I was going to start my own thread, but hey, everybody knows this late in the thread the only way to karma whore is to post in an another large thread.
Anyway, the thing that really gets my goat about people like the guy who wrote this up is his blatant disregard for the term "open source". He states "This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
That's well and great, but what in his mind dictates that open source options are synonymous with free as in beer? What makes him think that just because I sympathize with OS, I can't still make a dollar. AFAIK (I'm surmising this from what I've read of the GPL, and of Stallman's biography, Free As In Freedom), the GPL lets me charge whatever exorbitant rate I so chose for my binaries and support, so long as I include some obligatory license information, and my source. Sure that may not always be saleable, but you shouldn't preclude that every open source project (especially the ones used in a business setting) should be free as in beer.
A few of people seem to be disagreeing with you, but I think the actual truth lies in what field you're in. In a lot of fields, say manufacturing, needs don't change as quickly as operating system revisions, and in that case upgrading the OS would be a waste of time. Thus yes, a lot of people would feel that if a server serves its primary purpose, why upgrade? But I think main point that you should have addressed is that in business today, 7 years is a VERY, VERY long time to not restructure your needs and the needs of everyone your department answers to. Some servers, like someone said, file servers can easily be backed up on an existing os, as long as it works, will not need to be changed, as their purpose has not. Some however, will need to be updated for new features, support new infrastructures, etc. I do agree greatly though, that running an NT4 network is not going to help you in trying to find a job after you've been displaced and the rest of the world is two server OSes (or more) past you.
Sweet, I was wondering what to do with my 1 Billion monkeys and computers. They really haven't produced anything of worth lately, "Blurst of times"? what the shit is that.
Re:Looks like an interesting book.
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
That's just not the way the console wars work. This has been going on with many different companies over the last 20+ years. Almost no one EVER makes money on the console, the business plan is always to: try to make a desirable console that both players enjoy and developers enjoy programming, market it like crazy, make a good number of games yourself and directly profit, and license out games that other game shops develop for your system for a good amount of indirect profit. Except for the NeoGeo, the price of a new (as in, just released) is always $150-300, and no one wants to break that, as you make fewer and fewer sales above that mark, forcing money-wise developers to leave for other, more profitable systems. With that in mind, you also have to develop cutting-edge technology that fits in this price range. That's pretty rough itself.
Just curious here (because I honestly don't know), does 'over the next six years' actually mean the Army gets ALL software and revisions that come out for the products they're purchasing over the time period of the next six years? That doesn't seem to make sense. When I hear large corporations talk about anything relating to money 'over the next xx months/years/etc.', it usually means (as applied to this case) that they'll be buying $471,000,000 worth of Microsoft products spread over the next 6 years, i.e. buying 5,000 units of Win2k3 Server in 2003, 12,000 units of Longhorn and Office by 2005, etc.
The rest of your ideas are completely logical to me, but the infinite upgrades over 6 years thing sounds kind of fishy to me.
"Would you care to guestimate the cost of training users? Employing linux administrators? converting existing data? Support?" Significantly less than $950/computer. You're still going to have to pay someone to train users, employ windows administrators, transfer existing data, and support (respectively) all of those machiens, anyway. You think any network technicians and support staff for Windows are free?
"..it will have a unique, non-geographical area code - eg, in the UK all mobile numbers begin with 07xxx." Ok, I must have missed something here. If it's non-geographical, but all UK numbers are assigned 07xxx...hm. Well shit, _my_ brain is fried.
Err...that *was* confusing, sorry. I didn't mean Windows does the same things with the files, I was referring to where he stated that Mac binaries can be passed around Macs, and my point was that Windows binaries can be passed around in the same way, the.apps are just packaged more nicely.
Hence why when you get a file for a mac to be installed you just drop a binary in, every mac is the same (to an extent), whereas every PC is not, but the components are the same some just perform better than others.
No, that's because every Mac.app is actually a directory (you can't view the directory in Finder [at least, I couldn't figure out how], but it's perfectly clear from a console) which contains the binaries, resources, and user config files. Windows (barring Win16) is mostly the same, it just uses the registry for some of those purposes and scatters resources in a user-viewable directory. That's not so much a trait of the Mac's common software environment as it is of a *better* software environment (at least for users, in my opinion).
6. So you believe that master copy compression should use lossless compression. Fine. So does everyone else. The fact of the matter is we are NOT talking about master copies, we're talking about pay-per-download songs on a Phish site. That's about as end user as you can get.
Did you read what it was about? In my opinion, the margin by which a vote must be won should be variable depending on the circumstances.
In this case, we're not talking about, "Should we spend some money on building a stadium at an undisclosed location?", we're talking about building a giant road (yes, the road is to be diverted to allow parallel bridges) through the middle of a community, and force people out of their homes because some people outside of King County want to commute a little faster. Now granted, I've sat through Tacoma Narrows traffic coming out of Seattle at 5pm, and no, I didn't like it. But I've stared straight at where the road is to pass, and it's straight through homes that I think are being needlessly wasted for want of a better solution, which I think is out there.
Regardless of this scenario, my point is that in terms of public works, the government works for the people, and if 47% of the people are against something...there is something wrong with the proposition. I'm not saying outright ditch the idea, but if you can't please more than 53% of the people, some reform is necessary by any measure of logic.
Unfortunately, I had no idea about them, I'm not from the area myself. My girlfriend (who grew up in Kitsap County) was telling me about those two incidents as we drove across the existing Narrows a few months ago, and I did a little sleuth work to get the scoop on my own.
Information has value, especially in the new economy. I sometimes think people get to bent out of shape when people/companies try to protect that value.
âoeNowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.â - Oscar Wilde, 1891
As a rule, domestic policy should come before foreign policy. Of all people, conservative, religious Republicans should know this, it's in the the Bible, (something like) "Ignore not the log in your own eye before removing the twig from your brother's." As we've seen, Bush is poor on both fronts.
Quite, in this case. As Slashdot blurb reads, the ISC is a "global coalition of large and small companies committed to advancing the concept that multiple competing software markets should be allowed to develop and flourish unimpeded by government preference or mandate." Well, great. But in this case, there *was* a competing market, and the government chose the open source model at least as a starting block (nothing more). The hypocrisy of the ISC lies in the fact that they are not, in fact, proponents of competing markets in the event that they don't win. It's like playing Monopoly with your five year old nephew, they really want to play, they don't really understand the rules, and if they lose then they cry that you must have cheated.
Looking at it another way, what *are* they trying to accomplish, insubordination? I know if my boss said "write this application with MFC", and I handed him a Java app, he'd be miffed. On a grander scale, a government body here tells its employees and departments what kind of apps they should use, much as requiring a business to be an MS house. Even if you didn't see that proprietary companies were the constituent body of the ISC, surely you must find it hypocritical that they only go after open source shops and not when a government dept decides to go all Windows.
If you would have bothered to read the latter half of my comment, you would have realized that I was telling you why I think branching out to Linux workstations is a bad idea for Sun right now.
KDE? Gnome? Maybe for a workstation, but Sun's mainstay is the server market, where it really, really doesn't matter what kind of eye-candy bloatware window manager you're running. If you're spending tens of thousands (pricing is on page 5 of the article) on a server, you probably don't give a damn about an easy-to-use integrated desktop, as your support staff better know what they're doing with it.
The article didn't breathe a word about desktops because guess what? That's not a Sun specialty. Sure they make money selling high-end workstations, but the bread and butter of their existence is certainly servers. The point of this article was markedly not about venturing into a completely separate area of business, it was about rearranging their outlook and shaping again in a market that WAS completely theirs.
I'll agree with you so far as *someone* should step in and try what Lindows did (well..not EXACTLY what Lindows did, all that crap about running Windows programs aside), that is, a third party completely devoid of any ties to Redmond trying to create a unified Linux desktop system and get it sold at major retailers. I disagree however, that this should be Sun's job. That is a HUGE venture, especially since Sun is not well-equipped to build such machinery, and would be foolish, as they don't have enough capital now survive long if that fails miserably. Think of it, would you risk a gambit betting the farm on a game where there may not even be a way to win your money back (even RedHat boasted only $25Mil in profit the last quarter of last year), and worse yet, you have absolutely no experience in the field? I hope not, for your sake.
Hm...following your logic...then you've read aloud the Doom binary in Japanese before? I doubt it. However, to his credit, you could describe Doom (however excruciating) in boolean logic, and of course logic is a means of solving problems.
Slashdot Mirror
..Are just not as fun!
Best (hell, maybe the only!) reference to software engineering principles on Slashdot ever.
I was going to start my own thread, but hey, everybody knows this late in the thread the only way to karma whore is to post in an another large thread.
Anyway, the thing that really gets my goat about people like the guy who wrote this up is his blatant disregard for the term "open source". He states "This is not necessarily awful, however, for those who hope businesses will start looking toward open source options as the cost effective alternatives..."
That's well and great, but what in his mind dictates that open source options are synonymous with free as in beer? What makes him think that just because I sympathize with OS, I can't still make a dollar. AFAIK (I'm surmising this from what I've read of the GPL, and of Stallman's biography, Free As In Freedom), the GPL lets me charge whatever exorbitant rate I so chose for my binaries and support, so long as I include some obligatory license information, and my source. Sure that may not always be saleable, but you shouldn't preclude that every open source project (especially the ones used in a business setting) should be free as in beer.
A few of people seem to be disagreeing with you, but I think the actual truth lies in what field you're in. In a lot of fields, say manufacturing, needs don't change as quickly as operating system revisions, and in that case upgrading the OS would be a waste of time. Thus yes, a lot of people would feel that if a server serves its primary purpose, why upgrade? But I think main point that you should have addressed is that in business today, 7 years is a VERY, VERY long time to not restructure your needs and the needs of everyone your department answers to. Some servers, like someone said, file servers can easily be backed up on an existing os, as long as it works, will not need to be changed, as their purpose has not. Some however, will need to be updated for new features, support new infrastructures, etc.
I do agree greatly though, that running an NT4 network is not going to help you in trying to find a job after you've been displaced and the rest of the world is two server OSes (or more) past you.
Sweet, I was wondering what to do with my 1 Billion monkeys and computers. They really haven't produced anything of worth lately, "Blurst of times"? what the shit is that.
That's just not the way the console wars work. This has been going on with many different companies over the last 20+ years. Almost no one EVER makes money on the console, the business plan is always to: try to make a desirable console that both players enjoy and developers enjoy programming, market it like crazy, make a good number of games yourself and directly profit, and license out games that other game shops develop for your system for a good amount of indirect profit. Except for the NeoGeo, the price of a new (as in, just released) is always $150-300, and no one wants to break that, as you make fewer and fewer sales above that mark, forcing money-wise developers to leave for other, more profitable systems. With that in mind, you also have to develop cutting-edge technology that fits in this price range. That's pretty rough itself.
Just curious here (because I honestly don't know), does 'over the next six years' actually mean the Army gets ALL software and revisions that come out for the products they're purchasing over the time period of the next six years? That doesn't seem to make sense. When I hear large corporations talk about anything relating to money 'over the next xx months/years/etc.', it usually means (as applied to this case) that they'll be buying $471,000,000 worth of Microsoft products spread over the next 6 years, i.e. buying 5,000 units of Win2k3 Server in 2003, 12,000 units of Longhorn and Office by 2005, etc.
The rest of your ideas are completely logical to me, but the infinite upgrades over 6 years thing sounds kind of fishy to me.
"Would you care to guestimate the cost of training users? Employing linux administrators? converting existing data? Support?"
Significantly less than $950/computer. You're still going to have to pay someone to train users, employ windows administrators, transfer existing data, and support (respectively) all of those machiens, anyway. You think any network technicians and support staff for Windows are free?
"..it will have a unique, non-geographical area code - eg, in the UK all mobile numbers begin with 07xxx."
Ok, I must have missed something here. If it's non-geographical, but all UK numbers are assigned 07xxx...hm. Well shit, _my_ brain is fried.
Really? Curt never took loose money from me before, he used to be such a nice boy..
Err...that *was* confusing, sorry. I didn't mean Windows does the same things with the files, I was referring to where he stated that Mac binaries can be passed around Macs, and my point was that Windows binaries can be passed around in the same way, the .apps are just packaged more nicely.
Hence why when you get a file for a mac to be installed you just drop a binary in, every mac is the same (to an extent), whereas every PC is not, but the components are the same some just perform better than others.
.app is actually a directory (you can't view the directory in Finder [at least, I couldn't figure out how], but it's perfectly clear from a console) which contains the binaries, resources, and user config files. Windows (barring Win16) is mostly the same, it just uses the registry for some of those purposes and scatters resources in a user-viewable directory. That's not so much a trait of the Mac's common software environment as it is of a *better* software environment (at least for users, in my opinion).
No, that's because every Mac
6. So you believe that master copy compression should use lossless compression. Fine. So does everyone else. The fact of the matter is we are NOT talking about master copies, we're talking about pay-per-download songs on a Phish site. That's about as end user as you can get.
Did you read what it was about? In my opinion, the margin by which a vote must be won should be variable depending on the circumstances.
In this case, we're not talking about, "Should we spend some money on building a stadium at an undisclosed location?", we're talking about building a giant road (yes, the road is to be diverted to allow parallel bridges) through the middle of a community, and force people out of their homes because some people outside of King County want to commute a little faster. Now granted, I've sat through Tacoma Narrows traffic coming out of Seattle at 5pm, and no, I didn't like it. But I've stared straight at where the road is to pass, and it's straight through homes that I think are being needlessly wasted for want of a better solution, which I think is out there.
Regardless of this scenario, my point is that in terms of public works, the government works for the people, and if 47% of the people are against something...there is something wrong with the proposition. I'm not saying outright ditch the idea, but if you can't please more than 53% of the people, some reform is necessary by any measure of logic.
Unfortunately, I had no idea about them, I'm not from the area myself. My girlfriend (who grew up in Kitsap County) was telling me about those two incidents as we drove across the existing Narrows a few months ago, and I did a little sleuth work to get the scoop on my own.
In Western Washington? HAH! You must not be from Seattle, my friend.
One would think that would be a viable solution..like the time the constituency voted against building a new Kingdome, but it was built anyway. Or the time there was a referendum to see if bridge parallel to the Tacoma Narrows bridge should be built, only won by 3%, and was built anyway, unchanged. Now, the ballpark was only an initial query, with no set location, but the new Tacoma Narrows will be plowing through neighborhoods and taking out houses. Surely, that should require a margin of voter hapiness greater than 3%. The area definitely has a history of shady tactics when it comes to gauging public interest.
Information has value, especially in the new economy. I sometimes think people get to bent out of shape when people/companies try to protect that value.
âoeNowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.â - Oscar Wilde, 1891
As a rule, domestic policy should come before foreign policy. Of all people, conservative, religious Republicans should know this, it's in the the Bible, (something like) "Ignore not the log in your own eye before removing the twig from your brother's." As we've seen, Bush is poor on both fronts.
Most of the bands I listen to (all on independent labels) DO have day jobs, you insensitive clod.
That is the single funniest thing I've seen on Slashdot in a long, long time.
(what's Natalie up to these days?).
I'd say she's about up to her armpits on hot grits.
Quite, in this case. As Slashdot blurb reads, the ISC is a "global coalition of large and small companies committed to advancing the concept that multiple competing software markets should be allowed to develop and flourish unimpeded by government preference or mandate." Well, great. But in this case, there *was* a competing market, and the government chose the open source model at least as a starting block (nothing more). The hypocrisy of the ISC lies in the fact that they are not, in fact, proponents of competing markets in the event that they don't win. It's like playing Monopoly with your five year old nephew, they really want to play, they don't really understand the rules, and if they lose then they cry that you must have cheated.
Looking at it another way, what *are* they trying to accomplish, insubordination? I know if my boss said "write this application with MFC", and I handed him a Java app, he'd be miffed. On a grander scale, a government body here tells its employees and departments what kind of apps they should use, much as requiring a business to be an MS house. Even if you didn't see that proprietary companies were the constituent body of the ISC, surely you must find it hypocritical that they only go after open source shops and not when a government dept decides to go all Windows.
If you would have bothered to read the latter half of my comment, you would have realized that I was telling you why I think branching out to Linux workstations is a bad idea for Sun right now.
KDE? Gnome? Maybe for a workstation, but Sun's mainstay is the server market, where it really, really doesn't matter what kind of eye-candy bloatware window manager you're running. If you're spending tens of thousands (pricing is on page 5 of the article) on a server, you probably don't give a damn about an easy-to-use integrated desktop, as your support staff better know what they're doing with it.
The article didn't breathe a word about desktops because guess what? That's not a Sun specialty. Sure they make money selling high-end workstations, but the bread and butter of their existence is certainly servers. The point of this article was markedly not about venturing into a completely separate area of business, it was about rearranging their outlook and shaping again in a market that WAS completely theirs.
I'll agree with you so far as *someone* should step in and try what Lindows did (well..not EXACTLY what Lindows did, all that crap about running Windows programs aside), that is, a third party completely devoid of any ties to Redmond trying to create a unified Linux desktop system and get it sold at major retailers. I disagree however, that this should be Sun's job. That is a HUGE venture, especially since Sun is not well-equipped to build such machinery, and would be foolish, as they don't have enough capital now survive long if that fails miserably. Think of it, would you risk a gambit betting the farm on a game where there may not even be a way to win your money back (even RedHat boasted only $25Mil in profit the last quarter of last year), and worse yet, you have absolutely no experience in the field? I hope not, for your sake.
Hm...following your logic...then you've read aloud the Doom binary in Japanese before? I doubt it. However, to his credit, you could describe Doom (however excruciating) in boolean logic, and of course logic is a means of solving problems.