I worked as a sysadmin at a medium sized architecture/graphics design firm that was running Alpha based systems on their renderfarm. Those boxes were between 5 and 8 years old and it was long over due for upgrading.
I started working as a consultant with them in June and the choice was between Sun and IBM. IBM won because of Linux. Everyone saw it was the future for CGI and rendering options. So last month they installed 4 Blade servers with 14 1U servers each with dual 2Ghz Xeon's and 2GB of ram each. Consolidated a 1600 Sq. ft room of Alpha servers to 2 Racks (well they could have put them all in 1, but they decided not to for some reason).
It's all about TCO in the end. You buy the sparcs less often, and they're cheaper to maintain.
Finally someone else that understands this. Linux/*bsd on commodity hardware is great for a small office that needs a moderately active file or print server. I even like them for webservers and backup systems, but as I can see it, most/.ers have never worked in an Enterprise level datacenter before. Its a whole differnet ball game there. Sure a new server may cost $400,000, but your planning on keeping it for at least five years and need that 99.99% relabilty and support when it does break, because if it does, you could loose $1M if the damn thing is down for a day.
For high end database work, there has always been two platforms I've seen, IBM and Sun. The two datacenters I have worked at in my life time were running AS/400 (about 200 of them) and the other was a medium sized architecture/graphics design firm with about 30 ALPHA units. Those AS/400's were about $500,000 a piece when new and when one broke, or was being upgraded, IBM's people were there within two hours and often fixed in 4 hours. Those were redundant systems, so if one or two server went down, it might slow down the DB processing speed a tad, but not by much.
I now work as a consultant on helping SMB/E's make wise technology choices and we focus on TCO in all respects from servers to printers. For SMB's, Linux is not a toy, its a solution. Its a cost effective tool when you compare its TCO to that of Windows.
Where can TCO be killers? Well one our clients owns and operates kiosk systems for several businesses. He also had one other competetor in the market and both were using Windows 2000 based solutions. We help our client migrate all of his systems to the Linux-based FirecastOS last spring before the "Worm-of-the-Week" hit. The other company lost 20% of their market share over the summer and now are barely in business to our client and I predict that by the end of 2005, they will be out of business completely. Why? Because our client told us, "After we switched to linux, our service calls have reduced by 85%. Now we are just dealing with hardware failures, not software problems. Also, Licensing on his old system was $1200 with windows and the kiosk software. Now its $400 per unit.
At any rate, it depends on who and want your customer needs. A small office with 10 employees would proably be wasting their money on a SUN system as that $10,000 would buy them 3 systems for about 12 years compaired to a reasonable 6 year life of that Sun sever. A larger company, its a different story.
The internet is no different that catalog or mail order shipping. People label the internet "New and must be taxed differently" when really, its just an innovation by placing a catalog online instead of printing them.
Under mail order tax collection, the rules are: If you do not have offices in other states, you only have to charge customers in the state you operate sales tax. Transactions going to other states are tax free.
Let's say I sell books and I live in Missouri and I mail a copy to someone in St. Louis, I have to collect state sales tax on that transaction. Let's say I mail a copy to someone else in little rock arkansas, no sales tax because I don't operate out of AR.
Although citizens naturally prefer low-tax regimes, sometimes it's just silly: look at California's budget to see what "low tax at any price" does
California, and low tax? Isn't that an oxymoron. I mean they have the second highest state income Max bracket in the nation of 9.3% if you make more than $38,000 per year (ie middle class in most other places). SourceTaxadmin.org
Calforina is in the top 10 of highest state corperate income taxes, and the highest bank income tax in the country at a whopping 10.84%
Calafornia has the highest state sales tax rate of 7.25% And that doesn't include California's car taxes, properity taxes, and don't forget local sales taxes etc. Also don't forget Federal Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes you have to pay too, or get deducted from your pay check.
California's budget problems arose from Davis' favors to his campaign donors, the number of social programs, the number of illegal immigrants that tap those social programs, and the general hostility to business on the left coast. Also the downturn in the ecnomy and the fact the dot com bubble was built and bursted.
I mean what do you want, to pay 70% of your income to the state? And California's policies are low tax?
Next time know what the hell your talking about.
Not all figures from: http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/tax_stru.html
I saw the Matrix first on video. I thought it was a great movie, and if they had ended it there, I would have said, damn good film.
I was the second one last summer at the $2 cheap theater and I enjoyed the movie as an action flick with no real story line. In fact, if I had paid more than $2 to see it, I would have been pissed I just wasted my money. I had a bunch of friends that went to the 8AM release, although they are 'real huge fans' and they liked it, except for one that said, "Huh, it doesn't really have an ending of any kind. Its like in 10 years they will do another triliogy and leave us where we began".
I might go see it in the cheap theatre if the fight scenes are good just for one of those thoughtless entertainment films.
For RotK, I have tickets to an IMAX theatre that is showing fellowship extended, TTT extended, and then RotK at midnight all in a row. We bought tickets for everyone in the company and a guest, all 12 in all, and that will be our company "christmas party"
I studied the first matrix in a philosophy call in college and it was interesting. Then like many sucessful movies, they decided to go back and milk the franchise. From what I've heard, there was no ending and if they wanted, might be able to go back and do another tiology or movie or whatever for more money.
Lord of the Rings has a complete story line, a beginning, a middle and an end. After RotK, there are no more. We will have an end to the story.
As Jackson deviated from the books, yes. But you have too. I checked out the unabridged BBC radio drama on CD about 2 years ago to refresh my memory about LoTR and it was like 14 hours long. However, Jackson has done what he could. There are the scenes in the extended edition, like the giving of the gifts, that needed to be in the original film because it makes a lot more scense, but one has to strike a balance and I think Jackson has done a pretty good job of doing this.
At least TTT had real diologe and showed human emotion unlike reloaded, which seemed to have some new-age mobo-jumbo with a lot of fight scenes.
Funny, where have you been in the world of CGI arts the last couple years. Scripting in animation programs is becomming a rather big deal. You still have your modellers/texture arts out there, but then when it comes time to add thousands of models into a scene, lets say a large battle, it becomes rather tedious and not very time effiecent to place and animate all the objects.
In starwars Episode I, all the grass on the hills were animated. Sure there were some basic "motions" defined, but then the coders came along and wrote a mathatical model so that the computer could calculate each indivdual blade's movment.
I worked as a systems admin at a local architechture/Graphics design firm and they actually hired a civil engineer that had his BS in Physics along with a newly gradute in mathatics & computer science who wrote some nice AI programs for an undergrad to program scripts for modelling buidling and anaylize stress patterns. They actually chose Blender 2.23 because Python was pretty damn easy to use.
In LOTR: TTT, the battle scence was constructed by using a "learning" computer program that calculated the battle. There were indivudal actions model, then they used a mathmatical script/program to have the computer AI simulate the battle. Each time they ran it, the elven arcahers got more accurate, etc. The one scene where it looks like they used just "store actions" was if you look closely, the last two riders when aragon and Theadon are riding down the path, they are swinging at nothing and doing the same actions as the two in front of them.
Scripting and the use of Computer AI in animation is becomming a large part of the CGI industry. The artist just make things look good for close ups with modelling and texturing. Most of the actual animating is being done with scripts.
The money in CGI is also on the math end. Starting out, our guy with a BS in math & comp sci was making more than the senior GA that had been there 10 years. I learned how to use some of the 3D applications (two were special software they had created that ran on Alpha's). They also had some Lightwave and several 3D studio stations to take their Autocad specs from the architects and have the GA's make cool 3D virtual walk throughs.
When I left to take a job at a consulting company, they were taking a serious look at blender for replacing their Lightwave system. Why? Yes, Blender lacks a raytracing engine, however you go use third party applications if you need to, but modelling buildings and its intergated game engine (on older version) and at least the python scripting language ment that mathmatical programs can quickly be written to simulate various aspects.
And then there is Blender's ablity to read and write.dxf and the fact that blender does do a damn good job for rendering buidlings if you have a good GA with some talent.
Blender was hurt by that year of non development with NAN was in bankruptcy. However, Blender is worth a good look.
Off all the OSS software out there, this is the one that is gaining a lot of attention out there in industry land. Its learning curve is extremely steep, but I have found it to be an extremely good program for basic 3D animation. With some of the tools to use POV-RAY for ray-tracing, one can get the same results as with Lightwave with a little practice.
I'll be glad to see the game engine back into the platform. I know of several indie gaming companies that could save a lot of time and money by using blender to help create their works.
I'm orginally from Lake St. Louis, about 20 miles west on 40/61, and I once saw the damnest thing driving through Baldwin. The police had open the controls to a signal light and were flipping the switch to suddenly cause the lights to go red so they could write a ticket for "running a red light". Needless to say this nearly caused an accident.
On the more serious side, these devices pose a real public safety hazard and their sale should be restricted. However, I think that the company selling these devices will soon see one hell of a lawsuit if the use one of these devices would cause an accident.
So chances are either laws will limit their market, or the trial lawyers will take care of them in time...
Netscape around version 2 and three were much better than IE 2 and 3. The 4.x versions where more or less equal with IE edging out in speed. From 5.x, the battle was over, IE won because Netscape became bloated and IE was faster.
Did bundling IE help it win, well after 4.0 I would have to say yes. At that point, the two were more or less equal and when connecting at 33.6, why should I spend 6 hours downloading Netscape. Was that monolpolistic competition, you bet. Is that fair and legal, NO on both accounts.
Mozilla is a bloated mess. Why do you think Apple chose KHTML to serve as the foundation for its Safari browser, which I use now.
Yes, some websites out there only cater to MSIE users and I don't go to those site. Why? at some point a bad consultant or lazy programmer decided that if 5% of the market can't view our site, not that big of a loss. I work as a tech consultant and I hear that more than you can believe. Then I remind them that there are 5% of the market that will go else where to buy whatever it is, that makes them think.
BSD is good after creating that 5000th version of Hangman in your javascript class and there is no other great use than maybe a few people will DL and learn javascript or use it on their web site and you just want to have a bit of an ego trip.
I am starting to see the down side to opensource technology. I had one office switch to RH 9 for their desktop about four months ago, only for the announcement by Red Hat about how support for RH 9 is going away. I was attempting to convence two other offices that Linux was the way to go, but with Novell's purchase of SuSE yesterday I had to make two phone calls today and say its either Apple or Dell and M$ to purchase this round of computers. Chances are they will be going back to Dell despite having less than desired support and quality control with their present desktops.
Now its been pretty easy to get Linux and *BSD into server rooms and even some OSS applications like Openoffice onto people's machines, but entire platforms is a hard sale and with uncertainty...well that just killed linux on the desktop for now.
The airlines...their little 10 year price war has cut out just about all the profits in the markets. If you recall, the US government bailed them out in 2001.
Started with Linux on servers with Slackware 3. The good ole days of GUI's were for wimps and if you wanted that SCSI card to work, write your own damned drivers...okay maybe not that bad, but close.
Eventually I attempted to install RH 5.2 on my desktop to replace Windows 98 in the middle of 99. I could do it, went out and bought SuSE. Everything worked, except for my Winmodem and sound card. Easy enough, I recycled a jumper based 33.6 from my old 486 and was on the net. I thought Star Office was cool, used it for a summer. THen I came back to college and it came time to replace my laptop.
I was doing a lot of work in PHP and MySQL at the time and liked being able to develop in a native *iux enviroment, but I needed M$ office, powerpoint really, for classes and the ablity to use my scanner, digital camera, and other devices. I was not going to buy another shitty windows laptop, so I chose an iBook with OS 10.1 and then upgraded to 10.2.
I have been impressed. I had my native *iux, on a FreeBSD core (I quit using Linux for webservers over their BSD cousins in 2001), plus I had many products that provided drivers for the macs. Also, I had access to a number of applications like Photoshop, DW, Flash, Pagemaker, and many other standard applications. iPhoto, iTunes, and the Combo drive coupled with battery life was great.
Since then I have been sold on the macintosh over Linux for most desktop uses and there are even a few games available...
I have spent the last couple days on the phone with CIO's and several SMB's that use linux around this town as I am one of the few *iux in this area asking questions about red hat and now this. This will get me trolled, but I now have to remove linux as an option for a while. If your a zealot, you can -1 me now, if not read on to see why.
In fact I hadn't read slashdot today until about 30 minutes ago when one client called to ask about novell buying SuSE and me going, "Novell did what?". I knew SuSE's sale was in the works, but I didn't know to whom. Novell makes some pretty impressive enterprise level stuff, but I work with SMB's.
We had one office here in the last three months abandon Windows for Linux on 90% of their desktops. Their accounting and shipping department still used Windows 2k pro and their whopping Marketing and PR department of two people are using Macs. So far they loved the advantages, but I might have just shot myself in the foot in this town if RH and Novell doesn't make what is going to happen clear. I had two other offices in town getting ready to switch, and let me tell you, Linux just lost.
I had to call one office today and tell them the truth as I see it, "The Linux market is going into flux and I cannot predict how its going turn out. That leaves Microsoft and Apple." Between RH yesterday and SuSE today, that's the truth. The last thing businesses want is a question mark on what's going to happen. My Guess is that today or tomorrow, he will be placing an order for 30 new Dell computers with XP pro and Office 2003.
Most of the businesses I work with have between 10 - 50 employees and maybe one or two IT support staff. Most of these companies hire me has a consultant to act as CIO to the president/CEO and give them advice. I had been going around recommending Linux as alternative to M$ since it would run on their exisiting hardware, cost, and that there was commerical support from IBM, RH, and SuSE. Well, there is not a clear road map for either RH or SuSE at this moment. I cannot recommend either of these products in good faith because I don't know if there will the support they are looking for in a year or two years, and that leaves two options: Apple and Microsoft.
Apple is creating some killer systems, especially laptops and mid range systems. All of our desktops and laptops here in the office are macs and we love their stablity and the fact we don't have to worry about the Worm of the Week. But their higher front end cost compared to Dell is often enough that no matter what people's expirances are, they will choose the Dell, especially since the stablity with 2k and XP has improved a lot from the 9X series.
My senior year of High School in the late 1990's went something like this:
Mother diagonsed with a rare form of Breast Cancer, and caught in stage 4 despite regular check ups and mamagrams.
Very ill due to chemo treatments. Made an effort to see my marching competitions, but couldn't be around large crowds.
Had to drop out of several activities because she was in and out of the hospital including an audition for a music scholarship to college.
Day of prom, rushed to the hospital, discovered the tumor has spread to her brain. Spent my senior prom in an emergancy waiting room.
Made it through graduation, but couldn't walk without a walker and after my graduation party went into the hospital that night. Found the cancer in her spine, didn't respond to any more treatments and watched my mother waste away for the next month at home until she died exactly 1 month after my high school graduation.
Some how I managed to regain enough will to enter college just over six weeks later.
I hope this isn't some marketing/investment blitz and that this might be a giant leap forward in cancer treatment. Sometimes I wonder if these companies want to find a cure. I mean, research is profitable business. Just look at the March of Dimes. Their orginial goal was to help find a cure for Polio and after one was discovered, they had to find a new mission.
I've been using SQL-ledger for my small business for about a year. We have grown from 2 to now 8 employees. We started out offering VR modelling to real estate agencies, develoeprs, event planners, wedding/floral design, interior designers, etc. and that side grow quickly to about a $25,000 a month business.
We also provide affordable online and print advertising campaigns for SMB's and technology consulting service (my area) to small businesses and manage five relatively large sites for churches and other non-profits.
Even though we are still small, we are growing an expect to gross about 400k for FY 2003 and proably reach over the $500k mark next year.
One of our "units" runs an online art co-op store for local artists. We manage the site, take pictures, handle transactions and payments to the artists each quarter, scan images, create QTVR models of sculptures, etc. As our business has evolved and became diversified, we needed an ERP and settled on using OSsuite which is a modification of the NOLA ERP solution and OSCommerce webstore software. We are waiting to see if their CRM system also comes into play at some point.
For our needs, it works very well, but its designed for small businesses like ourselves.
Not like that. I have flown scale lear jet kits that had ducted fan engines that were gas powered. However, at $15 a gallon for the special fuel, it got expensive and I went back to prop jobs that used regular ole 2-cycle fuel (gas with oil mixture like you put into your chain saw).
This was like 10 years ago, the engines were a tad bit under powered and expensive. I think that plane took about 5 months and $6000 with engines and all to put together. It flew fine, but couldn't do any fancy manouvers.
Any serious R/C plane gear will cost you about $150 for a starter kit. Anything less than that is more of a toy than a hobby kit. I just got into R/C planes again and it cost me about $300 for a gas powered trainer with remote.
Back in the late 1990's Altavista was king of the search engine. Then Google came along a replaced it as king of the hill. I don't even remember if Altavista is still around, but the point is, it won't take much to replace it.
Let me say this, as much as we bash gates and company, OSS has the same damn issues. Anyone ever look at the phpBB or phpnuke code?
I work as a technology consultant. Security advice and audits account for about 40% of my business and generates our most profits. Only about 20% of the time, from my expirance, have systems been well maintained. Good firewalls, up to date security patches even on M$ systems, but most of their problems come from 3rd party applications and bad code.
Look at the OpenSSH problem. That wasn't a problem with Linux per say, it was with bad code in a module (that was one of those "glad we run OpenBSD" days). Sendmail, DNS/BIND are natorious for this.
You can sure up a system, but one line of bad code, whether it be in PERL, PHP, ASP, C++, VB,.net or whatever can quickly negate any hardware security measures.
Re:Linux users won't Switch? Where has he been?
on
Mac OS X 10.3 vs. Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can tell you haven't had a lot of experance with computer users. I used to be like you and loved to play with Linux in my college days, but then I got into the real world and discovered a few things about technology and end users. 99.9% of them wants something that WORKS. They couldn't give a shit why or how, they just want it to work. I'm not a zelaot one way or the other. I had been using Win 98 and its consent crashing was pain in the ass. So I switched to Linux, which had its problems too, like my printer didn't work, my scanner didn't work, my sound card didn't have drivers, etc. and it was taking a lot of time for me to play with the system configuration, time that could be best spent actually generating income so that I can pay rent, buy food, etc.. With OSX, I still have the tools I need for *iux developement along with tools like Microsoft Office, which I love on the Mac, and Adobe Photoshop.
Although, first let me tell you that I stopped using Linux all together last year finally switching the last of our servers to FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Frankly I find the orgainzation of the *BSD software and communities much better and more organized. Linux has always seemed more hodgepodge. I once heard AOL described as "training wheels for the internet" and I feel the same way about Linux...its training wheels for many students and others into the world of Unix. Its what I learned on, but once I got the hang of it, I found many time saving admin features in BSD, especially the ports tree.
Most of the Linux users that switch to Mac OS were not macfanbots. Most, like myself, hated 'Classic" and still do. What apple did was give the world an affordable Unix, and I said UNIX because as many linux users are quick to point out - LINUX IS NOT UNIX ITS UNIX-LIKE, platform that is:
1) Easy to use for the average joe that want's something easy to use
2) If you are a power user, the tools are there and you can use them
3) Aka, best of the OSS support & those 'evil' close source people.
At leas with OS X I have the choice of easy to use interface and not having to worry about it, or opening up terminal/shell and going hardcore when I want.
Moreover, I no longer have the time to "play around" with an OS no matter what it is. I work as an SMB consultant primarily in technology. In fact I am proably wasting 15 minutes I could be charging someone about $50 for by writing this post. I don't have time to toy around with something that might or might not work.
great example is our accounting software. I looked at NOLA, liked the package a lot, but decided on Quickbooks for Mac. Why? Our CPA supports Quickbooks and gives us a discount for using it because it makes her job easier, plus it took about 15 minutes to install and another two hours to set up. It would have taken at least that long to get Nola up and running, let along configured. Furthermore, our sectary was already familar with the software which saved a lot of time for us in training. TCO was a hell of a lot cheaper than NOLA for our business. Now that's not the case with everyone.
Boils down to right tool for the job. Linux has its place, like running application spefic taks such as Kiosks and on embeded chips. I like Linux's flexablities in that regaurd, but the average user just wants something that is easy to use and works. They don't have the time nor the desire to mess with problems.
And the likes of CNN and MSNBC as well as the network news DON"T have a liberal bias? God forbid we conservatives have gotten a foothold in the left's dominate propaganda machines.
You want to talk about bias? Why is it that we only hear about the 2 troops killed in Iraq and not the fact that roads, schools, factories, and other infracstructure is being improved in many areas of the country? That the Iraqi people befar are happier to see the torture chambers gone and Saddam no where to be found. Where is that in the news reports? Why is it at the ribbon cutting at a waste water treatment plat or a school in the south of Iraq doesn't have a single American journalist there to cover the story? Maybe some of that is the military's fault for not playing an effective PR game. After all, if the military "highly encouraged" reports to show for an event, the whole media lobby would cry unfairness and that they were not allowed to get "The real story" and the military was manipulating the PR. Talk about your catch-22.
I have talked with several people I know that are back on leave, and the story they tell from the ground is FAR different than what is on NBC nightly news. In fact, I've heard several pieces about this on NPR of all places the last few weeks, that once your outside of Saddam's core of power in the Sunni triangle, things are starting to get better for the people of Iraq.
About two weeks ago NBC nightly news had a story about a concrete plant that the Iraq people, with about $10,000 from the 101st Airborne, was able to get their plant back up and running. Granted, at only 25% capacity, but its employing Iraqi's and generating a profit. The best part is the piece was slanted with the view, "See they are doing this without millions of dollars. If they were to have waited to rebuild, it would have cost private companies millions of dollars. The USD 87 Billion wouldn't have gone to help this project".
Journalist, no matter it be Fox, CNN, or whomever, have their own damned agenda. They don't report news, they report what they want us to decide...with them.
My final straw with journalist came a couple years ago. My now business partner was a jounalism major and wrote for the College newspaper. His family owned several banks and had made a fair amount of money in their lives and were deeply seated republicans. Well, the journalism department's chair was about as leftist as they come and she hated rich people with a passion for no other reason than they sucedded in the American Dream. Their luck/good fortune/and skills be damned. My friend's grandfather donated an entire lab of about 40 brand new 500 Mhz G4 towers, monitors, scanners, and software totally about $80,000 after the College refused to provide funding to the department. How was this gesture thanked? Well my friend was fired from the staff and the professor didn't fail him in the classes, but gave him D's causing him to loose his scholarship. That was one hell of a "Thank you" for actually helping.
That caused me to take on look at journalism and just think, "Gee, now we know why those press reporters have their agendas, they learn early on".
24/7 news has only hurt, because now the press almost has to invent stories in order to keep people's attention. Really is the Scott Peterson case (now the Scott who? case) or Kobe really that important? NO!
Simple facts: CNN, Network News, Foxnews, BBC, NPR, MSNBC all have their agenda's. It just so happens that most lean one way, Fox leans the other way. God forbid that one network tells what the other side believes.
Linux users won't Switch? Where has he been?
on
Mac OS X 10.3 vs. Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
but he doesn't think many Linux users will switch to it, and that a lot of 'classic' Mac OS users may not want to move to it, either."
Why is it at every PERL and PHP developers conference I attend, I see more and more carrying iBooks and Powerbooks? There are a few running Linux on a DELL or other PC notebook, but there were many Linux users that abandoned Linux on their desktop for OSX. Most "switchers" I know were from Linux to Mac, not Win to Mac.
I am one of them. I was tired of Windows crashing, even with 2000 and now XP being much better in that regaurds, and it was consent problem of not having drivers for the hardware I already had and what to consider in the future.
OSX came out and I waited until 10.1 for Apple to get the major bugs out of the software and when it came time to buy a new laptop, I chose an iBook. Why? I still have MySQL, PERL and PHP along with BBEdit now to code in and test in a *iux platform on my laptop. Plus, I can still communicate with the rest of the business world with MS Office, plus programs like Photoshop, QuarkXpress, GoLive, Dreamweaver, Flash, Quicktime, iLife, etc..
Apple beat Linux in the desktop market hands down. Truefully, the smaller businesses I deal with don't have the resources or the need for a dedicated IT person on staff. That want products that have a 1-800 number they can call for support or if they do need to hire someone to come fix something, that they at least know what they hell the program is.
Now, several SMB's I have delt with in the past six months have switched from Windows to Mac, and most have been perfectly happy because their systems don't crash, its easy to use. Some use it as a Point-of-Sale system with a CC reader. USB barcode scanner and USB cash drawer without any problems. Others just need MS Office, email, and Quickbooks. The biggest complaint I have heard was one manger loved the productivy, easy of use, and stablity of their Macs, but complained that the Mac didn't have solitare.
Until we see commercial vendors, the Adobe's and Macromedia's of the world, produce native Linux products, the platform in the US won't be takening off in the business world.
Part of the reason has to do with the Dot communism mystique of the OSS community. While businesses know that the deployment costs of Linux on the desktop is a hell of a lot lower, TCO may or may not be. I have only had one client switch his office over to mostly Linux. Their accounting and shipping units still use PC's because of their software needs. There was nothing there in OSS land that would have proved cost effective to switch too, and their PR department (2 people) are using Macs for page layouts and the like. However, this was a medium sized company with 40 employees including 5 IT guys that had been running Linux on servers for close to three years and played with the system at home.
I will place my own predictions: Linux users will continue to switch to OSX. Maybe not in droves, but proably more than one would think.
...[ie 6] number-one browser overall, controls 66.3 percent of the market, compared with 14.5 percent for IE 5.5 and 12.7 for IE 5.0. Mozilla is in fourth place with 1.6 percent of the market, but the total market share for browsers based on Mozilla technology is about 4.1 percent.
From http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/39691/3 9691.html
I've seen this once. I was looking at a new stereo once upon a time and CC and BB had identically looking units, but one was running a sale and had the price about $20 or $30 cheaper. When I took in the add, the numbers matched exactly, but one ended in T the other P, so they said "Sorry its not the same". It was a bunch of hogwash, so I went down the street and bought it at the cheaper store. Damn it, I was looking forward to that extra 10% (about $50 or so) off if they were the same.
SQL-Ledger works great. I now offically am the "General Manager" of a small graphics and specialized consultancy firm. (Basically means that I run the business and its 6 employees and meet with clients. I don't do much of the grunt work, which I enjoyed).
It was hard to win over our investors, who wanted us to use Quickbooks, but eventually it came down to the, "if your going to put me in charge, let me run the damn thing". Somehow, despite my arrogance, we got our $600 white box with OpenBSD set-up in the office and the secatary/bookkeeper inputs invoices on her iMac with Safari without any complaints. (yes, our shop is 100% *BSD between Free, Open, and OS X)
You complain about a four year old operating system, you list off a bunch of complaints, and then you say you will ignore Longhorn, which fixes all those complaints. With Longhorn, you can even write your own XML-based installation scripts.
*Looks at Pentium Pro 200 file server with FreeBSD in corner, 282 days of uptime on FBSD 3.4*
*Looks in other corner, sees 2 quad 500Mhz ALPHA boxes running databases running True64 Unix from circa 1997*
*Looks between them at 10 former PIII 700Mhz boxes running OpenBSD...well okay those are only 6 months - 18 months old)
No compliants with 4 year old operating systems here...
A vast majority of software out there in the OSS community is licensed under the GPL. Once in GPL, one cannot simply remove that and change it into BSD. I've seen people try it and catch a lot of flak, not to mention that YOU CANNOT DO IT because of the terms of the GPL.
Most of the programs I wrote as a student, I let loose under BSD, because frankly, if they figured out a way to use my hangman script and make money, more power to them...
Slashdot Mirror
I started working as a consultant with them in June and the choice was between Sun and IBM. IBM won because of Linux. Everyone saw it was the future for CGI and rendering options. So last month they installed 4 Blade servers with 14 1U servers each with dual 2Ghz Xeon's and 2GB of ram each. Consolidated a 1600 Sq. ft room of Alpha servers to 2 Racks (well they could have put them all in 1, but they decided not to for some reason).
Finally someone else that understands this. Linux/*bsd on commodity hardware is great for a small office that needs a moderately active file or print server. I even like them for webservers and backup systems, but as I can see it, most /.ers have never worked in an Enterprise level datacenter before. Its a whole differnet ball game there. Sure a new server may cost $400,000, but your planning on keeping it for at least five years and need that 99.99% relabilty and support when it does break, because if it does, you could loose $1M if the damn thing is down for a day.
For high end database work, there has always been two platforms I've seen, IBM and Sun. The two datacenters I have worked at in my life time were running AS/400 (about 200 of them) and the other was a medium sized architecture/graphics design firm with about 30 ALPHA units. Those AS/400's were about $500,000 a piece when new and when one broke, or was being upgraded, IBM's people were there within two hours and often fixed in 4 hours. Those were redundant systems, so if one or two server went down, it might slow down the DB processing speed a tad, but not by much.
I now work as a consultant on helping SMB/E's make wise technology choices and we focus on TCO in all respects from servers to printers. For SMB's, Linux is not a toy, its a solution. Its a cost effective tool when you compare its TCO to that of Windows.
Where can TCO be killers? Well one our clients owns and operates kiosk systems for several businesses. He also had one other competetor in the market and both were using Windows 2000 based solutions. We help our client migrate all of his systems to the Linux-based FirecastOS last spring before the "Worm-of-the-Week" hit. The other company lost 20% of their market share over the summer and now are barely in business to our client and I predict that by the end of 2005, they will be out of business completely. Why? Because our client told us, "After we switched to linux, our service calls have reduced by 85%. Now we are just dealing with hardware failures, not software problems. Also, Licensing on his old system was $1200 with windows and the kiosk software. Now its $400 per unit.
At any rate, it depends on who and want your customer needs. A small office with 10 employees would proably be wasting their money on a SUN system as that $10,000 would buy them 3 systems for about 12 years compaired to a reasonable 6 year life of that Sun sever. A larger company, its a different story.
Under mail order tax collection, the rules are: If you do not have offices in other states, you only have to charge customers in the state you operate sales tax. Transactions going to other states are tax free.
Let's say I sell books and I live in Missouri and I mail a copy to someone in St. Louis, I have to collect state sales tax on that transaction. Let's say I mail a copy to someone else in little rock arkansas, no sales tax because I don't operate out of AR.
Calforina is in the top 10 of highest state corperate income taxes, and the highest bank income tax in the country at a whopping 10.84%
Calafornia has the highest state sales tax rate of 7.25% And that doesn't include California's car taxes, properity taxes, and don't forget local sales taxes etc. Also don't forget Federal Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes you have to pay too, or get deducted from your pay check.
California's budget problems arose from Davis' favors to his campaign donors, the number of social programs, the number of illegal immigrants that tap those social programs, and the general hostility to business on the left coast. Also the downturn in the ecnomy and the fact the dot com bubble was built and bursted.
I mean what do you want, to pay 70% of your income to the state? And California's policies are low tax?
Next time know what the hell your talking about. Not all figures from: http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/tax_stru.html
I was the second one last summer at the $2 cheap theater and I enjoyed the movie as an action flick with no real story line. In fact, if I had paid more than $2 to see it, I would have been pissed I just wasted my money. I had a bunch of friends that went to the 8AM release, although they are 'real huge fans' and they liked it, except for one that said, "Huh, it doesn't really have an ending of any kind. Its like in 10 years they will do another triliogy and leave us where we began".
I might go see it in the cheap theatre if the fight scenes are good just for one of those thoughtless entertainment films.
For RotK, I have tickets to an IMAX theatre that is showing fellowship extended, TTT extended, and then RotK at midnight all in a row. We bought tickets for everyone in the company and a guest, all 12 in all, and that will be our company "christmas party"
I studied the first matrix in a philosophy call in college and it was interesting. Then like many sucessful movies, they decided to go back and milk the franchise. From what I've heard, there was no ending and if they wanted, might be able to go back and do another tiology or movie or whatever for more money.
Lord of the Rings has a complete story line, a beginning, a middle and an end. After RotK, there are no more. We will have an end to the story.
As Jackson deviated from the books, yes. But you have too. I checked out the unabridged BBC radio drama on CD about 2 years ago to refresh my memory about LoTR and it was like 14 hours long. However, Jackson has done what he could. There are the scenes in the extended edition, like the giving of the gifts, that needed to be in the original film because it makes a lot more scense, but one has to strike a balance and I think Jackson has done a pretty good job of doing this.
At least TTT had real diologe and showed human emotion unlike reloaded, which seemed to have some new-age mobo-jumbo with a lot of fight scenes.
In starwars Episode I, all the grass on the hills were animated. Sure there were some basic "motions" defined, but then the coders came along and wrote a mathatical model so that the computer could calculate each indivdual blade's movment.
I worked as a systems admin at a local architechture/Graphics design firm and they actually hired a civil engineer that had his BS in Physics along with a newly gradute in mathatics & computer science who wrote some nice AI programs for an undergrad to program scripts for modelling buidling and anaylize stress patterns. They actually chose Blender 2.23 because Python was pretty damn easy to use.
In LOTR: TTT, the battle scence was constructed by using a "learning" computer program that calculated the battle. There were indivudal actions model, then they used a mathmatical script/program to have the computer AI simulate the battle. Each time they ran it, the elven arcahers got more accurate, etc. The one scene where it looks like they used just "store actions" was if you look closely, the last two riders when aragon and Theadon are riding down the path, they are swinging at nothing and doing the same actions as the two in front of them.
Scripting and the use of Computer AI in animation is becomming a large part of the CGI industry. The artist just make things look good for close ups with modelling and texturing. Most of the actual animating is being done with scripts.
The money in CGI is also on the math end. Starting out, our guy with a BS in math & comp sci was making more than the senior GA that had been there 10 years. I learned how to use some of the 3D applications (two were special software they had created that ran on Alpha's). They also had some Lightwave and several 3D studio stations to take their Autocad specs from the architects and have the GA's make cool 3D virtual walk throughs.
When I left to take a job at a consulting company, they were taking a serious look at blender for replacing their Lightwave system. Why? Yes, Blender lacks a raytracing engine, however you go use third party applications if you need to, but modelling buildings and its intergated game engine (on older version) and at least the python scripting language ment that mathmatical programs can quickly be written to simulate various aspects.
And then there is Blender's ablity to read and write .dxf and the fact that blender does do a damn good job for rendering buidlings if you have a good GA with some talent.
Blender was hurt by that year of non development with NAN was in bankruptcy. However, Blender is worth a good look.
I'll be glad to see the game engine back into the platform. I know of several indie gaming companies that could save a lot of time and money by using blender to help create their works.
On the more serious side, these devices pose a real public safety hazard and their sale should be restricted. However, I think that the company selling these devices will soon see one hell of a lawsuit if the use one of these devices would cause an accident.
So chances are either laws will limit their market, or the trial lawyers will take care of them in time...
Netscape around version 2 and three were much better than IE 2 and 3. The 4.x versions where more or less equal with IE edging out in speed. From 5.x, the battle was over, IE won because Netscape became bloated and IE was faster.
Did bundling IE help it win, well after 4.0 I would have to say yes. At that point, the two were more or less equal and when connecting at 33.6, why should I spend 6 hours downloading Netscape. Was that monolpolistic competition, you bet. Is that fair and legal, NO on both accounts.
Mozilla is a bloated mess. Why do you think Apple chose KHTML to serve as the foundation for its Safari browser, which I use now.
Yes, some websites out there only cater to MSIE users and I don't go to those site. Why? at some point a bad consultant or lazy programmer decided that if 5% of the market can't view our site, not that big of a loss. I work as a tech consultant and I hear that more than you can believe. Then I remind them that there are 5% of the market that will go else where to buy whatever it is, that makes them think.
BSD is good after creating that 5000th version of Hangman in your javascript class and there is no other great use than maybe a few people will DL and learn javascript or use it on their web site and you just want to have a bit of an ego trip.
I am starting to see the down side to opensource technology. I had one office switch to RH 9 for their desktop about four months ago, only for the announcement by Red Hat about how support for RH 9 is going away. I was attempting to convence two other offices that Linux was the way to go, but with Novell's purchase of SuSE yesterday I had to make two phone calls today and say its either Apple or Dell and M$ to purchase this round of computers. Chances are they will be going back to Dell despite having less than desired support and quality control with their present desktops.
Now its been pretty easy to get Linux and *BSD into server rooms and even some OSS applications like Openoffice onto people's machines, but entire platforms is a hard sale and with uncertainty...well that just killed linux on the desktop for now.
The airlines...their little 10 year price war has cut out just about all the profits in the markets. If you recall, the US government bailed them out in 2001.
Started with Linux on servers with Slackware 3. The good ole days of GUI's were for wimps and if you wanted that SCSI card to work, write your own damned drivers...okay maybe not that bad, but close.
Eventually I attempted to install RH 5.2 on my desktop to replace Windows 98 in the middle of 99. I could do it, went out and bought SuSE. Everything worked, except for my Winmodem and sound card. Easy enough, I recycled a jumper based 33.6 from my old 486 and was on the net. I thought Star Office was cool, used it for a summer. THen I came back to college and it came time to replace my laptop.
I was doing a lot of work in PHP and MySQL at the time and liked being able to develop in a native *iux enviroment, but I needed M$ office, powerpoint really, for classes and the ablity to use my scanner, digital camera, and other devices. I was not going to buy another shitty windows laptop, so I chose an iBook with OS 10.1 and then upgraded to 10.2.
I have been impressed. I had my native *iux, on a FreeBSD core (I quit using Linux for webservers over their BSD cousins in 2001), plus I had many products that provided drivers for the macs. Also, I had access to a number of applications like Photoshop, DW, Flash, Pagemaker, and many other standard applications. iPhoto, iTunes, and the Combo drive coupled with battery life was great.
Since then I have been sold on the macintosh over Linux for most desktop uses and there are even a few games available...
In fact I hadn't read slashdot today until about 30 minutes ago when one client called to ask about novell buying SuSE and me going, "Novell did what?". I knew SuSE's sale was in the works, but I didn't know to whom. Novell makes some pretty impressive enterprise level stuff, but I work with SMB's.
We had one office here in the last three months abandon Windows for Linux on 90% of their desktops. Their accounting and shipping department still used Windows 2k pro and their whopping Marketing and PR department of two people are using Macs. So far they loved the advantages, but I might have just shot myself in the foot in this town if RH and Novell doesn't make what is going to happen clear. I had two other offices in town getting ready to switch, and let me tell you, Linux just lost.
I had to call one office today and tell them the truth as I see it, "The Linux market is going into flux and I cannot predict how its going turn out. That leaves Microsoft and Apple." Between RH yesterday and SuSE today, that's the truth. The last thing businesses want is a question mark on what's going to happen. My Guess is that today or tomorrow, he will be placing an order for 30 new Dell computers with XP pro and Office 2003.
Most of the businesses I work with have between 10 - 50 employees and maybe one or two IT support staff. Most of these companies hire me has a consultant to act as CIO to the president/CEO and give them advice. I had been going around recommending Linux as alternative to M$ since it would run on their exisiting hardware, cost, and that there was commerical support from IBM, RH, and SuSE. Well, there is not a clear road map for either RH or SuSE at this moment. I cannot recommend either of these products in good faith because I don't know if there will the support they are looking for in a year or two years, and that leaves two options: Apple and Microsoft.
Apple is creating some killer systems, especially laptops and mid range systems. All of our desktops and laptops here in the office are macs and we love their stablity and the fact we don't have to worry about the Worm of the Week. But their higher front end cost compared to Dell is often enough that no matter what people's expirances are, they will choose the Dell, especially since the stablity with 2k and XP has improved a lot from the 9X series.
Mother diagonsed with a rare form of Breast Cancer, and caught in stage 4 despite regular check ups and mamagrams.
Very ill due to chemo treatments. Made an effort to see my marching competitions, but couldn't be around large crowds.
Had to drop out of several activities because she was in and out of the hospital including an audition for a music scholarship to college.
Day of prom, rushed to the hospital, discovered the tumor has spread to her brain. Spent my senior prom in an emergancy waiting room.
Made it through graduation, but couldn't walk without a walker and after my graduation party went into the hospital that night. Found the cancer in her spine, didn't respond to any more treatments and watched my mother waste away for the next month at home until she died exactly 1 month after my high school graduation.
Some how I managed to regain enough will to enter college just over six weeks later.
I hope this isn't some marketing/investment blitz and that this might be a giant leap forward in cancer treatment. Sometimes I wonder if these companies want to find a cure. I mean, research is profitable business. Just look at the March of Dimes. Their orginial goal was to help find a cure for Polio and after one was discovered, they had to find a new mission.
We also provide affordable online and print advertising campaigns for SMB's and technology consulting service (my area) to small businesses and manage five relatively large sites for churches and other non-profits.
Even though we are still small, we are growing an expect to gross about 400k for FY 2003 and proably reach over the $500k mark next year.
One of our "units" runs an online art co-op store for local artists. We manage the site, take pictures, handle transactions and payments to the artists each quarter, scan images, create QTVR models of sculptures, etc. As our business has evolved and became diversified, we needed an ERP and settled on using OSsuite which is a modification of the NOLA ERP solution and OSCommerce webstore software. We are waiting to see if their CRM system also comes into play at some point.
For our needs, it works very well, but its designed for small businesses like ourselves.
This was like 10 years ago, the engines were a tad bit under powered and expensive. I think that plane took about 5 months and $6000 with engines and all to put together. It flew fine, but couldn't do any fancy manouvers.
Any serious R/C plane gear will cost you about $150 for a starter kit. Anything less than that is more of a toy than a hobby kit. I just got into R/C planes again and it cost me about $300 for a gas powered trainer with remote.
Back in the late 1990's Altavista was king of the search engine. Then Google came along a replaced it as king of the hill. I don't even remember if Altavista is still around, but the point is, it won't take much to replace it.
I work as a technology consultant. Security advice and audits account for about 40% of my business and generates our most profits. Only about 20% of the time, from my expirance, have systems been well maintained. Good firewalls, up to date security patches even on M$ systems, but most of their problems come from 3rd party applications and bad code.
Look at the OpenSSH problem. That wasn't a problem with Linux per say, it was with bad code in a module (that was one of those "glad we run OpenBSD" days). Sendmail, DNS/BIND are natorious for this.
You can sure up a system, but one line of bad code, whether it be in PERL, PHP, ASP, C++, VB, .net or whatever can quickly negate any hardware security measures.
Although, first let me tell you that I stopped using Linux all together last year finally switching the last of our servers to FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Frankly I find the orgainzation of the *BSD software and communities much better and more organized. Linux has always seemed more hodgepodge. I once heard AOL described as "training wheels for the internet" and I feel the same way about Linux...its training wheels for many students and others into the world of Unix. Its what I learned on, but once I got the hang of it, I found many time saving admin features in BSD, especially the ports tree.
Most of the Linux users that switch to Mac OS were not macfanbots. Most, like myself, hated 'Classic" and still do. What apple did was give the world an affordable Unix, and I said UNIX because as many linux users are quick to point out - LINUX IS NOT UNIX ITS UNIX-LIKE, platform that is:
1) Easy to use for the average joe that want's something easy to use
2) If you are a power user, the tools are there and you can use them
3) Aka, best of the OSS support & those 'evil' close source people.
At leas with OS X I have the choice of easy to use interface and not having to worry about it, or opening up terminal/shell and going hardcore when I want.
Moreover, I no longer have the time to "play around" with an OS no matter what it is. I work as an SMB consultant primarily in technology. In fact I am proably wasting 15 minutes I could be charging someone about $50 for by writing this post. I don't have time to toy around with something that might or might not work.
great example is our accounting software. I looked at NOLA, liked the package a lot, but decided on Quickbooks for Mac. Why? Our CPA supports Quickbooks and gives us a discount for using it because it makes her job easier, plus it took about 15 minutes to install and another two hours to set up. It would have taken at least that long to get Nola up and running, let along configured. Furthermore, our sectary was already familar with the software which saved a lot of time for us in training. TCO was a hell of a lot cheaper than NOLA for our business. Now that's not the case with everyone.
Boils down to right tool for the job. Linux has its place, like running application spefic taks such as Kiosks and on embeded chips. I like Linux's flexablities in that regaurd, but the average user just wants something that is easy to use and works. They don't have the time nor the desire to mess with problems.
You want to talk about bias? Why is it that we only hear about the 2 troops killed in Iraq and not the fact that roads, schools, factories, and other infracstructure is being improved in many areas of the country? That the Iraqi people befar are happier to see the torture chambers gone and Saddam no where to be found. Where is that in the news reports? Why is it at the ribbon cutting at a waste water treatment plat or a school in the south of Iraq doesn't have a single American journalist there to cover the story? Maybe some of that is the military's fault for not playing an effective PR game. After all, if the military "highly encouraged" reports to show for an event, the whole media lobby would cry unfairness and that they were not allowed to get "The real story" and the military was manipulating the PR. Talk about your catch-22.
I have talked with several people I know that are back on leave, and the story they tell from the ground is FAR different than what is on NBC nightly news. In fact, I've heard several pieces about this on NPR of all places the last few weeks, that once your outside of Saddam's core of power in the Sunni triangle, things are starting to get better for the people of Iraq.
About two weeks ago NBC nightly news had a story about a concrete plant that the Iraq people, with about $10,000 from the 101st Airborne, was able to get their plant back up and running. Granted, at only 25% capacity, but its employing Iraqi's and generating a profit. The best part is the piece was slanted with the view, "See they are doing this without millions of dollars. If they were to have waited to rebuild, it would have cost private companies millions of dollars. The USD 87 Billion wouldn't have gone to help this project".
Journalist, no matter it be Fox, CNN, or whomever, have their own damned agenda. They don't report news, they report what they want us to decide...with them.
My final straw with journalist came a couple years ago. My now business partner was a jounalism major and wrote for the College newspaper. His family owned several banks and had made a fair amount of money in their lives and were deeply seated republicans. Well, the journalism department's chair was about as leftist as they come and she hated rich people with a passion for no other reason than they sucedded in the American Dream. Their luck/good fortune/and skills be damned. My friend's grandfather donated an entire lab of about 40 brand new 500 Mhz G4 towers, monitors, scanners, and software totally about $80,000 after the College refused to provide funding to the department. How was this gesture thanked? Well my friend was fired from the staff and the professor didn't fail him in the classes, but gave him D's causing him to loose his scholarship. That was one hell of a "Thank you" for actually helping.
That caused me to take on look at journalism and just think, "Gee, now we know why those press reporters have their agendas, they learn early on".
24/7 news has only hurt, because now the press almost has to invent stories in order to keep people's attention. Really is the Scott Peterson case (now the Scott who? case) or Kobe really that important? NO!
Simple facts: CNN, Network News, Foxnews, BBC, NPR, MSNBC all have their agenda's. It just so happens that most lean one way, Fox leans the other way. God forbid that one network tells what the other side believes.
Why is it at every PERL and PHP developers conference I attend, I see more and more carrying iBooks and Powerbooks? There are a few running Linux on a DELL or other PC notebook, but there were many Linux users that abandoned Linux on their desktop for OSX. Most "switchers" I know were from Linux to Mac, not Win to Mac.
I am one of them. I was tired of Windows crashing, even with 2000 and now XP being much better in that regaurds, and it was consent problem of not having drivers for the hardware I already had and what to consider in the future.
OSX came out and I waited until 10.1 for Apple to get the major bugs out of the software and when it came time to buy a new laptop, I chose an iBook. Why? I still have MySQL, PERL and PHP along with BBEdit now to code in and test in a *iux platform on my laptop. Plus, I can still communicate with the rest of the business world with MS Office, plus programs like Photoshop, QuarkXpress, GoLive, Dreamweaver, Flash, Quicktime, iLife, etc..
Apple beat Linux in the desktop market hands down. Truefully, the smaller businesses I deal with don't have the resources or the need for a dedicated IT person on staff. That want products that have a 1-800 number they can call for support or if they do need to hire someone to come fix something, that they at least know what they hell the program is.
Now, several SMB's I have delt with in the past six months have switched from Windows to Mac, and most have been perfectly happy because their systems don't crash, its easy to use. Some use it as a Point-of-Sale system with a CC reader. USB barcode scanner and USB cash drawer without any problems. Others just need MS Office, email, and Quickbooks. The biggest complaint I have heard was one manger loved the productivy, easy of use, and stablity of their Macs, but complained that the Mac didn't have solitare.
Until we see commercial vendors, the Adobe's and Macromedia's of the world, produce native Linux products, the platform in the US won't be takening off in the business world.
Part of the reason has to do with the Dot communism mystique of the OSS community. While businesses know that the deployment costs of Linux on the desktop is a hell of a lot lower, TCO may or may not be. I have only had one client switch his office over to mostly Linux. Their accounting and shipping units still use PC's because of their software needs. There was nothing there in OSS land that would have proved cost effective to switch too, and their PR department (2 people) are using Macs for page layouts and the like. However, this was a medium sized company with 40 employees including 5 IT guys that had been running Linux on servers for close to three years and played with the system at home.
I will place my own predictions: Linux users will continue to switch to OSX. Maybe not in droves, but proably more than one would think.
I've seen this once. I was looking at a new stereo once upon a time and CC and BB had identically looking units, but one was running a sale and had the price about $20 or $30 cheaper. When I took in the add, the numbers matched exactly, but one ended in T the other P, so they said "Sorry its not the same". It was a bunch of hogwash, so I went down the street and bought it at the cheaper store. Damn it, I was looking forward to that extra 10% (about $50 or so) off if they were the same.
It was hard to win over our investors, who wanted us to use Quickbooks, but eventually it came down to the, "if your going to put me in charge, let me run the damn thing". Somehow, despite my arrogance, we got our $600 white box with OpenBSD set-up in the office and the secatary/bookkeeper inputs invoices on her iMac with Safari without any complaints. (yes, our shop is 100% *BSD between Free, Open, and OS X)
*Looks in other corner, sees 2 quad 500Mhz ALPHA boxes running databases running True64 Unix from circa 1997*
*Looks between them at 10 former PIII 700Mhz boxes running OpenBSD...well okay those are only 6 months - 18 months old)
No compliants with 4 year old operating systems here...
Most of the programs I wrote as a student, I let loose under BSD, because frankly, if they figured out a way to use my hangman script and make money, more power to them...