Try telling that to the PCI-DSS folks (Payment Card Industry, aka if you're running E-Commerce/Point of Sale/anything that touches credit card data). They make running anti-virus part of the requirement REGARDLESS of OS. Running on OSX, Linux, or FreeBSD? Doesn't matter. You still HAVE to run AV software on each terminal that touches credit card data.
It's required by PCI-DSS. Anything that is touching Credit Card data has to be running AV. Our e-commerce servers run on FreeBSD. Guess what, they're running ClamAV. Not because there are viruses for FreeBSD, but it's a PCI requirement.
We found this when testing our point of sale app. So long as the POS software was running only the POS software on the terminal with the DB hosting on another machine/server, it was great. But as soon as you coupled POS + DB on the same terminal, lag started to be noticed. It was still acceptable, but it would take 3 seconds to create a new ticket vs. less than a second on a 2.8Ghz P4. Especially on the single core Atoms. The Dual Core atoms seemed to handle things just as well as their 2.8Ghz & 3Ghz power hungry Pentium they were to be replacing. And we tested both Windows XP/WEPOS & Linux (openSuSE/Ubuntu) and saw the same results.
We have an online ordering package for restaurants, many of whom what to do delivery within a certain "Radius" and they often wonder why we don't. They think "Oh well, you can use google maps!". Well, Google Maps can't pass the "My Dad's house Test". Which I show them where Google Maps/MapQuest/anything Teleatlas shows my dad's how is located and then where it really is one street over on the opposite end of the street.
One of my geek friends is a total oss zealot bought a droid phone for him, the one that was touch screen only like an iphone, and one with a keyboard for his texting like mad wife. They quickly found they couldn't always download the same apps from the market place due to hardware differences of the two phones. And it happened a few times.
All my none geek friends who got one b/c they were with verizon were elated at first, but now are kind of ho-hum and most will tell you if they could have gotten an iPhone on Verizon, they would have.
I can tell already Android is not getting fun to develop for from a professional stand point. We've spent 5x's the amount on test hardware in the past six months than we have in the past 2 years for Apple devices. And we're finding QA testing is taking 3X's the time/expense because we have to test against 1.5,1.6,2.0, and 2.1. There are hardware differences, feature differences, and for an open platform it costs more to develop for. It's been a sticker shock when we quote a price that is 4x's the cost to develop the same app for the iPhone, and that is enough that most of our clients will develop for the iPhone first. And only for Android if the iPhone app proves to be successful.
But with everything that happens when someone passes away, it's damn hard to remember everybody and even harder to get ahold of everyone. Especially when you're having to get burial plots, caskets, and all the other stuff that goes on. Especially if the person was highly connected and you had been away for quite some time. I saw it with my mother. She was one of those people who knew a lot of people. I certainly didn't know them all.
We've been in a similar situation. It's gotten to the point where our customers want an integrated Point of Sale with our service. We spent 2007 integrating with other POS's for specific clients, but to integrate with just the top 10 point of sales in our market was going to cost us well over $100k in SDK's and licenses. We looked to Open source and found only one point of sale solution and it had the basics, but lacked a bunch of basics like employee time tracking and required a manger to know XML and something about Javan order to assign employee roles. After we made "suggestions" to the developers and seeing no action for two years we ended up forking it and started fixing these things ourselves.
Well we just landed our first big contracts to do customized development. One of the big reason we won the contracts is because we have an opensource contract. Our Service/support agreement was about the same as our closed sourced competitors. But with our solution there were no per terminal licensing fees and for what our competitors wanted to write an integration module to our client's ERP we could deliver a customized product. The biggest advantage our clients felt was getting the full source code. No matter what happens to our company, they are free to hire internal developers to continue modifications or hire someone else. We hope they don't, but that only means we have to provide the best service/support at a reasonable price.
We have one long meeting at the end of each month where we're usually planning what feature to work on during the next month. And a lot of that meeting time is just assigning tasks and addressing any upfront concerns and is usually about an hour to two hours tops if we're adding a major feature. Then I keep track of the developers via their commit comments. I tell them put the status in there in less than 2 sentences. My only rule is that if they are having a problem let me know about it.
If I see a problem in a recent build, I file a bug report. It works extremely well.
I heard they were just waiting for the Duke Nuk'em team to finish up. After all, it's Duke Nukem Forever being written in Perl 6 for the Phantom console, right?
The big difference was that Microsoft HAD NO HARDWARE! You couldn't go buy a "Microsoft Windows PC". They were not in the hardware business but structured their licensing with hardware manufactures to where you couldn't buy a Packard-Bell, Compaq, IBM PC, HP, Dell, Gateway without Windows. No matter whose hardware you bought, it came with Windows due to the licensing agreement which meant you couldn't buy a Dell with BeOS even if Dell wanted to produce a model with BeOS. (Yes I'm talking about 10 years ago).
There is no anti-trust problems here. Apple has full rights to a monopoly on Apple branded hardware. The problem with microsoft was it didn't matter if you bought an IBM PC, HP, or Dell, they all had Windows and couldn't package their hardware with any other OS under MS's licensing agreements. Thus they forced out other possible competitors on the PC platform. In the Cell Phone world, Apple competes with Nokia, RIM, and now the Android platform. You can walk into any wireless store and buy a phone that's NOT apple. It's not like there is an HTC, Motorola, and Nokia there, but they all run iPhoneOS.
In the MP3 player world, I am free to buy a number of different MP3 players and use different music stores if I so choose. It just so happens that Apple has the best platform that works for me. They've done nothing to stop competitors from entering the market. They have no exclusive deals with music labels that doesn't allow them to distribute to other online stores, etc.. Most songs are available on Amazon or you can go buy a CD if you so choose.
The fact that no one else has been able to create a solution that works just as well and easily for most people and is a market failure doesn't mean that Apple has an anti-trust case against them.
...if they are for "public safety" instead of revenue. I know of several cities here in Missouri that have turned them off because people stopped running the red lights. Instead of going to the press and talking about their success. No the departments were complaining because NO ONE WAS RUNNING THE LIGHTS and therefore not making any money and forcing them to "turn them off". They didn't put those cameras there to increase public safety. They did it to increase revenue.
And when I buy a Mac, I take it out of the box, plug it in, press the power button and go. Granted, more than $200, but far less than 3 days of my time.
WTF. We were blasting people into space on the Atlas 50 years ago. I know the Atlas V is a different vehicle, but hell, the Atlas was a modified ICBM. How much does it cost to redesign the payload platform on the DIVH or Atlas V?
I thought off-line storage was a big part of HTML5? Hell we're even using it now with our iPhone apps. There are a lot of things I like about google docs. It's great because we have a Joint Venture with a company in San Francisco where we're based out of St. Louis. We can edit in real time using Skype for voice and then see what people are editing in a text document or spreadsheet.
But Microsoft Office and iWork are both on my MacBook Pro. Why? Because sometimes I'm on an airplane and need to finish up that presentation for tomorrow or write a report, etc.. Or I'm riding in a car doing the same through the backwoods where the cell towers don't go. Until I can, Google Docs will not be replacing Office or iWork as my everyday office tools.
I don't use the tools on a daily basis like I did 5 years ago, but I've been playing with Blender since 1.25 days in 1998. And to this day, I still can't produce as good of results out the box without tweaking the hell out of things in blender as I can with Lightwave. And I started using Lightwave about the same 1998 time frame. And if we want to talk horrible UI interfaces, Blender takes the cake. I remember it was like someone took the worst features of Lightwave's 5.4's UI and designed an entire program around them. Really, it took me a couple YEARS to master the UI and about the time I had, they went and changed it all. And then proceeded to make more changes about every 6 months. It seems like every time I finally get a Blender UI down, it's time to upgrade and suddenly something has moved or doesn't work the same way any more. The biggest example was with the particle/physics engine. I had about 20 minutes worth animation finished (60k frames). Then suddenly the particle engine changed and at least half those files no longer worked. That kind rapid development cycle hurts it in professional production shops. It seems like Blender gets a feature that you've been dying to see for ages the price is anything you've been working on has to be redone. But even then, it seems like a lot of "new" features are stuff that I've seen Lightwave/Maya/MAX for years and at this point, they've got it refined.
Now as far as a tool to learn 3D animation, Blender is great to learn the basics. And if you have time, you can produce some amazing results. It's perfect for the hobby/enthusiast.
GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop Elements. It does a lot of what I need up and until the point I really need to use filters and plug ins or really do some advanced color tweaking. That's where Photoshop has GIMP beat hands down. I have a few plugins I've bought over the years that allow me to do in minutes what would take a couple hours in GIMP by hand. As far as UI's go, GIMP has a better over all UI than Photoshop now other than the Tool bar in the image window instead of at the top of the application. That still annoys me. .
I think an app store for OSX would be seen as a great benefit by most end users. One place where you can go search for apps, browse for apps, read reviews, and buy & install effortlessly that is also vetted to not to be Malware/virus is something that most end users would find extremely useful.
Because Apple has control of only their hardware. It's no different than buying an IBM mainframe that only support z/OS. Windows was on everybody's hardware. So whether you bought Dell, HP, or the computer shop down the street, the computer was likely running Windows.
Especially when different stores have different pay out rules. If android has umpteen different stores where you have make X in sales before they pay you vs. Apple's model of one place where we at least know the rules....we'll take apple.
But even with our current apps, the download ratio is about 300:1, iphone:android versions. Even blackberry to android is 22:1.
Firmware added to "their phones" that only allow users to purchase from their app store. Apple cut the carriers out of the market with the iPhone. The carriers aren't going to let Google do the same.
And notice I said some of the Solaris/OpenSolaris market. Not all. In the past two years we've been working on a project and took a look at Solaris and OpenSolaris for the enterprise version of our software products. We could deploy smaller/medium sized companies who were growing with OpenSolaris on x86 and then if/when they needed the support, they could always move to bid daddy Solaris.
Then Oracle announced they were buying Sun and having been an IT manager, I absolutely hate and refuse to deal with Oracle unless there is no other way. When it comes to databases, I'd much rather deal with the DB/400 (i/p/whatever series it's called now) and IBM for OLTP or Teradata for warehousing.
If you need the enterprise level stuff and going to pay the support contracts for it, you're going to go over to IBM or REHL. But for those of us looking at OpenSolaris, FreeBSD makes a much more logical choice to replace it than Linux. Especially if you want DTrace and ZFS.
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Try telling that to the PCI-DSS folks (Payment Card Industry, aka if you're running E-Commerce/Point of Sale/anything that touches credit card data). They make running anti-virus part of the requirement REGARDLESS of OS. Running on OSX, Linux, or FreeBSD? Doesn't matter. You still HAVE to run AV software on each terminal that touches credit card data.
It's required by PCI-DSS. Anything that is touching Credit Card data has to be running AV. Our e-commerce servers run on FreeBSD. Guess what, they're running ClamAV. Not because there are viruses for FreeBSD, but it's a PCI requirement.
I have an easy solution: buy a mac.
We found this when testing our point of sale app. So long as the POS software was running only the POS software on the terminal with the DB hosting on another machine/server, it was great. But as soon as you coupled POS + DB on the same terminal, lag started to be noticed. It was still acceptable, but it would take 3 seconds to create a new ticket vs. less than a second on a 2.8Ghz P4. Especially on the single core Atoms. The Dual Core atoms seemed to handle things just as well as their 2.8Ghz & 3Ghz power hungry Pentium they were to be replacing. And we tested both Windows XP/WEPOS & Linux (openSuSE/Ubuntu) and saw the same results.
Let's be honest. At least 90% of bit torrent traffic is either downloading p0rn or people pirating games, movies, and music.
We have an online ordering package for restaurants, many of whom what to do delivery within a certain "Radius" and they often wonder why we don't. They think "Oh well, you can use google maps!". Well, Google Maps can't pass the "My Dad's house Test". Which I show them where Google Maps/MapQuest/anything Teleatlas shows my dad's how is located and then where it really is one street over on the opposite end of the street.
One of my geek friends is a total oss zealot bought a droid phone for him, the one that was touch screen only like an iphone, and one with a keyboard for his texting like mad wife. They quickly found they couldn't always download the same apps from the market place due to hardware differences of the two phones. And it happened a few times.
All my none geek friends who got one b/c they were with verizon were elated at first, but now are kind of ho-hum and most will tell you if they could have gotten an iPhone on Verizon, they would have.
I can tell already Android is not getting fun to develop for from a professional stand point. We've spent 5x's the amount on test hardware in the past six months than we have in the past 2 years for Apple devices. And we're finding QA testing is taking 3X's the time/expense because we have to test against 1.5,1.6,2.0, and 2.1. There are hardware differences, feature differences, and for an open platform it costs more to develop for. It's been a sticker shock when we quote a price that is 4x's the cost to develop the same app for the iPhone, and that is enough that most of our clients will develop for the iPhone first. And only for Android if the iPhone app proves to be successful.
But with everything that happens when someone passes away, it's damn hard to remember everybody and even harder to get ahold of everyone. Especially when you're having to get burial plots, caskets, and all the other stuff that goes on. Especially if the person was highly connected and you had been away for quite some time. I saw it with my mother. She was one of those people who knew a lot of people. I certainly didn't know them all.
We've been in a similar situation. It's gotten to the point where our customers want an integrated Point of Sale with our service. We spent 2007 integrating with other POS's for specific clients, but to integrate with just the top 10 point of sales in our market was going to cost us well over $100k in SDK's and licenses. We looked to Open source and found only one point of sale solution and it had the basics, but lacked a bunch of basics like employee time tracking and required a manger to know XML and something about Javan order to assign employee roles. After we made "suggestions" to the developers and seeing no action for two years we ended up forking it and started fixing these things ourselves.
Well we just landed our first big contracts to do customized development. One of the big reason we won the contracts is because we have an opensource contract. Our Service/support agreement was about the same as our closed sourced competitors. But with our solution there were no per terminal licensing fees and for what our competitors wanted to write an integration module to our client's ERP we could deliver a customized product. The biggest advantage our clients felt was getting the full source code. No matter what happens to our company, they are free to hire internal developers to continue modifications or hire someone else. We hope they don't, but that only means we have to provide the best service/support at a reasonable price.
We have one long meeting at the end of each month where we're usually planning what feature to work on during the next month. And a lot of that meeting time is just assigning tasks and addressing any upfront concerns and is usually about an hour to two hours tops if we're adding a major feature. Then I keep track of the developers via their commit comments. I tell them put the status in there in less than 2 sentences. My only rule is that if they are having a problem let me know about it.
If I see a problem in a recent build, I file a bug report. It works extremely well.
I heard they were just waiting for the Duke Nuk'em team to finish up. After all, it's Duke Nukem Forever being written in Perl 6 for the Phantom console, right?
The big difference was that Microsoft HAD NO HARDWARE! You couldn't go buy a "Microsoft Windows PC". They were not in the hardware business but structured their licensing with hardware manufactures to where you couldn't buy a Packard-Bell, Compaq, IBM PC, HP, Dell, Gateway without Windows. No matter whose hardware you bought, it came with Windows due to the licensing agreement which meant you couldn't buy a Dell with BeOS even if Dell wanted to produce a model with BeOS. (Yes I'm talking about 10 years ago).
There is no anti-trust problems here. Apple has full rights to a monopoly on Apple branded hardware. The problem with microsoft was it didn't matter if you bought an IBM PC, HP, or Dell, they all had Windows and couldn't package their hardware with any other OS under MS's licensing agreements. Thus they forced out other possible competitors on the PC platform. In the Cell Phone world, Apple competes with Nokia, RIM, and now the Android platform. You can walk into any wireless store and buy a phone that's NOT apple. It's not like there is an HTC, Motorola, and Nokia there, but they all run iPhoneOS.
In the MP3 player world, I am free to buy a number of different MP3 players and use different music stores if I so choose. It just so happens that Apple has the best platform that works for me. They've done nothing to stop competitors from entering the market. They have no exclusive deals with music labels that doesn't allow them to distribute to other online stores, etc.. Most songs are available on Amazon or you can go buy a CD if you so choose.
The fact that no one else has been able to create a solution that works just as well and easily for most people and is a market failure doesn't mean that Apple has an anti-trust case against them.
...if they are for "public safety" instead of revenue. I know of several cities here in Missouri that have turned them off because people stopped running the red lights. Instead of going to the press and talking about their success. No the departments were complaining because NO ONE WAS RUNNING THE LIGHTS and therefore not making any money and forcing them to "turn them off". They didn't put those cameras there to increase public safety. They did it to increase revenue.
And when I buy a Mac, I take it out of the box, plug it in, press the power button and go. Granted, more than $200, but far less than 3 days of my time.
WTF. We were blasting people into space on the Atlas 50 years ago. I know the Atlas V is a different vehicle, but hell, the Atlas was a modified ICBM. How much does it cost to redesign the payload platform on the DIVH or Atlas V?
I thought off-line storage was a big part of HTML5? Hell we're even using it now with our iPhone apps. There are a lot of things I like about google docs. It's great because we have a Joint Venture with a company in San Francisco where we're based out of St. Louis. We can edit in real time using Skype for voice and then see what people are editing in a text document or spreadsheet.
But Microsoft Office and iWork are both on my MacBook Pro. Why? Because sometimes I'm on an airplane and need to finish up that presentation for tomorrow or write a report, etc.. Or I'm riding in a car doing the same through the backwoods where the cell towers don't go. Until I can, Google Docs will not be replacing Office or iWork as my everyday office tools.
I don't use the tools on a daily basis like I did 5 years ago, but I've been playing with Blender since 1.25 days in 1998. And to this day, I still can't produce as good of results out the box without tweaking the hell out of things in blender as I can with Lightwave. And I started using Lightwave about the same 1998 time frame. And if we want to talk horrible UI interfaces, Blender takes the cake. I remember it was like someone took the worst features of Lightwave's 5.4's UI and designed an entire program around them. Really, it took me a couple YEARS to master the UI and about the time I had, they went and changed it all. And then proceeded to make more changes about every 6 months. It seems like every time I finally get a Blender UI down, it's time to upgrade and suddenly something has moved or doesn't work the same way any more. The biggest example was with the particle/physics engine. I had about 20 minutes worth animation finished (60k frames). Then suddenly the particle engine changed and at least half those files no longer worked. That kind rapid development cycle hurts it in professional production shops. It seems like Blender gets a feature that you've been dying to see for ages the price is anything you've been working on has to be redone. But even then, it seems like a lot of "new" features are stuff that I've seen Lightwave/Maya/MAX for years and at this point, they've got it refined.
Now as far as a tool to learn 3D animation, Blender is great to learn the basics. And if you have time, you can produce some amazing results. It's perfect for the hobby/enthusiast.
GIMP is a good alternative to Photoshop Elements. It does a lot of what I need up and until the point I really need to use filters and plug ins or really do some advanced color tweaking. That's where Photoshop has GIMP beat hands down. I have a few plugins I've bought over the years that allow me to do in minutes what would take a couple hours in GIMP by hand. As far as UI's go, GIMP has a better over all UI than Photoshop now other than the Tool bar in the image window instead of at the top of the application. That still annoys me. .
I think an app store for OSX would be seen as a great benefit by most end users. One place where you can go search for apps, browse for apps, read reviews, and buy & install effortlessly that is also vetted to not to be Malware/virus is something that most end users would find extremely useful.
Because Apple has control of only their hardware. It's no different than buying an IBM mainframe that only support z/OS. Windows was on everybody's hardware. So whether you bought Dell, HP, or the computer shop down the street, the computer was likely running Windows.
Especially when different stores have different pay out rules. If android has umpteen different stores where you have make X in sales before they pay you vs. Apple's model of one place where we at least know the rules....we'll take apple.
But even with our current apps, the download ratio is about 300:1, iphone:android versions. Even blackberry to android is 22:1.
Firmware added to "their phones" that only allow users to purchase from their app store. Apple cut the carriers out of the market with the iPhone. The carriers aren't going to let Google do the same.
It's called college.
And notice I said some of the Solaris/OpenSolaris market. Not all. In the past two years we've been working on a project and took a look at Solaris and OpenSolaris for the enterprise version of our software products. We could deploy smaller/medium sized companies who were growing with OpenSolaris on x86 and then if/when they needed the support, they could always move to bid daddy Solaris.
Then Oracle announced they were buying Sun and having been an IT manager, I absolutely hate and refuse to deal with Oracle unless there is no other way. When it comes to databases, I'd much rather deal with the DB/400 (i/p/whatever series it's called now) and IBM for OLTP or Teradata for warehousing.
If you need the enterprise level stuff and going to pay the support contracts for it, you're going to go over to IBM or REHL. But for those of us looking at OpenSolaris, FreeBSD makes a much more logical choice to replace it than Linux. Especially if you want DTrace and ZFS.
We already have an amendment about this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution