It is with documents the same as with old media/tapes: when you buy into a new technology, you convert all of your media to the new format.
The advantages are: * you have confirmation that you could still read your old data. * you have the data in a format for which you have the equipment. This has been best practice in mainframe land for ages.
When you move your data to a new application (including a new version of the same application) it is best practice to convert all data to the new format.
The advantages are: * you have confirmation that you can read all your data. * you have converted all documents while you were really aware of the pitfalls of the current conversion. * you do not compound the complexity by converting from several data formats.
The disadvatage is: * it takes discipline and effort.
NB as to "de facto standard", it is your customer, your supplier who decides what standards are acceptable. When you live in Brasil, Open Office may be the standard and you DO NOT argue with your government. You expect your application to read/write the appropriate formats acceptable to your government.
In Europe there was this entrepeneur totally pissed off with the USA. He created a COLA called Mecca Cola. From the receipts a part goes to the Palestinian cause. His brand is doing exceedingly well, he is exporting to Arabia..
A product like Coca Cola is sold because of its marketing, when its message does strike a discord, it just will not sell.
Then again what IS cola but a fizzy sugar drink with a flavour?
According to Microsoft man you pay a company for the services as "the industry now accepts that Linux is commercial software: it carries a significant acquisition cost and is typically bundled with suppliers' proprietary software and services."
Blatant FUD. What you have are two tracks: the track that is highly published where companies like RedHat, SUSE, IBM et al score big implementation trajects. They are the same type of trajects that would also have a similar consultancy aspect regarless of the infrastructure. The other track is more low key, this is where a system here, a system there is converted to another platform generating the climate both intelectually and emotionally towards the next step. These tracks exist regardless of platform.
The second track does not need expensive consulting and expensive maintenance contracts in an Open Source environment. They need time and sweat.
Some googling including "2003" will give you that Mr Terpstra is the former SCO evangelist. So all who go to heckle might want to know who is talking and where he stands at the moment.
Thanks,
Gerard
Microsoft is good at comparing their latest product with yesterday's news. The Microsoft figures were a comparison with Samba 2. Not only that, the Samba software configuration was not exactly great if memory serves me well.
In Germany SCO was gagged for spoiling the environment for Linux companies. SCO spoiled things by claiming that SCO IP is in Linux without providing proof.
Therefore as long as SCO does not provide proof it falls foul of the German court order and have to pay a penalty as they just did.
The IBM case has nothing to do with it. SCO can say in an American court what it likes. I am sure that the American judge wants proof from SCO in order to validate their point.
WHY they got this fine is because they said things that they did not substantiate. They were under orders NOT to do that. They were punished for asserting things without the needed prove. Without knowing their "prove" we do not know if it is accurate or assertions of dubious value. Thanks,
Gerard
SCO has been fined for saying things without proof/ Where SCO to say the same things and substantiating their claim, it would be ok for them to say so.
It is scary how people know that I would refer to Microsoft's stuff. Really, I am not impressed by what Microsoft has to offer. It is imho a watered down version of what Novell does much better.
As to your assertion that the Open Source system management tools are good, compare them to enterprise functionality as offered by some of the proprietary companies. The bottom line is delivered by a flexible integrated system where a few good man can reliably MANAGE many servers in a WAN network with thousands of people working in many locations. As far as I am aware there are great OSS tools but the integration required is not there (yet).
IBM's Tivoli uses bash, perl in a major way. Scripting in a Novell environment is powerfull.
By the way, GUI tools can be very effective a picture paints a thousand words, certainly in the hands of a few good man.
If business is to be held for its actions or inactions, it is not something that you want for IT only. When an accountant is held personally responsible for the integrity of money transfers, it would be the end of money laundering. We would be seen to have many more white collar criminals. There is a huge intrest NOT to make people / companies accountable for their actions.
When you are to be held responsible for the security of your systems, you need management tools that enable you to do your job; to patch / modify / verify. System management will again be primary to the business now order to prevent costs due to "negligence". This while the trent has been that system management is there to manage the systems for the business..
As Linux exists in its distributions, only the distribution with the best implemented system management tools will survive in a corporate setting. When Linux is to be ready for the desktop, it must be easy to adjust 20.000 systems with patches and/or policy changes. Servers are different from desktops in the ratio of sysadmins per system...
With Novell you can have the control that you require. When you want to control the patches, Novell can. When you want to control systems you can. You can have policies that only allow use of the firewall from systems known by the Neware network.
With Novell being there for any operating system, you do not have to rely on AD. I am not up to date enough to know to what extend you can control Linux systems, but Windows systems can be totally controlled by the system administrators.
To make this work it has one BIG requirement: as a system operator you have to be transparant in your policies. Lab systems are NOT dormitory systems and therefore have different policies. Your students are CUSTOMERS. Treat them right, they may grumble but will not complain.
Not only that, Fawlty Towers without commercials. The BBC does not do commercials..:)
Another great reason to love BBC is their BBC worldservice AM 648:)
With Novell being great as a directory company and Ximian great as a desktop company, I would expect to see security and ease of administration for Linux desktops to be the great beneficiary. This could become available as a proprietary solution or as an open source solution. In either the quality and ease of administring Linux application will improve.
What I am happy with is that Novell first proved itself as a good member of the community before they bought Ximian.
I am wondering, is this a Linux distribution or is it a breakaway project? Some time ago there were similar stories about an Asian Linux. There have been grumblings from RedHat that the Chinese were not contributing towards the "Linus" Linux.
Is Asia going a seperate way with OSS and if so can someone explain why this is happening?
Thanks,
Gerard
Update: Link renders well on Mozilla !!
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
I notified GTW associates and asked them to remedy their non standard page makeup.
They were so gracious to fix things. It works fine for me (Mozilla). If you have seen the old version, you may need to reload the page.. Thanks,
Gerard
Running shoes have made an amazing change for me over time. I have US size 13,5 feet. The first shoes I bought when I was 18 did not fit. They did not exist. Now there are a lot of shoes that fit more or less. When you have a big size they do not go by halves so I can buy 13 or 14.
The technology is great; the shock absorption, the weight, the progress has been awesome.
The main drawback is that the milage you can get our of running shoes is less than stellar. Some shoes have a max of 600 km. When you consider that some run 100 km a week.. The sturdy shoes average 1500 km. Good are Asics, New Balance and Brooks.
The shock absorbtion materials in shoes bounce back over time so it is a smart move to have two pairs and alternate them. This enhances the longevity a lot.
The great thing about good shoes is that they prevent injuries. But that is true only when you wear the right shoes for YOUR feet. It really pays to buy them in a speciality shop.
Having people that think this kind of equipment is nice to have are * destroying their hearing (their problem) * major sound polluters (not only their problem) On the risk of being told I troll, people with sound systems that can be heard in a car next to you or on the sidewalk should be measured and if it exceeds the maximum sound levels for their motors they should have to give up their stereo.
This may be contrary to US culture but this is a bit that we do not need.
Freedom goes as far as where the freedom of others starts.
Linux has things like LSB, the Linux Standard Base. All these companies contribute towards one Linux and take THEIR pick out of the applications they support. For security they share their insights into what they find. You can say a lot about the RedHat GUI but it did stimulate Gnome and KDE to increase their cooperation. My point is, all these companies struggle with the FACT that they have to distinguish themselves while their work IS open source. Everyone can take note (and does) of what they do and can incorporate the innovations.
This is not Unix where all software is proprietaty and where you have to program all features yourself to compete. It is a different ballgame.
With SCO disconitinuing their distribution, Linux as a whole is not worse off. A distribution is valuable for the value that they add. (SCO does not add value they destroy what is good, everybodies time and "their" IP). When someone cares to continue the SCO distribution, everybody can as the code is available. But in the same vain there is less of a lock in, current users of the SCO distro can move relatively easy.
Conclusion, you think in terms of Linux needing only one version one orgnisation to succeed. It is alive and well and doing insanely great without it. Thanks,
Gerard
Even though all this huha can be considered important, the BBC website does not deem it important. CNN mentions it under the heading "more news".
I spoke to a senior person of a big Telco, he knows who SCO is but was not aware about the treat to AIX customers re their licenses (the SCO story) the non issue (the IBM story).
I think this issue has had more funnies and comments than most other topics. But really, the world at large is not aware; it was not in my paper this morning.
Thanks,
Gerard
When there is a choise between proprietary programmers and Open Source programmers; it is in the macro economic intrest of a government to have the programmers within its realm.
Given the profit margins on software, there is a lot that can be spent on programmers without affecting the economic balance and the taxpayers..
Thanks,
Gerard
Microsoft is not above the law. Microsoft can operate in certain bands. These bands are the law of the lands and its contracts.
Microsoft can buy its way out of many situations. But when it is clear how the market is manipulated, where the money goes, it becomes possible to assess the law, the contracts vis a vis what is done.
So yes, by documenting what is objectively done, you get a situation where a Dell can ask for the same rebate, where a justice department can start an investigation, where another organisation decides that there is an alternative and look into it. Thanks, Gerard
In databases, you have your actions and when a sequence of events start, they are committed at the end of the event cycle. When you change things, there is a sequence of events that lead to a "stable" state. When the stable state has arrived, you commit. When you decide that it is no good anyway there is the possibility of a roll-back; everything is rolled back to a last known good state.
In practice it would mean that changes are logged and possibly after logging changes are effectuated. This does result in overhead and in potential vulnerabilities (both for hackers and for errors).
Things like this also reek like what a "standardised" hardware and software would look like. How else can you control the quality of such a system? NB this does not mean that a Linux BSD is inferior, it would only be more obvious and visible what went right what went wrong. Thanks,
Gerard
A product that is not sold is vaporware; speculation, not real.
Microsoft is important; they move and shake the industry. They keep intrest in their products by producing "beta's or alpha's". This marketing trick allows them to say: "this may be in tbe new product". The product will not ship for such a long time that producing static without these alpha's and beta's is legally iffie.
If you get real, Longhorn is there for the long haul. Not for now and not for the next two years. Forget it for now it is not relevant.
Thanks,
Gerard
Slashdot Mirror
It is with documents the same as with old media/tapes: when you buy into a new technology, you convert all of your media to the new format.
The advantages are:
* you have confirmation that you could still read your old data.
* you have the data in a format for which you have the equipment.
This has been best practice in mainframe land for ages.
When you move your data to a new application (including a new version of the same application) it is best practice to convert all data to the new format.
The advantages are:
* you have confirmation that you can read all your data.
* you have converted all documents while you were really aware of the pitfalls of the current conversion.
* you do not compound the complexity by converting from several data formats.
The disadvatage is:
* it takes discipline and effort.
NB as to "de facto standard", it is your customer, your supplier who decides what standards are acceptable. When you live in Brasil, Open Office may be the standard and you DO NOT argue with your government. You expect your application to read/write the appropriate formats acceptable to your government.
In Europe there was this entrepeneur totally pissed off with the USA. He created a COLA called Mecca Cola. From the receipts a part goes to the Palestinian cause. His brand is doing exceedingly well, he is exporting to Arabia..
A product like Coca Cola is sold because of its marketing, when its message does strike a discord, it just will not sell.
Then again what IS cola but a fizzy sugar drink with a flavour?
According to Microsoft man you pay a company for the services as "the industry now accepts that Linux is commercial software: it carries a significant acquisition cost and is typically bundled with suppliers' proprietary software and services."
Blatant FUD. What you have are two tracks: the track that is highly published where companies like RedHat, SUSE, IBM et al score big implementation trajects. They are the same type of trajects that would also have a similar consultancy aspect regarless of the infrastructure. The other track is more low key, this is where a system here, a system there is converted to another platform generating the climate both intelectually and emotionally towards the next step. These tracks exist regardless of platform.
The second track does not need expensive consulting and expensive maintenance contracts in an Open Source environment. They need time and sweat.
Thanks,
Gerard
Some googling including "2003" will give you that Mr Terpstra is the former SCO evangelist. So all who go to heckle might want to know who is talking and where he stands at the moment. Thanks, Gerard
Microsoft is good at comparing their latest product with yesterday's news. The Microsoft figures were a comparison with Samba 2. Not only that, the Samba software configuration was not exactly great if memory serves me well.
In Germany SCO was gagged for spoiling the environment for Linux companies. SCO spoiled things by claiming that SCO IP is in Linux without providing proof.
Therefore as long as SCO does not provide proof it falls foul of the German court order and have to pay a penalty as they just did.
The IBM case has nothing to do with it. SCO can say in an American court what it likes. I am sure that the American judge wants proof from SCO in order to validate their point.
Thanks,
Gerard
WHY they got this fine is because they said things that they did not substantiate. They were under orders NOT to do that. They were punished for asserting things without the needed prove. Without knowing their "prove" we do not know if it is accurate or assertions of dubious value.
Thanks,
Gerard
SCO has been fined for saying things without proof/ Where SCO to say the same things and substantiating their claim, it would be ok for them to say so.
A hell of a difference.
It is scary how people know that I would refer to Microsoft's stuff. Really, I am not impressed by what Microsoft has to offer. It is imho a watered down version of what Novell does much better.
As to your assertion that the Open Source system management tools are good, compare them to enterprise functionality as offered by some of the proprietary companies. The bottom line is delivered by a flexible integrated system where a few good man can reliably MANAGE many servers in a WAN network with thousands of people working in many locations. As far as I am aware there are great OSS tools but the integration required is not there (yet).
IBM's Tivoli uses bash, perl in a major way. Scripting in a Novell environment is powerfull.
By the way, GUI tools can be very effective a picture paints a thousand words, certainly in the hands of a few good man.
If business is to be held for its actions or inactions, it is not something that you want for IT only. When an accountant is held personally responsible for the integrity of money transfers, it would be the end of money laundering. We would be seen to have many more white collar criminals. There is a huge intrest NOT to make people / companies accountable for their actions.
When you are to be held responsible for the security of your systems, you need management tools that enable you to do your job; to patch / modify / verify. System management will again be primary to the business now order to prevent costs due to "negligence". This while the trent has been that system management is there to manage the systems for the business..
As Linux exists in its distributions, only the distribution with the best implemented system management tools will survive in a corporate setting. When Linux is to be ready for the desktop, it must be easy to adjust 20.000 systems with patches and/or policy changes. Servers are different from desktops in the ratio of sysadmins per system...
Thanks,
Gerard
With Novell you can have the control that you require. When you want to control the patches, Novell can. When you want to control systems you can. You can have policies that only allow use of the firewall from systems known by the Neware network.
With Novell being there for any operating system, you do not have to rely on AD. I am not up to date enough to know to what extend you can control Linux systems, but Windows systems can be totally controlled by the system administrators.
To make this work it has one BIG requirement: as a system operator you have to be transparant in your policies. Lab systems are NOT dormitory systems and therefore have different policies. Your students are CUSTOMERS. Treat them right, they may grumble but will not complain.
Thanks,
Gerard
Not only that, Fawlty Towers without commercials. The BBC does not do commercials.. :)
Another great reason to love BBC is their BBC worldservice AM 648 :)
With Novell being great as a directory company and Ximian great as a desktop company, I would expect to see security and ease of administration for Linux desktops to be the great beneficiary. This could become available as a proprietary solution or as an open source solution. In either the quality and ease of administring Linux application will improve.
What I am happy with is that Novell first proved itself as a good member of the community before they bought Ximian.
I am wondering, is this a Linux distribution or is it a breakaway project? Some time ago there were similar stories about an Asian Linux. There have been grumblings from RedHat that the Chinese were not contributing towards the "Linus" Linux. Is Asia going a seperate way with OSS and if so can someone explain why this is happening? Thanks, Gerard
I notified GTW associates and asked them to remedy their non standard page makeup.
They were so gracious to fix things. It works fine for me (Mozilla). If you have seen the old version, you may need to reload the page..
Thanks,
Gerard
Running shoes have made an amazing change for me over time. I have US size 13,5 feet. The first shoes I bought when I was 18 did not fit. They did not exist. Now there are a lot of shoes that fit more or less. When you have a big size they do not go by halves so I can buy 13 or 14.
.. The sturdy shoes average 1500 km. Good are Asics, New Balance and Brooks.
The technology is great; the shock absorption, the weight, the progress has been awesome.
The main drawback is that the milage you can get our of running shoes is less than stellar. Some shoes have a max of 600 km. When you consider that some run 100 km a week
The shock absorbtion materials in shoes bounce back over time so it is a smart move to have two pairs and alternate them. This enhances the longevity a lot.
The great thing about good shoes is that they prevent injuries. But that is true only when you wear the right shoes for YOUR feet. It really pays to buy them in a speciality shop.
PS IANASSM
Gerard
Having people that think this kind of equipment is nice to have are
* destroying their hearing (their problem)
* major sound polluters (not only their problem)
On the risk of being told I troll, people with sound systems that can be heard in a car next to you or on the sidewalk should be measured and if it exceeds the maximum sound levels for their motors they should have to give up their stereo.
This may be contrary to US culture but this is a bit that we do not need.
Freedom goes as far as where the freedom of others starts.
Linux has things like LSB, the Linux Standard Base.
All these companies contribute towards one Linux and take THEIR pick out of the applications they support.
For security they share their insights into what they find.
You can say a lot about the RedHat GUI but it did stimulate Gnome and KDE to increase their cooperation. My point is, all these companies struggle with the FACT that they have to distinguish themselves while their work IS open source. Everyone can take note (and does) of what they do and can incorporate the innovations.
This is not Unix where all software is proprietaty and where you have to program all features yourself to compete. It is a different ballgame.
With SCO disconitinuing their distribution, Linux as a whole is not worse off. A distribution is valuable for the value that they add. (SCO does not add value they destroy what is good, everybodies time and "their" IP). When someone cares to continue the SCO distribution, everybody can as the code is available. But in the same vain there is less of a lock in, current users of the SCO distro can move relatively easy.
Conclusion, you think in terms of Linux needing only one version one orgnisation to succeed. It is alive and well and doing insanely great without it.
Thanks,
Gerard
Even though all this huha can be considered important, the BBC website does not deem it important. CNN mentions it under the heading "more news". I spoke to a senior person of a big Telco, he knows who SCO is but was not aware about the treat to AIX customers re their licenses (the SCO story) the non issue (the IBM story). I think this issue has had more funnies and comments than most other topics. But really, the world at large is not aware; it was not in my paper this morning. Thanks, Gerard
I have been wondering for a long time what IANAL means. Thanks. IANAA (I am not an American..) so I do not have this obsession with lawyers.
When there is a choise between proprietary programmers and Open Source programmers; it is in the macro economic intrest of a government to have the programmers within its realm. Given the profit margins on software, there is a lot that can be spent on programmers without affecting the economic balance and the taxpayers.. Thanks, Gerard
Microsoft is not above the law. Microsoft can operate in certain bands. These bands are the law of the lands and its contracts.
Microsoft can buy its way out of many situations. But when it is clear how the market is manipulated, where the money goes, it becomes possible to assess the law, the contracts vis a vis what is done.
So yes, by documenting what is objectively done, you get a situation where a Dell can ask for the same rebate, where a justice department can start an investigation, where another organisation decides that there is an alternative and look into it.
Thanks,
Gerard
When you get into an accident, it helps to have accurate information. When BOTH cars have an recorder accidents are less of a mistery.
:)
It could also help to establish the fact that you drove throught red lighst when the data on traffic lights were kept for say a day.
What it accomplishes is safer roads; people are not free to go against traffic regulations as this endangers others by doing so.
PS how about combining black boxes with GPS
Thanks,
Gerard
In databases, you have your actions and when a sequence of events start, they are committed at the end of the event cycle. When you change things, there is a sequence of events that lead to a "stable" state. When the stable state has arrived, you commit. When you decide that it is no good anyway there is the possibility of a roll-back; everything is rolled back to a last known good state.
In practice it would mean that changes are logged and possibly after logging changes are effectuated. This does result in overhead and in potential vulnerabilities (both for hackers and for errors).
Things like this also reek like what a "standardised" hardware and software would look like. How else can you control the quality of such a system? NB this does not mean that a Linux BSD is inferior, it would only be more obvious and visible what went right what went wrong.
Thanks,
Gerard
A product that is not sold is vaporware; speculation, not real. Microsoft is important; they move and shake the industry. They keep intrest in their products by producing "beta's or alpha's". This marketing trick allows them to say: "this may be in tbe new product". The product will not ship for such a long time that producing static without these alpha's and beta's is legally iffie. If you get real, Longhorn is there for the long haul. Not for now and not for the next two years. Forget it for now it is not relevant. Thanks, Gerard