"
There is nothing that says that a company can upgrade to the newest versions of everything all the time, and who supplies fixes to a large set of dated versions?"
Actually, this is one place where OSS is probably better positioned than closed source software. There are a lot of places still running some pretty old versions of Red Hat, for example. Red Hat's new Enterprise contracts do allow for updating older kernels as necessary for people willing to pay for them.
I also understand there's an entire branch of the Debian environment that maintains patches for really old kernels.
Closed source vendors have traditionally done a decent job of backporting patches for a few revs. Sooner or later, however, they try to force you to upgrade to preserve their revenue stream.
My point is that if you expect unlimited patch maintenance for any platform, be it closed or open, you are going to be disappointed. If instead you are looking for version stability measured in years, not months, OSS can be accomodating enough. Linux as an OSS OS demonstrates that today, as does Apache as a OSS Web server.
I can't, but RedHat can. You may recall that they bought Cygnus Systems a few years back. Cygnus Systems' claim to fame was that they were one of the first (if not the very first) OSS company to turn a profit. Guess what market segment they were selling to?
Re:IPv6 - Chicken and egg ? - no!
on
Slashdot over IPv6
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't mean this as a slam, really I don't.
However, if you need to host 500 servers and can't figure out how to set up a NAT gateway to support them, maybe you need to hire some competent help.
If you can't figure out how to negotiate a contract with your Internet provider to get the bandwidth that you need, maybe you need to hire some competent help.
If you can't figure out that when you are talking about 500 computers to hide behind a NAT you should be talking to an ISP/bandwidth provider who knows how to sell commercial class services, maybe you need to hire some competent help.
If you are the help, then God help the organization that you work for. In the meantime, I strongly suggest spending a lot of time polishing your skillset, because your next boss won't be as willing to put up with this kind of mess.
This analogy falls down almost immediately, however. Governance is a principle that is not limited to national governments. By this I mean that governance simply shows the power relationship between an individual and the group(s) that he takes orders from. Almost all of us can point to at least a couple of such relationships; our place of employment and the government of the location where we live. A few can show more complex governance relationships because their place of employment is in a foreign country. One such example is the bedroom community of Windsor, Canada. Many of its residents work across the border in Detroit, USA. Then there the relationships that people have with their church, their families, their clubs, etc.
I will stipulate that when you look at each relationship in isolation, there is nearly always a clear hierarchy that is evident, even if it is not formally documented or even acknowledged. However, I would argue that it is clear most people already belong to multiple governance relationships.
There is only a limited amount of energy and time that each person has to allocate to each one of these relationships. When the senior hierarchy abuses their power relationship by demanding more of their junior members than those members are willing to provide, you generally see an immediate rise in whatever the organization is seeking to achieve. However, the longterm effect is to drive away the junior members. They will seek a relationship that they are happier with.
The political and economic refugees who seek to leave opressive regimes for what they see as a freer environment is the most obvious example. People who change their religious affiliation by the act of conversion is another such example. It is rarer because people in general have more emotional commitment to their church than they do to where they reside. When they do make that conversion they tend to be extremely committed to their new position.
Actually, if you have a fileserver with all the files on it, you don't need the CDs or the DVDs. Just choose the ftp build from your boot floppy. Do it once, then script it.
Disclaimer: I haven't done it myself, but I do know two guys who swear by it.
I'm glad you brought this up because I never would have attempted what you did with any OS. The thing I've always really liked about Unices is the idea that everything is a file. This lets you do the following with a fair degree of confidence that everything will Just Work when you're done:
First partition:/ Second (optional) partition/boot Third (or second if you skipped/boot)/usr
Data partitions:/home/data
store all your 'gotta have' extra packages on/data. If it's easier to manage them in something like/usr/local/RPMs, add a symlink.
Now, when you rebuild an old box a lot of your concerns go away. After backing up/home and/data, fire up your PC with the installation CD of the distro of your choice and let it do its thing.
The modern distros do a good job of autodetection nowadays, so that's not a problem. The only real issue that you've got is (a) telling it where your/,/usr, and maybe/boot are so it can format them, and (b) telling it not to format your/home and/data partitions.
I've gone through 3 migrations of Mandrake this way rather than simple updates. Works well. Occasionally I run into problems with user config files having variables changed, but that's generally easy to deal with.
Note to distro owners: Maybe it's time to use a model like this for your installs?
Oh? Care to explain why Micheal Jackson's album tanked? Mariah Carey's? Both had so much money thrown at their marketing they should have debuted at #1. Both sank without a trace.
MJ called Sony Music execs racist instead of accepting blame for producing an album the public didn't want to hear. MC's record company paid her millions just to get her to go away so they wouldn't have to put out another one of her albums.
Tell me again about how P2P sunk those albums. Please. I really want to know.
I'm not a Mac geek, although I've used Macs in the past. My cousin, however, is a dyed in the wool Mac fan. Between his rants plus just staying up on technology in general I think I've got a pretty good handle on what's real and what isn't in the Mac world. As usual, there are grains of truth behind the myths. I'll answer the ones I know.
"Ripped off Xerox"
Back in the '80s Steve Jobs managed to wangle a tour or four at PARC for himself and some other Apple types to see the windowing system that Xerox researchers were working on. The researchers were ordered to show the Apple team members how things worked.
At least one key member of the team objected strenuously to giving any information to Apple without any sort of benefit for Xerox. (no NDA, no financial compensation, no limits on the information that was being given away, etc.) She was ordered to comply anyway.
Was Xerox 'ripped off'? Not really. Was the management team at Xerox incredibly incompetent not to take even the most basic steps to protect their research investment? Absolutely.
"Can't use multi button mouse"
Hasn't been true for a long time. However, it's still the hardware configuration on laptops. And before you ask, I have never liked the "ctrl+mousebutton" combination.
"Uses non-standard hardware"
Yup. What did you expect? Apple still sees itself as a hardware company.:)
Seriously, though, if you're talking about peripherals that's not really accurate. PCI and AGP hardware and drivers are available that can be bought from a variety of vendors. I don't know if IDE controllers are there. I assume there are.
"Is a monopoly"
Of what? Their own hardware? Sorry, that's not how everyone else in the world sees the desktop/server market.
"Owned by Microsoft, a major shareholder"
This dates back to the huge influx of cash that Microsoft injected into Apple some years ago. At the time, I think it made Microsoft Apple's single largest shareholder behind Steve Jobs. I remember wondering what impact if any this might have on Apple. There was some speculation by conspiracy fans then that Microsoft might buy out Apple entirely and cut Intel out of the business.
In fact, it's clear now that it was part of a defensive strategy on Microsoft's part to try to convince the US DOJ that it wasn't a monopoly by showing that there was competition in the market. In order for that strategy to work, there had to be at least one other viable desktop vendor out there. At that time, Apple was the only other player in the market that was worth a damn in terms of marketshare, but they were in deep trouble financially.
Microsoft almost HAD to give Apple some money if their strategy was to pay off. Obviously, the strategy failed (witness the conviction).
"Costs too much"
Compared to what? For what it does, the Mac line is very reasonably priced now. However, IMO it was definitely overpriced for quite a while in the '90s.
"OS X is slow"
Well, if you're trying to run a modern OS on ancient hardware, yes it'll be slow. If you're running OS X on modern hardware and you've upgraded to the latest release it runs just fine.
As an aside, one of the reasons I like both BSD and Linux is the ability to strip down the OS to run on some really lightweight platforms. OS X is not designed for that because, as I've already noted, Apple is a hardware company. It's not in their best interests to make it easy to run OS X on platforms like the old Mac Classic.
I suppose you could probably get at least part of it to run on a Classic since OS X uses BSD in its core. No one but an obsessive geek with way too much time on his hands would even try. Oh, wait.:)
"Lawsuits for no reason"
The only example I can think of was the lawsuit against Microsoft for the use of the windows paradigm for a UI. A frivolous lawsuit on its face for a variety of reasons. I don't know of any in the same vein in the last 5 or 10 years. Does anyone more knowledgeable than I about Apple care to elaborate?
"Rips off Linux"
Umm, no. There are a number of GNU tools available as part of the OS X package, but as long as Apple follows all the rules in the GPL they're not ripping off Linux. And, since Apple uses a BSD kernel and not the Linux kernel, this is false on its face. Unless you've dug into the source for the BSD kernel Apple is running and can show that they're using GPL'ed code from the Linux source tree. No? Didn't think so.
Your.sig really intrigues me. But then, provocative statements always do.:)
You imply that you've given a great deal of thought to all of the open source/closed source conflicts. I'd love to open a dialog with you to understand your position.
Wow. I've read through a good deal of the commentary and the one recurring theme seems to be that ESR is a shrill, whiny, attention addict yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
Personally, I thought his comments in H8 were hilarious satire, stuff that Scott Adams would be proud to steal. Of course, I've spent far too much time in huge institutions like the USN and big companies who shall remain nameless to preserve my job.:)
When Microsoft acquired Hotmail they immediately announced that they were going to migrate off those slow, ineffective insecure Open Source *BSD servers to the much faster, secure, and stable Win2000 servers in 6 months. Well, they finally managed it about 3 years later after throwing massive amounts of hardware at their mail service.
Also, longtime Hotmail account holders claim that the spam didn't start getting bad until AFTER Microsoft bought the company. Hmmm, ya don't suppose MS saw an opportunity to market your email address without your express permission?
Finally, why on Earth would anyone recommend using Outlook or Outlook Express to read mail? Or don't you bother to read all the reports of exploits of Outlook's incredibly weak security model?
Do yourself a favor. Download Mozilla and use that mail client instead, then learn to applay some simple filtering rules. Better yet, dump your Hotmail account and find an ISP that actively discourages spam!
Plug for the finest ISP in Minnesota:
http://www.visi.com
This company has a sysadmin staff and ownership dedicated to the proposition that their customers' data is their own, NOT theirs. They do provide services for people not located in their geographic area for some small fee. Check them out if you're looking for the best!
Running lousy apps that were purchased by some twit in a business unit who fancied himself a technoweenie because he was once in the same room as an old copy of Byte. And why did IT sign off on those apps? IT didn't, senior management TOLD them to run it.
[sigh] Been there, done that more times than I care to think about. Thank Ghu that eventually senior management eventually figures out what a mistake making those kinds of decisions really is, or every company in the world would go under from the weight of the maintenance costs of all this crap. The amazing thing is that the vendors responsible for it all still manage to keep finding suckers who'll buy their steaming piles of pig effluvia.
Umm, how about the BSD TCP/IP stack? Oops, sorry. I forgot Microsoft grabbed that code base in the '90s only after their IP stack turned out to be so bad.
True multitasking, multiuser systems? Oops, sorry. I forgot Microsoft still can't do that very well. Besides, open source systems have only been doing that since oh, 1986 or so. I think that's when 386BSD came out, anyway. BTW, was OS/9 open source? I don't recall. That came out in 1984 I think.
Kerberos? Oh, I forgot. Microsoft 'improves' their version so that it doesn't interoperate with anything else, including the original source code.
Let's see, just the last 10 years, huh? How about HTML? Oh, I forgot. Microsoft 'improves' their servers and their desktop so it doesn't interoperate with the standard.
How about tabbed browsing? Popups and popunders blocked by the browser? Oh, that's right. IE6 does do that now. Hmm, whereever did they get the idea?
Well, that was the nifty part about CIWS when it first came out. It used OTS hardware and software that the Navy didn't have to develop. The systems themselves were relatively inexpensive when you consider the threat that they were aimed at preventing.
BTW, while the threat of a couple of guys in a Zodiac full of explosives is always a concern, keep in mind that kind of action only works once in a great while. Try to repeat it too often, and the USN will just start blowing away anything that comes close without responding to a challenge. IOW, "no more Mr. Nice Guy!":)
Nothing I stated isn't available in public libraries anywhere in the US. Everything that I talked about came from publicly available sources. Which you would know if you had bothered to look.
Anyone who has served on board ship in the US Navy since 1980 knows just how good our targeting systems can be. Ever heard of the acronym CIWS? It stands for Close In Weapons System. It was designed to take out inbound projectiles such as cruise missiles between 10 km and 1 km from the ship. It is still actively deployed on many US ships.
The system consists of a tracking radar system with enough computing power to track up to 150 threats at once. It prioritizes the targeting system based upon inbound speed, size of the object, IFF status, and distance from the ship. Once this sucker is enabled, you'd better hope your planes have their IFF turned on, or they'll be shot down quicker than you can blink.
The system did all this using a Vulcan cannon, which is a gatling gun design throwing depleted uranium rounds downrange. The system was designed to fire and correct inflight to hose down a target until it dropped out of the sky. The system's biggest weakness was the fact that it went through rounds so fast (up to 6,000 rpm theoretical, 2,000 rpm typical) that the magazines had to be HUGE. I once saw a picture of the USS New Jersey after its refit. The 4 magazines on board held enough rounds to fire for a grand total of 15 minutes without stopping. The smaller ships that had the system frequently were limited to less than 2 minutes. A decent laser system's power plant occupying the same space would solve this problem.
This system was successfully demonstrated almost 25 years ago. Its first active deployment was in 1980 or 1981. And you "experts" are trying to tell me that the targeting technology hasn't improved enough since to take down an artillery shell? Oh, please. Go do some very basic research on what's in use TODAY before hollering about weapons tests for stuff that might be deployed tomorrow.
The only question in my mind is the size of the power plant necessary to drive a powerful enough laser to be useful. Can it be mounted on anything smaller than a ship? Anyone know?
As an enterprise architect for a very large US bank, I understand your concerns. However, I think it may be time for you to re-evaluate your position. Many big Wall Street trading houses are migrating their core mission critical trading applications from Unix to Linux. Some of them are quoting some truly outrageous savings in the process. When you get traders willing to move those kinds of apps to OSes based upon the Linux kernel, you have to realize that it is possible to buy the kind of support contract that you're looking for.
BTW, have you explored the Linux support offerings from Sun, IBM, and Compaq/HP lately? You might be pleasantly surprised.
Yep, that's true. You notice he's not trying this crap out West where 'right to carry' laws are far more common, don't you?
IMO if this guy was wandering around shooting people in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, or any one of another dozen or so states he'd already be dead.
We don't want Wine so we can run MS Office, IE, and Photoshop. We want Wine so we can run the dozens of 3rd party apps that our business relies on every day. Most of these apps were written by mom and pop shops as much as 10 or 12 years ago, and have barely made the crossover from DOS to Windows. Some of them can't even be run in Win9x or NT, let alone Linux! (OK, I know for those we need dosemu, not Wine)
My point is that there is a lot of old software out there that we HAVE to continue supporting. If we can't have Wine to do it, and those same mom and pop shops won't convert because they have a captive market, we are condemned to run Windows.
To answer your original question then; yes, I think OpenOffice has reached that point. No one has noticed that I've been using OO here at work since May.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is one place where OSS is probably better positioned than closed source software. There are a lot of places still running some pretty old versions of Red Hat, for example. Red Hat's new Enterprise contracts do allow for updating older kernels as necessary for people willing to pay for them.
I also understand there's an entire branch of the Debian environment that maintains patches for really old kernels.
Closed source vendors have traditionally done a decent job of backporting patches for a few revs. Sooner or later, however, they try to force you to upgrade to preserve their revenue stream.
My point is that if you expect unlimited patch maintenance for any platform, be it closed or open, you are going to be disappointed. If instead you are looking for version stability measured in years, not months, OSS can be accomodating enough. Linux as an OSS OS demonstrates that today, as does Apache as a OSS Web server.
This is by far the most reasonable post on this subject so far. Too bad it's so far down the original person probably won't read it. :(
Man, I wish I had mod points now instead of last week. I'd give them all to this post. Right on the money!
I can't believe no one has commented yet on what was obviously an illegal detention of a civilian almost anywhere in the First World.
+ No mention made of a warrant.
+ If a warrant was presented, how come the person being detained for questioning or being arrested wasn't taken directly to the police headquarters?
I can't, but RedHat can. You may recall that they bought Cygnus Systems a few years back. Cygnus Systems' claim to fame was that they were one of the first (if not the very first) OSS company to turn a profit. Guess what market segment they were selling to?
I don't mean this as a slam, really I don't.
However, if you need to host 500 servers and can't figure out how to set up a NAT gateway to support them, maybe you need to hire some competent help.
If you can't figure out how to negotiate a contract with your Internet provider to get the bandwidth that you need, maybe you need to hire some competent help.
If you can't figure out that when you are talking about 500 computers to hide behind a NAT you should be talking to an ISP/bandwidth provider who knows how to sell commercial class services, maybe you need to hire some competent help.
If you are the help, then God help the organization that you work for. In the meantime, I strongly suggest spending a lot of time polishing your skillset, because your next boss won't be as willing to put up with this kind of mess.
This analogy falls down almost immediately, however. Governance is a principle that is not limited to national governments. By this I mean that governance simply shows the power relationship between an individual and the group(s) that he takes orders from. Almost all of us can point to at least a couple of such relationships; our place of employment and the government of the location where we live. A few can show more complex governance relationships because their place of employment is in a foreign country. One such example is the bedroom community of Windsor, Canada. Many of its residents work across the border in Detroit, USA. Then there the relationships that people have with their church, their families, their clubs, etc.
I will stipulate that when you look at each relationship in isolation, there is nearly always a clear hierarchy that is evident, even if it is not formally documented or even acknowledged. However, I would argue that it is clear most people already belong to multiple governance relationships.
There is only a limited amount of energy and time that each person has to allocate to each one of these relationships. When the senior hierarchy abuses their power relationship by demanding more of their junior members than those members are willing to provide, you generally see an immediate rise in whatever the organization is seeking to achieve. However, the longterm effect is to drive away the junior members. They will seek a relationship that they are happier with.
The political and economic refugees who seek to leave opressive regimes for what they see as a freer environment is the most obvious example. People who change their religious affiliation by the act of conversion is another such example. It is rarer because people in general have more emotional commitment to their church than they do to where they reside. When they do make that conversion they tend to be extremely committed to their new position.
Actually, if you have a fileserver with all the files on it, you don't need the CDs or the DVDs. Just choose the ftp build from your boot floppy. Do it once, then script it.
Disclaimer: I haven't done it myself, but I do know two guys who swear by it.
I'm glad you brought this up because I never would have attempted what you did with any OS. The thing I've always really liked about Unices is the idea that everything is a file. This lets you do the following with a fair degree of confidence that everything will Just Work when you're done:
/ /boot /boot) /usr
/home /data
/data. If it's easier to manage them in something like /usr/local/RPMs, add a symlink.
/home and /data, fire up your PC with the installation CD of the distro of your choice and let it do its thing.
/, /usr, and maybe /boot are so it can format them, and (b) telling it not to format your /home and /data partitions.
First partition:
Second (optional) partition
Third (or second if you skipped
Data partitions:
store all your 'gotta have' extra packages on
Now, when you rebuild an old box a lot of your concerns go away. After backing up
The modern distros do a good job of autodetection nowadays, so that's not a problem. The only real issue that you've got is (a) telling it where your
I've gone through 3 migrations of Mandrake this way rather than simple updates. Works well. Occasionally I run into problems with user config files having variables changed, but that's generally easy to deal with.
Note to distro owners: Maybe it's time to use a model like this for your installs?
Oh? Care to explain why Micheal Jackson's album tanked? Mariah Carey's? Both had so much money thrown at their marketing they should have debuted at #1. Both sank without a trace.
MJ called Sony Music execs racist instead of accepting blame for producing an album the public didn't want to hear. MC's record company paid her millions just to get her to go away so they wouldn't have to put out another one of her albums.
Tell me again about how P2P sunk those albums. Please. I really want to know.
I'm not a Mac geek, although I've used Macs in the past. My cousin, however, is a dyed in the wool Mac fan. Between his rants plus just staying up on technology in general I think I've got a pretty good handle on what's real and what isn't in the Mac world. As usual, there are grains of truth behind the myths. I'll answer the ones I know.
:)
:)
"Ripped off Xerox"
Back in the '80s Steve Jobs managed to wangle a tour or four at PARC for himself and some other Apple types to see the windowing system that Xerox researchers were working on. The researchers were ordered to show the Apple team members how things worked.
At least one key member of the team objected strenuously to giving any information to Apple without any sort of benefit for Xerox. (no NDA, no financial compensation, no limits on the information that was being given away, etc.) She was ordered to comply anyway.
Was Xerox 'ripped off'? Not really. Was the management team at Xerox incredibly incompetent not to take even the most basic steps to protect their research investment? Absolutely.
"Can't use multi button mouse"
Hasn't been true for a long time. However, it's still the hardware configuration on laptops. And before you ask, I have never liked the "ctrl+mousebutton" combination.
"Uses non-standard hardware"
Yup. What did you expect? Apple still sees itself as a hardware company.
Seriously, though, if you're talking about peripherals that's not really accurate. PCI and AGP hardware and drivers are available that can be bought from a variety of vendors. I don't know if IDE controllers are there. I assume there are.
"Is a monopoly"
Of what? Their own hardware? Sorry, that's not how everyone else in the world sees the desktop/server market.
"Owned by Microsoft, a major shareholder"
This dates back to the huge influx of cash that Microsoft injected into Apple some years ago. At the time, I think it made Microsoft Apple's single largest shareholder behind Steve Jobs. I remember wondering what impact if any this might have on Apple. There was some speculation by conspiracy fans then that Microsoft might buy out Apple entirely and cut Intel out of the business.
In fact, it's clear now that it was part of a defensive strategy on Microsoft's part to try to convince the US DOJ that it wasn't a monopoly by showing that there was competition in the market. In order for that strategy to work, there had to be at least one other viable desktop vendor out there. At that time, Apple was the only other player in the market that was worth a damn in terms of marketshare, but they were in deep trouble financially.
Microsoft almost HAD to give Apple some money if their strategy was to pay off. Obviously, the strategy failed (witness the conviction).
"Costs too much"
Compared to what? For what it does, the Mac line is very reasonably priced now. However, IMO it was definitely overpriced for quite a while in the '90s.
"OS X is slow"
Well, if you're trying to run a modern OS on ancient hardware, yes it'll be slow. If you're running OS X on modern hardware and you've upgraded to the latest release it runs just fine.
As an aside, one of the reasons I like both BSD and Linux is the ability to strip down the OS to run on some really lightweight platforms. OS X is not designed for that because, as I've already noted, Apple is a hardware company. It's not in their best interests to make it easy to run OS X on platforms like the old Mac Classic.
I suppose you could probably get at least part of it to run on a Classic since OS X uses BSD in its core. No one but an obsessive geek with way too much time on his hands would even try. Oh, wait.
"Lawsuits for no reason"
The only example I can think of was the lawsuit against Microsoft for the use of the windows paradigm for a UI. A frivolous lawsuit on its face for a variety of reasons. I don't know of any in the same vein in the last 5 or 10 years. Does anyone more knowledgeable than I about Apple care to elaborate?
"Rips off Linux"
Umm, no. There are a number of GNU tools available as part of the OS X package, but as long as Apple follows all the rules in the GPL they're not ripping off Linux. And, since Apple uses a BSD kernel and not the Linux kernel, this is false on its face. Unless you've dug into the source for the BSD kernel Apple is running and can show that they're using GPL'ed code from the Linux source tree. No? Didn't think so.
Oh, really?
http://www.baen.com
Dublin;
.sig really intrigues me. But then, provocative statements always do. :)
Your
You imply that you've given a great deal of thought to all of the open source/closed source conflicts. I'd love to open a dialog with you to understand your position.
If you're interested, contact me at:
jsmilan at visi dot com
Thx
Wow. I've read through a good deal of the commentary and the one recurring theme seems to be that ESR is a shrill, whiny, attention addict yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
:)
Personally, I thought his comments in H8 were hilarious satire, stuff that Scott Adams would be proud to steal. Of course, I've spent far too much time in huge institutions like the USN and big companies who shall remain nameless to preserve my job.
Let's see;
When Microsoft acquired Hotmail they immediately announced that they were going to migrate off those slow, ineffective insecure Open Source *BSD servers to the much faster, secure, and stable Win2000 servers in 6 months. Well, they finally managed it about 3 years later after throwing massive amounts of hardware at their mail service.
Also, longtime Hotmail account holders claim that the spam didn't start getting bad until AFTER Microsoft bought the company. Hmmm, ya don't suppose MS saw an opportunity to market your email address without your express permission?
Finally, why on Earth would anyone recommend using Outlook or Outlook Express to read mail? Or don't you bother to read all the reports of exploits of Outlook's incredibly weak security model?
Do yourself a favor. Download Mozilla and use that mail client instead, then learn to applay some simple filtering rules. Better yet, dump your Hotmail account and find an ISP that actively discourages spam!
Plug for the finest ISP in Minnesota:
http://www.visi.com
This company has a sysadmin staff and ownership dedicated to the proposition that their customers' data is their own, NOT theirs. They do provide services for people not located in their geographic area for some small fee. Check them out if you're looking for the best!
Running lousy apps that were purchased by some twit in a business unit who fancied himself a technoweenie because he was once in the same room as an old copy of Byte. And why did IT sign off on those apps? IT didn't, senior management TOLD them to run it.
[sigh] Been there, done that more times than I care to think about. Thank Ghu that eventually senior management eventually figures out what a mistake making those kinds of decisions really is, or every company in the world would go under from the weight of the maintenance costs of all this crap. The amazing thing is that the vendors responsible for it all still manage to keep finding suckers who'll buy their steaming piles of pig effluvia.
Umm, how about the BSD TCP/IP stack? Oops, sorry. I forgot Microsoft grabbed that code base in the '90s only after their IP stack turned out to be so bad.
True multitasking, multiuser systems? Oops, sorry. I forgot Microsoft still can't do that very well. Besides, open source systems have only been doing that since oh, 1986 or so. I think that's when 386BSD came out, anyway. BTW, was OS/9 open source? I don't recall. That came out in 1984 I think.
Kerberos? Oh, I forgot. Microsoft 'improves' their version so that it doesn't interoperate with anything else, including the original source code.
Let's see, just the last 10 years, huh? How about HTML? Oh, I forgot. Microsoft 'improves' their servers and their desktop so it doesn't interoperate with the standard.
How about tabbed browsing? Popups and popunders blocked by the browser? Oh, that's right. IE6 does do that now. Hmm, whereever did they get the idea?
Well, that was the nifty part about CIWS when it first came out. It used OTS hardware and software that the Navy didn't have to develop. The systems themselves were relatively inexpensive when you consider the threat that they were aimed at preventing.
:)
BTW, while the threat of a couple of guys in a Zodiac full of explosives is always a concern, keep in mind that kind of action only works once in a great while. Try to repeat it too often, and the USN will just start blowing away anything that comes close without responding to a challenge. IOW, "no more Mr. Nice Guy!"
Nothing I stated isn't available in public libraries anywhere in the US. Everything that I talked about came from publicly available sources. Which you would know if you had bothered to look.
Anyone who has served on board ship in the US Navy since 1980 knows just how good our targeting systems can be. Ever heard of the acronym CIWS? It stands for Close In Weapons System. It was designed to take out inbound projectiles such as cruise missiles between 10 km and 1 km from the ship. It is still actively deployed on many US ships.
The system consists of a tracking radar system with enough computing power to track up to 150 threats at once. It prioritizes the targeting system based upon inbound speed, size of the object, IFF status, and distance from the ship. Once this sucker is enabled, you'd better hope your planes have their IFF turned on, or they'll be shot down quicker than you can blink.
The system did all this using a Vulcan cannon, which is a gatling gun design throwing depleted uranium rounds downrange. The system was designed to fire and correct inflight to hose down a target until it dropped out of the sky. The system's biggest weakness was the fact that it went through rounds so fast (up to 6,000 rpm theoretical, 2,000 rpm typical) that the magazines had to be HUGE. I once saw a picture of the USS New Jersey after its refit. The 4 magazines on board held enough rounds to fire for a grand total of 15 minutes without stopping. The smaller ships that had the system frequently were limited to less than 2 minutes. A decent laser system's power plant occupying the same space would solve this problem.
This system was successfully demonstrated almost 25 years ago. Its first active deployment was in 1980 or 1981. And you "experts" are trying to tell me that the targeting technology hasn't improved enough since to take down an artillery shell? Oh, please. Go do some very basic research on what's in use TODAY before hollering about weapons tests for stuff that might be deployed tomorrow.
The only question in my mind is the size of the power plant necessary to drive a powerful enough laser to be useful. Can it be mounted on anything smaller than a ship? Anyone know?
As an enterprise architect for a very large US bank, I understand your concerns. However, I think it may be time for you to re-evaluate your position. Many big Wall Street trading houses are migrating their core mission critical trading applications from Unix to Linux. Some of them are quoting some truly outrageous savings in the process. When you get traders willing to move those kinds of apps to OSes based upon the Linux kernel, you have to realize that it is possible to buy the kind of support contract that you're looking for.
BTW, have you explored the Linux support offerings from Sun, IBM, and Compaq/HP lately? You might be pleasantly surprised.
Yep, that's true. You notice he's not trying this crap out West where 'right to carry' laws are far more common, don't you?
IMO if this guy was wandering around shooting people in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, or any one of another dozen or so states he'd already be dead.
You forgot:
:)
sub sailors
the entire Mat Crank crew
CBs
deck apes
BTs
HTs
MMs
Drink it, fight it, or fuck it! You'll forget it by the morning!
We don't want Wine so we can run MS Office, IE, and Photoshop. We want Wine so we can run the dozens of 3rd party apps that our business relies on every day. Most of these apps were written by mom and pop shops as much as 10 or 12 years ago, and have barely made the crossover from DOS to Windows. Some of them can't even be run in Win9x or NT, let alone Linux! (OK, I know for those we need dosemu, not Wine)
My point is that there is a lot of old software out there that we HAVE to continue supporting. If we can't have Wine to do it, and those same mom and pop shops won't convert because they have a captive market, we are condemned to run Windows.
Free us! Give us Wine!
To answer your original question then; yes, I think OpenOffice has reached that point. No one has noticed that I've been using OO here at work since May. :)