tcpdump, rdesktop, ssh, ftp,... have all been ported to the zaurus. Also important, linux on the zaurus flies!. You can start a command line and run multiple apps, saving a lot of valuable memory which would be used by a gui. Try http://www.debian.org/ports/arm , http://ipkgfind.handhelds.org, http://zaurusoft.com,... for a lot of those ports.
You can do stuff yourself if you develop in linux or java, the zaurus is simply a 2.4 kernel running on a ARM chip.
Compaq supports linux on the iPaq
Yeah, after you've handed out your hard-earned cash to MS.
The zaurus is bulky and unlikely to succeed in a big way I take it, you have some kind of proof to back that up? Another poster has already brought up the fact that the zaurus is a relatively small pda ( compared to other ARM pdas )
Especially since the iPaq is going to have (iPaq only) 144 kbps both ways worldwide...
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just clueless. This service is most likely just another GSM/GPRS service. Sure you might have heard it from a compaq/hp rep, but all the wireless providers ( major ones ) are rolling out GSM/GPRS. And the CF cellular modems exist for zaurus, ipaq, journada, and most other pdas.
I say don't buy another MS license, if you don't want too! If you want a linux pda, then get a
Linux PDA
lemon laws should only affect products which are sold, opensource or otherwise.
If I give you a car, for free, with no value returned to be of any kind. I can't be sued under current lemon laws. But if I sell a car, I can. at least in FL.
to me the point of lemon laws are to protect consumer investments. You can't sue someone who gives you a bad gift.
The law would affect open-source consultants and businesses though ( ie. redhat et. al )
There are talkback nightly builds for linux. If you can reproduce a crash consistently then file a bug. You don't have to have a stack if you can repro regularly. If it's reproducible then someone else can get the stack.
That's exactly the problem. Mozilla is very stable now. Most crashers seem to be entirely random. On the other hand, If the build had symbols, you can get the bug on a single crash.
PS. Where are those talkback nightlies for linux? I would love to see them.
There's a talkback for this release, but not usually. That should be the norm, just as with windows nightlies. Are linux bugs less important than others?
PS. I feel both unstripped and talkbacks should be available. There are a lot of cases where talkback will not be of use, because the crash didn't seem to trigger it's start. I'm sure you've seen cases where mozilla dies and you never hear from talkback. And the thing is, building a unstripped distribution would be much additional work at all. It would literally be modifying a single make file to set STRIP=false, make, then reset strip and make again.
But still, a nightly linux talkback build would be great.
AFAIK, there is no talkback nightly for linux. There's no unstripped linux nightly either.
I still get random crashes with mozilla now-and-then ( very far inbetween, but I'm in mozilla all day, everyday, so I see a few ), but without even a coredump file, how am I going to report it?
Usually, I'm not doing anything special or at an elaborate site.
I spend a significant amount of my time coding and evangelizing open-source at my workplace, so I hate to be a nay-sayer to your open-source pat-on-the-back post, but...
How many of those geeks are just giving lip service? Don't be fooled by slashdot postings and a call done in the heat of the moment. A lot of people are just all talk.
Just check out the contradictions when the next cool microsoft powered gizmo comes out.
Posting messages on slashdot, will not stop microosoft. Not buying their products will.
In a few minutes, this story would have vanished from the minds of most slashdotters, and most will go play half-life on their primary partition ( ie. windows. ). They'll surf the web in IE for software for their WinCE powered PocketPC.
Sorry for being negative, but I thought I had to point that out.
If you want a linux pda, why pay the ms tax? And fund more predatory behavior? Just get a zaurus.
Check out opie.handhelds.org/
For a great distro for handhelds. supports ipaq, zaurus, and I think others. This project, could do wonders, for unifying linux PDAs on a single platform.
With countless stories every day on how Microsoft is evil, and Microsoft practices must be stopped ( more articles than I could stomach usually ), I'm surprised on how eagerly slashdot jumps on their products. Guess what, you're funding them!!
By buying their products, you're speaking with the voice that counts, your money.
The zaurus is a great tool. I love mine. Everyone was raving yesterday about how the clie had a software writing area that's hideable, guess what, the zaurus has that. And it has a built in keyboard, and a screen keyboard, and a unicode keyboard...
so go ahead. complain that microsoft is bullying the educational institutes, that their licenses prevent OEMs from distributing alternative OSes, that they want to prevent us from being able to buy computers without paying them everytime...
The Zaurus comes with apps for handling word, excel, and powerpoint files. Although, I must admit that I never actually tested them to see how well the file filters work.
The app is Hancom word, spreadsheet, presenter. Hancom is based of OpenOffice, which is *really* good with Office support. I have a zaurus in my hand right now, but to be honest, I've never had to use this.
One Hancom guy had an interview here on slashdot a few days ago, in which he mentioned this.
Linux may also be a good competitor in this area, but the flagship product of Linux, Sharp Zaurus, seems to be not so successful, if successful at all.
How did you figure that?
You should really try it out. I have a zaurus, I got one after finally going down to the store and playing with all the PDAs/Pocket PCs *in hand*.
My advice, go out there and try them first!. Don't just read reviews. From the reviews I was headset on the new CLIE, after I compared the units in hand, I left the store with a zaurus. A PDA is a very personal electronic device ( yeah, I know how that sounds:) ), you have to see for yourself.
I think the better question is, can the CLIE be refitted with a real processor.
If you're really want a palmOS device, instead of that 66MHz crap, I'd wait for the strongArm 206MHz based palms that are supposed to come out soon ( later this year??? )
I know MHz isn't everything, but come on. 66MHz vs. 206MHz at the same price!!!
There is bluetooth for the zaurus http://www.handhelds.org/pipermail/handhelds/2002- January/002393.html Check out the zaurus sourceforge project for more info.
I wonder how hard it would be to port rdesktop terminal services client ( http://www.rdesktop.org ) to embedix/qt. If you haven't used rdesktop, you *must* try it out. At any rate, can't you do terminal services from any browser? If opera doesn't work, there's KDE's konquerer for the zaurus.
There's a lot of software for the zaurus, check out http://zaurus.sourceforge.net/ and http://myzaurus.com/
The mail software can be replaced, although I think the current package works well.
Truth is, as a linux/java based PDA, the zaurus is the first sane PDA platform out there. I hope they push enough units to spark a trend, ( I've heard they're doing well )
Truth is I was waiting for months for this. I put in my preorder as soon as they were available. But two days ago, I cancelled it and got a Sharp Zaurius after I played with one. These are much more attractive in hand than the pictures on the website suggest, and they have a 206MHz processor. They are *very* responsive.
It's true that for some people a traditional low powered PDA might be better. But if you're a power user, geek, etc. Do yourself a favor and check out the Zaurius or iPaq FIRST!!!
a lot of wrongful citations fall through the cracks and give some that guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling.
Ever been to traffic court? It's always been that way. Unless you can somehow prove that the officer was wrong, misguided, you are guilty.
Last time I went to traffic court I checked it out. The only people that went free were the defendants who's accusing officer did not show up ( like me:) Even cases where both the officer and the accused did not show up, the accused was found guilty
I believe it is that way if the case isn't a criminal case or something. not a lawyer.
PS. Want to increase the odds of your accusing officer not showing up? Then (a) ask for the trial at the last possible time, we have 2 weeks to do so, (b) Schedule the case as late has they'll let you, (c) When the date comes up,ask for continuance, ie. reschedule. Here we have 1 continuance (d) reschedule as late as you can again. The point is to put as much time between the time of the infraction and the court date. There's no guarantee, but it works
As soon as the VR3 gets ethernet ( the page says june ) I think I'll get one.
Good network testers run for well over $500+, and their not even that hot That's why I still carry a laptop around
A VR3, software like, tcpdump, slightly modified nic driver ( maybe, for an attempt at diagnosising hardware faults ), ping, traceroute, portmap, arp. Would be better than most of the testers I'm seeing right now. All for $150+price of NIC.
The only issue is text entry. I don't think it would be all that bad, if a menu is made available to the user. So the user can click on "broadcast discovery", to discovery host by an ethernet broadcast, arp, then dns ( maybe ), or the user can store a list of known host. For people with small networks, or particularly troublesome servers, that would work well.
[Note: I am not a writer/editor of any kind, but...]
Slashdot editors should know how important banner adds are to online content providers. They should also realize how important user data, however small, is as well.
Yet they link the 'print' version of the articles, thus bypassing the articles writer's means of making money. What if every slashdot user used junkbusters? What if everyone circumvented the slashdot subscribtion? How would slashdot make money?
We continue to rail on NYtimes for their subscription requierement. But think, you get (i) well written (ii) timely (iii) well researched, articles for free daily. Although there are tons of expenses associated in getting that content to you. And all they ask is a stupid alias ( doesn't even have to be your real name ) to build numbers on users reading habits. Yet you post accounts and account generators.
Is that reasonable? Is that fair?
There is an old saying in my religion, "do onto others as you would like done unto you". Religion aside, it is a very wise saying.
That's interesting. Maybe you should start a fact-finding project. Just by yourself listing your goals and resources you've identified (RFCs, existing source code, API reference guides etc.) If other developers like what you've put together maybe something'll start from there.
I've seen the start and failure of at least one other groupware project, was not pretty:) And I'd say that first step of defining the project in detail is for one or two people only. Others can join later if they agree.
You can take a integrated mail daemon approach eg. http://courier-mta.org/
Which is an integrated ESMTP/POP/IMAP server, and try to add a calender server( whatever that is). Or create the standalone server as you said. I use Cyrus for IMAP/POP and sendmail for SMTP, so actually that way may suit me better. But I suspect starting with something like courier might be better for you.
I know little of exchange, but from what I've seen, I'm not impressed. A lot of functionality I see when someone says "hey, see what exchange can do", I can attribute to any IMAP or LDAP server. Any IMAP server can share folders for instances, etc. The shared calender is missing in OSS though.
Microsoft has release their Mail API, MAPI protocol ( don't know if that's pertinent to this cause ), and there are the free ICAL and MCAL libraries floating around the net for use.
Mozilla has a calendering client, they got it from some company, I can't remember. But it's not going to be in Mozilla 1.0 for sure. You can download CVS mozilla and build it yourself though.
http://mozilla.org./projects/calendar/ That could be a good client to start with. Although developing with a mozilla based product can be a chore in inself, since it's hard to exert changes to the process as a non-aol developer.
OpenLDAP as the LDAP server.
I guess my point is, there's a lot of information, choices to be made at first. Maybe if you start by getting it all together and separating the impossible from what's not you might get a decent following?
Not to be a unix zealot, or anything but that quote bothers me, because it implies that Linux maintainnence is a nightmare while other OSes are point and click. That is simply not true.
Didn't have a chance to see MS shops when nimda virus roled along did you? Or constantly taking down their servers for the latest service pack? Or Exchange is "acting up again"
The point is there are major time cost for maintannence of any operating system.
I management solaris servers currently ( linux only as my desktop for now ). And we're constantly on the look out for critical patches, etc. Software screws up just like on any other OS ( eg. very expensive iplanet ldap starts to use 100% CPU for no apparent reason ) My point is the windows people are busy doing the same kind of thing, only with Exchange, IIS, etc.
That view that UNIX total cost of ownership is higher due to higher maintainence cost is incorrect. If you have to hire a small group of competent MS admins to run your MS shop, it would cost you the same as to hire a group of UNIX admins.
Please not buy into that MS marketing crap that any modern Enterprise class OS is point and click
I'm seeing some highly modded posts saying "this is OSS fud!"
I think that's true, although fud is a strong term. It's OSS marketing, and marketing is ugly. I know most people here are tech types and don't have the stomach for it, but it's a necessary evil. This same type of resource has existed for commercial software vendor interest for years, and all we say is "well that's to be expected".
I was happy to see this page, and I hope more of this papers are written in the future.
Now when I go up against those guys who seem to have a Microsoft default answer to every IT question that comes up, I have some documents to show the boss.
We're not all techs. You can't argue to a suit using the same logic that would make you popular on slashdot. And I bet I'm not saying anything you haven't figured out yourself.
I think the more, well written, scientific papers that the OSS community produces on specific topics, then the better for adoption of OSS.
Microsoft and others have billion dollar marketing budgets, what does OSS have?
Not that I don't appreciated this great product, but I am tired of sending bug reports and being ignored.
I run nightlies, and before I use to run my own CVS builds that I built every 2 to 3 days. I even ran mozilla under gdb at *all* times. It was a bit slower but I did not mind, because I thought I was helping out.
I would send in detailed bug reports with websites and stackstraces for crashers. I am reasonabley familiar with gdb.
Then I realized that that a lot of the bugs were just be ignored. I had one crasher label simpley "can not reproduce". He could not reproduce it because after waiting a month or 2 to check the offending site out, the site had moved! But wait, I had included a full backstrace, but that did not seem to matter. I know the guys are busy, but still!
After a few of those, I just said screw that. I'm not wasting my time.
It's not only me. The most voted mozilla bug for months maybe years running is futured. The 'view source of dynamic pages' bug. One full time developer said 'it did not affect enough people'. Um, yeah that's why it has more votes then any other bug by far.
to nitpick...
<ms-word format="screw-you">
<![CDATA[
l;wekras'epfu]9rj]-w34rmgq]4 5u]`mwmu
-345u1vu3bm405m-uq[w4rkv=wr,v3,rvir=\aaoifj[0u5
[0uigjmlvn'sdlku[0qrt94tu0349'rgja'ergj'
q49u]1349tjg'oalrjg'90ut][340tpojer'porgj093
4u51]04jg'aorjg'q394u51340tuj4nmg'eut[034
]]>
</ms-word>
You definately want to go with a zaurus then.
tcpdump, rdesktop, ssh, ftp,... have all been ported to the zaurus. Also important, linux on the zaurus flies!. You can start a command line and run multiple apps, saving a lot of valuable memory which would be used by a gui. Try http://www.debian.org/ports/arm
, http://ipkgfind.handhelds.org, http://zaurusoft.com,... for a lot of those ports.
You can do stuff yourself if you develop in linux or java, the zaurus is simply a 2.4 kernel running on a ARM chip.
Other cool stuff on the zaurus. zMame.
There's a linux distro for the PDA called, http://opie.handhelds.org. It runs on the z and ipaq. Should check that out.
I have a zaurus, and I plan to use it for this exact purpose, when I get my NIC compact flash card.
There are other
Linux PDAs out there as well, if you're on a budget.
Compaq supports linux on the iPaq
Yeah, after you've handed out your hard-earned cash to MS.
The zaurus is bulky and unlikely to succeed in a big way
I take it, you have some kind of proof to back that up? Another poster has already brought up the fact that the zaurus is a relatively small pda ( compared to other ARM pdas )
Especially since the iPaq is going to have (iPaq only) 144 kbps both ways worldwide...
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just clueless. This service is most likely just another GSM/GPRS service. Sure you might have heard it from a compaq/hp rep, but all the wireless providers ( major ones ) are rolling out GSM/GPRS. And the CF cellular modems exist for zaurus, ipaq, journada, and most other pdas.
I say don't buy another MS license, if you don't want too! If you want a linux pda, then get a Linux PDA
lemon laws should only affect products which are sold, opensource or otherwise.
If I give you a car, for free, with no value returned to be of any kind. I can't be sued under current lemon laws. But if I sell a car, I can. at least in FL.
to me the point of lemon laws are to protect consumer investments. You can't sue someone who gives you a bad gift.
The law would affect open-source consultants and businesses though ( ie. redhat et. al )
That's exactly the problem. Mozilla is very stable now. Most crashers seem to be entirely random. On the other hand, If the build had symbols, you can get the bug on a single crash.
PS. Where are those talkback nightlies for linux? I would love to see them.
There's a talkback for this release, but not usually. That should be the norm, just as with windows nightlies. Are linux bugs less important than others?
PS. I feel both unstripped and talkbacks should be available. There are a lot of cases where talkback will not be of use, because the crash didn't seem to trigger it's start. I'm sure you've seen cases where mozilla dies and you never hear from talkback. And the thing is, building a unstripped distribution would be much additional work at all. It would literally be modifying a single make file to set STRIP=false, make, then reset strip and make again.
But still, a nightly linux talkback build would be great.
AFAIK, there is no talkback nightly for linux. There's no unstripped linux nightly either.
I still get random crashes with mozilla now-and-then ( very far inbetween, but I'm in mozilla all day, everyday, so I see a few ), but without even a coredump file, how am I going to report it?
Usually, I'm not doing anything special or at an elaborate site.
I spend a significant amount of my time coding and evangelizing open-source at my workplace, so I hate to be a nay-sayer to your open-source pat-on-the-back post, but...
How many of those geeks are just giving lip service? Don't be fooled by slashdot postings and a call done in the heat of the moment. A lot of people are just all talk.
Just check out the contradictions when the next cool microsoft powered gizmo comes out.
Posting messages on slashdot, will not stop microosoft. Not buying their products will.
In a few minutes, this story would have vanished from the minds of most slashdotters, and most will go play half-life on their primary partition ( ie. windows. ). They'll surf the web in IE for software for their WinCE powered PocketPC.
Sorry for being negative, but I thought I had to point that out.
Check out opie.handhelds.org/ For a great distro for handhelds. supports ipaq, zaurus, and I think others. This project, could do wonders, for unifying linux PDAs on a single platform.
With countless stories every day on how Microsoft is evil, and Microsoft practices must be stopped ( more articles than I could stomach usually ), I'm surprised on how eagerly slashdot jumps on their products. Guess what, you're funding them!!
By buying their products, you're speaking with the voice that counts, your money.
The zaurus is a great tool. I love mine. Everyone was raving yesterday about how the clie had a software writing area that's hideable, guess what, the zaurus has that. And it has a built in keyboard, and a screen keyboard, and a unicode keyboard...
And don't talk about software either. Because, there are tons of ARM linux software. In places like zaurus.sourceforge.com http://zaurusoft.com http://opie.handhelds.com http://myzaurus.com http://ipkgfind.handhelds.org http://www.debian.org/ports/arm
so go ahead. complain that microsoft is bullying the educational institutes, that their licenses prevent OEMs from distributing alternative OSes, that they want to prevent us from being able to buy computers without paying them everytime...
Then go buy their friggin' products.
The app is Hancom word, spreadsheet, presenter. Hancom is based of OpenOffice, which is *really* good with Office support. I have a zaurus in my hand right now, but to be honest, I've never had to use this.
One Hancom guy had an interview here on slashdot a few days ago, in which he mentioned this.
How did you figure that?
You should really try it out. I have a zaurus, I got one after finally going down to the store and playing with all the PDAs/Pocket PCs *in hand*.
My advice, go out there and try them first!. Don't just read reviews. From the reviews I was headset on the new CLIE, after I compared the units in hand, I left the store with a zaurus. A PDA is a very personal electronic device ( yeah, I know how that sounds :) ), you have to see for yourself.
I think the better question is, can the CLIE be refitted with a real processor.
If you're really want a palmOS device, instead of that 66MHz crap, I'd wait for the strongArm 206MHz based palms that are supposed to come out soon ( later this year??? )
I know MHz isn't everything, but come on. 66MHz vs. 206MHz at the same price!!!
I have a zaurus. I like it :)
- January/002393.html
There is bluetooth for the zaurus http://www.handhelds.org/pipermail/handhelds/2002
Check out the zaurus sourceforge project for more info.
I wonder how hard it would be to port rdesktop terminal services client ( http://www.rdesktop.org ) to embedix/qt. If you haven't used rdesktop, you *must* try it out. At any rate, can't you do terminal services from any browser? If opera doesn't work, there's KDE's konquerer for the zaurus.
There's a lot of software for the zaurus, check out http://zaurus.sourceforge.net/ and http://myzaurus.com/
The mail software can be replaced, although I think the current package works well.
Truth is, as a linux/java based PDA, the zaurus is the first sane PDA platform out there. I hope they push enough units to spark a trend, ( I've heard they're doing well )
true.
Although "pocket pc" sounds lame.
Truth is I was waiting for months for this. I put in my preorder as soon as they were available. But two days ago, I cancelled it and got a Sharp Zaurius after I played with one. These are much more attractive in hand than the pictures on the website suggest, and they have a 206MHz processor. They are *very* responsive.
It's true that for some people a traditional low powered PDA might be better. But if you're a power user, geek, etc. Do yourself a favor and check out the Zaurius or iPaq FIRST!!!
I am glad I did.
with that list I'm suprised he didn't make video games illegal.
a lot of wrongful citations fall through the cracks and give some that guilty-until-proven-innocent feeling.
Ever been to traffic court? It's always been that way. Unless you can somehow prove that the officer was wrong, misguided, you are guilty.
Last time I went to traffic court I checked it out. The only people that went free were the defendants who's accusing officer did not show up ( like me :) Even cases where both the officer and the accused did not show up, the accused was found guilty
I believe it is that way if the case isn't a criminal case or something. not a lawyer.
PS. Want to increase the odds of your accusing officer not showing up? Then (a) ask for the trial at the last possible time, we have 2 weeks to do so, (b) Schedule the case as late has they'll let you, (c) When the date comes up,ask for continuance, ie. reschedule. Here we have 1 continuance (d) reschedule as late as you can again. The point is to put as much time between the time of the infraction and the court date. There's no guarantee, but it works
gnome and kde aren't OSes
Truth is, I still can't name one.
As soon as the VR3 gets ethernet ( the page says june ) I think I'll get one.
Good network testers run for well over $500+, and their not even that hot That's why I still carry a laptop around
A VR3, software like, tcpdump, slightly modified nic driver ( maybe, for an attempt at diagnosising hardware faults ), ping, traceroute, portmap, arp. Would be better than most of the testers I'm seeing right now. All for $150+price of NIC.
The only issue is text entry. I don't think it would be all that bad, if a menu is made available to the user. So the user can click on "broadcast discovery", to discovery host by an ethernet broadcast, arp, then dns ( maybe ), or the user can store a list of known host. For people with small networks, or particularly troublesome servers, that would work well.
[Note: I am not a writer/editor of any kind, but...]
Slashdot editors should know how important banner adds are to online content providers. They should also realize how important user data, however small, is as well.
Yet they link the 'print' version of the articles, thus bypassing the articles writer's means of making money. What if every slashdot user used junkbusters? What if everyone circumvented the slashdot subscribtion? How would slashdot make money?
We continue to rail on NYtimes for their subscription requierement. But think, you get (i) well written (ii) timely (iii) well researched, articles for free daily. Although there are tons of expenses associated in getting that content to you. And all they ask is a stupid alias ( doesn't even have to be your real name ) to build numbers on users reading habits. Yet you post accounts and account generators.
Is that reasonable? Is that fair?
There is an old saying in my religion, "do onto others as you would like done unto you". Religion aside, it is a very wise saying.
It goes on to point out that AMD has filed more patents in the last 3 years than Intel
number of patents filed does not equate to level of innovation.
How many of them were "sideways swing" type patents?
sheesh, this is slashdot, you'd think we could at least agree on that.
Get a packet shaper. We had this problem until we got a packeteer ( http://packeteer.com/ ) I think most schools use that one.
Linux kernel has packet shaping capability as well.
That's interesting. Maybe you should start a fact-finding project. Just by yourself listing your goals and resources you've identified (RFCs, existing source code, API reference guides etc.) If other developers like what you've put together maybe something'll start from there.
I've seen the start and failure of at least one other groupware project, was not pretty :) And I'd say that first step of defining the project in detail is for one or two people only. Others can join later if they agree.
You can take a integrated mail daemon approach eg. http://courier-mta.org/ Which is an integrated ESMTP/POP/IMAP server, and try to add a calender server( whatever that is). Or create the standalone server as you said. I use Cyrus for IMAP/POP and sendmail for SMTP, so actually that way may suit me better. But I suspect starting with something like courier might be better for you.
I know little of exchange, but from what I've seen, I'm not impressed. A lot of functionality I see when someone says "hey, see what exchange can do", I can attribute to any IMAP or LDAP server. Any IMAP server can share folders for instances, etc. The shared calender is missing in OSS though.
Microsoft has release their Mail API, MAPI protocol ( don't know if that's pertinent to this cause ), and there are the free ICAL and MCAL libraries floating around the net for use.
Mozilla has a calendering client, they got it from some company, I can't remember. But it's not going to be in Mozilla 1.0 for sure. You can download CVS mozilla and build it yourself though. http://mozilla.org./projects/calendar/ That could be a good client to start with. Although developing with a mozilla based product can be a chore in inself, since it's hard to exert changes to the process as a non-aol developer.
OpenLDAP as the LDAP server.
I guess my point is, there's a lot of information, choices to be made at first. Maybe if you start by getting it all together and separating the impossible from what's not you might get a decent following?
linux is only free if your time has no value.
Not to be a unix zealot, or anything but that quote bothers me, because it implies that Linux maintainnence is a nightmare while other OSes are point and click. That is simply not true.
Didn't have a chance to see MS shops when nimda virus roled along did you? Or constantly taking down their servers for the latest service pack? Or Exchange is "acting up again"
The point is there are major time cost for maintannence of any operating system.
I management solaris servers currently ( linux only as my desktop for now ). And we're constantly on the look out for critical patches, etc. Software screws up just like on any other OS ( eg. very expensive iplanet ldap starts to use 100% CPU for no apparent reason ) My point is the windows people are busy doing the same kind of thing, only with Exchange, IIS, etc.
That view that UNIX total cost of ownership is higher due to higher maintainence cost is incorrect. If you have to hire a small group of competent MS admins to run your MS shop, it would cost you the same as to hire a group of UNIX admins.
Please not buy into that MS marketing crap that any modern Enterprise class OS is point and click
I'm seeing some highly modded posts saying "this is OSS fud!"
I think that's true, although fud is a strong term. It's OSS marketing, and marketing is ugly. I know most people here are tech types and don't have the stomach for it, but it's a necessary evil. This same type of resource has existed for commercial software vendor interest for years, and all we say is "well that's to be expected".
I was happy to see this page, and I hope more of this papers are written in the future.
Now when I go up against those guys who seem to have a Microsoft default answer to every IT question that comes up, I have some documents to show the boss.
We're not all techs. You can't argue to a suit using the same logic that would make you popular on slashdot. And I bet I'm not saying anything you haven't figured out yourself.
I think the more, well written, scientific papers that the OSS community produces on specific topics, then the better for adoption of OSS.
Microsoft and others have billion dollar marketing budgets, what does OSS have?
http://splint.org - write safer C code.
I am not sending anymore bug reports to mozilla.
Not that I don't appreciated this great product, but I am tired of sending bug reports and being ignored.
I run nightlies, and before I use to run my own CVS builds that I built every 2 to 3 days. I even ran mozilla under gdb at *all* times. It was a bit slower but I did not mind, because I thought I was helping out.
I would send in detailed bug reports with websites and stackstraces for crashers. I am reasonabley familiar with gdb.
Then I realized that that a lot of the bugs were just be ignored. I had one crasher label simpley "can not reproduce". He could not reproduce it because after waiting a month or 2 to check the offending site out, the site had moved! But wait, I had included a full backstrace, but that did not seem to matter. I know the guys are busy, but still!
After a few of those, I just said screw that. I'm not wasting my time.
It's not only me. The most voted mozilla bug for months maybe years running is futured. The 'view source of dynamic pages' bug. One full time developer said 'it did not affect enough people'. Um, yeah that's why it has more votes then any other bug by far.