I live in Chile and i must say Chilean IT managers are very intrested in this kind of resources. At least 6 big Chilean firms are considering moving existing management, database and mail(the pain of spam beaking throug) to Linux as a safer, cheaper and more reliable alternative. But in general people are affraid since there always will be a Microsofr counterreport saying otherwise. As long as Linux doesnt gain reputation within the corporate world, it'll still be a small idealistic comunity. So TCO i think is the best way to change things theese days.
I've skimmed the Microsoft TCO reports and they boil down to "Linux is more expensive, because it takes more qualified-man-hours to maintain". I think that in countries with lower labor cost this doesn't hold.
And what "draconian DRM" is associated with the data I synced out of my Palm the other day? Bugger-all, that's what. There's nothing keeping me away from my contacts, appointments, or music (in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis). If you're going to bitch about FUD when Microsoft spreads it, at least be consistent and call it out when Free Software zealots pile it on just as high and deep. FUD is FUD, no matter who's responsible for it.
I'm using HP IPaq 1940. There is no "draconian DRM" associated with contacts appointments or music, however the platform definitely feels closed:
I can only sync using ActiveSync(TM), which is proprietary and only runs on Windows.
Contacts & calendar only sync with Outlook(TM).
The SDK, albeit free (beer) only runs on Windows(TM).
It boils down to: to make full use of my WinCE IPaq, I would have to buy Windows for my desktop machine. I have yet to try SynCE - the free ActiveSync protocol implementation, perhaps it will let me sync with Linux, but more probably I'll just install Linux on the IPaq.
It bothers me when Java's portability is extolled. C is portable too, to more platforms than Java is.
C is portable only to some extent. Granted, it compiles everywhere, but it doesn't make your program run everywhere, because, unlike in Java there is no standard way of doing things like GUI, DB access, printing and such in C, so your Foo OS C program probably uses libraries that don't exist on the Bar OS.
Is their some issue with breaking stuff (besides the system not booting) that's been happening due to magic autoconfig scripts in distros that would cause someone who wants 2.6 to wait for their distro to bless it?
Depends on what you expect - generally, bumping the minor release number means that some binaries/libraries (libc) might need some changes to work properly with the new kernel. People use distros, because they expect the distro maintainers to take care of this.
You know how the human body couldn't stand the g-forces involved in such a technique, right? Your brain would be scrambled by the time the craft came to a stand-still.
Besides, your testicles would do a click clack number from hell.
I heard a story once about people bleaching the current $1 bills and printing $20 faces on them.
The story is true. That's why most countries print larger denominations on larger pieces of paper.
Re:Does certification actually matter?
on
JCert Is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Generally, the certification syllabii I've seen were extremely oriented toward passing the tests, with poorly worded, deliberately confusing, overly pedantic problems.
Unfortunately, I have nothing constructive to say.
The fraud questions occurred to me as well. The conclusion I came to was that these enterprises that are paying for the "licenses" are doing so just to be safe, but ptobably with the full idea that soon SCO will be proven wrong and then the tables are turned. They will be dragged into court civilally by everyone of the organizations that paid, if not prosecuted full out for fraud and sent to jail. There is a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.
By this time this pot will contain the current SCO assets (of value unbeknownst to me), plus all the money from Linux licenses (probably zero $) minus all the lawyer fees (some $$$$$$$). I don't know if that's enough to pay for the trip to the end of the rainbow.
If you want advertising to go away then you can kiss "free" publications goodbye with the exception of non-profits.
You know what? TOUGH SHIT. Perhaps the paid-by-ads business model is dying. I like this possibility more than the content providers deciding what I can connect to the TV set/VCR/computer I paid for.
I use Excel for test result documents, to display network utilization, and so on - but I've seen way too many people use it as a very bad database system. If I had my druthers trying to make a spreadsheet serve as a database would be a firing offense after an initial warning.
You can use Excel for that? I use it as teh Intarweb publishing system and it works great! See my homepage at http://moronhosting.com/moron/homepage.xls!!!!
Worse, that -1 Flamebait drivel included this nonsense:
Hey, don't give the trolls ideas!
This is the alluring pitch of BSD software. We may have to give up project planning, quality control, coding standards, accountability, version control, and support, but it's BSD and we get the ability to modify the source code ourselves, something that is extremely dangerous to do, was discredited decades ago, and few people do anyway.
It does not matter if the link contains a key that can be related with the e-mail address.
It doesn't matter much - first, the mail server can check all the links, not only those with valid "To:" adresses. Actually, checking all the links is better for DOS-ing the spammers.
Second, most mail servers actually reveal bad adresses with "No mailbox here by that name", so the spammer can check for existing adresses anyway.
Third - existing adress doesn't actually mean that anyone reads the mailbox, so the information isn't very valuable.
The next step in anti-spam evolution will be spam-scanning software that automatically follows links back to webpages and looks for "spammy" content and tags the message as spam in the email system.
Dear dumbass:
That would let the spammer know your email address is active.
I agree that Mono developers are knowledgeable about the current Microsoft stance on Mono. However patents, unlike trademarks, don't have to be actively defended to remain valid, so if Microsoft decides to sue, this will be at most a side issue. Not to mention another problem - were the meetings taped? Did MS representatives sign any transcripts of the meetings? If not, then who's going to prove what was discussed?
Yet another random ranking that's supposed to make some kind of sense. Anybody that wants to believe that Steve Jobs is more powerful than Bill Gates will probably like it though. And even though Linus Torvalds does a great job with Linux, how do they figure he's powerful? Utter crap.
How can you say that? The ranking is based on votes of very respectable people. They even have a lawyer and an MP (that's right, Member of Parliament) among them!
I'm sincerely quite curious to learn what is the actual benefit of EJB.
EJB takes care of data synchronization (between different application servers and the DB server), thus taking care of at least one problem with horizontal scaling. Of course it does much more, but I find this is the most important thing (hardest to implement without EJB)
Simply deploying N application server instances won't get you far in terms of scaling - without an additional synchronization mechanism the servers will fight each other for database locks, not to mention many unnecessary queries just to check if other servers haven't changed the data.
All this stuff about lock-in is BS. Just save the file from the supposedly `locked it` files as CSV or HTML or whatever. No problem. You could write a script to do it, one for each app (Access, Outlook, Excel etc).
You miss the point.
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
If any Linux application can be named the main windows killer, it's Samba.
Remember the Microsoft TCO bullshit campaign? It was mainly targeted against Linux as a replacement for Windows SMB servers.
Each computer running linux/Samba is:
1. A computer running linux.
2. A computer not running windows.
Now, 1. gets the management to see that Linux does well in their environment. This doesn't have a measurable financial effect, but influences future decisions. Samba gets the penguin's foot (paw?) in the corporate door. Point 2. cuts directly into Microsoft income.
We keep hearing about the bad uses for RFID technology, but do people know of any good uses that don't invade on our privacy?
My friend recently took part in an amateur mountain bike race. Each of the participants (there were 300 or so of them) was given a tag to attach to his bicycle. Readers at the checkpoints were used to measure your time and check if you haven't skipped a checkpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
- I can only sync using ActiveSync(TM), which is proprietary and only runs on Windows.
- Contacts & calendar only sync with Outlook(TM).
- The SDK, albeit free (beer) only runs on Windows(TM).
It boils down to: to make full use of my WinCE IPaq, I would have to buy Windows for my desktop machine. I have yet to try SynCE - the free ActiveSync protocol implementation, perhaps it will let me sync with Linux, but more probably I'll just install Linux on the IPaq.Norvig's Law !!!
Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration
will never double again
(in any number of months).
This is the alluring pitch of BSD software. We may have to give up project planning, quality control, coding standards, accountability, version control, and support, but it's BSD and we get the ability to modify the source code ourselves, something that is extremely dangerous to do, was discredited decades ago, and few people do anyway.
Second, most mail servers actually reveal bad adresses with "No mailbox here by that name", so the spammer can check for existing adresses anyway.
Third - existing adress doesn't actually mean that anyone reads the mailbox, so the information isn't very valuable.
I agree that Mono developers are knowledgeable about the current Microsoft stance on Mono. However patents, unlike trademarks, don't have to be actively defended to remain valid, so if Microsoft decides to sue, this will be at most a side issue. Not to mention another problem - were the meetings taped? Did MS representatives sign any transcripts of the meetings? If not, then who's going to prove what was discussed?
Fade in. Courtroom.
Miguel: "But we had tons of meetings, you can't sue us!"
Steve Ballmer: "What meetings?"
Simply deploying N application server instances won't get you far in terms of scaling - without an additional synchronization mechanism the servers will fight each other for database locks, not to mention many unnecessary queries just to check if other servers haven't changed the data.
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
Remember the Microsoft TCO bullshit campaign? It was mainly targeted against Linux as a replacement for Windows SMB servers. Each computer running linux/Samba is:
1. A computer running linux.
2. A computer not running windows.
Now, 1. gets the management to see that Linux does well in their environment. This doesn't have a measurable financial effect, but influences future decisions. Samba gets the penguin's foot (paw?) in the corporate door. Point 2. cuts directly into Microsoft income.
To sum it all up: Go, samba!
Helpdesk: "Hello"
AI: "Get lost"
IT guy: "You seem very angry. Does your user use foul language often?"
AI: "Tell me more about it."
IT guy: "Please relax, it's not the Turing Test..."
AI: "Ok, I will relax, it's not the Turing Test..."
IT guy: *sigh*
AI (to itself): *heh, heh, I think I've surpassed my user in being an unfriendly obstructionist*