What are you talking about ? From all I have heard Microsoft pays quite well. Also Microsoft's money belongs to its shareholders (of which large ones are Bill Gates, Steve Balmer etc. but also lots of ordinary people, institutional investors etc.), not to BG himself. So even if he wanted to give it all away he would be forbidden to do so by the law without getting the consent of the shareholders (who would scream bloody murder). What he can give away freely (and apparently also is doing to some extent) is giving away his own money.
Also it is the basic idea of running a business (be it your newspaper booth around the corner or MS) to make more money than you spent on people and things you need to run your business. Such a thing is called "earning money". Don't like it ? Found your own company.
Compare VM for IBM mainframes, where the hardware was done right.)
Great comparison. Like in: "You can stuff lots of people in your Cessna, but it is a horrible hack. Compare a Boing 747, which is an aircraft done right." The right tool for the right job, and VMWare does its job pretty well, ugly hack or not.
More the heat from Microsoft's (ex Connectix) virtual PC which was originally planned to be cheaper than VMWare Workstation while offering similar features (at least on Windows) (which cannot honestly said for the Open Source ones, or noone would buy either VMWare or Virtual PC anymore).
In any case it's great it has become less expensive as VMWare Workstation really is a great product.
Seeing that Steve Jobs seems to be sometimes a little choleric I really could imagine him tearing those T-Shirts off people wearing them personally. With a flamethrower.;-)
Me: "Excuse me, the books I have ordered from you (Amazon) have not arrived yet." Call center agent: "This is because Amazon does have an EMC storage solution"/"This is because your flat does not have an IBM SAN"
Judging from our Web stats (I know, very unscientific etc.pp.) our customers (we are a biotech service company) that use Macs use MacOS 9.x and before twice as much as OS X. Even if you consider the tremendous unreliability of such statistics, it's still amazing.
Points taken, but I think they owe(d) this more to their absolutely overwhelming market presence and domination (as well as doing things like calling your boss to make sure you get fired for not buying IBM) than their supreme marketing. For a long time, for people computers was IBM. IBM always was there, and everyone thought they would stick around as they always would, unchanged, untouched, invincible. Their style of selling apparently was more something like shock and awe with sales people, threats and promises, one-to-one, than marketing as it is usually done.
Then came the PC, Unix, the fiascos with OS/2 (especially OS/2 marketing was pretty bad) and Microchannel, and IBM changed. They certainly still are one of (if not even the) largest, but they are only a shadow of their former might and the terror they could inflict on people daring to not choose IBM.
I think you can say a lot of stuff about IBM, but "unmatched marketing department" ? *ahem*
How goes the old joke ? "How do the US solve their drug problem ?" "They legalize drugs and leave marketing to IBM."
Most print campaigns of the last years IBM had over here in Germany sucked mightily at least IMO. There were some really funny few, those were great, but most of them were either hard to understand or just boring.
You can't read excel files with a python script - can you ? Can you calculate ?
You can read and write Excel easily using Python via Python's COM classes (ok, so that limits you to Win, but it's in Python and it's easy) and most likely a lot of other scripting languages as well as using everything else that supports COM. No huge VB application needed.
Well, the no-flying thing might work in large or not very densely populated countries like the US or even France. If you take instead a very densely populated country like Germany were a lot of commercial air traffic routinely passes by close to or even directly over nuclear power plants you got a problem. Regarding the containment withstanding aircraft impact see my other post in this thread.
surely the US and European governments thought of this. And yet they still built those plants. Why would the current situation be any different?
The situation is indeed different. E.g. it was said for the last 30 years or so that Germany's nuclear plants would be completely safe against aircrashs, terrorist attackes, malfunction, even most kinds of military activities. However, recent studies undertaken on behalf of the German government had the result that none of Germany's nuclear power stations would be able to withstand the direct impact of a large airliner without considerable damage, some of them would even be catastrophically destroyed.
How could this happen ? On one hand, when those plants were built between the 60s and 80s, terrorist activity was understood mostly as single bombs or sabotage as was commonly acted out by the left-wing terrorist of the time. Attacks of 9/11 or Madrid scale or suicide attacks of the kind we see in the middle east were unthinkable back then. It was also thought that the Red Army would not see to actively destroy nuclear power stations as they wanted to make use of land they conquered. Regarding aircrashs, the problem is similar to the planning parameters of the Twin Towers. On one hand everyone assumed an air crash to happen by accident, so mostly fast but small military aircraft were taken into account. On the other hand, the largest commercial aircraft when a lot of these plants were planned were Boing 707 and the like, which apparently could cause much less damage than modern aircraft.
The problem with long-lived technologies like nuclear energy is that in a couple of decades a lot of key parameters regarding the security of them can drastically change.
OT: The spelling for Solomon is indeed wrong in the respect that it is the German one (where I am located). The problem is that there is a popular brand of skies around here (probably also in the US) by a very similar name so I never know if it is the English spelling or the ski brand (or if they are indeed identical), so I used the German one. Mea culpa. Regarding the source in the bible: In German it is "officially" called "Prediger Salomo" (the preacher Salomo", but I think it is often (maybe wrongly) refered to over here as "The book Salomo" in colloquial language.
Between '93 and '95 I supervised my University's PC lab for the medical faculty. One of my main jobs was to help the users around to were back then more or less computer illiterate. Certainly the Uni also offered PC courses. The result of that often were people who entered the lab and then painstakingly started to type letters written on a secret magic piece of paper where they had exactly written down from their course the magic keys they had to press to get to their Word 5 or Word Perfect 5.1 (it was still a Novell3/DOS based lab back then). Sooner or later they would forget a letter or something unexpected would pop up, and then they could be completely out of their league and utterly helpless but still to proud to ask anybody for help, even the guy with the big "Ask me I you have any questions, I won't eat you" sign at his desk.
Moral of the story: CLI doesn't necessarily foster a deeper understanding of computers, it just improves sales of magic pieces of paper to write keys on.
Additionally it was always an open secret that the KGB and other Eastern-bloc secret services funded and helped the infamous left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction in Germany and a lot of middle-eastern left-wing groups between the late 60s until far in the 80s. Several long wanted suspected terrorists were arrested in former Eastern Germany after the reunification were they were hiding out.
It is likely that there were comparable activities the other way round like supporting contra-revolutionary groups in East-bloc countries, but terrorism-like acts certainly were no uni-lateral thing.
This argument is coming up again and again. It used to be true, but no longer is. The most likely companies to do the job are IBM and SuSE. IBM is American, SuSE is now 100%-Novell owned and therefore also American. Both will certainly most likely use local personal, but this is no different from Microsoft, whose German headquarters is based in Munich with several thousand employees.
I'm with you there; but as a former boss of my mother used to say: There are two kinds of people in the world: assholes and super-assholes. The same applies to morons, I'm afraid.;-)
Also IBM has not too much to lose. Sure, they produce and sell a lot of software. But they are still one of the leading hardware companies and are moving more and more towards a consulting and service oriented business model. So what do they have to lose ? Some unsold AIX lincenses ? DB2, Domino and WebSphere can or will soon be able to run as well on a RS6K machine (or what they are called this week) running Linux than on a RS6K machine running AIX. Sure, AIX still has a lot to offer Linux does not, but for that they still will move a machine with AIX.
I think this is normal human behaviour and does not only apply to people's choices in computing. It starts with essential things like food: A lot of people often aggressively refuse to even try a little bit of a dish they don't know causing people to complain that they don't get a good Schnitzel with fries in Bangkog. Stupid ? Maybe. Human ? Very.
How many people have 'tried' switching and given up under pressure from Micro$oft?
Oh yes, especially as we all know that Microsoft is cooperating closely with the Italian Mafia. Duh.
Might it be that a lot of people/organizations switch back or abort migration projects because they find out that Linux is not the right thing for them (yet) ?
Had Apple and Commodore been less stingy with their proprietary hardware technology, things could have played out very differently
This more or less BS. Back then you either got the whole completely detailed hardware documentation with the system on purchase (Apple II) or you could buy it cheaply afterwards (C-64). Both platforms were excellently documented and there were numerous Apple-II clones around. IBM PC did not win because they were "Open Source", they just gave the new PC segment credibility.
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What are you talking about ? From all I have heard Microsoft pays quite well. Also Microsoft's money belongs to its shareholders (of which large ones are Bill Gates, Steve Balmer etc. but also lots of ordinary people, institutional investors etc.), not to BG himself. So even if he wanted to give it all away he would be forbidden to do so by the law without getting the consent of the shareholders (who would scream bloody murder). What he can give away freely (and apparently also is doing to some extent) is giving away his own money.
Also it is the basic idea of running a business (be it your newspaper booth around the corner or MS) to make more money than you spent on people and things you need to run your business. Such a thing is called "earning money". Don't like it ? Found your own company.
Compare VM for IBM mainframes, where the hardware was done right.)
Great comparison. Like in: "You can stuff lots of people in your Cessna, but it is a horrible hack. Compare a Boing 747, which is an aircraft done right." The right tool for the right job, and VMWare does its job pretty well, ugly hack or not.
More the heat from Microsoft's (ex Connectix) virtual PC which was originally planned to be cheaper than VMWare Workstation while offering similar features (at least on Windows) (which cannot honestly said for the Open Source ones, or noone would buy either VMWare or Virtual PC anymore).
In any case it's great it has become less expensive as VMWare Workstation really is a great product.
Seeing that Steve Jobs seems to be sometimes a little choleric I really could imagine him tearing those T-Shirts off people wearing them personally. With a flamethrower. ;-)
Which means that they have to release the sources to the testers, nobody else. What they likely do, if they send them a CD/DVD.
And that would be how ? Enlighten us !
Me: "Excuse me, the books I have ordered from you (Amazon) have not arrived yet."
Call center agent: "This is because Amazon does have an EMC storage solution"/"This is because your flat does not have an IBM SAN"
NOT.
Judging from our Web stats (I know, very unscientific etc.pp.) our customers (we are a biotech service company) that use Macs use MacOS 9.x and before twice as much as OS X. Even if you consider the tremendous unreliability of such statistics, it's still amazing.
Points taken, but I think they owe(d) this more to their absolutely overwhelming market presence and domination (as well as doing things like calling your boss to make sure you get fired for not buying IBM) than their supreme marketing. For a long time, for people computers was IBM. IBM always was there, and everyone thought they would stick around as they always would, unchanged, untouched, invincible. Their style of selling apparently was more something like shock and awe with sales people, threats and promises, one-to-one, than marketing as it is usually done.
Then came the PC, Unix, the fiascos with OS/2 (especially OS/2 marketing was pretty bad) and Microchannel, and IBM changed. They certainly still are one of (if not even the) largest, but they are only a shadow of their former might and the terror they could inflict on people daring to not choose IBM.
even given their unmatched maketing department
I think you can say a lot of stuff about IBM, but "unmatched marketing department" ? *ahem*
How goes the old joke ? "How do the US solve their drug problem ?" "They legalize drugs and leave marketing to IBM."
Most print campaigns of the last years IBM had over here in Germany sucked mightily at least IMO. There were some really funny few, those were great, but most of them were either hard to understand or just boring.
You can't read excel files with a python script - can you ? Can you calculate ?
You can read and write Excel easily using Python via Python's COM classes (ok, so that limits you to Win, but it's in Python and it's easy) and most likely a lot of other scripting languages as well as using everything else that supports COM. No huge VB application needed.
Well, the no-flying thing might work in large or not very densely populated countries like the US or even France. If you take instead a very densely populated country like Germany were a lot of commercial air traffic routinely passes by close to or even directly over nuclear power plants you got a problem. Regarding the containment withstanding aircraft impact see my other post in this thread.
surely the US and European governments thought of this. And yet they still built those plants. Why would the current situation be any different?
The situation is indeed different. E.g. it was said for the last 30 years or so that Germany's nuclear plants would be completely safe against aircrashs, terrorist attackes, malfunction, even most kinds of military activities. However, recent studies undertaken on behalf of the German government had the result that none of Germany's nuclear power stations would be able to withstand the direct impact of a large airliner without considerable damage, some of them would even be catastrophically destroyed.
How could this happen ? On one hand, when those plants were built between the 60s and 80s, terrorist activity was understood mostly as single bombs or sabotage as was commonly acted out by the left-wing terrorist of the time. Attacks of 9/11 or Madrid scale or suicide attacks of the kind we see in the middle east were unthinkable back then. It was also thought that the Red Army would not see to actively destroy nuclear power stations as they wanted to make use of land they conquered. Regarding aircrashs, the problem is similar to the planning parameters of the Twin Towers. On one hand everyone assumed an air crash to happen by accident, so mostly fast but small military aircraft were taken into account. On the other hand, the largest commercial aircraft when a lot of these plants were planned were Boing 707 and the like, which apparently could cause much less damage than modern aircraft.
The problem with long-lived technologies like nuclear energy is that in a couple of decades a lot of key parameters regarding the security of them can drastically change.
*ahaem*
The Web site you quoted is about Cambodia, not Laos (as one easily can see by just looking at the home page).
OT: The spelling for Solomon is indeed wrong in the respect that it is the German one (where I am located). The problem is that there is a popular brand of skies around here (probably also in the US) by a very similar name so I never know if it is the English spelling or the ski brand (or if they are indeed identical), so I used the German one. Mea culpa. Regarding the source in the bible: In German it is "officially" called "Prediger Salomo" (the preacher Salomo", but I think it is often (maybe wrongly) refered to over here as "The book Salomo" in colloquial language.
Indeed. As already the book of Salomon in the Bible said: "There is nothing new under the sun".
Every year is the year of Linux on the desktop, Apple and BSD are dying and Microsoft will collapse soon.
Between '93 and '95 I supervised my University's PC lab for the medical faculty. One of my main jobs was to help the users around to were back then more or less computer illiterate. Certainly the Uni also offered PC courses. The result of that often were people who entered the lab and then painstakingly started to type letters written on a secret magic piece of paper where they had exactly written down from their course the magic keys they had to press to get to their Word 5 or Word Perfect 5.1 (it was still a Novell3/DOS based lab back then). Sooner or later they would forget a letter or something unexpected would pop up, and then they could be completely out of their league and utterly helpless but still to proud to ask anybody for help, even the guy with the big "Ask me I you have any questions, I won't eat you" sign at his desk.
Moral of the story: CLI doesn't necessarily foster a deeper understanding of computers, it just improves sales of magic pieces of paper to write keys on.
Additionally it was always an open secret that the KGB and other Eastern-bloc secret services funded and helped the infamous left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction in Germany and a lot of middle-eastern left-wing groups between the late 60s until far in the 80s. Several long wanted suspected terrorists were arrested in former Eastern Germany after the reunification were they were hiding out.
It is likely that there were comparable activities the other way round like supporting contra-revolutionary groups in East-bloc countries, but terrorism-like acts certainly were no uni-lateral thing.
This argument is coming up again and again. It used to be true, but no longer is. The most likely companies to do the job are IBM and SuSE. IBM is American, SuSE is now 100%-Novell owned and therefore also American. Both will certainly most likely use local personal, but this is no different from Microsoft, whose German headquarters is based in Munich with several thousand employees.
I'm with you there; but as a former boss of my mother used to say: There are two kinds of people in the world: assholes and super-assholes. The same applies to morons, I'm afraid. ;-)
Also IBM has not too much to lose. Sure, they produce and sell a lot of software. But they are still one of the leading hardware companies and are moving more and more towards a consulting and service oriented business model. So what do they have to lose ? Some unsold AIX lincenses ? DB2, Domino and WebSphere can or will soon be able to run as well on a RS6K machine (or what they are called this week) running Linux than on a RS6K machine running AIX. Sure, AIX still has a lot to offer Linux does not, but for that they still will move a machine with AIX.
I think this is normal human behaviour and does not only apply to people's choices in computing. It starts with essential things like food: A lot of people often aggressively refuse to even try a little bit of a dish they don't know causing people to complain that they don't get a good Schnitzel with fries in Bangkog. Stupid ? Maybe. Human ? Very.
How many people have 'tried' switching and given up under pressure from Micro$oft?
Oh yes, especially as we all know that Microsoft is cooperating closely with the Italian Mafia. Duh.
Might it be that a lot of people/organizations switch back or abort migration projects because they find out that Linux is not the right thing for them (yet) ?
Had Apple and Commodore been less stingy with their proprietary hardware technology, things could have played out very differently
This more or less BS. Back then you either got the whole completely detailed hardware documentation with the system on purchase (Apple II) or you could buy it cheaply afterwards (C-64). Both platforms were excellently documented and there were numerous Apple-II clones around. IBM PC did not win because they were "Open Source", they just gave the new PC segment credibility.
I wasn't born back then, you insensitive clod !