What would just the client licenses for Exchange cost for 25000 users?
How much would all of the copies of NT Server and Exchange you'd need (you aren't going to run that many people on one box, that is for sure) to support that many users with Exchange cost?
How much is all of the technical support you'll need from Microsoft going to cost?
How many MSCE's will you need to hire to administer all of those NT Servers?
Etc, etc.
My guess is you are talking costs in excess of a million dollars more to implement NT/Exchange than it would cost to implement an open sourced solution.
Right now, for me, USB seems to be Windows' key advantage over Linux in the hardware department,
I'm not so sold on USB personally. I suppose if I had bought a new system that came bundled with USB and USB peripherals I might feel differently, but none of my current machines have USB, and I have no USB peripherals. I don't see any real reason to prefer USB peripherals to those I already have. I don't see any point in USB keyboards and mice (what is wrong with the old DIN keyboard connector or the PS/2 style mouse connector). I have a SCSI scanner, and I don't see any reason why I'd prefer USB over that. My printers work fine on plain old parallel, and I don't see why I'd want to buy a new one or a USB adapter. Frankly, I'd buy one of those little Ethernet print server boxes if I really wanted to get rid of the parallel port. My 56k modem works fine on the serial port...
Now, I'd like to see Linux get full USB support just out of principle, but I fail to see why USB is so important.
If/when this passes to reality, it will make identity theft on the internet into a much larger problem than it is now.
While technology might provide tools to make anonymity more difficult, it won't resolve the problem that humans will still be the weak link in the system. There are too many stupid people out there that will have their identities stolen and that will let script kiddies and other malicious people be at least semi-anonymous while preventing the legitimate (like whistle-blowers, for example) from saying things without fear of reprisal.
While you may think that all of this is a good thing, I am not at all convinced. Of course I'm more than a little paranoid, but when I see the increasing big-brother influences in the world, I feel more justified in those feelings.
Knowing when to acknowledge when people have changed shows that Bruce is more than just a hothead. Hopefully this rational discourse will benefit similar efforts in the future.
Seriously though, Microsoft may be right, but they certainly do look hypocritcal as hell when they in general like to make their products proprietary and only advocate open standards when they can't get into a market any other way.
When they start opening up the formats for their office products, then we can start saying they are for open standards.
Re:eRaid = eStupid eMarketing (lame comment)
on
IBM Buying Mylex
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Now that was one of the funniest posts I have read in a long time...
no real mention made of lost innovation due to loss of competition as it becomes a commodity.
The only case where commoditization eliminates innovation seems to be with closed source software like Microsoft. One only has to look to freshmeat.net to see that multiple forks and competing packages can flourish even in a completely commoditized market. Even long time, successful open source packages like sendmail, bind, Apache, Linux, etc. all have multiple competitors. But in commercial software, once a market seems to get commoditized, it seems like all the commercial competitors give up or are rudely pushed aside.
IBM sent me DB2 for Linux months ago. They didn't send me one for NT, not that I care. I could easily get a copy of NT if I wanted one, but I would consider it a waste of space.
Most GNU programs have "embraced and extended" standard UNIX tools by adding nonstandard things. Half the damn things I try to compile depend on GNU specific extensions that they didn't have to use.
Give me some examples... I have built a ton of stuff on Linux, Solaris and SunOS, and in most cases these days it is just a matter of running config and then doing a make.
Most of the Debian distribution won't work if you try to use a regular old POSIX/bin/sh.
Well, I don't use Debian, but I've used shells other than bash on Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and Slackware (for example tcsh).
I don't see how what MS does is worse than this.
Maybe because MS doesn't give us the source code? And if they did, have you ever tried to port source written for Windows to any other platform? I have, and it isn't fun. All of their APIs are proprietarized (look at the Winsock API and how it has changed), all of them are highly Windows specific. All of them seem to change because of short sighted planning on Microsoft's part (Win16 vs. Win32s vs Win32 (and all the variants between 95, 98 and NT), and the upcoming Win64). There is no way you can compare difficulty in porting between Windows and anything else and between one *nix and another. I am still using code I wrote under 4.2BSD UNIX on VAXes in the mid 80's today. It compiles and runs with little trouble on several different *nixes.
If you can't see how Microsoft is worse, then you need a white cane, dark glasses and a guide dog. No offense to blind people, because you may not be blind, but you sure can't see.
Shrink wrap boxed software is already commoditized, but IT professionals aren't. It still takes skill to put together and localize even boxed software. There will always be a need for in-house developed custom apps, regardless of what some people think. That sort of software will never become commoditized even if all the infrastructure software (OSes, server software, generic applications, etc) does.
What you just said mirrors what MS said in those halloween documents to a T.
Not quite. The difference is that when M$ 'embraces and extends' they do it in a non-standard way. Their version usually doesn't play nicely with others. Their motivations are different, they don't use cloning to enhance what you can do with Windows and expand choice, they do it to eliminate choice.
You'd be doing exactly what MS does, find a product that works, make a blatant copy of it, and then sell it for a lower price.
Give it away for free, including source code, actually. Increase what you cando with free software and give people new choices.
But because it is now "open-source" that's supposed to make it all better for the company who made the initial investment to get product to market in the first place.
Of course not, part of the point in doing this is to punish companies for not doing Linux ports.
In a few instances, I've been impressed, but overall it seems that the open source doesn't really contribute anything back to the world, aside from source code.
That isn't enough?
Where's the innovation? At least MS was first on the block with a unified-browser interface (though it sucks!!!)... Then KDE appears and lo and behold, it's got an integrated browser! Where's the originality?
If that is Microsoft's only 'innovation' then I am not impressed. I am not at all convinced that browser integration is even a good idea. I think that open source software's track record when it comes to 'innovation' can easily hold its own against Microsoft. Check freshmeat.net on a regular basis.
Clone it? let's not. I've used NAS and it absolutely sucks.
If this is true, then it not being ported to Linux isn't such a big deal except that it still could lock some people into NAS on some other platform (and thus lock Linux out of some shops).
This kind of expensive junkware should be left to die.
Well, obviously someone thinks that it is a worthwhile product. Maybe 'cloning' isn't the correct thing to do, maybe just building a similar package that is done right would be good enough. I don't know enough about NAS or any of its possible freeware competitors to say at this point.
If you really want to run a website on java on linux (not a good idea with the current state of VMs on linux) you should look at Enhydra, Locomotive, or GSP. All of these are more useful than NAS.
Maybe adding a conversion utility or compatibility mode to one of these products to allow them to be used as a functional replacement for NAS would be good enough.
Actually what really scares away suits is when they do a commercial port and people do an open sourced clone anyway. A free, open sourced clone of an expensive product will actually attract some suits (especially those of Sun/Netscape/AOL's competitors).
Actually suits are only one part of the problem. I think it is more important for Linux to have credible software to fill these kind of niches than it is to worry about what commercial software interests we might step on a few toes of.
Amen brother. Just asking for health insurance here in the South
Here in the midwest, any sort of decent white collar job includes health insurance (although you may have to pay part of it, its generally $15-$60 a month).
(south-eastern United States for you international readers) can easily mean that you won't get the job.
Around here the real unemployment rate is less than 3%. Basically anyone who can and will work has a job. Other than people who are temporarily between jobs, anyone able bodied (or minded) around here who isn't working is either too picky or too lazy. Jobs for people with actual skills or experience are hard for employers to fill because there aren't sufficient quality people.
I've given-up on finding a job with health insurance, so I'm paying for it myself. I'd hate to imagine how quickly I'd be asked to leave if I mentioned the word "union" and/or any demands that this "union" would make. The guy from Microsoft complained about paying for health insurance out of $60K per year. Try doing the same on a $22K per year job in the South designing monitoring equipment for textile machinery. I've got a $1,000 deductable, but I don't have a $1,000 in the bank.
Who does? I may make good money, but I have a wife that knows how to spend it.:-( At any rate, my deductable is much smaller than that.
What do I do if I get sick? Put the $1,000 on a credit card? After all of my fixed costs, I only have about $150 per month to pay for food, entertainment, and gas. I went to a concert last month (woohoo Ozzy), and I had to eat white bread and liver mush (hey, it was less than a $1 for a pound) for the rest of the month. It's not that bad, except that on my way home, I have to pass by more than a dozen restaurants that I've never been able to go to. Someone w/ a degree from a good school (hint, it's in Atlanta GA and it rhymes w/ wreck)
I don't have a degree at all, and I manage to pull down considerably more than you are. That is not unusual. You need to switch jobs, yesterday.
shouldn't have to get a part-time job working at a GNC just so I can eat a meal or two a week in a restaurant. I make about half of what the uneducated machine operators make,
Entry level PC techs are making about double what you are getting around here, and most of them don't know one end of a soldering iron from the other. Get out of there now, before you screw up your career for good (if you stay in a bad job too long, it becomes more difficult to get a good one).
and I'm the one building the circuits and writing the software that schedules their production and computes their production pay. Bah!
Once again, get out. You don't have to put up with that. If you don't, then I will not feel sorry for you.
As a professional tech worker I seriously doubt that any union could represent me as well as I can represent myself. I would never join a union, nor would I work in a job that would require me to. It would guarantee me less pay and fewer benefits than I can acquire on my own. I'm sure a lot of tech workers feel the same way.
The only unionized IT people I know of around here (I live in a 'right to work' state, so unions aren't as prevalent here as some places) are state and county workers who are covered by AFSCME. They are in general paid $10 to $20k less than what private employers pay for similar positions. You might say that the government doesn't pay as well as private industry in general, and you'd be right, but the differential between AFSCME negotiated contracts for IT workers and IT industry salaries is worse than it is for other types of workers.
Personally, I say no way to unionizing the IT industry, it just doesn't look like a good deal.
In college, I worked at a supermarket that was a closed shop. For a $4.50/hour job with 12hrs/week, I had to pay the union $17/ week, $7 dues, and $10 initiation. After Taxes and Union dues I had maybe $25 spending money. I guess I was supposed to be grateful that I didn't make minimum wage (4.25/hour at the time).
When I was in high school, I worked at a supermarket that was a non-union shop. I started out making $3.50, but was up to $5 an hour by the time I had been there two years.The minimum wage was $3.35 in those days. I also got more benefits than were typically given to part time people. Obviously some employers know how to treat their employees.
Oracle has a LONG LONG history of vaporware that goes back to when the company started.
O.K., that is only one of the many questionable tactics that Microsoft uses. It is also a far less effective practice when it is done by a company which has credible competitors, because when the vapor fails to condense, customers can choose to go with a competitors product, or at least threaten to.
It's well established in the printed record. This spring I read a 'sympathetic' biography of Larry Ellison (it was obvious that it was written by somebody who had received friendly access to Larry) where some of his personal ethical lapses were documented.
Personal ethical lapses by management, while not a good thing, have no bearing on whether a company is excercising illegal monopoly powers or trade practices. Bringing them up here doesn't seem to do much to further your argument, but rather makes it look like you have a personal beef against Larry Ellison.
Things like sleeping with employees, having them fired when he breaks up with them. Outright lieing to customers about new releases. The book title is "The Difference between God and Larry Ellison (God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison)".
I never said Larry Ellison was a nice guy, I just said I didn't see any evidence that Oracle was nearly as bad in their business dealings as Microsoft. I still haven't seen anything to change that.
Oh, and wether or not a company has "credible competition" has nothing to do with wether a company is ethical or not.
But it has everything to do with whether they are using monopoly powers to crush smaller competitors. In other words, if a company has credible competition it tends to act to a certain degree to keep them 'honest'.
I am NOT writing this to apologize for Microsoft in any way or form, just to point out that it's not a pink-and-fuzzy world out there of happy ethical competitors, except for big mean bad Microsoft.
Nobody ever said it was a perfect world. A lot of companies do a few questionable things. The difference is that Microsoft continuously uses every dirty trick in the book even when they don't need to. Get real.
Actually, it seems pretty obvious who isn't dealing with reality.
Listen, Oracle is a company that can make Microsoft look like a bunch of eager Boy Scouts, as far as business ethics goes.
Care to back that up with some examples? I don't particularly like Oracle or Larry Ellison personally, but I've seen no evidence that they are anywhere near as unethical as Microsoft and Bill Gates. And at least Oracle has always had credible competition from companies like Informix, Sybase, Ingres (Computer Associates), Software AG (Adabas), etc.
crackers will NOT publish their modifications to the code
Some will, and some won't. Where would script kiddies be if some crackers didn't publish scripts and how-tos for them? Crackers will publish their modifications, albiet a lot of them will not do so right away. Most of them seem to publish once they have moved on to a newer technique.
If/. DID run on FreeBSD, that'd be a good reason to steer clear of it./. is one of the slowest sites on the Net, period. The performance is absolutely laughable.
I think that most of Slashdot's performance issues are related to lack of bandwidth. If Slashdot is maxing out its pipes, no amount of hardware or software thrown at it is going to fix that problem.
Processing wise, Slashdot does a lot of dynamic content generation and is written primarily in Perl, which is interpretive. If memory serves, Slashdot runs primarily on a single machine and not a huge or expensive one, with a second machine that only serves up the graphics. Additionally, I believe that the database engine is running on the same machine as the web server. Serving up the graphics seems to be the slowest part of the whole system. If Slashdot used multiple graphics servers (preferably on seperate pipes), it might help matters.
I believe a significant boost in dynamic content generation performance could be had on Slashdot if it used a seperate database server box connected to the web server on a dedicated 100Mbit Ethernet. Moving to this sort of architecture could also allow clustering of the front end web servers. However, as I said before, if the bottleneck is bandwidth, that won't make much difference. All in all, I think Slashdot does pretty well considering the limited resources it has had to work with. Now that it is owned by Andover, perhaps they will be willing to put some investment into infrastructure.
Lets put aside the fact that OFFICE 2000 uses XML or whatever,
More like whatever. Microsoft's XML/HTML implementation in MS-O2K is not getting the best reviews as being very standardized.
and MS do use standards where good standards exist like TCP/IP.
Again, Microsoft's adherence to the TCP/IP standards have been pretty spotty. They were also slow to embrace TCP/IP (can anyone say NetBIOS), and it appears that they are intending to 'embrace and extend' with proprietarized prototols if they can get away with it.
Why should Microsoft publish its own property ?
That's what entities which are serious about standards do.
Are the US government then going to force BMW to release its engines specs so we can all manaufacture cars with great engine ?
Not an accurate comparison for a couple of reasons. First, 'hard' manufactured goods are much easier to reverse engineer. You can buy a BMW, take it apart and measure all the parts. Microsoft on the other hand, licenses their products with the restriction that you can't look under the hood and take it apart to figure out how it works inside. Secondly, for the user, a person who knows how to drive a Ford can probably drive a BMW without too many problems. The same gas that runs a BMW will run a Ford, the same oil that works in a BMW works in a Ford. BMW's and Fords can run on the same roads. But Microsoft makes applications with proprietary file formats, and all the competing programs have to deal with reverse engineering them.
Secondly, car manufacturers have in fact been forced by the U.S. government (and also pressured by the insurance industry) to allow 3rd party 'compatible' parts vendors to build replacement parts.
I am afraid the only thing that can tumble MS is a competitive product,
I'd prefer if strictly market pressures could eliminate monopolies, but sometimes it doesn't work the way it is supposed to. Mainly when said monopoly exercises dishonest tactics in order to maintain their position. When a monopoly power is allowed to do that, even superior products will fail (or be bought up).
any else means americans don't have freedom at all, like being free to be successful.
Being free to be successful and being free to use dishonest tactics to succeed are not necessarily the same thing.
Are we free to be successful if any well funded competitor can squash us through whatever means they want even if we come up with a competitive product?
Slashdot Mirror
What would just the client licenses for Exchange cost for 25000 users?
How much would all of the copies of NT Server and Exchange you'd need (you aren't going to run that many people on one box, that is for sure) to support that many users with Exchange cost?
How much is all of the technical support you'll need from Microsoft going to cost?
How many MSCE's will you need to hire to administer all of those NT Servers?
Etc, etc.
My guess is you are talking costs in excess of a million dollars more to implement NT/Exchange than it would cost to implement an open sourced solution.
I've unplugged the keyboard on my Linux box and plugged it back in while it was running and I don't recall anything wierd happening.
What is the advantage to a USB modem over a normal serial port modem? Why would I want to replace my existing 56K modem?
Right now, for me, USB seems to be Windows' key advantage over Linux in the hardware department,
I'm not so sold on USB personally. I suppose if I had bought a new system that came bundled with USB and USB peripherals I might feel differently, but none of my current machines have USB, and I have no USB peripherals. I don't see any real reason to prefer USB peripherals to those I already have. I don't see any point in USB keyboards and mice (what is wrong with the old DIN keyboard connector or the PS/2 style mouse connector). I have a SCSI scanner, and I don't see any reason why I'd prefer USB over that. My printers work fine on plain old parallel, and I don't see why I'd want to buy a new one or a USB adapter. Frankly, I'd buy one of those little Ethernet print server boxes if I really wanted to get rid of the parallel port. My 56k modem works fine on the serial port...
Now, I'd like to see Linux get full USB support just out of principle, but I fail to see why USB is so important.
If/when this passes to reality, it will make identity theft on the internet into a much larger problem than it is now.
While technology might provide tools to make anonymity more difficult, it won't resolve the problem that humans will still be the weak link in the system. There are too many stupid people out there that will have their identities stolen and that will let script kiddies and other malicious people be at least semi-anonymous while preventing the legitimate (like whistle-blowers, for example) from saying things without fear of reprisal.
While you may think that all of this is a good thing, I am not at all convinced. Of course I'm more than a little paranoid, but when I see the increasing big-brother influences in the world, I feel more justified in those feelings.
Knowing when to acknowledge when people have changed shows that Bruce is more than just a hothead. Hopefully this rational discourse will benefit similar efforts in the future.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
Seriously though, Microsoft may be right, but they certainly do look hypocritcal as hell when they in general like to make their products proprietary and only advocate open standards when they can't get into a market any other way.
When they start opening up the formats for their office products, then we can start saying they are for open standards.
Now that was one of the funniest posts I have read in a long time...
no real mention made of lost innovation due to loss of competition as it becomes a commodity.
The only case where commoditization eliminates innovation seems to be with closed source software like Microsoft. One only has to look to freshmeat.net to see that multiple forks and competing packages can flourish even in a completely commoditized market. Even long time, successful open source packages like sendmail, bind, Apache, Linux, etc. all have multiple competitors. But in commercial software, once a market seems to get commoditized, it seems like all the commercial competitors give up or are rudely pushed aside.
IBM sent me DB2 for Linux months ago. They didn't send me one for NT, not that I care. I could easily get a copy of NT if I wanted one, but I would consider it a waste of space.
Most GNU programs have "embraced and extended" standard UNIX tools by adding nonstandard things. Half the damn things I try to compile depend on GNU specific extensions that they didn't have to use.
/bin/sh.
Give me some examples... I have built a ton of stuff on Linux, Solaris and SunOS, and in most cases these days it is just a matter of running config and then doing a make.
Most of the Debian distribution won't work if you try to use a regular old POSIX
Well, I don't use Debian, but I've used shells other than bash on Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and Slackware (for example tcsh).
I don't see how what MS does is worse than this.
Maybe because MS doesn't give us the source code? And if they did, have you ever tried to port source written for Windows to any other platform? I have, and it isn't fun. All of their APIs are proprietarized (look at the Winsock API and how it has changed), all of them are highly Windows specific. All of them seem to change because of short sighted planning on Microsoft's part (Win16 vs. Win32s vs Win32 (and all the variants between 95, 98 and NT), and the upcoming Win64). There is no way you can compare difficulty in porting between Windows and anything else and between one *nix and another. I am still using code I wrote under 4.2BSD UNIX on VAXes in the mid 80's today. It compiles and runs with little trouble on several different *nixes.
If you can't see how Microsoft is worse, then you need a white cane, dark glasses and a guide dog. No offense to blind people, because you may not be blind, but you sure can't see.
If the software becomes commoditized, so will we.
Shrink wrap boxed software is already commoditized, but IT professionals aren't.
It still takes skill to put together and localize even boxed software. There will always be a need for in-house developed custom apps, regardless of what some people think. That sort of software will never become commoditized even if all the infrastructure software (OSes, server software, generic applications, etc) does.
What you just said mirrors what MS said in those halloween documents to a T.
Not quite. The difference is that when M$ 'embraces and extends' they do it in a non-standard way. Their version usually doesn't play nicely with others. Their motivations are different, they don't use cloning to enhance what you can do with Windows and expand choice, they do it to eliminate choice.
You'd be doing exactly what MS does, find a product that works, make a blatant copy of it, and then sell it for a lower price.
Give it away for free, including source code, actually. Increase what you cando with free software and give people new choices.
But because it is now "open-source" that's supposed to make it all better for the company who made the initial investment to get product to market in the first place.
Of course not, part of the point in doing this is to punish companies for not doing Linux ports.
In a few instances, I've been impressed, but overall it seems that the open source doesn't really contribute anything back to the world, aside from source code.
That isn't enough?
Where's the innovation? At least MS was first on the block with a unified-browser interface (though it sucks!!!)... Then KDE appears and lo and behold, it's got an integrated browser!
Where's the originality?
If that is Microsoft's only 'innovation' then I am not impressed. I am not at all convinced that browser integration is even a good idea. I think that open source software's track record when it comes to 'innovation' can easily hold its own against Microsoft. Check freshmeat.net on a regular basis.
Clone it? let's not. I've used NAS and it absolutely sucks.
If this is true, then it not being ported to Linux isn't such a big deal except that it still could lock some people into NAS on some other platform (and thus lock Linux out of some shops).
This kind of expensive junkware should be left to die.
Well, obviously someone thinks that it is a worthwhile product. Maybe 'cloning' isn't the correct thing to do, maybe just building a similar package that is done right would be good enough. I don't know enough about NAS or any of its possible freeware competitors to say at this point.
If you really want to run a website on java on linux (not a good idea with the current state of VMs on linux) you should look at Enhydra, Locomotive, or GSP. All of these are more useful than NAS.
Maybe adding a conversion utility or compatibility mode to one of these products to allow them to be used as a functional replacement for NAS would be good enough.
Actually what really scares away suits is when they do a commercial port and people do an open sourced clone anyway. A free, open sourced clone of an expensive product will actually attract some suits (especially those of Sun/Netscape/AOL's competitors).
Actually suits are only one part of the problem. I think it is more important for Linux to have credible software to fill these kind of niches than it is to worry about what commercial software interests we might step on a few toes of.
If they won't do a port, let's just clone it and release a free, open sourced version.
Amen brother. Just asking for health insurance here in the South
:-( At any rate, my deductable is much smaller than that.
Here in the midwest, any sort of decent white collar job includes health insurance (although you may have to pay part of it, its generally $15-$60 a month).
(south-eastern United States for you international readers) can easily mean that you won't get the job.
Around here the real unemployment rate is less than 3%. Basically anyone who can and will work has a job. Other than people who are temporarily between jobs, anyone able bodied (or minded) around here who isn't working is either too picky or too lazy. Jobs for people with actual skills or experience are hard for employers to fill because there aren't sufficient quality people.
I've given-up on finding a job with health insurance, so I'm paying for it myself. I'd hate to imagine how quickly I'd be asked to leave if I mentioned the word "union" and/or any demands that this "union" would make. The guy from Microsoft complained about paying for health insurance out of $60K per year. Try doing the same on a $22K per year job in the South designing monitoring equipment for textile machinery. I've got a $1,000 deductable, but I don't have a $1,000 in the bank.
Who does? I may make good money, but I have a wife that knows how to spend it.
What do I do if I get sick? Put the $1,000 on a credit card? After all of my fixed costs, I only have about $150 per month to pay for food, entertainment, and gas. I went to a concert last month (woohoo Ozzy), and I had to eat white bread and liver mush (hey, it was less than a $1 for a pound) for the rest of the month. It's not that bad, except that on my way home, I have to pass by more than a dozen restaurants that I've never been able to go to. Someone w/ a degree from a good school (hint, it's in Atlanta GA and it rhymes w/ wreck)
I don't have a degree at all, and I manage to pull down considerably more than you are. That is not unusual. You need to switch jobs, yesterday.
shouldn't have to get a part-time job working at a GNC just so I can eat a meal or two a week in a restaurant. I make about half of what the uneducated machine operators make,
Entry level PC techs are making about double what you are getting around here, and most of them don't know one end of a soldering iron from the other. Get out of there now, before you screw up your career for good (if you stay in a bad job too long, it becomes more difficult to get a good one).
and I'm the one building the circuits and writing the software that schedules their production and computes their production pay. Bah!
Once again, get out. You don't have to put up with that. If you don't, then I will not feel sorry for you.
As a professional tech worker I seriously doubt that any union could represent me as well as I can represent myself. I would never join a union, nor would I work in a job that would require me to. It would guarantee me less pay and fewer benefits than I can acquire on my own. I'm sure a lot of tech workers feel the same way.
The only unionized IT people I know of around here (I live in a 'right to work' state, so unions aren't as prevalent here as some places) are state and county workers who are covered by AFSCME. They are in general paid $10 to $20k less than what private employers pay for similar positions. You might say that the government doesn't pay as well as private industry in general, and you'd be right, but the differential between AFSCME negotiated contracts for IT workers and IT industry salaries is worse than it is for other types of workers.
Personally, I say no way to unionizing the IT industry, it just doesn't look like a good deal.
Make your own choices. Don't try to make mine for me.
I sure hope you are a supporter of 'right to work' laws then (laws that prevent 'closed shops' where you have to join a union to get a job).
In college, I worked at a supermarket that was a closed shop. For a $4.50/hour job with 12hrs/week, I had to pay the union $17/ week, $7 dues, and $10 initiation. After Taxes and Union dues I had maybe $25 spending money. I guess I was supposed to be grateful that I didn't make minimum wage (4.25/hour at the time).
When I was in high school, I worked at a supermarket that was a non-union shop. I started out making $3.50, but was up to $5 an hour by the time I had been there two years.The minimum wage was $3.35 in those days. I also got more benefits than were typically given to part time people. Obviously some employers know how to treat their employees.
Oracle has a LONG LONG history of vaporware that goes back to when the company started.
O.K., that is only one of the many questionable tactics that Microsoft uses. It is also a far less effective practice when it is done by a company which has credible competitors, because when the vapor fails to condense, customers can choose to go with a competitors product, or at least threaten to.
It's well established in the printed record. This spring I read a 'sympathetic' biography of Larry Ellison (it was obvious that it was written by somebody who had received friendly access to Larry) where some of his personal ethical lapses were documented.
Personal ethical lapses by management, while not a good thing, have no bearing on whether a company is excercising illegal monopoly powers or trade practices. Bringing them up here doesn't seem to do much to further your argument, but rather makes it look like you have a personal beef against Larry Ellison.
Things like sleeping with employees, having them fired when he breaks up with them. Outright lieing to customers about new releases. The book title is "The Difference between God and Larry Ellison (God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison)".
I never said Larry Ellison was a nice guy, I just said I didn't see any evidence that Oracle was nearly as bad in their business dealings as Microsoft. I still haven't seen anything to change that.
Oh, and wether or not a company has "credible competition" has nothing to do with wether a company is ethical or not.
But it has everything to do with whether they are using monopoly powers to crush smaller competitors. In other words, if a company has credible competition it tends to act to a certain degree to keep them 'honest'.
I am NOT writing this to apologize for Microsoft in any way or form, just to point out that it's not a pink-and-fuzzy world out there of happy ethical competitors, except for big mean bad Microsoft.
Nobody ever said it was a perfect world. A lot of companies do a few questionable things. The difference is that Microsoft continuously uses every dirty trick in the book even when they don't need to.
Get real.
Actually, it seems pretty obvious who isn't dealing with reality.
Listen, Oracle is a company that can make Microsoft look like a bunch of eager Boy Scouts, as far as business ethics goes.
Care to back that up with some examples? I don't particularly like Oracle or Larry Ellison personally, but I've seen no evidence that they are anywhere near as unethical as Microsoft and Bill Gates. And at least Oracle has always had credible competition from companies like Informix, Sybase, Ingres (Computer Associates), Software AG (Adabas), etc.
crackers will NOT publish their modifications to the code
Some will, and some won't. Where would script kiddies be if some crackers didn't publish scripts and how-tos for them? Crackers will publish their modifications, albiet a lot of them will not do so right away. Most of them seem to publish once they have moved on to a newer technique.
If /. DID run on FreeBSD, that'd be a good reason to steer clear of it. /. is one of the slowest sites on the Net, period. The performance is absolutely laughable.
I think that most of Slashdot's performance issues are related to lack of bandwidth. If Slashdot is maxing out its pipes, no amount of hardware or software thrown at it is going to fix that problem.
Processing wise, Slashdot does a lot of dynamic content generation and is written primarily in Perl, which is interpretive. If memory serves, Slashdot runs primarily on a single machine and not a huge or expensive one, with a second machine that only serves up the graphics. Additionally, I believe that the database engine is running on the same machine as the web server. Serving up the graphics seems to be the slowest part of the whole system. If Slashdot used multiple graphics servers (preferably on seperate pipes), it might help matters.
I believe a significant boost in dynamic content generation performance could be had on Slashdot if it used a seperate database server box connected to the web server on a dedicated 100Mbit Ethernet. Moving to this sort of architecture could also allow clustering of the front end web servers. However, as I said before, if the bottleneck is bandwidth, that won't make much difference.
All in all, I think Slashdot does pretty well considering the limited resources it has had to work with. Now that it is owned by Andover, perhaps they will be willing to put some investment into infrastructure.
Lets put aside the fact that OFFICE 2000 uses XML or whatever,
More like whatever. Microsoft's XML/HTML implementation in MS-O2K is not getting the best reviews as being very standardized.
and MS do use standards where good standards exist like TCP/IP.
Again, Microsoft's adherence to the TCP/IP standards have been pretty spotty. They were also slow to embrace TCP/IP (can anyone say NetBIOS), and it appears that they are intending to 'embrace and extend' with proprietarized prototols if they can get away with it.
Why should Microsoft publish its own property ?
That's what entities which are serious about standards do.
Are the US government then going to force BMW to release its engines specs so we can all manaufacture cars with great engine ?
Not an accurate comparison for a couple of reasons. First, 'hard' manufactured goods are much easier to reverse engineer. You can buy a BMW, take it apart and measure all the parts. Microsoft on the other hand, licenses their products with the restriction that you can't look under the hood and take it apart to figure out how it works inside. Secondly, for the user, a person who knows how to drive a Ford can probably drive a BMW without too many problems. The same gas that runs a BMW will run a Ford, the same oil that works in a BMW works in a Ford. BMW's and Fords can run on the same roads. But Microsoft makes applications with proprietary file formats, and all the competing programs have to deal with reverse engineering them.
Secondly, car manufacturers have in fact been forced by the U.S. government (and also pressured by the insurance industry) to allow 3rd party 'compatible' parts vendors to build replacement parts.
I am afraid the only thing that can tumble MS is a competitive product,
I'd prefer if strictly market pressures could eliminate monopolies, but sometimes it doesn't work the way it is supposed to. Mainly when said monopoly exercises dishonest tactics in order to maintain their position. When a monopoly power is allowed to do that, even superior products will fail (or be bought up).
any else means americans don't have freedom at all, like being free to be successful.
Being free to be successful and being free to use dishonest tactics to succeed are not necessarily the same thing.
Are we free to be successful if any well funded competitor can squash us through whatever means they want even if we come up with a competitive product?