These media conglomarates also come with a political point of view. In a very real sense they will determine who your next president or senator will be. It's hard enough to win an election while debating and fighting against another party. These media conglomarates throw a monkey wrench into the equation by constantly slanting news and commentary to favor their favored candidates.
Now only are these corporations a threat to consumers but they are a threat to democracy itself.
You are presuming those people pick ferraris because of some technical reasons. They don't. They want ferraris because all their neighbors are driving BMWs and Mercedes.
People buy these cars to show off and a chevy no matter how nice is not going to impress their neigbors.
Don't worry republicans won't be watching this film. Anything that comes out of france is filthy and immoral, if you don't believe me just ask fox news.
" The original comment didn't compare it to Windows. Nor did he say that Windows installer was awesome. For that matter, in the part that you quoted, he didn't even mention Windows Installer."
He said linux will need cleaner installs in order to make it on the desktop. Since windows rules the desktop it makes sense to compare the two.
" If Windows UnInstaller sucks hardcore at 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, then Linux UnInstallation sucks at 10,000,000 on the same 1-to-10 scale."
" A well made and valid point. However there is of course the old debate of the cost of training people to use the open source stuff, although I think it has been established that it saves money in the long term."
In the case of databases there is no retraining except for the DBAs. That's a very small number of relatively smart people to train.
"Also, how many taxpayers would know, and comprehend, the alternatives and would be vocal enough bring this issue up to the relevant people."
Some would. If the state is forced to justify it's reasoning then I am positive hundreds of people would read it and comment on it.
"Hopefully gobo have also sorted the Installing-a-program bomb-blast, i.e. as soon as you install something it scatters a million files all over the filesystem in different directories that makes it impossible to keep track of and (sometimes) impossible to completely remove if you compiled it rather than used a package manager."
Yes. Windows has this problem solved completely. For example in windows when you install a file it goes into c:\program files\progname. All the libraries go into c:\winnt\system32. The config files sometimes go into the c:\program files\progname or into c:\winnt\systems32 ir get merged into a binary file called the registry. Any files that are shared go into c:\program files\common files\progname.
Linux will no go anywhere until program installs are as clean as windows. Look how nice the windows system is!
"Doh... No matter what anybody says, this is my main gripe about most OSS software that I have used. Except for some exceptions, documentation is difficult to find, and User Interfaces were not well thought out. I think most OSS developers feel that once their software functions as they think it should, they stop! Again, maybe I have just had some bad experiences, but it seems like 90% of the OSS software I use falls under this description."
I don't think this is likely to be a problem with the types of porgrams the state is considering. The products a state govt is likely to use are apache, mysql, postgres, php, samba, iptables/ipfilter, openoffice etc. Each one of these software packages has excellant documentation as well as a slew of books on the shelves of your local bookstore.
In most cases all you get with most MS software is a help file anyway.
How is this in any way forcing somebody to use open source. If you state govt just spent millions (or billions) on SQL server licences don't you think they taxpayers should ask "why did you choose SQL server when you could have gotten postgres, mysql, interbase, or sapdb for free?". Personally I would also ask them justify why they chose one proprietary product instead of using less expensive ones too.
If they had legitamate reasons for choosing MS sql server then they should have no problems telling the taxpayers why.
" I think the point is the vendor supplying the support"
If that's the point then stop making it. It's a stupid and silly point. Most people who buy support for windows or oracle or whatever don't get it from the vendor. Usually because it's too expensive.
" it's neater than 'buy some O'Reilly books and go on the web and ask someone.'"
It's also more expensive. BTW you are likely to get a better answer from google then from the vendor. I know.
"If you had gold support from Sun you'd stick it on your server or mission critical workstations. It'd cost about 10-15% of the list price and importantly is a hardware AND software warranty, so you get support for the lot. If you had 800 highend Sun workstations you'd probably upgrade to silver support and have gold on the server. "
How much? 10 to 15 percent of 800 high end sun workstations? Yes I can hire a full time linux hacker for that much. In fact I can also save a ton of money on off the shelf intel hardware too, enough to maybe hire two linux hackers.
"Equally, if you did have an open source team, you'd need to make sure that team was doing stuff inline with all the other hospitals around the country or all the work you were doing would essentially be useless."
What? Who made this rule up? They would be working for me, they would do what I told them to.
"It's also doubtful you could keep guys employed and motivated who had the skills to troubleshoot the entire gamut of software you were using. They'd neet to be able to do everything from configure Apache to write device drivers."
It depends on my application. If I was using the linux boxes as servers then I would hire somebody from an ISP, if I was running linux as a desktop I would hire somebody who had experience with that. In over a decade of using linux I have never needed to write a device driver so I would probably not put that on the want ad at all.
"What you do is have a coherent IT strategy where you pick some key vendors who will partner well with you and you get your accontability and support from this relationship."
I have worked with many companies who had these "relationships". They all paid way too much for next to nothing.
Once again you seem to define accountability as "it won't get fixed but I can blame somebody and maybe save my own ass". You are destined to become a PHB some day.
" Its more of a finger to point at if something blows up. Its always about accountability and failure in the business world."
How do you define accountability? How is saying "it's their fault" holding anybody accountable?
"With Oracle, Microsoft or even Sun you can get great documentation and support which Linux lacks."
Huh? You mean those Ireilly books are not good enough for you? My apache book is way better then the help file MS shipped with IIS. MS does not even provide written documentation anymore.
". Microsoft support is terrible I admit but sun will actaully have an engineer in your office within 4 hours if your a gold member."
With 800 stations? How much do you have to pay for a gold membership? My guess is that it's at least one million a year. For that kind of money I can hire a team of open source developer to support me 24/7 on site.
"If you use an open solution and an employee can't find an answer to a problem, who are your (l)users going to point the finger too? YOU!"
If you can't find the answer then you aren't looking. If there is no answer then you chose the wrong product in the first place.
"Again this has to do with accountability or "you selected this product so please make the problem just go away!"."
Go ahead and call Microsoft and complain to them about your PC crashing or your network getting hacked. See if they can surpress their chuckles while they tell you to eat shit and die.
"Trusting the Linux howto's are pretty scary for alot of people."
You don't have to. You can buy a book!. You can get on IRC. You can join a listserve. Hell you can go pay redhat for support. In fact IBM, Oracle, HP, Compaq and yes even sun will support linux too.
It's time to retire the "you can't get support" FUD buddy. Also please check amazon.com before you go around spreading the "there is no documentation" FUD too.
Yes that god damned legal system, those god damned judges. What the fuck do they know about the law. They should just let the criminals decide what is good for us.
" And you keep saying they were willing to surrender when what they were willing to do was negotiate a peace. "
Once again it's evil to kill soldiers who are waving white flags. We never entered into negotiations so we'll never know what they would or could have done.
"What reason do *you* have to believe otherwise?"
We will never know. We chose to kill them by the hundreds of thousands rather then enter into negotiations. We also chose to slaughter civillians rather then to demonstrate our bombs in less lethal ways.
At every opportunity we chose to pick the most evil option available to us.
"And of course *you* have completely ignored the 100,000 Chinese and Koreans, the vast majority of them civilians, that the Japanese were butchering every month. I'll save my tears for them."
Woo hoo you are less evil then the evil japanese regime you were fighting. Congratulations. I am happy to see that you set the bar so low yourself. I guess being the second most evil person is good enough for you. I should be fair I guess maybe you were the third or fourth most evil.
Woo Hoo! congratulate us. We are not the most evil people in the world!.
"Support is important so it does not have to end this way. If Microsoft or Oracle can fix a problem then your own reputation as well as another employee's stays normal."
Interesting claim. You think that a company with 800 stations can call microsoft and have them send somebody out to fix the problem. That's the size of a small hospital. Go ask your hospital how responsive Microsoft is to their demands for support of flaky software.
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It's much worse then that.
These media conglomarates also come with a political point of view. In a very real sense they will determine who your next president or senator will be. It's hard enough to win an election while debating and fighting against another party. These media conglomarates throw a monkey wrench into the equation by constantly slanting news and commentary to favor their favored candidates.
Now only are these corporations a threat to consumers but they are a threat to democracy itself.
His reply was an advertisement for java. Since .NET is nothing but a reworking of java anyway I guess it would apply.
What the??
You leave out things like lack of inheritance and polymorphism and concentrate on the little stuff?
What gives kimo sabe?
That's because all .NET languages have look like C# and work like C#.
Microsft lies. Honestly doesn't everybody already know this.
It's not a hoax but the journalists got suckered. They are stupid enough to get suckered again when MS announces some future product.
You are presuming those people pick ferraris because of some technical reasons. They don't. They want ferraris because all their neighbors are driving BMWs and Mercedes.
People buy these cars to show off and a chevy no matter how nice is not going to impress their neigbors.
And you make the assumption that all code written gets sold.
Of the millions of lines of code I have written in my life less then 1% were in a software product that was for sale. What's your percentage?
Yes and those israelis drink the blood of arabs, liberals hate america and fox news is fair and balanced.
If you had enough brains to compile it yourself you would not need a package manager.
You could argue the same about the wine that is being poured in the gutters by the republicans.
Don't worry republicans won't be watching this film. Anything that comes out of france is filthy and immoral, if you don't believe me just ask fox news.
The law could pay for itself with the first widely deployed open source product.
" The original comment didn't compare it to Windows. Nor did he say that Windows installer was awesome. For that matter, in the part that you quoted, he didn't even mention Windows Installer."
He said linux will need cleaner installs in order to make it on the desktop. Since windows rules the desktop it makes sense to compare the two.
" If Windows UnInstaller sucks hardcore at 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, then Linux UnInstallation sucks at 10,000,000 on the same 1-to-10 scale."
Apt-get remove packagename.
" A well made and valid point. However there is of course the old debate of the cost of training people to use the open source stuff, although I think it has been established that it saves money in the long term."
In the case of databases there is no retraining except for the DBAs. That's a very small number of relatively smart people to train.
"Also, how many taxpayers would know, and comprehend, the alternatives and would be vocal enough bring this issue up to the relevant people."
Some would. If the state is forced to justify it's reasoning then I am positive hundreds of people would read it and comment on it.
"Hopefully gobo have also sorted the Installing-a-program bomb-blast, i.e. as soon as you install something it scatters a million files all over the filesystem in different directories that makes it impossible to keep track of and (sometimes) impossible to completely remove if you compiled it rather than used a package manager."
Yes. Windows has this problem solved completely. For example in windows when you install a file it goes into c:\program files\progname. All the libraries go into c:\winnt\system32. The config files sometimes go into the c:\program files\progname or into c:\winnt\systems32 ir get merged into a binary file called the registry. Any files that are shared go into c:\program files\common files\progname.
Linux will no go anywhere until program installs are as clean as windows. Look how nice the windows system is!
"Doh... No matter what anybody says, this is my main gripe about most OSS software that I have used. Except for some exceptions, documentation is difficult to find, and User Interfaces were not well thought out. I think most OSS developers feel that once their software functions as they think it should, they stop! Again, maybe I have just had some bad experiences, but it seems like 90% of the OSS software I use falls under this description."
I don't think this is likely to be a problem with the types of porgrams the state is considering. The products a state govt is likely to use are apache, mysql, postgres, php, samba, iptables/ipfilter, openoffice etc. Each one of these software packages has excellant documentation as well as a slew of books on the shelves of your local bookstore.
In most cases all you get with most MS software is a help file anyway.
How is this in any way forcing somebody to use open source. If you state govt just spent millions (or billions) on SQL server licences don't you think they taxpayers should ask "why did you choose SQL server when you could have gotten postgres, mysql, interbase, or sapdb for free?". Personally I would also ask them justify why they chose one proprietary product instead of using less expensive ones too.
If they had legitamate reasons for choosing MS sql server then they should have no problems telling the taxpayers why.
In other words they were lying. Why is that news? I was under the impression that MS employees were not allowed to ever tell the truth.
Those are the defaults. Most windows users are too stupid to change the defaults.
" I think the point is the vendor supplying the support"
If that's the point then stop making it. It's a stupid and silly point. Most people who buy support for windows or oracle or whatever don't get it from the vendor. Usually because it's too expensive.
" it's neater than 'buy some O'Reilly books and go on the web and ask someone.'"
It's also more expensive. BTW you are likely to get a better answer from google then from the vendor. I know.
"If you had gold support from Sun you'd stick it on your server or mission critical workstations. It'd cost about 10-15% of the list price and importantly is a hardware AND software warranty, so you get support for the lot. If you had 800 highend Sun workstations you'd probably upgrade to silver support and have gold on the server. "
How much? 10 to 15 percent of 800 high end sun workstations? Yes I can hire a full time linux hacker for that much. In fact I can also save a ton of money on off the shelf intel hardware too, enough to maybe hire two linux hackers.
"Equally, if you did have an open source team, you'd need to make sure that team was doing stuff inline with all the other hospitals around the country or all the work you were doing would essentially be useless."
What? Who made this rule up? They would be working for me, they would do what I told them to.
"It's also doubtful you could keep guys employed and motivated who had the skills to troubleshoot the entire gamut of software you were using. They'd neet to be able to do everything from configure Apache to write device drivers."
It depends on my application. If I was using the linux boxes as servers then I would hire somebody from an ISP, if I was running linux as a desktop I would hire somebody who had experience with that. In over a decade of using linux I have never needed to write a device driver so I would probably not put that on the want ad at all.
"What you do is have a coherent IT strategy where you pick some key vendors who will partner well with you and you get your accontability and support from this relationship."
I have worked with many companies who had these "relationships". They all paid way too much for next to nothing.
Once again you seem to define accountability as "it won't get fixed but I can blame somebody and maybe save my own ass". You are destined to become a PHB some day.
" Its more of a finger to point at if something blows up. Its always about accountability and failure in the business world."
How do you define accountability? How is saying "it's their fault" holding anybody accountable?
"With Oracle, Microsoft or even Sun you can get great documentation and support which Linux lacks."
Huh? You mean those Ireilly books are not good enough for you? My apache book is way better then the help file MS shipped with IIS. MS does not even provide written documentation anymore.
". Microsoft support is terrible I admit but sun will actaully have an engineer in your office within 4 hours if your a gold member."
With 800 stations? How much do you have to pay for a gold membership? My guess is that it's at least one million a year. For that kind of money I can hire a team of open source developer to support me 24/7 on site.
"If you use an open solution and an employee can't find an answer to a problem, who are your (l)users going to point the finger too? YOU!"
If you can't find the answer then you aren't looking. If there is no answer then you chose the wrong product in the first place.
"Again this has to do with accountability or "you selected this product so please make the problem just go away!"."
Go ahead and call Microsoft and complain to them about your PC crashing or your network getting hacked. See if they can surpress their chuckles while they tell you to eat shit and die.
"Trusting the Linux howto's are pretty scary for alot of people."
You don't have to. You can buy a book!. You can get on IRC. You can join a listserve. Hell you can go pay redhat for support. In fact IBM, Oracle, HP, Compaq and yes even sun will support linux too.
It's time to retire the "you can't get support" FUD buddy. Also please check amazon.com before you go around spreading the "there is no documentation" FUD too.
Better yet just stop spreading FUD.
Yes that god damned legal system, those god damned judges. What the fuck do they know about the law. They should just let the criminals decide what is good for us.
" And you keep saying they were willing to surrender when what they were willing to do was negotiate a peace. "
Once again it's evil to kill soldiers who are waving white flags. We never entered into negotiations so we'll never know what they would or could have done.
"What reason do *you* have to believe otherwise?"
We will never know. We chose to kill them by the hundreds of thousands rather then enter into negotiations. We also chose to slaughter civillians rather then to demonstrate our bombs in less lethal ways.
At every opportunity we chose to pick the most evil option available to us.
"And of course *you* have completely ignored the 100,000 Chinese and Koreans, the vast majority of them civilians, that the Japanese were butchering every month. I'll save my tears for them."
Woo hoo you are less evil then the evil japanese regime you were fighting. Congratulations. I am happy to see that you set the bar so low yourself. I guess being the second most evil person is good enough for you. I should be fair I guess maybe you were the third or fourth most evil.
Woo Hoo! congratulate us. We are not the most evil people in the world!.
"Support is important so it does not have to end this way. If Microsoft or Oracle can fix a problem then your own reputation as well as another employee's stays normal."
Interesting claim. You think that a company with 800 stations can call microsoft and have them send somebody out to fix the problem. That's the size of a small hospital. Go ask your hospital how responsive Microsoft is to their demands for support of flaky software.