"You'd be surprised how many people just do not consider Macs an option. You need a computer, it's strictly PC and Windows, nothing else. So with the masses, I would say Mac is not an option, unless they are a little more savvy."
Terminal Server is a great solution for apps like accounting software as is vmware with an old win95 license. Cuts down on licensing costs. And by the way most office software use the standardard api - DirectX isn't part of it.
Honestly one of the best ways to change the situation is to spend money and complain to the developers - open source or not.
A friend of mine has a company that supports about 8 or 10 law firms. All use more or less amounts of linux (mostly on the backend).
For example many lawyers use time tracking software such as time matters a time tracking and billing package that is windows based.
Postgresql is the database in the back end that Time matters supports. The performance is poor compared with MS SQL Server - mostly due to poor coding. What do you do? Call them up and complain. It runs mostly under wine on the desktop, or typically we have it run under terminal server.
I would also have a look at www.osafoundation.org/ which will eventually produce a platform to do something like which you probably want to do. That is, easily customize your contact, scheduler and email system.
Another solution I've seen firms use in linux is based on Lotus Domino/Notes. Proprietary but runs in Linux. Often you can get 10 licenses bundled if you buy a new or used IBM server.
Microsoft has far more access to personal information than google. Hotmail for example has 100x as many users as gmail (close to 200 million at last count).
Type in a bogus website? Microsoft knows. Look up a word to be translated in Office 2003? Microsoft knows. Windows XP, Office 2003, Visual Studio, Encarta etc are all closely linked to the web services. With Microsoft Live Meeting they could know all about your business meetings as it is hosted offsite.
If one wanted to be paranoid (like the author of that article) one could question all the corporate email (100 Million users) going through those Exchange servers...
My point is that Microsoft has far more opportunity than google to abuse its power. Why doesn't CNET attack MS?
After I graduated from college I decided to take a year off and went to Taiwan to teach young kids. Most of them were about 8 years old and went to school from 7AM until 6 PM and then went home and did 3-4 hours of homework. Weekends were made up of bushibans of math, science and english.
Does repetition work? Yes mostly. Learning to write Chinese is best taught by repetition. Any sport is best learned by repetition.
Being a brilliant scientist is that learned by repetition? No. The important thing seems to me is to leave some time for creativity and that is one thing Asian schools (assuming Korea/Singapore/Japan are similar) don't seem to get.
Understanding patterns, applying information from another part of your brain and another field to the task at hand etc. This is where creativity comes from. I don't think it can 100% be taught - but I think it can be inspired by good teachers.
Where are the Asian Nobel prize winners? How come Taiwan can take 60% of the US Electrical Engineering Phds (90s stat) but not produce top line physics research? That is probabably a question for another day.
Oracle's current work on Mozilla Lightning (Thunderbird Mail + Sunbird Calendar ++) should be interesting. Thunderbird is already a fairly decent mail client. Its main flaws from a large company perspective are its lack of calendaring and administration tools (pushing updates, profiles etc). If Oracle can fix these flaws and tie it to the Oracle database backend they should have a product they can sell.
What Oracle will need to do:
1) Fix the flaws and make it "good enough" for most business use 2) Create a connector to the Oracle database backend (something more efficient then IMAP) 3) Promote it in places where exchange is seen as a headache to be avoided: Universities, Small Businesses, Charities, Developing countries.. etc 4) Slowly move up the food chain until it is usable by Oracle's bread and butter clients - Financial institutions and large companies, & governments. 5) Tie the pricing to the customer's current licensing agreement - for example, Customers could get a reduced per CPU Oracle licensing charge if they use Lightning with the Oracle backend.
The trick will be to ensure that Mozilla Lightning supports POP3, IMAP, and Oracle DB Backend seamlessly so that the customer could slowly move up the food chain. Also important will be tools to do the Exchange to Thunderbird/Lightning migration in a background script, RIM(PDA) integration, and Exchange coexistence tools.
Opportunities
Security One of the perceived weaknesses of Exchange is security. An opportunity will be to create a simple way to manage S/Mime or PGP certificates centrally. Copying and improving a system similar to the one that Lotus Notes uses might be a first step.
Automated Archiving Financial institutions spend large amounts of money in software to manage archives to meet Sarbanes Oxley and FED regulations. If Oracle were to integrate tools for this then they might have a slight advantage over MS Exchange.
External HD w/ USB 2 + Debian + Paper CDholder
on
CD Storage Advice?
·
· Score: 1
Recently 120 Drives were $49 CDN ($38 US). Bought that + a USB case for media backups (music and movies).
Nice thing is with Linux - Ubuntu/Debian - you only ever really need 1 cd and can download everything else you need with apt get.
For proprietary software I use the white paper cd cases and a CD box I got from ikea. Holds 150+ CDs/DVDs. Spindles are more likely to scratch a DVD/CD.
Remember when MS was going to save the world with MS Passport centralized authentication? Well now they will try again with another angle and tie into into Hailstorm.
If I were SAP etc I would be annoyed. SAP and Oracle are both pushing Linux to their customers. All those companies have dozens of other partners as well.
In fact if I were EDS I would be worried. In order to maintain 20% growth Microsoft will eventually have to move heavily into consulting (copying IBMs old form).
My guess is by speaking about Linux he immediately gets better press coverage.
Honestly I wouldn't use either Office or OpenOffice for these tasks. Nor would I dis your average office worker. I would check out Numeric and SCI Python. More on it Here . And a presentation from EuroPython where the BioSimGrid is manipulating and reporting on 2000 chunks of data that are each 5-20GB in size.
It hasn't quite caught up with MS Office 2003 in terms of functionality - but who cares? OpenOffice 2.0 is more that good enough for your average office worker. The suite is comparible to older versions of MS Office, which are functioning fine on millions of desktops around the world. The only things that I really disliked was the increased reliance on proprietary software (Java JRE) and the interoperability issues I experienced cutting and pasting tables between calc, write and impress. The Beta is currently a bit slow - however that should improve once it is released and any debugging code is removed. The user interface feels significantly nicer than the previous version; however, the dialog boxes are still not perfect. The suite uses Oasis file format - which may become the holy grail of document formats. HTML editing in write is far superior to MS Word and I recommend OpenOffice as a filter for word documents that require conversion to HTML or Oasis. Write includes a long awaited WordPerfect import filter. Overall I was extremely impressed with the new MS Office interoperability and the application's overall functionality.
* Very good new functionality * Oasis file format - may be the new killer feature * Meets the needs of your average text oriented office worker * Excellent MS Office Integration * Annoying Java JRE reliance. Either open source java or remove the dependancy. * Dialog boxes occasionally still feel clunky * Crashes and table copy and paste issues need to be cleaned up before gold release * Free and open source
I was involved in a OS/2 Migration for a Canadian bank. The business was shocked when they found out it was going to cost them 2 million more a year to support the windows infrastructure. In particular more full time staff were required for Active Directory management, security, and new version of the software for ATM management was required(Pegasus).
From some research I did a while ago the Windows has an api for financial peripherals. In particular the cash feeding machine (the guts of the device). Java also has a similar api. No such thing exists for python - but I suppose you could use Jython.
I used Brazil because I know that Brazil is switching to Linux. Poverty levels are high by Canadian levels (where I live). Yes I know this is relative.
The US government slammed Canada with Tarrifs on Lumber ($200M profit). Meanwhile you can hear a sucking sound as the Microsoft Monopoly sucks money south to Redmond ($2B profit).
Meanwhile the US is trying to force the US patent and copywrite system on the rest of the world. Brazil's embrase of open source is a smart move.
1) Do you really think that Microsoft has a 90% profit margin on Office? Yes they do - actually 86% - Ok I exagerated a bit
2. the price of software is insignificant compared to the other costs. That $100 WindowsXP license is peanuts compared to the $800 computer it's running on, or the annual salaries of the employees, or even the cost of the office space that computer is sitting on....
- Office + XP = $350 USD per year Not counting application server licenses, Exchange server license, SQL server etc. Just the basics. - Cost of $800 computer (depreciated over 4 years) = $200 USD per year Salary per week in Brazil $30
Cost of saving a child with Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS)(500,000 die per year): 10 cents
another example:
Canada's work force totaled 15.6 million people in 2001 (stats Canada). Microsoft Office + Windows profit margins are 86%
If 40% of the Canadian workforce use Office and Windows and an additional 20% just use Windows (conservative I think)
MSOffice + Win: $1,767,168,000 Win: $314,496,000 Total : $2,081,664,000 per year profits leaving Canada
Other Stats: 60% of all canadians were online in 2001 (not included - and the majority used windows)
Softwood lumber has been hit with constant US trade barriers in the past 10 years. Total profitability of BC Forestry in 2001 was $200 Million from selling world wide - not only the US. Plus this number includes hardwood lumber that is sent to Japan. Does anyone else think Canada is getting shafted by our friendly neighbours to the south?
3) The Microsoft employees that I know always talk about "killing" their competitors. 123 Killer, Netscape Killer. I'm just wondering who is next - I have a feeling it is Oracle.
He is simply spouting the same stuff that Microsoft has been saying for quite a while.
Also I don't think the questions were hard enough. Not enough questions about their monopoly.
eg
1)If you went to a car dealer and bought a car for $30,000 and you found out it only cost the dealer $3,000 would you feel ripped off? If yes - isn't that what MS does with MS Office?
2) How do you feel about governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software in countries where a large percent of the population is homeless and hungry (eg Brazil). Wouldn't the governments be better off spending the money locally on support than importing software from the US?
3) What companies/products are highest on the MS radar? Oracle/IBM/SAP. If you could grind one competitor into the dust which would it be?
AD is hard to migrate because it is very proprietary. (Mind you SAMBA can authenticate users).
For free software I would use 1) Linux as a firewall 2) Linux as a file and print server 3) Linux as a database server (Oracle, UDB, Postgresql) 4) Linux as an Application Server (Oracle/SAP/Peoplesoft) 5) Linux as a web server - Apache/Tux 6) Linux as a J2EE server (Websphere/JBOSS/BEA) 7) Linux as workstation (limited use) OpenOffice/etc
Enterprise software means different things to different people. I for example am working with a bank that uses DOS (and some win95) for all its tellers. The DOS machines almost have never received an significant outage. And surely linux is more stable that DOS/Win95...
Here is why: Oracle is now officially pushing linux on its customer base (they are slowing moving Oracle Hosting Services (OHS) over to a Linux based service. IBM is removing support for Solaris (Domino, Websphere, DB2). And Checkpoint is pushing Linux appliance servers. And so Sun is seeing an assult from all quarters.
In fact most people buy Oracle per CPU (typically $50K per CPU). Those running a machine with AMD Opterons running 64 bit Suse Linux and Oracle can expect to see a 4x improvement in performance per dollar of Oracle licensing fees. PowerPC also outperform Sun machines - and so many Banks are switching to AIX to reduce Oracle licensing fees.
What does that leave for Sun? To move up the value chain and start selling a system with a database integrated right into the OS. Sun will want a database that they can control though - so I bet the relationship with CA Ingris will sour (joint ventures almost never work) and they will switch to supporting Postgresql or another database they can dominate and buy up most of the developers.
Slashdot Mirror
We've setup 8 law firms on varying amounts of linux and open source tools.
Outlook + Exchange is poor at tracking time for lawyers although many of them use it (along with their crackberries).
I think the original poster of the article is looking for solutions. Not additional problems.
From your earlier post - you obviously think that windows is the only solution.
"You'd be surprised how many people just do not consider Macs an option. You need a computer, it's strictly PC and Windows, nothing else. So with the masses, I would say Mac is not an option, unless they are a little more savvy."
Terminal Server is a great solution for apps like accounting software as is vmware with an old win95 license. Cuts down on licensing costs. And by the way most office software use the standardard api - DirectX isn't part of it.
I would disagree to the extent that
1) There are ASP solutions fill your needs (a la Salesforce.com)
2) Wine can solve some problems
3) Terminal Server can solve other problems
If all else fails post a project on rentacoder. Its amazing how much php $500 can buy you.
Honestly one of the best ways to change the situation is to spend money and complain to the developers - open source or not.
A friend of mine has a company that supports about 8 or 10 law firms. All use more or less amounts of linux (mostly on the backend).
For example many lawyers use time tracking software such as time matters a time tracking and billing package that is windows based.
Postgresql is the database in the back end that Time matters supports. The performance is poor compared with MS SQL Server - mostly due to poor coding. What do you do? Call them up and complain.
It runs mostly under wine on the desktop, or typically we have it run under terminal server.
I would also have a look at www.osafoundation.org/ which will eventually produce a platform to do something like which you probably want to do. That is, easily customize your contact, scheduler and email system.
Another solution I've seen firms use in linux is based on Lotus Domino/Notes. Proprietary but runs in Linux. Often you can get 10 licenses bundled if you buy a new or used IBM server.
Microsoft has far more access to personal information than google. Hotmail for example has 100x as many users as gmail (close to 200 million at last count).
Type in a bogus website? Microsoft knows. Look up a word to be translated in Office 2003? Microsoft knows. Windows XP, Office 2003, Visual Studio, Encarta etc are all closely linked to the web services. With Microsoft Live Meeting they could know all about your business meetings as it is hosted offsite.
If one wanted to be paranoid (like the author of that article) one could question all the corporate email (100 Million users) going through those Exchange servers...
My point is that Microsoft has far more opportunity than google to abuse its power. Why doesn't CNET attack MS?
Zope/Plone offers "WebDAV, Apache support, BSD/Linux support and Active Directory-LDAP authentication with support for Windows and Mac clients"
After I graduated from college I decided to take a year off and went to Taiwan to teach young kids. Most of them were about 8 years old and went to school from 7AM until 6 PM and then went home and did 3-4 hours of homework. Weekends were made up of bushibans of math, science and english.
Does repetition work? Yes mostly. Learning to write Chinese is best taught by repetition. Any sport is best learned by repetition.
Being a brilliant scientist is that learned by repetition? No. The important thing seems to me is to leave some time for creativity and that is one thing Asian schools (assuming Korea/Singapore/Japan are similar) don't seem to get.
Understanding patterns, applying information from another part of your brain and another field to the task at hand etc. This is where creativity comes from. I don't think it can 100% be taught - but I think it can be inspired by good teachers.
Where are the Asian Nobel prize winners? How come Taiwan can take 60% of the US Electrical Engineering Phds (90s stat) but not produce top line physics research? That is probabably a question for another day.
From my weblog
Oracle's current work on Mozilla Lightning (Thunderbird Mail + Sunbird Calendar ++) should be interesting. Thunderbird is already a fairly decent mail client. Its main flaws from a large company perspective are its lack of calendaring and administration tools (pushing updates, profiles etc). If Oracle can fix these flaws and tie it to the Oracle database backend they should have a product they can sell.
What Oracle will need to do:
1) Fix the flaws and make it "good enough" for most business use
2) Create a connector to the Oracle database backend (something more efficient then IMAP)
3) Promote it in places where exchange is seen as a headache to be avoided: Universities, Small Businesses, Charities, Developing countries.. etc
4) Slowly move up the food chain until it is usable by Oracle's bread and butter clients - Financial institutions and large companies, & governments.
5) Tie the pricing to the customer's current licensing agreement - for example, Customers could get a reduced per CPU Oracle licensing charge if they use Lightning with the Oracle backend.
The trick will be to ensure that Mozilla Lightning supports POP3, IMAP, and Oracle DB Backend seamlessly so that the customer could slowly move up the food chain. Also important will be tools to do the Exchange to Thunderbird/Lightning migration in a background script, RIM(PDA) integration, and Exchange coexistence tools.
Opportunities
Security
One of the perceived weaknesses of Exchange is security. An opportunity will be to create a simple way to manage S/Mime or PGP certificates centrally. Copying and improving a system similar to the one that Lotus Notes uses might be a first step.
Automated Archiving
Financial institutions spend large amounts of money in software to manage archives to meet Sarbanes Oxley and FED regulations. If Oracle were to integrate tools for this then they might have a slight advantage over MS Exchange.
Recently 120 Drives were $49 CDN ($38 US). Bought that + a USB case for media backups (music and movies).
Nice thing is with Linux - Ubuntu/Debian - you only ever really need 1 cd and can download everything else you need with apt get.
For proprietary software I use the white paper cd cases and a CD box I got from ikea. Holds 150+ CDs/DVDs. Spindles are more likely to scratch a DVD/CD.
Remember when MS was going to save the world with MS Passport centralized authentication? Well now they will try again with another angle and tie into into Hailstorm.
If I were SAP etc I would be annoyed. SAP and Oracle are both pushing Linux to their customers. All those companies have dozens of other partners as well.
In fact if I were EDS I would be worried. In order to maintain 20% growth Microsoft will eventually have to move heavily into consulting (copying IBMs old form).
My guess is by speaking about Linux he immediately gets better press coverage.
Honestly I wouldn't use either Office or OpenOffice for these tasks. Nor would I dis your average office worker. I would check out Numeric and SCI Python. More on it Here . And a presentation from EuroPython where the BioSimGrid is manipulating and reporting on 2000 chunks of data that are each 5-20GB in size.
Another review:
It hasn't quite caught up with MS Office 2003 in terms of functionality - but who cares? OpenOffice 2.0 is more that good enough for your average office worker. The suite is comparible to older versions of MS Office, which are functioning fine on millions of desktops around the world. The only things that I really disliked was the increased reliance on proprietary software (Java JRE) and the interoperability issues I experienced cutting and pasting tables between calc, write and impress. The Beta is currently a bit slow - however that should improve once it is released and any debugging code is removed. The user interface feels significantly nicer than the previous version; however, the dialog boxes are still not perfect. The suite uses Oasis file format - which may become the holy grail of document formats. HTML editing in write is far superior to MS Word and I recommend OpenOffice as a filter for word documents that require conversion to HTML or Oasis. Write includes a long awaited WordPerfect import filter. Overall I was extremely impressed with the new MS Office interoperability and the application's overall functionality.
* Very good new functionality
* Oasis file format - may be the new killer feature
* Meets the needs of your average text oriented office worker
* Excellent MS Office Integration
* Annoying Java JRE reliance. Either open source java or remove the dependancy.
* Dialog boxes occasionally still feel clunky
* Crashes and table copy and paste issues need to be cleaned up before gold release
* Free and open source
7.7 out of 10
I was involved in a OS/2 Migration for a Canadian bank. The business was shocked when they found out it was going to cost them 2 million more a year to support the windows infrastructure. In particular more full time staff were required for Active Directory management, security, and new version of the software for ATM management was required(Pegasus).
From some research I did a while ago the Windows has an api for financial peripherals. In particular the cash feeding machine (the guts of the device). Java also has a similar api. No such thing exists for python - but I suppose you could use Jython.
His non profit site has lots of information: Rocky Mountain Institute. I would also search around the web for webcasts or interviews with him.
Oil is used in plastic and fabric and is the main component in fertalizer. Everything gets more expensive...
Don't only look at amount of RAM look at access speed from the CPU and CPU contention. AMD HyperTransport addresses this somewhat.
HP DL585 supports model 852 processors, running at 2.6GHz, 1GHz HyperTransport and PC3200, running at 400MHz. 64-32GB of RAM depending on speed.
HP
For a white box check out iWill (or Tyan motherboards)
iWill 8 Way Opteron supports 64 GB RAM
Quite a good book on what not to do. Kind of like a checklist of mistakes to avoid.
Gui Bloopers. Also I dislike Swing - but the Java Look and feel design guidelines are ok. Apple, and gnome have similar documents.
Are these the same as http://www.howtoons.org/?
I used Brazil because I know that Brazil is switching to Linux. Poverty levels are high by Canadian levels (where I live). Yes I know this is relative.
The US government slammed Canada with Tarrifs on Lumber ($200M profit). Meanwhile you can hear a sucking sound as the Microsoft Monopoly sucks money south to Redmond ($2B profit).
Meanwhile the US is trying to force the US patent and copywrite system on the rest of the world. Brazil's embrase of open source is a smart move.
1) Do you really think that Microsoft has a 90% profit margin on Office?
Yes they do - actually 86% - Ok I exagerated a bit
2. the price of software is insignificant compared to the other costs. That $100 WindowsXP license is peanuts compared to the $800 computer it's running on, or the annual salaries of the employees, or even the cost of the office space that computer is sitting on....
- Office + XP = $350 USD per year
Not counting application server licenses, Exchange server license, SQL server etc. Just the basics.
- Cost of $800 computer (depreciated over 4 years) = $200 USD per year
Salary per week in Brazil $30
Cost of saving a child with Oral
Rehydration Salts (ORS)(500,000 die per year): 10 cents
another example:
Canada's work force totaled 15.6 million people in 2001 (stats Canada).
Microsoft Office + Windows profit margins are 86%
If 40% of the Canadian workforce use Office and Windows and an additional 20% just use Windows (conservative I think)
MSOffice + Win: $1,767,168,000
Win: $314,496,000
Total : $2,081,664,000 per year profits leaving Canada
Other Stats:
60% of all canadians were online in 2001 (not included - and the majority used windows)
Softwood lumber has been hit with constant US trade barriers in the past 10 years. Total profitability of BC Forestry in 2001 was $200 Million from selling world wide - not only the US. Plus this number includes hardwood lumber that is sent to Japan. Does anyone else think Canada is getting shafted by our friendly neighbours to the south?
3) The Microsoft employees that I know always talk about "killing" their competitors. 123 Killer, Netscape Killer. I'm just wondering who is next - I have a feeling it is Oracle.
He is simply spouting the same stuff that Microsoft has been saying for quite a while.
Also I don't think the questions were hard enough. Not enough questions about their monopoly.
eg
1)If you went to a car dealer and bought a car for $30,000 and you found out it only cost the dealer $3,000 would you feel ripped off? If yes - isn't that what MS does with MS Office?
2) How do you feel about governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars on software in countries where a large percent of the population is homeless and hungry (eg Brazil). Wouldn't the governments be better off spending the money locally on support than importing software from the US?
3) What companies/products are highest on the MS radar? Oracle/IBM/SAP. If you could grind one competitor into the dust which would it be?
All will run on linux.
AD is hard to migrate because it is very proprietary. (Mind you SAMBA can authenticate users).
For free software I would use
1) Linux as a firewall
2) Linux as a file and print server
3) Linux as a database server (Oracle, UDB, Postgresql)
4) Linux as an Application Server (Oracle/SAP/Peoplesoft)
5) Linux as a web server - Apache/Tux
6) Linux as a J2EE server (Websphere/JBOSS/BEA)
7) Linux as workstation (limited use) OpenOffice/etc
Enterprise software means different things to different people. I for example am working with a bank that uses DOS (and some win95) for all its tellers. The DOS machines almost have never received an significant outage. And surely linux is more stable that DOS/Win95...
Not to mention he can save 750 Million in taxes.
Actually I forecasted this on my weblog last week.
Here is why: Oracle is now officially pushing linux on its customer base (they are slowing moving Oracle Hosting Services (OHS) over to a Linux based service. IBM is removing support for Solaris (Domino, Websphere, DB2). And Checkpoint is pushing Linux appliance servers. And so Sun is seeing an assult from all quarters.
In fact most people buy Oracle per CPU (typically $50K per CPU). Those running a machine with AMD Opterons running 64 bit Suse Linux and Oracle can expect to see a 4x improvement in performance per dollar of Oracle licensing fees. PowerPC also outperform Sun machines - and so many Banks are switching to AIX to reduce Oracle licensing fees.
What does that leave for Sun? To move up the value chain and start selling a system with a database integrated right into the OS. Sun will want a database that they can control though - so I bet the relationship with CA Ingris will sour (joint ventures almost never work) and they will switch to supporting Postgresql or another database they can dominate and buy up most of the developers.