The way you present it is a bit misleading, the thing is you can look like a strong competitor but then it turns out the market ran with somebody else. Take something like AltaVista, they were a huge search engine around 1998. Unless you had a very good crystal ball you could easily think they would become what Google is today. Google doesn't sound like such a bad investment, does it?
Same with social sites, if there's anything that has network effects it's this. You* are on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook, it all gravitates towards one big network. The winner will be a huge Google-class company, the others will be an AltaVista-class nobody. MySpace is in the "nobody" class, but that's easy to say in retrospect. It's all about what it potentially could have been.
* well, everyone EXCEPT you then
This further reaffirms my belief that the 'market' has long ago given up on actual fundamentals of 'value', and mostly follow hype and become totally irrational. It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.
If you give an absolutely certain cash flow, I can tell you on the cent what that's worth. It will be pretty close to the bank interest, because otherwise everybody (if over) or nobody (if under) would invest in it. Everybody else are speculating, even if you think that "oh this company has really good products and I think they'll sell well in the future" and invest long term that's speculation. And if *everybody* thinks that, then it'll already be priced so in the market. Then you're speculating that they'll do even better than the market thinks (or short because you think it'll do worse, but that's generally considered more speculative). Even things that lower your risk are speculation, if you fix the interest rate on your loan (or savings) you are taking a bet against the money market, compared to floating interest. It just a matter of degree.
At this point that's like trying to become a better WoW than WoW, good luck. I definitively think they need to try being something very different from Facebook - in a good way - if they are to survive.
I don't think it's a secret that Intel has the fastest processors if you're willing to pay $$$ for it. And since a dual card solution costs quite a bit of $$$ already, I doubt there are that many that want to pair an AMD CPU with a dual nVidia GPU.
No offense, but those phrases mean the same thing. It's just that redundancy generally isn't good for employees (exceptions: pilots, doctors/nurses, nuclear plant operators), but is laudable in data storage.
No. If I and a colleague get cross-trained so we can do each other's jobs nobody would call that "redundant skills" even though we've mirrored our skills. If we work in a Java shop then programming COBOL is a redundant skill (though general CS might still be useful). It's a word engineers and computer scientists co-opted, originally it means excessive, superfluous, useless. It can also mean repetitive, but only in that sense. "Look at all those redundant safety nets" doesn't mean they're covering for each other in case of failure, it means there's excessively many. At least it did originally, the idea that "redundant system" ~= "robust system that handles component failure" is only recent. But language is an evolving thing so if enough people use it differently, the meaning will change.
It works because small groups are transparent. The change happens when the group is so large small groups find they can freeload on the others by lying. Then you have to start supervising, then the supervisors start abusing their positions by making favorites or hate objects, or worse being corrupt. And the ones supervising the supervisors get kickbacks so they don't say anything either. As long what you get is the same in the good socialist spirit, it's almost impossible to keep production up. Then you start with perks and bonuses, but that just leads to more power and corruption by the ones handing them out. Then people lose faith in that what you get is just and fair and everybody starts working to game the system instead. Pretty soon after you have one group that made it (The Party) and a lot of serfs that didn't. And so the communist state is born.
They're not common carriers, but YES this should strip them of any protection under USC 17512.
512. Limitations on liability relating to material online
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications. - A service provider shall not be liable (...) if -
(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
I would say they are now liable to be sued by practically anybody. This is the equivalent of placing stickers over the ads in the paper and reselling it, a pretty blatant violation of copyright. No more "but I'm just the paper boy" excuse for them.
If the government doesn't have a way in, you won't find the product on the open market.
Which is why you use a software solution like PGP (well, GPG mostly nowadays) or OpenSSL, which doesn't have backdoors. The cat got out of the bag in the early 90s, but they're still trying to keep it out of the hands of average people.
Their business model has always been to start out with low prices, then ramp them up later.
Somehow I don't remember that part where DVD players - their most important patent pool - became more and more expensive. Yes, fractions within the MPEG LA do want to raise royalties but other fractions want to use it to sell H.264 hardware and want the decoding royalties to be minimal.
I also very much doubt some of the other big players gave up their efforts for a standard license, like say Microsoft and VC-1. I'm pretty sure they negotiated a license for the whole duration of the patents before dropping it and made H.264 standard in Windows 7 and IE9. The MPEG LA are far more bound than they like to give the impression of, methinks.
Dunno, but at least one thing Disney was infamous for was playing with availability - they know that your kids are only in the right age for their movies for a short time so they'd choke and pump supply, instead of going into the bargain bin they'd disappear - and they wouldn't be back until your kid is a little too old. Pretty nice trick to stress out parents into buying and to pay full price. I think with piracy going up that's more or less died out though, if it's not in the store it's always on TPB...
Dot matrix printers: When it comes to debugging very poorly written undocumented spaghetti code (especially VB with goto abuse all over the place) nothing beats a wide dot matrix printer and tractor paper for making sense of spaghetti code because you can see all the code at once and trace through the spaghetti.
My impression is that this is a different anti-pattern, one megafunction and tons of global state - no encapsulation or classes. Spaghetti code is typically recognized by massive and unstructured layers and calling, making it impossible to see where one code call goes like tracing one piece of spaghetti on a plate. A matrix printer won't do you any good because it's not linear at all.
They're going to stream it to unicast it to 11 million households, many of whom are going to want to do DVR things like skipping and pausing?
Exactly. Which is why IP multicast is and forever will be dead in the water. With unicast I watch exactly what I want, when I want and it doesn't matter if we're watching 11 million different YouTube videos or one sports broadcast. That will just be a special use case compared to all the videos, tv series and other things we watch more or less as it suits ourselves.
With fiber to the home spreading there is no more "last mile" problem. Here in Norway 12% have their Internet delivered by fiber already (Q2 2010) and the rollout is massive, I've heard predictions of 35% by 2015. To take one provider (Altibox) as example, for $100/month (549 NOK) you'll get 60/60 Mbit. And it's quite real, from those I've talked to.
The US can be as retarded as they will on cable/dsl monopolies, but the rest of the world isn't going to stop. In a matter of decades that giant waste won't matter. It'd be like arguing GIF vs PNG sizes, it just doesn't matter.
Dual stack, they will all still use an IPv4 address. If all ISPs had done this years ago and we had slowly phased out IPv4 in favor of IPv6 this would have worked. Now it will do nothing to lessen the blow of the brick wall we're running into.
Heh, that's what I get for swapping order after I started typing out the sentence. Another reason not to go around bragging, some variation of Murphy's law will make sure you end up with egg on your face.
Repeat after me, we are all individuals. Yeah, the whole premise here is lame. ERPs are essentially custom tailored one-stop solutions for your business, it's pretty close to the definition of an ERP. So they wrote some special stuff for this business, just like they do for every business. Yawn.
I don't think it's very different than participating in a timed race. Some people will be faster than you, some people will be slower (hopefully) and you get a feel for where you stand. Whether you work harder or give up doesn't really depend on your time. I think all of us have at one point asked ourselves "Am they slow or am I just not making any sense?" when it seems people can't grip what you're saying. IQ is at least part of the answer, yes you *do* see logic and patterns the average person don't.
Personally, I've just taken it as a reminder to try sketching the logic to those I'm talking to so people follow me from the premises to the conclusion. Even when I feel I'm stating the obvious it usually turns out to be useful. That is, I never bothered to take an official test, if I did I'd probably be around borderline for Mensa - certainly past the 90th percentile but possibly not the 98th. I just never felt the need to put that kind of "score" on me, if you are impressed by what I do fine but not just from an IQ score.
Couldn't it also be that higher intelligence makes you more motivated? After all, we all like to go in and show something we do well in. If you suspect you're not really all that bright, you're not very motivated to have it confirmed. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." and all that.
When I'm on IPv4 and you're on IPv6, whose do you think will get blamed for it being broken? Oh, yours because I can access 99% of the Internet just fine, just not you. Everybody who wants a server or just have their Internet work "normally" will want an IPv4 address.
Sure, eventually IPv6 will work all that shit out. But mostly people would rather pay a few bucks and make it somebody else's problem. You try it, switch an ISP's customers to IPv6 and watch the wires glow as people go nuts because their silly little app from 1997 doesn't support IPv6 addresses. I dare you and your $11/ip router to do it.
landing capsule: Done, with their Dragon capsule sent into orbit and brought back for water landing last year. The heat shield and parachute system are apparently have much more capability than needed for mere return from Earth orbit, although not known yet how they'd deal with Mars.
Huge not done. Mars doesn't have enough atmosphere for the chutes, they'd impact more than land. At the same time it's got enough atmosphere to make thrusters very difficult. The Mars rovers landed in a way no human would be close to surviving. AFAIK it's one of the big "never been done before" obstacles.
I must say I'm still a bit skeptical about the 10~15 year target. For orbiting Mars, sure, but to actually land on Mars?
It will almost certainly take more than SpaceX to put men on Mars. For one SpaceX is a commercial company so someone has to pay - much like NASA is paying for ISS missions, I guess they could pay for a Mars mission. Secondly SpaceX is a rocket company, I doubt they'll develop all the other bits needed. I'm guessing this is to fire up everyone else, like "We're ready to do the rocketry... are you ready for the rest?"
Err, yeah. I'm pretty sure that 0.001% is going to be pretty miserable, and assuming there are even enough of them in one spot, and in sufficient numbers, to insure against inbreeding? Let's just say that it'll likely take at least 6,000 years to get things back up technologically, just to where we are now. This is of course assuming that these folks would have the same lucky breaks that our civilization had along the way.
Yeah well what do you think, that we can do a planet wide evacuation of earth? Even if we - at massive expense - could establish a colony with a few thousand people off world, if disaster strikes earth as such is no better or worse off than before. Those 99.999% are going to die regardless, the only thing such a colony would be good for is the continued survival of the human race if life on earth should fail completely. I guess it depends on how to the brink of extinction we are, but a few thousand would be enough to preserve the bulk of human knowledge - essential things like steam engine, gunpowder, electricity, radio that doesn't take massive high tech. We'd quite quickly reboot to at least late medieval era technology, not the stone age. And unless we're talking more than one off-site colony, that is very vulnerable by itself and could be wiped out by a much smaller disaster than what would take out earth.
That asteroid would strike with a power roughly equal to the 9.0 earthquake in Japan at about 500 megatons. Whatever is in the blast zone would be toast, but the planet and humanity would do just fine.
Simulations of total nuclear war - about 5000 megatons - shows we'd have ice age temperatures for years, which would probably lead to world wide famine but nowhere near extinction.
The dino-killer was about 95,200,000 megatons and even that a few of humanity would survive in deep underground bunkers - we'd be talking 99.999%+ fatality but probably still not extinction.
Long story short, anything so bad as to wipe out humanity on earth is quite possibly so bad Mars would become uninhabitable too. And yes, many million years apart.
This is total rubbish - not just your comment but the entire idea that he made the CD to fit Beethoven's 9th. In what world does Beethoven's 9th have a set length?
Facts: The prototype was 60 minutes. The final product was 74 minutes. Surely they argued what would fit in 74 minutes but not in 60 minutes. Like you say, there's no set length but pretty much all agree Beethoven's ninth takes more than 60 minutes. Most recordings do in fact fit within 74 minutes, including the one most consider the "reference recording".
That's really where the facts end and the speculation begins. Most likely Beethoven's 9th was mentioned as an example of what wouldn't fit a 60 minute disc. There's no credible source to say it HAD to fit. The whole mythos seem to assume everyone else agreed on 11.5 cm, but one man insisted on 12 cm. There's really no proof of that, there was a prototype and they agreed to tweak it a little making it half a cm bigger. When people asked why, Beethoven's 9th was probably a convenient example to use. So after turning a feather into five hens this became this huge mysterious legend.
Well, I can read German and there wasn't really much there that proved it was a "political" decision more than any other policy decision. It basically seemed to boil down to "Everybody else is using Office and Outlook, we're standardizing on that as well". That sounds like a rather boilerplate decision you'd find in many corporations as well.
The text is throwing out several unfounded claims of its own, like: "Eine einmalige Erstellung eines oder mehrerer Treiber ist aber deutlich günstiger als die generelle Nutzung von proprietÃren Systemen" - "A one-time creation of one or more device drivers is clearly cheaper than the general use of proprietary systems"
Anyone who's worked with custom software knows it gets very expensive very fast. That they alone should be able to write all the drivers they need for far less than a volume license from Microsoft is a pretty heavy claim. And it also ignores that hardware is replaced with new models and driver development may also be a running cost. In short, a lot of hand waving and very little convincing substance.
Slashdot Mirror
The way you present it is a bit misleading, the thing is you can look like a strong competitor but then it turns out the market ran with somebody else. Take something like AltaVista, they were a huge search engine around 1998. Unless you had a very good crystal ball you could easily think they would become what Google is today. Google doesn't sound like such a bad investment, does it?
Same with social sites, if there's anything that has network effects it's this. You* are on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook, it all gravitates towards one big network. The winner will be a huge Google-class company, the others will be an AltaVista-class nobody. MySpace is in the "nobody" class, but that's easy to say in retrospect. It's all about what it potentially could have been.
* well, everyone EXCEPT you then
This further reaffirms my belief that the 'market' has long ago given up on actual fundamentals of 'value', and mostly follow hype and become totally irrational. It's all funny money and speculation. I always though financial people were supposed to know better.
If you give an absolutely certain cash flow, I can tell you on the cent what that's worth. It will be pretty close to the bank interest, because otherwise everybody (if over) or nobody (if under) would invest in it. Everybody else are speculating, even if you think that "oh this company has really good products and I think they'll sell well in the future" and invest long term that's speculation. And if *everybody* thinks that, then it'll already be priced so in the market. Then you're speculating that they'll do even better than the market thinks (or short because you think it'll do worse, but that's generally considered more speculative). Even things that lower your risk are speculation, if you fix the interest rate on your loan (or savings) you are taking a bet against the money market, compared to floating interest. It just a matter of degree.
At this point that's like trying to become a better WoW than WoW, good luck. I definitively think they need to try being something very different from Facebook - in a good way - if they are to survive.
I don't think it's a secret that Intel has the fastest processors if you're willing to pay $$$ for it. And since a dual card solution costs quite a bit of $$$ already, I doubt there are that many that want to pair an AMD CPU with a dual nVidia GPU.
No offense, but those phrases mean the same thing. It's just that redundancy generally isn't good for employees (exceptions: pilots, doctors/nurses, nuclear plant operators), but is laudable in data storage.
No. If I and a colleague get cross-trained so we can do each other's jobs nobody would call that "redundant skills" even though we've mirrored our skills. If we work in a Java shop then programming COBOL is a redundant skill (though general CS might still be useful). It's a word engineers and computer scientists co-opted, originally it means excessive, superfluous, useless. It can also mean repetitive, but only in that sense. "Look at all those redundant safety nets" doesn't mean they're covering for each other in case of failure, it means there's excessively many. At least it did originally, the idea that "redundant system" ~= "robust system that handles component failure" is only recent. But language is an evolving thing so if enough people use it differently, the meaning will change.
It works because small groups are transparent. The change happens when the group is so large small groups find they can freeload on the others by lying. Then you have to start supervising, then the supervisors start abusing their positions by making favorites or hate objects, or worse being corrupt. And the ones supervising the supervisors get kickbacks so they don't say anything either. As long what you get is the same in the good socialist spirit, it's almost impossible to keep production up. Then you start with perks and bonuses, but that just leads to more power and corruption by the ones handing them out. Then people lose faith in that what you get is just and fair and everybody starts working to game the system instead. Pretty soon after you have one group that made it (The Party) and a lot of serfs that didn't. And so the communist state is born.
They're not common carriers, but YES this should strip them of any protection under USC 17512.
512. Limitations on liability relating to material online
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications. - A service provider shall not be liable (...) if -
(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
I would say they are now liable to be sued by practically anybody. This is the equivalent of placing stickers over the ads in the paper and reselling it, a pretty blatant violation of copyright. No more "but I'm just the paper boy" excuse for them.
If the government doesn't have a way in, you won't find the product on the open market.
Which is why you use a software solution like PGP (well, GPG mostly nowadays) or OpenSSL, which doesn't have backdoors. The cat got out of the bag in the early 90s, but they're still trying to keep it out of the hands of average people.
Their business model has always been to start out with low prices, then ramp them up later.
Somehow I don't remember that part where DVD players - their most important patent pool - became more and more expensive. Yes, fractions within the MPEG LA do want to raise royalties but other fractions want to use it to sell H.264 hardware and want the decoding royalties to be minimal.
I also very much doubt some of the other big players gave up their efforts for a standard license, like say Microsoft and VC-1. I'm pretty sure they negotiated a license for the whole duration of the patents before dropping it and made H.264 standard in Windows 7 and IE9. The MPEG LA are far more bound than they like to give the impression of, methinks.
Dunno, but at least one thing Disney was infamous for was playing with availability - they know that your kids are only in the right age for their movies for a short time so they'd choke and pump supply, instead of going into the bargain bin they'd disappear - and they wouldn't be back until your kid is a little too old. Pretty nice trick to stress out parents into buying and to pay full price. I think with piracy going up that's more or less died out though, if it's not in the store it's always on TPB...
Dot matrix printers: When it comes to debugging very poorly written undocumented spaghetti code (especially VB with goto abuse all over the place) nothing beats a wide dot matrix printer and tractor paper for making sense of spaghetti code because you can see all the code at once and trace through the spaghetti.
My impression is that this is a different anti-pattern, one megafunction and tons of global state - no encapsulation or classes. Spaghetti code is typically recognized by massive and unstructured layers and calling, making it impossible to see where one code call goes like tracing one piece of spaghetti on a plate. A matrix printer won't do you any good because it's not linear at all.
They're going to stream it to unicast it to 11 million households, many of whom are going to want to do DVR things like skipping and pausing?
Exactly. Which is why IP multicast is and forever will be dead in the water. With unicast I watch exactly what I want, when I want and it doesn't matter if we're watching 11 million different YouTube videos or one sports broadcast. That will just be a special use case compared to all the videos, tv series and other things we watch more or less as it suits ourselves.
With fiber to the home spreading there is no more "last mile" problem. Here in Norway 12% have their Internet delivered by fiber already (Q2 2010) and the rollout is massive, I've heard predictions of 35% by 2015. To take one provider (Altibox) as example, for $100/month (549 NOK) you'll get 60/60 Mbit. And it's quite real, from those I've talked to.
The US can be as retarded as they will on cable/dsl monopolies, but the rest of the world isn't going to stop. In a matter of decades that giant waste won't matter. It'd be like arguing GIF vs PNG sizes, it just doesn't matter.
Dual stack, they will all still use an IPv4 address. If all ISPs had done this years ago and we had slowly phased out IPv4 in favor of IPv6 this would have worked. Now it will do nothing to lessen the blow of the brick wall we're running into.
Heh, that's what I get for swapping order after I started typing out the sentence. Another reason not to go around bragging, some variation of Murphy's law will make sure you end up with egg on your face.
Repeat after me, we are all individuals. Yeah, the whole premise here is lame. ERPs are essentially custom tailored one-stop solutions for your business, it's pretty close to the definition of an ERP. So they wrote some special stuff for this business, just like they do for every business. Yawn.
I don't think it's very different than participating in a timed race. Some people will be faster than you, some people will be slower (hopefully) and you get a feel for where you stand. Whether you work harder or give up doesn't really depend on your time. I think all of us have at one point asked ourselves "Am they slow or am I just not making any sense?" when it seems people can't grip what you're saying. IQ is at least part of the answer, yes you *do* see logic and patterns the average person don't.
Personally, I've just taken it as a reminder to try sketching the logic to those I'm talking to so people follow me from the premises to the conclusion. Even when I feel I'm stating the obvious it usually turns out to be useful. That is, I never bothered to take an official test, if I did I'd probably be around borderline for Mensa - certainly past the 90th percentile but possibly not the 98th. I just never felt the need to put that kind of "score" on me, if you are impressed by what I do fine but not just from an IQ score.
Couldn't it also be that higher intelligence makes you more motivated? After all, we all like to go in and show something we do well in. If you suspect you're not really all that bright, you're not very motivated to have it confirmed. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." and all that.
When I'm on IPv4 and you're on IPv6, whose do you think will get blamed for it being broken? Oh, yours because I can access 99% of the Internet just fine, just not you. Everybody who wants a server or just have their Internet work "normally" will want an IPv4 address.
Sure, eventually IPv6 will work all that shit out. But mostly people would rather pay a few bucks and make it somebody else's problem. You try it, switch an ISP's customers to IPv6 and watch the wires glow as people go nuts because their silly little app from 1997 doesn't support IPv6 addresses. I dare you and your $11/ip router to do it.
landing capsule: Done, with their Dragon capsule sent into orbit and brought back for water landing last year. The heat shield and parachute system are apparently have much more capability than needed for mere return from Earth orbit, although not known yet how they'd deal with Mars.
Huge not done. Mars doesn't have enough atmosphere for the chutes, they'd impact more than land. At the same time it's got enough atmosphere to make thrusters very difficult. The Mars rovers landed in a way no human would be close to surviving. AFAIK it's one of the big "never been done before" obstacles.
I must say I'm still a bit skeptical about the 10~15 year target. For orbiting Mars, sure, but to actually land on Mars?
It will almost certainly take more than SpaceX to put men on Mars. For one SpaceX is a commercial company so someone has to pay - much like NASA is paying for ISS missions, I guess they could pay for a Mars mission. Secondly SpaceX is a rocket company, I doubt they'll develop all the other bits needed. I'm guessing this is to fire up everyone else, like "We're ready to do the rocketry... are you ready for the rest?"
Err, yeah. I'm pretty sure that 0.001% is going to be pretty miserable, and assuming there are even enough of them in one spot, and in sufficient numbers, to insure against inbreeding? Let's just say that it'll likely take at least 6,000 years to get things back up technologically, just to where we are now. This is of course assuming that these folks would have the same lucky breaks that our civilization had along the way.
Yeah well what do you think, that we can do a planet wide evacuation of earth? Even if we - at massive expense - could establish a colony with a few thousand people off world, if disaster strikes earth as such is no better or worse off than before. Those 99.999% are going to die regardless, the only thing such a colony would be good for is the continued survival of the human race if life on earth should fail completely. I guess it depends on how to the brink of extinction we are, but a few thousand would be enough to preserve the bulk of human knowledge - essential things like steam engine, gunpowder, electricity, radio that doesn't take massive high tech. We'd quite quickly reboot to at least late medieval era technology, not the stone age. And unless we're talking more than one off-site colony, that is very vulnerable by itself and could be wiped out by a much smaller disaster than what would take out earth.
That asteroid would strike with a power roughly equal to the 9.0 earthquake in Japan at about 500 megatons. Whatever is in the blast zone would be toast, but the planet and humanity would do just fine.
Simulations of total nuclear war - about 5000 megatons - shows we'd have ice age temperatures for years, which would probably lead to world wide famine but nowhere near extinction.
The dino-killer was about 95,200,000 megatons and even that a few of humanity would survive in deep underground bunkers - we'd be talking 99.999%+ fatality but probably still not extinction.
Long story short, anything so bad as to wipe out humanity on earth is quite possibly so bad Mars would become uninhabitable too. And yes, many million years apart.
This is total rubbish - not just your comment but the entire idea that he made the CD to fit Beethoven's 9th. In what world does Beethoven's 9th have a set length?
Facts: The prototype was 60 minutes. The final product was 74 minutes. Surely they argued what would fit in 74 minutes but not in 60 minutes. Like you say, there's no set length but pretty much all agree Beethoven's ninth takes more than 60 minutes. Most recordings do in fact fit within 74 minutes, including the one most consider the "reference recording".
That's really where the facts end and the speculation begins. Most likely Beethoven's 9th was mentioned as an example of what wouldn't fit a 60 minute disc. There's no credible source to say it HAD to fit. The whole mythos seem to assume everyone else agreed on 11.5 cm, but one man insisted on 12 cm. There's really no proof of that, there was a prototype and they agreed to tweak it a little making it half a cm bigger. When people asked why, Beethoven's 9th was probably a convenient example to use. So after turning a feather into five hens this became this huge mysterious legend.
Nah, if it was possible you'd use the HTML entity. Many are allowed, just not that one. Examples:
>: >
<: <
æ: æ
ø: ø
å: å
However:
&sigma:
In fact, none of the greek letters will work. Or pretty much anything else from maths etc.
Well, I can read German and there wasn't really much there that proved it was a "political" decision more than any other policy decision. It basically seemed to boil down to "Everybody else is using Office and Outlook, we're standardizing on that as well". That sounds like a rather boilerplate decision you'd find in many corporations as well.
The text is throwing out several unfounded claims of its own, like: "Eine einmalige Erstellung eines oder mehrerer Treiber ist aber deutlich günstiger als die generelle Nutzung von proprietÃren Systemen" - "A one-time creation of one or more device drivers is clearly cheaper than the general use of proprietary systems"
Anyone who's worked with custom software knows it gets very expensive very fast. That they alone should be able to write all the drivers they need for far less than a volume license from Microsoft is a pretty heavy claim. And it also ignores that hardware is replaced with new models and driver development may also be a running cost. In short, a lot of hand waving and very little convincing substance.
Heh, you didn't think you could use the sigma sign on slashdot did you? News for nerds, where scientific notation is frowned upon.