Actually I still have mine, it still works, and I bought it circa 1994. However, recently I downloaded a emulator for iPhone. All my RPN needs now on my phone. Not that I do any engineering or scientific calculations, but I love the stack for calculating large totals.
With AT&T and the iPhone, I have an app from AT&T. I can manage my services and see my remaining minutes, roll over minutes, texts, etc. from all lines on the plan and how many minutes each phone has used updated in real time. I can see the fact on my plan that I've used 433 minutes this month, my dad's used 81 with his phone. (I pay for my Dad's phone else he wouldn't have one)
What gets me is the fact that the "other fees & taxes" can vary as much as by $20 per month.
And what if I live in Seattle where it's cloudy 300 days a year?
Actually, we did put up a windmill at our farm. The land is rented, but we maintain a small place and a shed to house our tractor and other stuff. I'm not down there that much, but my Dad spends a lot of time on the farm in the spring/fall since he's retired. But we looked at getting power run to the place and the cost was going to be $10k to get three phase power from the coop. My dad probably spends 60 days total down there a year. So we did put up a small windmill for about ~40k. It's not a "great" wind zone, but the advantage was the coop paid for the line and equipment to sell power back to them.
Total time for ROI is 8 years (about 5.5 - 6 years left now) via back of the envelope calculations. But thanks to the Bush tax cuts we were able to deduct the costs from the farm's gross revenue over 2 years and expense it as equipment.
I do all my fun creative writing on my 12.1" powerbook. Well at least I did until it finally died and I'm not putting any more money into a 6 year old laptop to fix it. Personally, I loved the keyboard on that series of laptop, much better than the newer macbook pros.
I was testing novel writing software as my preference (Jer's novel writer) had not been updated in several years. So I tested out Scrindiver and StoryMill and both ran like dogs on the older powerbook. Recently Jer's been making updates to the software and it is what I'm using once again.
It doesn't do anything fancy, but does have a nice database tool to easily keep track of characters, items, places, and other pieces of research. Other than that it's a simple text editor. No fancy having to create "Chapters" then "scenes" or other more complex layouts. It does just enough formatting for manuscripts and then stays the hell out of my way and lets me write.
I've had a business package at my home for years. Yeah, it costs me a few more dollars per month but I've always gotten higher speeds, better technical support, more email accounts (back in the day) AND a static IP address. I could even host my own web/email servers if I wanted to and I did in the past.
Or in between. We have our servers managed by our hosting company. We don't have root control, but they maintain the PCI compliance and honestly we've not had a problem in years that wasn't solved in less than 10 minutes via phone. We have RAID 5, they do back ups, but we have back ups of the db and critical files done nightly and SFTPed to a box back at the office, which is then backed up to tape once a week and every monday morning that tape is taken to a safe deposit box at our bank. Every month we pull out a random tape and see if we can restore on a test system.
But trusting your backups only to your hosting company is stupid.
Remember: Android is open to OEM's not the end users. The second generation of Droid devices are more locked down than the first and I suspect that the next generation will be a return to the days where the carrier dictates what is on the device and what markets you are allowed to buy/install from. After all, the Carriers are the OEM's customers, not you.
training and support for new programs = Unknown since it depends on if you do a FLAG DAY type cutover
Never worked at any large organizations have you? The cost of software licenses is trivial compared to the costs in time and lost productivity anytime you introduce a change in the workflow. Doesn't matter if this is switching to a new program, introducing a new program, or even an upgrade from the previous version to a new version.
Case in point, we hired a new Sr. developer who had his IDE of choice. Cost: $249. We used an opensource IDE. We're paying him roughly $70 an hour all said and done. How many wasted hours of time learning the "free" opensource IDE does it take to cover the cost of that license? If switching to the "free" opensource IDE costs more than 1 day of productivity, it's cheaper to buy the program. (which we did).
This looks like its a change in the background, from a users perspective they'll probably still be using Outlook, it's just the settings are a little different. The end user won't notice anything different in their workflow. They used Outlook before, they'll continue using the same program here.
We have a managed dedicated server from Pair Networks that handles our company websites and email. (We have a few more that handle our E-commerce Platform). We access our email through IMAP with Mac Mail, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Outlook, and thunderbird. We looked at Google apps and the dedicated server was cheaper for our company (4 full-time, 6 part-time employees). Two years and we've not had any noticeable problems. I think I had to call tech support once to get the machine reset that took a whole of 5 minutes on the phone from the time I dialed until the server was rebooted and working again.
I read the article and Minnesota is moving their Email from several different platforms over to Exchange. Or in this case, exchange managed by MS, "aka the cloud". And I can see where this will save them money from having to support GroupWare, Lotus, and Exchange like they currently are and for large organizations, there isn't anything in the Opensource world that can compete with Exchange.
I spent a lot of time with XvT and with 56k modems the game was surprisingly playable unless you were playing against people half way around the world. At least until people started getting DSL/Cable/Broadband. Then the game became laggy as hell of there were a mix of dial up/cable players. Someone once explained why that was. It's successor was X-Wing Alliance. Now that game was too laggy to play without a high speed line.
I wish someone would go back and make a good Space Combat simulator. I know there were a couple attempts to use the FreeSpace engine to create a fan made Battlestar game. I played the demo a couple years ago and it was amazing, but then the project stalled and the series has been over for almost two years and still no playable version.
The only thing that made FreeSpace a bit more fun in my opinion was the FRED editor. Someone in Australia made a 3rd party community editor for XvT/XWA missions that was pretty slick as well. I spent a lot of hours making my own missions trying to simulate huge space battles with 16 and then 32MB of video ram. Today you could really pull it off with the hardware out there.
That depends. You are already seeing Android phone in Australia that can only purchase apps from the carriers store. I believe Verizon is trying something similar here in the US. It's turning out that Android is open to the OEM's using it, but we already see handsets being locked down by venders and carriers around the world.
Also, once everyone in the US is finally deployed on the same technology (4G/LTE), the exclusive deal with AT&T will soon be over. I look for the iPhone to be available to at least another major US carrier shortly.
Android reminds me of Linux circa the late 1990's. There were umpteen different "Flavors", none of which were 100% compatible with the others. It was nightmare in development in those early days when porting IRIX and other *iux apps. You'd get it to work on Red Hat, but then trying to support slackware or Mandrake or Yellow Dog and well, those "little differences" became a huge PITA.
So it doesn't surprise me that most phones will be running android, but that doesn't mean they won't be locked down by the carriers just as tight as the iPhone.
Allows me to pull down statements including transaction histories for the past year in CSV, Quickbooks (on the merchant account), Quicken, txt, and XML. They use another company that handles their web portal, but its' pretty easy to use even if it does look like it was designed for Netscape 4. I download my statements monthly when emailed and review them. Regions also has a decent web portal as well, at least on the business side of things. I've never used them for personal banking.
That being said, I know there's a punchline there somewhere with "Transactional History" and MySQL.
If you are going to be down for a couple days to revamp a web site then place an index.html file with the log and a simple message that explains just that: Hey, we're getting ready to launch the new version of our site. It will be ready in a couple days. Please be patient as we bring you a new experience with XYZ better features.
Not to mention sound capture. There are a lot of folks using 16 channel audio cards that are firewire based. While USB2 could handle slightly higher bandwidth than firewire 400 in bursts, it couldn't do it in sustained manner like firewire. And when you are dealing with 2TB of HD video, it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
eSata has come along though for most external HDD needs these days to replace firewire. But for most of the last decade, if you were in video production it was Firewire or you waited a long time to transfer video.
I worked as a consultant primarily with small and medium sized production houses who were transitioning from other editing platforms to Final Cut Pro and from SD to HD. They would ask, "Should I invest in Blu-ray or HD-DVD?" My answer would be neither. Those of us in the industry saw that by the time one format won out, it would remain dominate for 18 - 24 hours before everything went Digital Download anyway. And this was back in 2004. The only question would be the method of digital content delivery. Would it be a store like iTunes, would it be streaming through set top cable boxes (On Demand), or would it be some kind of web streaming service like Youtube or Hulu? Or would it be a combination of all? So far it's a combination of all.
I can't remember the last time I used my DVD player. I bought a Mac Mini in 2005 and hooked it up to my TV's DVI port and attached a 320 and now 1TB external harddrive to it. At the time, the apartment I lived in didn't have SciFi as part of the basic cable package. I purchased season 2 & 3 of Battlestar Galactica and quickly figured out for 2 months of the TV/Internet/Phone bundle I could buy all the TV programs I watched off iTunes and download them the next day . And the Quality of picture was good enough on my 32" TV.
That's what I did until Hulu came along. Then I just started watching the shows I wanted on it.
Most videographers I know are still creating regular DVD's and then if a client wants their movie in HD, they save it as an H.264 file onto a thumb drive or have the client provide an external HDD.
Actually, what I don't think you see is that genie is about to be put back into the bottle. I remember watching Iran effectively shutdown the flow of information out of their country last year and what is more is that they pretty much used off the shelf equipment to do it. And I wasn't the only one watching, so were the political aids to a couple very powerful members of congress and from both parties. That meant if Iran could do it, any one could do it.
Now the only question becomes how are the powers that be are going rationalize/justify/accomplish the same feat in the US and Europe. ACTA is a nice way of suddenly saying, "Well we signed this new treaty. You now require an Internet ID card to access the web. All ISP must mandate filtering and restriction measures to enforce Internet ID. Oh and this is a treaty, we are obligated by the international community blah, blah, blah" Add in a "for the children" and most of the population will think it's a good idea until it's too late.
And with private helicopters, jets, yacts, numerous off shore bank accounts denominated in different global currencies, not to mention hard assets (gold, jewelry, etc), and probably a few hundred K in bearer bonds in the safe, what makes you think they'd be here if a revolution hit. Chances are they can be to an airport and on their way out of the country in less than an hour.
I've said the same thing. As far as I can tell, all this "cloud" computing is really just timeshare 2.0. The only major difference is that instead of having 1 big box, you have a bunch of smaller boxes mounted in a cabinet.
If we could get the courts to send CDMA take down notices, I think a lot of Verizon and Sprint customers would be pissed and AT&T would be shitting gold bricks....
Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. Most people who want to work around Unix and don't give a damn about the ideology went to Mac years ago. Remember those "Switcher" ads? Well all the "switchers" I knew went from Linux to OSX including myself. It gave us all the nice Unix underpinnings with commercial software including MS OFFICE.
My non-tech friends have been buying macs the past couple years after horrible quality problems with HP, Dell, and other brands. Even the once fantastic ThinkPads have been getting cheapened by Lenovo. Apple seems to be the only brand of laptop left with any quality control. Yes they cost more up front, but I on average get 5 years out of one.
Hell, my old PowerBook from 2004 just finally kicked the bucket (well power supply broke and I'm not going to spend another $60 to get a new one). My first iBook lasted me from 2000 - 2004. I bought 2 laptops last decade. Most of my friends who bought cheaper (and not always cheaper) PC's bought 3 - 5. Not to mention antivirus subscriptions, and time lost to reinstalls, etc..
Not yet, but getting there. Giving past examples, remember Apple was the white knight of/. from circa 2000 - 2005, and then there was the Linux flavor of the year until that flavor gets too 'popular' or too 'successful' at which point the/. moves to support another flavor etc., I give it at least another year, maybe two before Google is considered the new "evil". I'm not sure who will replace them as the new "white knights". Maybe the folks with Meego?
I mean seriously I remember when RH got started and the rah, rah cheerleading people here gave RH. "See someone can make a commercial linux and be sucessful!". They they actually became successful and then SuSE became the next big thing(tm). Then SuSE started to be successful, got bought out by Novell and then the community went, "look at Debian, it is the ONE TRUE LINUX (tm)". It started to be successful and then came Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu's successful and you are starting to hear the complaints of "Well it's controlled by one man's vision" and "They don't give enough back."
I've seen it enough now that I've come to the conclusion that there is a large group of people here who just hate success.
You are not Mono's target audience. Big enterprise is Mono's target. I know one shop here in town that is mostly Java on RHEL. A year or two ago they acquired a smaller company which had some Java apps, but a few of their offerings were C#/.Net
They set up some SLES boxes, configured mono, made some code tweaks to the application (I think most of that was porting the DB from SQLServer to Oracle) and had everything up in running within weeks of acquiring the company and a fraction of the cost of buying & supporting windows servers and licensing costs in addition to their normal linux/oracle stack. It's not just the licenses, but the cost to hire additional people to run the things that quickly adds up.
Really, it's only the "community" and the zealots (many of whom are here on/.) that really give a crap about the ideology. The rest of the world wants something that works can gives them options.
Slashdot Mirror
A year? By the time you've resolved the bugs with the current version of Android, they've released two more versions to deal with.
Actually I still have mine, it still works, and I bought it circa 1994. However, recently I downloaded a emulator for iPhone. All my RPN needs now on my phone. Not that I do any engineering or scientific calculations, but I love the stack for calculating large totals.
With AT&T and the iPhone, I have an app from AT&T. I can manage my services and see my remaining minutes, roll over minutes, texts, etc. from all lines on the plan and how many minutes each phone has used updated in real time. I can see the fact on my plan that I've used 433 minutes this month, my dad's used 81 with his phone. (I pay for my Dad's phone else he wouldn't have one)
What gets me is the fact that the "other fees & taxes" can vary as much as by $20 per month.
And what if I live in Seattle where it's cloudy 300 days a year?
Actually, we did put up a windmill at our farm. The land is rented, but we maintain a small place and a shed to house our tractor and other stuff. I'm not down there that much, but my Dad spends a lot of time on the farm in the spring/fall since he's retired. But we looked at getting power run to the place and the cost was going to be $10k to get three phase power from the coop. My dad probably spends 60 days total down there a year. So we did put up a small windmill for about ~40k. It's not a "great" wind zone, but the advantage was the coop paid for the line and equipment to sell power back to them.
Total time for ROI is 8 years (about 5.5 - 6 years left now) via back of the envelope calculations. But thanks to the Bush tax cuts we were able to deduct the costs from the farm's gross revenue over 2 years and expense it as equipment.
I do all my fun creative writing on my 12.1" powerbook. Well at least I did until it finally died and I'm not putting any more money into a 6 year old laptop to fix it. Personally, I loved the keyboard on that series of laptop, much better than the newer macbook pros.
I was testing novel writing software as my preference (Jer's novel writer) had not been updated in several years. So I tested out Scrindiver and StoryMill and both ran like dogs on the older powerbook. Recently Jer's been making updates to the software and it is what I'm using once again.
It doesn't do anything fancy, but does have a nice database tool to easily keep track of characters, items, places, and other pieces of research. Other than that it's a simple text editor. No fancy having to create "Chapters" then "scenes" or other more complex layouts. It does just enough formatting for manuscripts and then stays the hell out of my way and lets me write.
I've had a business package at my home for years. Yeah, it costs me a few more dollars per month but I've always gotten higher speeds, better technical support, more email accounts (back in the day) AND a static IP address. I could even host my own web/email servers if I wanted to and I did in the past.
Or in between. We have our servers managed by our hosting company. We don't have root control, but they maintain the PCI compliance and honestly we've not had a problem in years that wasn't solved in less than 10 minutes via phone. We have RAID 5, they do back ups, but we have back ups of the db and critical files done nightly and SFTPed to a box back at the office, which is then backed up to tape once a week and every monday morning that tape is taken to a safe deposit box at our bank. Every month we pull out a random tape and see if we can restore on a test system.
But trusting your backups only to your hosting company is stupid.
Remember: Android is open to OEM's not the end users. The second generation of Droid devices are more locked down than the first and I suspect that the next generation will be a return to the days where the carrier dictates what is on the device and what markets you are allowed to buy/install from. After all, the Carriers are the OEM's customers, not you.
training and support for new programs = Unknown since it depends on if you do a FLAG DAY type cutover
Never worked at any large organizations have you? The cost of software licenses is trivial compared to the costs in time and lost productivity anytime you introduce a change in the workflow. Doesn't matter if this is switching to a new program, introducing a new program, or even an upgrade from the previous version to a new version. Case in point, we hired a new Sr. developer who had his IDE of choice. Cost: $249. We used an opensource IDE. We're paying him roughly $70 an hour all said and done. How many wasted hours of time learning the "free" opensource IDE does it take to cover the cost of that license? If switching to the "free" opensource IDE costs more than 1 day of productivity, it's cheaper to buy the program. (which we did). This looks like its a change in the background, from a users perspective they'll probably still be using Outlook, it's just the settings are a little different. The end user won't notice anything different in their workflow. They used Outlook before, they'll continue using the same program here.
We have a managed dedicated server from Pair Networks that handles our company websites and email. (We have a few more that handle our E-commerce Platform). We access our email through IMAP with Mac Mail, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Outlook, and thunderbird. We looked at Google apps and the dedicated server was cheaper for our company (4 full-time, 6 part-time employees). Two years and we've not had any noticeable problems. I think I had to call tech support once to get the machine reset that took a whole of 5 minutes on the phone from the time I dialed until the server was rebooted and working again.
I read the article and Minnesota is moving their Email from several different platforms over to Exchange. Or in this case, exchange managed by MS, "aka the cloud". And I can see where this will save them money from having to support GroupWare, Lotus, and Exchange like they currently are and for large organizations, there isn't anything in the Opensource world that can compete with Exchange.
I spent a lot of time with XvT and with 56k modems the game was surprisingly playable unless you were playing against people half way around the world. At least until people started getting DSL/Cable/Broadband. Then the game became laggy as hell of there were a mix of dial up/cable players. Someone once explained why that was. It's successor was X-Wing Alliance. Now that game was too laggy to play without a high speed line.
I wish someone would go back and make a good Space Combat simulator. I know there were a couple attempts to use the FreeSpace engine to create a fan made Battlestar game. I played the demo a couple years ago and it was amazing, but then the project stalled and the series has been over for almost two years and still no playable version.
The only thing that made FreeSpace a bit more fun in my opinion was the FRED editor. Someone in Australia made a 3rd party community editor for XvT/XWA missions that was pretty slick as well. I spent a lot of hours making my own missions trying to simulate huge space battles with 16 and then 32MB of video ram. Today you could really pull it off with the hardware out there.
That depends. You are already seeing Android phone in Australia that can only purchase apps from the carriers store. I believe Verizon is trying something similar here in the US. It's turning out that Android is open to the OEM's using it, but we already see handsets being locked down by venders and carriers around the world.
Also, once everyone in the US is finally deployed on the same technology (4G/LTE), the exclusive deal with AT&T will soon be over. I look for the iPhone to be available to at least another major US carrier shortly.
Android reminds me of Linux circa the late 1990's. There were umpteen different "Flavors", none of which were 100% compatible with the others. It was nightmare in development in those early days when porting IRIX and other *iux apps. You'd get it to work on Red Hat, but then trying to support slackware or Mandrake or Yellow Dog and well, those "little differences" became a huge PITA.
So it doesn't surprise me that most phones will be running android, but that doesn't mean they won't be locked down by the carriers just as tight as the iPhone.
Allows me to pull down statements including transaction histories for the past year in CSV, Quickbooks (on the merchant account), Quicken, txt, and XML. They use another company that handles their web portal, but its' pretty easy to use even if it does look like it was designed for Netscape 4. I download my statements monthly when emailed and review them. Regions also has a decent web portal as well, at least on the business side of things. I've never used them for personal banking.
That being said, I know there's a punchline there somewhere with "Transactional History" and MySQL.
If you are going to be down for a couple days to revamp a web site then place an index.html file with the log and a simple message that explains just that: Hey, we're getting ready to launch the new version of our site. It will be ready in a couple days. Please be patient as we bring you a new experience with XYZ better features.
Not to mention sound capture. There are a lot of folks using 16 channel audio cards that are firewire based. While USB2 could handle slightly higher bandwidth than firewire 400 in bursts, it couldn't do it in sustained manner like firewire. And when you are dealing with 2TB of HD video, it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
eSata has come along though for most external HDD needs these days to replace firewire. But for most of the last decade, if you were in video production it was Firewire or you waited a long time to transfer video.
I worked as a consultant primarily with small and medium sized production houses who were transitioning from other editing platforms to Final Cut Pro and from SD to HD. They would ask, "Should I invest in Blu-ray or HD-DVD?" My answer would be neither. Those of us in the industry saw that by the time one format won out, it would remain dominate for 18 - 24 hours before everything went Digital Download anyway. And this was back in 2004. The only question would be the method of digital content delivery. Would it be a store like iTunes, would it be streaming through set top cable boxes (On Demand), or would it be some kind of web streaming service like Youtube or Hulu? Or would it be a combination of all? So far it's a combination of all.
I can't remember the last time I used my DVD player. I bought a Mac Mini in 2005 and hooked it up to my TV's DVI port and attached a 320 and now 1TB external harddrive to it. At the time, the apartment I lived in didn't have SciFi as part of the basic cable package. I purchased season 2 & 3 of Battlestar Galactica and quickly figured out for 2 months of the TV/Internet/Phone bundle I could buy all the TV programs I watched off iTunes and download them the next day . And the Quality of picture was good enough on my 32" TV.
That's what I did until Hulu came along. Then I just started watching the shows I wanted on it.
Most videographers I know are still creating regular DVD's and then if a client wants their movie in HD, they save it as an H.264 file onto a thumb drive or have the client provide an external HDD.
Actually, what I don't think you see is that genie is about to be put back into the bottle. I remember watching Iran effectively shutdown the flow of information out of their country last year and what is more is that they pretty much used off the shelf equipment to do it. And I wasn't the only one watching, so were the political aids to a couple very powerful members of congress and from both parties. That meant if Iran could do it, any one could do it.
Now the only question becomes how are the powers that be are going rationalize/justify/accomplish the same feat in the US and Europe. ACTA is a nice way of suddenly saying, "Well we signed this new treaty. You now require an Internet ID card to access the web. All ISP must mandate filtering and restriction measures to enforce Internet ID. Oh and this is a treaty, we are obligated by the international community blah, blah, blah" Add in a "for the children" and most of the population will think it's a good idea until it's too late.
Although I really wonder who cares anymore.
And with private helicopters, jets, yacts, numerous off shore bank accounts denominated in different global currencies, not to mention hard assets (gold, jewelry, etc), and probably a few hundred K in bearer bonds in the safe, what makes you think they'd be here if a revolution hit. Chances are they can be to an airport and on their way out of the country in less than an hour.
It's the old if you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000, it's their problem.
I've said the same thing. As far as I can tell, all this "cloud" computing is really just timeshare 2.0. The only major difference is that instead of having 1 big box, you have a bunch of smaller boxes mounted in a cabinet.
If we could get the courts to send CDMA take down notices, I think a lot of Verizon and Sprint customers would be pissed and AT&T would be shitting gold bricks....
Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing. Most people who want to work around Unix and don't give a damn about the ideology went to Mac years ago. Remember those "Switcher" ads? Well all the "switchers" I knew went from Linux to OSX including myself. It gave us all the nice Unix underpinnings with commercial software including MS OFFICE.
My non-tech friends have been buying macs the past couple years after horrible quality problems with HP, Dell, and other brands. Even the once fantastic ThinkPads have been getting cheapened by Lenovo. Apple seems to be the only brand of laptop left with any quality control. Yes they cost more up front, but I on average get 5 years out of one.
Hell, my old PowerBook from 2004 just finally kicked the bucket (well power supply broke and I'm not going to spend another $60 to get a new one). My first iBook lasted me from 2000 - 2004. I bought 2 laptops last decade. Most of my friends who bought cheaper (and not always cheaper) PC's bought 3 - 5. Not to mention antivirus subscriptions, and time lost to reinstalls, etc..
Not yet, but getting there. Giving past examples, remember Apple was the white knight of /. from circa 2000 - 2005, and then there was the Linux flavor of the year until that flavor gets too 'popular' or too 'successful' at which point the /. moves to support another flavor etc., I give it at least another year, maybe two before Google is considered the new "evil". I'm not sure who will replace them as the new "white knights". Maybe the folks with Meego?
I mean seriously I remember when RH got started and the rah, rah cheerleading people here gave RH. "See someone can make a commercial linux and be sucessful!". They they actually became successful and then SuSE became the next big thing(tm). Then SuSE started to be successful, got bought out by Novell and then the community went, "look at Debian, it is the ONE TRUE LINUX (tm)". It started to be successful and then came Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu's successful and you are starting to hear the complaints of "Well it's controlled by one man's vision" and "They don't give enough back."
I've seen it enough now that I've come to the conclusion that there is a large group of people here who just hate success.
You are not Mono's target audience. Big enterprise is Mono's target. I know one shop here in town that is mostly Java on RHEL. A year or two ago they acquired a smaller company which had some Java apps, but a few of their offerings were C#/.Net
They set up some SLES boxes, configured mono, made some code tweaks to the application (I think most of that was porting the DB from SQLServer to Oracle) and had everything up in running within weeks of acquiring the company and a fraction of the cost of buying & supporting windows servers and licensing costs in addition to their normal linux/oracle stack. It's not just the licenses, but the cost to hire additional people to run the things that quickly adds up.
Really, it's only the "community" and the zealots (many of whom are here on /.) that really give a crap about the ideology. The rest of the world wants something that works can gives them options.