So now that the Internet is as fast as a LAN for many users, we can go back to thin clients and subscriptions, which provide a stable revenue for Microsoft. Very well.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Zoolz yet. They are a legitimate business and have been operating for years. You can find a "for life" 2 TB deal for $49.99 this week.
No Linux client but given it's developed in.NET with no obfuscation, I guess it won't take long before someone decompiles the code and implements the feature in Duplicati or rclone.
I think their strategy towards Thunderbird is absolutely wrong.
What they did: abandon Thunderbird. "Sorry pals, now you are on your own"
What I would have done: create a thunderbird.com service, competing with GMail and Outlook.com. Plus provide Thunderbird as a desktop/offline client, like Microsoft does with Outlook. THAT would have been a logical step: further develop one of your products, provide a cloud version, take a % of a successful existing market (e-mail outsourcing) which provides recurrent income, etc
They can still do that but as some other people have already said, they are too busy meddling in unrelated fields where everybody knows they cannot succeed, such as Firefox OS, Rust and now IoT.
I see more and more people in IT leaving their jobs to work on something else.
People are fed up with low pay, crazy schedules, lots of pressure -often times for no reason!- and technology changing at Formula 1 speed (just take a look at the web: what was good and trendy 2 years ago is proscribed today).
To top that up, add off-shoring: today you are key, tomorrow your job is in India, Vietnam or who knows where. People do not like job insecurity.
What are they moving to? Everything else: law, gardening, plumbing, cake shops, teaching, whatever with a more relaxed schedule, people not discussing about hourly cost and difficult or impossible to offshore. Really.
Too bad. After "Matthew Garrett forks the Linux kernel", I thought the next sentence would be "and merged it into systemd". That'd make systemd complete, finally:-)
Most Chinese cameras use a HiSilicon 3518C SoC running Linux 2.6 (or 2.4, I cannot remember).
A year ago a reverse engineered the firmware of one of those cameras (it was not easy to persuade the seller in Alibaba to send it). With that, I built a compiler toolchain for the Hi3518C, re-generated the firmware and flashed it. There is a binary blob for the camera and it's not easy to replace it because it's not a UVC driver (it pre-dates UVC).
The plan was to get rid of the ActiveX and replace it with an HTML5 player and some other nifty stuff but then I got involved in another project and never finished that.
Fidelity Systems also has a MUMPS-based database called GT.M. It's open source (licensing is GPL+fuck up) and it's the main competitor to Intersystems Caché
They are not committed to BlackBerry 10. Proof is they stopped development in Qt5 for BBX half a year ago. They are stuck with Qt4, which is out-of-support already. Smells bad.
CDs and DVDs already have a big hole in the center. Why are you drilling a new one? You are wasting your time, and also freeing residues that will later go to your trees and vines. (I also use CDs and DVDs for the same purpose:-) )
How do you cope with old browsers? Supporting 2 year-old browsers is already difficult, I can't imagine supporting 6-8 year-old browsers, which is the usual thing in enterprise. Or are you limiting your development to old APIs only?
The situation with Android and Linux and the userland Android uses is essentially the same mess the Linux kernel suffered 10 years ago with ARM.
After years neglecting the problem, Linus finally decided something had to be done spend a lot of time merging, unifying and mainstreaming all the ARM shit. It was a great success, in part because ARM, Linaro and essentially everybody saw the benefit.
In Valencia, they have actually replaced every Windows, Microsoft Office and any other non-FLOSS software with LliureX. It was done last year, when Microsoft threatened to take legal action after the regional government failed to pay for Microsoft licenses. LliureX had been languishing for years before that, after a huge hype, excitement and first deployments about 10 years ago.
Had Microsoft not threatened to take legal action, Linux would not be in use today. Thank you, Microsoft!
It's sad to hear this but it's exactly what I predicted 2 years ago. I even provided an alternative that would work: use an "Android Core" as the base operating system, instead of Mer Linux, then port KDE to this "Android Core":
There have been several threads on NuttX on the RPi and the "problem" is: what to do with so many resources? NuttX does not need 512 MB or RAM. It does not even need 512 *KB* of RAM! But yes, it's completely possible and there was a thread recently about using NuttX as a desktop operating system. Maybe not that crazy.
Bad reason, too. Serenity Systems is now the official (blessed by IBM) provider for patches, security updates, new drivers, etc under the brand "OS/2 eCommStation".
It seems you have little knowledge of the SCADA world. The air gap is an illusory security. Iran's nuclear plants had SCADA computers air gapped from the IT network. It did nothing: a USB, a CD, a virus infecting an update to your very SCADA software, etc will bring you back to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Suse is independent too
Many manufacturers make ARM-based industrial-grade systems, e. g. the VIA AMOS 820 or the VIA AMOS 3003.
https://www.viatech.com/en/sys...
https://www.viatech.com/en/sys...
So now that the Internet is as fast as a LAN for many users, we can go back to thin clients and subscriptions, which provide a stable revenue for Microsoft. Very well.
Sounds like a great candidate for a talk at FOSDEM 2018 Retrocomputing DevRoom. Call for Participation here:
https://lists.fosdem.org/piper...
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Zoolz yet. They are a legitimate business and have been operating for years. You can find a "for life" 2 TB deal for $49.99 this week.
No Linux client but given it's developed in .NET with no obfuscation, I guess it won't take long before someone decompiles the code and implements the feature in Duplicati or rclone.
https://deals.fossbytes.com/sa...
Have you tried Zoho Docs? It's like a native application, both in features and performance
They pretty much gave up on Thunderbird.
I think their strategy towards Thunderbird is absolutely wrong.
What they did: abandon Thunderbird. "Sorry pals, now you are on your own"
What I would have done: create a thunderbird.com service, competing with GMail and Outlook.com. Plus provide Thunderbird as a desktop/offline client, like Microsoft does with Outlook. THAT would have been a logical step: further develop one of your products, provide a cloud version, take a % of a successful existing market (e-mail outsourcing) which provides recurrent income, etc
They can still do that but as some other people have already said, they are too busy meddling in unrelated fields where everybody knows they cannot succeed, such as Firefox OS, Rust and now IoT.
I see more and more people in IT leaving their jobs to work on something else.
People are fed up with low pay, crazy schedules, lots of pressure -often times for no reason!- and technology changing at Formula 1 speed (just take a look at the web: what was good and trendy 2 years ago is proscribed today).
To top that up, add off-shoring: today you are key, tomorrow your job is in India, Vietnam or who knows where. People do not like job insecurity.
What are they moving to? Everything else: law, gardening, plumbing, cake shops, teaching, whatever with a more relaxed schedule, people not discussing about hourly cost and difficult or impossible to offshore. Really.
Too bad. After "Matthew Garrett forks the Linux kernel", I thought the next sentence would be "and merged it into systemd". That'd make systemd complete, finally :-)
Nobody uses GOTO anymore. With event driven programming and call back functions, it all spaghetti code strewn with COME FROM statements, effectively.
You have never read the Linux kernel source code, systemd, Samba, etc, have you? They use goto extensively and it results in easy to understand code.
Most Chinese cameras use a HiSilicon 3518C SoC running Linux 2.6 (or 2.4, I cannot remember).
A year ago a reverse engineered the firmware of one of those cameras (it was not easy to persuade the seller in Alibaba to send it). With that, I built a compiler toolchain for the Hi3518C, re-generated the firmware and flashed it. There is a binary blob for the camera and it's not easy to replace it because it's not a UVC driver (it pre-dates UVC).
The plan was to get rid of the ActiveX and replace it with an HTML5 player and some other nifty stuff but then I got involved in another project and never finished that.
Fidelity Systems also has a MUMPS-based database called GT.M. It's open source (licensing is GPL+fuck up) and it's the main competitor to Intersystems Caché
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They are not committed to BlackBerry 10. Proof is they stopped development in Qt5 for BBX half a year ago. They are stuck with Qt4, which is out-of-support already. Smells bad.
CDs and DVDs already have a big hole in the center. Why are you drilling a new one? You are wasting your time, and also freeing residues that will later go to your trees and vines. (I also use CDs and DVDs for the same purpose :-) )
How do you cope with old browsers? Supporting 2 year-old browsers is already difficult, I can't imagine supporting 6-8 year-old browsers, which is the usual thing in enterprise. Or are you limiting your development to old APIs only?
The situation with Android and Linux and the userland Android uses is essentially the same mess the Linux kernel suffered 10 years ago with ARM.
After years neglecting the problem, Linus finally decided something had to be done spend a lot of time merging, unifying and mainstreaming all the ARM shit. It was a great success, in part because ARM, Linaro and essentially everybody saw the benefit.
There are/have been several Debian developers in their payroll: Jordi Mallach, Miquel Gea and others.
In Valencia, they have actually replaced every Windows, Microsoft Office and any other non-FLOSS software with LliureX. It was done last year, when Microsoft threatened to take legal action after the regional government failed to pay for Microsoft licenses. LliureX had been languishing for years before that, after a huge hype, excitement and first deployments about 10 years ago.
Had Microsoft not threatened to take legal action, Linux would not be in use today. Thank you, Microsoft!
It's sad to hear this but it's exactly what I predicted 2 years ago. I even provided an alternative that would work: use an "Android Core" as the base operating system, instead of Mer Linux, then port KDE to this "Android Core":
http://www.elpauer.org/2012/09...
Interestingly, this is exactly what Digia did for Qt, with the Boot to Qt (AKA Qt Enterprise Embedded) solution, a while after I made my proposal.
Why would I buy a weak HP tablet for $100 when I can have a better tablet for $90?
http://www.pandawill.com/cube-...
Cube (well-known Chinese manufacturer) tablet with same features as HP plus: built-in BlueTooth, GPS and 3G. Only $90, shipping included.
Kexi has worked on Windows and Mac for more than 5 years already and latest builds are available as part of Calligra
There have been several threads on NuttX on the RPi and the "problem" is: what to do with so many resources? NuttX does not need 512 MB or RAM. It does not even need 512 *KB* of RAM! But yes, it's completely possible and there was a thread recently about using NuttX as a desktop operating system. Maybe not that crazy.
Bad reason, too. Serenity Systems is now the official (blessed by IBM) provider for patches, security updates, new drivers, etc under the brand "OS/2 eCommStation".
No, sound support is not reason enough. OS/2 ATMs in Spain have blind support, including sound.
It seems you have little knowledge of the SCADA world. The air gap is an illusory security. Iran's nuclear plants had SCADA computers air gapped from the IT network. It did nothing: a USB, a CD, a virus infecting an update to your very SCADA software, etc will bring you back to reality.