Disagree with "most people." I would say "often times."
It depends on what you are trying to do. I think that if you are writing something for publication, that separation IS beneficial and even necessary. If you are writing a class handout, maybe not so much.
I like LaTeX a great deal but if I am writing a once-off business letter, I will generally choose Abiword on Linux over LaTeX in VIM. If I am writing a complex business plan, a book, or an automatic document generation system, LaTeX is the best way to go.
but one of the real glories of TeX is the ability to separate content from presentation. A closer example would be if HTML + CSS could handle all these things.
With LaTeX I can take articles written in basic LaTeX and style them to a specific theme or format for a book or journal. Word strikes me as much harder to do this with. It might be possible to do this with Word but there seems to be too much temptation to paint a document.
Hmmm... If you run the only grocery store in town, I think refusing service to folks without compelling reason ought to be sufficiently disruptive to deserve the designation of "public nuissance."
Really, I think there needs to be some balance of the rights and interests of both parties when it comes to a business generally open to the public, and I DO think that scarcity of a service or resource is a reason to restrict exclusions from service.
The FAA relies, I believe, on leased telco lines with a backup system of microwave transmitters. Unfortunately, either of these could be compromised between sites.
Lack of connectivity to other networks is no substitute for security between sites.
Whether sodium explodes depends on a number of factors.
I watched my HS chem teacher try to do the demonstration you mention and blow up one pitrie dish after another until the whole stack was gone. His mistake? Not enough water (the water also provides a thermal mass as well as a reactant).
Also there are certain cases where having someone else control your data (as long as you can have backups!) can be a good thing. For example, it greatly simplifies the question of accounting controls, etc. Sometimes a lack of the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot is a good thing and in this case, it doesn't impact any essential freedom.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but RMS seems to have claimed that letting your own computations be run on someone else's machines is a bad idea:
This comes from a section of Stallman's interview about the benefits and limitations of the AGPL.
However, if you get full access to your data (in the form of a postgresql dump, no less), and full access to the source code (as a matter of contract), why is it a software freedom issue?
let me give you an example of SaaS that I think is Free under RMS's standards.
So I have customers who run LedgerSMB (prerelease versions, if you can believe that) in production with a fair bit of handholding as required, and we provide a fair bit of expertise. The software is hosted. The customer gets access to all patches, backups, etc. And the entire software stack is under GPL v2, BSD, and similar licenses. We release as much back to the projects as possible for solid business reasons.
Do the customers have the expertise to do all this themselves? If they did, they wouldn't be hiring me. Certainly hiring consultants doesn't suddenly make free software non-free, so why would not having the experience to set things up yourself make it unfree?
If they don't pay their bills, sure access to the software would eventually go away. But what they are paying for is expertise, hosting, and management. Certainly if I set up Drupal on a shared hosting site, that doesn't make Drupal un-free does it?
This is a case of RMS barking up the wrong tree. It is true you get more freedom to handle things when you control the servers. However, if that were the only consideration, we would all be running our web sites from our business locations on our own servers and the shared hosting guys would be out of business.
Software as a service can be good or bad depending on specifics. It is entirely unfair to paint the entire industry as evil just because there is some loss of freedom involved (by that measure the GPL v3, the GFDL, and the AGPL are evil). In reality many companies may prefer to let the software sit somewhere else and be managed by someone else rather than have to pay for inhouse IT folks. This is especially true for smaller businesses.
Certainly some forms of software as a service are entirely unfree. Other forms are quite a bit more free than the EMACS Manual. So it depends.
"We" didn't do all that in 1918. 50 million people died. Hygiene is primarily responsible for the drastic reduction in infectious disease in the last 100 years.
IMO the middle ground is best. Except in some environments (hospitals, etc), I don't think one should go out of one's way to sanitize every conceivable surface. Washing hands is good. Spraying the telephone with lysol is paranoia and counterproductive, despite what the ads on TV say.
Also there is a growing body of evidence that kids who grow up in less sterile environments (farms, etc) grow faster and have fewer illnesses as adults than those who grow up in more sterile environments. Some of these involve experiments with raising animals in sterile environments.
Thus far, I am not calling off my trip to Ecuador this summer. However, I AM following this closely. My suspicion is that this will be reasonably contained, but it is something to pay attention to.
There are fairly good studies dismissing Echinacea's impact on colds.
There are plenty of herbal remedies which are shown to be effective at some things. Ginko, Feverfew, Ginger, Garlic, etc.
In many of these cases, we can even show the mechanism. At the same time, I have to admit that the studies dismissing Echinacea's effectiveness in the normal recommended approaches are pretty good. This does NOT mean it is ineffective at everything (I would be surprised it it is), but it is ineffective as a general immune stimulant and cold remedy.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Actually, there are a few cases when going in and copying a table file from Pgsql can be helpful and this isn't THAT hard to do.
Examples of cases where that is helpful is trying to determine if an error that is causing Pg from starting up (rarely happens, but might in the case of hardware failure) is something which can be repaired or not with a bit of a hex editor or whether to just restore from backup.
However, if you NEED to do this, you can google how to do it.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Not sure.
CREATE table test(
testfld text);
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX test_testfld_u ON test (lower(testfld));
I think you're mostly right but it's clear you're not using AD beyond an authentication system for your workstations. Start putting group policies to use and you'll quickly see that Linux/Samba can't compete.
True. On the other hand, if you try to minimize the support time necessary to update every system, you will find that Windows can't compete. MIT, for example, built networks far easier to admin than anything Microsoft has been able to come up with.
Value is a function of the extent to which a software and hardware platform support your internal business processes.
Let's start there. Let's not talk about support costs. Let's not talk about how much admins make. At least not until after we do a comparison there. Then let's talk about how to minimize these costs too.
In general, if you can maximize the benefit you get from the software, that value will totally dwarf all of the associated support costs. For big companies, many things will not be doable with FOSS within a reasonable budget. Furthermore, usually if this is well managed, long-term costs will be much lower.
So this is all about management of the project, ensuring you have people doing so who understand these ideas, etc. And yes, there is a premium I have seen in FOSS projects so they usually cost more than proprietary ones. Why? Because there are additional easy changes which can improve the value (as defined above) to the business which cost money. So it is rational to spend MORE on FOSS projects than for proprietary ones.
The thing is, it isn't about cost at all. The issue is that you are trying to position one package against another, and this is the wrong approach. The manager will compare it and see if, out of the box, the extra features are worth that extra cost, whether it fits into what they currently have, etc.
Instead, you need to take the time to understand what the management NEEDS and see if you can offer a more complete set using FOSS plus some optional customization or extension. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. But that is the question.
Usually, if you come up with something that is more complete in supporting their business tasks, managers will take it even if it costs a bit more. The reason is that this is VALUE. Repeat after me: "Value is defined by how a piece of software supports operations in your business." Unless you understand that and make it the key point of your proposals, you will not get many managers to take your approach seriously.
Now...... I have seen managers choose software for reasons that had nothing to do with value. "The CEO's wife works for Microsoft, so we won't use FOSS" is a case where you just should walk away and not even try....
Add in what you pay people to make the solution do exactly what you want it to do and you end up with something quite a bit above $0.
However.... the choice is usually that you CAN do the above with FOSS. It is generally a lot harder (if it is even possible) to do the same with proprietary software, and when it is possible it usually costs a lot more.
IMO, most customers end up paying a bit MORE for open source solutions simply because there is so much more they can do to use these solutions to support other business processes.
Cost is usually a false argument for FOSS. Value is the main area where the software excels.
Honestly, I would like to thank Sam Ramji for bringing up an important point in open source sales which is: Nobody cares about cost comparison so much as value propositions. On behalf of all of us, thanks!
"Occultation" in the dictionary. It's an astronomical term and refers to what happens when one heavenly body is concealed because another heavenly body passes in front of it.....
Slashdot Mirror
LyX isn't too bad as a middle-ground between text-based and WYSIWYG.
I still prefer VIM though.
Disagree with "most people." I would say "often times."
It depends on what you are trying to do. I think that if you are writing something for publication, that separation IS beneficial and even necessary. If you are writing a class handout, maybe not so much.
I like LaTeX a great deal but if I am writing a once-off business letter, I will generally choose Abiword on Linux over LaTeX in VIM. If I am writing a complex business plan, a book, or an automatic document generation system, LaTeX is the best way to go.
but one of the real glories of TeX is the ability to separate content from presentation. A closer example would be if HTML + CSS could handle all these things.
With LaTeX I can take articles written in basic LaTeX and style them to a specific theme or format for a book or journal. Word strikes me as much harder to do this with. It might be possible to do this with Word but there seems to be too much temptation to paint a document.
Hmmm... If you run the only grocery store in town, I think refusing service to folks without compelling reason ought to be sufficiently disruptive to deserve the designation of "public nuissance."
Really, I think there needs to be some balance of the rights and interests of both parties when it comes to a business generally open to the public, and I DO think that scarcity of a service or resource is a reason to restrict exclusions from service.
The FAA relies, I believe, on leased telco lines with a backup system of microwave transmitters. Unfortunately, either of these could be compromised between sites.
Lack of connectivity to other networks is no substitute for security between sites.
Whether sodium explodes depends on a number of factors.
I watched my HS chem teacher try to do the demonstration you mention and blow up one pitrie dish after another until the whole stack was gone. His mistake? Not enough water (the water also provides a thermal mass as well as a reactant).
Evidently it is fading for you ;-)
They are talking about lithium ions in water (from salts like lithium chloride), not dumping metallic lithium in the reservoires ;-)
Also there are certain cases where having someone else control your data (as long as you can have backups!) can be a good thing. For example, it greatly simplifies the question of accounting controls, etc. Sometimes a lack of the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot is a good thing and in this case, it doesn't impact any essential freedom.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but RMS seems to have claimed that letting your own computations be run on someone else's machines is a bad idea:
This comes from a section of Stallman's interview about the benefits and limitations of the AGPL.
However, if you get full access to your data (in the form of a postgresql dump, no less), and full access to the source code (as a matter of contract), why is it a software freedom issue?
let me give you an example of SaaS that I think is Free under RMS's standards.
So I have customers who run LedgerSMB (prerelease versions, if you can believe that) in production with a fair bit of handholding as required, and we provide a fair bit of expertise. The software is hosted. The customer gets access to all patches, backups, etc. And the entire software stack is under GPL v2, BSD, and similar licenses. We release as much back to the projects as possible for solid business reasons.
Do the customers have the expertise to do all this themselves? If they did, they wouldn't be hiring me. Certainly hiring consultants doesn't suddenly make free software non-free, so why would not having the experience to set things up yourself make it unfree?
If they don't pay their bills, sure access to the software would eventually go away. But what they are paying for is expertise, hosting, and management. Certainly if I set up Drupal on a shared hosting site, that doesn't make Drupal un-free does it?
But if a lot of processing, access control, etc. happens on the server, then what difference does this make?
This is a case of RMS barking up the wrong tree. It is true you get more freedom to handle things when you control the servers. However, if that were the only consideration, we would all be running our web sites from our business locations on our own servers and the shared hosting guys would be out of business.
Software as a service can be good or bad depending on specifics. It is entirely unfair to paint the entire industry as evil just because there is some loss of freedom involved (by that measure the GPL v3, the GFDL, and the AGPL are evil). In reality many companies may prefer to let the software sit somewhere else and be managed by someone else rather than have to pay for inhouse IT folks. This is especially true for smaller businesses.
Certainly some forms of software as a service are entirely unfree. Other forms are quite a bit more free than the EMACS Manual. So it depends.
Hence "Except in some environments (hospitals, etc)..."
I was fairly careful to note that there were exceptions....
"We" didn't do all that in 1918. 50 million people died. Hygiene is primarily responsible for the drastic reduction in infectious disease in the last 100 years.
IMO the middle ground is best. Except in some environments (hospitals, etc), I don't think one should go out of one's way to sanitize every conceivable surface. Washing hands is good. Spraying the telephone with lysol is paranoia and counterproductive, despite what the ads on TV say.
Also there is a growing body of evidence that kids who grow up in less sterile environments (farms, etc) grow faster and have fewer illnesses as adults than those who grow up in more sterile environments. Some of these involve experiments with raising animals in sterile environments.
Thus far, I am not calling off my trip to Ecuador this summer. However, I AM following this closely. My suspicion is that this will be reasonably contained, but it is something to pay attention to.
There are fairly good studies dismissing Echinacea's impact on colds.
There are plenty of herbal remedies which are shown to be effective at some things. Ginko, Feverfew, Ginger, Garlic, etc.
In many of these cases, we can even show the mechanism. At the same time, I have to admit that the studies dismissing Echinacea's effectiveness in the normal recommended approaches are pretty good. This does NOT mean it is ineffective at everything (I would be surprised it it is), but it is ineffective as a general immune stimulant and cold remedy.
Actually, there are a few cases when going in and copying a table file from Pgsql can be helpful and this isn't THAT hard to do.
Examples of cases where that is helpful is trying to determine if an error that is causing Pg from starting up (rarely happens, but might in the case of hardware failure) is something which can be repaired or not with a bit of a hex editor or whether to just restore from backup.
However, if you NEED to do this, you can google how to do it.
Not sure.
CREATE table test(
testfld text);
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX test_testfld_u ON test (lower(testfld));
Solves your problem.....
I think you're mostly right but it's clear you're not using AD beyond an authentication system for your workstations. Start putting group policies to use and you'll quickly see that Linux/Samba can't compete.
True. On the other hand, if you try to minimize the support time necessary to update every system, you will find that Windows can't compete. MIT, for example, built networks far easier to admin than anything Microsoft has been able to come up with.
Really:
Value is a function of the extent to which a software and hardware platform support your internal business processes.
Let's start there. Let's not talk about support costs. Let's not talk about how much admins make. At least not until after we do a comparison there. Then let's talk about how to minimize these costs too.
In general, if you can maximize the benefit you get from the software, that value will totally dwarf all of the associated support costs. For big companies, many things will not be doable with FOSS within a reasonable budget. Furthermore, usually if this is well managed, long-term costs will be much lower.
So this is all about management of the project, ensuring you have people doing so who understand these ideas, etc. And yes, there is a premium I have seen in FOSS projects so they usually cost more than proprietary ones. Why? Because there are additional easy changes which can improve the value (as defined above) to the business which cost money. So it is rational to spend MORE on FOSS projects than for proprietary ones.
Usually I say "I can fix that for $x dollars!"
Goes over much better..... Note not ALL patches end up accepted, and some I end up having to maintain for more money in the future.
Usually, that is....
The thing is, it isn't about cost at all. The issue is that you are trying to position one package against another, and this is the wrong approach. The manager will compare it and see if, out of the box, the extra features are worth that extra cost, whether it fits into what they currently have, etc.
Instead, you need to take the time to understand what the management NEEDS and see if you can offer a more complete set using FOSS plus some optional customization or extension. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. But that is the question.
Usually, if you come up with something that is more complete in supporting their business tasks, managers will take it even if it costs a bit more. The reason is that this is VALUE. Repeat after me: "Value is defined by how a piece of software supports operations in your business." Unless you understand that and make it the key point of your proposals, you will not get many managers to take your approach seriously.
Now...... I have seen managers choose software for reasons that had nothing to do with value. "The CEO's wife works for Microsoft, so we won't use FOSS" is a case where you just should walk away and not even try....
Add in what you pay people to make the solution do exactly what you want it to do and you end up with something quite a bit above $0.
However.... the choice is usually that you CAN do the above with FOSS. It is generally a lot harder (if it is even possible) to do the same with proprietary software, and when it is possible it usually costs a lot more.
Absolutely.
IMO, most customers end up paying a bit MORE for open source solutions simply because there is so much more they can do to use these solutions to support other business processes.
Cost is usually a false argument for FOSS. Value is the main area where the software excels.
Honestly, I would like to thank Sam Ramji for bringing up an important point in open source sales which is: Nobody cares about cost comparison so much as value propositions. On behalf of all of us, thanks!
"Occultation" in the dictionary. It's an astronomical term and refers to what happens when one heavenly body is concealed because another heavenly body passes in front of it.....