Re: the 10K a seat. The University does not pay that much. Only commericial interests do.
Your point is taken that many times an open product can take the place of a closed one and that sometimes hgih end software is the wrong solution. Nonetheless, there will be times you need this stuff.
My after post (I apologize for that) research made me aware of the limitations of the BSA scope. My point was simply that you can't be 100% free right now. Increasing the amount of free machines is a good idea, but I don't think a University could entirely duck the scope of the BSA in the near future. Thanks for the ->informative- post.
Now you're just going to call me stupid? Real mature. I'm sorry if I stepped on the toes of the mythology that open source cures all ills, but I think you'd be dissapointed in a university that was 100% open.
Let me check that. You may be the coder type whose curriclum would be largely unaffected. In that case you'd be fine, it's just your peers who would suffer for your dream world.
"BSA members represent the fastest growing industries in the world. Worldwide members include
Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Borland, CNC Software/Mastercam, Macromedia,
Microsoft, Symantec, and Unigraphic Solutions. Additional members of BSA's Policy Council
include Compaq, Dell, Entrust, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Network Associates, Novell, and Sybase"
I think the best you could say is that you would migrate away from BSA where possible. Checking the list of BSA partners, which is smaller than I thought, I saw both apple and microsoft. It's difficult to run a university free of those companies. 99.9% of students would be less than pleased. You might find some success by targetting other members in an effort to get them to withdraw from the alliance or change it's policies. For instance, you could target Intel by formally letting them know, that in response to BSA tactics, all further purchases for x86 student labs will be run on AMD. Dell and Compaq could be notified that Gateway will be your premier supplier. IBM notified that they won't be used for servers or integration.
I was mistaken before that they were the total proprietary software dicks. They are really rather limited. Tactically choosing to take business away from some members could erode the funding and credibility of the organization should those members choose to leave.
In fact, I would suggest that users don't wait for the BSA to knock on their door. Instead, they contact companies and tell them how many dollars of business they will now loose. Hopefully, enough people will do this that the lost amount will be less than revenues generated by the assholes.
Yeah, that's a great plan if you don't need to use any software. Seriously, a chemistry friend of mine works on commericial software running in the 10K per seat range. No quality open source alternitive. Oh, and it runs on Windows. Language classes use language tutoring software. Graphic art classes use photoshop. Computer science runs on donated equipment. It might be hard to get Sun to keep sending you free boxen when you remove solaris from every box you get so you can go free.
While the idea of a campus that's totally open source is cute, the idea is totally unworkable and not a feasible solution. That is the reason noone will respond this way. People spend money on software because some software is only legally available when you spend money. If I was still in high school, it would be a no-brainer to decide not to go to any school that didn't use any proprietary software.
We'd all like free software. However, with very rare exceptions, the best (or all) software in most domains is closed. Why? Because I can't find enough chemistry people and programmers who will cooperate to make me specialized software of superb quality unless I unload a big pile of cash.
Either way, it's generally a good idea to have spec done prior to completing your product. I know the hackers out there will balk at this simple minded engineer, but some people out there think that writing down what you're going to do before you do it, might be a decent way to get it done. But let's face it, writing specs isn't always the sexiest work.
IBM wants (perhaps more importantly their analysts want it to) to focus their energies on things that they can get a high margin for. Services, big servers, and software. Hard drives are a commodity and not a very lucrative business. Hitatchi is a major player in storage which might explain their desire to own some IBM tech. Anyway, hard drives didn't make a lot of profit, so they trim down thier operation to focus on the big bucks. It's a smart move.
This is something I've found interesting too. A couple of the recent super computers have been Itanic. I think Intel has done something that allows them to scale pretty well into the several hundred or thousand processor range. Meanwhile, most of the RISC server processors are focused on configurations of 2-128 processors. I'm speculating here, but that's my guess.
True about the decision making. Same thing goes for 20 years 360 days can't drink. Basically, we guess at the age when people should be mature enough. Then you put in a line at an easy to see point. For some people, they won't be mature enough, but you hope for most they will be. As stated in other threads, laws need to be clear and precise. Citing specific dates you can do stuff is the most straightforward way to be clear and precise. Ideally, someone could shoot a beam into our head and easily determine our maturity to make decisions about doing a porn. Since we can't do that and have decided (as a society) that very young people can't make this decision, we need to pick a date. 18-21 is our range where we start calling people adults so picking an age in there ames sense. So no, it's not perfect, but do you have a better solution?
I believe that in most states an 18 year old can have sex with a 17 year old legally. A 30 year old could not do the same. These laws tend to say something to the effect that if either partner is under-age there can not be more than a 2-5 year age difference between the partners.
I for one would have been very interested in this sort of service. I wanted to get my girlfriend the complete works of a band (about 12 CDs) for her birthday and approached it from a "I'll just download them" approach. Knowing what I value my time at, I would have happily paid 25 cents a track. The hassles of poorly named files, digging for some more obscure older tracks and loosing downloads in the middle leave a place where the music industry could provide a better service and charge for it. The only reason I might not participate at this point is that I feel bad about myself when I give those jerks money. But then again, I feel bad about ripping off the artists too.
Your arguement that free is always cheaper than cheap for most people couldn't be further from the truth. People pay for services they could do themselves all the time. Some could do some repair and plumbing work for pretty much free, but prefer to hire a plumber or handiman. Milkmen just drive milk to your house. Many technical people choose not to build their own computers because it's so much less hassle to have Dell or Gateway or the shop down the street do it for them. People pay for quality service. If the music industry provided a high quality service that made it quicker and easier to download high quality mp3s, they could charge for it. It's not going to be a p2p solution, most likely, but a centralized site (perhaps with a downloadable ap) where I say, I want song XXXX or every song from cd yyyyy and a little bit later, I've got it at a fraction of the cost of a CD and a fraction of the time of finding all the songs myself.
The kind of user I am:
  I can't say I'm the most sophisticated mp3 digger out there, but I use tools like limewire and audiogalaxy pretty well.
They aren't reaching the vastly larger market of people who like to mod their games. They are reaching a market of people who like to play mods. Most gamers aren't the type to spend tons of times creating cool new maps or weapons or rule sets. They will however, play coutner-strike or scenerios created by other people. Game companies get free labor for developing a long term brand by helping out those who mod games.
A secret deal to keep Mozlilla lousy, financed by Microsoft? Are you nuts? Unless you see some sort of evidence of a conspiracy, don't go shooting off your mouth.
Yeah, 1.0 will have bugs. Guess, what? IE 6.0 will have bugs too. Bugs MS knows about. Software projects that feel the need to get released sometime damn near always shipped with known (and deemed acceptable) bugs. Welcome to the real world.
Your complaint that they haven't generated a stable release to date is somewhat weak as well. They are shipping 0.X.X versions. That ->0- out front stands for not stable. You can complain much more when there are unacceptable problems with the 1.0. Until then, just yell at the Netscape folks for releasing a 6.0 version based on someone elses beta software.
Nice idea, but you're really missing the point. Websites and such that sell personal info are doing so for marketting reasons. Slimy, and bad yes, destructie to you? only a little bit. What the article discusses is trading identity theft type of info. Like your credit card, social and name. With that sort of info, you can be harmed much much more than getting spam or what have you. Be critical of this article, but be fair.
Last I checked, sun had twice as many software guys as hardware guys. Software is a huge part of the company. I don't understand why Sun has to maintain its iron grip on java though. I'm guessing it has something to do with bringing the language up as quickly as it thinks it can so java/unix can compete with wintel.
IBM isn't kicking everyone's ass. Their OS's are failing and so their moving to Linux. They are fighting tooth and nail with Sun in the server market; Sun still maintains a lead there. The list goes on. IBM is a very competitive company but isn't kicking everyone's ass.
Except for Global Services. GS has the ability to come into an organization and keep on selling IBM goods and services until the customer runs out of money:) They kick ass; they get repeat business at low cost of aquisition; they are the reason IBM is sinking.
Two companies merging and controlling 50+% of the unix server market (and a chunk of the workstation market) would worry regulatory commities. Probably either American or EU groups would put enough restrictions on a merger to make the parties want to walk.
The next question is how would that happen? IBM probably can't afford to outright purchase Sun. So a merger would be needed. Would Sun, whose orginal leadership still remains, be willing to roll into big blue? Things would have to get a lot worse for them I'd guess.
Thanks for correcting me guys. This is why I like slashdot. I can contribute an idea and learn more about things because ppl shoot down my idea. Please mod some of the people correcting me up as informative.
True, but in a very real way, Microsoft has a point. The Open Source community has never really taken time to say, "ok let's stop development and everyone will go check code extremely carefully." Now, why that hasn't been done or if it isn't needed because of how well the open community works, is a wholly differant question. But MS can fairly say it has just done some the open community hasn't matched.
Personally, I think both sides have code review procedures which are legitimate. MS is bragging because the open source community can't match what it did within its own procedure. It would be like waterfall method people bragging that they got a product out the door in fewer milestones than an extreme team did. An answer to this is, "Ok, good for you but saying you are better than me is a non-sequitor."
You must also be a nature over nurture kind of person. Personally, I think that if we cloned Einstien and set the clone loose in a family where neither they nor he knew whose DNA was involved, we would not have another great physicist.
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Re: the 10K a seat. The University does not pay that much. Only commericial interests do.
Your point is taken that many times an open product can take the place of a closed one and that sometimes hgih end software is the wrong solution. Nonetheless, there will be times you need this stuff.
My after post (I apologize for that) research made me aware of the limitations of the BSA scope. My point was simply that you can't be 100% free right now. Increasing the amount of free machines is a good idea, but I don't think a University could entirely duck the scope of the BSA in the near future. Thanks for the ->informative- post.
Let me check that. You may be the coder type whose curriclum would be largely unaffected. In that case you'd be fine, it's just your peers who would suffer for your dream world.
"BSA members represent the fastest growing industries in the world. Worldwide members include
Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Borland, CNC Software/Mastercam, Macromedia,
Microsoft, Symantec, and Unigraphic Solutions. Additional members of BSA's Policy Council
include Compaq, Dell, Entrust, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Network Associates, Novell, and Sybase"
I was mistaken before that they were the total proprietary software dicks. They are really rather limited. Tactically choosing to take business away from some members could erode the funding and credibility of the organization should those members choose to leave.
In fact, I would suggest that users don't wait for the BSA to knock on their door. Instead, they contact companies and tell them how many dollars of business they will now loose. Hopefully, enough people will do this that the lost amount will be less than revenues generated by the assholes.
Do they have a O.X version of the spec? I guess the real question is do they have something internal that they are using.
While the idea of a campus that's totally open source is cute, the idea is totally unworkable and not a feasible solution. That is the reason noone will respond this way. People spend money on software because some software is only legally available when you spend money. If I was still in high school, it would be a no-brainer to decide not to go to any school that didn't use any proprietary software.
We'd all like free software. However, with very rare exceptions, the best (or all) software in most domains is closed. Why? Because I can't find enough chemistry people and programmers who will cooperate to make me specialized software of superb quality unless I unload a big pile of cash.
Either way, it's generally a good idea to have spec done prior to completing your product. I know the hackers out there will balk at this simple minded engineer, but some people out there think that writing down what you're going to do before you do it, might be a decent way to get it done. But let's face it, writing specs isn't always the sexiest work.
IBM wants (perhaps more importantly their analysts want it to) to focus their energies on things that they can get a high margin for. Services, big servers, and software. Hard drives are a commodity and not a very lucrative business. Hitatchi is a major player in storage which might explain their desire to own some IBM tech. Anyway, hard drives didn't make a lot of profit, so they trim down thier operation to focus on the big bucks. It's a smart move.
This is something I've found interesting too. A couple of the recent super computers have been Itanic. I think Intel has done something that allows them to scale pretty well into the several hundred or thousand processor range. Meanwhile, most of the RISC server processors are focused on configurations of 2-128 processors. I'm speculating here, but that's my guess.
True about the decision making. Same thing goes for 20 years 360 days can't drink. Basically, we guess at the age when people should be mature enough. Then you put in a line at an easy to see point. For some people, they won't be mature enough, but you hope for most they will be. As stated in other threads, laws need to be clear and precise. Citing specific dates you can do stuff is the most straightforward way to be clear and precise. Ideally, someone could shoot a beam into our head and easily determine our maturity to make decisions about doing a porn. Since we can't do that and have decided (as a society) that very young people can't make this decision, we need to pick a date. 18-21 is our range where we start calling people adults so picking an age in there ames sense. So no, it's not perfect, but do you have a better solution?
I believe that in most states an 18 year old can have sex with a 17 year old legally. A 30 year old could not do the same. These laws tend to say something to the effect that if either partner is under-age there can not be more than a 2-5 year age difference between the partners.
Your arguement that free is always cheaper than cheap for most people couldn't be further from the truth. People pay for services they could do themselves all the time. Some could do some repair and plumbing work for pretty much free, but prefer to hire a plumber or handiman. Milkmen just drive milk to your house. Many technical people choose not to build their own computers because it's so much less hassle to have Dell or Gateway or the shop down the street do it for them. People pay for quality service. If the music industry provided a high quality service that made it quicker and easier to download high quality mp3s, they could charge for it. It's not going to be a p2p solution, most likely, but a centralized site (perhaps with a downloadable ap) where I say, I want song XXXX or every song from cd yyyyy and a little bit later, I've got it at a fraction of the cost of a CD and a fraction of the time of finding all the songs myself.
The kind of user I am:
  I can't say I'm the most sophisticated mp3 digger out there, but I use tools like limewire and audiogalaxy pretty well.
They aren't reaching the vastly larger market of people who like to mod their games. They are reaching a market of people who like to play mods. Most gamers aren't the type to spend tons of times creating cool new maps or weapons or rule sets. They will however, play coutner-strike or scenerios created by other people. Game companies get free labor for developing a long term brand by helping out those who mod games.
This is very, very cool. But we should be very, very careful we know what's going on before we start experimenting with terraforming earth.
Yeah, 1.0 will have bugs. Guess, what? IE 6.0 will have bugs too. Bugs MS knows about. Software projects that feel the need to get released sometime damn near always shipped with known (and deemed acceptable) bugs. Welcome to the real world.
Your complaint that they haven't generated a stable release to date is somewhat weak as well. They are shipping 0.X.X versions. That ->0- out front stands for not stable. You can complain much more when there are unacceptable problems with the 1.0. Until then, just yell at the Netscape folks for releasing a 6.0 version based on someone elses beta software.
Nice idea, but you're really missing the point. Websites and such that sell personal info are doing so for marketting reasons. Slimy, and bad yes, destructie to you? only a little bit. What the article discusses is trading identity theft type of info. Like your credit card, social and name. With that sort of info, you can be harmed much much more than getting spam or what have you. Be critical of this article, but be fair.
I think that was just one quarter. I was talking yearly. Of course, when that quarter was, makes this next year very interesting.
oops. Make that isn't sinking, not is sinking. That was a typo. There's a couple extra in there, prizes to those who find 'em.
Last I checked, sun had twice as many software guys as hardware guys. Software is a huge part of the company. I don't understand why Sun has to maintain its iron grip on java though. I'm guessing it has something to do with bringing the language up as quickly as it thinks it can so java/unix can compete with wintel.
IBM isn't kicking everyone's ass. Their OS's are failing and so their moving to Linux. They are fighting tooth and nail with Sun in the server market; Sun still maintains a lead there. The list goes on. IBM is a very competitive company but isn't kicking everyone's ass.
:) They kick ass; they get repeat business at low cost of aquisition; they are the reason IBM is sinking.
Except for Global Services. GS has the ability to come into an organization and keep on selling IBM goods and services until the customer runs out of money
The next question is how would that happen? IBM probably can't afford to outright purchase Sun. So a merger would be needed. Would Sun, whose orginal leadership still remains, be willing to roll into big blue? Things would have to get a lot worse for them I'd guess.
Thanks for correcting me guys. This is why I like slashdot. I can contribute an idea and learn more about things because ppl shoot down my idea. Please mod some of the people correcting me up as informative.
Personally, I think both sides have code review procedures which are legitimate. MS is bragging because the open source community can't match what it did within its own procedure. It would be like waterfall method people bragging that they got a product out the door in fewer milestones than an extreme team did. An answer to this is, "Ok, good for you but saying you are better than me is a non-sequitor."
You must also be a nature over nurture kind of person. Personally, I think that if we cloned Einstien and set the clone loose in a family where neither they nor he knew whose DNA was involved, we would not have another great physicist.