1. Getting married 2. Fathering multiple children 3. Buying a house with a garden 4. Developing social relations with non IT people
Lets face it. To keep on top of the IT field you have to work fulltime++ at the dayjob with technology that is current, up-to-date and mainstream and then go home and spend evenings & weekends exploring bleeding edge technology and learning new languages, tools, frameworks etc.
That is easy enough when you are 25, live in a small apartment full of computers and your "girlfriend" is an neural network you coded yourself from an AI book you read.
But is gets harder as the children wants to be driven to sports, their school wants parents to contribute and attend various events, the wife wants the occasional romantic weekend holiday just the two of you, while the children is at the grandparents and the house & garden needs care & attention etc.
I once spoke to (tried to pull) a smart, bright, knowledgeable, beautiful female programmer, who worked in the software development department of a very large well known manufacturer of hospital equipment. The sort of equipment you hook up to patients and use to monitor their well-being, or interconnect to their bodies in various ways.
She told me she had been admitted to hospital once and been hooked up to such a machine. She had felt very relieved when she saw it was made by a competing manufacturer and not her own employer, as she knew full well how crappy the software in the machines made by her employer was made.
She relaxed in the hospital bed, hoping thee competitors had better software that her own employer.
If the hypothesis is true and some evil badguys can turn a laptop into a bomb capable of bringing down an airplane, why will laptops be banned from the cabin only?
Why is a "bomb-concealed-as-laptop" not a threat to the airplane when carried in the cargo compartment of the airplane inside someones checked luggage?
For the last couple years I have used a Jolla phone as my primary phone.
When i got it I expected it to be a shaky unstable alpha/beta/pre-release product, I bought it mostly out of curiosity, but to my surprise it worked well enough to use as a daily phone.
In some ways it works better than say an Android, for instance the underlying Linux OS is much more readily available for direct use by the enduser.
Is there a recent Thinkpad that can drive todays external monitors with any kind of acceptable quality?
If the answer is yes, is it one of those fully laden models costing 3x times the price of the bare bones configuration?
I have a T40. It is unable to display a sharp picture free from shadows and other artifacts at any resolution above 1280x1024. That's really disappointing and prevents me from using the thinkpad as a desktop replacement. I know a handfull of people with T4[012] laptops. All their thinkpads are equally underperforming in this area. One of them works for IBM and took the issue up with internal IT and was told that this is just the way these machines are.
I am typing this on a Dell D620 laptop that drives two TFT screens in a dual monitor setup. One is 1280x1024 the other 1600x1200. The image is sharp and artifact free on both monitors.
Of course if people routinely block traffic from certain areas of the world with a high concentration of spammers and the like, then it is going to hurt the honest people who happen to be living in the same neighbourhood as the spammers. It is called "collateral damage" by some military organisations.
It looks as if Florids is high on the list of areas to have all its Internet traffic blocked, if we want to block spammers.
I find the Apple advertisements that claimed the G5 is the "first personal computer with a 64 bit address bus" quite funny, especially when I view them in Netscape on my 1997 SGI Indigo2 with a 64 bit MIPS R10000 CPU;-)
So are a "personal computer" by definition a peice of hardware that can run either MacOS or Windozz on one of their incarnations?
If the criteria is that the machine can be the sole computer vehicle for the bulk of your paid work, as well as for casual webbrowsing, editing of snapshots of your cat, children etc. then a lot of UNIX workstations especially from SUN and SGI are in use as "personal computers" at home and in the office by a lot of people around the world. Themajority of these has been 64 bit since the start of the 90-ties, or the middle of the 90-ties if you postponed buying one until they got cheap;-)
Try opening the word-format file in different wordprocessors.
In Office XP on an XP machine the pagenumbers for the chapters in the table of content does not line up vertically!
Also there are no space in between the chapter and sub-chapter numbers and their titles in the table of contents. This one can be either a file-format problem or plain bad taste;-)
They do line up in OpenOffice 1.1 on Windoss XP.
In StarOffice 5.2 on Linux the "Table of Contents" header in on a page by itself before the page with the content of the table of contents!
It is interesting that M$ thwmself cannot manage to create word documents that look correct on the most recent version of their own products ie. Office XP on a Windozz XP machine!
So the next time the US is invading a country, the country to be invaded can get an accurate assesment of what the US military literaly "has in store for it" by flying a reconnaissance airplane over each US military cargo ship and past each US cargo plane to collect a complete and accutary inventory list of the cargo onboard the ship or airplane!
As I read the part of the report starting at page 140, that chronicles the obtain wing photos or not story, this is what happened:
The request for photo-help from the military was denied by management because such help is very expensive and the managers had not received the impression that not obtaining these photos could very well lead to the loss of the orbiter.
Instead of explaining the urgency of the matter to the relevant management, the engineers appealed to other managers, aparently including their own high level line managers instead of the STS-107 mission project managers, and through these unofficial channels got the military to look into obtaining the images for them.
When the project managers discovered these unoffocial egnineers to military contacts they stopped it due to the unofficial nature of the contacts. This is chronicled on and around page 153
The engineers then curled up in fetal position under their tables, figuratively speaking that is, and dared not press the issue further with management. See, among other places, the "unsent email" on page 157
Now isn't that just a little bit i-responsible?
Knowing with all your engineering heart and knowledge that something terrible is likely to happen to somebody else very soon, but not daring to voice your concern to upper management in a sufficiently assertive and aggressive way as to get their attention and get them to do what has to be done to prevent the likely disaster, just because they are upper management and you are a lowly engineer, and your first feeble attempts to get something done has come to nothing, because you did it in such a low-key and sneaky way that your actions was mistaken for mere childish misbehaviour.
Back in the 90'ties companies started demanding that applications be created as browser based programs running on a server rather than as Windows programs running on the users desktop PCs, because this removed the need to upgrade windows applications on the users machines.
Such upgrades are very costly both in employee time wasted while the upgrade takes place and while the resulting problems are resolved, and in system adminitsrator time.
Wasting 2-4 hours of employee time for every desktop PC that needs to have a piece of software upgraded is rather common. And the least you can expect is to have to reboot your machine and waste one hour while it reboots, the upgrades are performed by the startup script, and you resume your work afterwards.
When something turns bad during upgrading, peoples desktop PCs can be more or less out of order for several days, which is massively expensive for the company.
Imagine the cost of doing this in an organisation with several thousand PC's. If you do upgrades once a month to some program and two out of these twelve yearly upgrades screws up somehow (these are common figures in the M$ companies I have experience with), then you have wasted 10x2+2*8=36 work hours for each employee per year. That is roughly a full work week wasted per year per employee because your company choose to use windows desktop "productivity software".
When you know that upgrading the windows software in your organisation carries a one out of five risc. of making the entire organisation unable to work for a day or more, then you start being reluctant to do upgrades, and you start to try to bundle them together in vacation times etc. to lower the cost to the organisation. This means that your employees has to wait longer for bug fixes and much needed new functionality, than if you could upgrade as soon as these are available.
So being able to install and upgrade for every user by upgrading on a single server, looks extremely attractive from the business side of the fence. Even if an upgrade on the server goes bad, roll back to the previous version only takes a couple of minutes, where you restore the content of a few directories from a zip with the previous version.
You can also go all fancy and have several servers, each power full enough to handle the entire workload, then perform upgrades on an off-line server and swap this for the currently online server after you have tested the upgrade. Then you can even swap back to the previous version in case of unforseen trouble, by simply substituting the old server, that you have kept around just in case, for the new one.
The RIAA apears to want to put the fear to create any sort of software than can in any way be used to diminish their earnings, no matter what else it can be used for, into all programmers worldwide.
Bullying individuals, is not only cheaper for RIAA than attacking companies with adequate legal defense capabilities, is is sending the message to programmers worldwide just as well or maybe even better, because the victims are more like you and me.
Why didn't university help him?
Were they afraid to help him, or just plain indifferent?
It would seem that morally the right thing for the university to do would be to pay for an adequate legal defense and counter attack for their student, because the student has been a very good example for the other students in the university by creating a usefull piece of software for the benefit of his fellow students, and are being victimized because of it.
Maybe the university is afraid that if they helped the student, half the other students and their parents would be begging the university to pay their legal fees, in all sorts of cases that did not merit the universities help. We will never know, unless someone gets an interview with the persons in the university administration who made the decision not to help their student.
For close to a decade I have worked as a software developer for various companies, and in the course of that period I have read quite a few books and papers on software project management, process and the like, as well as participated in conferences and study groups on the topic. Both theorethical and anecdotical evidence points towards the way we organise software development to be the main limiter to quality and creativity.
In most software companies you get promoted for political aptitude with little or no regard to yoru knowledge of how to create software and just as important how to organise software development teams well and how to get a mutually benefitical relationship with the clients during and after the project.
Such people tend to beleive urban legends such as in bygone days, in a country far from here, there was a software project that used the waterfall process and finished on time, within budget and with a happy customer.
They do this despite the reasons why waterfall processes leads to nowhere pleasent having been throughly documented in everything from scholary texts on organisational theory to excessive numbers of first person narrated horror stories. And who can blame them. They got promoted to middle or upper management, not because they knew a thing about organising software projects, but because they were better politicans than the next guy, so it would not further their carear if they were to sit down and read their first book on software project management throry.
The reason the majority of programmers in industry seem to be young, especially at the larger financial/insurance/whatever IT departments, is that most programmers leaves the field 7 years +/- 2 years after having started his/her first fulltime software job.
This is mostly due to excessive disillusion about the pathetic state of software development project organisation. Ie. when you are facing your third broken-by-design waterfall deathmarch project with a clueless project office, projectmanagers and vice presidents that think software development can be threated like a house building project etc., and you have gained enough experience to recognise the symptoms right from the start of the project, yet find yourself without any hope of improving the situation, then you tend to leave the field completely disillusioned.
People either leave the field outright, go to work for small software product companies with a small number of other experienced people serving a small number of clients, get into teaching or research positions in academia, or become independent consultants.
Go read these to further enhance your spleen and general disillusionment of the sad state of affairs within the software field:
"Deathmarch" by Ed Yourdon
http://www.yourdon.com/books/DeathMarch/index.html
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201 835959/qid=1052528704/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-440775 4-3733639?v=glance&s=books
Hope, Belief and Wizardry by Marcus Voelter
http://www.voelter.de/data/pub/hbw.pdf
Within the last coouple of years it has become possible to run mainframe software using the CICS transaction manager on SUN hardware. There are a lot of large scale applications using CICS running at large companies worldwide eg. at banks. Before this became a possibility, you could only run these applications on IBM mainframes and compatible mainframes, effectively locking the users of these applications into the IBM mainframe platform.
This area is the last large market segment IBM mainframes has, where they are the only player, so this is a serious threat to the IBM mainframes and therefore to all the services&support contracts, and peripheral systems that comes with IBM mainframe ownership.
The recent 100+ CPU servers from SUN and compatible Fujitsu machines as well as their mid-range machines with "hot-swap everything", and everything possible done to make software running on them 24x7x365 capable even while the hardware and OS is being upgraded, is another area where SUN is fast becoming a serious threat to the marketshare and market dominance of AS/400 and mainframes from IBM.
For these reasons alone it would be a very smart move if IBM were to acquire SUN, because it will remove a very serious competitor for from the marketplace.
Well yes, the service and support route is often mentioned, especially as something that was common up until the pc's came on the scene with their scrink wrapped software. It is still used in the mainframe software business by CA, IBM et. all. with sizeable amounts of money changing being paid for yearly "subscriptions" for the right to use th esoftware as well as access to service and support from its manufactor.
However apart from cygnus, linuxcare and a few more companies that sold service and support for other peoples open source programs and sort of crashed and burned during the.com age, are there a sizeable number of contemporary succesfull cases especially where the program authors ran the service and support business themself?
I did look for such cases and while I found some very small mom&pop style operations that apered to operate succesfully, I did not find a huge number of these, and not really anything larger than this.
I am looking for a way to support a team of around ten people who will work on the product itself on an ongoing base, but have not seen examples of operations doing this well with the income from a service and support organisation for an open source program.
For a widely used program, the authors showcased would risc. receiving a lot of email from end users thanking them, asking for help or screaming at them. Due to google and friends, including the authors email in the credits is not neccesary in order for the end users to easily reach him/her.
Of course feedback from end users is nice for the programmer and leads to improved software if the programmer is inclided to listen to the users, however receiving several thousand emails a day from end users of a widely used piece of software would be anyones nightmare.
Are there any known cases of program ideas, in contrast to projects projects trying to copy and improve the idea of an existing program, that was made available as open source from the start of?
If yes, how did the people behind the project earn enough money off the idea to at least pay their living expenses and some more to compensate for the risc. they took that failure of the project would lead with them to have lived without income for a while?
I ask because I am at present engaged in producing a piece of software that is not a copy of an existing product, and cannot think of a way to make a living out of it if I release it as open source.
I have a Hitachi CM753 19" Invar CRT from 1998. It has seen at least 40 hours use a week for those five years and has only started to become slightly corner unsharp during the last month. It runs at 1600x1200 with a refresh rate of 85 updates per second, and yes the holes in the invar plate are really small enough and close enough together that there are roughly 1600x1200 of them.
The image quality of the good trinitron monitors I have experienced including 20"-21" ones rebranded as HP or SGI and 19" and 21" Sony Fxxx and similar quality level branded ones has started to detoriate after two years use at 40+ hours a week. They do not become unsharp as such, just really annoyingly tiresome in some strange way.
Unfortunately it is very hard to buy CRT monitors these days that are not of the trinitron type (wires for diffraction layer), only Hitachi and to some degree Philips markets the good quality Invar models (a thin sheet of the alloy invar with lots od holes as the diffraction layer) anymore and they are hard to find.
It would be nice to know for how long I can expect an LCD to last before its image quality detoriates enough to make me want to relocate it to server duty.
Slashdot Mirror
IT Career killers:
1. Getting married
2. Fathering multiple children
3. Buying a house with a garden
4. Developing social relations with non IT people
Lets face it. To keep on top of the IT field you have to work fulltime++ at the dayjob with technology that is current, up-to-date and mainstream and then go home and spend evenings & weekends exploring bleeding edge technology and learning new languages, tools, frameworks etc.
That is easy enough when you are 25, live in a small apartment full of computers and your "girlfriend" is an neural network you coded yourself from an AI book you read.
But is gets harder as the children wants to be driven to sports, their school wants parents to contribute and attend various events, the wife wants the occasional romantic weekend holiday just the two of you, while the children is at the grandparents and the house & garden needs care & attention etc.
I once spoke to (tried to pull) a smart, bright, knowledgeable, beautiful female programmer, who worked in the software development department of a very large well known manufacturer of hospital equipment. The sort of equipment you hook up to patients and use to monitor their well-being, or interconnect to their bodies in various ways.
She told me she had been admitted to hospital once and been hooked up to such a machine. She had felt very relieved when she saw it was made by a competing manufacturer and not her own employer, as she knew full well how crappy the software in the machines made by her employer was made.
She relaxed in the hospital bed, hoping thee competitors had better software that her own employer.
Do they also exhibit political and economic failure?
In that case large areas of present day Sweden can be seen as a huge open-air museum of failure :-(
Google: "swedish immigration policy" or something along those lines, if unaware of what I refer to.
If the hypothesis is true and some evil badguys can turn a laptop into a bomb capable of bringing down an airplane, why will laptops be banned from the cabin only?
Why is a "bomb-concealed-as-laptop" not a threat to the airplane when carried in the cargo compartment of the airplane inside someones checked luggage?
For the last couple years I have used a Jolla phone as my primary phone.
When i got it I expected it to be a shaky unstable alpha/beta/pre-release product, I bought it mostly out of curiosity, but to my surprise it worked well enough to use as a daily phone.
In some ways it works better than say an Android, for instance the underlying Linux OS is much more readily available for direct use by the enduser.
Is there a recent Thinkpad that can drive todays external monitors with any kind of acceptable quality?
If the answer is yes, is it one of those fully laden models costing 3x times the price of the bare bones configuration?
I have a T40. It is unable to display a sharp picture free from shadows and other artifacts at any resolution above 1280x1024. That's really disappointing and prevents me from using the thinkpad as a desktop replacement. I know a handfull of people with T4[012] laptops. All their thinkpads are equally underperforming in this area. One of them works for IBM and took the issue up with internal IT and was told that this is just the way these machines are.
I am typing this on a Dell D620 laptop that drives two TFT screens in a dual monitor setup. One is 1280x1024 the other 1600x1200. The image is sharp and artifact free on both monitors.
Of course if people routinely block traffic from certain areas of the world with a high concentration of spammers and the like, then it is going to hurt the honest people who happen to be living in the same neighbourhood as the spammers. It is called "collateral damage" by some military organisations.
It looks as if Florids is high on the list of areas to have all its Internet traffic blocked, if we want to block spammers.
Business Week Are Hurricanes Swamping Spammers? Lots of folks think the hits that the Sunshine State (aka Spam State) have taken slowed the volume. Probably isn't so, though
Spamhaus United States Heads Towards Legalization of Spam
The RegisterFlorida spammers sue anti-spam groups
What an interesting match we are going to witness:
The "Chess master" vs. "the KGB master"
"It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."
Ohh like powerpoint slides?
Ohh like the Nasa department for Space Shuttles
"post-dotcom stress disorder"
That is exactly what I suffer from. Thanks for putting a name to my suffering.
No, all for a mansion and a Gulfstream V airplane for each member of the board, for the CEO and maybe a few other "lucky executives".
So are a "personal computer" by definition a peice of hardware that can run either MacOS or Windozz on one of their incarnations?
If the criteria is that the machine can be the sole computer vehicle for the bulk of your paid work, as well as for casual webbrowsing, editing of snapshots of your cat, children etc. then a lot of UNIX workstations especially from SUN and SGI are in use as "personal computers" at home and in the office by a lot of people around the world. Themajority of these has been 64 bit since the start of the 90-ties, or the middle of the 90-ties if you postponed buying one until they got cheap ;-)
Try opening the word-format file in different wordprocessors.
In Office XP on an XP machine the pagenumbers for the chapters in the table of content does not line up vertically!
Also there are no space in between the chapter and sub-chapter numbers and their titles in the table of contents. This one can be either a file-format problem or plain bad taste
They do line up in OpenOffice 1.1 on Windoss XP .
In StarOffice 5.2 on Linux the "Table of Contents" header in on a page by itself before the page with the content of the table of contents!
It is interesting that M$ thwmself cannot manage to create word documents that look correct on the most recent version of their own products ie. Office XP on a Windozz XP machine!
So the next time the US is invading a country, the country to be invaded can get an accurate assesment of what the US military literaly "has in store for it" by flying a reconnaissance airplane over each US military cargo ship and past each US cargo plane to collect a complete and accutary inventory list of the cargo onboard the ship or airplane!
Very convenient ;-)
As I read the part of the report starting at page 140, that chronicles the obtain wing photos or not story, this is what happened:
The request for photo-help from the military was denied by management because such help is very expensive and the managers had not received the impression that not obtaining these photos could very well lead to the loss of the orbiter.
Instead of explaining the urgency of the matter to the relevant management, the engineers appealed to other managers, aparently including their own high level line managers instead of the STS-107 mission project managers, and through these unofficial channels got the military to look into obtaining the images for them.
When the project managers discovered these unoffocial egnineers to military contacts they stopped it due to the unofficial nature of the contacts. This is chronicled on and around page 153
The engineers then curled up in fetal position under their tables, figuratively speaking that is, and dared not press the issue further with management. See, among other places, the "unsent email" on page 157
Now isn't that just a little bit i-responsible?
Knowing with all your engineering heart and knowledge that something terrible is likely to happen to somebody else very soon, but not daring to voice your concern to upper management in a sufficiently assertive and aggressive way as to get their attention and get them to do what has to be done to prevent the likely disaster, just because they are upper management and you are a lowly engineer, and your first feeble attempts to get something done has come to nothing, because you did it in such a low-key and sneaky way that your actions was mistaken for mere childish misbehaviour.
Making Windozz 95 useable - now that is an accomplishment!
Such upgrades are very costly both in employee time wasted while the upgrade takes place and while the resulting problems are resolved, and in system adminitsrator time.
Wasting 2-4 hours of employee time for every desktop PC that needs to have a piece of software upgraded is rather common. And the least you can expect is to have to reboot your machine and waste one hour while it reboots, the upgrades are performed by the startup script, and you resume your work afterwards.
When something turns bad during upgrading, peoples desktop PCs can be more or less out of order for several days, which is massively expensive for the company.
Imagine the cost of doing this in an organisation with several thousand PC's. If you do upgrades once a month to some program and two out of these twelve yearly upgrades screws up somehow (these are common figures in the M$ companies I have experience with), then you have wasted 10x2+2*8=36 work hours for each employee per year. That is roughly a full work week wasted per year per employee because your company choose to use windows desktop "productivity software".
When you know that upgrading the windows software in your organisation carries a one out of five risc. of making the entire organisation unable to work for a day or more, then you start being reluctant to do upgrades, and you start to try to bundle them together in vacation times etc. to lower the cost to the organisation. This means that your employees has to wait longer for bug fixes and much needed new functionality, than if you could upgrade as soon as these are available.
So being able to install and upgrade for every user by upgrading on a single server, looks extremely attractive from the business side of the fence. Even if an upgrade on the server goes bad, roll back to the previous version only takes a couple of minutes, where you restore the content of a few directories from a zip with the previous version.
You can also go all fancy and have several servers, each power full enough to handle the entire workload, then perform upgrades on an off-line server and swap this for the currently online server after you have tested the upgrade. Then you can even swap back to the previous version in case of unforseen trouble, by simply substituting the old server, that you have kept around just in case, for the new one.
Very true.
The RIAA apears to want to put the fear to create any sort of software than can in any way be used to diminish their earnings, no matter what else it can be used for, into all programmers worldwide.
Bullying individuals, is not only cheaper for RIAA than attacking companies with adequate legal defense capabilities, is is sending the message to programmers worldwide just as well or maybe even better, because the victims are more like you and me.
Why didn't university help him?
Were they afraid to help him, or just plain indifferent?
It would seem that morally the right thing for the university to do would be to pay for an adequate legal defense and counter attack for their student, because the student has been a very good example for the other students in the university by creating a usefull piece of software for the benefit of his fellow students, and are being victimized because of it.
Maybe the university is afraid that if they helped the student, half the other students and their parents would be begging the university to pay their legal fees, in all sorts of cases that did not merit the universities help. We will never know, unless someone gets an interview with the persons in the university administration who made the decision not to help their student.
In most software companies you get promoted for political aptitude with little or no regard to yoru knowledge of how to create software and just as important how to organise software development teams well and how to get a mutually benefitical relationship with the clients during and after the project.
Such people tend to beleive urban legends such as in bygone days, in a country far from here, there was a software project that used the waterfall process and finished on time, within budget and with a happy customer.
They do this despite the reasons why waterfall processes leads to nowhere pleasent having been throughly documented in everything from scholary texts on organisational theory to excessive numbers of first person narrated horror stories. And who can blame them. They got promoted to middle or upper management, not because they knew a thing about organising software projects, but because they were better politicans than the next guy, so it would not further their carear if they were to sit down and read their first book on software project management throry.
This is mostly due to excessive disillusion about the pathetic state of software development project organisation. Ie. when you are facing your third broken-by-design waterfall deathmarch project with a clueless project office, projectmanagers and vice presidents that think software development can be threated like a house building project etc., and you have gained enough experience to recognise the symptoms right from the start of the project, yet find yourself without any hope of improving the situation, then you tend to leave the field completely disillusioned.
People either leave the field outright, go to work for small software product companies with a small number of other experienced people serving a small number of clients, get into teaching or research positions in academia, or become independent consultants.
Go read these to further enhance your spleen and general disillusionment of the sad state of affairs within the software field:l 1 835959/qid=1052528704/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-440775 4-3733639?v=glance&s=books
"Deathmarch" by Ed Yourdon http://www.yourdon.com/books/DeathMarch/index.htm
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020
Hope, Belief and Wizardry by Marcus Voelter http://www.voelter.de/data/pub/hbw.pdf
This area is the last large market segment IBM mainframes has, where they are the only player, so this is a serious threat to the IBM mainframes and therefore to all the services&support contracts, and peripheral systems that comes with IBM mainframe ownership.
The recent 100+ CPU servers from SUN and compatible Fujitsu machines as well as their mid-range machines with "hot-swap everything", and everything possible done to make software running on them 24x7x365 capable even while the hardware and OS is being upgraded, is another area where SUN is fast becoming a serious threat to the marketshare and market dominance of AS/400 and mainframes from IBM.
For these reasons alone it would be a very smart move if IBM were to acquire SUN, because it will remove a very serious competitor for from the marketplace.
However apart from cygnus, linuxcare and a few more companies that sold service and support for other peoples open source programs and sort of crashed and burned during the
I did look for such cases and while I found some very small mom&pop style operations that apered to operate succesfully, I did not find a huge number of these, and not really anything larger than this.
I am looking for a way to support a team of around ten people who will work on the product itself on an ongoing base, but have not seen examples of operations doing this well with the income from a service and support organisation for an open source program.
Of course feedback from end users is nice for the programmer and leads to improved software if the programmer is inclided to listen to the users, however receiving several thousand emails a day from end users of a widely used piece of software would be anyones nightmare.
If yes, how did the people behind the project earn enough money off the idea to at least pay their living expenses and some more to compensate for the risc. they took that failure of the project would lead with them to have lived without income for a while?
I ask because I am at present engaged in producing a piece of software that is not a copy of an existing product, and cannot think of a way to make a living out of it if I release it as open source.
I have a Hitachi CM753 19" Invar CRT from 1998. It has seen at least 40 hours use a week for those five years and has only started to become slightly corner unsharp during the last month. It runs at 1600x1200 with a refresh rate of 85 updates per second, and yes the holes in the invar plate are really small enough and close enough together that there are roughly 1600x1200 of them.
The image quality of the good trinitron monitors I have experienced including 20"-21" ones rebranded as HP or SGI and 19" and 21" Sony Fxxx and similar quality level branded ones has started to detoriate after two years use at 40+ hours a week. They do not become unsharp as such, just really annoyingly tiresome in some strange way.
Unfortunately it is very hard to buy CRT monitors these days that are not of the trinitron type (wires for diffraction layer), only Hitachi and to some degree Philips markets the good quality Invar models (a thin sheet of the alloy invar with lots od holes as the diffraction layer) anymore and they are hard to find.
It would be nice to know for how long I can expect an LCD to last before its image quality detoriates enough to make me want to relocate it to server duty.