The standard disclaimer applies that this is not legal advice and is only offered for your viewing pleasure.
Have I been duped ? I thought that I was going to get the full McKoy to find, once I had downloaded, it some EULA saying that it wasn't as I expected.
Is Don Shelkey able to put this discaimer in after he enticed me with a promise of something that it turns out that he can't deliver ?
On it's big machines (mainframes) you can run lots of virtual Linux machines under VM, by using Xen they will be able to have the same configuration from big zSeries (Mainframe) to iSeries (AS400) to small Intel serers and maybe even desktop.
Presumably Xen isn't quite as secure as VM and this work will fix that.
I wonder if they will then port OS/390 and OS/400 to run on top of Xen ?
The British legal system is as badly broken as anywhere else.
The main purpose of legal systems is to enrich those who practice in the legal system, the rest of us are just a source of income. Lawyers play silly games just to increase costs - like the sending of endless needless letters or winding up each party to ensure that litigation will go on for longer.
I have seen this many times at first hand; a good friend of mine gave up being a solicitor because it was dishonest.
which is when the UNIX 32 bit time representation wraps round - I doubt that anyone will survive. Think of all the coding effort that that will save and the Y2K type panics!
I should imagine that it would not be too difficult to pursuade a couple of one man bands to buy SCO licences - especially if, quite coincidentally, SCO happened to buy some consultancy...
A 500 seat/licence company would be quite different.
What happens to the RFID tag once the bottle has been emptied by the pharmasist ? Put in the drstbin or destroyed ? I can see a nice little earner by the pharmasist/cleaner of collecting these and selling them to a supplier of grey market drugs.
It's a different story for companies that are primarily Microsoft shops. A total switch from Windows to Linux, or even a significant Linux deployment in the middle of a Windows environment, will be three to four times more expensive--and take three times as long to deploy--as an upgrade from one version of Windows to a newer release, according to a Yankee Group study Ballmer cited in his memo.
Well that is a surprise - it costs more to switch from one OS to another than to just upgrade the OS version - who would have guessed it ? I assume that the cost of switching from Unix to MS Windows is also higher than upgrading Unix version. I would expect that the cost of switching from Unix to Linux (and/or BSD) would be marginally higher than a Unix upgrade.
He also cited a May Forrester Research study that said Linux training is on average 15% more expensive than Windows training.
But Ballmer says that the cost of OS Software is just a small part of the total implementation cost, so why is he suddenly talking about the extra cost of OSS training compared to MS training ?
The survey, by META Group, found that in one large telecommunications company, consolidation on Windows allowed a greater than 50 percent reduction in the number of required servers.
Presumably they replaced old servers with new ones, so, say, 4 old i386s with 2 new Athlons ? Hardly surprising it is ?
Any one got any old pics of Ballmer, I'd like to see how much his nose has grown by this last year.
Wow, that is complicated, too complicated.
There is another voting system that does much the same thing, STV (Single Transferrable Vote).
1) All voters number their choices in order of preference (easy to understand).
2) All 1st preference votes are counted, if someone has > 50% they are the winner
3) One candidate will have least votes, they are now out of the race so for all those that voted for him preference 1 redistribute the #2 preference.
4) It one candidate has > 50% there is a winner, stop
5) Repeat from step 3 until there is a winner using the appropriate #nth preference.
This system can also be used to elect several winners from a basket of candiates.
Something like this is used in Australia amongst other countries.
How long before OpenOffice or Abiword does the same thing to MS word ?
This is the conversion that I am waiting for, this is what will kill the M$ monopoly.
The trouble is that a modern Linux desktop also
crawls under 128MB on a PIII. I regret to say that the Linux desktops are suffering as much from bloat as does MS.
Serverwise: the bloat does not seem to have hit - fortunately.
Should we send a request to Muguel & KDE leads to mandate that their developers should use 64MB PIIs as their desktop machine? It would result it usable systems on old machines and take Linux users off the hardware upgrade treadmill.
Typical civil servants - know about a problem, know that it will get worse with time, just sit on their hands and hope that they retire or move to a different department before they need to make a decision.
Yet when it comes to enforcing trivial health & safety laws they are keep to act against all businesses that don't do everything.
I know that some don't like it, but we need the option of file system versioning, so that if/when you delete half the lines in your letter/program/... you can get them back from the previous copy on disk.
There is an expectation that the application should do it, that means extra code in each application and they all do it slightly differently.
OK: need an O_NOVERSION on open(2) if the app *really* doesn't want this - eg a database.
The cost of changing software can be looked at 2 ways:
Move the software to a new box (but similar) since the old one is worn out or not fast enough or... In practice this is not too difficult since you can either just copy the binaries or buy new ones or
./configure && make
This I would not call a real change and is not too expensive.
Move the software to a new (or much changed [the current] version of the same one) operating system.
This is expensive as there is a lot of recoding that must be done and then work configuring it on the new platform.
Note that the above is only valid if the software being copied does not really change it's functionality as the customer has not changed the requirement spec.
One of the nice things about Unix (Linux/...) is that you can still run very old software on new boxes with at most minimal changes - I still use code that I first wrote some 20 years ago.
There has been much assumption in this discussion that the whole system (hardware, OS, software) has to live unchanged for many years; I think that is missing the point as the true cost of software change is only big in case (2) above.
Note that some software does need to be regularily changed, eg payroll - because the governments change the rules every year or two.
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- The standard disclaimer applies that this is not legal advice and is only offered for your viewing pleasure.
Have I been duped ? I thought that I was going to get the full McKoy to find, once I had downloaded, it some EULA saying that it wasn't as I expected. Is Don Shelkey able to put this discaimer in after he enticed me with a promise of something that it turns out that he can't deliver ?Presumably Xen isn't quite as secure as VM and this work will fix that.
I wonder if they will then port OS/390 and OS/400 to run on top of Xen ?
I was hoping to get some insight as to how well dirac performs ...
Easy: plant a few bombs on the megahighway !
OK: it might not be the act of a madman/terrorist but perhaps some natural disaster or accident.
Am I the only one that gets worried when I see too many important things concentrated in a small place ?
The main purpose of legal systems is to enrich those who practice in the legal system, the rest of us are just a source of income. Lawyers play silly games just to increase costs - like the sending of endless needless letters or winding up each party to ensure that litigation will go on for longer.
I have seen this many times at first hand; a good friend of mine gave up being a solicitor because it was dishonest.
which is when the UNIX 32 bit time representation wraps round - I doubt that anyone will survive. Think of all the coding effort that that will save and the Y2K type panics!
I read the headline and eagerly hoped for a picture of another lady running across a test match cricket pitch .... alas, it wasn't.
Who else thought that they had ended up at groklaw when they looked at the pictures ?
A 500 seat/licence company would be quite different.
In other news: RedHat head office moves from Raleigh (USA) to Guildford (UK).
What happens to the RFID tag once the bottle has been emptied by the pharmasist ? Put in the drstbin or destroyed ? I can see a nice little earner by the pharmasist/cleaner of collecting these and selling them to a supplier of grey market drugs.
Well that is a surprise - it costs more to switch from one OS to another than to just upgrade the OS version - who would have guessed it ? I assume that the cost of switching from Unix to MS Windows is also higher than upgrading Unix version. I would expect that the cost of switching from Unix to Linux (and/or BSD) would be marginally higher than a Unix upgrade.
But Ballmer says that the cost of OS Software is just a small part of the total implementation cost, so why is he suddenly talking about the extra cost of OSS training compared to MS training ?
Presumably they replaced old servers with new ones, so, say, 4 old i386s with 2 new Athlons ? Hardly surprising it is ?
Any one got any old pics of Ballmer, I'd like to see how much his nose has grown by this last year.
I remember at a conference a few years ago, it was talked about adding TCL to Rexx, the resulting language would be: T/Rexx
Wow, that is complicated, too complicated. There is another voting system that does much the same thing, STV (Single Transferrable Vote). 1) All voters number their choices in order of preference (easy to understand). 2) All 1st preference votes are counted, if someone has > 50% they are the winner 3) One candidate will have least votes, they are now out of the race so for all those that voted for him preference 1 redistribute the #2 preference. 4) It one candidate has > 50% there is a winner, stop 5) Repeat from step 3 until there is a winner using the appropriate #nth preference. This system can also be used to elect several winners from a basket of candiates. Something like this is used in Australia amongst other countries.
I am listening to it as a type, welcome back - I missed it.
How long before OpenOffice or Abiword does the same thing to MS word ? This is the conversion that I am waiting for, this is what will kill the M$ monopoly.
Serverwise: the bloat does not seem to have hit - fortunately.
Should we send a request to Muguel & KDE leads to mandate that their developers should use 64MB PIIs as their desktop machine? It would result it usable systems on old machines and take Linux users off the hardware upgrade treadmill.
If we have a Beowulf cluster of these, do we have a space invasion on our hands ?
If so: who is invading who ?
The next games will feature the new event where the winner is the first sponsor to make $100,000,000 through sales as a result of the games.
Also: which national chairman will first make $10,000,000 out of back handers in deciding the venue for the next Olympics.
Typical civil servants - know about a problem, know that it will get worse with time, just sit on their hands and hope that they retire or move to a different department before they need to make a decision.
Yet when it comes to enforcing trivial health & safety laws they are keep to act against all businesses that don't do everything.
I don't really care what extra things google will do as long as they continue to be a great Internet search engine
I know that some don't like it, but we need the option of file system versioning, so that if/when you delete half the lines in your letter/program/... you can get them back from the previous copy on disk.
There is an expectation that the application should do it, that means extra code in each application and they all do it slightly differently.
OK: need an O_NOVERSION on open(2) if the app *really* doesn't want this - eg a database.
- Move the software to a new box (but similar) since the old one is worn out or not fast enough or
... In practice this is not too difficult since you can either just copy the binaries or buy new ones orThis I would not call a real change and is not too expensive.
- Move the software to a new (or much changed [the current] version of the same one) operating system.
This is expensive as there is a lot of recoding that must be done and then work configuring it on the new platform.
Note that the above is only valid if the software being copied does not really change it's functionality as the customer has not changed the requirement spec.One of the nice things about Unix (Linux/...) is that you can still run very old software on new boxes with at most minimal changes - I still use code that I first wrote some 20 years ago.
There has been much assumption in this discussion that the whole system (hardware, OS, software) has to live unchanged for many years; I think that is missing the point as the true cost of software change is only big in case (2) above.
Note that some software does need to be regularily changed, eg payroll - because the governments change the rules every year or two.