That all depends. If you're talking about, say, a small business that needs basic desktop machines, the overhead in say, going with an OS OS will far exceed any price savings. On the other hand, if you're talking about a very specific business application, then yes, it may be a big difference if the programs are of equal quality.
Does anybody really still believe in intrinsic TCO savings by using OSS, anyway? I think most people know better. I wasn't too surprised (but I was relieved that the fanatical Slashdot crowd isn't typical).
This guy is still living in the Dot-Com bullshit days in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. When he says "startup", he means one of those companies with slick marketing, lots of venture capital, and no real product (and the owners have no real stake in it either). They're essentially paper companies, that do very little other than make vaporware, and hope to go public. These aren't real companies with value that add anything to the economy.
What you're talking about is real entrepreneurship (I think). Rolling up your sleeves to rent a dumpy storefront to make pizzas is starting a real business. Not what this silly essay is about.
As I was reading this, as a business owner, I wasn't able to follow the loads of bullshit venture-capital speak. This, in turn, made me realize that this article isn't about average jobs or even average statups. This guy is living in the ridiculous little Silicon Valley bubble. A disclaimer would've been nice.
The portable digital music market is in it's infancy. Apple will have it's loyal followers (disciples, more like it) forever, but once people start using digital music, Apple will be a moot point. Most people haven't even heard of the ipod, I'm willing to bet. Hell, and there are lots of people like me that were actually waiting for a low-cost alternative to the ipud.
If you're comparing Yahoo against Apple, you should know that Yahoo is much more profitable, has much larget capitalization, and is in much more solid financial standing than Apple. If anything, you should worry about Apple folding, and then the ipod will be another (grossly overpriced) piece of plastic junk. Yahoo? WMA? They're here to stay.
Because Microsoft cares about control and winning at all costs, whereas Apple cares about making a good product.
Really? First off, you're talking about corporations. Corporations don't have consciousnesses and ideas of their own. Are you maybe talking about some of the executives in the corporations? If so, which ones?
Secondly, how do you know? Maybe Apple is concerned about control and winning at all costs but just isn't successful as MS has been.
I hardly think that you can make such a ridiculous statement with no proof, whatsoever. [Well, actually you can, and you did, but that doesn't mean it's a good statement or even remotely logical]
But with the iPod also working with Windows, it gave the iPod the market share it now has... which is somewhere around 70%-75% or so of hard drive music players.
So what? The MP3/digital portable audio market is still in it's infancy. I'd bet that most Americans still haven't heard of the Ipod, and quite a few still don't know what MP3's are. To assume the MP3 market is done and settled because everybody you is keepin up with the Joneses is pretty naive. Hell, I don't even own an ipod yet because I'm waiting for the reasonable priced knockoffs which may very well be WMA enabled.
The answer is simple: Americans like Big and Cheap. Look at any city in the US. Every town is full of the same giant strip malls *full* of Big Box Stores, filled with fat people eating giant portions of fast food from their gas guzzling, crappy Ford Explorers. I'm American. Sadly, it's true. Almost the whole country is now like this.
They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards?
Because in the business market, which many manufacturers still consider to be important, people aren't throwing away new gizmos and replacing them with new ones every 6 months. Our business has *tons* for misson-critical accessories that are either serial or parallel, and I wouldn't buy a machine without serial and parallel ports.
And here we see the beginning of Firefox becoming just like commercial software.... they're working on new "features" to "sell" the piece of software faster/better/whatever instead of taking time to fix current bugs. If Firefox continues at this rate, it'll be no better than IE soon, and we (web developers) will be back to the drawing board, looking for another decent browser.
The only difference here is that this is the blessed client by Apple.
Actually, the more important difference is that Apple is spending some money to let people know that this product exists. How many people have heard of "Howl" before your post? 5?
That's true. On my server, I block entire subnets that allow spamming. I know that I have several class A's, and lots of Class B's, and the majority are based in china. And, it's not websites... it's all IP traffic. They're essentially a rogue state on Net. If anything, I think that we'll soon see a Net for China, and a Net for everybody else.
I had never even heard of Oasis before this article. So I figured that this must be an impressive group of people, if they're designing standards, and at least the Slashdot editors think that those standards will make some ripples. Instead, the membership of this standards group consists of:
Tom Magliery Blast Radius Inc. Voting Member
Nathaniel Borenstein IBM Voting Member - Probation
Xiaowei Hu IBM Voting Member - Probation
Gary Edwards Individual Voting Member
David Faure Individual Voting Member
Patrick Durusau Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Voting Member
Michael Brauer Sun Microsystems* TC Chair
Lars Oppermann Sun Microsystems* Secretary
Instead, 8 seemingly random, average people are making this "standard". Who are these people? What are their qualifications?
On a similar note, my buddy and I came up with a new standard that should replace EDI for all intra-business communication. We'll have it up just as soon as my Geocities account is activated.
I gotta thank you for that link. Seriously. I, just for fun, checked out the link about "Nokia 6600 syncing". Figure it'd say "install this, and click "Synchronize". On the contrary, I found the most convoluted, difficult, insanely ridiculous instructions I've ever found for any computer-related hobby/fetish, considering that there were levels upon levels upon levels of complication. I had no idea how much brainpower is wasted on pointless hobbies like this. Wow.
You're talking about beauracracy, which as you describe it, is very common in large organizations (I worked as a hired gun for many large companies). I'm saying that from a technical and architectural standpoint, there are many, many benefits to fully utilizing a RDBMS like Oracle or DB2. The unfortunate fact that your company has locked down the databases too tight (and from what it sounds like, *no* database developers to handle that middle layer) really doesn't have a lot to do with the fact that RDBMS' are *not* designed to eb simple data repositories, but are designed to, and are effective at handling a large amount of business logic and data integrity for many applications.
I love it... The "micropayment guy" here on Slashdot is like the face-painters at professional sports events. They're always there, they always are vocal and the regulars who know better aren't able to do much but roll their eyes and hope they go away and quit embarrassing them.
If you've ever needed legal services, you'll know that it's very tough to get a lawyer without a massive retainter, unless the lawyer is 99% sure that you're gonna win (GPL isn't anywhere near this). Also, what are you gonna do about China...?
The problem is that all open source licensing relies on honesty
Wait until Asia gets heavy into development. Right now, there's an entire culture that doesn't even care about pirating commercial, copyrighted software. They won't even blink when they start including and selling GPL'ed code.
When did adding overhead become the mark of skill?
Never. But using databases to encapsulate business logic (PL/SQL, for example) has been a mark of good developers and engineers for years. Apparently, you've missed that mark...
Other than the fact that one of the article's authors works at Microsoft, there is not a single reference to Microsoft. What article are you reading? And if you think that MS is an important player with enterprise-class RDBMS', what are you smoking?
Queues? Workflows? Business logic? Excuse me for thinking that a database should just store data. I guess that makes me a caveman or something.
Well, either you're a caveman, or you are simply ignorant. Either way, it can be cured. Try talking to some of those DBA's and Database Developers. You may learn something. If all you need is data stored, then use a flat file (or MySQL if you're feeling lucky). If you want data integrity, performance, stability, AND business logic, use a database.
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
Occasionally. And it's almost always due to user error, misconfiguration, or using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Your use of the word "site" makes it obvious that you think that databases are used primarily for websites, or that websites are a test of a real database. How often do you hear of Visa or Mastercard going down? How about the NYSE? How about banks? I would say that "sites" are rarely used as any kind of litmus test for databases. They're simply NOT "fragile".
Slashdot Mirror
That all depends. If you're talking about, say, a small business that needs basic desktop machines, the overhead in say, going with an OS OS will far exceed any price savings. On the other hand, if you're talking about a very specific business application, then yes, it may be a big difference if the programs are of equal quality.
Does anybody really still believe in intrinsic TCO savings by using OSS, anyway? I think most people know better. I wasn't too surprised (but I was relieved that the fanatical Slashdot crowd isn't typical).
This guy is still living in the Dot-Com bullshit days in Silicon Valley/San Francisco. When he says "startup", he means one of those companies with slick marketing, lots of venture capital, and no real product (and the owners have no real stake in it either). They're essentially paper companies, that do very little other than make vaporware, and hope to go public. These aren't real companies with value that add anything to the economy.
What you're talking about is real entrepreneurship (I think). Rolling up your sleeves to rent a dumpy storefront to make pizzas is starting a real business. Not what this silly essay is about.
As I was reading this, as a business owner, I wasn't able to follow the loads of bullshit venture-capital speak. This, in turn, made me realize that this article isn't about average jobs or even average statups. This guy is living in the ridiculous little Silicon Valley bubble. A disclaimer would've been nice.
The portable digital music market is in it's infancy. Apple will have it's loyal followers (disciples, more like it) forever, but once people start using digital music, Apple will be a moot point. Most people haven't even heard of the ipod, I'm willing to bet. Hell, and there are lots of people like me that were actually waiting for a low-cost alternative to the ipud.
If you're comparing Yahoo against Apple, you should know that Yahoo is much more profitable, has much larget capitalization, and is in much more solid financial standing than Apple. If anything, you should worry about Apple folding, and then the ipod will be another (grossly overpriced) piece of plastic junk. Yahoo? WMA? They're here to stay.
Because Microsoft cares about control and winning at all costs, whereas Apple cares about making a good product.
Really? First off, you're talking about corporations. Corporations don't have consciousnesses and ideas of their own. Are you maybe talking about some of the executives in the corporations? If so, which ones?
Secondly, how do you know? Maybe Apple is concerned about control and winning at all costs but just isn't successful as MS has been.
I hardly think that you can make such a ridiculous statement with no proof, whatsoever. [Well, actually you can, and you did, but that doesn't mean it's a good statement or even remotely logical]
But with the iPod also working with Windows, it gave the iPod the market share it now has... which is somewhere around 70%-75% or so of hard drive music players.
So what? The MP3/digital portable audio market is still in it's infancy. I'd bet that most Americans still haven't heard of the Ipod, and quite a few still don't know what MP3's are. To assume the MP3 market is done and settled because everybody you is keepin up with the Joneses is pretty naive. Hell, I don't even own an ipod yet because I'm waiting for the reasonable priced knockoffs which may very well be WMA enabled.
Until every single person on this planet can eat, you don't need a 80 inch big screen television.
Well then, let's get all countries to mandate one child per couple (or less). I don't believe that people have any intrinsic right to reproduce.
The answer is simple: Americans like Big and Cheap. Look at any city in the US. Every town is full of the same giant strip malls *full* of Big Box Stores, filled with fat people eating giant portions of fast food from their gas guzzling, crappy Ford Explorers. I'm American. Sadly, it's true. Almost the whole country is now like this.
They aren't used by 75% of the rest of the world, why are they even included as standard on ALL boards?
Because in the business market, which many manufacturers still consider to be important, people aren't throwing away new gizmos and replacing them with new ones every 6 months. Our business has *tons* for misson-critical accessories that are either serial or parallel, and I wouldn't buy a machine without serial and parallel ports.
And here we see the beginning of Firefox becoming just like commercial software.... they're working on new "features" to "sell" the piece of software faster/better/whatever instead of taking time to fix current bugs. If Firefox continues at this rate, it'll be no better than IE soon, and we (web developers) will be back to the drawing board, looking for another decent browser.
The only difference here is that this is the blessed client by Apple.
Actually, the more important difference is that Apple is spending some money to let people know that this product exists. How many people have heard of "Howl" before your post? 5?
Ok, somebody tell me how this is "evil". I'm gonna enjoy this one.
That's true. On my server, I block entire subnets that allow spamming. I know that I have several class A's, and lots of Class B's, and the majority are based in china. And, it's not websites... it's all IP traffic. They're essentially a rogue state on Net. If anything, I think that we'll soon see a Net for China, and a Net for everybody else.
I had never even heard of Oasis before this article. So I figured that this must be an impressive group of people, if they're designing standards, and at least the Slashdot editors think that those standards will make some ripples. Instead, the membership of this standards group consists of:
Tom Magliery Blast Radius Inc. Voting Member
Nathaniel Borenstein IBM Voting Member - Probation
Xiaowei Hu IBM Voting Member - Probation
Gary Edwards Individual Voting Member
David Faure Individual Voting Member
Patrick Durusau Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Voting Member
Michael Brauer Sun Microsystems* TC Chair
Lars Oppermann Sun Microsystems* Secretary
Instead, 8 seemingly random, average people are making this "standard". Who are these people? What are their qualifications?
On a similar note, my buddy and I came up with a new standard that should replace EDI for all intra-business communication. We'll have it up just as soon as my Geocities account is activated.
I gotta thank you for that link. Seriously. I, just for fun, checked out the link about "Nokia 6600 syncing". Figure it'd say "install this, and click "Synchronize". On the contrary, I found the most convoluted, difficult, insanely ridiculous instructions I've ever found for any computer-related hobby/fetish, considering that there were levels upon levels upon levels of complication. I had no idea how much brainpower is wasted on pointless hobbies like this. Wow.
You're talking about beauracracy, which as you describe it, is very common in large organizations (I worked as a hired gun for many large companies). I'm saying that from a technical and architectural standpoint, there are many, many benefits to fully utilizing a RDBMS like Oracle or DB2. The unfortunate fact that your company has locked down the databases too tight (and from what it sounds like, *no* database developers to handle that middle layer) really doesn't have a lot to do with the fact that RDBMS' are *not* designed to eb simple data repositories, but are designed to, and are effective at handling a large amount of business logic and data integrity for many applications.
I love it... The "micropayment guy" here on Slashdot is like the face-painters at professional sports events. They're always there, they always are vocal and the regulars who know better aren't able to do much but roll their eyes and hope they go away and quit embarrassing them.
If you've ever needed legal services, you'll know that it's very tough to get a lawyer without a massive retainter, unless the lawyer is 99% sure that you're gonna win (GPL isn't anywhere near this). Also, what are you gonna do about China...?
The problem is that all open source licensing relies on honesty
Wait until Asia gets heavy into development. Right now, there's an entire culture that doesn't even care about pirating commercial, copyrighted software. They won't even blink when they start including and selling GPL'ed code.
When did adding overhead become the mark of skill?
Never. But using databases to encapsulate business logic (PL/SQL, for example) has been a mark of good developers and engineers for years. Apparently, you've missed that mark...
Other than the fact that one of the article's authors works at Microsoft, there is not a single reference to Microsoft. What article are you reading? And if you think that MS is an important player with enterprise-class RDBMS', what are you smoking?
Queues? Workflows? Business logic? Excuse me for thinking that a database should just store data. I guess that makes me a caveman or something.
Well, either you're a caveman, or you are simply ignorant. Either way, it can be cured. Try talking to some of those DBA's and Database Developers. You may learn something. If all you need is data stored, then use a flat file (or MySQL if you're feeling lucky). If you want data integrity, performance, stability, AND business logic, use a database.
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
Occasionally. And it's almost always due to user error, misconfiguration, or using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Your use of the word "site" makes it obvious that you think that databases are used primarily for websites, or that websites are a test of a real database. How often do you hear of Visa or Mastercard going down? How about the NYSE? How about banks? I would say that "sites" are rarely used as any kind of litmus test for databases. They're simply NOT "fragile".