Just to let you know that MS didn't innovate this one.
Back in the 80's a British computer company, ICL, produced a chunk of hardware called CAFS. This did a basically similar thing.
Unfortunately for them their management was absolutely crap and a number of their other ideas (Distributed Array Processor, mainframes with a tagged architecture, compilable scripting language) all disappeared. I believe they are now an MS reseller.
The original comment is what "foreigners" believe is a stereotypical American response. What are called here in Britain "Little Englanders".
If I was to to take the same attitude then I would be shouting about having my daughter's boyfried repatriated. After all, what is someone from Arkansaw doing at Cambridge University, we should be saving the places for British students. He could be an undercover terrorist.
It is noticeable that all your presidents who have travelled abroad believe in a policy of engagement. They seem to realise the world actually exists outside of your borders. The ones who haven't travelled seem to be almost xenophobic in their attitude to other nations.
The last Tory government and the current Labour(?) one only seem to think that there is one industry in Great Britain, the Financial Services.
Manufacturing has been sacrificed to feed the bankers. As a result we have seen an increase in the number of accountants and MBAs coming out of our universities, but a phenomenal drop in the number of engineers and scientists.
It is not just the sciences that have suffered. Any course that is not seen to have an immediate payback is at risk. This is not just a student loans issue, it is part of the creeping corporatism that seems to be affecting most of the West. The attitude that nothing is worth doing unless it makes a profit within 18 months blights any long term view.
> What the business cares about is application availability. The OS is irrelevant to them.
Agreed and agreed. However rebooting a system is not an option if it loses you a transaction. I happen to work in a bank where transactions up to £1 billion are not uncommon. We schedule IPLs of our mainframes 6 months in advance. We simply can't afford to run with systems with 99% availability.
All the TCO studies I have seen include elements of initial capital cost, software maintenance and support.
What they do not include are estimates of the cost of non-availabilty. Obviously this is difficult to quantify, since it varies according to the application and business. However since we are talking about Linux and Windows in the entreprise one ought to be able to put some kind of estimate or estimates together (this much per hour of down time in a small development shop, this much in a bank). I think one would then see what the real cost of ownership of each platform is.
> because we drive *every*fuckingwhere in our *own* cars. especially in cities like los angeles. no one walks even a block or two. you get in your car, and you drive. that's the standard mentality.
I can well believe this. I was stopped twice by police in Milwaukee for walking near the outskirts of the city. They wanted to know where my car was. I had to explain that
a. I was a visitor from the UK doing some consultancy. b. I didn't have a car c. I was walking to try and throw off the effects of jet lag.
> The primary reason most people advocate capitalism is ETHICAL, not scientific.
In what theory is capitalism ethical? Nothing in my readings has any statements about an ethical dimension.
> Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer.
So what happens if I have cancer, but no money for treatment? How is this different to the "socialist" case?
> You need to think about more than one possibility. Chanting to yourself over and over again "Government can solve my problems, government can solve my problems" is not going to work.
As opposed to chanting "Government can't solve my problems" or "Only the market can solve my problems"?
> The chips typically allow a game machine to play legally and illegally copied discs, run unauthorized software, and play game discs intended for other geographic regions.
I buy an Xbox (not that I would), it is therefore mine. I chip it, which presumably voids the warranty, but this is still legal because I own it.
If I use it to play pirated games then I am breaking the law because the vendor has copyright on the game, not because I have done anything illegal with the console.
If I purchased the console then it is up to me to decide what software I run on it. The OEM has no right to tell me what is and is not authorised software.
If I use it to play games from other regions then this should be fine, because the vendor of the game is applying a restraint on trade.
This article seems, like many others, to be offering a report that has little to do with logic or the law but has everything to do with partiality.
You seem to be ceasing to be a democratic nation and are becoming a corporate oligarchy (and before anybody accuses me of being anti-American, the same thing is happening here in the UK).
It would be more honest if you renamed members of the administration, Fritz Hollings already seems to be nominated as the senator for Disney, presumably now you need senators for Xerox, Pfizer, General Motors etc. This would give people an idea of who these people really represent.
> It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance;
I can't speak for GNOME. However, they have modified the code for KDE. This seems to be the main reason that the KDE developers are upset. They are not sure whether they will be responding to bugs in the vanilla version, or the one that RH modified.
A unified look and feel is fine, as is a common mechanism to change it regardless of the underlying desktop system.
Where I think Red Hat have made mistakes (by incompetence, rather than malignly) is by modifying code rather than commissioning the GNOME and KDE teams to do it on their behalf. What they have generated are Red Hat GNOME and KDE desktops. In doing this they have antagonised developers and made both their own and the vanilla desktops more difficult to support.
They have also made maintenance more difficult, KDE 3.1 is due out shortly. This means that all the changes the RH put in place will have to be repeated. If they had engaged the developers in the first place this would have been much less likely to happen.
While there are mujahadin on both the KDE and GNOME desktops, the developers seem to have a relationship of friendly rivalry. By taking the lead on this RH could have facilitated better interworking between the two systems.
The trademark is controlled by a single company, the actual implementation is not
It may not be a standard, but all the specifications are published. To my mind this is much better than a partial submission to a standards body, without disclosure of what may or may not be patented, copyrighted or subject to law suits at a later date.
Initial releases of Swing were memory and CPU hogs. The current versions are much better
The above comments hold true for individuals and small companies. However, try extrapolating to an organisation with 10,000+ desktops.
The amount of effort required to keep this up to the mark is tremendous, hardware replacement, software installs and upgrades, support etc.This is where the major amount of cost arises and where the TCO bites. If an organisation can use a desktop that is easier to maintain then they have a major win.
Remember also that the majority of desktops in an organisation this size will not be running Office, they will be running counter-top applications in front offices or communicating with backend databases. Many of the applications that these desktops use will be browser based, so all they need is a kiosk-like UI. They don't need all the bells and whistles of XP or Windows 2000.
One of the reasons I think most CMS systems seem to be slow (on the client side at least) is because they insist on using tables for everything. You end up with tables inside tables inside tables inside...
Most browsers take inordinate amounts of time to render pages with this kind of structure. Much cleaner to use
and , especially for tables consisting of one cell which many of these systems generate.
> And what are the best legal methods for kicking the RIAA where it hurts?
I understand that the American constitution allows you to be members of armed militias to prevent government becoming overly dominant.
What you seem to have is a weak government, with corporations taking over its functions. It would seem logical therefore to apply constitutional principles to what is the effective government of your country.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to let you know that MS didn't innovate this one.
Back in the 80's a British computer company, ICL, produced a chunk of hardware called CAFS. This did a basically similar thing.
Unfortunately for them their management was absolutely crap and a number of their other ideas (Distributed Array Processor, mainframes with a tagged architecture, compilable scripting language) all disappeared. I believe they are now an MS reseller.
The original comment is what "foreigners" believe is a stereotypical American response. What are called here in Britain "Little Englanders".
If I was to to take the same attitude then I would be shouting about having my daughter's boyfried repatriated. After all, what is someone from Arkansaw doing at Cambridge University, we should be saving the places for British students. He could be an undercover terrorist.
It is noticeable that all your presidents who have travelled abroad believe in a policy of engagement. They seem to realise the world actually exists outside of your borders. The ones who haven't travelled seem to be almost xenophobic in their attitude to other nations.
The last Tory government and the current Labour(?) one only seem to think that there is one industry in Great Britain, the Financial Services.
Manufacturing has been sacrificed to feed the bankers. As a result we have seen an increase in the number of accountants and MBAs coming out of our universities, but a phenomenal drop in the number of engineers and scientists.
It is not just the sciences that have suffered. Any course that is not seen to have an immediate payback is at risk. This is not just a student loans issue, it is part of the creeping corporatism that seems to be affecting most of the West. The attitude that nothing is worth doing unless it makes a profit within 18 months blights any long term view.
> I think the UK is being wise in choosing the role of middle-man/mediator.
The only trouble with sitting on the fence is that you get a fence post up your arse (yes, the spelling is correct, I am British).
If your government is trying to undermine your constitution then is it doing it on its own behalf, or the corporations that own it?
The web page with content packed into a 728 x 90 strip!
You know what the rest will be.
> What the business cares about is application availability. The OS is irrelevant to them.
Agreed and agreed. However rebooting a system is not an option if it loses you a transaction. I happen to work in a bank where transactions up to £1 billion are not uncommon. We schedule IPLs of our mainframes 6 months in advance. We simply can't afford to run with systems with 99% availability.
All the TCO studies I have seen include elements of initial capital cost, software maintenance and support.
What they do not include are estimates of the cost of non-availabilty. Obviously this is difficult to quantify, since it varies according to the application and business. However since we are talking about Linux and Windows in the entreprise one ought to be able to put some kind of estimate or estimates together (this much per hour of down time in a small development shop, this much in a bank). I think one would then see what the real cost of ownership of each platform is.
You can use ASP pages on UNIX now if your really want to. Just look up Chilisoft on Google to see how.
> Yes but are you black or white ?
White - but I do have a Yorkshire accent.
> because we drive *every*fuckingwhere in our *own* cars. especially in cities like los angeles. no one walks even a block or two. you get in your car, and you drive. that's the standard mentality.
I can well believe this. I was stopped twice by police in Milwaukee for walking near the outskirts of the city. They wanted to know where my car was. I had to explain that
a. I was a visitor from the UK doing some consultancy.
b. I didn't have a car
c. I was walking to try and throw off the effects of jet lag.
Shinoda: "The age of Millennium."
Io: "What does that mean?"
Shinoda: "A thousand year kingdom. It wants to create a home for itself.
A thousand year Reich. Wasn't that innovated by someone else?
> The primary reason most people advocate capitalism is ETHICAL, not scientific.
In what theory is capitalism ethical? Nothing in my readings has any statements about an ethical dimension.
> Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer.
So what happens if I have cancer, but no money for treatment? How is this different to the "socialist" case?
> You need to think about more than one possibility. Chanting to yourself over and over again "Government can solve my problems, government can solve my problems" is not going to work.
As opposed to chanting "Government can't solve my problems" or "Only the market can solve my problems"?
In fact the base numbers of all users who actually registered for Passport was comparatively small.
Passport is essentially dead technology in the way that MS wanted to use it. It just hasn't laid down yet.
> The chips typically allow a game machine to play legally and illegally copied discs, run unauthorized software, and play game discs intended for other geographic regions.
I buy an Xbox (not that I would), it is therefore mine. I chip it, which presumably voids the warranty, but this is still legal because I own it.
If I use it to play pirated games then I am breaking the law because the vendor has copyright on the game, not because I have done anything illegal with the console.
If I purchased the console then it is up to me to decide what software I run on it. The OEM has no right to tell me what is and is not authorised software.
If I use it to play games from other regions then this should be fine, because the vendor of the game is applying a restraint on trade.
This article seems, like many others, to be offering a report that has little to do with logic or the law but has everything to do with partiality.
I didn't think it was a conjecture anymore since Andrew Wiles proved it.
You seem to be ceasing to be a democratic nation and are becoming a corporate oligarchy (and before anybody accuses me of being anti-American, the same thing is happening here in the UK).
It would be more honest if you renamed members of the administration, Fritz Hollings already seems to be nominated as the senator for Disney, presumably now you need senators for Xerox, Pfizer, General Motors etc. This would give people an idea of who these people really represent.
> It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance;
I can't speak for GNOME. However, they have modified the code for KDE. This seems to be the main reason that the KDE developers are upset. They are not sure whether they will be responding to bugs in the vanilla version, or the one that RH modified.
A unified look and feel is fine, as is a common mechanism to change it regardless of the underlying desktop system.
Where I think Red Hat have made mistakes (by incompetence, rather than malignly) is by modifying code rather than commissioning the GNOME and KDE teams to do it on their behalf. What they have generated are Red Hat GNOME and KDE desktops. In doing this they have antagonised developers and made both their own and the vanilla desktops more difficult to support.
They have also made maintenance more difficult, KDE 3.1 is due out shortly. This means that all the changes the RH put in place will have to be repeated. If they had engaged the developers in the first place this would have been much less likely to happen.
While there are mujahadin on both the KDE and GNOME desktops, the developers seem to have a relationship of friendly rivalry. By taking the lead on this RH could have facilitated better interworking between the two systems.
The above comments hold true for individuals and small companies. However, try extrapolating to an organisation with 10,000+ desktops.
The amount of effort required to keep this up to the mark is tremendous, hardware replacement, software installs and upgrades, support etc.This is where the major amount of cost arises and where the TCO bites. If an organisation can use a desktop that is easier to maintain then they have a major win.
Remember also that the majority of desktops in an organisation this size will not be running Office, they will be running counter-top applications in front offices or communicating with backend databases. Many of the applications that these desktops use will be browser based, so all they need is a kiosk-like UI. They don't need all the bells and whistles of XP or Windows 2000.
One of the reasons I think most CMS systems seem to be slow (on the client side at least) is because they insist on using tables for everything. You end up with tables inside tables inside tables inside...
Most browsers take inordinate amounts of time to render pages with this kind of structure. Much cleaner to use and , especially for tables consisting of one cell which many of these systems generate.
The major downside to it (which seem to be common to most things in this area) is a lack of documentation.
Telstra wouldn't bother producing anything that a prestigious publication like Eweek says there is no interest in would they?
> And what are the best legal methods for kicking the RIAA where it hurts?
I understand that the American constitution allows you to be members of armed militias to prevent government becoming overly dominant.
What you seem to have is a weak government, with corporations taking over its functions. It would seem logical therefore to apply constitutional principles to what is the effective government of your country.