Total Cost of Ownership is a marketing buzzword that is supposed to mean 'measurement of how much it costs to maintain'. There are so many variables involved in that definition:
Having sold software and hardware for literally decades using TCO, I can tell you conclusively that it's worse than you think. TCO is MUCH MORE SWEEPING and includes:
* Cost of Acquisition (hard) * Cost of Installation (soft) * Cost of maintenance (soft) * Cost of downtime (soft) * Interest costs from loans (hard) * Cost of consumables (soft) * Utility costs (electric) (soft) * Cost of anticipated moves, adds changes (soft) * Cost of anticipated upgrades (soft) * Cost of disposal (soft)
Most of which are highly subjective soft costs. TCO is basically useless unless it's your accountant telling you what your departmental expenses related to ____ are. If you here it from a sales person or marketing type, it is most likely bs. ROI is even worse and TCO comparisons are the worst of all. If you want reality have your CFO or controller do a ROAE (Return on Assets Employed) study.
We don't want it. It looks like one of those domain squater search engines where every link goes to gay oran utan porn. You all can keep it. I like my error messages better.
You should still consider rephasing/clarifying your statement instead of giving a narrow definition you preassume everyone holds to.
I meant what I said - the context is appropriate. The SCO situation is all about the money. If a property (land, product, intellectual) has any of the attributes you list (except the "derivable of subjectivity"), it's monetary value will increase.
Money doesn't measure everything, but this whole SCO thing is most certainly all about the money.
I've often wondered why the internet is fascinated by:
* Getting a larger penis * Using chemical pheremones to motivate the opposite sex * Porn
Then I remembered that the internet is was created by geeks for geeks and funded by a government that knows that large numbers bored smart people would eventually get tired of large numbers of stupid people making the rules.
LOL - at least for the past five years their product has not been the best. It's out of it's league as a worstation OS but is fine for driving terminals and acting as an application server for something that is accessed via telnet. That's where their innovation has failed. They at one time had a decent product that had great potential...
"...as Linux erodes the value of intellectual property."
That doesn't seem accurate considering even Linus protects his copyrights around Linux. Otherwise the same would not be copyrighted by him.
Property's value is set by a combination of the following two factors:
* How much someone will buy it for. * How much income can be generated for the owner through utilization.
Traditionally, intellectual property gets its income from the selling of licenses - which depends on if that license is a one time purchase or a periodic contract. Linux is a problem for owners of other properties (say Windos or SCO) because it is a lot like a new mall being built down the street from the old mall. The old mall's owners will likely lose their shirts over the short haul because their utilization revenue goes down.
SCO got screwed when they bought Unix because they didn't realize that not only had a new mall been built, but the entire population moved to the other side of town and urban blight had set in on the Unix neighborhood. They bought the intellectual property equivilent to an old-style open air mall with pay bathrooms and pay parking. At least MS had built their joint on the right side of town.
SCO's filing was 80% fluff and was filled with a lot of mistruth concerning the os marketplace. Looks like it comes down to one question: does SCO or IBM own JFS. The answer there is obvious. Regardless, SCOs bantering about wanting $600 per processor and the like are silly - most linux users don't use JFS anyway. At the end of the day we can expect more suits like this as Linux erodes the value of intellectual property. And it's important to remember that an idea is only valuable if it is a comparitively good idea... Had SCO continued to innovate, and adapt to the market there would be no reason to sue. Linux exists because Unix vendors screwed users for far too many years.
Based on the last 20-30 programmers I interviewed, I think teaching assembly language is a great idea. One of the questions I ask in the interview just to weed out the posers is to whiteboard how each type of number (int, float, double, etc...) is represented in memory. Then I ask them how a simple string is handled in memeory (c or c++ style). Anyone who can't show me confidently is confidently shown the door. Last time it cleared 8 out of 10 candidates.
Why is it when people use the word respectfully they mean exactly the opposite:-) Because disagreement does not imply disrespect.
So were the people giving the unlawful/unauthorised orders court martialed?In one case yes (it involved a navigation issue that ended up doing a few million in damage to our ship). In other cases, no. At the end of the day what is important is that we all thought better of the situations and made a decision to do the right thing.
Not all service personnel are as you paint them, prehaps somewhere between our two view points the majority reside. You are right - sll military people are not the same. There are disagreements, people have different perspectives, but not unlike civilian life, you work it out and work togather.
but history and my experience speak otherwise. Having served, I can say from experience that I am correct. So far as history goes, the US military is on new ground. It is an all volunteer force. The nature of the military is totally different than it was even 30 years ago in Viet Nam. I'm not sure it's fair to anyone who is in uniform right now to hold the sins of an impressed pauper forced to kill at gun (or sword) point against someone who volunteers to defend our nation.
For the record I've never seen Universal Soldier, anything like All Quiet on the Western Front? No, more like all quiet on the frontal lobe, cerebral cortex and spinal chord. Typical Hollywood mad scientist/rogue commander flick.
As a sailor you would have done as ordered. I respectfully disagree. There was more than one occasion where I either disregarded, belayed (recinded and issued different orders) or refused to obey orders on the grounds they were illegal or unauthorized.
At no time was I ever told to blindly follow orders. I was taught respect for the chain of command - but to also ballance that with the oath I took to uphold the Constitution, follow standing orders as well as discern if an order was from my chain of command. Believe it or not, if I was given an illegal order and followed it, I could be court martialed same as the officer who gave the order!
You should get to know some real soldiers and sailors. I think you will gain an appreciation for them - they are not the mindless automotons you see in B grade movies like "Universal Soldier". They are extremely capable young people who are trained to achieve incredible outcomes with limited resources in extremely hostile environments. Good judgment comes with the job.
In the US soldiers forgo the bill of rights. As a former sailor in the US Navy, I can tell you that I checked some of my personal rights in at the door. I did not however check in my duty to uphold the constitution for other citizens. I was under no obligation to stomp someone else's rights into the ground - in fact I had a duty to protect them.
In the US soldiers are used in civil matters Last I looked that was ATF, FBI and the department of justice's show.
Keeping our peace seems to entail invading other countries. Keeping our peace may require invading other nations. Mainly so they don't invade us or our allies.
he USA has mad cow disease, a puppet for a president, a huge debt, a slow economy and we're spending billions more on rebuilding a country that we destroyed while looking for weapons that didn't exist.
Three observations:
A) Run for office or get involved in politics. Do something about our government. In case you haven't noticed there's very little real choice coming in the presidential election. I'm going to have to vote holding my nose the same way I have the last three elections.
B) The economy was slow. The issue now is the dollar is devalued and is causing problems in other economies (i.e. American products cost less than theirs) because their economies were slow at a time when arrogant monetary policy (the ____ is worth more than ever vs. the dollar) was driving the cost of their currency up.
C) Iraq is a mess. Complaining about why we are there is a little late. The discussion now should be on how to get out and deliver on the promises we made to the Iraqi people, not on the cause of the war.
As for mad cow disease, that's a minor issue compared to other concerns we fact. Before you run to India, you need to learn more about the socio-economic situation there...
Microsoft has had years to take the search market. The pos MSN start page that IE defaults to is one of the first default settings in IE to get changed by new users. What really cracks me up is two of the internet's biggest success stories are also two of the ugliest websites: google and ebay! I hope MS's marketing department designs the page... it will continue to be too pretty to succeed.
Just to play a devil's advocate: what business do we have throwing our limited resources to other planets when we have so many problems already down here?
Many of the technologies developed in going to Mars will have direct impact on problems here on earth. It's not as if we can't work on problems here and getting to there (just in case we can't solve the problems here)...
As the last big bastion of Communism, why isn't China dedicated to only using open source software?
Actually, could it be that open source != communist philosophy!? The last thing that a tolitarian government wants is a profound lack of control. Open source is controlled by the market (NOT BY MONEY).
IMO, open source is the ultimate expression of free market economics. Software is created and developed by the market to serve the needs of the market. How many web developers make their living off of Zope, PHP or Apache? It's to their benefit to assist in development. Commoditization of mature technology (i.e. OSes, SQL databases, web servers, mail transport) should result in lower prices. Intellectual property rights create artificial scarcity. The result is there is an unfilled, very large demand for a given product. That demand is filled by the open source bazar. Where would email be without sendmail? Open source is the free market's way of beating intellectual property. It beats it to death.
For those of you who are not capitalists or are closet marxists the true enemies of a free market are:
* Monopolies (intellectual property is a form of monopoly) * Government intrusion/limitation - tarrifs, taxes, restrictions and duties. * Corruption
Things that are not enemies of capitalism, but symptoms of a market problem:
* black and grey markets - lower cost alternative markets often formed to combat #1 and #2. An example would be re-importing drugs from canada to the US. Hurts the US market, but is the market attempting to compensate for intellectual property monopolies and governement restriction.
* Consortiums - Players unite against a bully in the market (hint: open source)
* Commoditization - as a product or service becomes more available the price falls and puts often the inventor out of business.
I think many npr shows are reluctant to do this because they have an alternative income source by selling mp3s at audible.com.
I'm sure they could find a better way to make $10,000 per year.
Would be nice to be able to tune in via winamp...
Re:What's the difference?
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 1
"What's the difference between writing a virus that targets sco.com and posting a link to sco.com in a slashdot story?"
One generates trafic that the marketing department can spin as interested potential buyers. The second generates trafic that the marketing department can spin as thiefs and competitors.
Most Americans will be precluded from participating in Indiana because of:
* Debt. Consumer and Credit card debt payments often exceed an India level salary on an annual basis.
* Transportation cost. Coming to/from the US for visits is prohibitive on India level salaries.
The only reason to go is to get business contacts/experience that allows you to be a US based sales agent or project manager for outsourcing to India. This is short sided as the labor cost advantage will go away quickly - much like Japan in the late 70s and 802.
I've always enjoyed the material Groklaw provides. It may really help though if they put a press/business friendly bullet point summary of the article. The open source position is very easy to understand:
* SCO claims Linux infringes on their UNIX copyrights.
* Linux was written by thousands of programmers all over the world led by Linus Torvalds.
* SCO has not disclosed all of the parts of UNIX that they beleive are being infringed.
* SCO has disclosed some of the alleged infringements. In each of these cases, it was found that the parts in question were already in the public domain or had been released to the public as free GPL software.
Care should be taken to avoid terms like "code" "ABI" and "header files" they are too technical. This is a Brooklyn Bridge scam. Call it that.
Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community.
For those of you who wonder why this is important, let's put it this way:
If I direct my company to do something that has potential to disrupt operations and therefore cashflow, my CEO gig is gone. A DDOS paralyzes modern corporation - no email, possibly no volip, no ecommerce. It can bring operations to a standstill, and there is usually NO WAY TO CATCH UP.
If Linux becomes associated with ddoses, lawsuits or anything else that can affect cash flow negatively, Linux will become a footnote in the history of computing.
Right now is not the time to be tarnishing Linux reputation -- unless you really want another 20 years of proprietary, closed source, low quality, expensive software.
Focus your programming efforts on making Linux and other free software GREAT!
I used to thik that punishing Microsoft would be a good idea. After seeing the behavior of many Non-MS players like Rambus, SCO, GPL zealots and so on, they make MS look like nice guys.
I'm glad to see Europe try to do something about MS... unfortunately, I think a lot less money will change hands and the problem will go away just like here in the US
Slashdot Mirror
Total Cost of Ownership is a marketing buzzword that is supposed to mean 'measurement of how much it costs to maintain'. There are so many variables involved in that definition:
Having sold software and hardware for literally decades using TCO, I can tell you conclusively that it's worse than you think. TCO is MUCH MORE SWEEPING and includes:
* Cost of Acquisition (hard)
* Cost of Installation (soft)
* Cost of maintenance (soft)
* Cost of downtime (soft)
* Interest costs from loans (hard)
* Cost of consumables (soft)
* Utility costs (electric) (soft)
* Cost of anticipated moves, adds changes (soft)
* Cost of anticipated upgrades (soft)
* Cost of disposal (soft)
Most of which are highly subjective soft costs. TCO is basically useless unless it's your accountant telling you what your departmental expenses related to ____ are. If you here it from a sales person or marketing type, it is most likely bs. ROI is even worse and TCO comparisons are the worst of all. If you want reality have your CFO or controller do a ROAE (Return on Assets Employed) study.
They are also inaccurate because they count people who don't want to work as part of the workforce.
On the sitefinder thing: NO THANK YOU.
We don't want it. It looks like one of those domain squater search engines where every link goes to gay oran utan porn. You all can keep it. I like my error messages better.
You should still consider rephasing/clarifying your statement instead of giving a narrow definition you preassume everyone holds to.
I meant what I said - the context is appropriate. The SCO situation is all about the money. If a property (land, product, intellectual) has any of the attributes you list (except the "derivable of subjectivity"), it's monetary value will increase.
Money doesn't measure everything, but this whole SCO thing is most certainly all about the money.
Several billion dollars worth I believe.
I've often wondered why the internet is fascinated by:
* Getting a larger penis
* Using chemical pheremones to motivate the opposite sex
* Porn
Then I remembered that the internet is was created by geeks for geeks and funded by a government that knows that large numbers bored smart people would eventually get tired of large numbers of stupid people making the rules.
Had SCO continued to innovate
You never used their Unix did you?
LOL - at least for the past five years their product has not been the best. It's out of it's league as a worstation OS but is fine for driving terminals and acting as an application server for something that is accessed via telnet. That's where their innovation has failed. They at one time had a decent product that had great potential...
"...as Linux erodes the value of intellectual property."
That doesn't seem accurate considering even Linus protects his copyrights around Linux. Otherwise the same would not be copyrighted by him.
Property's value is set by a combination of the following two factors:
* How much someone will buy it for.
* How much income can be generated for the owner through utilization.
Traditionally, intellectual property gets its income from the selling of licenses - which depends on if that license is a one time purchase or a periodic contract. Linux is a problem for owners of other properties (say Windos or SCO) because it is a lot like a new mall being built down the street from the old mall. The old mall's owners will likely lose their shirts over the short haul because their utilization revenue goes down.
SCO got screwed when they bought Unix because they didn't realize that not only had a new mall been built, but the entire population moved to the other side of town and urban blight had set in on the Unix neighborhood. They bought the intellectual property equivilent to an old-style open air mall with pay bathrooms and pay parking. At least MS had built their joint on the right side of town.
SCO's filing was 80% fluff and was filled with a lot of mistruth concerning the os marketplace. Looks like it comes down to one question: does SCO or IBM own JFS. The answer there is obvious. Regardless, SCOs bantering about wanting $600 per processor and the like are silly - most linux users don't use JFS anyway. At the end of the day we can expect more suits like this as Linux erodes the value of intellectual property. And it's important to remember that an idea is only valuable if it is a comparitively good idea... Had SCO continued to innovate, and adapt to the market there would be no reason to sue. Linux exists because Unix vendors screwed users for far too many years.
Based on the last 20-30 programmers I interviewed, I think teaching assembly language is a great idea. One of the questions I ask in the interview just to weed out the posers is to whiteboard how each type of number (int, float, double, etc...) is represented in memory. Then I ask them how a simple string is handled in memeory (c or c++ style). Anyone who can't show me confidently is confidently shown the door. Last time it cleared 8 out of 10 candidates.
Why is it when people use the word respectfully they mean exactly the opposite :-)
Because disagreement does not imply disrespect.
So were the people giving the unlawful/unauthorised orders court martialed?In one case yes (it involved a navigation issue that ended up doing a few million in damage to our ship). In other cases, no. At the end of the day what is important is that we all thought better of the situations and made a decision to do the right thing.
Not all service personnel are as you paint them, prehaps somewhere between our two view points the majority reside. You are right - sll military people are not the same. There are disagreements, people have different perspectives, but not unlike civilian life, you work it out and work togather.
but history and my experience speak otherwise.
Having served, I can say from experience that I am correct. So far as history goes, the US military is on new ground. It is an all volunteer force. The nature of the military is totally different than it was even 30 years ago in Viet Nam. I'm not sure it's fair to anyone who is in uniform right now to hold the sins of an impressed pauper forced to kill at gun (or sword) point against someone who volunteers to defend our nation.
For the record I've never seen Universal Soldier, anything like All Quiet on the Western Front? No, more like all quiet on the frontal lobe, cerebral cortex and spinal chord. Typical Hollywood mad scientist/rogue commander flick.
As a sailor you would have done as ordered.
I respectfully disagree. There was more than one occasion where I either disregarded, belayed (recinded and issued different orders) or refused to obey orders on the grounds they were illegal or unauthorized.
At no time was I ever told to blindly follow orders. I was taught respect for the chain of command - but to also ballance that with the oath I took to uphold the Constitution, follow standing orders as well as discern if an order was from my chain of command. Believe it or not, if I was given an illegal order and followed it, I could be court martialed same as the officer who gave the order!
You should get to know some real soldiers and sailors. I think you will gain an appreciation for them - they are not the mindless automotons you see in B grade movies like "Universal Soldier". They are extremely capable young people who are trained to achieve incredible outcomes with limited resources in extremely hostile environments. Good judgment comes with the job.
In the US soldiers forgo the bill of rights.
As a former sailor in the US Navy, I can tell you that I checked some of my personal rights in at the door. I did not however check in my duty to uphold the constitution for other citizens. I was under no obligation to stomp someone else's rights into the ground - in fact I had a duty to protect them.
In the US soldiers are used in civil matters
Last I looked that was ATF, FBI and the department of justice's show.
Keeping our peace seems to entail invading other countries.
Keeping our peace may require invading other nations. Mainly so they don't invade us or our allies.
he USA has mad cow disease, a puppet for a president, a huge debt, a slow economy and we're spending billions more on rebuilding a country that we destroyed while looking for weapons that didn't exist.
Three observations:
A) Run for office or get involved in politics. Do something about our government. In case you haven't noticed there's very little real choice coming in the presidential election. I'm going to have to vote holding my nose the same way I have the last three elections.
B) The economy was slow. The issue now is the dollar is devalued and is causing problems in other economies (i.e. American products cost less than theirs) because their economies were slow at a time when arrogant monetary policy (the ____ is worth more than ever vs. the dollar) was driving the cost of their currency up.
C) Iraq is a mess. Complaining about why we are there is a little late. The discussion now should be on how to get out and deliver on the promises we made to the Iraqi people, not on the cause of the war.
As for mad cow disease, that's a minor issue compared to other concerns we fact. Before you run to India, you need to learn more about the socio-economic situation there...
Microsoft has had years to take the search market. The pos MSN start page that IE defaults to is one of the first default settings in IE to get changed by new users. What really cracks me up is two of the internet's biggest success stories are also two of the ugliest websites: google and ebay! I hope MS's marketing department designs the page... it will continue to be too pretty to succeed.
Just to play a devil's advocate: what business do we have throwing our limited resources to other planets when we have so many problems already down here?
Many of the technologies developed in going to Mars will have direct impact on problems here on earth. It's not as if we can't work on problems here and getting to there (just in case we can't solve the problems here)...
As the last big bastion of Communism, why isn't China dedicated to only using open source software?
Actually, could it be that open source != communist philosophy!? The last thing that a tolitarian government wants is a profound lack of control. Open source is controlled by the market (NOT BY MONEY).
IMO, open source is the ultimate expression of free market economics. Software is created and developed by the market to serve the needs of the market. How many web developers make their living off of Zope, PHP or Apache? It's to their benefit to assist in development. Commoditization of mature technology (i.e. OSes, SQL databases, web servers, mail transport) should result in lower prices. Intellectual property rights create artificial scarcity. The result is there is an unfilled, very large demand for a given product. That demand is filled by the open source bazar. Where would email be without sendmail? Open source is the free market's way of beating intellectual property. It beats it to death.
For those of you who are not capitalists or are closet marxists the true enemies of a free market are:
* Monopolies (intellectual property is a form of monopoly)
* Government intrusion/limitation - tarrifs, taxes, restrictions and duties.
* Corruption
Things that are not enemies of capitalism, but symptoms of a market problem:
* black and grey markets - lower cost alternative markets often formed to combat #1 and #2. An example would be re-importing drugs from canada to the US. Hurts the US market, but is the market attempting to compensate for intellectual property monopolies and governement restriction.
* Consortiums - Players unite against a bully in the market (hint: open source)
* Commoditization - as a product or service becomes more available the price falls and puts often the inventor out of business.
I think many npr shows are reluctant to do this because they have an alternative income source by selling mp3s at audible.com.
I'm sure they could find a better way to make $10,000 per year.
Would be nice to be able to tune in via winamp...
"What's the difference between writing a virus that targets sco.com and posting a link to sco.com in a slashdot story?"
One generates trafic that the marketing department can spin as interested potential buyers. The second generates trafic that the marketing department can spin as thiefs and competitors.
Most Americans will be precluded from participating in Indiana because of:
* Debt. Consumer and Credit card debt payments often exceed an India level salary on an annual basis.
* Transportation cost. Coming to/from the US for visits is prohibitive on India level salaries.
The only reason to go is to get business contacts/experience that allows you to be a US based sales agent or project manager for outsourcing to India. This is short sided as the labor cost advantage will go away quickly - much like Japan in the late 70s and 802.
I've always enjoyed the material Groklaw provides. It may really help though if they put a press/business friendly bullet point summary of the article. The open source position is very easy to understand:
* SCO claims Linux infringes on their UNIX copyrights.
* Linux was written by thousands of programmers all over the world led by Linus Torvalds.
* SCO has not disclosed all of the parts of UNIX that they beleive are being infringed.
* SCO has disclosed some of the alleged infringements. In each of these cases, it was found that the parts in question were already in the public domain or had been released to the public as free GPL software.
Care should be taken to avoid terms like "code" "ABI" and "header files" they are too technical. This is a Brooklyn Bridge scam. Call it that.
By that time, let's home we have
disarmed and defeated all the dictators and totalitarian states this kind of thing won't be needed.
I personally will welcome our new autonomous, software driven overlords.
Turn off and lock in vault.
Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community.
For those of you who wonder why this is important, let's put it this way:
If I direct my company to do something that has potential to disrupt operations and therefore cashflow, my CEO gig is gone. A DDOS paralyzes modern corporation - no email, possibly no volip, no ecommerce. It can bring operations to a standstill, and there is usually NO WAY TO CATCH UP.
If Linux becomes associated with ddoses, lawsuits or anything else that can affect cash flow negatively, Linux will become a footnote in the history of computing.
Right now is not the time to be tarnishing Linux reputation -- unless you really want another 20 years of proprietary, closed source, low quality, expensive software.
Focus your programming efforts on making Linux and other free software GREAT!
News media conglomerate allegedly may have a hand in creating news. Video at 6.
Of course, this is surprising given that the BBC does not film episodes of the Jerry Springer Show..
I used to thik that punishing Microsoft would be a good idea. After seeing the behavior of many Non-MS players like Rambus, SCO, GPL zealots and so on, they make MS look like nice guys.
I'm glad to see Europe try to do something about MS... unfortunately, I think a lot less money will change hands and the problem will go away just like here in the US