Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Ooooohhh... give the troll a cookie.
Try reading Sun's annual report sometime. You might come to the realization that your company is in the minority by far.
Sun's cash cow back in the day was the $10,000 pizza-box workstations that they sold to universities and companies. The market has completely vaporized expect in the minds of/. trolls.
Hell -- even SUN abandoned that market. Most Sun people are using Sun Ray terminals last I heard.
Big money scientists running with government grants didn't do too much with Windows anyway. The scientists switching to OSX aren't hurting Microsoft -- they are hammering one more nail into Sun's coffin.
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The key word is "lower" margin. (ie 40% margins are great, 20% are good)
Apple makes obscene profit margins on the rest of its hardware, while making traditional consumer-electronics margins on the iPod.
Remember also that Apple has all sorts of overhead. They need to keep OSX current, they develop their own software and must spend R&D money to improve their hardware... all to sell a few computers.
Contrast this to Dell. They do no R&D... they assemble.
Sun lived on Apple's business model for years, and look where it brought them. When was the last time you bought a Sun Workstation?
If she wants to escape her current locale so badly that she's going to ditch you to leave, you have a marriage problem.
If anybody ever gave me an ultimatum requiring me to drop everything, abandon my livlihood and move hundreds of miles away, I'd be out the door before nightfall.
Marriage is a two way street. Take care of that problem before you move 1 foot.
If I was a potential customer of yours, red alarm bells would be going of in my head.
Instead of offering standardized equipment that can be managed via console, ssh or SNMP by any competent network engineer, you offer some customized linux router solution that will always need to be handled differently.
What advantage does your solution offer?
Is it worth "saving" a little money up front, only to need to seek out your consulting services later?
The government obviously forced the filmmakers to "confess" to faking the film. Otherwise, the public would become aware of their insidious plot to cross breed aliens with bigfoot to create the ultimate soldier.
I was mugged by bigfoot in the Maine woods while investigating Stephen King death claims that I read on/. He is real.
It seems to me that the number of users who have picked up 2.6 x compared to the number that picked up 2.4 from 2.2 has greatly diminished on many of the distro mailing lists. From this it seems that either the migration is uglier than anticipated, or that more people are just willing to sit back and wait for their distro to provide them with all their needs.
You are of course, exactly right. Applications are going to be targeted at RedHat, Suse or whatever other commercial distro.
This is going to change the nature of linux, and I fear it is going to result in forking and incompatible code bases.
The problem with Linux lately is the annoying lack of stability and binary backward compatability.
For example, the new threading libraries break all sorts of applications until you recompile the apps against the new library. This is particularly painful with commercial applications or for companies that need to provide support.
Sun, IBM, HP, etc have all been able to enhance the functionality of their proprietary Unix systems without breaking binary compatability. It is a shame that the linux kernel people do not care to do so.
The customers don't give a shit. A smallish medical practice has something like $2 million in "sales" per year. $5-20k is pissing in the ocean.
Doctors want their shit to work so the insurance companies pay for his services. That's it. They do not care about open source and likely prefer to deal with the vendors that they know about.
The other thing is that EDI and other standards that vertical applications must adhere to are not free. The standards and specs are not open and often cost signifigant sums of money.
You do not understand how vertical markets work at all.
A software vendor who designs billing software for doctors, public utilities, car dealership management, etc doesn't give a shit about open source software. The software is generally accounting software that a 2nd year CS student and and accounting major could write and some sort of interface to send data to an EDI system (for billing and receivables) and whatever the accountants want to audit the books.
Plus, 1/2 of the time the "hard part" (ie EDI interface) is just some library licensed from another vendor.
We're not talking about complicated problems here... and collaborating with other developers doesn't add too much value.
The vertical market business model is to lock your customer into your software and violate him with license and support costs. And it works. If a small doctor's office gets 16,000 transactions per year, than an $8,000/yr licence "only" costs $0.50 per transaction.
If you were using open source software, the doctor could go to anybody for support... and the vertical software vendor would go out of business.
That is cool... when I had T-Mobile, the signal was totally hit or miss and the voice quality was abysmal.
My dad had Cingular back when it was Cellular One in our area. At that time they used franchised tower operators, some of whom billed Cellular One quarterly. This poses a problem when your plan allocates minutes monthly. (I think this situation led to the rollover minute plans)
If you read compare death registers in the Western US to European (Irish in my case) towns, you'll find that deaths due to criminal activity were far lower.
It is sad... This year I have the dubious honor of paying more towards state & federal income taxes than for housing. I'm getting married this year as well... can't wait to get that tax bill!
I guess I should look at the bright side... my local school district is building a $20,000,000 addition to accomodate an additional 500 students and a local city is building a $15 million movie theatre in a decaying downtown to "revitalize" the area.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooooohhh... give the troll a cookie.
/. trolls.
Try reading Sun's annual report sometime. You might come to the realization that your company is in the minority by far.
Sun's cash cow back in the day was the $10,000 pizza-box workstations that they sold to universities and companies. The market has completely vaporized expect in the minds of
Hell -- even SUN abandoned that market. Most Sun people are using Sun Ray terminals last I heard.
Datacenter Server isn't a high-volume product. It runs on multi-million dollar 32 processor computers.
Big money scientists running with government grants didn't do too much with Windows anyway. The scientists switching to OSX aren't hurting Microsoft -- they are hammering one more nail into Sun's coffin.
The key word is "lower" margin. (ie 40% margins are great, 20% are good)
Apple makes obscene profit margins on the rest of its hardware, while making traditional consumer-electronics margins on the iPod.
Remember also that Apple has all sorts of overhead. They need to keep OSX current, they develop their own software and must spend R&D money to improve their hardware... all to sell a few computers.
Contrast this to Dell. They do no R&D... they assemble.
Sun lived on Apple's business model for years, and look where it brought them. When was the last time you bought a Sun Workstation?
Sounds like your wife is the problem.
If she wants to escape her current locale so badly that she's going to ditch you to leave, you have a marriage problem.
If anybody ever gave me an ultimatum requiring me to drop everything, abandon my livlihood and move hundreds of miles away, I'd be out the door before nightfall.
Marriage is a two way street. Take care of that problem before you move 1 foot.
If I was a potential customer of yours, red alarm bells would be going of in my head.
Instead of offering standardized equipment that can be managed via console, ssh or SNMP by any competent network engineer, you offer some customized linux router solution that will always need to be handled differently.
What advantage does your solution offer?
Is it worth "saving" a little money up front, only to need to seek out your consulting services later?
Your argument is akin to "x don't kill people, people kill people". It's a good argument, but it isn't what people want to hear.
Whether you are talking about cars, software or jungle gyms, engineers design things for sensible people.
The problem is that management want silver bullets and airtight systems and users want usability. Nobody really wins in the short term.
The government obviously forced the filmmakers to "confess" to faking the film. Otherwise, the public would become aware of their insidious plot to cross breed aliens with bigfoot to create the ultimate soldier.
/. He is real.
I was mugged by bigfoot in the Maine woods while investigating Stephen King death claims that I read on
Nobody wants a secure telephone network.
The benefit (privacy from snoops) is far outweighed by the inability to intercept criminal or other communications.
During the cold war, american divers successfully spliced a Soviet military telephone line deep under the white sea.
They then proceeded to record every call that took place over that line.
Today, organized crime in Las Vegas reroute calls away from escort and massage services that refuse to pay protection money.
The telephone network is obscure and complex... but hardly secure.
WTF are you talking about?
90% of browsers are using Javascript.
Prolly 80% of browsers are using Flash.
Any primadonna user who thinks the world should redesign itself around his or her preferences needs to wake up.
You are of course, exactly right. Applications are going to be targeted at RedHat, Suse or whatever other commercial distro.
This is going to change the nature of linux, and I fear it is going to result in forking and incompatible code bases.
The problem with Linux lately is the annoying lack of stability and binary backward compatability.
For example, the new threading libraries break all sorts of applications until you recompile the apps against the new library. This is particularly painful with commercial applications or for companies that need to provide support.
Sun, IBM, HP, etc have all been able to enhance the functionality of their proprietary Unix systems without breaking binary compatability. It is a shame that the linux kernel people do not care to do so.
You missed the point.
The customers don't give a shit. A smallish medical practice has something like $2 million in "sales" per year. $5-20k is pissing in the ocean.
Doctors want their shit to work so the insurance companies pay for his services. That's it. They do not care about open source and likely prefer to deal with the vendors that they know about.
The other thing is that EDI and other standards that vertical applications must adhere to are not free. The standards and specs are not open and often cost signifigant sums of money.
You do not understand how vertical markets work at all.
A software vendor who designs billing software for doctors, public utilities, car dealership management, etc doesn't give a shit about open source software. The software is generally accounting software that a 2nd year CS student and and accounting major could write and some sort of interface to send data to an EDI system (for billing and receivables) and whatever the accountants want to audit the books.
Plus, 1/2 of the time the "hard part" (ie EDI interface) is just some library licensed from another vendor.
We're not talking about complicated problems here... and collaborating with other developers doesn't add too much value.
The vertical market business model is to lock your customer into your software and violate him with license and support costs. And it works. If a small doctor's office gets 16,000 transactions per year, than an $8,000/yr licence "only" costs $0.50 per transaction.
If you were using open source software, the doctor could go to anybody for support... and the vertical software vendor would go out of business.
That's a big problem with RMS... he has devoting his life to replicate a particular time at a particular place with a unique group of people.
It's not gonna happen... and it is kinda sad.
That is cool... when I had T-Mobile, the signal was totally hit or miss and the voice quality was abysmal.
My dad had Cingular back when it was Cellular One in our area. At that time they used franchised tower operators, some of whom billed Cellular One quarterly. This poses a problem when your plan allocates minutes monthly. (I think this situation led to the rollover minute plans)
Would anyone choose to switch to T-Mobile or Cingular?
I would recommend switching to an avian messaging system or tin cans over either carrier.
I'm glad to hear someone else voicing this.
There is a growing "security" industry that benefits from propagandizing the threat that viruses sponsored by organized crime.
The better neighborhood is often in the country, where jobs (ie easy to use desktop apps) are hard to come by.
If you read compare death registers in the Western US to European (Irish in my case) towns, you'll find that deaths due to criminal activity were far lower.
And if you really wanted to communicate with people on the road you could purchase a CB or portable shortwave set.
Get real.
The issue is that because you gave your software away, you really have no recource to enforce complance.
Your options are:
1. Ask the vendor to comply with the license.
2. Sue the vendor to force him to comply.
3. Raise hell with the user community.
Option 1 has been done already, and the vendor simply ignored the complaint.
Option 3 is probally doable, but it takes time & money to get the word out, especially since we're not talking about software that everybody is using.
Option 2 will work, but will cost a fortune. Say you take the guy to court and the court rules against the offending vendor.
What is the remedy? Put this dudes name on the software. He incurred no financial loss, so he's unlikely to get a signifigant financial reward.
And lawyers don't work for free.
It is sad... This year I have the dubious honor of paying more towards state & federal income taxes than for housing. I'm getting married this year as well... can't wait to get that tax bill!
I guess I should look at the bright side... my local school district is building a $20,000,000 addition to accomodate an additional 500 students and a local city is building a $15 million movie theatre in a decaying downtown to "revitalize" the area.
Sorry... I had forgotten that democrats are as clean & pure as the wind-driven snow.