There are risks that are worth to take. The question is if a Linux migration is one of those.
Especially if you are heading IT of some larger organization where any kind of migration becomes a multi-month or even multi-year event with respective costs (just consider the timeframe for the planned Munich Linux migration, IIRC correctly it's something going until 2007 or 2008).
In the end the old saying most of the time stays true: Never change a running system.
So what you are saying is: Being platform dependent doesn't work, being platform independent neither, well, so let's just give our product away, this will make us shitloads of money. Ummm, no.
You are telling me the recent Slashdot poll was not the real election ? Bastards !
However, this in some way explains why I was able to vote in spite of not being American... and here I was thinking "Those Americans are SO internationally-minded people"...
It would be similar to modelling the global weather system, a software capability we already have.
Where do we have this amazing capability ?
I mean not only have a rough model ignoring a lot of important influences on weather like water temperatures in the Oceans etc. on a very rough grid , like we have now, but a really accurate weather model.
A recent article I read about NEC's Earth simulator stated that even if this amazing machine was supposed to deliver beneath other things climate calculations with unprecedented accuracy and comprehensiveness it still came short of this ambitious goal. Quite short.
Well, he can do with his works as he likes, it's supposed to be a free country after all, isn't it ?
Also to say he changed it to market response would mean that everyone reading the already published book said "Ohhh ! It has a sad ending ! But we want a happy end !" and he put in a happy end after that so more people bought the book. You are just pissed of that he somewhat outsmarted the oh-so-heroic "pirates" that are for some stupid reason the great heroes over here.
I'm afraid I can only agree to you. The main reason why I have been to a cinema only one time for the last three years and why I also only rarely visit public classical concerts is the really stupid people you meet there. Old ladies gossiping in organ concerts in the Cathedral, parents with crying little children in a classical concert, and busloads of people like mentioned above.
My solution (not completely satisfactory, but better for my health as I really can get pretty mad about such disturbances) is to watch movies on DVD (which additonally gives me original language in English-spoken movies as I am in Germany) and to listen to music on CD. Especially in case of church concerts it is a pitty to lose the athmosphere, but still much better than having to have a conniption fit every time and not being able to strangle the originators.
IIRC the original reason Intel licensed the chip architecture to AMD (at least for the 808x and onwards) was that IBM demanded a second source for the CPUs from Intel when they started the IBM PC.
Well, the last time everybody got together to do the great Unixy thing back in the 90s that's exactly how it happened: First the big peachy Unix-lovefest, Unix on the desktop was expected to arrive any day now (really ! that's how it was thought back then !), lots of big names announcing proud initiatives (OSF anybody ? At least CDE was adopted by more than one vendor...), then in the end nothing really got out of it, most things were only implemented by single vendors if at all, and in the end the great Unix schisma not only continued but got still worse. More infighting, more ways of doing one and the same thing in an incompatible and drastically different fashion so that a seasoned Sun admin would have needed considerable retraining to do serious AIX stuff... well, you get the picture.
In the end the only winners were NT, and much later Linux, both shooting the wounded and looting their userbase.
Not only very likely but also extremely attractive if you are a large company. My last employer (a large US life science corp) standardized their PC procurement on Dell getting obszene discounts that way. You can also define so-called "standard configurations" for your company that are even more discounted.
Yes, and failing to create a working result, apt-get sometimes offers you to remove half of the system's packages trying to fulfill some low-level dependency, as I got some time back when trying to install a package some GNOME program wanted and that conflicted with some KDE dependencies. apt's solution ? Let's remove all of KDE's packages. Uhm... no.
X may not perform as well, but at least it is designed properly - so you can share per application, or even per window, rather than having a goofy desktop in a window.
What Citrix also can do, at least the per application part (never tried per window). You are thinking of MS's RDP (AFAIK derived from Citrix, but another product).
In the 90s this was very likely. Currently it's more like "Those bastards bomb Iraq ! Block their bases ! Demonstrate against them ! Don't allow them to fly bomb runs from Germany or even to treat wounded in military hospitals in Germany" (there were lots of people demanding this kind of stuff last year).
Almost at the same time there came first hints from the US government that they might change their troup structure in Europe and especially in Germany (naturally, as a large part of US forces in Europe are currently located in Germany). And more or less the same people went "Bastards ! They try to starve us by removing their troops !".
I'm not a big fan of the current US government, but this is something like damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The amazing thing with those bases is (myself being in Germany in a city that had several large US bases until a couple of years ago) that as long as they were there people kept shouting and spraying "Ami go home". The moment they decided to leave everyone at least in the regions the bases were in and in big politics went "NONONO ! You can't just leave ! What about local economy !"
This is especially bizarre if one considers the quarrels Germany and the US had about Iraq; on one hand people don't want the US to operate from German soil against Iraq or the like, on the other (what's been happening in the last couple of weeks since Mr. Rumsfeld made the big announcement about a major change in the US forces' structure in Europe) it is seen as punishment if the US want to close bases and people are upset. Seemingly having something to eat is more important than lofty ideals.;-)
Indeed in my city (Ulm/Neu-Ulm in Southern Germany) large areas suddenly were deserted more or less over night when the US troops moved out at the beginning of the 90's, also the real estate market weakened considerably. Luckily as the city was not too bad off financially back then the city put the vacated bases and housing facilities to good use (which took a good part of the last 10 years to happen), but poorer communities or small towns somewhere in the countryside where the US base and their supplyers often are the only larger employer really got into trouble. Seems you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Might depend on where you buy; looking at the German Dell site all servers come per default without OS, all OS'ses (W2K, W2K3, RedHat Enterprise, Novell) cost extra. The same IIRC for Fujitsu-Siemens (they are large in Germany) and others. I never saw it otherwise over here for servers in the last couple of years; desktops certainly are another story.
Servers are not desktops. If you buy a server with Windows if you do not want to install Windows but Linux, *BSD, whatever you either have too much money or you are stupid. Almost all relevant vendors ship today servers at least without an operating system, some even with a Linux distro of (mostly limited) choice installed.
Usually it's a tit-for-tat. Bosnia gets protection by US troops, which costs the US shitloads of money and weakens the already stretched resources of the US military. Romania might get something else out for them. Money ? Special status for doing trade ? Large US bases ?
If those nations trade their national sovereignity for bribes by the US it's their loss. But I don't think that they are forced by the US with dark and ominous threats as the grand parent insinuated without having considerable advantages from this.
The problem is that at least in life sciences a lot of journals require you to sign over all your rights to them thus effectively preventing you from publishing your work on your Web site without getting in legal hot water. Yet for many researchers being published in a journal with high impact factor seems to outweight such limitations.
Therefore it would really make sense if the NIH as one of the most influencial funders of science not only in the US but internationally would push the life science comunity towards more openness.
For those who don't know, BLAST is a genetic sequencing database that allows for comparison with an extracted gene (retrived through polymerase chain reaction) with a known, sequenced gene in their database.
Nitpicking, but BLAST is not a database, it is a set of programs/algorithms for searching genomic databases (for more info). But indeed such a machine should be ideal for doing BLAST searches.
You mean as in DOS games or other DOS programs that brought their own DOS extenders, sound drivers, gfx drivers etc. ? Like in game consoles ? Like in programs for the good old home computers like the C-64, Apple II and the like that often brought their own OS-like routines delivering functionality the machine either did not have or (most cases) to do some kind of copy protection ? Everyone re-inventing the wheel every time in a incompatible way with a different look-and-feel ?
This would be like tape-recording all your spoken conversations. What do you need to search your IM conversations for ? "Hey, you called me this-and-that on January 24th, 2005 11:23:11, don't deny it ! I got proof !" Yeah. Great. Well... perhaps not.
It's already more than enough that I can find all the shit I wrote on usenet ten years ago when I was young and foolish on Google groups as well as my old, for me long inaccessible homepages from 94/95 on Google. If Microsoft tried this, everyone would be up in arms, but because it is Google it would be oh so cool.
Slashdot Mirror
There are risks that are worth to take. The question is if a Linux migration is one of those.
Especially if you are heading IT of some larger organization where any kind of migration becomes a multi-month or even multi-year event with respective costs (just consider the timeframe for the planned Munich Linux migration, IIRC correctly it's something going until 2007 or 2008).
In the end the old saying most of the time stays true: Never change a running system.
So what you are saying is: Being platform dependent doesn't work, being platform independent neither, well, so let's just give our product away, this will make us shitloads of money. Ummm, no.
You are telling me the recent Slashdot poll was not the real election ? Bastards !
However, this in some way explains why I was able to vote in spite of not being American... and here I was thinking "Those Americans are SO internationally-minded people"...
One person's social responsibility is the next person's political correctness. Depends all on the point of view.
It would be similar to modelling the global weather system, a software capability we already have.
Where do we have this amazing capability ?
I mean not only have a rough model ignoring a lot of important influences on weather like water temperatures in the Oceans etc. on a very rough grid , like we have now, but a really accurate weather model.
A recent article I read about NEC's Earth simulator stated that even if this amazing machine was supposed to deliver beneath other things climate calculations with unprecedented accuracy and comprehensiveness it still came short of this ambitious goal. Quite short.
Well, he can do with his works as he likes, it's supposed to be a free country after all, isn't it ?
Also to say he changed it to market response would mean that everyone reading the already published book said "Ohhh ! It has a sad ending ! But we want a happy end !" and he put in a happy end after that so more people bought the book. You are just pissed of that he somewhat outsmarted the oh-so-heroic "pirates" that are for some stupid reason the great heroes over here.
Just nitpicking, but last time I checked India was still in Asia. Damned tectonics... ;->
I'm afraid I can only agree to you. The main reason why I have been to a cinema only one time for the last three years and why I also only rarely visit public classical concerts is the really stupid people you meet there. Old ladies gossiping in organ concerts in the Cathedral, parents with crying little children in a classical concert, and busloads of people like mentioned above.
My solution (not completely satisfactory, but better for my health as I really can get pretty mad about such disturbances) is to watch movies on DVD (which additonally gives me original language in English-spoken movies as I am in Germany) and to listen to music on CD. Especially in case of church concerts it is a pitty to lose the athmosphere, but still much better than having to have a conniption fit every time and not being able to strangle the originators.
IIRC the original reason Intel licensed the chip architecture to AMD (at least for the 808x and onwards) was that IBM demanded a second source for the CPUs from Intel when they started the IBM PC.
Well, the last time everybody got together to do the great Unixy thing back in the 90s that's exactly how it happened: First the big peachy Unix-lovefest, Unix on the desktop was expected to arrive any day now (really ! that's how it was thought back then !), lots of big names announcing proud initiatives (OSF anybody ? At least CDE was adopted by more than one vendor...), then in the end nothing really got out of it, most things were only implemented by single vendors if at all, and in the end the great Unix schisma not only continued but got still worse. More infighting, more ways of doing one and the same thing in an incompatible and drastically different fashion so that a seasoned Sun admin would have needed considerable retraining to do serious AIX stuff... well, you get the picture.
In the end the only winners were NT, and much later Linux, both shooting the wounded and looting their userbase.
Not only very likely but also extremely attractive if you are a large company. My last employer (a large US life science corp) standardized their PC procurement on Dell getting obszene discounts that way. You can also define so-called "standard configurations" for your company that are even more discounted.
Yes, and failing to create a working result, apt-get sometimes offers you to remove half of the system's packages trying to fulfill some low-level dependency, as I got some time back when trying to install a package some GNOME program wanted and that conflicted with some KDE dependencies. apt's solution ? Let's remove all of KDE's packages. Uhm... no.
X may not perform as well, but at least it is designed properly - so you can share per application, or even per window, rather than having a goofy desktop in a window.
What Citrix also can do, at least the per application part (never tried per window). You are thinking of MS's RDP (AFAIK derived from Citrix, but another product).
In the 90s this was very likely. Currently it's more like "Those bastards bomb Iraq ! Block their bases ! Demonstrate against them ! Don't allow them to fly bomb runs from Germany or even to treat wounded in military hospitals in Germany" (there were lots of people demanding this kind of stuff last year).
Almost at the same time there came first hints from the US government that they might change their troup structure in Europe and especially in Germany (naturally, as a large part of US forces in Europe are currently located in Germany). And more or less the same people went "Bastards ! They try to starve us by removing their troops !".
I'm not a big fan of the current US government, but this is something like damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The amazing thing with those bases is (myself being in Germany in a city that had several large US bases until a couple of years ago) that as long as they were there people kept shouting and spraying "Ami go home". The moment they decided to leave everyone at least in the regions the bases were in and in big politics went "NONONO ! You can't just leave ! What about local economy !"
;-)
This is especially bizarre if one considers the quarrels Germany and the US had about Iraq; on one hand people don't want the US to operate from German soil against Iraq or the like, on the other (what's been happening in the last couple of weeks since Mr. Rumsfeld made the big announcement about a major change in the US forces' structure in Europe) it is seen as punishment if the US want to close bases and people are upset. Seemingly having something to eat is more important than lofty ideals.
Indeed in my city (Ulm/Neu-Ulm in Southern Germany) large areas suddenly were deserted more or less over night when the US troops moved out at the beginning of the 90's, also the real estate market weakened considerably. Luckily as the city was not too bad off financially back then the city put the vacated bases and housing facilities to good use (which took a good part of the last 10 years to happen), but poorer communities or small towns somewhere in the countryside where the US base and their supplyers often are the only larger employer really got into trouble. Seems you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Might depend on where you buy; looking at the German Dell site all servers come per default without OS, all OS'ses (W2K, W2K3, RedHat Enterprise, Novell) cost extra. The same IIRC for Fujitsu-Siemens (they are large in Germany) and others. I never saw it otherwise over here for servers in the last couple of years; desktops certainly are another story.
Servers are not desktops. If you buy a server with Windows if you do not want to install Windows but Linux, *BSD, whatever you either have too much money or you are stupid. Almost all relevant vendors ship today servers at least without an operating system, some even with a Linux distro of (mostly limited) choice installed.
Usually it's a tit-for-tat. Bosnia gets protection by US troops, which costs the US shitloads of money and weakens the already stretched resources of the US military. Romania might get something else out for them. Money ? Special status for doing trade ? Large US bases ?
If those nations trade their national sovereignity for bribes by the US it's their loss. But I don't think that they are forced by the US with dark and ominous threats as the grand parent insinuated without having considerable advantages from this.
But what would the US have done if they had not extradited him ? Being pissed off ? Likely. Invaded ? Hardly. Economic sanctions ? Not really.
The problem is that at least in life sciences a lot of journals require you to sign over all your rights to them thus effectively preventing you from publishing your work on your Web site without getting in legal hot water. Yet for many researchers being published in a journal with high impact factor seems to outweight such limitations.
Therefore it would really make sense if the NIH as one of the most influencial funders of science not only in the US but internationally would push the life science comunity towards more openness.
For those who don't know, BLAST is a genetic sequencing database that allows for comparison with an extracted gene (retrived through polymerase chain reaction) with a known, sequenced gene in their database.
Nitpicking, but BLAST is not a database, it is a set of programs/algorithms for searching genomic databases (for more info). But indeed such a machine should be ideal for doing BLAST searches.
Nonono ! This is all wrong ! Here on Slashdot we are supposed to talk about doing things, not actually do them !
You mean as in DOS games or other DOS programs that brought their own DOS extenders, sound drivers, gfx drivers etc. ? Like in game consoles ? Like in programs for the good old home computers like the C-64, Apple II and the like that often brought their own OS-like routines delivering functionality the machine either did not have or (most cases) to do some kind of copy protection ? Everyone re-inventing the wheel every time in a incompatible way with a different look-and-feel ?
Sounds like a great idea. NOT.
This would be like tape-recording all your spoken conversations. What do you need to search your IM conversations for ? "Hey, you called me this-and-that on January 24th, 2005 11:23:11, don't deny it ! I got proof !" Yeah. Great. Well... perhaps not.
It's already more than enough that I can find all the shit I wrote on usenet ten years ago when I was young and foolish on Google groups as well as my old, for me long inaccessible homepages from 94/95 on Google. If Microsoft tried this, everyone would be up in arms, but because it is Google it would be oh so cool.