When you call the president a facist, you've pretty much trashed not just the country, not just its leaders, but everything the country is about.
But it's ok to call the President a communist, right?
The main point here is that criticism going on mostly these days is not in good faith. It is made in bad faith to score political or other points.
But again, it was ok to criticize Clinton, right?
It shows that you are not a patriot, but an opportunist.
Unless you are attacking Clinton, then you are a patriot!
where was the large anti-war movement in Kosovo.
Protesting the war, of course.
and the left-wing of the American politics wasn't against it.
Actually the left-wing of American politics was very much against it, those damn unAmerican commies!
The right-wing of American politics was against it.
But that's because they were opportunists, you admitted so yourself.
Now this time around, things are exactly opposite. The left-wing is freaking out. The right-wing is all for it. Why? Politics. That's all.
Naw the only difference is the right-wing isn't against it this time because they are opportunists. And to be correct on the label right-wing, I'm referring to the Bush lickspittles in the GOP. Pat Buchnan, of the older isolationalist GOP is opposed to the war.(Not that he wasn't an opportunist when it came to Watergate...)
99% of the dissent we see is not principled, but rather, based on politics.
Don't kid yourself. This is only true with todays right-wing.:( People such as yourself try to paint this epidemnic on the nation's left-wing as well in order to confuse people into thinking both parties are the same, both are corrupted of morals and ethics.
Just because Rush Limbaugh tells you something doesn't make it true. Check out some of the liberal leaning websites that were around back in the mid 90's and you'll find a lot of opposition to Kosovo. counterpunch.org, fas.org, etc. I know because I've been doing research on issues in Wesley Clark's past and how those might influence the campaign.
Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
I think you'd better go look up the figures on budget deficits.
The deficits were far greater than the $10 billion/year differences you see between the President and Congressional budgets.
In 1980 Reagan said he was going to balance the budget by 1984...
It is simply wrong, indeed, dangerous, to name anything after a living personage, especially a politician. And double especially a President.
I agree, and this was certainly the attitude of men like George Washington.
But today we have civilian commanders putting on flight suits and strutting around aircraft carriers, something else Washington would have been opposed to. If he'd wanted to wear a flight suit so bad, he shouldn't have gone AWOL from the Air National Guard in his youth.
I'm surprised we don't have a Iraqi triumphant arch being constructed in D.C. like the Caesars would have done.
America is going down the path that our founding fathers tried to move us away from.:(
Quite clearly if you are getting in hot water for the Quick & Dirty solution, then you're doing the wrong thing.
You're also asking the wrong people. You see, this isn't a techy question, this is a business question. You don't get to make this decision, and there is no right answer from any technical point of view. It's entirely up to the business need. Is a prototype that you're going to scrap a completely acceptable solution? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It depends.
Speaking from a customer view point, a lot of us have been burned by dorks like yourself who think they can win a contract by showing us a prototype and claiming it's the final product. We've bought the bait, paid the money and then wondered why after a year the solution still doesn't work right.
The information super highway is littered with the bodies of such bad deals and they leave a really bad taste in the mouth. So while you might be thinking it get's you the deal right away, the long term impact of your actions is a bad reputation for your company. And word spreads around... You're definition of Success is hardly in the customers best interest, as you apparently are only looking for ways to soak us for cash.
It's up to the PHBs and Marketroids who you apparently disdain to be making these decisions because they are the ones who understand the customers position, not you.
It's posts like this that make me want to abandon Slashdot after 5 years of faithfully following, commenting and posting stories.
I have always generally found about 20% of the content on slashdot to be new and interesting. But in the last two years I've noticed an increasing trend for slashdot to be several days behind other news sources. Also the attempts to attack Microsoft are becoming more and more desperate.
But keep in mind that while slashbot did post this, the original article was written by some moron at eWeek. Not to lessen the responsibility of slashbot in contributing to this sad lie, but to help spread the blame of poor tech journalism.
I find the Open Source community growing up around.NET to be far more fun to be involved with than the zealots which surround Linux.
Without using frames I just wanted to dynamically change the controls within a page.
Huh? There are multiple ways to do this, at the simplest level you throw a number of controls on the screen, possibly grouped with panels, and then change the Visible tag accordingly to display the one you want.
On a more complex level, you can create a number of controls which all inherit from a base class, and then instantiate the one you need into the main page. I've been working with the Dotnetnuke framework, and this is the entire basis of how it operates, as custom controls inherit from PortalModuleControl and are loaded dynamically at runtime according to database criteria for the page.
We gave 3 others a chance at it, two of them full time and true Microserfs.
Microserf? What is this, a contest to see who can act most like a child?
Since then I've tried other things and come to the same conclusion.
I guess it's nice that you came to a conclusion, it's just unfortunate that you are trying to extend your technical incompetence onto others.
ASP.NET has rocked my world as well, and I am barely even scratching the surface of functionality.
Simple economics, my dear Watson, simple economics.
This is the quote from adobe... "If Apple's already doing an application, it makes the market for a third-party developer that much smaller," said David Trescot, senior director of Adobe's digital video products group.
It's the size of the market. A good chunk share of a tiny market is a reasonable number to make money off of. A tiny chunk of a tiny market is barely enough to scrape by.
Apple simply reduced Adobe's marketshare potential.
The same thing happens with Microsoft bundling in things like it's movie maker. It's going to be adequate for a good portion of people using the OS who just want to play around. But for those really trying to get something working, it's not adequate and so they look for third party products.
But the Windows market is so huge that even a tiny market share is still a large number of sales, enough to sustain a business off of. Look at Opera as an example of that.
It has nothing to do with preferential treatment, or hidden APIs. It's not an unfair advantage, it's merely a question of market demand. Of course one thing, in Microsoft's case with most of their bundled in utilities, they are purposefully crippled in order to encourage a third party market. That's not true with what Apple is bundling in.
I have a cousin working for a company that sells, among other things, a mainframe based spreadsheet app. He claims that the market for applications is drying up, and I have to agree.
I agree as well. The market for applications running on mainframes is drying up.
Your attempt to extend this point further is rather absurd.
So I'm reading the news.com summary, which is a bit biased, but basically shows the slashbot title as being grossly misleading. California is still debating an anti-spam bill, and will probably pass one.
It just won't be the one written by Senator Bowen.
From reading the articles it is unclear if this is a bad thing or not. Bowen sounds hysterical, and the Murray complaints against her bill are not very specific.
Need more info. Or am I just supposed to be outraged like a good little slashbot?
When I am travelling on business and need a portable workstation, I know which one I want.
I have a 15" display on my Toshiba, and it's near impossible to use on an airplane in the coach seating. Especially if the person in front of you leans back in their chair.
But then since you are considering buying an Apple product, I'm assuming you are always flying first class.
Given that most people do not know about Mozilla, do not know about popup blockers, and do not know about the powertoys Microsoft offers, it is irrelevent to the average user who does not download any so-called add-ons to their operating system.
Only in your mind.
The average user knows how to download stuff and install it just fine. Napster would never have had the millions of people using it, if your theory was correct. Perhaps the reality is that the features you talk about really just aren't that compelling to the average user?
I know I could do without tabbed browsing, and multi-desktops isn't all that useful. I only need popup blocking because of other lamers.
Users care about what's on their system at the time of the installation, they don't like to get out of their way and spend time getting extra plugins.
You're definately a typical Linux user. You've never had to deal with endusers, or you'd know this statement is false.
The fact that your experience is different shouldn't dismay you as much as it does: The two markets are different.
Actually I don't agree that the markets are all that different. I've worked in a University research lab, a small business with only 5 employees, another small consulting firm with about 300 employees and several Fortune 500 corporations. The luxury that the Fortune 500 corps have is experience, and if you take that knowledge and apply it at the smaller business level you can save an awful lot of aggravation and cost.
Anyhow, I think your points are excellent, but I don't think they are inconsistent with my own. There are two markets here.
I would agree on the surface it appears that the markets are different. I don't think in the end that they are. But it's a question that involves how the sale is sold.
Bill's assertion that Linux and OS/2 pose the same sort of threat are flawed because of this.
I don't think Bill's assertion with regards to OS/2 was about the market. Yes large banks went with OS/2, but they did so because of the functionality that OS/2 offered. Once that functionality was delivered with Windows NT, the other compelling features of NT on top of that suddenly made OS/2 less attractive of a purchase.
Now in the Linux market, it's hard to say. Right now the only compelling feature of Linux is initial cost. Everything beyond that is of lesser quality and value than what is available on Windows.
Now Gates is saying is that what he's going to do is go out there and sell you on that value add. Show you all the other things you get in the box, the other features you can add easily, etc. and sell you a end-to-end solution. Maybe it will work, but it's a real tough sell.
However I think if they addressed it from the price side of the equation, Linux would be dead in a wide variety of markets. The compelling feature would be eliminated. I'm not saying Microsoft needs to give their product away for free... But certainly far less than what it sells at today.
Hell, Sony sells more PSOne's in Japan than Microsoft selles XBOX's in Japan.
While your at it, why don't you take a look at automobile marketshare in Japan and compare that with the world. Japanese cars do far better in Japan than they do in the US or Europe.
Your analogy is lousy, you obviously don't understand the market.
I worked for a Fortune 500 company with 5,000 desktop installations of OS/2, and we were one of the smaller examples. There were larger companies like American Express, US Bank, Norwest, etc. that had OS/2 installations in tens of thousands.
OS/2 on the server side pretty much never latched on. At the time PC servers were really only for file/print. Email was generally handled by the Mainframe, as were database and applications.
At the time the web started growing in popularity, OS/2 didn't have a viable web server to allow it to be used. Same problem Netware had.
Most of those functions (tab based browsing, popup blocking, multiple desktops) are not present in a default Windows installation, and the other functions are certainly not Free in the Windows world.
tab based browsing... Uhh, Mozilla and Opera are available on Windows. Mozilla is still free of charge.
popup blocking... Amazing new toolbar from google.
But multiple desktops has been around since at least Windows 3.1, it's not that new.
You're making the mistake of underestimating the competition, thinking that these things don't exist in Windows just because you lack experience with it.
I don't know it's been pretty consistent with what I've seen.
A typical IT project in a large company costs around $1 million. That's a team of about 6-10 people on a 6-9 month project. Desktop licensing for each person on the team averages at around $1,000 each. Development servers cost maybe $1,000 in licensing. Staging servers maybe $5,000 in licensing, with production servers maybe $20,000 in licensing. Now I'm just fudging numbers for a web app with a database back end. It'll be more if you're integrating with some other third party tool like Peoplesoft, EAI, whatever. I believe when I priced out Adobe's document server it was like $20k/CPU, as an example.
Anyway, so my fudged numbers is around $35k in software licensing on a 1 Million project. That's roughly 3%. Also realize that most of those costs aren't entirely sunk. When this project is done, you can reuse the same software/equipment to work on another project. Even deploy to the same production servers.
Where I see Linux being really successful is in places where the Microsoft Barrier-to-Entry(tm) is just too high.
I can see that. Of course if the company is truly small, then it is probably better to deploy any web presence at a hosting ISP. I can start with their smaller packages at like $25/month and move on up to having my own dedicated server at $300/month as the company grows.
In looking at hosting providers, I haven't seen much difference in cost, but I certainly have in capabilities... with the Microsoft providers offering far more for the dollar. SQL Server instead of mySQL, better email support, etc. For whatever reason, software licensing savings doesn't seem to give the Linux providers much of an edge.
And as more and more small businesses and contractors and researchers use Linux to do cool and interesting things on the cheap, bigger businesses will start to notice.
Ok, look back at that initial swag I gave on an IT project. $1 million. 3% or so of that is software licensing. The remaining 97% is labor.
Businesses are interested in cutting that cost, but since it's primarily labor the way to cost cutting is in reducing the timeline. Take that project from 6 months down to 3 months, and you've cut your costs in half.
That's not to say that there aren't certain situations where the cost of deploying servers into production may not be extreme. In my example, the prod environment probably has 4-6 servers. If your environment has a couple hundred web servers to handle one app, then maybe saving the 3% on licensing adds up. Such is the case for say google.com.
But most of business IT cost is labor of construction. Microsoft understands this, and their marketing materials address that. I don't see the Linux vendors understanding this point, and you certainly don't seem to recognize it in your post.
I can see a brand new market -- deploy some these bad boys, set up a wireless access point, and you have an instant internet community with no other power infrastructure.
Absolutely! Because when you don't have an electrical power infrastructure, the first thing that is needed are laptop computers connected to the internet! Screw cooking and lighting! Those aren't nearly as important as surfing p0rn!
I can see the military, scientific and commercial uses for this. But don't kid yourself into thinking this is part of some utopian world achievement. It's not. Computers are a luxury item compared to food, clothing and shelter.
Re:Does it really matter?
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
No, he assumed everybody could get their hands on that software.
It's a free download.
Go to gotdotnet.com or asp.net. And yes that includes the SQL engine.
Slashdot Mirror
When you call the president a facist, you've pretty much trashed not just the country, not just its leaders, but everything the country is about.
:( People such as yourself try to paint this epidemnic on the nation's left-wing as well in order to confuse people into thinking both parties are the same, both are corrupted of morals and ethics.
But it's ok to call the President a communist, right?
The main point here is that criticism going on mostly these days is not in good faith. It is made in bad faith to score political or other points.
But again, it was ok to criticize Clinton, right?
It shows that you are not a patriot, but an opportunist.
Unless you are attacking Clinton, then you are a patriot!
where was the large anti-war movement in Kosovo.
Protesting the war, of course.
and the left-wing of the American politics wasn't against it.
Actually the left-wing of American politics was very much against it, those damn unAmerican commies!
The right-wing of American politics was against it.
But that's because they were opportunists, you admitted so yourself.
Now this time around, things are exactly opposite. The left-wing is freaking out. The right-wing is all for it. Why? Politics. That's all.
Naw the only difference is the right-wing isn't against it this time because they are opportunists. And to be correct on the label right-wing, I'm referring to the Bush lickspittles in the GOP. Pat Buchnan, of the older isolationalist GOP is opposed to the war.(Not that he wasn't an opportunist when it came to Watergate...)
99% of the dissent we see is not principled, but rather, based on politics.
Don't kid yourself. This is only true with todays right-wing.
Just because Rush Limbaugh tells you something doesn't make it true. Check out some of the liberal leaning websites that were around back in the mid 90's and you'll find a lot of opposition to Kosovo. counterpunch.org, fas.org, etc. I know because I've been doing research on issues in Wesley Clark's past and how those might influence the campaign.
Had it not been for excessive spending by Congress (which also increased the amount of "locked in" spending for each successive budget), the budget deficit would have disappeared by the end of Reagan's term.
I think you'd better go look up the figures on budget deficits.
The deficits were far greater than the $10 billion/year differences you see between the President and Congressional budgets.
In 1980 Reagan said he was going to balance the budget by 1984...
He didn't even try.
It is simply wrong, indeed, dangerous, to name anything after a living personage, especially a politician. And double especially a President.
:(
I agree, and this was certainly the attitude of men like George Washington.
But today we have civilian commanders putting on flight suits and strutting around aircraft carriers, something else Washington would have been opposed to. If he'd wanted to wear a flight suit so bad, he shouldn't have gone AWOL from the Air National Guard in his youth.
I'm surprised we don't have a Iraqi triumphant arch being constructed in D.C. like the Caesars would have done.
America is going down the path that our founding fathers tried to move us away from.
Quite clearly if you are getting in hot water for the Quick & Dirty solution, then you're doing the wrong thing.
You're also asking the wrong people. You see, this isn't a techy question, this is a business question. You don't get to make this decision, and there is no right answer from any technical point of view. It's entirely up to the business need. Is a prototype that you're going to scrap a completely acceptable solution? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. It depends.
Speaking from a customer view point, a lot of us have been burned by dorks like yourself who think they can win a contract by showing us a prototype and claiming it's the final product. We've bought the bait, paid the money and then wondered why after a year the solution still doesn't work right.
The information super highway is littered with the bodies of such bad deals and they leave a really bad taste in the mouth. So while you might be thinking it get's you the deal right away, the long term impact of your actions is a bad reputation for your company. And word spreads around... You're definition of Success is hardly in the customers best interest, as you apparently are only looking for ways to soak us for cash.
It's up to the PHBs and Marketroids who you apparently disdain to be making these decisions because they are the ones who understand the customers position, not you.
Very good post!
.NET to be far more fun to be involved with than the zealots which surround Linux.
It's posts like this that make me want to abandon Slashdot after 5 years of faithfully following, commenting and posting stories.
I have always generally found about 20% of the content on slashdot to be new and interesting. But in the last two years I've noticed an increasing trend for slashdot to be several days behind other news sources. Also the attempts to attack Microsoft are becoming more and more desperate.
But keep in mind that while slashbot did post this, the original article was written by some moron at eWeek. Not to lessen the responsibility of slashbot in contributing to this sad lie, but to help spread the blame of poor tech journalism.
I find the Open Source community growing up around
Without using frames I just wanted to dynamically change the controls within a page.
Huh? There are multiple ways to do this, at the simplest level you throw a number of controls on the screen, possibly grouped with panels, and then change the Visible tag accordingly to display the one you want.
On a more complex level, you can create a number of controls which all inherit from a base class, and then instantiate the one you need into the main page. I've been working with the Dotnetnuke framework, and this is the entire basis of how it operates, as custom controls inherit from PortalModuleControl and are loaded dynamically at runtime according to database criteria for the page.
We gave 3 others a chance at it, two of them full time and true Microserfs.
Microserf? What is this, a contest to see who can act most like a child?
Since then I've tried other things and come to the same conclusion.
I guess it's nice that you came to a conclusion, it's just unfortunate that you are trying to extend your technical incompetence onto others.
ASP.NET has rocked my world as well, and I am barely even scratching the surface of functionality.
Simple economics, my dear Watson, simple economics.
This is the quote from adobe... "If Apple's already doing an application, it makes the market for a third-party developer that much smaller," said David Trescot, senior director of Adobe's digital video products group.
It's the size of the market. A good chunk share of a tiny market is a reasonable number to make money off of. A tiny chunk of a tiny market is barely enough to scrape by.
Apple simply reduced Adobe's marketshare potential.
The same thing happens with Microsoft bundling in things like it's movie maker. It's going to be adequate for a good portion of people using the OS who just want to play around. But for those really trying to get something working, it's not adequate and so they look for third party products.
But the Windows market is so huge that even a tiny market share is still a large number of sales, enough to sustain a business off of. Look at Opera as an example of that.
It has nothing to do with preferential treatment, or hidden APIs. It's not an unfair advantage, it's merely a question of market demand. Of course one thing, in Microsoft's case with most of their bundled in utilities, they are purposefully crippled in order to encourage a third party market. That's not true with what Apple is bundling in.
often you have to wait for over 2 months for a dentist's appointment, for example
Hmm, sounds like America. That is, if you can find a dentist willing to accept new patients from the particular medical plan you have.
So consider yourself fortunate, because America has the best damn health care industry in the world!
I have a cousin working for a company that sells, among other things, a mainframe based spreadsheet app. He claims that the market for applications is drying up, and I have to agree.
I agree as well. The market for applications running on mainframes is drying up.
Your attempt to extend this point further is rather absurd.
Agreed. I get a lot of email, ads and such. If it's from a legitimate company I can easily opt-out.
For some reason I haven't been able to do that with the Hong Kong porn spammers.
BTW, all the Hong Kong spam comes to the email address I used here on slashbot. So that must make slashbot culpable for spam as well, right?
So I'm reading the news.com summary, which is a bit biased, but basically shows the slashbot title as being grossly misleading. California is still debating an anti-spam bill, and will probably pass one.
It just won't be the one written by Senator Bowen.
From reading the articles it is unclear if this is a bad thing or not. Bowen sounds hysterical, and the Murray complaints against her bill are not very specific.
Need more info. Or am I just supposed to be outraged like a good little slashbot?
When I am travelling on business and need a portable workstation, I know which one I want.
I have a 15" display on my Toshiba, and it's near impossible to use on an airplane in the coach seating. Especially if the person in front of you leans back in their chair.
But then since you are considering buying an Apple product, I'm assuming you are always flying first class.
The opinion of one lawyer is worth at least 100,000 hits on slashbot!
Congratulations, you've convinced yourself that Linux is better by nitpicking.
Unfortunately your usage does not in any way resemble my usage of a computer. So your experience is completely irrelevant.
Given that most people do not know about Mozilla, do not know about popup blockers, and do not know about the powertoys Microsoft offers, it is irrelevent to the average user who does not download any so-called add-ons to their operating system.
Only in your mind.
The average user knows how to download stuff and install it just fine. Napster would never have had the millions of people using it, if your theory was correct. Perhaps the reality is that the features you talk about really just aren't that compelling to the average user?
I know I could do without tabbed browsing, and multi-desktops isn't all that useful. I only need popup blocking because of other lamers.
Users care about what's on their system at the time of the installation, they don't like to get out of their way and spend time getting extra plugins.
You're definately a typical Linux user. You've never had to deal with endusers, or you'd know this statement is false.
The fact that your experience is different shouldn't dismay you as much as it does: The two markets are different.
Actually I don't agree that the markets are all that different. I've worked in a University research lab, a small business with only 5 employees, another small consulting firm with about 300 employees and several Fortune 500 corporations. The luxury that the Fortune 500 corps have is experience, and if you take that knowledge and apply it at the smaller business level you can save an awful lot of aggravation and cost.
Anyhow, I think your points are excellent, but I don't think they are inconsistent with my own. There are two markets here.
I would agree on the surface it appears that the markets are different. I don't think in the end that they are. But it's a question that involves how the sale is sold.
Bill's assertion that Linux and OS/2 pose the same sort of threat are flawed because of this.
I don't think Bill's assertion with regards to OS/2 was about the market. Yes large banks went with OS/2, but they did so because of the functionality that OS/2 offered. Once that functionality was delivered with Windows NT, the other compelling features of NT on top of that suddenly made OS/2 less attractive of a purchase.
Now in the Linux market, it's hard to say. Right now the only compelling feature of Linux is initial cost. Everything beyond that is of lesser quality and value than what is available on Windows.
Now Gates is saying is that what he's going to do is go out there and sell you on that value add. Show you all the other things you get in the box, the other features you can add easily, etc. and sell you a end-to-end solution. Maybe it will work, but it's a real tough sell.
However I think if they addressed it from the price side of the equation, Linux would be dead in a wide variety of markets. The compelling feature would be eliminated. I'm not saying Microsoft needs to give their product away for free... But certainly far less than what it sells at today.
Actually, the service providers I've seen charge 20-50% less for Linux hosting than for Windows.
Not the ones I was looking at, but then I guess I was comparing equal level of services offered.
but for the types of applications best served by hosting providers it's hard to beat PHP/MySQL.
It's easy to beat PHP/MySQL... just use ASP.NET with SQL Server.
I can't see how the e-mail services provided would be significantly different.
Number of email accounts available, access to mailing lists, quality of the web based interface, etc.
So in the end, I think the hosting provider does pass the licensing savings on to you, and you get more bang for the buck with a Linux host.
Again, I haven't seen any evidence of this.
Mouse gestures will never be included in Windows or IE...
For the simple fact that they became irrelevant with the adoption of the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer with the side buttons.
And the wonderful thing about the back button on the mouse... Nobody had to read a manual to figure out how it works.
Obviously, even Bill knows that Linux kick MS ass on the server side.
Could you please define "kick" for me?
MS controls 3-4 times the server marketshare as Linux. We're not talking a niche here either, we're talking a 60% versus a 15-20% marketshare.
How exactly do you equate that to Linux kicking ass?
Hell, Sony sells more PSOne's in Japan than Microsoft selles XBOX's in Japan.
While your at it, why don't you take a look at automobile marketshare in Japan and compare that with the world. Japanese cars do far better in Japan than they do in the US or Europe.
Your analogy is lousy, you obviously don't understand the market.
Not on the desktop.
I worked for a Fortune 500 company with 5,000 desktop installations of OS/2, and we were one of the smaller examples. There were larger companies like American Express, US Bank, Norwest, etc. that had OS/2 installations in tens of thousands.
OS/2 on the server side pretty much never latched on. At the time PC servers were really only for file/print. Email was generally handled by the Mainframe, as were database and applications.
At the time the web started growing in popularity, OS/2 didn't have a viable web server to allow it to be used. Same problem Netware had.
Most of those functions (tab based browsing, popup blocking, multiple desktops) are not present in a default Windows installation, and the other functions are certainly not Free in the Windows world.
tab based browsing... Uhh, Mozilla and Opera are available on Windows. Mozilla is still free of charge.
popup blocking... Amazing new toolbar from google.
multiple desktops... It's a free download, if you want it. Personally I prefer my multi-monitor setup instead.
But multiple desktops has been around since at least Windows 3.1, it's not that new.
You're making the mistake of underestimating the competition, thinking that these things don't exist in Windows just because you lack experience with it.
Wow. Not my experience, to say the least.
I don't know it's been pretty consistent with what I've seen.
A typical IT project in a large company costs around $1 million. That's a team of about 6-10 people on a 6-9 month project. Desktop licensing for each person on the team averages at around $1,000 each. Development servers cost maybe $1,000 in licensing. Staging servers maybe $5,000 in licensing, with production servers maybe $20,000 in licensing. Now I'm just fudging numbers for a web app with a database back end. It'll be more if you're integrating with some other third party tool like Peoplesoft, EAI, whatever. I believe when I priced out Adobe's document server it was like $20k/CPU, as an example.
Anyway, so my fudged numbers is around $35k in software licensing on a 1 Million project. That's roughly 3%. Also realize that most of those costs aren't entirely sunk. When this project is done, you can reuse the same software/equipment to work on another project. Even deploy to the same production servers.
Where I see Linux being really successful is in places where the Microsoft Barrier-to-Entry(tm) is just too high.
I can see that. Of course if the company is truly small, then it is probably better to deploy any web presence at a hosting ISP. I can start with their smaller packages at like $25/month and move on up to having my own dedicated server at $300/month as the company grows.
In looking at hosting providers, I haven't seen much difference in cost, but I certainly have in capabilities... with the Microsoft providers offering far more for the dollar. SQL Server instead of mySQL, better email support, etc. For whatever reason, software licensing savings doesn't seem to give the Linux providers much of an edge.
And as more and more small businesses and contractors and researchers use Linux to do cool and interesting things on the cheap, bigger businesses will start to notice.
Ok, look back at that initial swag I gave on an IT project. $1 million. 3% or so of that is software licensing. The remaining 97% is labor.
Businesses are interested in cutting that cost, but since it's primarily labor the way to cost cutting is in reducing the timeline. Take that project from 6 months down to 3 months, and you've cut your costs in half.
That's not to say that there aren't certain situations where the cost of deploying servers into production may not be extreme. In my example, the prod environment probably has 4-6 servers. If your environment has a couple hundred web servers to handle one app, then maybe saving the 3% on licensing adds up. Such is the case for say google.com.
But most of business IT cost is labor of construction. Microsoft understands this, and their marketing materials address that. I don't see the Linux vendors understanding this point, and you certainly don't seem to recognize it in your post.
I can see a brand new market -- deploy some these bad boys, set up a wireless access point, and you have an instant internet community with no other power infrastructure.
Absolutely! Because when you don't have an electrical power infrastructure, the first thing that is needed are laptop computers connected to the internet! Screw cooking and lighting! Those aren't nearly as important as surfing p0rn!
I can see the military, scientific and commercial uses for this. But don't kid yourself into thinking this is part of some utopian world achievement. It's not. Computers are a luxury item compared to food, clothing and shelter.
No, he assumed everybody could get their hands on that software.
It's a free download.
Go to gotdotnet.com or asp.net. And yes that includes the SQL engine.