It is know clear that MS now admits that they meant 1.8 x 10^6 users transferred from Netware to Windows. In other words about 10^3 to 10^4 actual customers (companies) moved, on the assumption of about a mean of about 10^2 to 10^3 clients per migration.
As for mainframes... I don't know who is investing in new mainframes. All of my customers (government & financial) seem to be going with clusters of blade servers.
And who is the No.1 supplier of blade servers - IBM.
Most companies already have thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft productivity tools that their employees don't need to be retrained to use.
The nail in the coffin will be a distro that can run all those applications, plus their own. Until then, I can't sell it to management. They won't even look at it. And I'm sorry, but OpenOffice is NOT a replacement for M$ Office, if it looks slightly different then what people are used too, they won't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
MS Office 2007 has a substantially different user interface, Openoffice 2 is closer to the current Word interface. Companies will have to retrain for the MS Office upgrade. The old MS formats become obsolescent and MS introduces its new and untested XAML formats. Companies will have to decide whether to go with XAML supported by MS or ODF supported by Sun, IBM, Oracle and Adobe.
Vista will again present large changes in the user interface. It will also require a full hardware upgrade from the hardware used by most current XP systems. Novell SLED 10 with XGL and Beagle does everything new, that Vista promises, and does it on typical current hardware.
Some large corporations are going to do some costings some maybe a few are going to come to the conclusion that it is worth migrating both for financial savings and by escaping from being locked into a de facto monopoly supplier. It won't necessarily happen but it could happen over the next couple of years and be significant.
Stop selling products in Europe.
Deny tech support to companies/users in Europe.
Buy advertising stating why they're pulling out of the market.
Yes Yes Please do it Microsoft!
The backlash in Europe would be tremendous - against the US pigopolist corporations against US imperialism and its wars of agression. This could be the best thing that ever happened.
IBM is a consulting company - they provide hardware and software to support other company's infrastructure. The idea that they will convert their clients and potential clients to GNU/Linux is a kind of ridiculous in a market dominated by Windows.
IBM is aiming for platform agnostic software client, side with anything new based on the the Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) using Java as with IBM Workplace. The client side applications they produce will run on Linux, AIX, Mac OSX AND Windows
It is based on the Java Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) used by Workplace the Notes C++ code has been rewritten as an Eclipse plugin. The code can then be compiled to work on any platform that eclipse runs on; Linux, AIX , Mac OSX and Windows. I think the next Notes client release which will be based on Hannover is due later this year as Notes V7.0.
OOo is nothing short of butt-ugly on KDE.
It also looks pretty ugly on my GNOME as well with lousy system fonts. But on Windows I disagree with the first poster of this thread. I find it much more visually appealing that Word 2002 (which I have at work) on both XP and Win 2000. On visual appeal quite aside from any questions of of functionality OOo wins hands down.
As far as functionality goes I find OOo does everything I need. I recently prepared a 25 slide ODP presentation using OOo on Linux over the weekend. I saved the presentation in both ODP and PPT formats and took them to work on my USB key. I checked out the PPT file on Powerpoint and it looked perfect, I was all ready to go. Then I learnt that the laptop we normally use for our meetings was locked up in a cupboard and the person who normally had the key was not in. So I grabbed a laptop I have access to that had no MS Word on it (it is used for somewhat specialized function in the lab) and loaded a copy of OOo 2.0 on it. Then I gave the presentation using the ODP file and it all went perfectly.
At the end I showed the audience I was not using Powerpoint and that furthermore the presentation had been prepared on a computer that has no MS software on it in a open standard format (The presenation in part covered open standard format computer files for chemical structures) that MS doesn't and won't support.
Finally I pointed out that as major users of IBM software (we use Notes globally) the it might make more sense in the future to use IBM's support of ODF ruther than get bogged down into a radical upgrade to to MS Office 12 and its only senmi-open XAML format.
Abiword has one great feature on Linux, it works with images on the X-clipboard which Openoffice 2.0 doesn't (I know it works with the clipboard fully in Windows). I am a research chemist and I incorporate 2D chemical structures my documents. I can copy a structure drawing from Marvisnsketch and Jmoldraw (both cross platform Java apps) or Xdrawchem (a QT app whose Windows version is called Windrawchem) and they paste pefectly into Abiword, while with OOo I have to save them as files and then import them.
I now generally use Abiword as my main WP on Linux, at least for first drafts.
So I actually cringe when I see an article actually relating to open source.
The article is not about open source but about open standards. The two are not the same. You could use primarily only open standards but use only closed source software. For example IBM's implementation of ODF in Workplace and Sun's Staroffice are both closed source.
MS has been using the tactic with some of its more dubious FUDmongers (particularily with regard to ODF support in Mass.) of trying to deliberately confuse open standards and open source. I am not saying you are necessarily a MS FUDmonger but probably just duped by them.
Darwinism, when taken on itself, says the universe spontaniously came into existance for no reason whatsoever at all and that mankinds choices lead to his evolution,
Idiot - you have no idea what Darwinism is, or what modern evolutionary theory is for that matter.
Read The Origin of the Species and then come back and post. I have and therefore have a right to comment on Darwinism.
Because if they did MS would make sure each OEM copy of Windows overall cost them a little bit more than it does for HP and Lenovo. Dell profits go down and HP and Lenovo sales go up relatively. Tears and gnashing of teeth at Dell.
Anyone else find it incredibly ironic that many conservatives in the US enthusiastically support him?
What a lot of dreck - you US so-called "libertarians" make me want to vomit. You are so so dumb - as a libertarian socialist and a former member of the British Labour Party before Tony Bliar converted it to "New Labour", I can assure you Bliar's government has nothing to do with socialism.
The only difference between them and the Bush administration is that Bliar's government is more economically fiscally conservative than Bush (they don't run as huge deficits) while socially a little bit more liberal than Bush's in their support for gay rights. In terms of the suppression of civil liberties Bush and Bliar are about equivalent.
There are a few real socialists left in New Labour like Jeremy Corbyn but most have either left or sold out their principles.
If one counts all unixlike operating systems, you get $17.5 billion for Unix plus $5.3 billion for Linux equals $22.7 billion. This compares to $17.7 billion for Windows. *nix is the clear winner.
Yes, okay, but the bible is open to interpretation, isn't it?
Not to an American funtamentalist Christian they believe that the bible is the word of God and it is transparent and cannot be reinterpreted. Thus it has to be taken literally word for word. Presumably God dictated it word for word in English to the committee preparing the King James version.
American Chritian fundamentalists also believe that the World Council of Curches is a tool of Satan attempting to bring about the rule of the Anti-Christ, not to mention the "Rapture". Looney Tunes eh? They make even those damn Islamic fundamentalists look sane. I am just as worried about the American protestant fundamentalist "Ayatollahs" as the Islamic ones.
Be right or not, there are documented examples of people taking right choices or inspirations based on dreams, like i.e. Kekule's dream on benzene structure or other famous cases.
The other famous cases do don't include one of the best I know of, James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) graphically seeing the base pair interations in a dream. He had been trying to work out the significance of Chargaff's rules in the light of the chemical strucures of the bases composing DNA.
He was getting nowhere with conscious thought but it finally came to him in a dream while he was taking a nap in an armchair. This provided the the final idea needed to build the double helical model of DNA that helped Watson and Crick win their Nobel prizes.
If you haven't had broadband yet and only dialup, upgrading doesn't seem necessary. But once you've experienced the speed of broadband and the convenience of not having to dial up and log in, you'll never want to go back.
Not necessarily so. I have stuck with dialup at home but I have access broadband at work. I find that for general web browsing it is not really that much slower given the variable latency of the web servers supplying the pages viewed. If I want to download music or music videos, I can happily download them over dinner and have them ready when I have finished.
If I want some really large software downloads like the latest release of OOo I can download it at work put it on my usb key and then install it at home.
Also I have more security with a dynamic IP address and being offline most of the time. It means I dont feel the need to patch so often but then again if I had broadband that would be quicker. The principle reason why I don't upgrade to broadband is the extra cost it just doesn't seem worth it
I don't think Darwin's theory really says much about a guy getting cut open and having a bone removed, and a girl being made from that bone. Say what you want, but the fact of the matter is that those two verses absolutely CANNOT work alongside a theory of natural evolution. To call yourself a Christian and to support Darwin's theory is to compromise the system of beliefs and values that you base your life upon
You really believe that - hell you must be a real nutjob. Most real Christians interpret Genesis as a spiritual metaphor not a literal truth. But then I guess you are not a real Christian but just some sort of cultist.
By the way the theory of evolution is not a scientific fact it is a scientific theory just like the theory of relativity and quantum theory. These are the three best theories in modern science. Theory is as good as it gets in science. Scientific facts are what you build scientific theories on. No theory is ever scientifically proven. Current scientific theories are just the best theories in the light of all evidence that best describes the world we observe. Modern evolutionary theory describes it very well and is consistent with all the scientific evidence and is accepted by a large majority of Christians in the world today.
The trouble is, the vast majority of theists today follow particular religions that preclude this worldview
Wrong the majority of theists, at least Christian ones, belong to the Catholic, Anglican/Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Congregationalist, Unitarian or other mainstream churches that support evolution as being compatible with, but separate from religious belief. This is what the original posting on this thread is all about.
It is only a large section of Evangelicals and Southern Baptists that take a fundamentalist biblical literalist approach opposed the the theory of evolution and they are largely confined to the US.
I am an atheist, but I a have considerable respect for those christians that hold a theology that is compatible with modern science while only the deepest contempt for those dangerous fundamentalist that have launched a war science.
As a proponent of evolution, I'm sure you've heard arguments such as irreducible/specified complexity and life's beginnings hundreds of times. Allow me to ask you, merely out of curiosity rather than criticism - How do you defend your position against those arguments?
It is just one aspect of the fact that evolution is a falsifiable theory as all real scientific theories should be. It is a very good theory that as the great evolutionary biologist Dobzhansky put it: "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Dobzhansky was BTW a deeply commited Christian.
Modern evolutionary theory makes a great number of predictions in what we expect to find in our future observations, not merely retrodictions (which of themselves are not necessarily bad things), if any of these predictions were falsisfied (e.g. discovery of a Cambrian era mammal) the whole of evolutionary theory could potentially fail. However as evolution has proved to be a very robust theory, as new evidence continually reinforces the theory, it has become one of the best theories in modern science.
The arguement of "irreducible/specified complexity" is specious in the form it is usually presented. Basically what its proponents say is look how conmplicated a living organism is, how improbable it is that it could be created by chance. Evolution does not propose organisms are created by chance, it proposes that the random variation which evolutionary selection operates on are "created by chance". Darwin's statement: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." requires his opponents to demonstrate how a particular complex organ "could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications". The the opponents of theory of evolution have demonstrably failed to do so.
Oh yeah I remember it well, the establishment quaking in its boots when Johnny Rotten swore on the TV. The queen was gonna call out the army you know!
What amazed me at the time was how scared the establishment was - It showed the power of detournment. Say what you will about McLaren he introduced a lot a people to situationist ideas. I have just been listening to a recording the Pistols live on tour 30 years ago and its power and relevance today stands out like a skyscraper in the desert.
I too was around during the birth of British punk in the seventies - I will never forget seeing the Clash play the RAR rally in Victoria Park or for that matter seeing the Slits and Sham 69 play before the premiere of Don Letts' Punk Movie.
However Punk is an ongoing international movement new and impressive bands form all the time and all around the world. There are young punks carrying on the struggle against the pigopolists, against the empire and for an anarchic freedom that transcends the society of the spectacle. To compare these young punks who are the children of the enlightment (and us boring old fart middle aged punks for that matter) with the co-opted brain dead zombies we call chav's is an insult.
BTW Rik Mayall was not the punk in The Young Ones television series. It was Ade Edmundson who played the punk Vivian and he of course would have nutted you for this insult, impaling the three superglued metal stars on his forehead in your skull. No you haven't seen the pattern you just can't see the wood for the trees.
Impotent? Useless? This to me represents the best of all possible worlds with regards to the Conservative Party of Canada in power, or indeed any party.
Right on - eh!
Slashdot Mirror
It is know clear that MS now admits that they meant 1.8 x 10^6 users transferred from Netware to Windows. In other words about 10^3 to 10^4 actual customers (companies) moved, on the assumption of about a mean of about 10^2 to 10^3 clients per migration.
As for mainframes... I don't know who is investing in new mainframes. All of my customers (government & financial) seem to be going with clusters of blade servers. And who is the No.1 supplier of blade servers - IBM.
The nail in the coffin will be a distro that can run all those applications, plus their own. Until then, I can't sell it to management. They won't even look at it. And I'm sorry, but OpenOffice is NOT a replacement for M$ Office, if it looks slightly different then what people are used too, they won't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
MS Office 2007 has a substantially different user interface, Openoffice 2 is closer to the current Word interface. Companies will have to retrain for the MS Office upgrade. The old MS formats become obsolescent and MS introduces its new and untested XAML formats. Companies will have to decide whether to go with XAML supported by MS or ODF supported by Sun, IBM, Oracle and Adobe.
Vista will again present large changes in the user interface. It will also require a full hardware upgrade from the hardware used by most current XP systems. Novell SLED 10 with XGL and Beagle does everything new, that Vista promises, and does it on typical current hardware.
Some large corporations are going to do some costings some maybe a few are going to come to the conclusion that it is worth migrating both for financial savings and by escaping from being locked into a de facto monopoly supplier. It won't necessarily happen but it could happen over the next couple of years and be significant.
Yes Yes Please do it Microsoft!
The backlash in Europe would be tremendous - against the US pigopolist corporations against US imperialism and its wars of agression. This could be the best thing that ever happened.
Oh! dammit Miscrosoft is not that stupid.
pity !
IBM is aiming for platform agnostic software client, side with anything new based on the the Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) using Java as with IBM Workplace. The client side applications they produce will run on Linux, AIX, Mac OSX AND Windows
They have, the new client is called Hannover named after the location of the IBM technical forum where it was first announced:
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/hanno ver----announcing-the-next-post-7.0-version-of-lot us-notes
It is based on the Java Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) used by Workplace the Notes C++ code has been rewritten as an Eclipse plugin. The code can then be compiled to work on any platform that eclipse runs on; Linux, AIX , Mac OSX and Windows. I think the next Notes client release which will be based on Hannover is due later this year as Notes V7.0.
As far as functionality goes I find OOo does everything I need. I recently prepared a 25 slide ODP presentation using OOo on Linux over the weekend. I saved the presentation in both ODP and PPT formats and took them to work on my USB key. I checked out the PPT file on Powerpoint and it looked perfect, I was all ready to go. Then I learnt that the laptop we normally use for our meetings was locked up in a cupboard and the person who normally had the key was not in. So I grabbed a laptop I have access to that had no MS Word on it (it is used for somewhat specialized function in the lab) and loaded a copy of OOo 2.0 on it. Then I gave the presentation using the ODP file and it all went perfectly. At the end I showed the audience I was not using Powerpoint and that furthermore the presentation had been prepared on a computer that has no MS software on it in a open standard format (The presenation in part covered open standard format computer files for chemical structures) that MS doesn't and won't support.
Finally I pointed out that as major users of IBM software (we use Notes globally) the it might make more sense in the future to use IBM's support of ODF ruther than get bogged down into a radical upgrade to to MS Office 12 and its only senmi-open XAML format.
I now generally use Abiword as my main WP on Linux, at least for first drafts.
The article is not about open source but about open standards. The two are not the same. You could use primarily only open standards but use only closed source software. For example IBM's implementation of ODF in Workplace and Sun's Staroffice are both closed source.
MS has been using the tactic with some of its more dubious FUDmongers (particularily with regard to ODF support in Mass.) of trying to deliberately confuse open standards and open source. I am not saying you are necessarily a MS FUDmonger but probably just duped by them.
Idiot - you have no idea what Darwinism is, or what modern evolutionary theory is for that matter.
Read The Origin of the Species and then come back and post. I have and therefore have a right to comment on Darwinism.
Get a clue.
Thats why Dell won't promote its Linux desktops.
He stole his best ideas from the Icelandic Edda sagas, just as Wagner did.
What a lot of dreck - you US so-called "libertarians" make me want to vomit. You are so so dumb - as a libertarian socialist and a former member of the British Labour Party before Tony Bliar converted it to "New Labour", I can assure you Bliar's government has nothing to do with socialism.
The only difference between them and the Bush administration is that Bliar's government is more economically fiscally conservative than Bush (they don't run as huge deficits) while socially a little bit more liberal than Bush's in their support for gay rights. In terms of the suppression of civil liberties Bush and Bliar are about equivalent.
There are a few real socialists left in New Labour like Jeremy Corbyn but most have either left or sold out their principles.
If one counts all unixlike operating systems, you get $17.5 billion for Unix plus $5.3 billion for Linux equals $22.7 billion. This compares to $17.7 billion for Windows. *nix is the clear winner.
Not to an American funtamentalist Christian they believe that the bible is the word of God and it is transparent and cannot be reinterpreted. Thus it has to be taken literally word for word. Presumably God dictated it word for word in English to the committee preparing the King James version.
American Chritian fundamentalists also believe that the World Council of Curches is a tool of Satan attempting to bring about the rule of the Anti-Christ, not to mention the "Rapture". Looney Tunes eh? They make even those damn Islamic fundamentalists look sane. I am just as worried about the American protestant fundamentalist "Ayatollahs" as the Islamic ones.
The other famous cases do don't include one of the best I know of, James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) graphically seeing the base pair interations in a dream. He had been trying to work out the significance of Chargaff's rules in the light of the chemical strucures of the bases composing DNA.
He was getting nowhere with conscious thought but it finally came to him in a dream while he was taking a nap in an armchair. This provided the the final idea needed to build the double helical model of DNA that helped Watson and Crick win their Nobel prizes.
Not necessarily so. I have stuck with dialup at home but I have access broadband at work. I find that for general web browsing it is not really that much slower given the variable latency of the web servers supplying the pages viewed. If I want to download music or music videos, I can happily download them over dinner and have them ready when I have finished.
If I want some really large software downloads like the latest release of OOo I can download it at work put it on my usb key and then install it at home.
Also I have more security with a dynamic IP address and being offline most of the time. It means I dont feel the need to patch so often but then again if I had broadband that would be quicker. The principle reason why I don't upgrade to broadband is the extra cost it just doesn't seem worth it
You really believe that - hell you must be a real nutjob. Most real Christians interpret Genesis as a spiritual metaphor not a literal truth. But then I guess you are not a real Christian but just some sort of cultist.
By the way the theory of evolution is not a scientific fact it is a scientific theory just like the theory of relativity and quantum theory. These are the three best theories in modern science. Theory is as good as it gets in science. Scientific facts are what you build scientific theories on. No theory is ever scientifically proven. Current scientific theories are just the best theories in the light of all evidence that best describes the world we observe. Modern evolutionary theory describes it very well and is consistent with all the scientific evidence and is accepted by a large majority of Christians in the world today.
Wrong the majority of theists, at least Christian ones, belong to the Catholic, Anglican/Episcopalian, Methodist, Lutheran, Congregationalist, Unitarian or other mainstream churches that support evolution as being compatible with, but separate from religious belief. This is what the original posting on this thread is all about.
It is only a large section of Evangelicals and Southern Baptists that take a fundamentalist biblical literalist approach opposed the the theory of evolution and they are largely confined to the US.
I am an atheist, but I a have considerable respect for those christians that hold a theology that is compatible with modern science while only the deepest contempt for those dangerous fundamentalist that have launched a war science.
It is just one aspect of the fact that evolution is a falsifiable theory as all real scientific theories should be. It is a very good theory that as the great evolutionary biologist Dobzhansky put it: "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Dobzhansky was BTW a deeply commited Christian.
Modern evolutionary theory makes a great number of predictions in what we expect to find in our future observations, not merely retrodictions (which of themselves are not necessarily bad things), if any of these predictions were falsisfied (e.g. discovery of a Cambrian era mammal) the whole of evolutionary theory could potentially fail. However as evolution has proved to be a very robust theory, as new evidence continually reinforces the theory, it has become one of the best theories in modern science.
The arguement of "irreducible/specified complexity" is specious in the form it is usually presented. Basically what its proponents say is look how conmplicated a living organism is, how improbable it is that it could be created by chance. Evolution does not propose organisms are created by chance, it proposes that the random variation which evolutionary selection operates on are "created by chance". Darwin's statement: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." requires his opponents to demonstrate how a particular complex organ "could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications". The the opponents of theory of evolution have demonstrably failed to do so.
You are not a Crackberry addict.
Welcome to Freenux.
Port the Google Desktop to Linux on it ?
What amazed me at the time was how scared the establishment was - It showed the power of detournment. Say what you will about McLaren he introduced a lot a people to situationist ideas. I have just been listening to a recording the Pistols live on tour 30 years ago and its power and relevance today stands out like a skyscraper in the desert.
I too was around during the birth of British punk in the seventies - I will never forget seeing the Clash play the RAR rally in Victoria Park or for that matter seeing the Slits and Sham 69 play before the premiere of Don Letts' Punk Movie.
However Punk is an ongoing international movement new and impressive bands form all the time and all around the world. There are young punks carrying on the struggle against the pigopolists, against the empire and for an anarchic freedom that transcends the society of the spectacle. To compare these young punks who are the children of the enlightment (and us boring old fart middle aged punks for that matter) with the co-opted brain dead zombies we call chav's is an insult.
BTW Rik Mayall was not the punk in The Young Ones television series. It was Ade Edmundson who played the punk Vivian and he of course would have nutted you for this insult, impaling the three superglued metal stars on his forehead in your skull. No you haven't seen the pattern you just can't see the wood for the trees.
Impotent? Useless? This to me represents the best of all possible worlds with regards to the Conservative Party of Canada in power, or indeed any party. Right on - eh!