Yes. John Ashcroft and all his law enforcement buddies are helping us. They are looking our for our best interests, aren't they? So were the cops that bit the shit out of Rodney King, they were helping him see the light. Let me guess you live in some white suburbia where the cops call you sir or maam.
It must be nice to have such blind faith in a government that rarely does anything on a federal level that doesn't somehow benefit the insurance companies or the some other large industry that has billions of dollars already. Read between the lines and follow the money and you will find the motivating factor to many of our laws.
The only thing the republicans are interested in protecting is their money and their friend's money. I am not against making money, but the insurance industry isn't going to crumble to it's knees if lawmakers don't kiss their ass.
If you don't see this national id card thing as another example you are completly oblivious to what is right in front of your face.
Big brother does exist and he's getting more and more powerful every year, don't kid yourself.
Our government wants to control it's people and the people of the world as much as possible. Our government is constantly pushing it's agenda on other countries and the American people.
As for them going after bin Laden, they had no choice. Like they are going to just sit around letting assholes kill thousands of Americans. How would that look come election time?
You need to look past the obvious. And when I say they won, that doesn't mean they are alive. I mean they accomplished their goal.
As far as your why have a democracy question, that's just a stupid question.
Resistence is futile. How can you fight fear? Fear is going to win over liberty and I think everyone knows that.
Our world changed on 9/11/01 and it will never ever be the same. We are doing exactly what our enemies wished us to do, we are giving in?
Here's the deal: there have always been businesses and lobbyists waiting in the wings for something to happen that will allow them to get what they want, total control/knowledge of our daily lives. These people, for various reasons, want all this data in one place. They don't care about privacy, they don't care about civil liberties, they only care about their agenda.
Now that the majority of Americans are scared shitless they are getting their laws passed with ease. And they have the greatest reason in the world to shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The problem with the average person is that they lack vision. They lack the ability to see beyond their fears and beyond their own problems. They want tax cuts because that $300 will be great for a downpayment on a new tv. They don't mind giving up alittle privacy because they aren't doing anything wrong, not yet.
What people fail to see is the impact on the country as a whole. They fail to see the fact that once these things start being implemented there is no turning back. Social Security numbers weren't meant to be your national ID number, but it turned out that way. Even if social security were abolished, we would still be issued a number xxx-xx-xxxx
I really think the terrorists won, it's over. The United States of America lost and it's over. I am truly saddened by this, I really am. Where can I live now, where is there a country that truly cares about it's citizens?
3) The government will know that you have seen Lord of the Rings 46 times, (obsessive personality - probably a terrorist).
4) The government knows that you withdrew a large some of money from your bank account (that money could be headed to a terrorist organization).
5) What little is left of our pseudo-freedom will be gone.
I have been down that path myself and have come to conclusion that LDAP sounds great when you sit around talking about it. It's the best thing in the world and would be so cool, right? Then you actually try and implement and LDAP solution and realize that LDAP isn't as cool as you thought it would be.
There is limited good documentation. There are a limited number of tools available and it's just hard to get going.
LDAP works well if you work somewhere that has the resources to devote to the LDAP implementation and maintenance. Trying to it all be yourself, just isn't a reality (unless you are an LDAP guru which I am not).
I am not saying LDAP is bad, there just aren't any turnkey solutions out there.
Gee, why do some many people around the world hate the US? Could be because we bully other countries into doing shit they don't want to?
Being a superpower comes with responsibility to the rest of the world. We should be acting better than this. We should be helping people that need help (by giving them food with no strings attached).
But more importantly we should stop acting like big dumb American assholes. Is it really impossible for the US to stop sticking their nose in everyone else's business?
ADVICE TO MY COUNTRY: Stop pissing all over the rest of the world or we will have even bigger problems then a few terrorists. We could actually see a country with a military telling us to go fuck ourselves with big guns and bombs.
How would like to have a billion Chinese or Indians(the one's from India) on your ass. That's going to take more then a few tomahawk's and marines to put away.
I will have to disagree with your statement, "Apparently MS realizes they made a wrong decision in their approach to security (trusting the sysadmin's dilligence), and they are making strong strides to change this now, and in the future."
Microsoft's approach to security has/had nothing to do with trusting sysadmins and everything to do with gaining market share. The marketing department drives development plain and simple. You really should open your eyes when you are working on them NT servers, do they look like servers?
Microsoft's products should install out of the box as secure as possible, not with a blank SA password for SQL.
I am forced to work in an NT world and I hate it. I have worked with many other server OS's like Novell and Linux distros, and MS stuff sucks.
People who NT is easy are wrong, NT is high maintenance really high.
Speaking of high...I gotta go cough cough
The only good thing I can say about MS is that Windows 2000 works better then 95/98/ME every did, but that's it.
Maybe accounting packages aren't a big deal in the manufacturiing world, although I find that hard to believe. Accounting software is a major market that every single business participates in whether they own their own software or pay someone who owns the accounting software.
Out of all the areas that computers have helped, accounting has to be one of the greatest success stories. There are a lot shitty accounting packages out there, but the ones that are high-quality really are a money maker for accounting departments.
If someone could make rock solid accounting system that runs on Linux it would be a huge market that linux could tap into.
It's only a matter of time before we start seeing accounting software being developed for Linux. It's a good way for smaller companies with good ideas to start to break into the smaller markets with an easy to install and stable accounting package. The company could take the profits from the small business market and work on taking the software further and take on the larger enterprise accounting packages.
I don't think the accounting software should be web based. They need to be written in Java or C++. I just don't think the Web is advanced enough to be able to make effective data entry applications, which is what most accounting adds up to. Most people are afraid of the Web and don't want to run the entire accounting system on a web server, even if it's not really on the Web.
If this were 2 years ago I would have people writing me checks for 50 million dollars for that dot-com business plan.
I just heard about this "settlement" that MS would give schools more MS software. How is this punishment for MS? So MS gives a bunch of schools Windows XP or whatever, now they just ensure these schools continue to work in a MS environment making it harder for the school to justify going with an Open Source alternative.
The only punishment that makes sense to me would be for MS to give lots and lots of money and hardware if its hardware that works with non-MS software.
How much does it really cost MS to give out a few licences? How many people feel that Microsoft's goal is always been about gaining market share pure and simple (I know that's obvious). They really haven't been that concerned with people installing illegal copies of windows in the past. Their future is going to be making money off of services and leasing software that is controlled through Windows. Windows is merely a tool for MS to push more products and services, like the AOL software you get in the mail. AOL doesn't make money of the software, just the service.
Granted the new WinXP has some activation thing in it, but I don't know how that fits into my thought process because I don't yet understand what it does if you don't activate it after 30 days.
If you don't like what you are doing in college, it won't get much better when you get out. Working as a programmer can be a grind and I have yet to find a job that I actually enjoyed (one dot-com was cool, but we all know how that turned out).
Programming can be a blast if you get something interesting to work on. The problem is that there is very little out there that is actually interesting. You either spend your time maintaining someone else's garbage code or you work on project after project that are not only boring but probably will never get off the ground. Now granted, I seem to always pick the loser companies (I picked the last one because of the commute, boy was that a mistake).
I didn't get a CS degree I have worked my way into the field and can tell you this, it sucks. I have been doing this shit for going 6 years now and just can't find a job that doesn't drive me crazy (that could be my own fault).
I suggest staying in school for as long as you can. Get a Masters or a phd. The one thing I will always regret is not staying in school as long as I could. College may seem lame after 4 or 5 years, but working will suck for the rest of your life. Man I wish I could turn back the clock.
I envy you. Just don't jump too fast and think about how long you are going to be working for (50 years?).
Would you rather have a bunch of companies that you decide can have the key to a portion of your data that your grant them access to, or would you rather MS and all it's partners have the ability to access any of your data at any time they chose without you knowing about it?
What a nice long sentence.
I don't really know how MS is doing Passport and how they are storing data, but I have a feeling that will be able to gain access to anyone's data they wish. I am sure they will not setup the system in such a way that will not be able to see your data, it's just not their style.
However, if MS did come up with something actually interesting with Passport or Hailstorm and they did release it to the public, that would give MS a lot PR points. Sooner or later I predict that MS will start to give up source code to certain projects like IE or even Windows. MS has decided that the desktop market will not be profitable forever. They feel that providing online services and basically leasing software. Windows will/has become merely a tool that allows people to pay for MS services, like Office. You will login with Passport with Windows and will be given access to you word processing application if you've paid your monthly service fee to MS. I don't know how they will actually charge you, but the point is they will rent you Office and will be able to control your access to Office through Passport. This will allow MS to garrantee they are getting all the cash for their software.
So give away Windows and just make money of the applications/services.
This is a huge undertaking that will not be anywhere near a reality for quite some time. It's going to take awhile for standard protocols are widely adapted in order for it become widely used.
There is still time for Sun or AOL or whoever to compete with MS on this playing field and everyone else has the advantage of simply not being MS.
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
It would be nice to have someone really put some thought into examining the letter and what was stated. I thought the article was ok but it seemed to lack something.
It would have been nice if the article would have included some numbers on how many people are using Linux. Perhaps discuss the current position of the varioius software projects in their respective markets. Apache and Samba would be interesting.
I shouldn't talk, I can't write anything I can just critize what other people do. The open source community is represented as much by it's publications as it is for it's software to the rest of the world.
The difference between Sun's implementation and.NET is that Sun is proposing a distributed system where no one company holds the key to the data.
If the data is stored in a distributed system using encryption that the people running the server can't decrypt you don't run into the privacy problems the.NET will surely have.
Buy a G and L rather than a Fender. They are excellent quality guitars. I got mine for $500 brand new (Guitar Center was selling all the brands they don't carry because they bought a Musician's Friend store). I love my G and L.
Companies don't hire enough smart people to admin their network. They think that the guy who knows how install Windows would be a good candidate for admining the network.
Most companies and people that run them don't understand what it takes to properly setup and maintain a network.
I think this will/is changing though. The company I work for now takes the network seriously after they narrowly avoided a catastrophic data loss about a month ago. Now that backup solution I was bitching that we needed, has been purchased.
You don't think that the Ford/Firestone hasn't hurt Ford financially? Ford is not happy about that situation and probably lost millions in sales. A company doesn't have to belly-up everytime they screw and it can still hurt them.
Actually if Ashcroft and MS get their way the person that cracks it will be shot for being a terrorist and no one will blame MS because they were just the victim. Actually I don't think the federal gov. imposes the death penalty so he/she would just get life.
There's no support built into the product. Yes, you can hire people to support it for you, but it's a seperate cost.
Last time I checked you had to pay for support of proprietary software too. True, sometimes you get a free phone number that you can call when it's not busy, but's that's not an enterprise level support.
Yes. You have to pay people to support their software. For example Novell charges $250 per incident to solve a technical problem. If you had to hire someone whether a consultant or fulltime person to fix a problem it would cost you more than $250. Now granted I have ran into a situation with Novell where they knew the problem existed but it just was going to take them several weeks or months to get the changes implemented. That sort of thing usually doesn't happen with Open Source software.
3.The programmers may suddenly decide they have no vested interest in continuing the project, or development may slow to a crawl (eg, mozilla), and
there's nothing you can do about it.
False. The one key advantage you have with open source is that *anyone* can continue the project, including yourself. The original programmer
cannot prevent anyone from developing the project. On the other hand, with proprietary software, you have no such recourse. If the company suddenly decides it is no longer interested in the product, it can drop it and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Neither you nor anyone else can
continue the project. You are solely at the mercy of the vendor. This is actually one of the key arguments *for* open source.
This has happened many times, where developers graduate from college and no longer feel like programming for 16hours a day on their Open source code as well as working a day job. And yes you could take the code over yourself, but that is very costly for a company to invest in a programmer to maintain that code. Programmers aren't cheap and maintaining your own source code for applications is not usually feasible.
And yes a closed source company could just drop the app. or go out of business, that's why you make sure you are buying software from a company that knows what they are doing if it is a mission critical app.
I love Open source applications and use them one a daily basis and love the power that Open source gives you but it's not the answer to everyone's problems.
The problem with the Microsoft view is they deliberatly blur the lines between Open Source and the GPL.
Open Source and GPL are not the same. There are a number of different open source licenses that one can use when distributing open source software and the GPL doesn't always make sense.
Microsoft deliberatly points out the problems with the GPL and uses that misinformation to scare businesses and uninformed individuals.
I find that running Open Source software can be very resource intensive. What most people don't realize about software is that the initial cost of the software is a fraction of the actual cost of owning the software. If you install an open source email server, suchas Courier-IMAP and Qmail as I have, you will notice that it can eat up large amounts of your time to get some things working. There is very little documentation and the documentation that is available is scattered across the Internet.
Since I am the only person in the IT "department" when I have to spend 8 or 9 hours making something work or fixing a problem, that costs the company money. This exact thing happened last week. For no reason the mail server (Qmail), decided to stop sending mail. I spent hours trying to figure out the problem and never really did nail down the source of the problem, but I got it working. I was able to find an article on Deja that got me going in the right direction but it was difficult to find.
That's not to say the you will not have problems with other commercial non-Open Source servers, but there is a technical support person to speak with. And it is nice to have someone to complain to when things aren't working like you think they should.
This is also a problem not with just troubleshooting but a lot of Open Source software. Most are very powerful and very configurable, but they are also very time consuming to get running the way you want them to run. There are exceptions suchas Apache or Samba which are really easy to get going, but these projects have well established teams and have some money being invested into them.
I haven't worked with technical support with a commercial Open Source application so I don't know how that area is.
Open Source is very young and there is a lot of room to grow. It's not for everyone and just because it appears free doesn't mean that it won't cost you money.
Re:Where Can MS Go? Nowhere? Not So.
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: -1
In my opinion M$ will fail at its current objective, world domination through Internet services.
While M$ has deep penetration into the user desktop market,.NET/Passport/Hailstorm is going to require partnering or at least relationships with corporations. Many of these corporations will be large many will be small. In order for.NET to work they need to have lots and lots of businesses implementing.NET web services and therefore using Passport. The problem with this is the fact that while M$ was taking over the consumer PC desktop they alienated and showed the business community that they are not to be trusted.
Now it is time for M$ to start building relationships with these companies that know all to well how M$ works and they aren't going to buy it. Businesses do not trust M$. Passport would require businesses to allow M$ access to their client database. This can allow M$ the means to use that client database for their own purposes, even though they say wont. A business that does not compete with M$ now is surely not going to put themselves in a situation where they will end up having to compete with M$.
The bottom line is M$ gambled big time when they took over the desktop market and showed the business community how they do business. Now that it is time for M$ to be a part of every business that would implement.NET businesses will shy away. Businesses will look to companies like Sun, IBM, AOL anyone that is not M$.
M$ is not as far along with Hailstorm and.NET as they would like the world to believe.
I think the dude was just saying he is only interested in free OS's, period. Free not as in free beer but rather free as in our right (in the US I suppose) to free speech.
Some people like freedom and some people don't, that's ok.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. John Ashcroft and all his law enforcement buddies are helping us. They are looking our for our best interests, aren't they? So were the cops that bit the shit out of Rodney King, they were helping him see the light. Let me guess you live in some white suburbia where the cops call you sir or maam.
It must be nice to have such blind faith in a government that rarely does anything on a federal level that doesn't somehow benefit the insurance companies or the some other large industry that has billions of dollars already. Read between the lines and follow the money and you will find the motivating factor to many of our laws.
The only thing the republicans are interested in protecting is their money and their friend's money. I am not against making money, but the insurance industry isn't going to crumble to it's knees if lawmakers don't kiss their ass.
If you don't see this national id card thing as another example you are completly oblivious to what is right in front of your face.
Big brother does exist and he's getting more and more powerful every year, don't kid yourself.
Our government wants to control it's people and the people of the world as much as possible. Our government is constantly pushing it's agenda on other countries and the American people.
As for them going after bin Laden, they had no choice. Like they are going to just sit around letting assholes kill thousands of Americans. How would that look come election time?
You need to look past the obvious. And when I say they won, that doesn't mean they are alive. I mean they accomplished their goal.
As far as your why have a democracy question, that's just a stupid question.
Resistence is futile. How can you fight fear? Fear is going to win over liberty and I think everyone knows that.
Our world changed on 9/11/01 and it will never ever be the same. We are doing exactly what our enemies wished us to do, we are giving in?
Here's the deal: there have always been businesses and lobbyists waiting in the wings for something to happen that will allow them to get what they want, total control/knowledge of our daily lives. These people, for various reasons, want all this data in one place. They don't care about privacy, they don't care about civil liberties, they only care about their agenda.
Now that the majority of Americans are scared shitless they are getting their laws passed with ease. And they have the greatest reason in the world to shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The problem with the average person is that they lack vision. They lack the ability to see beyond their fears and beyond their own problems. They want tax cuts because that $300 will be great for a downpayment on a new tv. They don't mind giving up alittle privacy because they aren't doing anything wrong, not yet.
What people fail to see is the impact on the country as a whole. They fail to see the fact that once these things start being implemented there is no turning back. Social Security numbers weren't meant to be your national ID number, but it turned out that way. Even if social security were abolished, we would still be issued a number xxx-xx-xxxx
I really think the terrorists won, it's over. The United States of America lost and it's over. I am truly saddened by this, I really am. Where can I live now, where is there a country that truly cares about it's citizens?
3) The government will know that you have seen Lord of the Rings 46 times, (obsessive personality - probably a terrorist).
4) The government knows that you withdrew a large some of money from your bank account (that money could be headed to a terrorist organization).
5) What little is left of our pseudo-freedom will be gone.
I have been down that path myself and have come to conclusion that LDAP sounds great when you sit around talking about it. It's the best thing in the world and would be so cool, right? Then you actually try and implement and LDAP solution and realize that LDAP isn't as cool as you thought it would be.
There is limited good documentation. There are a limited number of tools available and it's just hard to get going.
LDAP works well if you work somewhere that has the resources to devote to the LDAP implementation and maintenance. Trying to it all be yourself, just isn't a reality (unless you are an LDAP guru which I am not).
I am not saying LDAP is bad, there just aren't any turnkey solutions out there.
Gee, why do some many people around the world hate the US? Could be because we bully other countries into doing shit they don't want to?
Being a superpower comes with responsibility to the rest of the world. We should be acting better than this. We should be helping people that need help (by giving them food with no strings attached).
But more importantly we should stop acting like big dumb American assholes. Is it really impossible for the US to stop sticking their nose in everyone else's business?
ADVICE TO MY COUNTRY: Stop pissing all over the rest of the world or we will have even bigger problems then a few terrorists. We could actually see a country with a military telling us to go fuck ourselves with big guns and bombs.
How would like to have a billion Chinese or Indians(the one's from India) on your ass. That's going to take more then a few tomahawk's and marines to put away.
I will have to disagree with your statement, "Apparently MS realizes they made a wrong decision in their approach to security (trusting the sysadmin's dilligence), and they are making strong strides to change this now, and in the future."
Microsoft's approach to security has/had nothing to do with trusting sysadmins and everything to do with gaining market share. The marketing department drives development plain and simple. You really should open your eyes when you are working on them NT servers, do they look like servers?
Microsoft's products should install out of the box as secure as possible, not with a blank SA password for SQL.
I am forced to work in an NT world and I hate it. I have worked with many other server OS's like Novell and Linux distros, and MS stuff sucks.
People who NT is easy are wrong, NT is high maintenance really high.
Speaking of high...I gotta go cough cough
The only good thing I can say about MS is that Windows 2000 works better then 95/98/ME every did, but that's it.
There are plenty of accounting packages, but not industrial strength ones that run on Linux.
I am quite that the manufacturer sector would be a huge market if Open Source could tap it.
Keith
Maybe accounting packages aren't a big deal in the manufacturiing world, although I find that hard to believe. Accounting software is a major market that every single business participates in whether they own their own software or pay someone who owns the accounting software.
Out of all the areas that computers have helped, accounting has to be one of the greatest success stories. There are a lot shitty accounting packages out there, but the ones that are high-quality really are a money maker for accounting departments.
If someone could make rock solid accounting system that runs on Linux it would be a huge market that linux could tap into.
It's only a matter of time before we start seeing accounting software being developed for Linux. It's a good way for smaller companies with good ideas to start to break into the smaller markets with an easy to install and stable accounting package. The company could take the profits from the small business market and work on taking the software further and take on the larger enterprise accounting packages.
I don't think the accounting software should be web based. They need to be written in Java or C++. I just don't think the Web is advanced enough to be able to make effective data entry applications, which is what most accounting adds up to. Most people are afraid of the Web and don't want to run the entire accounting system on a web server, even if it's not really on the Web.
If this were 2 years ago I would have people writing me checks for 50 million dollars for that dot-com business plan.
I just heard about this "settlement" that MS would give schools more MS software. How is this punishment for MS? So MS gives a bunch of schools Windows XP or whatever, now they just ensure these schools continue to work in a MS environment making it harder for the school to justify going with an Open Source alternative.
The only punishment that makes sense to me would be for MS to give lots and lots of money and hardware if its hardware that works with non-MS software.
How much does it really cost MS to give out a few licences? How many people feel that Microsoft's goal is always been about gaining market share pure and simple (I know that's obvious). They really haven't been that concerned with people installing illegal copies of windows in the past. Their future is going to be making money off of services and leasing software that is controlled through Windows. Windows is merely a tool for MS to push more products and services, like the AOL software you get in the mail. AOL doesn't make money of the software, just the service.
Granted the new WinXP has some activation thing in it, but I don't know how that fits into my thought process because I don't yet understand what it does if you don't activate it after 30 days.
I'm done now.
If you don't like what you are doing in college, it won't get much better when you get out. Working as a programmer can be a grind and I have yet to find a job that I actually enjoyed (one dot-com was cool, but we all know how that turned out).
Programming can be a blast if you get something interesting to work on. The problem is that there is very little out there that is actually interesting. You either spend your time maintaining someone else's garbage code or you work on project after project that are not only boring but probably will never get off the ground. Now granted, I seem to always pick the loser companies (I picked the last one because of the commute, boy was that a mistake).
I didn't get a CS degree I have worked my way into the field and can tell you this, it sucks. I have been doing this shit for going 6 years now and just can't find a job that doesn't drive me crazy (that could be my own fault).
I suggest staying in school for as long as you can. Get a Masters or a phd. The one thing I will always regret is not staying in school as long as I could. College may seem lame after 4 or 5 years, but working will suck for the rest of your life. Man I wish I could turn back the clock.
I envy you. Just don't jump too fast and think about how long you are going to be working for (50 years?).
Would you rather have a bunch of companies that you decide can have the key to a portion of your data that your grant them access to, or would you rather MS and all it's partners have the ability to access any of your data at any time they chose without you knowing about it?
What a nice long sentence.
I don't really know how MS is doing Passport and how they are storing data, but I have a feeling that will be able to gain access to anyone's data they wish. I am sure they will not setup the system in such a way that will not be able to see your data, it's just not their style.
However, if MS did come up with something actually interesting with Passport or Hailstorm and they did release it to the public, that would give MS a lot PR points. Sooner or later I predict that MS will start to give up source code to certain projects like IE or even Windows. MS has decided that the desktop market will not be profitable forever. They feel that providing online services and basically leasing software. Windows will/has become merely a tool that allows people to pay for MS services, like Office. You will login with Passport with Windows and will be given access to you word processing application if you've paid your monthly service fee to MS. I don't know how they will actually charge you, but the point is they will rent you Office and will be able to control your access to Office through Passport. This will allow MS to garrantee they are getting all the cash for their software.
So give away Windows and just make money of the applications/services.
This is a huge undertaking that will not be anywhere near a reality for quite some time. It's going to take awhile for standard protocols are widely adapted in order for it become widely used.
There is still time for Sun or AOL or whoever to compete with MS on this playing field and everyone else has the advantage of simply not being MS.
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.
It would be nice to have someone really put some thought into examining the letter and what was stated. I thought the article was ok but it seemed to lack something.
It would have been nice if the article would have included some numbers on how many people are using Linux. Perhaps discuss the current position of the varioius software projects in their respective markets. Apache and Samba would be interesting.
I shouldn't talk, I can't write anything I can just critize what other people do. The open source community is represented as much by it's publications as it is for it's software to the rest of the world.
The difference between Sun's implementation and .NET is that Sun is proposing a distributed system where no one company holds the key to the data.
.NET will surely have.
If the data is stored in a distributed system using encryption that the people running the server can't decrypt you don't run into the privacy problems the
Buy a G and L rather than a Fender. They are excellent quality guitars. I got mine for $500 brand new (Guitar Center was selling all the brands they don't carry because they bought a Musician's Friend store). I love my G and L.
Companies don't hire enough smart people to admin their network. They think that the guy who knows how install Windows would be a good candidate for admining the network.
Most companies and people that run them don't understand what it takes to properly setup and maintain a network.
I think this will/is changing though. The company I work for now takes the network seriously after they narrowly avoided a catastrophic data loss about a month ago. Now that backup solution I was bitching that we needed, has been purchased.
You don't think that the Ford/Firestone hasn't hurt Ford financially? Ford is not happy about that situation and probably lost millions in sales. A company doesn't have to belly-up everytime they screw and it can still hurt them.
Actually if Ashcroft and MS get their way the person that cracks it will be shot for being a terrorist and no one will blame MS because they were just the victim. Actually I don't think the federal gov. imposes the death penalty so he/she would just get life.
There's no support built into the product. Yes, you can hire people to support it for you, but it's a seperate cost.
Last time I checked you had to pay for support of proprietary software too. True, sometimes you get a free phone number that you can call when it's not busy, but's that's not an enterprise level support.
Yes. You have to pay people to support their software. For example Novell charges $250 per incident to solve a technical problem. If you had to hire someone whether a consultant or fulltime person to fix a problem it would cost you more than $250. Now granted I have ran into a situation with Novell where they knew the problem existed but it just was going to take them several weeks or months to get the changes implemented. That sort of thing usually doesn't happen with Open Source software.
3.The programmers may suddenly decide they have no vested interest in continuing the project, or development may slow to a crawl (eg, mozilla), and
there's nothing you can do about it.
False. The one key advantage you have with open source is that *anyone* can continue the project, including yourself. The original programmer
cannot prevent anyone from developing the project. On the other hand, with proprietary software, you have no such recourse. If the company suddenly decides it is no longer interested in the product, it can drop it and you can do absolutely nothing about it. Neither you nor anyone else can
continue the project. You are solely at the mercy of the vendor. This is actually one of the key arguments *for* open source.
This has happened many times, where developers graduate from college and no longer feel like programming for 16hours a day on their Open source code as well as working a day job. And yes you could take the code over yourself, but that is very costly for a company to invest in a programmer to maintain that code. Programmers aren't cheap and maintaining your own source code for applications is not usually feasible.
And yes a closed source company could just drop the app. or go out of business, that's why you make sure you are buying software from a company that knows what they are doing if it is a mission critical app.
I love Open source applications and use them one a daily basis and love the power that Open source gives you but it's not the answer to everyone's problems.
The problem with the Microsoft view is they deliberatly blur the lines between Open Source and the GPL.
Open Source and GPL are not the same. There are a number of different open source licenses that one can use when distributing open source software and the GPL doesn't always make sense.
Microsoft deliberatly points out the problems with the GPL and uses that misinformation to scare businesses and uninformed individuals.
I find that running Open Source software can be very resource intensive. What most people don't realize about software is that the initial cost of the software is a fraction of the actual cost of owning the software. If you install an open source email server, suchas Courier-IMAP and Qmail as I have, you will notice that it can eat up large amounts of your time to get some things working. There is very little documentation and the documentation that is available is scattered across the Internet.
Since I am the only person in the IT "department" when I have to spend 8 or 9 hours making something work or fixing a problem, that costs the company money. This exact thing happened last week. For no reason the mail server (Qmail), decided to stop sending mail. I spent hours trying to figure out the problem and never really did nail down the source of the problem, but I got it working. I was able to find an article on Deja that got me going in the right direction but it was difficult to find.
That's not to say the you will not have problems with other commercial non-Open Source servers, but there is a technical support person to speak with. And it is nice to have someone to complain to when things aren't working like you think they should.
This is also a problem not with just troubleshooting but a lot of Open Source software. Most are very powerful and very configurable, but they are also very time consuming to get running the way you want them to run. There are exceptions suchas Apache or Samba which are really easy to get going, but these projects have well established teams and have some money being invested into them.
I haven't worked with technical support with a commercial Open Source application so I don't know how that area is.
Open Source is very young and there is a lot of room to grow. It's not for everyone and just because it appears free doesn't mean that it won't cost you money.
In my opinion M$ will fail at its current objective, world domination through Internet services.
.NET/Passport/Hailstorm is going to require partnering or at least relationships with corporations. Many of these corporations will be large many will be small. In order for .NET to work they need to have lots and lots of businesses implementing .NET web services and therefore using Passport. The problem with this is the fact that while M$ was taking over the consumer PC desktop they alienated and showed the business community that they are not to be trusted.
.NET businesses will shy away. Businesses will look to companies like Sun, IBM, AOL anyone that is not M$.
.NET as they would like the world to believe.
While M$ has deep penetration into the user desktop market,
Now it is time for M$ to start building relationships with these companies that know all to well how M$ works and they aren't going to buy it. Businesses do not trust M$. Passport would require businesses to allow M$ access to their client database. This can allow M$ the means to use that client database for their own purposes, even though they say wont. A business that does not compete with M$ now is surely not going to put themselves in a situation where they will end up having to compete with M$.
The bottom line is M$ gambled big time when they took over the desktop market and showed the business community how they do business. Now that it is time for M$ to be a part of every business that would implement
M$ is not as far along with Hailstorm and
I think the dude was just saying he is only interested in free OS's, period. Free not as in free beer but rather free as in our right (in the US I suppose) to free speech.
Some people like freedom and some people don't, that's ok.
Yeah right.
I need freedom if I want to be different.
Exactly.
They don't teach you how to steal shit from your job either, but you will learn.
They don't teach you that you will be treated like shit for the first 5 years of your career, but you learn that too.