Uhh. AOL is putting all of this "neat" stuff into Mozilla because they eventually plan on using it. Since they are paying for the coders, you can't hardly blame them for adding features that they find useful.
Somehow I imagine that things like AIM and AOL email are going to be very important to AOL users. If you don't like the Netscape preview, I would reccomend taking a look at Mozilla (it's different).
That assumes, of course, that Joey the 14-year-old would pay for software if it was less expensive. I personally don't think that this is the case. Look at all the people who use shareware without paying for it. If you aren't paying for a $10 utility you use daily, then you aren't going to pay for MS Office.
Microsoft has taken the only sane route. Price the software so that it is well out of reach of 14-year-olds, but don't pester them if they decide to pirate. If Microsoft lowered prices they would have just as much pirating, but they would receive less money from those that did pay.
Part of the reason why corporations generally buy their software is that they know that they would get creamed if they got caught pirating. If software were less expensive, then there would be less damages to collect from the prosecution of pirates, and there would be less incentive to pay for software in the first place. After all, if it wasn't going to sink your business to get caught pirating, it might be worth the risk.
If all of you are truly concerned about fsck on boot, then why not give ReiserFS a try.
Seriously Linux will soon have it's choice of Journaling file systems (and ReiserFS is already being used in production systems). If being able to safely turn off your Linux box is truly the only thing keeping it from the desktop Microsoft is doomed.
So let's all talk about the "real" problems with Linux on the desktop. The fsck on startup issue is essentially dead.
On the other hand we won't need to worry about the police asking people to describe the suspect. Instead of "He was a caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan sportscoat and running shoes." We will get: "He was a white caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan JCPenny Sportscoat model 007958 item number 1119949396882. This same sportscoat was later scanned at 1610 Maple Street at Walt's Bar, and is currently believed to be in that area.
Theoretically, if you paid for your clothes with your credit card, the store would know that you bought the clothing. Those records could almost certainly be subpoenaed.
Of course it would be much more straightforward, and quite a bit more fun, to simply tatoo a bar code of your social security number on your forehead. Somehow I don't see that happening either. If you can't be paranoid on/., where can you be paranoid?
If there was one thing that used to tick me off about living abroad it was this sort of sentiment. I can understand why Americans have a bad name in many (perhaps most) countries overseas. We are rude, we never learn the language, we act like know-it-alls, etc. However, it's not my fault that people around the world like Nike shoes and McDonald's hamburgers. Heck, I don't like McDonald's hamburgers either. If you don't like Nike shoes and McDonald's hamburgers, then don't buy them. It's not my fault that McDonalds around the world are full of people eating Big Macs.
Besides, McDonald's hamburgers are not nearly as dangerous to your culture as American television and films. Blaming global Americanization on two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun is ridiculous (unless of course you are talking about the American commercial I just quoted).
You do have the right to be an atheist. Heck, you even have the right to believe the world is flat, or that the moon is made of green cheese. You can even share your beliefs with others (for example, you can post them to/.). You don't have the right, however, to make everyone be silent about their own beliefs.
Do you see the difference?
You have the right to believe however you want, but everyone else still has the right to "look down" on you for your beliefs (just like you probably look down on them for being so gullible as to believe in a supernatural entity).
The only way that you could be free from religion as you propose is if everyone shared the same beliefs. Since there is little chance that everyone is going to ever believe the same things, that means that we must learn to be tolerant. In your case that means ignoring people who think you are evil because you don't believe in God. In my case that means ignoring people that believe I am evil because I believe in the wrong god.
Re:There have been plenty of Death Marches.
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Precisely my point. Crying about what happened to your ancestors is ridiculous, nobody lives forever. Somehow you still managed to get born, and the fact that you are able to post to/. signals that you are almost amazingly fortunate. There have been few people in the history of the world as prosperous as most of us on/. are. Perhaps I should have put smileys on that sentence so that the Grammar Nazis would realize that it was a subtle touch of humor. Clearly I wasn't related to all of the thousands that lost their lives on the trek westward, some of my ancestors failed to die of exposure, and here I am today.
For that I should be grateful, I suppose, but anyway you look at it holding a grudge against the current residents of Illinois would be ludicrous.
It figures out all of the dependencies for you and magically installs them on your computer (downloading them from the Internet as necessary). Better yet, when the the KDE team decides to rev KDE, upgrading is as simple as:
apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade
If, for some reason unknown to me, you decided to install KDE on a system that doesn't do this for you, well then, that's your problem I suppose.
Just because you installed KDE the hard way does not necessarily mean that there isn't an easy way.
And Debian's KDE install is probably the hardest one of the lot. After all, you have to install Debian first, and that can be tricky. There are plenty of distributions that install KDE by default (whether you want it or not).
There have been plenty of Death Marches.
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Death March
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While the Trail of Tears was certainly a classic example of a deathmarch, it was by no means the first (or the most brutal). It isn't even the most recent historically.
Of course, they probably don't cover that in the comic books that they gave you to help you spot "caucasian patriarchs."
Yes, this post is extremely offtopic. Feel free to mod me clean out of existence, but it ticks me off when someone justifies their racism with something that happened hundreds of years ago. None of the whites living today had anything to do with the trail of tears, and none of the Cherokee living today are particularly worse off for it. If it makes you feel any better, my ancestors were also driven across the American West (from Illinois to Bunkerville Nevada, Oklahoma is a paradise compared to that hole in the ground). Of course, since my ancestors were white Mormons you probably couldn't care less that thousands died along the way.
DON'T GIVE KATZ ANY IDEAS!!! Some of us would like to watch our cartoons in peace and not have them regurtitated during the week Katz style. I had to throw out several hundred dollars worth of Shadowrun manuals because after Mr. Katz mentioned them I was no longer able to read them without getting nauseous.
It's a short jump from Johnny Quest to Scooby Doo, and if Katz started working Scooby into his schtick I would have to kill him.
This assumes, of course, that the IT exec has had good experience with Microsoft support, and poor experience with IBM support. After all, you can bet the farm that the reason that the machines in question are IBMs was so that Lawson's could get IBM support.
In the end, I think that any IT exec with two neurons to rub together is going to come to the realization that Microsoft support is basically worthless. IBM's Linux support couldn't possibly be worse, and could very well be substantially better. At the very least it is less expensive. And while IBM is always a safe bet for your support needs, you could theoretically shop around for another vendor if their support was poor. Purchase your OS from Microsoft, and only Microsoft knows how to fix it.
Besides, with the money you saved from purchasing MS's OS you can shop around for superior in house support. After all, you won't ever be paying for software upgrades.
Linux is finally at the point where companies are openly adopting it over Windows. You can bet that this decision was made by an IT Exec, and not some long haired programmers. For new systems Linux makes a ton of sense. It's stable, inexpensive, and it's chock full of developer tools. In these sorts of situations it makes a ton of sense.
Hmm... The only Open Source product in your list is Star Office, and it has been open for less than a month, and the open version doesn't even print. In fact, only Star Office even has an open format (and that's only in the newest incarnation).
And yet there are import filters between some of these formats and open formats (Word, for example has several Free Software filters). On the other hand if you would have created your document in some sort of an open format (like LaTeX, DocBook SGML, HTML, lout, lyx, TeXinfo, etc.) you would find that you could almost certainly change it to whatever format you need quickly and easily. There are all sorts of software specifically designed for the conversion of one of these formats to another.
Just because it runs on Linux does not guarantee that the software vendor isn't trying to trick you into their own brand of proprietary software hell. If you were foolish enough to put your precious documents into someone's proprietary format then don't be surprised if the company in question holds your information for ransom. I write all of my non-trivial documentation in either LaTeX or DocBook SGML (depending on what exactly the requirements are), and I am quite confident that 20 years from now these documents will still be useable. At the very least I am sure that tools like text editors and grep will still be available.
Yes, these tools are a little harder to use, but that's why there are people working on things like AbiWord, whatever the KDE word processor is called, the new StarWriter, and LyX. Soon their will be an abundance of free tools that are easy and inexpensive to use, and which support truly open formats.
In the meantime, if you feel you must, just use Microsoft Word. It's a fine word processor, and it's almost guaranteed that the filters between Word and whatever piece of Free Software replaces it will be brilliant. After all, no new word processor is going to take over from Word until the Word filters are "good enough."
The answer to this is quite simple. Pick one, and annoint it "standard." At least with the Free Software Office suites you have some chance of recovering your documents if you decide to switch later (open formats are a good thing).
Besides, for much less than it currently costs most large businesses to keep their Select agreements up to date they could afford to maintain their office suite of choice indefinitely.
Once upon a time IBM was the only safe choice, and then, almost overnight, IBM was a career limiting move. The little joke that was the PC had all of a sudden become the "standard." History will repeat itself, the less expensive solution will dominate, and those businesses that are slow to react will pay for their shortsightedness.
Thanks for a very informative post. I was aware that pretty much the entire industry fell in love with Microkernels, but I didn't realize that so many of them had actually sunk money into such osen.
I suppose that you are even right about Linus not being an ambassador for "Free Software," except possibly by example. I consider myself an advocate of Free Software, so it is a little disheartening to think that the creator of Linux might be disqualified simply because he is "too pragmatic."
Oh well, line me up with the rest of the zealots...
RMS and co. got tricked by all the academics into thinking that their new OS would have to be a Microkernel to be taken seriously. You see, the Hurd was started before Linus started working on Linux, but it's advanced architecture made it much harder to debug.
In waltzes Linus, some kid that wasn't worried about elegance, but instead wanted software that he could actually use, and all of a sudden it was possible to actually use the GNU system without any proprietary software. This was almost certainly a blow to the Hurd, but it has also been a tremendous win for Free Software. I am sure that even RMS would agree that it is better to have a completely free system with Linux than to have to continue to host GNU development on some other proprietary system. Besides, Linus has been an excellent ambassador for Free Software.
That being said, you can't hardly blame the FSF for finishing the Hurd. When finished it will have some very cool features, and they have put enough work into it, that it doesn't make sense to chuck it all out the window.
Now, I am not saying that RMS isn't interested in some of the credit for Linux's success, as that is clearly part of his goal. On the other hand, without the GNU tools Linux could not have been written, and it wouldn't have been useful when it was done, so he does have a point. Besides, RMS is clearly mostly interested in highlighting the fact that Linux systems are Free Software. To him this distinction is a very big deal.
Feel free to call it "Linux," I generally do, but you should do some research before you malign people you don't know.
For every wild haired Einstein with a raft of good ideas, you have 20 radicals that can't hit their butt with both hands. In the end the Einsteins and the Gallileos of the world win out for the simple reason that they are right, and the rest of us are wrong. The good ideas become mainstream, and the laws begin to reflect their good sense. Sure, this process takes a little longer, but it is the surest way to guarantee that progress is made. For example, it is much more likely to yield success than simply listening to whatever wild-haired loony happens to be passing by.
The good news is that if you are actually right, then your ideas will eventually prevail.
This is why it is so important that we don't try to short circuit the process. Anything that makes it easier for anyone to create laws is a bad idea. It allows our opponents to push through laws like the DMCA before we have time to organize opposition. Gridlock is our friend, and the political process that creates this gridlock in the national elections is doubly our friend. We want bland presidents with little power to actually change things, because their simply aren't enough Galileos and Einsteins to outnumber all of the Homers and Beavis's, so the popular vote is bound to elect some Presidents who have bad ideas. If these Presidents had a free reign to actually make changes we would be screwed.
Fortunately, the process that allows them to be elected, combined the politics of staying popular, means that they can only push for programs with wide public appeal. These sorts of programs are almost always well within the "safe" range of measures that nearly everyone agrees on (because they have been well proven).
What the majority of/. posters don't seem to understand is that this is actually a good thing. The whole point of national elections is that a candidate has to have a bland enough platform that they can be seen as the lesser of two evils by the majority of people. This means that the whole process is filled with compromises and politics, but it also means that the people we elect will be unlikely to do anything terribly radical without a huge amount of public concensus.
This way when the candidate you like fails to get elected it is not the end of the world. If splinter parties had more of a voice we would live in a very different place. During one president's term the Lord's prayer and the pledge of allegiance would be mandatory in every school, workplace, ballpark, and recreational facility, in the next president's term it would become illegal to drive a car anywhere in the Western United States because the resulting pollutants endanger the spotted tree marmot.
A good example of this has been President Clinton's tenure as Chief Executive Officer. His major plans were all completely frustrated, but he, in turn, was able to frustrate many of the plans of the Republican Congress. In the end only those measures that had broad public support were made into laws.
The bottom line is that if you are unwilling to cooperate with other people to forward the issues that you care most about, then you will never be heard. What's more, society is probably better off. Ideas that are only popular among a small part of the populace are generally not the kinds of ideas that should become laws.
MySQL is the perfect datastore for a mostly read database that needs to be fast, and doesn't need the ACID properties of a real database. If this describes your application then MySQL is probably the best solution for the job.
I find it a little disturbing that MySQL feels the need to change their database so that it becomes something that it is not. When they are done they almost certainly will be left with something slower than they have now for their current target audience, and it probably won't be as fast as PostgreSQL or Interbase for their new target audience.
Re:Novell ain't dead, but on the back burner
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Is Novell Doomed?
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I would certainly agree that Novell has the directory. And while I haven't worked at an NDS shop myself, I have seen the powerful benefits demonstrated, and am truly impressed. However, a powerful directory system didn't save Banyan Vines, and it won't save Netware either.
The problem is that Novell is getting precisely zero developer mindshare. Seriously, I would bet there are more people working on software for the Apple ][ than there are non-Novell employees working on Netware applications. This means that no matter what Novell does, or how cool their directory may be companies are almost going to have to use some other OS for their application servers. This means that your admins have to know both Netware and some other NOS. Even worse, while neither Active Directory nor OpenLDAP are nearly as cool as NDS, they are both considerably less expensive, and there are signs that for most people they have already entered the realm of "good enough." How many of us really need to manage a billion resources? If there is one common meme in the computer industry it is that the less expensive product that is "good enough" always wins. There are literally hundreds of examples of this phenomenon.
Remember, while market share is certainly important to Novell, market share doesn't put bread on the table. Novell doesn't need happy customers, they need sales. Every happy Novell customer that is purchasing new licenses might as well be migrating to Linux for as much good as they are doing Novell. Marketing would probably help, but unfortunately they have effectively lost their biggest and most powerful marketing tool, CNEs. Nowadays the people that used to get a CNE are getting an MCSE, and they are basically trying to sell Microsoft solutions. So Novell gets overlooked.
Netware may last, but Novell is done.
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If you worked in a business enviroment like a grocery store,you would realise using Novell as a file server makes sense.Novell isn't going anywhere.Novell provides a great secure file server in such applications.Especially since a lot of programs used in such cases run in DOS,it's a great solution.Linux isn't worth it due to retraining the workers..
Unfortunately for Novell existing Netware installations don't really help them out. After all, they have already taken your money. If you continue using your DOS solution forever then you might as well have switched to another operating system as far as Novell is concerned. Linux may be able to get by on sheer market share, but Novell needs to make new sales to stay in business.
Besides, while Netware makes a great file server, and their directory is nifty, it's not what people are using to develop the next generation of software. Eventually your supermarket is going to want to upgrade to a new accounting package, or a new point of sale system and that new package is not going to run on Netware. So you will either have hire admins who know both Netware and something else, or you will have to ditch Netware and use your new OS for file and print as well as application serving. I think that you will find that every OS in the world does an acceptable job at file and print serving. Netware has specialized in a field where just about everyone has an offering that is "good enough."
Novell is also losing the training war. It used to be that Novell's army of CNEs were their biggest salesforce. Nowadays these same people are MCSEs, and are actively campaigning to yank out Netware (because it makes them money).
Novell is dead, it's only a matter of time.
Re:Novell ain't dead, but on the back burner
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Is Novell Doomed?
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Yes, NDS is basically a superset of LDAP. Unfortunately for Novell most people are more than happy to either:
A) Use someone else's LDAP server (including the freely available OpenLDAP).
B) Use Microsoft's Active Directory.
NDS is only being used by those sites that are already Novell faithful. And the number of Novell faithful is shrinking, not growing. Since sales drives profits Novell has to either charge their existing customers more money, or they have to cut costs.
I personally believe that it is the beginning of a long dark night for Novell. Soon Netware will be in the same boat as Banyan Vines. They still will have some good technology, but no one will care.
Re:/. edit box (Was: See what happens when you...)
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Microsoft Cracked
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Or if you are truly sick, you can simply use Emacs+Gnus to read Slashdot. Some crazy hacker has actually added a Slashdot backend to Gnus so that you can read Slashdot as if it were just another news group.
That includes Gnus incredibly powerful scoring system (so your problems with slashdot moderation disappear). If you want you can just read the posts from known trolls.
Re:See what happens when you rely on NT
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It's easy to blame NT, or Inoculate IT, but the real culprit is Outlook.
Microsoft's policy of helping users (even their own users apparently) run binaries and scripts from untrusted locations is absolutely insane. Yes, Inoculate IT should have stopped the virus (theoretically), yes, Windows NT should have more protection against attacks, but the key is that Outlook is a trojan fun house waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, for Microsoft anyway, the fix for this type of thing goes far beyond patching some buffer exploits. They instead have to totally re-think how Outlook (and other Internet software) handle untrusted binaries (that probably includes ActiveX).
And that's the whole point. There is little question that Sun would still remain in control of an Open Source Java. Especially if this beast were released under a license like the GPL (which would give extraordinary powers to Sun, they could still release versions licensed under a closed-source license, but their competitors would not be able to do the same). If Sun released their source code they would almost certainly end up behind the steering wheel. The only difference would be that it would quiet the doubters. All of a sudden there would cease to be a reason to worry about Java's future. After all, if Sun were to screw up horribly, the Java community could right the ship.
Forks are evil, but if you base your future on software that you can't fork, you are at your vendor's mercy. If customers want that, they can stick with Microsoft and their solutions.
Besides, I want a decent Java2 JVM to be part of Debian main. In fact, I want all of the Linux distributions to ship with a Java2 JVM set up and ready to go. Running Java programs should be as straightforward under Linux as running programs written in C. The fact of the matter is that, in the Free Software world anyhow, Java isn't even as ubiquitous as Python, and it is no where near as universal as Perl, and that's Sun's fault, plain and simple.
Java could easily become the next lingua franca for programmers, replacing venerable C. But Sun's grasp is slowly squeezing the life out of it.
Wine's ace-in-the-hole is that Microsoft also has to be careful not to break any other commercial applications with it's new version. That even includes all of the applications that the Fortune 500 develop in house. If a new version of Office breaks in-house applications, then it doesn't get deployed until there is a "resolution." There is more to Windows than MS Office, and if Microsoft broke their OSes so that only Office would run they would soon find themselves without a market.
For example, imagine that you were a commercial developer and Microsoft broke compatibility with your products simply because it didn't want Office to run under Wine. Now imagine that you also learned that Wine would allow you to release your commercial application natively under Linux using libwine.
I imagine that there would be a lot of ticked off developers releasing Linux versions of their software.
Microsoft has to be very careful, or they will find they are only speeding up the inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhh. AOL is putting all of this "neat" stuff into Mozilla because they eventually plan on using it. Since they are paying for the coders, you can't hardly blame them for adding features that they find useful.
Somehow I imagine that things like AIM and AOL email are going to be very important to AOL users. If you don't like the Netscape preview, I would reccomend taking a look at Mozilla (it's different).
That assumes, of course, that Joey the 14-year-old would pay for software if it was less expensive. I personally don't think that this is the case. Look at all the people who use shareware without paying for it. If you aren't paying for a $10 utility you use daily, then you aren't going to pay for MS Office.
Microsoft has taken the only sane route. Price the software so that it is well out of reach of 14-year-olds, but don't pester them if they decide to pirate. If Microsoft lowered prices they would have just as much pirating, but they would receive less money from those that did pay.
Part of the reason why corporations generally buy their software is that they know that they would get creamed if they got caught pirating. If software were less expensive, then there would be less damages to collect from the prosecution of pirates, and there would be less incentive to pay for software in the first place. After all, if it wasn't going to sink your business to get caught pirating, it might be worth the risk.
If all of you are truly concerned about fsck on boot, then why not give ReiserFS a try.
Seriously Linux will soon have it's choice of Journaling file systems (and ReiserFS is already being used in production systems). If being able to safely turn off your Linux box is truly the only thing keeping it from the desktop Microsoft is doomed.
So let's all talk about the "real" problems with Linux on the desktop. The fsck on startup issue is essentially dead.
On the other hand we won't need to worry about the police asking people to describe the suspect. Instead of "He was a caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan sportscoat and running shoes." We will get: "He was a white caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan JCPenny Sportscoat model 007958 item number 1119949396882. This same sportscoat was later scanned at 1610 Maple Street at Walt's Bar, and is currently believed to be in that area.
Theoretically, if you paid for your clothes with your credit card, the store would know that you bought the clothing. Those records could almost certainly be subpoenaed.
Of course it would be much more straightforward, and quite a bit more fun, to simply tatoo a bar code of your social security number on your forehead. Somehow I don't see that happening either. If you can't be paranoid on /., where can you be paranoid?
Just don't buy the hamburgers then!
If there was one thing that used to tick me off about living abroad it was this sort of sentiment. I can understand why Americans have a bad name in many (perhaps most) countries overseas. We are rude, we never learn the language, we act like know-it-alls, etc. However, it's not my fault that people around the world like Nike shoes and McDonald's hamburgers. Heck, I don't like McDonald's hamburgers either. If you don't like Nike shoes and McDonald's hamburgers, then don't buy them. It's not my fault that McDonalds around the world are full of people eating Big Macs.
Besides, McDonald's hamburgers are not nearly as dangerous to your culture as American television and films. Blaming global Americanization on two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun is ridiculous (unless of course you are talking about the American commercial I just quoted).
You do have the right to be an atheist. Heck, you even have the right to believe the world is flat, or that the moon is made of green cheese. You can even share your beliefs with others (for example, you can post them to /.). You don't have the right, however, to make everyone be silent about their own beliefs.
Do you see the difference?
You have the right to believe however you want, but everyone else still has the right to "look down" on you for your beliefs (just like you probably look down on them for being so gullible as to believe in a supernatural entity).
The only way that you could be free from religion as you propose is if everyone shared the same beliefs. Since there is little chance that everyone is going to ever believe the same things, that means that we must learn to be tolerant. In your case that means ignoring people who think you are evil because you don't believe in God. In my case that means ignoring people that believe I am evil because I believe in the wrong god.
Precisely my point. Crying about what happened to your ancestors is ridiculous, nobody lives forever. Somehow you still managed to get born, and the fact that you are able to post to /. signals that you are almost amazingly fortunate. There have been few people in the history of the world as prosperous as most of us on /. are. Perhaps I should have put smileys on that sentence so that the Grammar Nazis would realize that it was a subtle touch of humor. Clearly I wasn't related to all of the thousands that lost their lives on the trek westward, some of my ancestors failed to die of exposure, and here I am today.
For that I should be grateful, I suppose, but anyway you look at it holding a grudge against the current residents of Illinois would be ludicrous.
Under Debian Linux it's as easy as:
apt-get install task-kde
It figures out all of the dependencies for you and magically installs them on your computer (downloading them from the Internet as necessary). Better yet, when the the KDE team decides to rev KDE, upgrading is as simple as:
apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade
If, for some reason unknown to me, you decided to install KDE on a system that doesn't do this for you, well then, that's your problem I suppose.
Just because you installed KDE the hard way does not necessarily mean that there isn't an easy way.
And Debian's KDE install is probably the hardest one of the lot. After all, you have to install Debian first, and that can be tricky. There are plenty of distributions that install KDE by default (whether you want it or not).
While the Trail of Tears was certainly a classic example of a deathmarch, it was by no means the first (or the most brutal). It isn't even the most recent historically.
Of course, they probably don't cover that in the comic books that they gave you to help you spot "caucasian patriarchs."
Yes, this post is extremely offtopic. Feel free to mod me clean out of existence, but it ticks me off when someone justifies their racism with something that happened hundreds of years ago. None of the whites living today had anything to do with the trail of tears, and none of the Cherokee living today are particularly worse off for it. If it makes you feel any better, my ancestors were also driven across the American West (from Illinois to Bunkerville Nevada, Oklahoma is a paradise compared to that hole in the ground). Of course, since my ancestors were white Mormons you probably couldn't care less that thousands died along the way.
Learn some history before you spout off.
DON'T GIVE KATZ ANY IDEAS!!! Some of us would like to watch our cartoons in peace and not have them regurtitated during the week Katz style. I had to throw out several hundred dollars worth of Shadowrun manuals because after Mr. Katz mentioned them I was no longer able to read them without getting nauseous.
It's a short jump from Johnny Quest to Scooby Doo, and if Katz started working Scooby into his schtick I would have to kill him.
Uh, just kidding... Don't call the FBI on me.
This assumes, of course, that the IT exec has had good experience with Microsoft support, and poor experience with IBM support. After all, you can bet the farm that the reason that the machines in question are IBMs was so that Lawson's could get IBM support.
In the end, I think that any IT exec with two neurons to rub together is going to come to the realization that Microsoft support is basically worthless. IBM's Linux support couldn't possibly be worse, and could very well be substantially better. At the very least it is less expensive. And while IBM is always a safe bet for your support needs, you could theoretically shop around for another vendor if their support was poor. Purchase your OS from Microsoft, and only Microsoft knows how to fix it.
Besides, with the money you saved from purchasing MS's OS you can shop around for superior in house support. After all, you won't ever be paying for software upgrades.
Linux is finally at the point where companies are openly adopting it over Windows. You can bet that this decision was made by an IT Exec, and not some long haired programmers. For new systems Linux makes a ton of sense. It's stable, inexpensive, and it's chock full of developer tools. In these sorts of situations it makes a ton of sense.
Hmm... The only Open Source product in your list is Star Office, and it has been open for less than a month, and the open version doesn't even print. In fact, only Star Office even has an open format (and that's only in the newest incarnation).
And yet there are import filters between some of these formats and open formats (Word, for example has several Free Software filters). On the other hand if you would have created your document in some sort of an open format (like LaTeX, DocBook SGML, HTML, lout, lyx, TeXinfo, etc.) you would find that you could almost certainly change it to whatever format you need quickly and easily. There are all sorts of software specifically designed for the conversion of one of these formats to another.
Just because it runs on Linux does not guarantee that the software vendor isn't trying to trick you into their own brand of proprietary software hell. If you were foolish enough to put your precious documents into someone's proprietary format then don't be surprised if the company in question holds your information for ransom. I write all of my non-trivial documentation in either LaTeX or DocBook SGML (depending on what exactly the requirements are), and I am quite confident that 20 years from now these documents will still be useable. At the very least I am sure that tools like text editors and grep will still be available.
Yes, these tools are a little harder to use, but that's why there are people working on things like AbiWord, whatever the KDE word processor is called, the new StarWriter, and LyX. Soon their will be an abundance of free tools that are easy and inexpensive to use, and which support truly open formats.
In the meantime, if you feel you must, just use Microsoft Word. It's a fine word processor, and it's almost guaranteed that the filters between Word and whatever piece of Free Software replaces it will be brilliant. After all, no new word processor is going to take over from Word until the Word filters are "good enough."
The answer to this is quite simple. Pick one, and annoint it "standard." At least with the Free Software Office suites you have some chance of recovering your documents if you decide to switch later (open formats are a good thing).
Besides, for much less than it currently costs most large businesses to keep their Select agreements up to date they could afford to maintain their office suite of choice indefinitely.
Once upon a time IBM was the only safe choice, and then, almost overnight, IBM was a career limiting move. The little joke that was the PC had all of a sudden become the "standard." History will repeat itself, the less expensive solution will dominate, and those businesses that are slow to react will pay for their shortsightedness.
Thanks for a very informative post. I was aware that pretty much the entire industry fell in love with Microkernels, but I didn't realize that so many of them had actually sunk money into such osen.
I suppose that you are even right about Linus not being an ambassador for "Free Software," except possibly by example. I consider myself an advocate of Free Software, so it is a little disheartening to think that the creator of Linux might be disqualified simply because he is "too pragmatic."
Oh well, line me up with the rest of the zealots...
RMS and co. got tricked by all the academics into thinking that their new OS would have to be a Microkernel to be taken seriously. You see, the Hurd was started before Linus started working on Linux, but it's advanced architecture made it much harder to debug.
In waltzes Linus, some kid that wasn't worried about elegance, but instead wanted software that he could actually use, and all of a sudden it was possible to actually use the GNU system without any proprietary software. This was almost certainly a blow to the Hurd, but it has also been a tremendous win for Free Software. I am sure that even RMS would agree that it is better to have a completely free system with Linux than to have to continue to host GNU development on some other proprietary system. Besides, Linus has been an excellent ambassador for Free Software.
That being said, you can't hardly blame the FSF for finishing the Hurd. When finished it will have some very cool features, and they have put enough work into it, that it doesn't make sense to chuck it all out the window.
Now, I am not saying that RMS isn't interested in some of the credit for Linux's success, as that is clearly part of his goal. On the other hand, without the GNU tools Linux could not have been written, and it wouldn't have been useful when it was done, so he does have a point. Besides, RMS is clearly mostly interested in highlighting the fact that Linux systems are Free Software. To him this distinction is a very big deal.
Feel free to call it "Linux," I generally do, but you should do some research before you malign people you don't know.
For every wild haired Einstein with a raft of good ideas, you have 20 radicals that can't hit their butt with both hands. In the end the Einsteins and the Gallileos of the world win out for the simple reason that they are right, and the rest of us are wrong. The good ideas become mainstream, and the laws begin to reflect their good sense. Sure, this process takes a little longer, but it is the surest way to guarantee that progress is made. For example, it is much more likely to yield success than simply listening to whatever wild-haired loony happens to be passing by.
The good news is that if you are actually right, then your ideas will eventually prevail.
This is why it is so important that we don't try to short circuit the process. Anything that makes it easier for anyone to create laws is a bad idea. It allows our opponents to push through laws like the DMCA before we have time to organize opposition. Gridlock is our friend, and the political process that creates this gridlock in the national elections is doubly our friend. We want bland presidents with little power to actually change things, because their simply aren't enough Galileos and Einsteins to outnumber all of the Homers and Beavis's, so the popular vote is bound to elect some Presidents who have bad ideas. If these Presidents had a free reign to actually make changes we would be screwed.
Fortunately, the process that allows them to be elected, combined the politics of staying popular, means that they can only push for programs with wide public appeal. These sorts of programs are almost always well within the "safe" range of measures that nearly everyone agrees on (because they have been well proven).
What the majority of /. posters don't seem to understand is that this is actually a good thing. The whole point of national elections is that a candidate has to have a bland enough platform that they can be seen as the lesser of two evils by the majority of people. This means that the whole process is filled with compromises and politics, but it also means that the people we elect will be unlikely to do anything terribly radical without a huge amount of public concensus.
This way when the candidate you like fails to get elected it is not the end of the world. If splinter parties had more of a voice we would live in a very different place. During one president's term the Lord's prayer and the pledge of allegiance would be mandatory in every school, workplace, ballpark, and recreational facility, in the next president's term it would become illegal to drive a car anywhere in the Western United States because the resulting pollutants endanger the spotted tree marmot.
A good example of this has been President Clinton's tenure as Chief Executive Officer. His major plans were all completely frustrated, but he, in turn, was able to frustrate many of the plans of the Republican Congress. In the end only those measures that had broad public support were made into laws.
The bottom line is that if you are unwilling to cooperate with other people to forward the issues that you care most about, then you will never be heard. What's more, society is probably better off. Ideas that are only popular among a small part of the populace are generally not the kinds of ideas that should become laws.
MySQL is the perfect datastore for a mostly read database that needs to be fast, and doesn't need the ACID properties of a real database. If this describes your application then MySQL is probably the best solution for the job.
I find it a little disturbing that MySQL feels the need to change their database so that it becomes something that it is not. When they are done they almost certainly will be left with something slower than they have now for their current target audience, and it probably won't be as fast as PostgreSQL or Interbase for their new target audience.
I would certainly agree that Novell has the directory. And while I haven't worked at an NDS shop myself, I have seen the powerful benefits demonstrated, and am truly impressed. However, a powerful directory system didn't save Banyan Vines, and it won't save Netware either.
The problem is that Novell is getting precisely zero developer mindshare. Seriously, I would bet there are more people working on software for the Apple ][ than there are non-Novell employees working on Netware applications. This means that no matter what Novell does, or how cool their directory may be companies are almost going to have to use some other OS for their application servers. This means that your admins have to know both Netware and some other NOS. Even worse, while neither Active Directory nor OpenLDAP are nearly as cool as NDS, they are both considerably less expensive, and there are signs that for most people they have already entered the realm of "good enough." How many of us really need to manage a billion resources? If there is one common meme in the computer industry it is that the less expensive product that is "good enough" always wins. There are literally hundreds of examples of this phenomenon.
Remember, while market share is certainly important to Novell, market share doesn't put bread on the table. Novell doesn't need happy customers, they need sales. Every happy Novell customer that is purchasing new licenses might as well be migrating to Linux for as much good as they are doing Novell. Marketing would probably help, but unfortunately they have effectively lost their biggest and most powerful marketing tool, CNEs. Nowadays the people that used to get a CNE are getting an MCSE, and they are basically trying to sell Microsoft solutions. So Novell gets overlooked.
Unfortunately for Novell existing Netware installations don't really help them out. After all, they have already taken your money. If you continue using your DOS solution forever then you might as well have switched to another operating system as far as Novell is concerned. Linux may be able to get by on sheer market share, but Novell needs to make new sales to stay in business.
Besides, while Netware makes a great file server, and their directory is nifty, it's not what people are using to develop the next generation of software. Eventually your supermarket is going to want to upgrade to a new accounting package, or a new point of sale system and that new package is not going to run on Netware. So you will either have hire admins who know both Netware and something else, or you will have to ditch Netware and use your new OS for file and print as well as application serving. I think that you will find that every OS in the world does an acceptable job at file and print serving. Netware has specialized in a field where just about everyone has an offering that is "good enough."
Novell is also losing the training war. It used to be that Novell's army of CNEs were their biggest salesforce. Nowadays these same people are MCSEs, and are actively campaigning to yank out Netware (because it makes them money).
Novell is dead, it's only a matter of time.
Yes, NDS is basically a superset of LDAP. Unfortunately for Novell most people are more than happy to either:
A) Use someone else's LDAP server (including the freely available OpenLDAP).
B) Use Microsoft's Active Directory.
NDS is only being used by those sites that are already Novell faithful. And the number of Novell faithful is shrinking, not growing. Since sales drives profits Novell has to either charge their existing customers more money, or they have to cut costs.
I personally believe that it is the beginning of a long dark night for Novell. Soon Netware will be in the same boat as Banyan Vines. They still will have some good technology, but no one will care.
Or if you are truly sick, you can simply use Emacs+Gnus to read Slashdot. Some crazy hacker has actually added a Slashdot backend to Gnus so that you can read Slashdot as if it were just another news group.
That includes Gnus incredibly powerful scoring system (so your problems with slashdot moderation disappear). If you want you can just read the posts from known trolls.
It's easy to blame NT, or Inoculate IT, but the real culprit is Outlook.
Microsoft's policy of helping users (even their own users apparently) run binaries and scripts from untrusted locations is absolutely insane. Yes, Inoculate IT should have stopped the virus (theoretically), yes, Windows NT should have more protection against attacks, but the key is that Outlook is a trojan fun house waiting to happen.
Unfortunately, for Microsoft anyway, the fix for this type of thing goes far beyond patching some buffer exploits. They instead have to totally re-think how Outlook (and other Internet software) handle untrusted binaries (that probably includes ActiveX).
And that's the whole point. There is little question that Sun would still remain in control of an Open Source Java. Especially if this beast were released under a license like the GPL (which would give extraordinary powers to Sun, they could still release versions licensed under a closed-source license, but their competitors would not be able to do the same). If Sun released their source code they would almost certainly end up behind the steering wheel. The only difference would be that it would quiet the doubters. All of a sudden there would cease to be a reason to worry about Java's future. After all, if Sun were to screw up horribly, the Java community could right the ship.
Forks are evil, but if you base your future on software that you can't fork, you are at your vendor's mercy. If customers want that, they can stick with Microsoft and their solutions.
Besides, I want a decent Java2 JVM to be part of Debian main. In fact, I want all of the Linux distributions to ship with a Java2 JVM set up and ready to go. Running Java programs should be as straightforward under Linux as running programs written in C. The fact of the matter is that, in the Free Software world anyhow, Java isn't even as ubiquitous as Python, and it is no where near as universal as Perl, and that's Sun's fault, plain and simple.
Java could easily become the next lingua franca for programmers, replacing venerable C. But Sun's grasp is slowly squeezing the life out of it.
Wine's ace-in-the-hole is that Microsoft also has to be careful not to break any other commercial applications with it's new version. That even includes all of the applications that the Fortune 500 develop in house. If a new version of Office breaks in-house applications, then it doesn't get deployed until there is a "resolution." There is more to Windows than MS Office, and if Microsoft broke their OSes so that only Office would run they would soon find themselves without a market.
For example, imagine that you were a commercial developer and Microsoft broke compatibility with your products simply because it didn't want Office to run under Wine. Now imagine that you also learned that Wine would allow you to release your commercial application natively under Linux using libwine.
I imagine that there would be a lot of ticked off developers releasing Linux versions of their software.
Microsoft has to be very careful, or they will find they are only speeding up the inevitable.