Many, and quite possibly the majority, of dot-coms were horribly managed; it's one thing to be a pioneer in a new field and fall down, but it's a different thing to take a badly-equipped, over-sized expiditonary force into certainly dangerous and mostly-uncharted territory, and expect them to be alright.
Most of these executives weren't pioneers. They were con-men.
Pioneers into modern fields of business started, in the past, often with little cash and no backing. Instead of depending on venture-capital funding and highly-promoted IPOs, pioneers of modern business relied on ingenuity, determination, and luck. If their idea couldn't stand in the marketplace, it died a small and insignifigant death. Today, we call these concepts capitalism and free-market economics.
Re:A crutch for the weak-minded?
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 1
And you are an expert on either fast-breeder nuclear reactors or God?
Nope. I didn't claim to be, and I don't think anyone really can claim to be an expert on the latter. I made no assertions about the expertise or nature of any gods or deities; I merely pointed out the factual and logical errors in the original post.
BTW, the Ben Franklin quote does not support your assertion. Sure, Christians can fall into rote worship, holier-than-thou attitudes, vanity. There is nothing in the quote you supplied that indicates that supports your assertion that he was agnostic or atheist.
An agnostic is, according to popular definition, one who believes in a God, but not necessarily one which conforms to the views held by a specific organized religion. I am arguing that Franklin is an agnostic this sense; that he believes in God, but does not support organized religion. Thomas Jefferson fits into the same category.
I'm a Presbyterian and I really hate some of the things they do. Doesn't change my relationship with God.
I never said that it did.
Re:A crutch for the weak-minded?
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You have committed a logical fallacy known as argumentum ad verecundiam, or appeal to authority; in this case. The individuals listed may be notable historical figures, but they have as much an expert opinion on "God" as George Washington would on fast-breeder nuclear reactors.
The other thing is that several of the individuals you listed are either deists (essentially agnostics; believing in a deity, but not necessarily the christian one), or atheists. Here's a few quotes for you:
Thomas Jefferson:
Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. -- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782.
Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. -- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. -- Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.
Benjamin Franklin:
"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works... I mean real good works... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity. -- Benjamin Franklin [Works, Vol. VII, p. 75]
Albert Einstein:
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms. -- Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955.
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being. -- Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. -- Albert Einstein, 1954, from Albert Einstein: The Human Side.
Do you know what the most popular restaurant in Paris is? McDonalds. The only reason SUVs don't sell well in Europe and Asia is the price of gasoline is higher. Every nation has shopping malls, and Must-See TV is syndicated around the world.
As to your first assertion, I'd like some proof about the popularity of McDonalds in Paris. SUVs don't sell well in other countries for many reasons, fuel costs among them; but if someone is rich enough to afford a US $50,000 Lincoln SUV, do you think that person is going to care what fuel costs them?
I am aware that every [first-world] nation has malls and plazas, but not on anywhere near the same scale; I hosted an exchange student from Hannover about five years ago, and she was amazed at the size of the local mall (the smallest of five in the area). Malls in Japan are, for the most part, more like open-air markets. Most importantly, malls in Europe and Asia are much smaller, and tend to have more locally-oriented shops.
America isn't perfect. We have our Christian fundamentalists (abortion clinic bombings anyone?), we have poverty, we need to work out more and eat better (which again, would be a sign of consumerism and wealth), we even have a legislature that is showing less and less willingness to preserve the Bill of Rights. That said, it's still a pretty decent place to live.
I admit I am feeling pretty nationalistic after 9-11. I'm a libertarian, I don't support capitalism at all costs, but I don't sing along with the brainwashed-politicly-correct Madison/Berkley/MIT dogma. That dogma being, no matter what the facts, you can feel good about yourself if you Blame America First.
I never said, "Blame America First" -- I think that the actions of the terrorists on September 11th are absolutely inexcusable, and that whomever responsible needs to be found, tried, and executed; and I know that the destruction of the WTC/NY is not the fault of the U.S.; it's because a group of religious nuts, who treat their own people worse than they treat foreigners from the land of the Great Satan, have some crazy idea about a holy war.
I also know that some Americans have a great deal to offer; look at the modern works of Hoffstadter, or the poetry of Kingsolver. Not all of America is bad -- but the mass of lemmings screaming for more oil, more malls, walls around our communities to feel safer is, to me at least, disgusting.
I do not endorse the bombing of a largely innocent population (the Afghanis). The people in Afghanistan have no say in what their dictatorial government does, yet we attack them blindly because their totalitarian regime provided refuge for Bin Laden.
I also do not agree with Bush's stance on Bin Laden's guilt -- I have seen no concrete proof that he is responsible, and until then there is reasonable doubt. The goal is to stop terrorism; not to become terrorists ourselves.
Finally -- politically correct? Last time I checked, being PC was about not offending people; telling most of your countrypeople that they are fat, wasteful, ignorant slobs isn't exactly the best way of going about that.
That's wholey absurd. "Why do they hate us?" "How can we make them like us?" "What can we do to earn their trust?" -- all of these questions are signs of ignorance. Why do the Slashdot trolls post comments about hot grits? WHO CARES! The only things we need to learn about fundamentalists is what will help us DESTROY them, not appease them!
This is a long explanation, but I think the anti-globalization argument is connected to "But why do they hate us argument." They are both equally ignorant points of view. If you are ready for some patriotism, read on. Otherwise, go back to Berkley!
Did we ask why Hitler hated Jews? No. Would it have helped? No.
I think you grossly misunderstood the original post, and your reply reeks of ignorance.
It's not that we need to understand why the islamic fundamentalists hate us -- they hate pretty much everybody who isn't an islamic fundamentalist; and you can feel free to substitue "christian fundamentalist" or "nationalist zealot" for "islamic fundamentalist" if you would like.
But the original post wasn't about fundamentalists. It was about normal, ordinary people.
The US is looked down upon not because we are rich, but because we are wasteful; not because we are powerful, but because we abuse that power; not because we are intelligent and educated, but because most American high school graduates can give you a biography for every player on their favorite football team, but can't tell you who their senators are or how many represenatives their state has in the House.
What you call patriotism, I call rabid nationalism. I consider myself patriotic because I believe in the Bill of Rights, in the concepts upon which this nation was founded. There were so many ideas flying around that not all of them could be put to words; only the most key of freedoms were, in fact -- but the authors of the Constitution trusted their posterity to remember why we fought a war against the British, and why the rights of the populus had to be guaranteed by law.
Sadly we have failed in the mission they have given us. The so-called "founding fathers" wished for us to have a love of diversity and a tolerance of others -- principles which are very difficult in practice.
Americans of today are disliked because they strive for homogeny; they want to always have access to their Starbucks lattes and their McDonalds' happy meals. Americans want to drive their SUVs, shop at malls, watch Must-See TV, and rely on others to make crucial decisions for them. Most importantly, Americans always want to blame someone else.
Something you should try some time -- go to another country and play "Spot the Foreigner" at a local plaza or major thoroughfare. A friend of mine did this in Florence, and the following patterns could be observed: Italians were usually rail-thin, tan, and relaxed. Germans were usually a bit heaver (although not obese), and very serious. English people smiled a lot and seemed to be content with their lot in life. Americans were nominally much more plump than the average, almost never spoke the local language, and spent their time trying to find things that were as American as possible.
The rest of the world doesn't want to be America.
The rest of your argument is going to be ignored, as it isn't relevant to the original post.
So your Director of Engineering couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag. Now please come up with a real refutation of the point made in the original post? You can't, because I am right.
Don't make pointless, baseless assertions.
The claim is not that ego only affects Open Source projects. The fact is that in Open Source projects nobody has the final authority and can keep progress rolling in the face of ego. Even if Linus says no to one option and yes to another, an equally respected leader can choose to ignore that decision and go his own way, taking a fair number of followers with him, dividing the effort.
The same thing can and does happen in commercial projects; instead of code forks you get mass firings, but the end result is the same. A manager with an overinflated ego is very bad for any project; be it open source or not; the difference is that, in open source, the clash between management (the project maintainer(s)) and programmers exists under the scrutiny of the public eye, whereas in a corporate setting the conflict is kept within the company walls.
One of the qualities, if not the top quality, of a good manager is the capability to admit that they are either wrong, or don't have sufficient information to make a decision.
No; 2.4 is a stable kernel. Changing the VM as of 2.4.10 without a code fork was bad enough, and the last thing that needs to be done is to introduce yet another radical change in a supposedly stable series of kernels.
It's not as simple as moving the code to a 'vm1.c' and a 'vm2.c'; VM structures are pretty deeply integrated into quite a bit of the kernel, so it would be a major rewrite to set up a pluggable VM architecture -- which is (theoretically) planned for 2.5 (where development code belongs).
Not really; it's hard to quantify the benefits of a text editor; and although one may make a statement such as, "Editor foo enables me to edit files 50% faster," it doesn't mean much; because the reference is subjective to personal preferences.
With VM in the kernel, it's pretty obvious when things aren't working as well as they should -- mainly because it is possible to write test programs (scaffolding) that check to see if a designed system is performing to specifications -- read _The_Mythical_Man-Month_ for an excellent explanation of the merits of specification-based "scaffold" testing.
CE = Computer Engineering; a subset of EE with an emphasis on computing systems (as opposed to radio, generators, etc.). I don't mean a job-shopper who just got their MCSE; a CE (in this case) is an EE who simply enjoyed working with computers more than anything else.
I completely agree that one should not hold the title of engineer for getting a certificate from some company; just because you can configure a Cisco router or install Unix on a Sparc workstation does not make you an engineer. It makes you a competent technician, but not an engineer.
I think this is definitely a good thing, but an electrical engineer is not qualified to examine a software patent; EEs and CEs deal mostly with hardware and software written in extremely low-level languages (such as assembly or raw machine code). It seems to me that the USPO desperately needs programmers (CS people) to look at the flood of incoming software patents to prevent cascades of lawsuits like the ones following the dot-com bust; e.g., where a company patents an already well-known or incredibly vague algorithm, and then files suit against everybody from Bob Dobbs to the Care Bears for patent violation.
Why are the same people who moan about the conformist nature of US society (Columbine etc), now turning around and trying to make MS confirm to US ideals?
That's grossly oversimplified; there is a difference between a large group of indpendent individuals conforming to an artifically created cultural trend, and a company being forced to conform to legal precedent that has been set down over the past two hundred or so years.
I know that America isn't very fond of free speech and democracy (ok, they say they are, but frankly it is one of the single most homogenous and confirmist countries in the world), but attacking MS because they 'don't confirm to American ideals' is frankly absurd.
Which America are you referring to -- the United States? I would say that Americans (in general) are quite fond of their freedoms, and that the massive conglomerate monopolistic mega-corporations are the ones opposed to indiviual liberties; companies of that magnitude desire to wield the powers of the government, but without the concession that the right to govern is derived from the governed.
Avoid generalizing; saying that all Americans are conformist and homogenous is like saying all Europeans are smelly thieves after spending a week in Rome; if you leave the suburbs and head into the cities, America becomes a much different place.
The reason why Microsoft doesn't conform to "american ideals" isn't because it's centralized; it is because Microsoft is anti-competitive; when one looks at U.S. history, a very competitive streak is evident.
Eh? Why were all the most successful Empires centrally controlled? Was the Roman Empire decentralised? Sure, they had some degree of devolution, but Rome was still the boss. The best economies have always been centrally and state controlled. For example, the USSR's economy increased 900% from a feudal economy in 1918 to a modern industrial state by 1928, under a communist regime. The US itself has put the economy under state control in wartime - the biggest growth period being WWII, which dragged america out of the depression.
The Roman republic was decentralized; provinces were, for the most part, autonomous, and although the Roman senate did have the final word, it was still based on the collective voice of the entire empire, and not on the will of a sole Emperor. This is easily evidenced by the speed of travel back around 200 B.C.; the Roman empire stretched across a goodly chunk of modern-day Europe, and carrying a message from Rome to an outlaying provincal capitol could take a week's journey; it is impossible to run a truly centralized government with that type of restriction.
The U.S. government during WWII did not control the economy; granted, some rationing was instituted, but the free market remained. The government contracted with companies to produce tanks, guns, and ships, and in true American style went with the lowest bidder -- in a controlled economy, the government simply would have ordered a selected company to produce without compensation.
This is completely fallacious. The history of the US is a hostory of power centralisation in the hands of federal government. The states have been emasculated, and now the same is happening in the EU wrt the nation states of Europe. America isn't about independant thought, democracy or devolved power at all - it is about centralised government control, confirmist attitudes (what other country would invent phrases like 'Anti-American' and 'The American Way' in the first place? I mean WTF?) and a lack of democracy thanks to having no real options in the democratic process.
Actually, the U.S. system of government was structured so that the individual states and the Federal government share power -- the Federal government handes anything involving interaction between states or between individuals and states, and the states get the rest of the power.
The difference is that Equifax (now Experion) doesn't draw its revenue directly from the consumer -- they don't physically rely on selling things to the mass market for revenue. In addition, Experion functions under a great deal of government restriction regarding what they can and cannot do with the information they possess.
Despite Sun's shady dealings and anti-competitive practices, this really isn't the time for an ad hominem attack. The piece presented is very well written, and outlines the dangers of Microsoft's.NET quite thoroughly.
My chief worry is that if.NET were to become a reality, it would be mandatory to have an entry in the Passport and Wallet databases. I have some serious issues in letting a consumer-driven company have not access to all of my personal and financial information, but complete autonomy in using it -- the EULA for Passport reads much like the standard Microsoft EULA -- e.g., Microsoft owns all of the information you put into it.
The point about Microsoft's securty track record is also quite valid; I know I will never trust my credit card numbers to a company that can't even keep internal email, well, internal.
I hate it when I forget that 'HTML Formatted' means 'Bring Your Own Paragraph Tags'
The idea of everything related to system and software configuration being stored in slow to parse text, in multiple formats is Unix. Having a single registry, stored without wasting space, is revolutionary.
It's pretty obvious you aren't a programmer; text takes just as much time to parse as a so-called binary file; why? Because they're *both* binary files; the only difference is that the "binary" file is formatted differently.
As for the oh-so-wonderful registry being a revolution, it was around in the days of VMS and VAXen; AIX keeps its logs in a binary, non-human-readable format, and most admins consider it to be a major pain-in-the-arse to deal with. The fact that/all/ system information is stored in/one/ file just means that the system can be annhilated by corrupting that file, and repairing a corrupted configuration file that isn't human-readable is literally next-to-impossible.
I can't count the times that I have been grateful that Unix conf files are human-readable when I do something stupid as an admin (which/all/ sysadmins do from time-to-time), and I can fix it from single-user mode with nothing more than/bin/cat and/bin/ed. Try removing the hardware information from the Windows registry, I'll delete/etc/conf.modules and/etc/modules/* on my Debian machine, and we'll see who is up faster.
Further, Windows problems can usually be fixed by commonly available utilities, requiring little skill. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that I should be a kernel expert to maintain a *nix system.
Right. Ask any experienced IT support person what they thing of those easy-to-use utilities, like First Aid and System Doctor, and I'll bet the response involves the rectal insertion of large boxy objects; something isn't effective just because it's easy to use. Furthermore, one need be a "kernel expert" only to write device drivers -- all you need to maintain a Unix machine is to have some understanding of how the system is structured (e.g., information about the peculairities of the local site), some basic administration commands, and a functioning brain. I was doing this at sixteen; are you telling me that an MCSE is dumber than a sixteen-year-old?
*nix programs are poorly named, either cute or short, causing much confusion. Task Scheduler vs crond or anacronda. Of course we all know about the thousands of text readers/displayers, etc, such as nroff, xv, latex (I know the case is wrong).
Your lack of understanding again shines brightly through your prose; the reason most Unix commands have short names is because they are easier to type. It's not that hard to remember that "cron" is used to schedule regular events, and that "ls" is used to LiSt a directory, and there is nothing wrong with having the reverse of the 'cat' command called 'tac'. How would you feel having to type 'task-scheduler -l joe' every time you wanted to look at Joe's task-schedulertab?
Cute names? You mean like Bob, Clippy, "XL", Visual Studio, and Hotmail?
Support and software availability is better on the Windows platform. OK, yeah I can get StarOffice or OpenOffice for Linux. But I can also get that on Windows, plus MS Office which is better than anything on Unix systems, plus WordPerfect (built for Windows and emulated on *nix systems), and Lotus SmartSuite.
I'd say that $0 for StarOffice with free downloads and cross-platform ability makes it much more available than an almost $500 copy of Microsoft Office that runs on one platform. I use StarOffice at my job, and although SO doesn't have every bell-and-whistle that Office XP does, SO does do a good job of importing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, SO is faster, and SO does quite nicely for writing documents.
Try writing a fifty-page paper with Word, cross-references, graphics, and all; and then try using LaTeX and LyX.
All of the above is a different story of course, if you're comparing the two platforms for purely server use. In that case you would probably pick *nix, but not necessarily.
That's because you know as much about Unix as Senator Strom Thurmand knows about gay sex.
The idea of everything related to system and software configuration being stored in slow to parse text, in multiple formats is Unix. Having a single registry, stored without wasting space, is revolutionary.
It's pretty obvious you aren't a programmer; text takes just as much time to parse as a so-called binary file; why? Because they're *both* binary files; the only difference is that the "binary" file is formatted differently.
As for the oh-so-wonderful registry being a revolution, it was around in the days of VMS and VAXen; AIX keeps its logs in a binary, non-human-readable format, and most admins consider it to be a major pain-in-the-arse to deal with. The fact that/all/ system information is stored in/one/ file just means that the system can be annhilated by corrupting that file, and repairing a corrupted configuration file that isn't human-readable is literally next-to-impossible.
I can't count the times that I have been grateful that Unix conf files are human-readable when I do something stupid as an admin (which/all/ sysadmins do from time-to-time), and I can fix it from single-user mode with nothing more than/bin/cat and/bin/ed. Try removing the hardware information from the Windows registry, I'll delete/etc/conf.modules and/etc/modules/* on my Debian machine, and we'll see who is up faster.
Further, Windows problems can usually be fixed by commonly available utilities, requiring little skill. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that I should be a kernel expert to maintain a *nix system.
Right. Ask any experienced IT support person what they thing of those easy-to-use utilities, like First Aid and System Doctor, and I'll bet the response involves the rectal insertion of large boxy objects; something isn't effective just because it's easy to use. Furthermore, one need be a "kernel expert" only to write device drivers -- all you need to maintain a Unix machine is to have some understanding of how the system is structured (e.g., information about the peculairities of the local site), some basic administration commands, and a functioning brain. I was doing this at sixteen; are you telling me that an MCSE is dumber than a sixteen-year-old?
*nix programs are poorly named, either cute or short, causing much confusion. Task Scheduler vs crond or anacronda. Of course we all know about the thousands of text readers/displayers, etc, such as nroff, xv, latex (I know the case is wrong).
Your lack of understanding again shines brightly through your prose; the reason most Unix commands have short names is because they are easier to type. It's not that hard to remember that "cron" is used to schedule regular events, and that "ls" is used to LiSt a directory, and there is nothing wrong with having the reverse of the 'cat' command called 'tac'. How would you feel having to type 'task-scheduler -l joe' every time you wanted to look at Joe's task-schedulertab?
Cute names? You mean like Bob, Clippy, "XL", Visual Studio, and Hotmail?
Support and software availability is better on the Windows platform. OK, yeah I can get StarOffice or OpenOffice for Linux. But I can also get that on Windows, plus MS Office which is better than anything on Unix systems, plus WordPerfect (built for Windows and emulated on *nix systems), and Lotus SmartSuite.
I'd say that $0 for StarOffice with free downloads and cross-platform ability makes it much more available than an almost $500 copy of Microsoft Office that runs on one platform. I use StarOffice at my job, and although SO doesn't have every bell-and-whistle that Office XP does, SO does do a good job of importing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, SO is faster, and SO does quite nicely for writing documents.
Try writing a fifty-page paper with Word, cross-references, graphics, and all; and then try using LaTeX and LyX.
All of the above is a different story of course, if you're comparing the two platforms for purely server use. In that case you would probably pick *nix, but not necessarily.
That's because you know as much about Unix as Senator Strom Thurmand knows about gay sex.
According to Microsoft, that boxed copy (not an upgrade, mind you) is $319. Add into that a copy of Office XP (not professional) for $479, McAffee AntiVirus for $49, and whatever other applications that the average user will need (like Visio, PhotoShop, Adobe Acrobat, etc.), and I can easily see the average licensing toll jumping to the thousands.
Even though the per-seat licenses are cheaper, you need to re-purchase those every year, and all you're doing is buying software that has (for the most part) free equivalants on Unix- or Linux-based systems.
Every month or so an article with content similar to the one on Wired pops up, and a link is pasted on/. These articles are always about how Linux is losing the desktop war, how Microsoft Windows will always dominate on the desktop, and about how Linux has no viable business model.
Last time I checked, though, Linux wasn't about making money. It wasn't about market share, customer preferences, or business models. Linux is tool, made and modified by and for its users -- a concept that is the driving force behind open source.
When RMS set out to create the GNU project and free-as-in-speech software, he didn't do it because he hoped to one day turn it into a business. The GNU project was started because RMS was tired of having available to the general computing community only lousy tools, designed by individuals who would never use them and who couldn't care less about quality or reliability.
The reason that the tools of the GNU project were kept open is that RMS recognized the benefits of collaboration, an idea that has in the past fifty years become very un-american -- the idea of mutual benefit has been all but annihilated from American culture. And although there are many (good) hackers in other countries, the amount of wealth and easy access to technology prevalent in the US makes it the ideal breeding ground for young coders; it's a lot easier to begin writing software when even the poor are economically capable of owning and operating a computer. But I digress.
The entire point of GNU project is honest collaberation, and the mutual benefit that *all* parties derive from it; if I write a tool that you need, and you write bugfixes for that tool, we both benefit, and neither of us really loses anything. It isn't about making money.
The same thing goes for the Linux kernel; Torvalds "open-sourced" it because he felt that there were other students who, like him, needed a small, efficient Unix variant, but who didn't have the means to purchase even a small Unix OS and its sources.
So stop whining about not being able to make money off of a community resource, and stop complaining about missing features in community software that you in no way contributed to.
Hypothetically speaking, of course, if I had not paid for my software yet, out of all of the software that I use, how much of it would I still use if I had to pay for it?
The thing is, you are speaking from an end-user viewpoint, where running unlicensed software isn't as big of a deal. Businesses who run unlicensed software have this nasty habit of being audited, and paying thousands to millions of dollars in fines. Thus, when you run IT for a business, you buy the software which your company uses.
I agree with you that the article needs more facts to lend it credibility, but your point about the use of unlicensed software is missing the target by quite a bit.
Oh, small rant: It's "using unlicensed software", not "piracy". People don't forcably attack the salesdroids at CompUSA, rape the women, kill the men, and steal copies of OfficeXP. Sheesh.
Look how quickly the BIND hole was patched. Look at the number of 'l33t r00t' BIND exploits that have come out since the birth of the internet. Not too many, eh? Also keep in mind that BIND is supposed to be a public network service; e.g., anyone can gain access to it.
Last time I checked, my private documents and emails aren't part of any public network service; but, when one compares the number of Outlook/Word macro viruses in the past year to the number of major (e.g., root-level) BIND exploits in the past four years, it appears that Microsoft is losing the battle. A private non-networked application is losing to a public network service in the arena of remote-over-the-internet exploitable bugs.
Come back and post after you grow a fscking brain.
If your definition of "maintain" is "moronically install stuff until the hard drive is full, then re-install Windows when I start having problems with the OS" and your definition of maintaining Linux is "hacking the kernel not from source, but with a hex editor" then yeah, Windows is much easier to maintain.
I'm not sure who you're trying to impress...I guess the "smart" people who switched back to Windows when they couldn't get Red Hat to work on their Presarios. Sad for them, sad for you. No, no, don't learn more about Linux and certainly don't help get support for your machines; dump Linux for being "crap" and go with the platform that "r00lz". j00r such l33t d00dZ!
Either you are a twit, or my sarcasm-o-meter is broken at the moment. At the moment I feel like writing an intelligent reply to something utterly trite and stupid, so your sterling example of prose definitely caught my eye.
First off, I believe "maintenance of a system" could be defined as keeping the system up-to-date with patches (security, bugfixes, etc.), reclaiming disk space, adding memory/needed hardware/etc. That's at least what I do as a system administrator, both for my primary employer, and at home (I have four servers and a small handful of workstations for myself and the 'rents). Since I have to maintain both Debian and Windows9x/NT installations, I think I'm qualified in saying that I find Linux much easier to maintain. Using apt-get, I can keep just about everything on my systems up-to-date with a few simple commands, which I can issue over an ssh session, or from a serial console. I keep my cluster of about seven (total) personal-use Linux machines up-to-date with little more than a simple shell script, cron, and ssh.
Now, that doesn't go for *all* Linux distributions -- I detest RedHat (and RPM), simply because of the irritating web of dependencies that aren't auto-satisfying, and that they try and push the latest-and-greatest out the door with a minimal amount of testing (same as with Our Friends In Redmond). I could go on and on about this one, but I'd prefer to stay on topic.
Windows update, on the other hand, I don't care for. On older systems (apt-get has been around for awhile), you have to manually go out and download the patches (something quite irritating about RPM-based distributions), and then manually install them, which usually requires a reboot. Even with Windows Update, most patches require rebooting the system, and some stand quite a fair chance of corrupting the registry or other system files. I have *never* corrupted a crucial system file on a Linux (or Solaris) machine when patching it. Never. I've had Windows machines get nice and toasted from simply appling one patch downloaded from the Microsoft web site.
Now as per your second argument: Linux is not for everybody. Why? Because it's different. It's not Windows. To use it, you need to learn a whole 'nother skill set, and some people can't (or don't want to) invest the time to do so. It's kind of like a Mac user who installs Windows2000 Advanced Server for the first time and then whines because, "It's not MacOS!".
Now, is this learning curve as steep as claimed by Windows pundits? Not really. I started computing with a Vic20, but didn't really get into it until DOS and Win3.1 were the de-facto standards. I managed to switch to Linux just fine. Could I get everything working right away? No. Took me a month to get my sound card to function, and about the same amount of time to get X working with my video card (keep in mind this was well before X 4.0, and my video card required an obscure patch to function properly under X 3.x). But I learned quickly, and after six months annhiliate the Windows partition and use only Linux. Now, three years later, I'm still using only Linux, moving away from using X for just about everything except web browsing and graphics work, and discovering the joys of being able to use computer equipment I am given for free because it is obsolete. I've been able to parlay my Linux skills into a well-paying job as a Unix sysadmin in a job market where young MCSEs posessing similar experience levels are sitting by the roadside with "Will reboot for food." signs. In short, I am a happier, wealthier, more productive person because of what I have learned. Am I a genius? No. Just someone who likes to learn, and was willing to put up with dual-booting for a few months while I picked up skill with a new OS.
But, to quote Dennis Miller, "That's just my opinion; I may be wrong."
I don't understand why most people can't see this as a complete farse -- if I want to copy CDs/DVDs, all I need is a reader that will read individual bits from the media, and write individual bits to the new media. It's that simple, and the hardware is fairly easily hackable so that even a copy-protected DVD player can be hacked in this fashion. DVDs (and any other format, really) can thus be easily copied.
This isn't about piracy. It's about squeezing as much money out of the population as possible. Why don't people see this?
Software licensing for the majority of business applications / operating systems _may_ be the lowest major cost for a business, but it is still a _signifigant_ expense. If you can reduce that expense by ten percent while only adding a few thousand onto the payroll, it makes good sense.
I work in a small Unix shop. Our Sun equipment (low-end Enterprise stuff) is slightly more expensive then NT equipment, but the support costs are signifigantly lower then NT (given what Microsoft charges for support), and we have _no_ downtime to speak of (an integraded hardware/software package has some great benefits). There is also a huge online community of other administrators who can provide answers to just about any question -- check out the Sun Managers mailing list sometime.
A Microsoft license is _not_ a license for support -- that costs extra. Windows2000 comes with a very limited number of incidents related to installation _only_ -- after that, you are on your own, or you can pay Microsoft. So Microsoft doesn't exactly guarentee you support of any kind.
The GNU, and free software in general, give you no support -- but you at least have the ability of looking "under the hood", and speaking with developers directly. How many times have you had problems with a RAID array under Windows and gotten to speak to the guy who wrote the software for it? Not many, I'm sure.
You are not guarenteed 99.99 percent availibility. If your system works one hour out of the year, Microsoft owes you nothing. Read your licensing agreement and deal with it.
So what about the human factor? Unix system administrators make more than their Windows counterparts, but you are getting an individual with years of experience and a genuine love for what he does (trust me, a clueless Unix sysadmin is a rarity). Getting him a few lackeys from a local college at ten or so dollars and hour is also a piece of cake -- there are a lot of CS students who would jump at the chance to make a moderately decent living wage working with Unix, learning future job skills, and doing so while going to school.
So -- the hardware/software is more expensive (if you go with Sun, IBM, or one of the big boys), but with virtually no downtime and incredibly good support. Additional small-time software (mail servers, web, etc) is free or near-zero cost, with a huge community of individuals standing behind it. And the cost of two Unix admins and two college lackeys is about the same going rate for three Windows2000 admins with less experience.
Because if you walk into CompUSSR and spend $5000 to purchase shrink-wrapped copies of Windows, you are paying the creator (Microsoft) for their product/works (Lousy OS). In this case, no compensation was offered to Warner. That's what makes it wrong (and technically illegal).
Slashdot Mirror
Is it me, or did they skip the whole truck/loading dock/delivery part of things and just drop the stuff out of the aircraft at 30,000 feet?
Many, and quite possibly the majority, of dot-coms were horribly managed; it's one thing to be a pioneer in a new field and fall down, but it's a different thing to take a badly-equipped, over-sized expiditonary force into certainly dangerous and mostly-uncharted territory, and expect them to be alright.
Most of these executives weren't pioneers. They were con-men.
Pioneers into modern fields of business started, in the past, often with little cash and no backing. Instead of depending on venture-capital funding and highly-promoted IPOs, pioneers of modern business relied on ingenuity, determination, and luck. If their idea couldn't stand in the marketplace, it died a small and insignifigant death. Today, we call these concepts capitalism and free-market economics.
And you are an expert on either fast-breeder nuclear reactors or God?
Nope. I didn't claim to be, and I don't think anyone really can claim to be an expert on the latter. I made no assertions about the expertise or nature of any gods or deities; I merely pointed out the factual and logical errors in the original post.
BTW, the Ben Franklin quote does not support your assertion. Sure, Christians can fall into rote worship, holier-than-thou attitudes, vanity. There is nothing in the quote you supplied that indicates that supports your assertion that he was agnostic or atheist.
An agnostic is, according to popular definition, one who believes in a God, but not necessarily one which conforms to the views held by a specific organized religion. I am arguing that Franklin is an agnostic this sense; that he believes in God, but does not support organized religion. Thomas Jefferson fits into the same category.
I'm a Presbyterian and I really hate some of the things they do. Doesn't change my relationship with God.
I never said that it did.
The other thing is that several of the individuals you listed are either deists (essentially agnostics; believing in a deity, but not necessarily the christian one), or atheists. Here's a few quotes for you:
Thomas Jefferson:
Do you know what the most popular restaurant in Paris is? McDonalds. The only reason SUVs don't sell well in Europe and Asia is the price of gasoline is higher. Every nation has shopping malls, and Must-See TV is syndicated around the world.
As to your first assertion, I'd like some proof about the popularity of McDonalds in Paris. SUVs don't sell well in other countries for many reasons, fuel costs among them; but if someone is rich enough to afford a US $50,000 Lincoln SUV, do you think that person is going to care what fuel costs them?
I am aware that every [first-world] nation has malls and plazas, but not on anywhere near the same scale; I hosted an exchange student from Hannover about five years ago, and she was amazed at the size of the local mall (the smallest of five in the area). Malls in Japan are, for the most part, more like open-air markets. Most importantly, malls in Europe and Asia are much smaller, and tend to have more locally-oriented shops.
America isn't perfect. We have our Christian fundamentalists (abortion clinic bombings anyone?), we have poverty, we need to work out more and eat better (which again, would be a sign of consumerism and wealth), we even have a legislature that is showing less and less willingness to preserve the Bill of Rights. That said, it's still a pretty decent place to live.
I admit I am feeling pretty nationalistic after 9-11. I'm a libertarian, I don't support capitalism at all costs, but I don't sing along with the brainwashed-politicly-correct Madison/Berkley/MIT dogma. That dogma being, no matter what the facts, you can feel good about yourself if you Blame America First.
I never said, "Blame America First" -- I think that the actions of the terrorists on September 11th are absolutely inexcusable, and that whomever responsible needs to be found, tried, and executed; and I know that the destruction of the WTC/NY is not the fault of the U.S.; it's because a group of religious nuts, who treat their own people worse than they treat foreigners from the land of the Great Satan, have some crazy idea about a holy war.
I also know that some Americans have a great deal to offer; look at the modern works of Hoffstadter, or the poetry of Kingsolver. Not all of America is bad -- but the mass of lemmings screaming for more oil, more malls, walls around our communities to feel safer is, to me at least, disgusting.
I do not endorse the bombing of a largely innocent population (the Afghanis). The people in Afghanistan have no say in what their dictatorial government does, yet we attack them blindly because their totalitarian regime provided refuge for Bin Laden.
I also do not agree with Bush's stance on Bin Laden's guilt -- I have seen no concrete proof that he is responsible, and until then there is reasonable doubt. The goal is to stop terrorism; not to become terrorists ourselves.
Finally -- politically correct? Last time I checked, being PC was about not offending people; telling most of your countrypeople that they are fat, wasteful, ignorant slobs isn't exactly the best way of going about that.
That's wholey absurd. "Why do they hate us?" "How can we make them like us?" "What can we do to earn their trust?" -- all of these questions are signs of ignorance. Why do the Slashdot trolls post comments about hot grits? WHO CARES! The only things we need to learn about fundamentalists is what will help us DESTROY them, not appease them!
This is a long explanation, but I think the anti-globalization argument is connected to "But why do they hate us argument." They are both equally ignorant points of view. If you are ready for some patriotism, read on. Otherwise, go back to Berkley!
Did we ask why Hitler hated Jews? No. Would it have helped? No.
I think you grossly misunderstood the original post, and your reply reeks of ignorance.
It's not that we need to understand why the islamic fundamentalists hate us -- they hate pretty much everybody who isn't an islamic fundamentalist; and you can feel free to substitue "christian fundamentalist" or "nationalist zealot" for "islamic fundamentalist" if you would like.
But the original post wasn't about fundamentalists. It was about normal, ordinary people.
The US is looked down upon not because we are rich, but because we are wasteful; not because we are powerful, but because we abuse that power; not because we are intelligent and educated, but because most American high school graduates can give you a biography for every player on their favorite football team, but can't tell you who their senators are or how many represenatives their state has in the House.
What you call patriotism, I call rabid nationalism. I consider myself patriotic because I believe in the Bill of Rights, in the concepts upon which this nation was founded. There were so many ideas flying around that not all of them could be put to words; only the most key of freedoms were, in fact -- but the authors of the Constitution trusted their posterity to remember why we fought a war against the British, and why the rights of the populus had to be guaranteed by law.
Sadly we have failed in the mission they have given us. The so-called "founding fathers" wished for us to have a love of diversity and a tolerance of others -- principles which are very difficult in practice.
Americans of today are disliked because they strive for homogeny; they want to always have access to their Starbucks lattes and their McDonalds' happy meals. Americans want to drive their SUVs, shop at malls, watch Must-See TV, and rely on others to make crucial decisions for them. Most importantly, Americans always want to blame someone else.
Something you should try some time -- go to another country and play "Spot the Foreigner" at a local plaza or major thoroughfare. A friend of mine did this in Florence, and the following patterns could be observed: Italians were usually rail-thin, tan, and relaxed. Germans were usually a bit heaver (although not obese), and very serious. English people smiled a lot and seemed to be content with their lot in life. Americans were nominally much more plump than the average, almost never spoke the local language, and spent their time trying to find things that were as American as possible.
The rest of the world doesn't want to be America.
The rest of your argument is going to be ignored, as it isn't relevant to the original post.
So your Director of Engineering couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag. Now please come up with a real refutation of the point made in the original post? You can't, because I am right.
Don't make pointless, baseless assertions.
The claim is not that ego only affects Open Source projects. The fact is that in Open Source projects nobody has the final authority and can keep progress rolling in the face of ego. Even if Linus says no to one option and yes to another, an equally respected leader can choose to ignore that decision and go his own way, taking a fair number of followers with him, dividing the effort.
The same thing can and does happen in commercial projects; instead of code forks you get mass firings, but the end result is the same. A manager with an overinflated ego is very bad for any project; be it open source or not; the difference is that, in open source, the clash between management (the project maintainer(s)) and programmers exists under the scrutiny of the public eye, whereas in a corporate setting the conflict is kept within the company walls.
One of the qualities, if not the top quality, of a good manager is the capability to admit that they are either wrong, or don't have sufficient information to make a decision.
No; 2.4 is a stable kernel. Changing the VM as of 2.4.10 without a code fork was bad enough, and the last thing that needs to be done is to introduce yet another radical change in a supposedly stable series of kernels.
It's not as simple as moving the code to a 'vm1.c' and a 'vm2.c'; VM structures are pretty deeply integrated into quite a bit of the kernel, so it would be a major rewrite to set up a pluggable VM architecture -- which is (theoretically) planned for 2.5 (where development code belongs).
Not really; it's hard to quantify the benefits of a text editor; and although one may make a statement such as, "Editor foo enables me to edit files 50% faster," it doesn't mean much; because the reference is subjective to personal preferences.
With VM in the kernel, it's pretty obvious when things aren't working as well as they should -- mainly because it is possible to write test programs (scaffolding) that check to see if a designed system is performing to specifications -- read _The_Mythical_Man-Month_ for an excellent explanation of the merits of specification-based "scaffold" testing.
CE = Computer Engineering; a subset of EE with an emphasis on computing systems (as opposed to radio, generators, etc.). I don't mean a job-shopper who just got their MCSE; a CE (in this case) is an EE who simply enjoyed working with computers more than anything else.
I completely agree that one should not hold the title of engineer for getting a certificate from some company; just because you can configure a Cisco router or install Unix on a Sparc workstation does not make you an engineer. It makes you a competent technician, but not an engineer.
I think this is definitely a good thing, but an electrical engineer is not qualified to examine a software patent; EEs and CEs deal mostly with hardware and software written in extremely low-level languages (such as assembly or raw machine code). It seems to me that the USPO desperately needs programmers (CS people) to look at the flood of incoming software patents to prevent cascades of lawsuits like the ones following the dot-com bust; e.g., where a company patents an already well-known or incredibly vague algorithm, and then files suit against everybody from Bob Dobbs to the Care Bears for patent violation.
Why are the same people who moan about the conformist nature of US society (Columbine etc), now turning around and trying to make MS confirm to US ideals?
That's grossly oversimplified; there is a difference between a large group of indpendent individuals conforming to an artifically created cultural trend, and a company being forced to conform to legal precedent that has been set down over the past two hundred or so years.
I know that America isn't very fond of free speech and democracy (ok, they say they are, but frankly it is one of the single most homogenous and confirmist countries in the world), but attacking MS because they 'don't confirm to American ideals' is frankly absurd.
Which America are you referring to -- the United States? I would say that Americans (in general) are quite fond of their freedoms, and that the massive conglomerate monopolistic mega-corporations are the ones opposed to indiviual liberties; companies of that magnitude desire to wield the powers of the government, but without the concession that the right to govern is derived from the governed.
Avoid generalizing; saying that all Americans are conformist and homogenous is like saying all Europeans are smelly thieves after spending a week in Rome; if you leave the suburbs and head into the cities, America becomes a much different place.
The reason why Microsoft doesn't conform to "american ideals" isn't because it's centralized; it is because Microsoft is anti-competitive; when one looks at U.S. history, a very competitive streak is evident.
Eh? Why were all the most successful Empires centrally controlled? Was the Roman Empire decentralised? Sure, they had some degree of devolution, but Rome was still the boss. The best economies have always been centrally and state controlled. For example, the USSR's economy increased 900% from a feudal economy in 1918 to a modern industrial state by 1928, under a communist regime. The US itself has put the economy under state control in wartime - the biggest growth period being WWII, which dragged america out of the depression.
The Roman republic was decentralized; provinces were, for the most part, autonomous, and although the Roman senate did have the final word, it was still based on the collective voice of the entire empire, and not on the will of a sole Emperor. This is easily evidenced by the speed of travel back around 200 B.C.; the Roman empire stretched across a goodly chunk of modern-day Europe, and carrying a message from Rome to an outlaying provincal capitol could take a week's journey; it is impossible to run a truly centralized government with that type of restriction.
The U.S. government during WWII did not control the economy; granted, some rationing was instituted, but the free market remained. The government contracted with companies to produce tanks, guns, and ships, and in true American style went with the lowest bidder -- in a controlled economy, the government simply would have ordered a selected company to produce without compensation.
This is completely fallacious. The history of the US is a hostory of power centralisation in the hands of federal government. The states have been emasculated, and now the same is happening in the EU wrt the nation states of Europe. America isn't about independant thought, democracy or devolved power at all - it is about centralised government control, confirmist attitudes (what other country would invent phrases like 'Anti-American' and 'The American Way' in the first place? I mean WTF?) and a lack of democracy thanks to having no real options in the democratic process.
Actually, the U.S. system of government was structured so that the individual states and the Federal government share power -- the Federal government handes anything involving interaction between states or between individuals and states, and the states get the rest of the power.
The difference is that Equifax (now Experion) doesn't draw its revenue directly from the consumer -- they don't physically rely on selling things to the mass market for revenue. In addition, Experion functions under a great deal of government restriction regarding what they can and cannot do with the information they possess.
Despite Sun's shady dealings and anti-competitive practices, this really isn't the time for an ad hominem attack. The piece presented is very well written, and outlines the dangers of Microsoft's .NET quite thoroughly.
.NET were to become a reality, it would be mandatory to have an entry in the Passport and Wallet databases. I have some serious issues in letting a consumer-driven company have not access to all of my personal and financial information, but complete autonomy in using it -- the EULA for Passport reads much like the standard Microsoft EULA -- e.g., Microsoft owns all of the information you put into it.
My chief worry is that if
The point about Microsoft's securty track record is also quite valid; I know I will never trust my credit card numbers to a company that can't even keep internal email, well, internal.
I hate it when I forget that 'HTML Formatted' means 'Bring Your Own Paragraph Tags'
The idea of everything related to system and software configuration being stored in slow to parse text, in multiple formats is Unix. Having a single registry, stored without wasting space, is revolutionary.
It's pretty obvious you aren't a programmer; text takes just as much time to parse as a so-called binary file; why? Because they're *both* binary files; the only difference is that the "binary" file is formatted differently.
As for the oh-so-wonderful registry being a revolution, it was around in the days of VMS and VAXen; AIX keeps its logs in a binary, non-human-readable format, and most admins consider it to be a major pain-in-the-arse to deal with. The fact that /all/ system information is stored in /one/ file just means that the system can be annhilated by corrupting that file, and repairing a corrupted configuration file that isn't human-readable is literally next-to-impossible.
I can't count the times that I have been grateful that Unix conf files are human-readable when I do something stupid as an admin (which /all/ sysadmins do from time-to-time), and I can fix it from single-user mode with nothing more than /bin/cat and /bin/ed. Try removing the hardware information from the Windows registry, I'll delete /etc/conf.modules and /etc/modules/* on my Debian machine, and we'll see who is up faster.
Further, Windows problems can usually be fixed by commonly available utilities, requiring little skill. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that I should be a kernel expert to maintain a *nix system.
Right. Ask any experienced IT support person what they thing of those easy-to-use utilities, like First Aid and System Doctor, and I'll bet the response involves the rectal insertion of large boxy objects; something isn't effective just because it's easy to use. Furthermore, one need be a "kernel expert" only to write device drivers -- all you need to maintain a Unix machine is to have some understanding of how the system is structured (e.g., information about the peculairities of the local site), some basic administration commands, and a functioning brain. I was doing this at sixteen; are you telling me that an MCSE is dumber than a sixteen-year-old?
*nix programs are poorly named, either cute or short, causing much confusion. Task Scheduler vs crond or anacronda. Of course we all know about the thousands of text readers/displayers, etc, such as nroff, xv, latex (I know the case is wrong).
Your lack of understanding again shines brightly through your prose; the reason most Unix commands have short names is because they are easier to type. It's not that hard to remember that "cron" is used to schedule regular events, and that "ls" is used to LiSt a directory, and there is nothing wrong with having the reverse of the 'cat' command called 'tac'. How would you feel having to type 'task-scheduler -l joe' every time you wanted to look at Joe's task-schedulertab?
Cute names? You mean like Bob, Clippy, "XL", Visual Studio, and Hotmail?
Support and software availability is better on the Windows platform. OK, yeah I can get StarOffice or OpenOffice for Linux. But I can also get that on Windows, plus MS Office which is better than anything on Unix systems, plus WordPerfect (built for Windows and emulated on *nix systems), and Lotus SmartSuite.
I'd say that $0 for StarOffice with free downloads and cross-platform ability makes it much more available than an almost $500 copy of Microsoft Office that runs on one platform. I use StarOffice at my job, and although SO doesn't have every bell-and-whistle that Office XP does, SO does do a good job of importing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, SO is faster, and SO does quite nicely for writing documents.
Try writing a fifty-page paper with Word, cross-references, graphics, and all; and then try using LaTeX and LyX.
All of the above is a different story of course, if you're comparing the two platforms for purely server use. In that case you would probably pick *nix, but not necessarily.
That's because you know as much about Unix as Senator Strom Thurmand knows about gay sex.
The idea of everything related to system and software configuration being stored in slow to parse text, in multiple formats is Unix. Having a single registry, stored without wasting space, is revolutionary. It's pretty obvious you aren't a programmer; text takes just as much time to parse as a so-called binary file; why? Because they're *both* binary files; the only difference is that the "binary" file is formatted differently. As for the oh-so-wonderful registry being a revolution, it was around in the days of VMS and VAXen; AIX keeps its logs in a binary, non-human-readable format, and most admins consider it to be a major pain-in-the-arse to deal with. The fact that /all/ system information is stored in /one/ file just means that the system can be annhilated by corrupting that file, and repairing a corrupted configuration file that isn't human-readable is literally next-to-impossible.
I can't count the times that I have been grateful that Unix conf files are human-readable when I do something stupid as an admin (which /all/ sysadmins do from time-to-time), and I can fix it from single-user mode with nothing more than /bin/cat and /bin/ed. Try removing the hardware information from the Windows registry, I'll delete /etc/conf.modules and /etc/modules/* on my Debian machine, and we'll see who is up faster.
Further, Windows problems can usually be fixed by commonly available utilities, requiring little skill. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that I should be a kernel expert to maintain a *nix system.
Right. Ask any experienced IT support person what they thing of those easy-to-use utilities, like First Aid and System Doctor, and I'll bet the response involves the rectal insertion of large boxy objects; something isn't effective just because it's easy to use. Furthermore, one need be a "kernel expert" only to write device drivers -- all you need to maintain a Unix machine is to have some understanding of how the system is structured (e.g., information about the peculairities of the local site), some basic administration commands, and a functioning brain. I was doing this at sixteen; are you telling me that an MCSE is dumber than a sixteen-year-old?
*nix programs are poorly named, either cute or short, causing much confusion. Task Scheduler vs crond or anacronda. Of course we all know about the thousands of text readers/displayers, etc, such as nroff, xv, latex (I know the case is wrong).
Your lack of understanding again shines brightly through your prose; the reason most Unix commands have short names is because they are easier to type. It's not that hard to remember that "cron" is used to schedule regular events, and that "ls" is used to LiSt a directory, and there is nothing wrong with having the reverse of the 'cat' command called 'tac'. How would you feel having to type 'task-scheduler -l joe' every time you wanted to look at Joe's task-schedulertab?
Cute names? You mean like Bob, Clippy, "XL", Visual Studio, and Hotmail?
Support and software availability is better on the Windows platform. OK, yeah I can get StarOffice or OpenOffice for Linux. But I can also get that on Windows, plus MS Office which is better than anything on Unix systems, plus WordPerfect (built for Windows and emulated on *nix systems), and Lotus SmartSuite.
I'd say that $0 for StarOffice with free downloads and cross-platform ability makes it much more available than an almost $500 copy of Microsoft Office that runs on one platform. I use StarOffice at my job, and although SO doesn't have every bell-and-whistle that Office XP does, SO does do a good job of importing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, SO is faster, and SO does quite nicely for writing documents.
Try writing a fifty-page paper with Word, cross-references, graphics, and all; and then try using LaTeX and LyX.
All of the above is a different story of course, if you're comparing the two platforms for purely server use. In that case you would probably pick *nix, but not necessarily.
That's because you know as much about Unix as Senator Strom Thurmand knows about gay sex.
According to Microsoft, that boxed copy (not an upgrade, mind you) is $319. Add into that a copy of Office XP (not professional) for $479, McAffee AntiVirus for $49, and whatever other applications that the average user will need (like Visio, PhotoShop, Adobe Acrobat, etc.), and I can easily see the average licensing toll jumping to the thousands.
Even though the per-seat licenses are cheaper, you need to re-purchase those every year, and all you're doing is buying software that has (for the most part) free equivalants on Unix- or Linux-based systems.
Every month or so an article with content similar to the one on Wired pops up, and a link is pasted on /. These articles are always about how Linux is losing the desktop war, how Microsoft Windows will always dominate on the desktop, and about how Linux has no viable business model.
Last time I checked, though, Linux wasn't about making money. It wasn't about market share, customer preferences, or business models. Linux is tool, made and modified by and for its users -- a concept that is the driving force behind open source.
When RMS set out to create the GNU project and free-as-in-speech software, he didn't do it because he hoped to one day turn it into a business. The GNU project was started because RMS was tired of having available to the general computing community only lousy tools, designed by individuals who would never use them and who couldn't care less about quality or reliability.
The reason that the tools of the GNU project were kept open is that RMS recognized the benefits of collaboration, an idea that has in the past fifty years become very un-american -- the idea of mutual benefit has been all but annihilated from American culture. And although there are many (good) hackers in other countries, the amount of wealth and easy access to technology prevalent in the US makes it the ideal breeding ground for young coders; it's a lot easier to begin writing software when even the poor are economically capable of owning and operating a computer. But I digress.
The entire point of GNU project is honest collaberation, and the mutual benefit that *all* parties derive from it; if I write a tool that you need, and you write bugfixes for that tool, we both benefit, and neither of us really loses anything. It isn't about making money.
The same thing goes for the Linux kernel; Torvalds "open-sourced" it because he felt that there were other students who, like him, needed a small, efficient Unix variant, but who didn't have the means to purchase even a small Unix OS and its sources.
So stop whining about not being able to make money off of a community resource, and stop complaining about missing features in community software that you in no way contributed to.
The thing is, you are speaking from an end-user viewpoint, where running unlicensed software isn't as big of a deal. Businesses who run unlicensed software have this nasty habit of being audited, and paying thousands to millions of dollars in fines. Thus, when you run IT for a business, you buy the software which your company uses.
I agree with you that the article needs more facts to lend it credibility, but your point about the use of unlicensed software is missing the target by quite a bit.
Oh, small rant: It's "using unlicensed software", not "piracy". People don't forcably attack the salesdroids at CompUSA, rape the women, kill the men, and steal copies of OfficeXP. Sheesh.
Last time I checked, my private documents and emails aren't part of any public network service; but, when one compares the number of Outlook/Word macro viruses in the past year to the number of major (e.g., root-level) BIND exploits in the past four years, it appears that Microsoft is losing the battle. A private non-networked application is losing to a public network service in the arena of remote-over-the-internet exploitable bugs.
Come back and post after you grow a fscking brain.
Either you are a twit, or my sarcasm-o-meter is broken at the moment. At the moment I feel like writing an intelligent reply to something utterly trite and stupid, so your sterling example of prose definitely caught my eye.
First off, I believe "maintenance of a system" could be defined as keeping the system up-to-date with patches (security, bugfixes, etc.), reclaiming disk space, adding memory/needed hardware/etc. That's at least what I do as a system administrator, both for my primary employer, and at home (I have four servers and a small handful of workstations for myself and the 'rents). Since I have to maintain both Debian and Windows9x/NT installations, I think I'm qualified in saying that I find Linux much easier to maintain. Using apt-get, I can keep just about everything on my systems up-to-date with a few simple commands, which I can issue over an ssh session, or from a serial console. I keep my cluster of about seven (total) personal-use Linux machines up-to-date with little more than a simple shell script, cron, and ssh.
Now, that doesn't go for *all* Linux distributions -- I detest RedHat (and RPM), simply because of the irritating web of dependencies that aren't auto-satisfying, and that they try and push the latest-and-greatest out the door with a minimal amount of testing (same as with Our Friends In Redmond). I could go on and on about this one, but I'd prefer to stay on topic.
Windows update, on the other hand, I don't care for. On older systems (apt-get has been around for awhile), you have to manually go out and download the patches (something quite irritating about RPM-based distributions), and then manually install them, which usually requires a reboot. Even with Windows Update, most patches require rebooting the system, and some stand quite a fair chance of corrupting the registry or other system files. I have *never* corrupted a crucial system file on a Linux (or Solaris) machine when patching it. Never. I've had Windows machines get nice and toasted from simply appling one patch downloaded from the Microsoft web site.
Now as per your second argument: Linux is not for everybody. Why? Because it's different. It's not Windows. To use it, you need to learn a whole 'nother skill set, and some people can't (or don't want to) invest the time to do so. It's kind of like a Mac user who installs Windows2000 Advanced Server for the first time and then whines because, "It's not MacOS!".
Now, is this learning curve as steep as claimed by Windows pundits? Not really. I started computing with a Vic20, but didn't really get into it until DOS and Win3.1 were the de-facto standards. I managed to switch to Linux just fine. Could I get everything working right away? No. Took me a month to get my sound card to function, and about the same amount of time to get X working with my video card (keep in mind this was well before X 4.0, and my video card required an obscure patch to function properly under X 3.x). But I learned quickly, and after six months annhiliate the Windows partition and use only Linux. Now, three years later, I'm still using only Linux, moving away from using X for just about everything except web browsing and graphics work, and discovering the joys of being able to use computer equipment I am given for free because it is obsolete. I've been able to parlay my Linux skills into a well-paying job as a Unix sysadmin in a job market where young MCSEs posessing similar experience levels are sitting by the roadside with "Will reboot for food." signs. In short, I am a happier, wealthier, more productive person because of what I have learned. Am I a genius? No. Just someone who likes to learn, and was willing to put up with dual-booting for a few months while I picked up skill with a new OS.
But, to quote Dennis Miller, "That's just my opinion; I may be wrong."
This isn't about piracy. It's about squeezing as much money out of the population as possible. Why don't people see this?
--
I work in a small Unix shop. Our Sun equipment (low-end Enterprise stuff) is slightly more expensive then NT equipment, but the support costs are signifigantly lower then NT (given what Microsoft charges for support), and we have _no_ downtime to speak of (an integraded hardware/software package has some great benefits). There is also a huge online community of other administrators who can provide answers to just about any question -- check out the Sun Managers mailing list sometime.
A Microsoft license is _not_ a license for support -- that costs extra. Windows2000 comes with a very limited number of incidents related to installation _only_ -- after that, you are on your own, or you can pay Microsoft. So Microsoft doesn't exactly guarentee you support of any kind.
The GNU, and free software in general, give you no support -- but you at least have the ability of looking "under the hood", and speaking with developers directly. How many times have you had problems with a RAID array under Windows and gotten to speak to the guy who wrote the software for it? Not many, I'm sure.
You are not guarenteed 99.99 percent availibility. If your system works one hour out of the year, Microsoft owes you nothing. Read your licensing agreement and deal with it.
So what about the human factor? Unix system administrators make more than their Windows counterparts, but you are getting an individual with years of experience and a genuine love for what he does (trust me, a clueless Unix sysadmin is a rarity). Getting him a few lackeys from a local college at ten or so dollars and hour is also a piece of cake -- there are a lot of CS students who would jump at the chance to make a moderately decent living wage working with Unix, learning future job skills, and doing so while going to school.
So -- the hardware/software is more expensive (if you go with Sun, IBM, or one of the big boys), but with virtually no downtime and incredibly good support. Additional small-time software (mail servers, web, etc) is free or near-zero cost, with a huge community of individuals standing behind it. And the cost of two Unix admins and two college lackeys is about the same going rate for three Windows2000 admins with less experience.
So there you go.
--
Because if you walk into CompUSSR and spend $5000 to purchase shrink-wrapped copies of Windows, you are paying the creator (Microsoft) for their product/works (Lousy OS). In this case, no compensation was offered to Warner. That's what makes it wrong (and technically illegal).
--
Potato has always been 2.2, AFIK. 2.4 is still in the works.
--