I guess what I want to say is that companies should aim to support every distribution and focus their QA attention on certifying a few rather than aiming to support only a few, as IBM seems to do, at least with Lotus Notes.
Also, not every distro puts the same files in the same place. Some might put something in/opt, others in/usr/bin, still others in/usr/sbin. Some might put config files in/usr/etc, and so on../configure --prefix=/usr/local
Why can't companies release software with a script that checks to see if you have all the required dependencies and tells you exactly what you are missing? Maybe you could call it 'configure'. And then they could have a command that would install the program. The command could take parameters to do slightly different things. Maybe you could have a configuration file for this program. The program could be called 'make', and the configuration files, 'Makefile'.
But no, they have to have spiffy graphical installers (Remember: don't run X as root!), that give you such helpful messages as "Could not validate Mozilla version." before exiting with no output to standard out.
I got DB2 to work just fine. No thanks to the installer - I had to figure out which RPMs I needed and use alien to install them. Lotus Notes/Workspaced Managed Client is a different story. I guess if it worked well and made sense, it just wouldn't be Lotus Notes.
Probably not. IBM's products don't really work on Linux, they work on one particular outdated version of RHEL and one version of Suse. I recently spoke to tech support about IBM Workspace Managed Client failing to install on Debian, and was told over and over that the only reason it gave me a particular error was because I needed to install a particular outdated version of Mozilla in a particular directory, and make a particular file with a line pointing to it. Over and over I tried this, and it did not work. They seem to have no idea how their installer works, much less care to do anything about it.
Do your developers use Firefox and heavily utilize features/plugins such as Live HTTP Headers, Firebug, DOM Inspector, and the Javascript Console? Are you going to piss them off by making them work in IE? The cost of having to replace developers and the cost of decreased productivity alone may sway your decision.
"We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source."
s/the open source community/Sun and \1 s/found a way/Sun provided a way
Do you _use_ Windows? I wasted 2 hours a few days ago finding out that I have to rewrite a bunch of scripts because Windows has an insanely short maximum command line argument length, and if you hit it it chops off your arguments and sticks a "D" at the end. Several times a I have coworkers come to me to have me run batch jobs on my Linux box because it will take me 2 minutes to do something that Windows make incredibly difficult. When they ask me to adapt my scripts to Cygwin/bash, it always takes me longer to deal with the stupidities of Windows than it took me to write the script in the first place.
Windows is a mediocre appliance. It is a terrible operating system.
There is insufficient scientific evidence to disprove many religions*. If you are basing your statements on scientific data and logical argument, you must allow that it is possible that some being created the universe and set up some rules for entry into heaven and guided some people to speak those rules. You must also allow that there may be no such supreme being. At least until we have further evidence one way or the other.
* Even if you could dispute some specific recorded happening of thousands of years ago that appears in some ancient religious text, you must consider that many ancient religious texts were understood as fiction or semi-fiction at the time of writing and thereafter, but are still illustrative of principles of the religion, and that does not mean that other (perhaps more supernatural) assertions of the religious are false.
Have you tried to install Lotus Notes on Linux? It is a disaster. Depends on an old deprecated version of Mozilla, and it is undocumented how the installer actually tries to find where it is. I, after many angry hours, got it working on a fresh install of Debian testing. But it won't work on my existing Debian testing box. Over and over it tells me "Cannot validate Mozilla version." That was useful. Thanks IBM. I tried calling IBM to get help. In 3 hours on the phone I could not find somebody who even knew that Lotus Notes for Linux existed, and had several people insist to me that it did not, despite the fact that they took my $140 for it.
I set up Trac at our 8 person office two weeks ago. I can't really comment on how well it is going because it has only been a few weeks, but I am very impressed with the ease with which you can add fields to the tickets and create reports based on those fields.
The infrastructure for cell phones isn't there yet though. I had two choices when choosing a phone company: a company full of lying idiots with terrible customer service, but fantastic coverage (Verizon), or no coverage where I live (little town of 1,000). In the US, Verizon could do this; they have the network. The other carriers are still putting up their towers.
Good advice. Remember, the HR department works for the company, not for you; and by HR's name alone, they are putting you in the same category as servers and office supplies.
Encrypt everything but/boot and use loop-aes with GPG, and put the key on a USB drive. If somebody demands that you decrypt, you accidentally drop the USB drive on the floor and step on it. Or flush it down the toilet. I don't expect this to protect my data from large governments that really want it, but it will probably make it enough of a hassle to ignore me if they are just being jerks and don't have a reason to believe that I actually committed a crime.
DRM will not stop satire or building on other people's work. To quote from xpdf.com:
"But copyright law allows me to quote parts of a document under the fair use provisions -- and Xpdf is preventing me from doing that." Not really: you're still free to quote the document the same way you would a newspaper article, i.e., by retyping the text.
DRM is not going to stop you from making satire or from building on another's work. It would just make you do the work yourself, just like the original author did. Poor baby.
(DRM stopping you from running software that you wrote on a computer that you bought is a whole separate issue.)
How exactly do you plan to tell IBM that they can't use Linux unless they promise not to enforce their patents? And how exactly is the GPLv3 going to help that cause at all?
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Punishments are Draconian, not rules. Draconian would be cutting off your fingers for violating the policy.
The configure scripts on many applications I have installed from source seem to figure it out just fine. How do they do it?
Please forgive any naivety on my part. I don't know C, I've never written a configure script or a Makefile, I've only installed things.
I guess what I want to say is that companies should aim to support every distribution and focus their QA attention on certifying a few rather than aiming to support only a few, as IBM seems to do, at least with Lotus Notes.
That, and the fact that configure/make don't help much without releasing source code. . .
You could have 'make install' to install without 'make' to compile. Ship it with compiled binaries.
Also, not every distro puts the same files in the same place. Some might put something in /opt, others in /usr/bin, still others in /usr/sbin. Some might put config files in /usr/etc, and so on. ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
Why can't companies release software with a script that checks to see if you have all the required dependencies and tells you exactly what you are missing? Maybe you could call it 'configure'. And then they could have a command that would install the program. The command could take parameters to do slightly different things. Maybe you could have a configuration file for this program. The program could be called 'make', and the configuration files, 'Makefile'.
But no, they have to have spiffy graphical installers (Remember: don't run X as root!), that give you such helpful messages as "Could not validate Mozilla version." before exiting with no output to standard out.
I got DB2 to work just fine. No thanks to the installer - I had to figure out which RPMs I needed and use alien to install them. Lotus Notes/Workspaced Managed Client is a different story. I guess if it worked well and made sense, it just wouldn't be Lotus Notes.
Probably not. IBM's products don't really work on Linux, they work on one particular outdated version of RHEL and one version of Suse. I recently spoke to tech support about IBM Workspace Managed Client failing to install on Debian, and was told over and over that the only reason it gave me a particular error was because I needed to install a particular outdated version of Mozilla in a particular directory, and make a particular file with a line pointing to it. Over and over I tried this, and it did not work. They seem to have no idea how their installer works, much less care to do anything about it.
Join the NAACP. Put on your application that you are an NAACP member. Don't fill out race. They'll assume you are black, even if you aren't.
All the more reason to home school. Teach your kids yourself. They'll probably get a better education, and won't have their rights taken away.
Where does the Bible say that everything has been the same since he created it?
Do your developers use Firefox and heavily utilize features/plugins such as Live HTTP Headers, Firebug, DOM Inspector, and the Javascript Console? Are you going to piss them off by making them work in IE? The cost of having to replace developers and the cost of decreased productivity alone may sway your decision.
6.5 and 7 still suck.
"We worked with the open source community and found a way to write software once that will work regardless of operating system. It will run on Windows, Macintosh or Linux," said Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source."
s/the open source community/Sun and \1
s/found a way/Sun provided a way
"Windows is a damn good OS."
Do you _use_ Windows? I wasted 2 hours a few days ago finding out that I have to rewrite a bunch of scripts because Windows has an insanely short maximum command line argument length, and if you hit it it chops off your arguments and sticks a "D" at the end. Several times a I have coworkers come to me to have me run batch jobs on my Linux box because it will take me 2 minutes to do something that Windows make incredibly difficult. When they ask me to adapt my scripts to Cygwin/bash, it always takes me longer to deal with the stupidities of Windows than it took me to write the script in the first place.
Windows is a mediocre appliance. It is a terrible operating system.
I'll bite. How do you deduce the non-existence statistically and logically?
You can work on that assumption, that is fine; but you should not state as fact something you cannot even begin to prove.
There is insufficient scientific evidence to disprove many religions*. If you are basing your statements on scientific data and logical argument, you must allow that it is possible that some being created the universe and set up some rules for entry into heaven and guided some people to speak those rules. You must also allow that there may be no such supreme being. At least until we have further evidence one way or the other.
* Even if you could dispute some specific recorded happening of thousands of years ago that appears in some ancient religious text, you must consider that many ancient religious texts were understood as fiction or semi-fiction at the time of writing and thereafter, but are still illustrative of principles of the religion, and that does not mean that other (perhaps more supernatural) assertions of the religious are false.
Have you tried to install Lotus Notes on Linux? It is a disaster. Depends on an old deprecated version of Mozilla, and it is undocumented how the installer actually tries to find where it is. I, after many angry hours, got it working on a fresh install of Debian testing. But it won't work on my existing Debian testing box. Over and over it tells me "Cannot validate Mozilla version." That was useful. Thanks IBM. I tried calling IBM to get help. In 3 hours on the phone I could not find somebody who even knew that Lotus Notes for Linux existed, and had several people insist to me that it did not, despite the fact that they took my $140 for it.
I set up Trac at our 8 person office two weeks ago. I can't really comment on how well it is going because it has only been a few weeks, but I am very impressed with the ease with which you can add fields to the tickets and create reports based on those fields.
The infrastructure for cell phones isn't there yet though. I had two choices when choosing a phone company: a company full of lying idiots with terrible customer service, but fantastic coverage (Verizon), or no coverage where I live (little town of 1,000). In the US, Verizon could do this; they have the network. The other carriers are still putting up their towers.
Good advice. Remember, the HR department works for the company, not for you; and by HR's name alone, they are putting you in the same category as servers and office supplies.
Why don't they call it personnel anymore?
Encrypt everything but /boot and use loop-aes with GPG, and put the key on a USB drive. If somebody demands that you decrypt, you accidentally drop the USB drive on the floor and step on it. Or flush it down the toilet. I don't expect this to protect my data from large governments that really want it, but it will probably make it enough of a hassle to ignore me if they are just being jerks and don't have a reason to believe that I actually committed a crime.
DRM is not going to stop you from making satire or from building on another's work. It would just make you do the work yourself, just like the original author did. Poor baby.
(DRM stopping you from running software that you wrote on a computer that you bought is a whole separate issue.)
How exactly do you plan to tell IBM that they can't use Linux unless they promise not to enforce their patents? And how exactly is the GPLv3 going to help that cause at all?