I agree that some call centers use old windows programs. However, any new call center should be shot if they design an application that isn't web based. Even a screen pop shouldn't be tied to Windows.
I think you miss the point of an NC or very thin client. In your example, the only thing that would have to happen is that you would move to a different terminal and log in. Your email, desktop and roles would follow you. Yes Windows "can" do that but the overhead is far larger and complex than a thin client setup. Another issue is the ability to "push" new software to a call center is more complex in a Windows environment (even with Wininstall) than a centrally managed/controlled environment.
I am not trying to be a jerk, but how much memory did you add before you had to recompile your kernel?
Do you run RH ES 3.0? Would that also be a problem with it?
I run SuSE and have been up to 4GiG and haven't had a problem, and the motherboard offers up to 24GB or RAM support (Duel AMD Opteron with 64bit SuSE).
Wow you hit the nail on the head and I don't believe you truely realize it.
In my experience companies only change when there is pain involved. By then it is usually too late to lead in a new area. They go in to "protective" mode instead of the risk taking that made them large in the first place. Heck it even applies to how they manage their employees.
So, it is easy for Dell to stay with Intel, until they suffer some pain. They will go in to the "protection" mode for as long as they can and "if" AMD continues to gain traction in the industry then Dell will eventually switch but they will give some other Dell wanabee the traction needed to be a serious competitor in the future. They have the ability to stop it now, but alas they won't.
Kinda like IBM could have gone direct to consumer before Dell did and have stopped Dell from becomming what they are now.
Lastly, as I said before this goes far more than just AMD, it has to do with the entire culture of a lot of companies. They will do things like screw their employees as much as possible, to the point until it begins to hurt their bottom line.
Ok, I normally don't respond to myself, but I thought some other things.
Stop the war with Sun. You may be gaining marketshare away from Sun, but you are gaining far more from Microsoft. Sun is a competitor with a small fraction of the total I.T. world. You could crush them out and still only have s small fraction of the I.T. world. Yet you could gain say 10% of Microsofts world and be much larger than Sun.
Next on that same topic. Start shipping Suns JVM + Tomcat with your systems. Set us the system so a Java developer can hit the ground running. Also allow us the way SuSE does to get the Nvidia drivers and other things that we have to agree to a license to. I can't tell you how nice it was to see all that with SuSE (JVM, Tomcat, Java) and wonder why the RedHat guys kept telling me they "couldn't" do it. It now appears that they didn't want to do it, not that they couldn't do it.
So in short. Sun is ok, Microsoft is your enemy. We need a way during the install or update to get proprietary software loaded if required by us (the client).
I have to admiit that we have switched almost everything off of Redhat and over to SuSE now, but here is what our company wants.
We want Redhat Enterprise with no support but the ability to download updates with up2Date. We want this not as a lease but we want to own the product. The unsupported version of Enterprise would cost around $60 (for the media) and could be loaded on as many machines as you wish, but the RedHat up2date serverice would cost a small fee for each server. Say around $50/year per server. Specifically you could buy a certain number of "active" servers in up2date and then actually have more, but you would have to switch servers in and out of the active pool. This allows companies like ours to have a development, testing and production environment without having to spend a fortion on the OS.
We want to be able to buy a support contract with you that has a certain number of calls. An example is that we could call 10X for $1,000 a year. That would make our management happy. If we don't buy that contract then the calls could be something like $400 a call. If we buy something like 50 calls then the price should go down.
Basically what I have just described was RedHat 7.1. It was supported by Oracle and other 3rd party vendors. We want that back and Fedora isn't it. You have forced us to look at things like white box linux (good product), and eventually switch to SuSE (great product, but the registration is a bit odd and the updates have caused problems).
Hope this helps. You have a great product and a great individuals working for your company. You just made a huge mistake and it needs to be corrected.
Ok Anonymous Coward. One other reply said that you could use a workgroup instead of a Domain. That still sucks. Why is the word Domain or Workgroup even used.
It appears that you do need something. Please explain.
I will start by saying that I don't use nor support any Microsoft Active Directory software, but isn't it correct that for every oragnizational unit you create you need a "Domain Controller" and probably a backup domain controller. If that is correct then AD kinda sucks. Well it doesn't kinda suck, it totally sucks. Is it fair to say that you HAVE to have at least one "DOMAIN". WTF?? Isn't this a Direcory Service? If I am wrong please let me know. I am not trying to be a jerk, I just want to know.
Now I do run quite a bit of SuSe servers and I also have looked at the new version of SuSe 9.0 Enterprise. It is the first major Linux distro that I have seen to try and make LDAP the default standard for all authentication. It will do what the poster wants. Now is OpenLDAP a good directory? Well if you consider that you can create objects below a leaf object then no, but again, it will do for 99% of the people out there.
You mention you have moved many people away from NDS to AD and that was a big win for them. I question how big of a win. If by win you mean they now only have one place to call for software support then I agree. If by managing thoughsands of users then I challenge you on it.
Lastly I agree that Novell buying SuSE was a great idea. We disagree on Ximian and probably the whole.NET software push they are doing, but alas that is Novell. Now I will hope you agree that Microsofts AD will only work on Windows servers and Novell's will work on quite a few platforms. So all those clients you switched off of NDS to AD, that now start getting Linux boxes in will have to look at an alternative solution to manage user accounts OR try and use OpenLDAP to AD. That "should" work, but is not near as clean as a good DS on all the servers.
Having said all this.... I wish Novell would open source NDS. GPL it specifically. Will they? Nope, but it would be nice. Also I wish they would focus efforts on Reiser instead of their file system.
I am a bit confused. After reading the blog, he goes on and on about the EPC thing. He wants an Intel device that is a PC to be in the living room of everyones house. Has he talked to customers? Do people really want this? I understand that he wants this to be simple to use and immune to virues and like, but that makes his product impossible to create AND still be a "PC".
I read the responses also, and one person hit it on the head. They site Apple as making cool products and Intel as making products that other people use to make "cool" products. Does Intel really want to get in to the same market as Apple? If so then are they going to write software for their products also? What about their OS? What OS are they going to use? Lots of questions and how they answer them depends on how much they piss off Microsoft and others.
Heck I have an idea for Intel. How about making the best X86 and X86-64 for the money? I will give you the mobile market for now. Then look at where the bottleneck is the current systems (memory) and do something about it. RAMBUS was not the answer!!! Adding more and more cache is not the answer either. You have around 12 BILLION in R&D and you let AMD beat you in your core business?? If you couldn't force Dell and others to not ship AMD systems then you would probably be in a world of hurt, but how long can you continue your stranglehold (illegal monopoly practace)?
Lastly I want to say again... You have BILLIONS in R&D. Come up with the best product.
They are releasing this code and are commiting resources to workk with Mozilla and others to create the "hooks" to email/calandar programs. Their intent is to offer a free/open source replacement to Microsoft Exchange. In their own words this will be a "low end" solution, however they hope it will become more of what Apache is to web servers.
I agree that they don't want to kill Groupwise, however, Groupwise is in a distant 3rd in the email race (Exchange/Notes 1/2) and "if" they actually put developers behind this and they get the Microsoft Outlook hooks (not the crappy web/dav http hooks mentioned in another post) this will offer a true replacement to Exchange. Will it hook in to a Directory Service? Probably not, will they put development dollars behind replication or any advanced feature? Probably not, but for small offices (under 200) this will be a great solution if they do it right.
Understand that OpenExchange is NOT a true replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Groupwise is, but it currently requires their client AND Novells Directory to work.
In short, a major company is trying to create a true open source replacements to Microsoft Exchange. That is great.
Now I hope they can work with the opengroupware people and create a great product. I hope this product becomes the defacto standard for open source groupware AND then companies like IBM would support it with their blackberries. Have you tried to integrate all these new mobile devices with Qmail or OpenGroupware? The vendors don't support anything but Notes and Exchange. This is very bad. Novell is trying to address it.
Umm point to some facts that say the PS3 will be 700.
Now some hard questions for the Xbox people. 1. Will the Xbox be backward compatable. 2. What major developers will there be a launch? Specifically how many games will be out before Christmass 2005?
I do agree that getting their console out early is much better than late, but I do not agree that just because Microsoft has billions in the bank they can afford to fund a looser forever. For every dollar they spend trying to defeat Sony on the PS3, they take one away from fighting Oracle on the DB, Palm and Linux on the PDA market, Apple on music sharing, Google on search engines, and Linux on both the client and desktop. Heck I won't even go in to the other battles like Tivo and cell phones. So yes Microsoft has some major resources but it is foolish to say they will put even 10% of those resources behind the Xbox.
But hey I hope they dump 100% of their resources behind it and let Longhorn slip another few more years.... and they keep ignoring their security flaws and stability in their products.
So in short, this is good for Microsoft, but it all comes down to games and cost, and don't believe for a second that Sony will ship the PS3 over $400. They won't. Heck, at Christmas time I talked to our Microsoft rep about the PSP and he said that he knew it would come out at well over $400, he believe more like $500. Well... here it is and guess what it isn't $400.
Sony is not stupid when it comes to hardware. Microsoft has had major issues when they have not been able to leverage their monopoly of operating systems and office, thus I believe Sony should be scared, but not at the point of rushing out a product.
Lastly my quesiton to Balmer, how few of these new Xboxes need to sell before you call it a complete failure? I want a hard figure for the Christmass 2005 season. To crush Sony you better sell around 20 million of them at least, and to add insult to injury how many of those xbox2 owners will still go out and buy a PS3 the following year? So "if" the hardware is far better on the PS3 then what games will they buy for? You better pray that Halo3 can save the system, or start talking to your stockholders about spending some more of that money in the bank:-)
You touch on the biggest question of app development. In some ways I agree with you, but in others I strongly disagree.
Here is the example. A company forks over a ton of money to Oracle. They have in one sense commited to Oracle for the companies data. Now you come and develop a Java application using JDO or Hibernate (great product by the way) and put all your logic in the app server. It runs great (although you have some issues with performance, but that is another debate...). Now another client comes in and says that they don't support Java and they want to talk directly to your database system. Heck lets say they only support a ODBC connection. Given your design your company only has one option. Get Java to talk to their system. You just put all the business rules in your app server, and EVERYONE must now talk to your app server. Now if the business rules were in the database you could switch out Java for another language with a much smaller effort.
To make this post even longer... I believe that you first make sure that your data integrity is met in the database, and then try and put as much business logic in the database if at all possible. Now this all falls apart in those rare situations where a company has multiple different databases. Then it makes sense to architect the solution you mentioned.
I was just having this conversation with someone who felt just like you and developed many applications at a large company here in town. In his words "everyone will talk to my app, which will talk to the database". I then said what about those Microsoft Access and Toad users that are now starting to hit your system? He turned white... well more white:-) He didn't even have any constraints on the system.:-)
You still haven't addressed my question to Microsoft. At what point do they offer it? When it has double the marketshare of the Mac? Triple? Quad? I will agree that "most" linux users want free software, but there comes a point where there is a market. Where is that market? My belief is that it is somewhere around 10%. If they wait much longer than that then they loose the ability to try and lock the Linux users in to Office, and thus back in to windows at a later date. It is my belief that they once the market hits around 10%, getting another 10% won't be that hard and will come quickly. The core reason most knock Linux is the lack of drivers and application support. With a 10% DESKTOP marketshare those issues go away.
So we agree that if Linux has a 2-3% marketshare, the number of paying Linux users does not justify the development and support effort. Now at 6-7% that "may" be enough, at 15% it is obvious that there is enough, if they wait much longer then they sacrafice loosing everything. Not a risk they can afford.
In the end it sucks to be them or any software vendor that has to compete with open source. They can but they need to add value for their cost, and the days of getting 30-50 BILLION in the bank are over. I fully expect to see office professional for under $100 in less than 5 years because of products like OpenOffice now. Another question that would be fun to ask would be: At what percentage of marketshare does OpenOffice need before you will put filters in to support their file format? 5%? 10% 25%?
I wish I could mod you up. There are a TON of MS only people out there. Heck just post a job and put one Microsoft product in the "like you to know" category and you will get a 100 resume's of MS ONLY people. The job could have 5 hard core non MS requirements and it won't make a difference. Then "if" you interview them just ask them what other technology they like besides Microsoft and why. You will probably get a puzzled look on their face.
I honestly wish I had a dime for all the times I have seen Microsoft people start a holy war when you mention replacing one of their products with a non "Windows" option. I generally ask them the question above "What other products have you looked at or worked with?" I personally don't care who makes a product as long as it makes my life easier and lets me focus on the business, however I will say that I try and avoid companies that lock me in to their technology, so I find myself trying to avoid Microsoft in some ways...
and as I have always said, Once free software is "Good Enough" then the proprietary software vendor is going to be dead. It is almost impossible to compete with free when free is "Good Enough". You can do it but you won't have 50Billion in the bank and have one of the highest profit margins in the world.
Lastly, my question. At what point in marketshare would Linux need on the client before Microsoft would start porting their applications over to it?
I ask this because it won't be long before the Linux client marketshare will be greater than the Macintosh...
Ok, how many Spitfires did you guys have left? Where exactly was Churchill? How was the food supply?
Now I will grant you this. We Americans came over and thought we could take our B17's and just go bomb Germany in the middle of the day. So I concede that we were a little arrogant:-)
But without the spitfires, you wouldn't have had much protection, and your ships wouldn't have lasted long. If Hitler wouldn't have waited after taking France, and let a large part of your military escape, he would have probably had your country. Thank God he didn't do that. I believe that he would have eventually lost anyway but it would have taken a lot longer, and many more lives would have been lost. Hitler made many mistakes, so it is hard to speculate what would have happened if he changed just one item. However it is fairly safe to say that if the Americans hadn't helped England wouldn't have lasted.
Well I agree with all you said except the last part. "get mad at Sony for screwing up the the distribution."
Sony is generally does an excellent job of creating enough product for demand. This issue is that they only produce what the distributors ask for. So lets say Circuit City ask for 25k units. Sony will take that as gospil and product 25k units 4 to 6 months in advance. Sony is notorius for not producing more than the distributors requested. There are some rare examples (PS2), but that is very very rare when they don't produce exactly what the distributors asked for. Most of the time this allows Sony to produce a product and then refine manufacturing and then produce a better product. It also allows Sony to not store inventory themselves. The bad news is that it makes it hard to increase supply if a product exceeds the distributors expectations.
So to make this even longer....
Blame your distributor, they could have asked for more. They will lie to you and say that they were only "shipped" so many, but their head of purchasing for their chain could have ordered more to begin with. So in this example; Sony is probably 2-6 months in to producing another product and has scaled back the production of the PSP to what the distributors said they would purchase over the next year, and they can't produce any more without killing "new" products that will be comming out later.
Again there are those rare examples where Sony does screw up (PS2). So a better question to your local BestBuy guy is: "How many PSP's did your chain order, and how many did you recieve?" The problem is that the lacky on the floor won't know Jack. If he is smart he bought as many of these hot items as he could and would be selling them on Ebay for a profit. Or holding some back for people that would pay him more.
I agree to a point. However, if you are running RedHat 3.x on supported hardware and the only "major" software you are running on it is Oracle DB, they will fully support both the DB and the server. I have never had them send my back to RedHat for a question or a new/old RPM. Oracle provides it. In this example open source kinda rocks.
Granted you may be talking to someone in India who can't speak english to save his/her life, but they will support you.
I just find it strange that the gun lobby seems not to either considering that the freedoms they claim can only be protected by guns are being lost while they shoot targets and small fury animals.
I think I can help you out here. The first thing most piss poor dictators try and do is remove the ability of the citizens to challenge them by force. They usually do this under the guise of security. Then when they have no serious "threats" to worry about they start to do more and more horrible actions against their people. This is why it is worded in the way it is in the second amendment. It is assumed that everyone will own a gun, and as such this right will never be taken away for any purpose. They knew all too well what could happen if the government got out of hand.
Saddam did it, and the Weimar government (Germans) did it before Hitler came to power, thus making it very difficult(impossible) to stop him.
I also want to point out how disconnected some of our current senators are: There is a program that models what the economy would be given a current tax rate. It is far from perfect but you can model how much money the government would have if the tax rate went up 1% on the top x% of people. One senator asked to see what the figures would be at 100% for all people. He was serious....
So do I think the U.S. government is going to do any of this? Nope, at least not in my lifetime. I am not at all worried about it. Now I was a little worried about the wacko's at BATF a few years back. Janet Rino and crowd was way out of control and seemed to come in with guns blazing. The only thing that seemed to "cool" her and those idiots was some mentally unstable person to go in and blow up a federal building and another crazy guy in Texas to actually kill a few Federal agents.
My last point is that Reno and company did NOT value anyones life (Ruby Ridge and Waco) and shot first and asked questions later. Then when confronted by "some" force suddenly started to act more reasonably in the future. Granted that force was an insane person. So just in my lifetime I have seen a government agency "bend" the law and be brought back to normal by a armed citizens. I want to say again that I do NOT condone what McVay did nor any of those people at Waco. It is just my observation that after people started to defend themselves better, the BATF changed a lot.
I would rather know what the female monkey would spend her money on, and what she liked to watch and do. Being a male what the heck do I care what other males like:-)
I also say forget Joe Sixpack and go after Jane.
Also, I just hope and pray that my tax dollars didn't go to fund this crap, but I am sure it did somehow:-(
1. Almost any program can be slow or fast depending on the coder. I suggest you take a look at some of the more modern Java programs and JVMs.
2. Define insane. OpenOffice takes a ton more memory than say vi. Then again they do different things. Java can take more memory, however as I posted before, if the program is bigger than say a simple calculaor program that difference isn't huge.
3. The look and feel can be set for all the major platforms. You will NOT be able the difference of a JAVA app (by look and feel) when done well for Windows or the Macintosh. Now Linux.... you have to be kidding me right???? I have apps written in plane old X, GNOME, and KDE running on my system. None look or feel the same.
4. The JVM can be larger than 15MB. Yes this ONE TIME DOWNLOAD can be an issue. We agree that this can be an issue. Now I find it interesting that most people like you who bitch about this won't complain one bit about downloading a 600-2000MB file to play say a Doom3 demo. So I again say that if you want a cool office program and it is 600MB, but 50MB of it is a JVM then that isn't that big of a deal.
My last comment on this... As far as speed and size in RAM goes - Your same arguments use to be made by people about C code vs machine code or assembler code. A program that was in assembler would be 50 to 100 bytes in size while a C program would be an enourmous 5k. I remember having a discussion with one of our coders much like you and I are having now 20 years ago. His comment was "This freaking C code is crap! It takes 5k to do what I can do in 54 bites! What a slow bloated piece of crap language it is."
My how times have changed, yet the arguments try and stay the same:-) 15MB is almost considered a joke now, and will be in a few more years.
How do you know and why do you care? If the application would do what you want and meets your needs then who cares what it was written in?
Unless you just hate JAVA for some reason and will never run any program written in it. I know some Microsoft people just like you then. They will NEVER run anything that is not developed by Microsoft unless they absolutely have to, and then they just count the days until Redmond releases a "similar" version.
There are some cool JAVA programs out there, that are nice to use because when you want to switch off of an underpowered overpriced laptop to say a "better" platform then you can still run all the exact same code:-)
I agree with what you say, in that if I launch a calculator program and one takes 100k and the other takes 15MB or RAM then that "can" be an issue. However the difference in bigger applications is not that huge. The amount of RAM needed by the JVM is somewhat static, so the larger the program the less of the difference between it and native code.
I think what you are really saying is that you don't want some piece of crap C program thats big and bloated nor do you want a JAVA program that is big and bloated. In that we agree. The difference in RAM requirements between a DVD burner or MP3 player written in any language shouldn't be that large, and won't be if written by good developers of JAVA or C or C++. The difference is that the one written in JAVA will be easily portable between different systems. The one in C or C++ will probably only be made available on Microsoft Windows.
Thanks for the input and you are correct about NIO, and the 3D API's. The Java NIO API's are relatively new and from what I have read, have improved a lot. Now as for the JAVA 3D API's... I believe that does require OpenGL to be installed. So your friend is using an API that requires another API to be installed. That in and of itself sounds dangerous. Yes it should work, but heck how many times have you needed to load a newer video driver on your Windows box just to play the latest OpenGL game. Companies like ATI don't support OpenGL near as well as say Nvidia, so that also could be some issues. His problem may have nothing to do with the JAVA API's so much as video driver issues. Then again the Java 3D packages could suck, I honestly don't know. I will say that I envy your friend, he is getting to code some cool stuff.
Again thanks for the input, but I still stand by my point that 99.999% of standard business applications will work great with not mofications to the code.
Lastly thanks again.... I have a new skunkworks project that needs to use JAVA's NIO package and needs to run on Linux/Solaris/Windows, so I will proceed with caution:-)
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I agree that some call centers use old windows programs. However, any new call center should be shot if they design an application that isn't web based. Even a screen pop shouldn't be tied to Windows.
I think you miss the point of an NC or very thin client. In your example, the only thing that would have to happen is that you would move to a different terminal and log in. Your email, desktop and roles would follow you. Yes Windows "can" do that but the overhead is far larger and complex than a thin client setup. Another issue is the ability to "push" new software to a call center is more complex in a Windows environment (even with Wininstall) than a centrally managed/controlled environment.
You miss Bill's main point.
You will need all that extra processing power and hard drive to drive all the spyware, adware and viruses that will be comming out.
Now I am still trying to understand why the cashier at walmart needs a full fledged PC, just to sell me my stuff.
Or any call center agent....
I am not trying to be a jerk, but how much memory did you add before you had to recompile your kernel?
Do you run RH ES 3.0? Would that also be a problem with it?
I run SuSE and have been up to 4GiG and haven't had a problem, and the motherboard offers up to 24GB or RAM support (Duel AMD Opteron with 64bit SuSE).
Thanks!
Wow you hit the nail on the head and I don't believe you truely realize it.
In my experience companies only change when there is pain involved. By then it is usually too late to lead in a new area. They go in to "protective" mode instead of the risk taking that made them large in the first place. Heck it even applies to how they manage their employees.
So, it is easy for Dell to stay with Intel, until they suffer some pain. They will go in to the "protection" mode for as long as they can and "if" AMD continues to gain traction in the industry then Dell will eventually switch but they will give some other Dell wanabee the traction needed to be a serious competitor in the future. They have the ability to stop it now, but alas they won't.
Kinda like IBM could have gone direct to consumer before Dell did and have stopped Dell from becomming what they are now.
Lastly, as I said before this goes far more than just AMD, it has to do with the entire culture of a lot of companies. They will do things like screw their employees as much as possible, to the point until it begins to hurt their bottom line.
Ok, I normally don't respond to myself, but I thought some other things.
Stop the war with Sun. You may be gaining marketshare away from Sun, but you are gaining far more from Microsoft. Sun is a competitor with a small fraction of the total I.T. world. You could crush them out and still only have s small fraction of the I.T. world. Yet you could gain say 10% of Microsofts world and be much larger than Sun.
Next on that same topic. Start shipping Suns JVM + Tomcat with your systems. Set us the system so a Java developer can hit the ground running. Also allow us the way SuSE does to get the Nvidia drivers and other things that we have to agree to a license to. I can't tell you how nice it was to see all that with SuSE (JVM, Tomcat, Java) and wonder why the RedHat guys kept telling me they "couldn't" do it. It now appears that they didn't want to do it, not that they couldn't do it.
So in short. Sun is ok, Microsoft is your enemy. We need a way during the install or update to get proprietary software loaded if required by us (the client).
I have to admiit that we have switched almost everything off of Redhat and over to SuSE now, but here is what our company wants.
We want Redhat Enterprise with no support but the ability to download updates with up2Date. We want this not as a lease but we want to own the product. The unsupported version of Enterprise would cost around $60 (for the media) and could be loaded on as many machines as you wish, but the RedHat up2date serverice would cost a small fee for each server. Say around $50/year per server. Specifically you could buy a certain number of "active" servers in up2date and then actually have more, but you would have to switch servers in and out of the active pool. This allows companies like ours to have a development, testing and production environment without having to spend a fortion on the OS.
We want to be able to buy a support contract with you that has a certain number of calls. An example is that we could call 10X for $1,000 a year. That would make our management happy. If we don't buy that contract then the calls could be something like $400 a call. If we buy something like 50 calls then the price should go down.
Basically what I have just described was RedHat 7.1. It was supported by Oracle and other 3rd party vendors. We want that back and Fedora isn't it. You have forced us to look at things like white box linux (good product), and eventually switch to SuSE (great product, but the registration is a bit odd and the updates have caused problems).
Hope this helps. You have a great product and a great individuals working for your company. You just made a huge mistake and it needs to be corrected.
Ok Anonymous Coward. One other reply said that you could use a workgroup instead of a Domain. That still sucks. Why is the word Domain or Workgroup even used.
It appears that you do need something. Please explain.
I will start by saying that I don't use nor support any Microsoft Active Directory software, but isn't it correct that for every oragnizational unit you create you need a "Domain Controller" and probably a backup domain controller. If that is correct then AD kinda sucks. Well it doesn't kinda suck, it totally sucks. Is it fair to say that you HAVE to have at least one "DOMAIN". WTF?? Isn't this a Direcory Service? If I am wrong please let me know. I am not trying to be a jerk, I just want to know.
.NET software push they are doing, but alas that is Novell. Now I will hope you agree that Microsofts AD will only work on Windows servers and Novell's will work on quite a few platforms. So all those clients you switched off of NDS to AD, that now start getting Linux boxes in will have to look at an alternative solution to manage user accounts OR try and use OpenLDAP to AD. That "should" work, but is not near as clean as a good DS on all the servers.
Now I do run quite a bit of SuSe servers and I also have looked at the new version of SuSe 9.0 Enterprise. It is the first major Linux distro that I have seen to try and make LDAP the default standard for all authentication. It will do what the poster wants. Now is OpenLDAP a good directory? Well if you consider that you can create objects below a leaf object then no, but again, it will do for 99% of the people out there.
You mention you have moved many people away from NDS to AD and that was a big win for them. I question how big of a win. If by win you mean they now only have one place to call for software support then I agree. If by managing thoughsands of users then I challenge you on it.
Lastly I agree that Novell buying SuSE was a great idea. We disagree on Ximian and probably the whole
Having said all this.... I wish Novell would open source NDS. GPL it specifically. Will they? Nope, but it would be nice. Also I wish they would focus efforts on Reiser instead of their file system.
I am a bit confused. After reading the blog, he goes on and on about the EPC thing. He wants an Intel device that is a PC to be in the living room of everyones house. Has he talked to customers? Do people really want this? I understand that he wants this to be simple to use and immune to virues and like, but that makes his product impossible to create AND still be a "PC".
I read the responses also, and one person hit it on the head. They site Apple as making cool products and Intel as making products that other people use to make "cool" products. Does Intel really want to get in to the same market as Apple? If so then are they going to write software for their products also? What about their OS? What OS are they going to use? Lots of questions and how they answer them depends on how much they piss off Microsoft and others.
Heck I have an idea for Intel. How about making the best X86 and X86-64 for the money? I will give you the mobile market for now. Then look at where the bottleneck is the current systems (memory) and do something about it. RAMBUS was not the answer!!! Adding more and more cache is not the answer either. You have around 12 BILLION in R&D and you let AMD beat you in your core business?? If you couldn't force Dell and others to not ship AMD systems then you would probably be in a world of hurt, but how long can you continue your stranglehold (illegal monopoly practace)?
Lastly I want to say again... You have BILLIONS in R&D. Come up with the best product.
They are releasing this code and are commiting resources to workk with Mozilla and others to create the "hooks" to email/calandar programs. Their intent is to offer a free/open source replacement to Microsoft Exchange. In their own words this will be a "low end" solution, however they hope it will become more of what Apache is to web servers.
I agree that they don't want to kill Groupwise, however, Groupwise is in a distant 3rd in the email race (Exchange/Notes 1/2) and "if" they actually put developers behind this and they get the Microsoft Outlook hooks (not the crappy web/dav http hooks mentioned in another post) this will offer a true replacement to Exchange. Will it hook in to a Directory Service? Probably not, will they put development dollars behind replication or any advanced feature? Probably not, but for small offices (under 200) this will be a great solution if they do it right.
Understand that OpenExchange is NOT a true replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Groupwise is, but it currently requires their client AND Novells Directory to work.
In short, a major company is trying to create a true open source replacements to Microsoft Exchange. That is great.
Now I hope they can work with the opengroupware people and create a great product. I hope this product becomes the defacto standard for open source groupware AND then companies like IBM would support it with their blackberries. Have you tried to integrate all these new mobile devices with Qmail or OpenGroupware? The vendors don't support anything but Notes and Exchange. This is very bad. Novell is trying to address it.
Could you point out the specifics of this?
As I recall the top tax braket was around 40% back in the Carter days and now it is below 36%.
Umm point to some facts that say the PS3 will be 700.
:-)
Now some hard questions for the Xbox people.
1. Will the Xbox be backward compatable.
2. What major developers will there be a launch? Specifically how many games will be out before Christmass 2005?
I do agree that getting their console out early is much better than late, but I do not agree that just because Microsoft has billions in the bank they can afford to fund a looser forever. For every dollar they spend trying to defeat Sony on the PS3, they take one away from fighting Oracle on the DB, Palm and Linux on the PDA market, Apple on music sharing, Google on search engines, and Linux on both the client and desktop. Heck I won't even go in to the other battles like Tivo and cell phones. So yes Microsoft has some major resources but it is foolish to say they will put even 10% of those resources behind the Xbox.
But hey I hope they dump 100% of their resources behind it and let Longhorn slip another few more years.... and they keep ignoring their security flaws and stability in their products.
So in short, this is good for Microsoft, but it all comes down to games and cost, and don't believe for a second that Sony will ship the PS3 over $400. They won't. Heck, at Christmas time I talked to our Microsoft rep about the PSP and he said that he knew it would come out at well over $400, he believe more like $500. Well... here it is and guess what it isn't $400.
Sony is not stupid when it comes to hardware. Microsoft has had major issues when they have not been able to leverage their monopoly of operating systems and office, thus I believe Sony should be scared, but not at the point of rushing out a product.
Lastly my quesiton to Balmer, how few of these new Xboxes need to sell before you call it a complete failure? I want a hard figure for the Christmass 2005 season. To crush Sony you better sell around 20 million of them at least, and to add insult to injury how many of those xbox2 owners will still go out and buy a PS3 the following year? So "if" the hardware is far better on the PS3 then what games will they buy for? You better pray that Halo3 can save the system, or start talking to your stockholders about spending some more of that money in the bank
You touch on the biggest question of app development. In some ways I agree with you, but in others I strongly disagree.
:-) He didn't even have any constraints on the system. :-)
Here is the example. A company forks over a ton of money to Oracle. They have in one sense commited to Oracle for the companies data. Now you come and develop a Java application using JDO or Hibernate (great product by the way) and put all your logic in the app server. It runs great (although you have some issues with performance, but that is another debate...). Now another client comes in and says that they don't support Java and they want to talk directly to your database system. Heck lets say they only support a ODBC connection. Given your design your company only has one option. Get Java to talk to their system. You just put all the business rules in your app server, and EVERYONE must now talk to your app server. Now if the business rules were in the database you could switch out Java for another language with a much smaller effort.
To make this post even longer... I believe that you first make sure that your data integrity is met in the database, and then try and put as much business logic in the database if at all possible. Now this all falls apart in those rare situations where a company has multiple different databases. Then it makes sense to architect the solution you mentioned.
I was just having this conversation with someone who felt just like you and developed many applications at a large company here in town. In his words "everyone will talk to my app, which will talk to the database". I then said what about those Microsoft Access and Toad users that are now starting to hit your system? He turned white... well more white
You still haven't addressed my question to Microsoft. At what point do they offer it? When it has double the marketshare of the Mac? Triple? Quad? I will agree that "most" linux users want free software, but there comes a point where there is a market. Where is that market? My belief is that it is somewhere around 10%. If they wait much longer than that then they loose the ability to try and lock the Linux users in to Office, and thus back in to windows at a later date. It is my belief that they once the market hits around 10%, getting another 10% won't be that hard and will come quickly. The core reason most knock Linux is the lack of drivers and application support. With a 10% DESKTOP marketshare those issues go away.
So we agree that if Linux has a 2-3% marketshare, the number of paying Linux users does not justify the development and support effort. Now at 6-7% that "may" be enough, at 15% it is obvious that there is enough, if they wait much longer then they sacrafice loosing everything. Not a risk they can afford.
In the end it sucks to be them or any software vendor that has to compete with open source. They can but they need to add value for their cost, and the days of getting 30-50 BILLION in the bank are over. I fully expect to see office professional for under $100 in less than 5 years because of products like OpenOffice now. Another question that would be fun to ask would be:
At what percentage of marketshare does OpenOffice need before you will put filters in to support their file format? 5%? 10% 25%?
Your talking to someone who has spend near hundreds of thoughsands of dollars on software for Linux. Yes, some want free software, but others pay.
There are a lot of Mac users who use free software also.
Corps are starting to support Linux more and more, but they pick either RedHat ES/AS or SuSe ES.
I wish I could mod you up. There are a TON of MS only people out there. Heck just post a job and put one Microsoft product in the "like you to know" category and you will get a 100 resume's of MS ONLY people. The job could have 5 hard core non MS requirements and it won't make a difference. Then "if" you interview them just ask them what other technology they like besides Microsoft and why. You will probably get a puzzled look on their face.
I honestly wish I had a dime for all the times I have seen Microsoft people start a holy war when you mention replacing one of their products with a non "Windows" option. I generally ask them the question above "What other products have you looked at or worked with?" I personally don't care who makes a product as long as it makes my life easier and lets me focus on the business, however I will say that I try and avoid companies that lock me in to their technology, so I find myself trying to avoid Microsoft in some ways...
and as I have always said, Once free software is "Good Enough" then the proprietary software vendor is going to be dead. It is almost impossible to compete with free when free is "Good Enough". You can do it but you won't have 50Billion in the bank and have one of the highest profit margins in the world.
Lastly, my question.
At what point in marketshare would Linux need on the client before Microsoft would start porting their applications over to it?
I ask this because it won't be long before the Linux client marketshare will be greater than the Macintosh...
Ok, how many Spitfires did you guys have left? Where exactly was Churchill? How was the food supply?
:-)
Now I will grant you this. We Americans came over and thought we could take our B17's and just go bomb Germany in the middle of the day. So I concede that we were a little arrogant
But without the spitfires, you wouldn't have had much protection, and your ships wouldn't have lasted long. If Hitler wouldn't have waited after taking France, and let a large part of your military escape, he would have probably had your country. Thank God he didn't do that. I believe that he would have eventually lost anyway but it would have taken a lot longer, and many more lives would have been lost. Hitler made many mistakes, so it is hard to speculate what would have happened if he changed just one item. However it is fairly safe to say that if the Americans hadn't helped England wouldn't have lasted.
Well I agree with all you said except the last part. "get mad at Sony for screwing up the the distribution."
Sony is generally does an excellent job of creating enough product for demand. This issue is that they only produce what the distributors ask for. So lets say Circuit City ask for 25k units. Sony will take that as gospil and product 25k units 4 to 6 months in advance. Sony is notorius for not producing more than the distributors requested. There are some rare examples (PS2), but that is very very rare when they don't produce exactly what the distributors asked for. Most of the time this allows Sony to produce a product and then refine manufacturing and then produce a better product. It also allows Sony to not store inventory themselves. The bad news is that it makes it hard to increase supply if a product exceeds the distributors expectations.
So to make this even longer....
Blame your distributor, they could have asked for more. They will lie to you and say that they were only "shipped" so many, but their head of purchasing for their chain could have ordered more to begin with. So in this example; Sony is probably 2-6 months in to producing another product and has scaled back the production of the PSP to what the distributors said they would purchase over the next year, and they can't produce any more without killing "new" products that will be comming out later.
Again there are those rare examples where Sony does screw up (PS2). So a better question to your local BestBuy guy is: "How many PSP's did your chain order, and how many did you recieve?" The problem is that the lacky on the floor won't know Jack. If he is smart he bought as many of these hot items as he could and would be selling them on Ebay for a profit. Or holding some back for people that would pay him more.
I agree to a point. However, if you are running RedHat 3.x on supported hardware and the only "major" software you are running on it is Oracle DB, they will fully support both the DB and the server. I have never had them send my back to RedHat for a question or a new/old RPM. Oracle provides it. In this example open source kinda rocks.
Granted you may be talking to someone in India who can't speak english to save his/her life, but they will support you.
I just find it strange that the gun lobby seems not to either considering that the freedoms they claim can only be protected by guns are being lost while they shoot targets and small fury animals.
I think I can help you out here. The first thing most piss poor dictators try and do is remove the ability of the citizens to challenge them by force. They usually do this under the guise of security. Then when they have no serious "threats" to worry about they start to do more and more horrible actions against their people. This is why it is worded in the way it is in the second amendment. It is assumed that everyone will own a gun, and as such this right will never be taken away for any purpose. They knew all too well what could happen if the government got out of hand.
Saddam did it, and the Weimar government (Germans) did it before Hitler came to power, thus making it very difficult(impossible) to stop him.
I also want to point out how disconnected some of our current senators are: There is a program that models what the economy would be given a current tax rate. It is far from perfect but you can model how much money the government would have if the tax rate went up 1% on the top x% of people. One senator asked to see what the figures would be at 100% for all people. He was serious....
So do I think the U.S. government is going to do any of this? Nope, at least not in my lifetime. I am not at all worried about it. Now I was a little worried about the wacko's at BATF a few years back. Janet Rino and crowd was way out of control and seemed to come in with guns blazing. The only thing that seemed to "cool" her and those idiots was some mentally unstable person to go in and blow up a federal building and another crazy guy in Texas to actually kill a few Federal agents.
My last point is that Reno and company did NOT value anyones life (Ruby Ridge and Waco) and shot first and asked questions later. Then when confronted by "some" force suddenly started to act more reasonably in the future. Granted that force was an insane person. So just in my lifetime I have seen a government agency "bend" the law and be brought back to normal by a armed citizens. I want to say again that I do NOT condone what McVay did nor any of those people at Waco. It is just my observation that after people started to defend themselves better, the BATF changed a lot.
I would rather know what the female monkey would spend her money on, and what she liked to watch and do. Being a male what the heck do I care what other males like :-)
:-(
I also say forget Joe Sixpack and go after Jane.
Also, I just hope and pray that my tax dollars didn't go to fund this crap, but I am sure it did somehow
1. Almost any program can be slow or fast depending on the coder. I suggest you take a look at some of the more modern Java programs and JVMs.
:-) 15MB is almost considered a joke now, and will be in a few more years.
2. Define insane. OpenOffice takes a ton more memory than say vi. Then again they do different things. Java can take more memory, however as I posted before, if the program is bigger than say a simple calculaor program that difference isn't huge.
3. The look and feel can be set for all the major platforms. You will NOT be able the difference of a JAVA app (by look and feel) when done well for Windows or the Macintosh. Now Linux.... you have to be kidding me right???? I have apps written in plane old X, GNOME, and KDE running on my system. None look or feel the same.
4. The JVM can be larger than 15MB. Yes this ONE TIME DOWNLOAD can be an issue. We agree that this can be an issue. Now I find it interesting that most people like you who bitch about this won't complain one bit about downloading a 600-2000MB file to play say a Doom3 demo. So I again say that if you want a cool office program and it is 600MB, but 50MB of it is a JVM then that isn't that big of a deal.
My last comment on this... As far as speed and size in RAM goes - Your same arguments use to be made by people about C code vs machine code or assembler code. A program that was in assembler would be 50 to 100 bytes in size while a C program would be an enourmous 5k. I remember having a discussion with one of our coders much like you and I are having now 20 years ago. His comment was "This freaking C code is crap! It takes 5k to do what I can do in 54 bites! What a slow bloated piece of crap language it is."
My how times have changed, yet the arguments try and stay the same
How do you know and why do you care? If the application would do what you want and meets your needs then who cares what it was written in?
:-)
:-)
Unless you just hate JAVA for some reason and will never run any program written in it. I know some Microsoft people just like you then. They will NEVER run anything that is not developed by Microsoft unless they absolutely have to, and then they just count the days until Redmond releases a "similar" version.
There are some cool JAVA programs out there, that are nice to use because when you want to switch off of an underpowered overpriced laptop to say a "better" platform then you can still run all the exact same code
NOTE: I am writing this on an Alienware laptop
I agree with what you say, in that if I launch a calculator program and one takes 100k and the other takes 15MB or RAM then that "can" be an issue. However the difference in bigger applications is not that huge. The amount of RAM needed by the JVM is somewhat static, so the larger the program the less of the difference between it and native code.
I think what you are really saying is that you don't want some piece of crap C program thats big and bloated nor do you want a JAVA program that is big and bloated. In that we agree. The difference in RAM requirements between a DVD burner or MP3 player written in any language shouldn't be that large, and won't be if written by good developers of JAVA or C or C++. The difference is that the one written in JAVA will be easily portable between different systems. The one in C or C++ will probably only be made available on Microsoft Windows.
Thanks for the input and you are correct about NIO, and the 3D API's. The Java NIO API's are relatively new and from what I have read, have improved a lot. Now as for the JAVA 3D API's... I believe that does require OpenGL to be installed. So your friend is using an API that requires another API to be installed. That in and of itself sounds dangerous. Yes it should work, but heck how many times have you needed to load a newer video driver on your Windows box just to play the latest OpenGL game. Companies like ATI don't support OpenGL near as well as say Nvidia, so that also could be some issues. His problem may have nothing to do with the JAVA API's so much as video driver issues. Then again the Java 3D packages could suck, I honestly don't know. I will say that I envy your friend, he is getting to code some cool stuff.
:-)
Again thanks for the input, but I still stand by my point that 99.999% of standard business applications will work great with not mofications to the code.
Lastly thanks again....
I have a new skunkworks project that needs to use JAVA's NIO package and needs to run on Linux/Solaris/Windows, so I will proceed with caution