If I use bug bombs in my house, my house will still be standing afterwards. It will not at all affect the structural integrity of the house. The critters inside might not be too happy though.
Global warming will not harm the Earth but the critters on the surface (you and me) might find it a little uncomfortable.
It's not the arctic ice cap that's a problem. It's the greenland ice cap (the biggest), and the ones in alaska, northern canada, russia and the scandinavian countries. The melting of those ice caps will raise ocean levels significantly (somewhere between 2 and 6 metres depending on who you listen to).
I'm not sure why the Slashdot crowd is so vituperative about this article. Laura Didio's past rantings aside, this article basically says that most corporate TCO comparisons are inaccurate because the corporations don't have enough information to make a proper comparison.
As a long time consultant, I'd say that the article is pretty accurate. It's rare that IT projects are forced to do a proper business case to justify the expenditure.
It sounds like HP is forgetting that these other companies are businesses and therefore have to make business decisions.
If IBM and Sun saw a competitive advantage in releasing their code under the GPL, they would. It would be cheaper for them that way as they wouldn't have had to pay a bunch of lawyers to write up their current licensing schemes.
Whether it is a mindshare advantage, a market position adavantage or whatever, these companies believe that their licenses make them more money.
Asking them to relinquish this competitive advantage would be like asking HP to give away their hardware for free. In fact, in the interest of furthering the free software movement, I call on HP to start the free hardware movement: start giving away all HP machines (desktops, laptops, servers, printers, printer cartridges, etc.) for free in order to benefit the free hardware
Interesting article, but I think it has very little to do with the life of the average programmer.
Let's face it, there are very few applications that would actually benefit significantly from changes to the O/S kernel. Certainly Google is one of them, but how many Google's are there?
If you're writing a web store, an internal corporate application or most other applications, choosing Linux just because you can hack on the kernel is not really relevant.
Marc Lawson seems to be a famous UK journalist (he works for the BBC)
Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. Note that's the WWW, not the internet. TBL's main contribution was HTTP and HTML. It's come a long way since then but it's still all based on the same technologies.
The first, as you mentioned is mindshare. No matter how hard Apple tries, their office suite will never be more than marginally noticed by mainstream IT managers.
The second, and more important, is that writing a full office suite is not a trivial undertaking. The combined person-years that have gone into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and anything else included in Office would be far beyond the means of Apple to duplicate. And even if they did have that kind of money (and with recent iPod sales, maybe they do), it would still not be as cost effective as the status quo.
The third reason, realted to the second, is that development of an office suite would take a very long time. Would you buy an Apple if some absolutely necessary piece of software like a word processor wouldn't be available for two to three years? Meaning that every desktop in your company would need to have two computers, one for whatever they could do on the Apple and one for everything else.
Apple's best hope if Microsoft were to pull support for Office for the Mac (which I doubt they would do) would be to work on OpenOffice until it works with Microsoft's new formats and works very well on the Mac. Only then would they MAYBE have a chance.
Well, for starters, I wasn't buying my computer in Australia or Britain, but in Canada.
And as for all of the features you metionned, we needed a machine for light word processing and some budgeting. Where was the Mac low-cost version that didn't have the ability to soft-eject a disk, multiple monitor support, networking and a bunch of other completely useless stuff?
As for calling bullshit on the price, were you at the University of Waterloo Math Society meeting in September, 1988 (can't remember the exact date). If you weren't, how the hell would you know what prices were quoted to us by whatever salepeople we were dealing with?
The problem isn't littering space which, as you point out, is pretty much a non-issue.
The problem is poluting low-Earth orbit, a narrow sphere around our planet. Putting even the most malicious space-based weapons somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri is no big deal. Ading a bunch of items to an already crowded area including the ISS, most shuttle flight paths, communications satellites, etc. would probably not be the best idea.
The article is a troll. I don't know who the author is, but he doesn't write very well.
Personally, I agree with his sentiments that Microsoft does not deserve to be reviled by the developer community; but throwing around insults to everybody who has taken a bite out of Microsoft (Sun, the EU) doesn't contribute to reasoned debate.
In 1988, I was at university and a campus group I was involved with was looking at buying a PC for our office. The prices were (approximately) as follows:
Fully loaded PC (including printer): $3,000 Fully loaded Mac (including printer: $14,000
Mac isn't losing the market share war now, they lost the market share war 20 years ago.
No, you choose a car based on: what do you need it to do? how much does it cost? and in some cases, is it cool?
For all of those years, Windows did not look as pretty as Mac OS, but it did everything that 99% of the market needed to do and did it at 20% of the price.
It's not a question of "do you want a good car", the question is "do you need a Mercedes SL600 Roadster to drive three blocks to the corner store"
But what if your customers have been conditioned to believe that all software should be free as in beer?
Or to put it another way, if you're a true Linux believer, are you more likely to use CorelDraw or Inkscape? OpenOffice or MS-Office?
We worry about kids not entering the software industry and yet the clear message coming from the most vocal part of the industry is that you should work hard and give away all of your work for free.
Software development, however, will not be affected.
And how exactly will software development not be affected if the community expects the developer to give away not only the products but also the source code for his software for free.
Perhaps that the damage that most hackers do is not criminal but civil.
The guy who wrote the Sasser worm didn't break any laws other than anti-hacking laws, but he did cause billions of dollars in damage.
And before you suggest that we just sue the guy, remember that most people are lucky if they make more than a few million in a lifetime. If you inlcude that the guy has to pay living expenses and restrict him from declaring bankruptcy, he'll still only pay off a fraction of a percent of the damage he caused.
Why exactly would I want to go the time, expense and trouble of reading Kaplan's book just to find out whether or not he thinks that his lawsuit is justified?
I think I can guess: according to Kaplan, his lawsuit is the most important lawsuit in the history of the world and is cause for a violent revolution against Microsoft.
All companies try to dominate their market. That's the point. Microsoft is just better at it.
And they enter new markets because it is the nature of companies to want to grow. Once you own a market and you've reached market saturation, there's nothing else to do but enter a new market.
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Who said anything about the Earth being fragile?
If I use bug bombs in my house, my house will still be standing afterwards. It will not at all affect the structural integrity of the house. The critters inside might not be too happy though.
Global warming will not harm the Earth but the critters on the surface (you and me) might find it a little uncomfortable.
It's not the arctic ice cap that's a problem. It's the greenland ice cap (the biggest), and the ones in alaska, northern canada, russia and the scandinavian countries. The melting of those ice caps will raise ocean levels significantly (somewhere between 2 and 6 metres depending on who you listen to).
actually, since it is only c that is squared, and c is a constant (the speed of light), it is always wrong.
Try empathy
I'm not sure why the Slashdot crowd is so vituperative about this article. Laura Didio's past rantings aside, this article basically says that most corporate TCO comparisons are inaccurate because the corporations don't have enough information to make a proper comparison.
As a long time consultant, I'd say that the article is pretty accurate. It's rare that IT projects are forced to do a proper business case to justify the expenditure.
It sounds like HP is forgetting that these other companies are businesses and therefore have to make business decisions.
If IBM and Sun saw a competitive advantage in releasing their code under the GPL, they would. It would be cheaper for them that way as they wouldn't have had to pay a bunch of lawyers to write up their current licensing schemes.
Whether it is a mindshare advantage, a market position adavantage or whatever, these companies believe that their licenses make them more money.
Asking them to relinquish this competitive advantage would be like asking HP to give away their hardware for free. In fact, in the interest of furthering the free software movement, I call on HP to start the free hardware movement: start giving away all HP machines (desktops, laptops, servers, printers, printer cartridges, etc.) for free in order to benefit the free hardware
Interesting article, but I think it has very little to do with the life of the average programmer.
Let's face it, there are very few applications that would actually benefit significantly from changes to the O/S kernel. Certainly Google is one of them, but how many Google's are there?
If you're writing a web store, an internal corporate application or most other applications, choosing Linux just because you can hack on the kernel is not really relevant.
Marc Lawson seems to be a famous UK journalist (he works for the BBC)
Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web. Note that's the WWW, not the internet. TBL's main contribution was HTTP and HTML. It's come a long way since then but it's still all based on the same technologies.
How about a society without spam? or a society without virii and worms? A society without spyware?
Why are people assuming the worst about everything TBL says? It's not like he has a history of totalitarianism.
Three reasons this won't fly:
The first, as you mentioned is mindshare. No matter how hard Apple tries, their office suite will never be more than marginally noticed by mainstream IT managers.
The second, and more important, is that writing a full office suite is not a trivial undertaking. The combined person-years that have gone into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and anything else included in Office would be far beyond the means of Apple to duplicate. And even if they did have that kind of money (and with recent iPod sales, maybe they do), it would still not be as cost effective as the status quo.
The third reason, realted to the second, is that development of an office suite would take a very long time. Would you buy an Apple if some absolutely necessary piece of software like a word processor wouldn't be available for two to three years? Meaning that every desktop in your company would need to have two computers, one for whatever they could do on the Apple and one for everything else.
Apple's best hope if Microsoft were to pull support for Office for the Mac (which I doubt they would do) would be to work on OpenOffice until it works with Microsoft's new formats and works very well on the Mac. Only then would they MAYBE have a chance.
Well, for starters, I wasn't buying my computer in Australia or Britain, but in Canada.
And as for all of the features you metionned, we needed a machine for light word processing and some budgeting. Where was the Mac low-cost version that didn't have the ability to soft-eject a disk, multiple monitor support, networking and a bunch of other completely useless stuff?
As for calling bullshit on the price, were you at the University of Waterloo Math Society meeting in September, 1988 (can't remember the exact date). If you weren't, how the hell would you know what prices were quoted to us by whatever salepeople we were dealing with?
The problem isn't littering space which, as you point out, is pretty much a non-issue.
The problem is poluting low-Earth orbit, a narrow sphere around our planet. Putting even the most malicious space-based weapons somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri is no big deal. Ading a bunch of items to an already crowded area including the ISS, most shuttle flight paths, communications satellites, etc. would probably not be the best idea.
The article is a troll. I don't know who the author is, but he doesn't write very well.
Personally, I agree with his sentiments that Microsoft does not deserve to be reviled by the developer community; but throwing around insults to everybody who has taken a bite out of Microsoft (Sun, the EU) doesn't contribute to reasoned debate.
In 1988, I was at university and a campus group I was involved with was looking at buying a PC for our office. The prices were (approximately) as follows:
Fully loaded PC (including printer): $3,000
Fully loaded Mac (including printer: $14,000
Mac isn't losing the market share war now, they lost the market share war 20 years ago.
So everybody drives an $80,000 car, right?
No, you choose a car based on: what do you need it to do? how much does it cost? and in some cases, is it cool?
For all of those years, Windows did not look as pretty as Mac OS, but it did everything that 99% of the market needed to do and did it at 20% of the price.
It's not a question of "do you want a good car", the question is "do you need a Mercedes SL600 Roadster to drive three blocks to the corner store"
So we send some average I.T. workers?
Have you considered sniffing their packets to get their porn?
(And on a side note, is "sniffing their packets" just the wrong words to use in this situation)?
But what if your customers have been conditioned to believe that all software should be free as in beer?
Or to put it another way, if you're a true Linux believer, are you more likely to use CorelDraw or Inkscape? OpenOffice or MS-Office?
We worry about kids not entering the software industry and yet the clear message coming from the most vocal part of the industry is that you should work hard and give away all of your work for free.
Did you ever wonder why all of your appliances expect 120V and 60Hz. Pressure from Consolidated Edison, maybe?
Glad nobody tolerated their monopoly.
And how exactly will software development not be affected if the community expects the developer to give away not only the products but also the source code for his software for free.
How is this like Microsoft coming after you?
All they've said is: if you don't provide us with a proof of purchase, we're not going to replace your product.
They haven't said: if you don't provide us with a proof of purchase, you're going to jail.
I think the original analogy was quite sound.
Please try to verify things you read on Slashdot before passing it on, including what I just said.
Are you on crack? Verifying information before posting on Slashdot goes against our most cherished values and longest held tradtions.
If we started doing as you suggest there would be reasoned argument! Intelligent discussion! Anarchy!!!
Perhaps that the damage that most hackers do is not criminal but civil.
The guy who wrote the Sasser worm didn't break any laws other than anti-hacking laws, but he did cause billions of dollars in damage.
And before you suggest that we just sue the guy, remember that most people are lucky if they make more than a few million in a lifetime. If you inlcude that the guy has to pay living expenses and restrict him from declaring bankruptcy, he'll still only pay off a fraction of a percent of the damage he caused.
Why exactly would I want to go the time, expense and trouble of reading Kaplan's book just to find out whether or not he thinks that his lawsuit is justified?
I think I can guess: according to Kaplan, his lawsuit is the most important lawsuit in the history of the world and is cause for a violent revolution against Microsoft.
In the grand scheme of things, who cares?
All companies try to dominate their market. That's the point. Microsoft is just better at it.
And they enter new markets because it is the nature of companies to want to grow. Once you own a market and you've reached market saturation, there's nothing else to do but enter a new market.