Corporates buy support for insurance purposes, not to actually use the support... They don't use it largely because it sucks these days, but not using it because the product works would fit too. They like having something to fall back on if something does go wrong, but are quite happy for nothing to go wrong at all. This works out well for support vendors, because you still get paid your annual contract but don't have to do much work... You are effectively selling insurance.
Maintenance and expansion of proprietary software is also extremely inefficient, you have multiple vendors each maintaining and expanding their own unique code, often implementing the same features but in a different way to a different codebase, with no ability to reuse code written by the others.
With OSS the code is reusable, so you don't need to keep reinventing the wheel, you can spend your time making actual improvements instead, and thus progress happens at a faster rate and costs less.
As you said, it's crappy and expensive, so perhaps people should get together to write something better...
Your using the crappy software, you can clearly identify the problems with it and presumably have the legal/financial/regulatory expertise necessary. Why not get together with some people to write something better? You can give the software away for free, while selling your expertise to those companies who use your software.
Also, when it comes to legal and regulatory issues, the government that created such issues should have a hand in making sure the information and tools necessary to deal with them is widely and freely available to all of it's citizens.
And inhouse software can often be garbage as you describe... However an inhouse solution based on open source is unlikely to be, because there is no monopoly on the service, anyone else can take the software and build their own solution around it... Similar to the boxware model, only in the OSS model the individual service providers can make their own changes too instead of relying on the original vendor.
Any market where a business has a monopoly, those in charge of that business will see reducing quality and increasing prices as a low risk high gain strategy, and therefore just good business sense. The customers are locked in, so the number who will leave as a result of you screwing them will be very low.
The model of selling support is not really broken, it just doesn't bring the obscene levels of short term profit the investors want...
Selling an item that costs nothing will obviously produce massive profits and there is very little that can match such a profit margin, but sooner or later the customers will realize just how badly they are getting screwed.
Selling a support service on the other hand, will always have lower margins because you actually have to employ competent staff to provide the service, but it's also an ongoing service with a continuing stream of income.
A lot of these investors are only out for the short term gains, and are unconcerned about the long term sustainability of the business - look what's happened to the banking sector as a result of such behavior...
What resolution is the source video? It's probably a low resolution video, being sent over the PCI bus at low resolution and then scaled by the GPU... Try playing 1080p video on that.
Most of the productivity software and "enterprise solutions" MS sells depends on their OS monopoly.. If people are using Macs or Linux they won't be able to buy any other MS software (ok, a small number of apps for mac, nothing for linux).
Oracle isn't NUMA aware? Surely it depends more on the OS tho... NUMA systems have been around for many years, SGI had such systems over 10 years ago... You'd have thought Oracle would have been able to take advantage of such systems... Also, how much does the application need to be NUMA aware? Shouldn't the OS take care of most of it...
Linux has a big head start on windows when it comes to NUMA, due to having support from other architectures, and having 64bit AMD support for a lot longer than windows.
Yes, comparing a phenom 9500 (2.3ghz quad core) to a Q6600 (quad 2.4ghz) running gentoo linux, compiled with relatively conservative CFLAGS (-O2) with the cpu type set appropriately, the AMD chip performs very well and beats the Intel chip in some benchmarks...
Starting from a clean sheet didn't work, but remember IA64 was developed with HP...
It would have made a lot more sense to start with the Alpha, not a totally clean sheet but a much cleaner one than x86, with the added advantage of existing applications (microsoft were bound by a court order to port windows to it), existing x86 emulation which performs better clock for clock than the ia64 equivalent, very good support for linux and bsd, and it's own operating systems in tru64 and vms... And older systems on the market which hobbyists could pick up cheap to learn the architecture on and port OSS software, by the time IA64 became affordable for hobbyists it was pretty much irrelevant.
On IA64 even today, you have a relatively poorly supported linux, gcc produces really inefficient code and i doubt many OSS devs who might be interested in it actually have IA64 hardware available to them.
Yeah, i miss Alpha too... What could have been if HP had continue Alpha instead of working on IA64... An existing architecture, well designed, existing customer base, existing applications and OS support, and availability of old cheap machines for hobbyists to learn the platform on. I think it would have been far more successful than IA64 has.
A lot of linux growth will also not be attributed to new sales... Infact, most new linux users i've encountered installed it on their existing hardware, or bought a new machine with windows and put linux on the older one.
In the current market, unemployment is rising, costs are rising... Using cheaper software is a good way to save money... If that cheaper software requires more staff, hiring those staff is comparatively easier in the current market, and the savings from free software could easily pay for a few staff while still saving you money in a medium to large company.
And consider long term savings, once you have postgres competent staff on hand the choice to make future deployments on postgres is a no brainer.
Also using something that doesn't lock you in to a single supplier is extremely sensible in the long term.
How many companies make software products? I'm willing to bet the vast majority don't... And even then, it's often permissible to link against OSS libraries without giving away the source of the program (you may have to distribute the library, which is open anyway).
But speaking of risk assessment, i hope your risk assessment of proprietary software includes the risks of not having a second source, because there is very little proprietary software for which a second source vendor is available if the first one goes bankrupt. And as you've nodoubt seen on the news lately, even the biggest companies can easily go bust.
Yes, niche software is far less likely to be covered... But in those cases, i would still like to run the niche software on linux, If i have to pay for the apps then so be it, the underlying OS is not a niche product and i shouldn't have to pay for that as well, just like i shouldn't have to buy proprietary hardware for a generic purpose (i want it to run on standard hardware, tho specialized peripherals are ok if its really necessary).
As a salaried employee, he will be paid wether he implements a new proxy or not. If he has no other work to do at the time he would just be sitting idle so yes, the relative cost really could be $0.
Just goes to show that anything can be implemented badly... Where i work we have 2 separate networks serving different parts of the company, one is all OSS while the other is primarily MS based. The OSS one is faster, has better uptime, cost very little to build (runs entirely on hardware that was discarded by the MS oriented staff), and requires minimal maintenance. Users don't really notice any difference until something goes wrong, which happens far less frequently on the OSS network. The bean counters notice because of how under-budget the OSS based network is.
The MS guys are jealous of some of the fancy kit we have to play with, but we've still spent a lot less overall.
Because you get more detail on the larger screen... Making them very useful for graphics work among other things. Larger resolutions also usually accompany larger screens.
What's stopping you decreasing the font size on the 1280x900 screen to get more stuff on the screen?
Screen dimensions need to map to real life sizes, you need to know that 1 screen inch equals 1 physical inch..
Font sizes are measured using points, 72 points equals 1 inch, if your system renders the text smaller on a higher resolution screen without you explicitly decreasing it's size then it's blatantly lying to you about the font size.
That's not to say you can't make the conscious decision to decrease the text size to fit more of it on the screen, and be able to decrease it while still being readable because of the higher resolution, but it should default to being the same size. A font which claims to be 72pt in size should always be 1 inch high, allowing for varying characters of course.
If a font is claiming to be a certain size, it had better actually be that size, otherwise the measurement becomes completely arbitrary and meaningless.
When you print text on a 1200dpi printer does it come out at half the size than on a 600dpi printer?
The point was that support for ipv6 in xp is lacking behind the supported offered by vista... Windows users don't expect to have to use the CLI for anything, remember the CLI is bad and that's why Linux sucks... Don't forget that any OS which forces you to use the CLI for anything must suck.
"if autoconfig didn't work you had to use the cli tools to configure it" sure it works fine if you have a router advertising ipv6 correctly, but what if you don't or you have multiple routers or you want to set up a tunnel?
You would think, but this is often not the case.. A lot of people are good at following books and set tasks, but aren't any good at thinking for themselves.
People don't want to migrate away from XP, but sooner or later they will have no choice. If by that time the alternatives suit their needs, and/or the forced migration away from xp pisses them off enough, and/or the offered upgrade path is too troublesome they may switch to something else.
When XP ceases to be supported, no longer has patches, can no longer be activated, does not have drivers for new hardware etc... Those users could migrate to whatever MS offers at the time, safe in the knowledge that sooner or later they will be forced to migrate again, or they could seek alternatives. People don`t like change, but when it's forced upon them they may very well rebel against those doing the forcing.
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Corporates buy support for insurance purposes, not to actually use the support... They don't use it largely because it sucks these days, but not using it because the product works would fit too. They like having something to fall back on if something does go wrong, but are quite happy for nothing to go wrong at all. This works out well for support vendors, because you still get paid your annual contract but don't have to do much work... You are effectively selling insurance.
Most support calls are not related to software bugs, they are related to human bugs like the user not knowing enough about the software in use.
Maintenance and expansion of proprietary software is also extremely inefficient, you have multiple vendors each maintaining and expanding their own unique code, often implementing the same features but in a different way to a different codebase, with no ability to reuse code written by the others.
With OSS the code is reusable, so you don't need to keep reinventing the wheel, you can spend your time making actual improvements instead, and thus progress happens at a faster rate and costs less.
As you said, it's crappy and expensive, so perhaps people should get together to write something better...
Your using the crappy software, you can clearly identify the problems with it and presumably have the legal/financial/regulatory expertise necessary. Why not get together with some people to write something better? You can give the software away for free, while selling your expertise to those companies who use your software.
Also, when it comes to legal and regulatory issues, the government that created such issues should have a hand in making sure the information and tools necessary to deal with them is widely and freely available to all of it's citizens.
And inhouse software can often be garbage as you describe...
However an inhouse solution based on open source is unlikely to be, because there is no monopoly on the service, anyone else can take the software and build their own solution around it... Similar to the boxware model, only in the OSS model the individual service providers can make their own changes too instead of relying on the original vendor.
Any market where a business has a monopoly, those in charge of that business will see reducing quality and increasing prices as a low risk high gain strategy, and therefore just good business sense. The customers are locked in, so the number who will leave as a result of you screwing them will be very low.
The model of selling support is not really broken, it just doesn't bring the obscene levels of short term profit the investors want...
Selling an item that costs nothing will obviously produce massive profits and there is very little that can match such a profit margin, but sooner or later the customers will realize just how badly they are getting screwed.
Selling a support service on the other hand, will always have lower margins because you actually have to employ competent staff to provide the service, but it's also an ongoing service with a continuing stream of income.
A lot of these investors are only out for the short term gains, and are unconcerned about the long term sustainability of the business - look what's happened to the banking sector as a result of such behavior...
What resolution is the source video?
It's probably a low resolution video, being sent over the PCI bus at low resolution and then scaled by the GPU...
Try playing 1080p video on that.
Most of the productivity software and "enterprise solutions" MS sells depends on their OS monopoly..
If people are using Macs or Linux they won't be able to buy any other MS software (ok, a small number of apps for mac, nothing for linux).
Oracle isn't NUMA aware? Surely it depends more on the OS tho...
NUMA systems have been around for many years, SGI had such systems over 10 years ago... You'd have thought Oracle would have been able to take advantage of such systems...
Also, how much does the application need to be NUMA aware? Shouldn't the OS take care of most of it...
Linux has a big head start on windows when it comes to NUMA, due to having support from other architectures, and having 64bit AMD support for a lot longer than windows.
Yes, comparing a phenom 9500 (2.3ghz quad core) to a Q6600 (quad 2.4ghz) running gentoo linux, compiled with relatively conservative CFLAGS (-O2) with the cpu type set appropriately, the AMD chip performs very well and beats the Intel chip in some benchmarks...
Starting from a clean sheet didn't work, but remember IA64 was developed with HP...
It would have made a lot more sense to start with the Alpha, not a totally clean sheet but a much cleaner one than x86, with the added advantage of existing applications (microsoft were bound by a court order to port windows to it), existing x86 emulation which performs better clock for clock than the ia64 equivalent, very good support for linux and bsd, and it's own operating systems in tru64 and vms... And older systems on the market which hobbyists could pick up cheap to learn the architecture on and port OSS software, by the time IA64 became affordable for hobbyists it was pretty much irrelevant.
On IA64 even today, you have a relatively poorly supported linux, gcc produces really inefficient code and i doubt many OSS devs who might be interested in it actually have IA64 hardware available to them.
Yeah, i miss Alpha too...
What could have been if HP had continue Alpha instead of working on IA64... An existing architecture, well designed, existing customer base, existing applications and OS support, and availability of old cheap machines for hobbyists to learn the platform on. I think it would have been far more successful than IA64 has.
A lot of linux growth will also not be attributed to new sales...
Infact, most new linux users i've encountered installed it on their existing hardware, or bought a new machine with windows and put linux on the older one.
No one is buying a GNU/Linux netbook and then torturing themselves with a $200 XP install.
No, but a lot of people buy the cheaper linux netbook, and then install a pirated xp on it.
Don't think splunk is open source...
In the current market, unemployment is rising, costs are rising...
Using cheaper software is a good way to save money...
If that cheaper software requires more staff, hiring those staff is comparatively easier in the current market, and the savings from free software could easily pay for a few staff while still saving you money in a medium to large company.
And consider long term savings, once you have postgres competent staff on hand the choice to make future deployments on postgres is a no brainer.
Also using something that doesn't lock you in to a single supplier is extremely sensible in the long term.
How many companies make software products? I'm willing to bet the vast majority don't...
And even then, it's often permissible to link against OSS libraries without giving away the source of the program (you may have to distribute the library, which is open anyway).
But speaking of risk assessment, i hope your risk assessment of proprietary software includes the risks of not having a second source, because there is very little proprietary software for which a second source vendor is available if the first one goes bankrupt. And as you've nodoubt seen on the news lately, even the biggest companies can easily go bust.
Yes, niche software is far less likely to be covered...
But in those cases, i would still like to run the niche software on linux, If i have to pay for the apps then so be it, the underlying OS is not a niche product and i shouldn't have to pay for that as well, just like i shouldn't have to buy proprietary hardware for a generic purpose (i want it to run on standard hardware, tho specialized peripherals are ok if its really necessary).
As a salaried employee, he will be paid wether he implements a new proxy or not. If he has no other work to do at the time he would just be sitting idle so yes, the relative cost really could be $0.
Just goes to show that anything can be implemented badly...
Where i work we have 2 separate networks serving different parts of the company, one is all OSS while the other is primarily MS based.
The OSS one is faster, has better uptime, cost very little to build (runs entirely on hardware that was discarded by the MS oriented staff), and requires minimal maintenance. Users don't really notice any difference until something goes wrong, which happens far less frequently on the OSS network. The bean counters notice because of how under-budget the OSS based network is.
The MS guys are jealous of some of the fancy kit we have to play with, but we've still spent a lot less overall.
Because you get more detail on the larger screen... Making them very useful for graphics work among other things.
Larger resolutions also usually accompany larger screens.
What's stopping you decreasing the font size on the 1280x900 screen to get more stuff on the screen?
Screen dimensions need to map to real life sizes, you need to know that 1 screen inch equals 1 physical inch..
Font sizes are measured using points, 72 points equals 1 inch, if your system renders the text smaller on a higher resolution screen without you explicitly decreasing it's size then it's blatantly lying to you about the font size.
That's not to say you can't make the conscious decision to decrease the text size to fit more of it on the screen, and be able to decrease it while still being readable because of the higher resolution, but it should default to being the same size.
A font which claims to be 72pt in size should always be 1 inch high, allowing for varying characters of course.
If a font is claiming to be a certain size, it had better actually be that size, otherwise the measurement becomes completely arbitrary and meaningless.
When you print text on a 1200dpi printer does it come out at half the size than on a 600dpi printer?
The point was that support for ipv6 in xp is lacking behind the supported offered by vista...
Windows users don't expect to have to use the CLI for anything, remember the CLI is bad and that's why Linux sucks... Don't forget that any OS which forces you to use the CLI for anything must suck.
"if autoconfig didn't work you had to use the cli tools to configure it"
sure it works fine if you have a router advertising ipv6 correctly, but what if you don't or you have multiple routers or you want to set up a tunnel?
You would think, but this is often not the case..
A lot of people are good at following books and set tasks, but aren't any good at thinking for themselves.
People don't want to migrate away from XP, but sooner or later they will have no choice.
If by that time the alternatives suit their needs, and/or the forced migration away from xp pisses them off enough, and/or the offered upgrade path is too troublesome they may switch to something else.
When XP ceases to be supported, no longer has patches, can no longer be activated, does not have drivers for new hardware etc... Those users could migrate to whatever MS offers at the time, safe in the knowledge that sooner or later they will be forced to migrate again, or they could seek alternatives.
People don`t like change, but when it's forced upon them they may very well rebel against those doing the forcing.