Sorry to have offended. The use of windows does not preclude engineering ability, however, as sheer numbers go (as it has a dominant share of the desktop market) it has a larger number of clueless ISV's then does Solaris, PTX, AIX, BSD, Linux, or cross-platform centric shops.
Your odds of running across a group of morons selling a windows widget are higher then your odds of finding a good engineering shop selling widgets exclusively for windows. Not implying that the company at hand is a group of morons, and my impression has not been that case, but more saying I shouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the case.
Honestly if you have worked with windows for a while you cannot tell me with a straight face that the majority of software vendors for that platform have their shit together.
I agree that the idea of software is close to a recipe but it is also close to a music composition or essay. All three of them benefit the population with wider use and creativity that builds on them gives back..
The general concept is sound, except that other aspects of human existence are still driven by laws of scarcity and where the two worlds collide is the problem. Specifically, you want people to be able to feed themselves (at the very basic level) and still focus their efforts on their various productive talents (division of labor and specialization). Since material goods and energy are still scarce they have to be able to trade a specialized talent (like music) for matrial goods and energy. Since those other products are driven be a free market (and they will always be until a one-world governing body controls all materials and energy or the laws of scarcity are removed).
So the conflict, a music composition or software recipe benefit the community when they are shared and are improved upon when shared but a music or software specialist has to be able to feed themselves and still focus their efforts on their most productive talents. Things have started to get out of hand recently but the basic conflict is still there.
Like, I said, I don't like where things have gone with the patent system, but I know throwing it out entirely will also have negative consequenses.
In either case the consumer gets screwed as these costs get passed along, be it from lawsuit funding/defending or through lack of R&D investment.
Big corps do, on occasion, do valuable research and the investments are often justified to stockholders by saying they can patent and license what they discover.
Somehow it has gotten way out of control and the patent system has become as much of a disinsentive to produce and invent as an insentive.
Honestly I hate software patents but I cant figure out a good system that strikes that balance. I know time limits were a good mitigation factor but those are getting destroyed..
damn good point. one could argue that the best compromise between oversight and operational effectiveness (secrecy is part of that) is the existing checks and balances systems and things like the Information Act.
Obviously there has to be a blance and wherever there is a balnace to be struck there is conflict. I think we could use a few more pulls on the privacy and freedom side and this recent ruling is good to see.
the generic concept of loosely coupled services within the enterprise is not entirely new but is badly needed. At JPMorgan/BankOne where I was an architect having to sort out how we were going to get all these vendor packages, legacy systems, and new projects to play nice together it is a very hot topic.
The idea is to allow us to abstract away vendors and certain ugliness so that replacing them can be scheduled seperately.
the concept of loose coupling, abstraction layers, and generic services is just good programming practice taken to a system and network level. Pick up a copy of Pragmatic Programmer to get some ideas that are less buzz-word marketing jargon laden.
Actualy if you go back a number of years there was a Clancy novel that illustrated the use of non-lethal light or laser weapons to disrupt the landing of an aircraft. If you payed attantion to Clancy (and was in the military like I was at the time) you saw that most of his stories were based on actuall intel, events, and weapons capabilities. I am not saying much more then that but do a little digging before crying Ashcroft..;-)
Yes, yes, and yes. I chose poor specific examples, and I wasn't saying google was a database (although you could classify it as such possibly). The point being that they have different approaches to solving the same problem. Saying one isn't foccussed on doing things the way the other one does isn't the same as saying that one is worse then the other or cant solve the same problems.
Sun is a good OS, as is AIX, PTX and every other version of unix I have worked with. They all have some years of engineering behind them are well suited to certain niches. But I think BSD and Linux are both very good competitors for solving most business needs and have the most opportunity to do things in a better way.
Well, he is not far off the mark there. At the very large bank I used to work at the Capital Markets section was predominantly Unix (mostly solaris and sprinklings of linux and bsd). There were 5 sys admins and 1 manager running 144 servers. The NT server team for the commercial side had 20+ admins and 5 managers for about the same number of servers, slightly less. The unix systems ran the important financial trading applications which were orders of magnitude more sensitive and risky.
5 good unix admins at ~$100k yr, vs 5 good, 10 ok, 5 bad NT admins at ~$50k yr. You do the math.
The servers that crashed everytime a new virus/worm found its way into the corporate network? Add that cost.
The overall downtime for scheduled maintenance? Add that cost.. hmm..
Well assuming that you bought an expensive commercial distro and the hardware was the same for either windows or linux, your out-of-pocket cost for personnel would be $500k/yr for linux or $1mil/yr for windows. Add your soft cost (we lost $400k worth of trades for every hour of downtime on average) and you have a good idea of why its cheaper.
Actually, after reading the various posts, I would say that a version comparrison isn't worthwhile at all and as the Sun developer mentioned, Linux and Solaris have different philosophies and approaches. Where I dont agree with him is that they have different markets entirely.
As an example, he talks about swapping hardrives and CPU boards in failure events. From Suns perspective of selling an E10K for $1mil to a customer to solve a database problem (as an example), this is a very neccessary feature. From a customers perspective, however, I can solve this problem with either an E10K or a Linux cluster. In the linux cluster I wouldn't care about swapping out a CPU while the machine was running as I would swap out the machine and the _system_ would still be running. Google is solving a traditional big-iron problem very differently then the way Sun would solve it for them.
I disagree with the statement that since Sun solves problem X with solution Y and Linux uses solution Z that they are competing in different markets. Truly there are things that Sun can do that Linux isn't well suited for and vice versa, however, the majority of corporations out there do not fall in either of those two areas. Where Sun has an advantage is not in its technology to solve standard corporate problem X but in its unified marketing, training, support, and existing market base. Those are assets but they are not technical reasons why Solaris is better then Linux at solving the technical problems of a business.
Emotional opinions, aside, neither Clinton nor Bush have done anything to encourage any of the steps mentioned in the book. Congerssional votes have gone the way they have gone with either party in control.
I think the book is great and am going to email the people I know about it. I think that is worth more than voting against one party for no other reason that it makes you feel good.
LOL! I rather fit the profile, linux cluster for production servers, linux for desktop, *BSD, Solaris, and W2K for dev and experimintation.
I have toyed with the idea of FreeBSD for servers but I went with an OpenMOSIX linux cluster instead as I decided to go contrary to the standard n-tiering of systems. It could be my lack of knowledge but most of the clustering software out there that fits my architectural needs either doesn't exist for *BSD or is not ready for prime-time.
BTW, wouldn't NetBSD or a slimmed FreeBSD work on that P200?
Thats interesting, squirrelmail itself isnt that heavy, so it must be SSL.. I think the issue might be with Engarde itself. They do a lot of their own mucking about with their distro, rather proprietary OS.
Give Gentoo a shot, although I would go with a stage3 install as it may take you 3 days to compile from scratch on a P200;-)
Re:Sounds like the moral of the story is....
on
Mambo Users Threatened
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That is the key point. My company uses a lot of open-source, as a point wether we distribute it or not, we release back any changes we make to packages we use (not many changes yet, though).
This Connolly guy wants to make money off of worked derived from other people that was given to the community. Then he gets pissy because someone he hired to modify open-source code for his money-making scheme wrote similar code and gave it back to the community he based it off. Thats just sleazy.
If you go to their site their products are standard PHP Groupware and CMS packages. How they can call anything they do a "trade secret" is beyond me.
Think of it more as a utility. Many things in life that you depend on, you dont own.
My company is like salesforce.com in that it is 100% browser based and you are using it to manage parts of your business, completely different application and market but its still a rental/subscription/usage model.
The one thing I would look for that we built into our system, is control and access of your data. Just like a hosting company you would be dumb to have the only copies of your HTML on their server. Our system doesn't really keep any special data, but what we do, you have complete access to (exports and reports and all that).
One solution that I helped a friend develop for a very similar problem was to use Flash and its scripting capabilities in conjunction with HTTP POSTs to the real backend.
My site has a flash emulation of a limited *nix command line. http://www.rexiliusgroup.com/
If you click your mouse just about 10 pixels to the right of the command prompt you will get a cursor and you can do some basic commands. It was an ugly and quick hack done more out of irony and fun so dont pick on it too badly.
I think you are correct, and although my company is open-sourcing any modifications we make to the open-source packages we use, there is other code that we are not (more because it is so implementation specific and would be too much work to make a good package out of it). And since we are not distributing any software, just selling browser-based access/use to it, we dont think we are in violation to the GPL.
As a business, I do have to walk a line between giving away my work that was the big investment of my company and using community developed software in good faith and giving back to the system that helped me. Karma isn't just for slashdot.
I dont think that the only way to deliver software as a service is via SOAP.. My company is doing just that, selling access to software, hardware, and network bandwidth via a browser interface.
Really the cost we are passing on to our clients is actually more hardware and bandwidth as we use all open-source platform and have written all the software ourselves without outside funding.
Now can you say the browser interface sucks?.. well I suppose, but I think its a hell of a lot better then fat-thin client software and a lot better then buying and managing the hardware and software yourself.
That the middle-east is an important area to control is true. That it is the US that is most interested in this is false.
We draw less then 15% (give or take some fluctations in the last couple of years) of our oil from that region and its importance to us lies more in stopping the likes of Hitler or the Soviets from having the resources they would need to be more of a threat to us then our own oil needs. The other importance is in keeping our primary trading partners (EU, Japan) well supplied with cheaper oil so that they can continue to trade goods with us (a more direct and larger effect on our economy then the 15% oil import).
To say that the EU governments behave purely out of high-mindedness, brotherly love, and altruism when dealing with the middle east is either naive or a lie. To say that we care only about the middle east for oil for ourselves is either ill-informed or a lie. To say that our attempt to respond to terrorist attacks and threats is all about oil, or your faulty notions of oil, is either completely removed from reality or, you guessed it, a lie.
It is an obvious way to design in a lot of the problems that plague windows.
The questions of making these types of setting difficult as a trade-off for having the type of instability, security, and bloat issues that arise from windows-type registry are probably ones the unix world has asked itself. And the answer is generally, keep using windows until we find a better solution. Its not to say that the goal is not ease-of-use and that we will never address those issues, its just that we aren't forced into an ugly hack that will cause more problems then it fixes.
sorta, it relies on webdav and iCal and is an open standard but I was thinking of a method that might be easier for existing web sites to add. adding an RSS feed or a SOAP service is often easier for existing app servers/developers/packages, then adding webdav and iCal. not that they are really that different in difficulty but I could see a lot of, perhaps, mental barriers to the webdav/ical method.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to have offended. The use of windows does not preclude engineering ability, however, as sheer numbers go (as it has a dominant share of the desktop market) it has a larger number of clueless ISV's then does Solaris, PTX, AIX, BSD, Linux, or cross-platform centric shops.
Your odds of running across a group of morons selling a windows widget are higher then your odds of finding a good engineering shop selling widgets exclusively for windows. Not implying that the company at hand is a group of morons, and my impression has not been that case, but more saying I shouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the case.
Honestly if you have worked with windows for a while you cannot tell me with a straight face that the majority of software vendors for that platform have their shit together.
If I were posting to slashdot I would make sure my site could handle both the load and non-IE browsers.
I guess expecting intelligent engineering out of a software company that is MS-centric is a bit of a stretch, though.
Let me know when it supports more than Winblows.
Would love to use something like this for my company but I need cross-platform capability.
Give me a version that outputs W3C spec compliant UI code and runs on either Linux, OSX, or Solaris and I will make the investment.
And your website sign-up form is broken, by the way. At least it doesnt work in Mozilla on Linux. Would like to sign-up, but can't.
hehehe.. yeah, I am a bit irrational at times..
I agree that the idea of software is close to a recipe but it is also close to a music composition or essay. All three of them benefit the population with wider use and creativity that builds on them gives back..
The general concept is sound, except that other aspects of human existence are still driven by laws of scarcity and where the two worlds collide is the problem. Specifically, you want people to be able to feed themselves (at the very basic level) and still focus their efforts on their various productive talents (division of labor and specialization). Since material goods and energy are still scarce they have to be able to trade a specialized talent (like music) for matrial goods and energy. Since those other products are driven be a free market (and they will always be until a one-world governing body controls all materials and energy or the laws of scarcity are removed).
So the conflict, a music composition or software recipe benefit the community when they are shared and are improved upon when shared but a music or software specialist has to be able to feed themselves and still focus their efforts on their most productive talents. Things have started to get out of hand recently but the basic conflict is still there.
Like, I said, I don't like where things have gone with the patent system, but I know throwing it out entirely will also have negative consequenses.
In either case the consumer gets screwed as these costs get passed along, be it from lawsuit funding/defending or through lack of R&D investment.
Big corps do, on occasion, do valuable research and the investments are often justified to stockholders by saying they can patent and license what they discover.
Somehow it has gotten way out of control and the patent system has become as much of a disinsentive to produce and invent as an insentive.
Honestly I hate software patents but I cant figure out a good system that strikes that balance. I know time limits were a good mitigation factor but those are getting destroyed..
damn good point. one could argue that the best compromise between oversight and operational effectiveness (secrecy is part of that) is the existing checks and balances systems and things like the Information Act.
Obviously there has to be a blance and wherever there is a balnace to be struck there is conflict. I think we could use a few more pulls on the privacy and freedom side and this recent ruling is good to see.
the generic concept of loosely coupled services within the enterprise is not entirely new but is badly needed. At JPMorgan/BankOne where I was an architect having to sort out how we were going to get all these vendor packages, legacy systems, and new projects to play nice together it is a very hot topic.
The idea is to allow us to abstract away vendors and certain ugliness so that replacing them can be scheduled seperately.
the concept of loose coupling, abstraction layers, and generic services is just good programming practice taken to a system and network level. Pick up a copy of Pragmatic Programmer to get some ideas that are less buzz-word marketing jargon laden.
I didn't know him but my condolances to his family, friends, and the people and projects that relied on him.
I felt a little strange visting his personal site and reading his diary and seeing pictures knowing that those would be the last entries.
Cheers to his life and the contributions he made to the world.
Yeah.. we are all like that.. lighten up francis.
Actualy if you go back a number of years there was a Clancy novel that illustrated the use of non-lethal light or laser weapons to disrupt the landing of an aircraft. If you payed attantion to Clancy (and was in the military like I was at the time) you saw that most of his stories were based on actuall intel, events, and weapons capabilities. I am not saying much more then that but do a little digging before crying Ashcroft.. ;-)
Yes, yes, and yes. I chose poor specific examples, and I wasn't saying google was a database (although you could classify it as such possibly). The point being that they have different approaches to solving the same problem. Saying one isn't foccussed on doing things the way the other one does isn't the same as saying that one is worse then the other or cant solve the same problems.
Sun is a good OS, as is AIX, PTX and every other version of unix I have worked with. They all have some years of engineering behind them are well suited to certain niches. But I think BSD and Linux are both very good competitors for solving most business needs and have the most opportunity to do things in a better way.
Well, he is not far off the mark there. At the very large bank I used to work at the Capital Markets section was predominantly Unix (mostly solaris and sprinklings of linux and bsd). There were 5 sys admins and 1 manager running 144 servers. The NT server team for the commercial side had 20+ admins and 5 managers for about the same number of servers, slightly less. The unix systems ran the important financial trading applications which were orders of magnitude more sensitive and risky.
5 good unix admins at ~$100k yr, vs 5 good, 10 ok, 5 bad NT admins at ~$50k yr. You do the math.
The servers that crashed everytime a new virus/worm found its way into the corporate network? Add that cost.
The overall downtime for scheduled maintenance? Add that cost.. hmm..
Well assuming that you bought an expensive commercial distro and the hardware was the same for either windows or linux, your out-of-pocket cost for personnel would be $500k/yr for linux or $1mil/yr for windows. Add your soft cost (we lost $400k worth of trades for every hour of downtime on average) and you have a good idea of why its cheaper.
Actually, after reading the various posts, I would say that a version comparrison isn't worthwhile at all and as the Sun developer mentioned, Linux and Solaris have different philosophies and approaches. Where I dont agree with him is that they have different markets entirely.
As an example, he talks about swapping hardrives and CPU boards in failure events. From Suns perspective of selling an E10K for $1mil to a customer to solve a database problem (as an example), this is a very neccessary feature. From a customers perspective, however, I can solve this problem with either an E10K or a Linux cluster. In the linux cluster I wouldn't care about swapping out a CPU while the machine was running as I would swap out the machine and the _system_ would still be running. Google is solving a traditional big-iron problem very differently then the way Sun would solve it for them.
I disagree with the statement that since Sun solves problem X with solution Y and Linux uses solution Z that they are competing in different markets. Truly there are things that Sun can do that Linux isn't well suited for and vice versa, however, the majority of corporations out there do not fall in either of those two areas. Where Sun has an advantage is not in its technology to solve standard corporate problem X but in its unified marketing, training, support, and existing market base. Those are assets but they are not technical reasons why Solaris is better then Linux at solving the technical problems of a business.
How was that Insightful?
Emotional opinions, aside, neither Clinton nor Bush have done anything to encourage any of the steps mentioned in the book. Congerssional votes have gone the way they have gone with either party in control.
I think the book is great and am going to email the people I know about it. I think that is worth more than voting against one party for no other reason that it makes you feel good.
LOL! I rather fit the profile, linux cluster for production servers, linux for desktop, *BSD, Solaris, and W2K for dev and experimintation.
I have toyed with the idea of FreeBSD for servers but I went with an OpenMOSIX linux cluster instead as I decided to go contrary to the standard n-tiering of systems. It could be my lack of knowledge but most of the clustering software out there that fits my architectural needs either doesn't exist for *BSD or is not ready for prime-time.
BTW, wouldn't NetBSD or a slimmed FreeBSD work on that P200?
Thats interesting, squirrelmail itself isnt that heavy, so it must be SSL.. I think the issue might be with Engarde itself. They do a lot of their own mucking about with their distro, rather proprietary OS.
;-)
Give Gentoo a shot, although I would go with a stage3 install as it may take you 3 days to compile from scratch on a P200
That is the key point. My company uses a lot of open-source, as a point wether we distribute it or not, we release back any changes we make to packages we use (not many changes yet, though).
This Connolly guy wants to make money off of worked derived from other people that was given to the community. Then he gets pissy because someone he hired to modify open-source code for his money-making scheme wrote similar code and gave it back to the community he based it off. Thats just sleazy.
If you go to their site their products are standard PHP Groupware and CMS packages. How they can call anything they do a "trade secret" is beyond me.
That doesnt sound right.. what distro and did you compile openSSL from scratch?
I had a P2 266 serving SSL pages and it was fine on a minimal RH8 install with hand compiled apache/php/ssl..
Give Gentoo a shot also.. I was amazed at the difference..
Think of it more as a utility. Many things in life that you depend on, you dont own.
My company is like salesforce.com in that it is 100% browser based and you are using it to manage parts of your business, completely different application and market but its still a rental/subscription/usage model.
The one thing I would look for that we built into our system, is control and access of your data. Just like a hosting company you would be dumb to have the only copies of your HTML on their server. Our system doesn't really keep any special data, but what we do, you have complete access to (exports and reports and all that).
One solution that I helped a friend develop for a very similar problem was to use Flash and its scripting capabilities in conjunction with HTTP POSTs to the real backend.
My site has a flash emulation of a limited *nix command line. http://www.rexiliusgroup.com/
If you click your mouse just about 10 pixels to the right of the command prompt you will get a cursor and you can do some basic commands. It was an ugly and quick hack done more out of irony and fun so dont pick on it too badly.
I think you are correct, and although my company is open-sourcing any modifications we make to the open-source packages we use, there is other code that we are not (more because it is so implementation specific and would be too much work to make a good package out of it). And since we are not distributing any software, just selling browser-based access/use to it, we dont think we are in violation to the GPL.
As a business, I do have to walk a line between giving away my work that was the big investment of my company and using community developed software in good faith and giving back to the system that helped me. Karma isn't just for slashdot.
I dont think that the only way to deliver software as a service is via SOAP.. My company is doing just that, selling access to software, hardware, and network bandwidth via a browser interface.
Really the cost we are passing on to our clients is actually more hardware and bandwidth as we use all open-source platform and have written all the software ourselves without outside funding.
Now can you say the browser interface sucks?.. well I suppose, but I think its a hell of a lot better then fat-thin client software and a lot better then buying and managing the hardware and software yourself.
That the middle-east is an important area to control is true. That it is the US that is most interested in this is false.
We draw less then 15% (give or take some fluctations in the last couple of years) of our oil from that region and its importance to us lies more in stopping the likes of Hitler or the Soviets from having the resources they would need to be more of a threat to us then our own oil needs. The other importance is in keeping our primary trading partners (EU, Japan) well supplied with cheaper oil so that they can continue to trade goods with us (a more direct and larger effect on our economy then the 15% oil import).
To say that the EU governments behave purely out of high-mindedness, brotherly love, and altruism when dealing with the middle east is either naive or a lie. To say that we care only about the middle east for oil for ourselves is either ill-informed or a lie. To say that our attempt to respond to terrorist attacks and threats is all about oil, or your faulty notions of oil, is either completely removed from reality or, you guessed it, a lie.
It is an obvious way to design in a lot of the problems that plague windows.
The questions of making these types of setting difficult as a trade-off for having the type of instability, security, and bloat issues that arise from windows-type registry are probably ones the unix world has asked itself. And the answer is generally, keep using windows until we find a better solution. Its not to say that the goal is not ease-of-use and that we will never address those issues, its just that we aren't forced into an ugly hack that will cause more problems then it fixes.
sorta, it relies on webdav and iCal and is an open standard but I was thinking of a method that might be easier for existing web sites to add. adding an RSS feed or a SOAP service is often easier for existing app servers/developers/packages, then adding webdav and iCal. not that they are really that different in difficulty but I could see a lot of, perhaps, mental barriers to the webdav/ical method.