixities it was almost a given they would also be a space exploration fanatic. That isn't true today.
Science fiction saturates our culture with TV shows, movies, video games, roll playing games, comics, graphic novels, etc. If space exploration is such a major artistic motif, why doesn't the space program get a lot of public support?
We'll, see. I have big hopes for Chinese space efforts. If their leaders think it is political valuable, things will happen. And I think the Chinese would like to use space exploration as a way to prove they are an important nation in the 21st century.
Like I said, I've been waiting for us to leave low earth orbit for thirty years. Space enthusiasts always talk about what will happen in 5 years or ten years, but then nothing happens. Maybe if the Chinese do something, the U.S. and other nations will feel compelled to compete.
The only reason we went to the moon in the first place was to compete with the Russians. Kennedy was not a pro-space person, but an anti-communist.
It's too bad space exploration couldn't be accomplished like the development open source code. If you could find 5 million people willing to contribute $1,000 a year, you could have a space program with a $5 billion dollar annual budget. The trouble is finding 5 million people who have a passion to see space exploration happen.
The progression of computer science evolution has far outstripped Clarke and Kubrick's imaginations. They only imagined an intelligent machine without going into the details. The details of computers have been developing at a wild pace since the sixties, which science fiction failed to predict.
Clarke's and Kubrick's real failure was not seeing how quickly space exploration would die. In 1968 it would be natural to predict that mankind would be traveling to Jupiter by 2001. What was unnatural to imagine was mankind would visit the moon, and then never leave low earth orbit for three decades. And there is no real reason to assume we'll leave low earth orbit for three more decades.
If they had predicted that in 1968 I would have been blown away by their power of their wisdom.
At the time I was positive that mankind would reach Mars in the 80's. Humanity's lack of real interest in space exploration has been my lifelong disappointment.
And, even though I love science fiction, the older I get the more I realize that science fiction is no more than fantasy. The gravity of the mundane keep us tied to this planet.
2001, the story just plain missed the mark.
Our science fiction based site, which I would think would be computer neutral, showed .2-.3 percent usage by Linux. Some days Solaris would beat Linux. The site I manage at work is one for a College of Education, and it also has similar Linux stats. That should be neutral too.
If some could find out the stats for CNN.com or Amazon.com, those would also be good neutral samples with a big pool of stats.
The real test would correlate web stats over time against the development of KDE. I think as KDE succeeds, Linux stats should go up.
Jim
I do have a FireWire port, but it's on a WinXP home machine. If iTunes was ported to Windows, then they'd have a much great potential market to sell to. FireWire is extremely nice. I don't like using Macs, even though I have a G4 at work, but you have to admire Apple's styling and engineering ability.
If I was in the market for a MP3 player and iTunes was available on Windows. I'd really consider this product.
Don't trust him at all.
BIG SPOILERS - don't read until after seeing the movie.
The ending has all the answers. I think the ending should have been the beginning, and then have all the movie shown in retrospect as the AIs of the far future try to put the puzzle all together. Like the book CITY by Clifford Simak.
There were some very cool ideas in the ending, especially the concept that our beings belong to a time and place, and thus they can't be reproduced. This is why I've always thought an afterlife can't exist. Our personalities exist in relation to the details of the time and space in which we live. Without the familiar, we'd go insane.
Also, I've always pictured AI/robots being our descendants. I think the far future AIs know that David is too strongly programmed for one purpose, and they can not overcome that programming. So they provide him a merciful ending.
But that says something about us too. I think one reason why mankind hasn't rushed out to explore space is because the programming really isn't there in our genes to be space explorers. Oh, there are individuals that want it, but the drive doesn't exist in the crowd. The amount of money we've spent on Stealth bombers and fighters could have let us colonize the Moon or Mars. The technology, money and resources are there, just not the will.
If you look at the movie you start seeing that all the beings, expect the far future AIs, are severely limited by their programming. We don't see enough of the far future AIs to know about them, but we have to assume that it is a limitation that they have overcome.
Jim Harris
You obviously know nothing about libraries, nor databases. Creating a good library system would take years of work. It's much better to buy a canned system, or hopefully a OSS system designed for the job.
This is a fascinating programming task and I was glad to discover the references Slashdot linked to on this subject.
I've never been happy with card catalogs and their electronic descendants or with web based search engines. Knowledge exploration needs a lot of work, and these kinds of tools will lead to interesting results.
If I was young and had lots of time, this would be a really challenging project to work on. Designing a schema to organize knowledge is a really cool task.
I think the issue of whether or not Deckard is a replicant is an after thought. Obviously Ridley Scott wanted viewers to think that because he added the scenes to make it an issue. But, it takes away from the rest of the movie.
Like you said, the issue is with Roy Batty. Roy becomes the equal of humans when he chooses not to kill Deckard. Neither Deckard or Rachael show as much development, they are like Pris and Leon.
As a secondary story, having a human fall in love with an android is another issue, but if Deckard is a replicant, then that is cancelled out.
The reason I think having Deckard be a replicant is an after thought is nothing else in the movie supports it.
The book was much more consistant. Androids are beings without compasion or empathy. They will kill humans, animals or other androids. I think they were PKD's metaphor for humans without souls, and thus deserving of death from his viewpoint.
Columbia House has a CD club that doesn't require you to send back the damn cards, and you can order online. It's great. Plus the prices are very low, but they always change. This month it's buy 1 at full price ($16.98) get two free. Shipping and handling and tax add another $3 per CD. I usually always get what I want for under $10 total, sometimes $8-9. They recently had a sale on box sets and I got several 3-4 discs sets for $29.95 plus S&H + tax. Not bad. It's called Play. And their selection is growing.
I'm so used to the cheap prices I won't buy CDs in stores anymore.
Ads I don't want, but if they were selling website placements, that might be different.
Right now, you get page after page of useless sites. If the better sites paid for position, maybe I would find what I wanted quicker.
There are times when I want high quality commercial sites. Take for instance Star Wars. Do you want every page where someone is daydreaming about seeing the next episode, or do you want some sites with quality info?
Someone needs to come up with some way to rank the quality of sites returned in search engines. If someone was paying, they are also betting they have a better than average site.
It would be a form of survival of the fittest.
I tried the LinuxPPC disk on a number of machines before it hit me to start the Mac with extensions off. It did start on one machine without doing so.
It's a beautiful demo. Can't wait to get KDE for my Intel machines. Just waiting for SUSE 6.1..., and now I've added LinuxPPC 5.0 to my list of things to buy.
Visual Basic may have its problems, but for corporate programming it is hard to find a substitute. I've evaluated Linux solutions and haven't found the right combination of tools.
VB in combination with a bunch of other tools like SQL Server, IIS, COM, MTS, ADO and ASP allow you to develop n-tier systems. I haven't found that kind of integration in the software tools for Linux. Linux now needs tools that are mature and scalable.