So I said they give away five percent. You say they give away five percent.
According to one report I read, they actually give away the INCOME on that $28.8 billion - which is probably five percent.
That nicely shelters the rest of the $28.8 billion which, again, is used to control the companies they INVEST IN (not DONATE TO.)
As for Gates being an asshole, read ANY biography. Then tell me again what a nice guy he is.
Just because a rich guy donates some money to relieve some guilt (and save himself some money on his taxes, let alone use it to control other companies so he makes MORE money) also does not make him a nice guy no matter how many people actually get helped. Those are two separate issues.
I know where Linux is outside the office - it's glomming onto every server from UNIX and once that's done it will glom onto every server from Windows. Every study indicates Linux growing several times faster percentagewise than Windows on the server, despite the spin the media articles give it. While Linux is starting way behind in that race, it will catch up and surpass Windows over the next five to ten years easily. The desktop will take longer given the sheer numbers that have to be replaced.
Every trade media study I've seen shows Windows XP took several years DESPITE being the default install to gain over 50% market share from 2000 and 98. With Microsoft's dominance of the market, that means a new OS has to be replaced on hundreds of millions of machines. The replacement rate of new machines - your "default install" - is almost irrelevant. Unless a corporation replaces its OS wholesale, only a small percentage of its machines will be replaced annually with a new OS on a new machine - unless the corporation has timed its wholesale replacement program with the release of a new OS (which would be smart.)
It's irrelevant that 2000 wasn't sold as a consumer machine. It was sold as the desktop machine for corporations to match 2000 Server. And XP simply wasn't a significant enough enhancement for most corporations to replace 2000 on the desktop. Where 98 was replaced, it was replaced by 2000 until XP came out, and then only replaced by XP where the corporation figured the difference between the XP and 2000 GUIs was not so great that it didn't matter if they used XP instead of 2000 to match their existing 2000 machines. Management wise, the two OS are nearly the same.
Of course, a few corporations with mostly 98 machines probably scheduled a wholesale replacement with XP, leapfrogging the 2000 upgrade. Some companies do that - only upgrade every two new releases. And of course early adopters probably upgrade on every release regardless of the actual costs and merits.
Consumers DO NOT upgrade unless they buy a new machine or are geeks or get tired of the limitations of their existing OS because they're power users. So I don't see consumers buying Vista in any great numbers, so it's uptake there will depend on the machine replacement rate.
Corporations will need to be sold something more than shiny icons with file previews before they upgrade to a system requiring them to replace their 1GHz Pentium IIIs and IVs with 40GB hard drives and 256MB-512MB RAM with 3GHz machines with 100GB hard drives and 1GB RAM - even if that machine only costs $500 by the time Vista is out.
I asked a City College tech yesterday how much the new machine I got yesterday goes for. It's a 2.6GHz Pentium IV with 512MB RAM and 40GB hard drive. He said TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS (albeit with 17" LCD monitor.) He knows the same machines go for $300-400 these days without monitor - and a 17" LCD goes for $250-300 these days. In other words, we pay a $600 premium on top of a $600 machine. I doubt the budget-strapped college is going to replace that machine with something half again as powerful AND go through the pain of replacing three thousand machines OS just to get minor improvements over XP.
All this means Microsoft is going to have a hard sell with Vista unless they put back in some of those major "features" they yanked out because they couldn't do them.
Interesting. So that's why I sit waiting for Task Manager to even show up.
And not being able to kill ANY process instantly - locked or not - is still dumb. It's an example of how Microsoft dumbs down and removes control from the sysadmin in favor of their own notion of what should be done, regardless of the actual circumstances. If you want to ASK a process to die, you send it a HUP, not a KILL. If it isn't ready to handle a signal, it should die; if it is, clean up and terminate, or reread a config, or whatever. Like I said elsewhere, Microsoft just doesn't understand process management like UNIX does - the result of twenty years more experience running on servers than consumer desktops, I guess.
Well, since the OLD machine is ALREADY in "Users and Computers" in AD, and was always there, merely physically disconnecting the first machine from the network and hooking up the second which is already configured offline to have the same name as the first should have merely swapped one physical machine for the other.
This was a physical machine swap, not a NEW machine being added to the network.
If that wasn't clear, well, sorry, but as I did say, this tech is sharp and wouldn't have made that mistake. He does this stuff all day every day and this site has thousands of machines (we have over 3,000 staff here scattered over seven locations in the city) which all work fine.
Well, if you'd like to find out about ZipGenius, go here.
Given the page full of awards from freeware sites, Tech TV and other places it's gotten, I'd say it's done well in the software world for being freeware. Featurewise, it's on the top with 7Zip and some other archive programs.
So I'd have to say that if you think it's written by an idiot, well, I'm not crazy about the user interface, but it does everything you want with an archiver and it works well for me.
I'm perfectly well aware that NEEDY guys don't get any action.
What I'm saying is that while women want strong males, they don't want assholes who only want to live off them. Which is exactly what you're saying.
What you don't get is that rap singers ARE that kind of guy. I guarantee you that nearly every bozo you showed in that Google list treats women like dirt.
Which is why women end up crying on the good guys shoulders.
In other words, women need to wake up and smell the shit instead of the roses before they make their sexual decisions.
Not that I expect that to happen - hasn't happened in forty thousand years and won't happen this year. Humans take absolutely no rational responsibility for their actions because they CAN'T - their primate nature is genetically ingrained.
The same women who bitch about good guys and date bad guys bitch about lack of monogamy in men and yearn for marriage. Guess what? There IS no such thing in bonobo chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives.
If you like bad guys, learn to take the bad with the good about them - which means, sure, you can get children out of them - but you won't get the white picket fence around the house in the suburbs.
You have to make a decision in your life whether you want a relationship or you want kids, money and a man to take care of you - because you won't get all three of the latter.
Less than ten percent of that money is actually going to charity - and I'm being generous, I suspect. It's probably more like 5% - just enough to keep up appearances.
The bulk of it is going into investments in companies Gates wants to influence or control.
Just like every other rich guys' foundation from the Rockefellers on down.
Sorry - it's been done. Guy had his wife install XP and some Linux distro, Mandrake maybe, I don't remember.
Linux won. She found it easier to install, learned more about the OS, had less problems.
Had a hell of lot more software installed on her system when she was done, too.
So much for your post./. Windows Shill Serial Number 189995.
You are hereby ordered to use this Serial Number next to your/. ID at all times. Orders of Taco himself. Violators will be forced to read dupes for two days (oh, wait...does that make everyone a violator?)
Actually you're paying for the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars spent on:
1) Labor - this included secretaries, receptionists, accountants, janitors and, oh yes, "product managers" - i.e., people who had absolutely nothing to do with the technical merits of the product. Not to mention "the boss" and his salary - which outstrips everyone else's combined.
2) Marketing - this includes the box, the design of the box, the CD, the design of the label on the CD, and numerous ads in trade journals and consumer PC magazines everywhere - including maybe a Superbowl ad if you're really gung-ho.
3) Distribution - Are you mailing those CDs out to responses from direct mail? Or did you send them to Dell - or CompUSA to be put on the shelf (with the wrong prices under them) for six months? How are you handling returns and damaged shipments?
4) Legal - How much did it cost you to determine that you didn't violate any Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, PeopleSoft, SAP, Computer Associates, etc., etc. patents and copyrights while writing the code?
5) Support - You DO support your product, right? Well, yeah, the Hindus don't cost THAT much, but it still costs something.
6) Taxes - Remember, everything in this country would cost ten percent of what it does now if there was no government...
7) Capital - You financed the company yourself? Or maybe it was actually Kleiner Perkins? And they own, oh, fifty-sixty percent of your company? Payback of investment in five years?
So, no, you're not paying for the development time or even the people doing the development. Especially if your developer is one gnomoid genius like Linus.
Software today, developed using modern technigues and distributed directly over the Net to the consumer, should cost maybe $10 a CD - not $600.
If a CD of an album, produced at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, utilizing the talents of a dozen band members, another dozen recording engineers, producers, etc., and marketed at great payola expense by the record company, and distributed to every Mom and Pop record store on the planet, can cost $15 - why should Microsoft Office cost $500?
Not to mention the cost of a movie DVD - where the movie cost $100-200 million, involved literally tens of thousands of people, and is marketed heavily, and then distributed to every video store on the planet - and costs $20-30 ($19.95 on sale immediately on release.)
Take that "it costs money to produce software because developers need to get paid" shit down the road. It doesn't work for the record industry and the recording artists, and it doesn't work here.
The cost to world industry of the Microsoft monopoly is the result of idiot MCSE's running crap software resulting in lost technological and business opportunities - and hence much higher costs - to run better software and thus achieve higher performance, better reliability, better productivity and higher security.
The net result of the Microsoft monopoly is undoubtedly in the hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide annually and certainly dwarfs the mere "profitability" figures used in the white paper.
Of course, the Linux figures would also be high, but no where near as high as the Microsoft figures.
(For the young and ignorant: "A billion here, a billion there - and pretty soon, you're talking about real money!")
Evidently the US doesn't consider three quarters of a trillion "real money" because that's the estimate of what the Iraq war will cost over the next X years - making it the most expensive war in the last fifty years.
And just think: I could have got rid of Saddam in ninety days for a lousy billion dollars AND made a nine hundred million dollar profit - and saved 100,000 Iraqi lives, 1700+ US lives, $199 billion US dollars to date and $749 billion in the future, reduced world terrorism, prevented the loss of US civil rights - and probably got laid as well.
Well, now I'm offering the same deal for Bill Gates! Give me just $100 million dollars, and I'll take out Microsoft within five years for a net profit to everyone of $9.9 billion times forever! Such a deal I make you!
As for no hot women in IT, well, I STILL like Kim Polese. And she does jazz dance as well as being smart, so she's hot.
Otherwise, of course, you're entirely correct. Nerdcore rap is just pathetic. And women who like bad boys are equally pathetic.
Of course, nigger rap is pathetic, too, as you'd know if you'd seen all these guys in Leavenworth as I have. Which is where it originated by the way - in prison. If you babes knew how niggers (and white rednecks, not to leave anyone out) talk about women amongst themselves, you'd kick their fucking asses out of your life in a heartbeat. Never mind what they tell YOU - in reality, to any street nigger, you're a bitch, a ho, and a way to get some money on their books.
And that, babe, is not exactly what women are looking for from men. Not in this evolutionary sequence, anyway.
Well, other people have pointed out your error, so I'll only add that I'm running Mandrake 10.1 and it hasn't cost me a penny.
I agree they make it a little hard to see that you DON'T have to spend money to get it. But that's not quite the same as, say, Microsoft refusing to give you an update until they examine your PC down to the chipset to see that you don't have a "pirated" copy.
Not to mention that with Microsoft, you get an OS for the money - and that's it. With ANY Linux distro, you get TONS of free software that would cost you ten grand in the Windows world (or at least a lot of hours finding, downloading and installing freeware.)
So comparing Mandriva to Microsoft is overstating the case a bit.
"Also in the latest version (2005LE) they have a convenient button in the software sources manager to setup all these free repos automatically."
Aah, now THAT was what I was asking for just the other day here! I complained about the easyurpmi bit just showing you the command lines you need to type to get the free repositories. I'm glad to see someone at Mandrake realized that wasn't the best approach.
Guess I should wait for the 2006 Mandriva and upgrade for sure. I'm still not doing enough with Linux on a day-to-day basis to upgrade to the 2005LE right now, might as well wait.
Well, while I agree with your points, there ARE other programs that do what the KDE/GNOME-based ones do and aren't dependent on the KDE/GNOME libraries.
He just has to be aware that these programs may not have been as heavily developed or feature-rich as the big boys. They might even be older or no longer under development.
For learning purposes, they might suit him very well.
The important thing would be, once his distro is selected (or before), to visit some of the forums related to the distro or distros he's considering and see who's using what for which distro to do what tasks. If a distro is seriously lacking a common utility (unlikely at this stage of Linux, I suspect), that would weed out that distro from consideration.
These machines are imaged, and unless the tech screwed up while trying to fix the problem the first couple times (where it might have been some other problem to begin with), the system should have been imaged with the correct settings. All he had to do was rename my new machine with the same name as the old one, shut down my old one, hook up the new one, and log on.
We actually logged on with no problem when we first booted the machine after he hooked it up. After I installed the ZipGenius archive utility, I rebooted (on the stupid request from ZipGenius) and haven't been able to get on the domain since no matter what tweaks he's done, including Sysprep'ing the machine again.
The replication delay issue was suggested by somebody else in the IT office he called. Who knows if it makes any sense?
If we don't get on tomorrow, I'm going to tell him to start from square one and ask, "What do you need to be true to join a domain?" - and start checking every aspect of the answer. In my opinion, it pretty much has to be something wrong with that single machine, not the AD setup because everybody else works fine.
But then, this IS Windows - where everything is connected to everything in ways nobody but Microsoft knows.
I'm one of the others. When I say it, I mean I literally don't give a rat's ass.
I use "couldn't" only if I suspect somebody might actually not understand me - which is almost never, which is why I don't feel the need to correct the usage - most people understand what you mean when you say it.
As I say, I don't doubt the ITS people at the top here at City College aren't slightly incompetent, but I suspect the problem is that they are average Windows sys admins and that Microsoft has produced those sorts of people by their system design decisions.
I think if you factor out the sys admin ability, you still end up with more complexity in administering Windows than you do with UNIX/Linux while paradoxically you have sys admins with less knowledge and control over Windows boxes than UNIX/Linux sys admins do on their boxes.
I'd like to see a study where a Windows 2003 Server and a Linux server are set up as default installs - NO tweaking at all.
Load the same set of automated scripts that do a fair number of different tasks. Use the same language (probably Perl) - and the same tasks for both. Vary the tasks enough to exercise the various subsystems - IP stack, DHCP, Web page serving, user logons, database access, whatever - but run the exact same tasks on each.
Let them run for a month.
See which one is in better condition at the end of that time in terms of performance of those tasks and system status.
My guess is the Windows server will be hosed and the Linux server will be cranking along (unless/tmp fills up!)
No sys admin excuses would be relevant there.
I think matching a smart Windows sys admin up against a smart Linux sys admin misses the point. The AVERAGE sys admin isn't smart or highly experienced. And I suspect part of the reason is that Microsoft's design on the one hand dumbs down the SYSTEM knowledge a sys admin needs and at the same time complicates his job by adding ever more "features" he needs to learn to coordinate himself.
The funny thing is, I was complaining to the tech who set me up about the situation and how I have had various problems with XP at home, and he basically said the same thing: "must be something wrong with how you set up your home machine."
I think 10% is doable in five years. Look where Linux was five years ago in usability. Red Hat 6.2 or 7.0 vrs Fedora Core 4? No comparison. (And I have 7.0 on my old Compaq vrs Mandrake 10.1 on my newer machine.)
20% is possible in perhaps ten years. 20% is a LOT of machines being switched - hundreds of millions. So maybe I would downgrade that to 10% as being doable, 15% as possible and 20% as unlikely but not impossible. The concept of "tipping point" might apply here, but I don't know where that point might be for Linux - 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%?
My work XP machine seems to be very stable - even after I installed Firefox, Thunderbird, jEdit, SQLTools, Winamp, a bunch of codecs, WallMaster (a wallpaper changer) and a small number of other things.
However, while I play some music videos on my work machine, and do some Web surfing, and do editing of programs FTP'd down using a jEdit plugin, most of the time I've either been buried in jEdit or actually been working via the Reflection terminal emulator on the HP/UX servers here. I don't do Microsoft Office stuff, and I don't install many programs. I don't constantly switch around from one thing to another like I do on the home machine.
Problem is - all of that stuff was installed on my home XP machine. And it behaves wierdly at times, mostly during third party app lockups. So I think it's not so much what was installed as it is the work habits on the different machines. I push the home machine more than I do the work machine.
And I suspect that's true for most office workers vrs geek home users. Office workers do the same things over and over, and as long as spyware doesn't get on the machine, it really isn't being pushed. Home users, OTOH, do all sorts of wildly different things - running videos, surfing, playing video-intensive games, pushing the memory and speed limits of the OS.
But I haven't had to reinstall the home XP yet, after seven months, whereas when I first installed Windows 2000, it hosed the Registry once itself and again by a third party app within the first three months.
So, I agree that XP is better than 2000, which is way better than 98.
Your stories about the servers matches others I've heard here and elsewhere. I just don't buy that Windows servers are as reliable as Linux servers, no matter what the Windows shills say.
And to the degree that it's the administrators fault, well, you know, who made it that way? The admins - or Microsoft for dumbing down (and simultaneously complicating with ever more "features") the interface so that the admins are simultaneously less knowledgable and less powerful than the equivalent UNIX admin?
I'm sure a sharp Windows admin with lots of experience with Windows can set up a Windows server that is very reliable and has long uptimes. I'm also sure he got that way by having a lot of experience with how Windows DOESN'T work and thus knows how to avoid the gotchas. Does that mean Microsoft is better in that scenario? If you compared how much knowledge that MS admin needs to do his job with how much a Linux admin needs, who actually spent more time getting the same level of knowledge and experience? I suspect it was MORE work for the Windows guy to get to the same level of reliability as the Linux guy.
So I think to say that a smart Windows admin can get as much uptime as a smart Linux admin doesn't say much about the overall differences between Windows and UNIX/Linux in terms of reliability. Comparing the AVERAGE sys admin on each side might be more revealing, if that could somehow be done.
In other words, factor OUT the sys admin somehow and see how the two OS's compare.
Slashdot Mirror
Send him to the moon.
As Jackie Gleason used to say: "To the moon, Alice! To the moon! Bang! Zoom!"
So I said they give away five percent. You say they give away five percent.
According to one report I read, they actually give away the INCOME on that $28.8 billion - which is probably five percent.
That nicely shelters the rest of the $28.8 billion which, again, is used to control the companies they INVEST IN (not DONATE TO.)
As for Gates being an asshole, read ANY biography. Then tell me again what a nice guy he is.
Just because a rich guy donates some money to relieve some guilt (and save himself some money on his taxes, let alone use it to control other companies so he makes MORE money) also does not make him a nice guy no matter how many people actually get helped. Those are two separate issues.
Get a clue.
I know where Linux is outside the office - it's glomming onto every server from UNIX and once that's done it will glom onto every server from Windows. Every study indicates Linux growing several times faster percentagewise than Windows on the server, despite the spin the media articles give it. While Linux is starting way behind in that race, it will catch up and surpass Windows over the next five to ten years easily. The desktop will take longer given the sheer numbers that have to be replaced.
Every trade media study I've seen shows Windows XP took several years DESPITE being the default install to gain over 50% market share from 2000 and 98. With Microsoft's dominance of the market, that means a new OS has to be replaced on hundreds of millions of machines. The replacement rate of new machines - your "default install" - is almost irrelevant. Unless a corporation replaces its OS wholesale, only a small percentage of its machines will be replaced annually with a new OS on a new machine - unless the corporation has timed its wholesale replacement program with the release of a new OS (which would be smart.)
It's irrelevant that 2000 wasn't sold as a consumer machine. It was sold as the desktop machine for corporations to match 2000 Server. And XP simply wasn't a significant enough enhancement for most corporations to replace 2000 on the desktop. Where 98 was replaced, it was replaced by 2000 until XP came out, and then only replaced by XP where the corporation figured the difference between the XP and 2000 GUIs was not so great that it didn't matter if they used XP instead of 2000 to match their existing 2000 machines. Management wise, the two OS are nearly the same.
Of course, a few corporations with mostly 98 machines probably scheduled a wholesale replacement with XP, leapfrogging the 2000 upgrade. Some companies do that - only upgrade every two new releases. And of course early adopters probably upgrade on every release regardless of the actual costs and merits.
Consumers DO NOT upgrade unless they buy a new machine or are geeks or get tired of the limitations of their existing OS because they're power users. So I don't see consumers buying Vista in any great numbers, so it's uptake there will depend on the machine replacement rate.
Corporations will need to be sold something more than shiny icons with file previews before they upgrade to a system requiring them to replace their 1GHz Pentium IIIs and IVs with 40GB hard drives and 256MB-512MB RAM with 3GHz machines with 100GB hard drives and 1GB RAM - even if that machine only costs $500 by the time Vista is out.
I asked a City College tech yesterday how much the new machine I got yesterday goes for. It's a 2.6GHz Pentium IV with 512MB RAM and 40GB hard drive. He said TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS (albeit with 17" LCD monitor.) He knows the same machines go for $300-400 these days without monitor - and a 17" LCD goes for $250-300 these days. In other words, we pay a $600 premium on top of a $600 machine. I doubt the budget-strapped college is going to replace that machine with something half again as powerful AND go through the pain of replacing three thousand machines OS just to get minor improvements over XP.
All this means Microsoft is going to have a hard sell with Vista unless they put back in some of those major "features" they yanked out because they couldn't do them.
Interesting. So that's why I sit waiting for Task Manager to even show up.
And not being able to kill ANY process instantly - locked or not - is still dumb. It's an example of how Microsoft dumbs down and removes control from the sysadmin in favor of their own notion of what should be done, regardless of the actual circumstances. If you want to ASK a process to die, you send it a HUP, not a KILL. If it isn't ready to handle a signal, it should die; if it is, clean up and terminate, or reread a config, or whatever. Like I said elsewhere, Microsoft just doesn't understand process management like UNIX does - the result of twenty years more experience running on servers than consumer desktops, I guess.
Well, since the OLD machine is ALREADY in "Users and Computers" in AD, and was always there, merely physically disconnecting the first machine from the network and hooking up the second which is already configured offline to have the same name as the first should have merely swapped one physical machine for the other.
This was a physical machine swap, not a NEW machine being added to the network.
If that wasn't clear, well, sorry, but as I did say, this tech is sharp and wouldn't have made that mistake. He does this stuff all day every day and this site has thousands of machines (we have over 3,000 staff here scattered over seven locations in the city) which all work fine.
Well, if you'd like to find out about ZipGenius, go here.
Given the page full of awards from freeware sites, Tech TV and other places it's gotten, I'd say it's done well in the software world for being freeware. Featurewise, it's on the top with 7Zip and some other archive programs.
So I'd have to say that if you think it's written by an idiot, well, I'm not crazy about the user interface, but it does everything you want with an archiver and it works well for me.
Skippy.
I'm perfectly well aware that NEEDY guys don't get any action.
What I'm saying is that while women want strong males, they don't want assholes who only want to live off them. Which is exactly what you're saying.
What you don't get is that rap singers ARE that kind of guy. I guarantee you that nearly every bozo you showed in that Google list treats women like dirt.
Which is why women end up crying on the good guys shoulders.
In other words, women need to wake up and smell the shit instead of the roses before they make their sexual decisions.
Not that I expect that to happen - hasn't happened in forty thousand years and won't happen this year. Humans take absolutely no rational responsibility for their actions because they CAN'T - their primate nature is genetically ingrained.
The same women who bitch about good guys and date bad guys bitch about lack of monogamy in men and yearn for marriage. Guess what? There IS no such thing in bonobo chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives.
If you like bad guys, learn to take the bad with the good about them - which means, sure, you can get children out of them - but you won't get the white picket fence around the house in the suburbs.
You have to make a decision in your life whether you want a relationship or you want kids, money and a man to take care of you - because you won't get all three of the latter.
Women...you just don't get it, do you?
BULLSHIT!
Gates Foundation is a stock laundering scheme.
Less than ten percent of that money is actually going to charity - and I'm being generous, I suspect. It's probably more like 5% - just enough to keep up appearances.
The bulk of it is going into investments in companies Gates wants to influence or control.
Just like every other rich guys' foundation from the Rockefellers on down.
You aren't.
You're just another
You are hereby ordered to report your Windows Shill Serial Number next to your
Failure to do so will force you to read dupes for the next ten days.
Orders from Taco himself.
Sorry - it's been done. Guy had his wife install XP and some Linux distro, Mandrake maybe, I don't remember.
Linux won. She found it easier to install, learned more about the OS, had less problems.
Had a hell of lot more software installed on her system when she was done, too.
So much for your post.
You are hereby ordered to use this Serial Number next to your
Actually you're paying for the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars spent on:
1) Labor - this included secretaries, receptionists, accountants, janitors and, oh yes, "product managers" - i.e., people who had absolutely nothing to do with the technical merits of the product. Not to mention "the boss" and his salary - which outstrips everyone else's combined.
2) Marketing - this includes the box, the design of the box, the CD, the design of the label on the CD, and numerous ads in trade journals and consumer PC magazines everywhere - including maybe a Superbowl ad if you're really gung-ho.
3) Distribution - Are you mailing those CDs out to responses from direct mail? Or did you send them to Dell - or CompUSA to be put on the shelf (with the wrong prices under them) for six months? How are you handling returns and damaged shipments?
4) Legal - How much did it cost you to determine that you didn't violate any Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, PeopleSoft, SAP, Computer Associates, etc., etc. patents and copyrights while writing the code?
5) Support - You DO support your product, right? Well, yeah, the Hindus don't cost THAT much, but it still costs something.
6) Taxes - Remember, everything in this country would cost ten percent of what it does now if there was no government...
7) Capital - You financed the company yourself? Or maybe it was actually Kleiner Perkins? And they own, oh, fifty-sixty percent of your company? Payback of investment in five years?
So, no, you're not paying for the development time or even the people doing the development. Especially if your developer is one gnomoid genius like Linus.
Software today, developed using modern technigues and distributed directly over the Net to the consumer, should cost maybe $10 a CD - not $600.
If a CD of an album, produced at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, utilizing the talents of a dozen band members, another dozen recording engineers, producers, etc., and marketed at great payola expense by the record company, and distributed to every Mom and Pop record store on the planet, can cost $15 - why should Microsoft Office cost $500?
Not to mention the cost of a movie DVD - where the movie cost $100-200 million, involved literally tens of thousands of people, and is marketed heavily, and then distributed to every video store on the planet - and costs $20-30 ($19.95 on sale immediately on release.)
Take that "it costs money to produce software because developers need to get paid" shit down the road. It doesn't work for the record industry and the recording artists, and it doesn't work here.
The cost to world industry of the Microsoft monopoly is the result of idiot MCSE's running crap software resulting in lost technological and business opportunities - and hence much higher costs - to run better software and thus achieve higher performance, better reliability, better productivity and higher security.
The net result of the Microsoft monopoly is undoubtedly in the hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide annually and certainly dwarfs the mere "profitability" figures used in the white paper.
Of course, the Linux figures would also be high, but no where near as high as the Microsoft figures.
As I've said many times here:
Windows is CRAP.
Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT: Linux is FREE crap.
Whatever you say, Everett!
(For the young and ignorant: "A billion here, a billion there - and pretty soon, you're talking about real money!")
Evidently the US doesn't consider three quarters of a trillion "real money" because that's the estimate of what the Iraq war will cost over the next X years - making it the most expensive war in the last fifty years.
And just think: I could have got rid of Saddam in ninety days for a lousy billion dollars AND made a nine hundred million dollar profit - and saved 100,000 Iraqi lives, 1700+ US lives, $199 billion US dollars to date and $749 billion in the future, reduced world terrorism, prevented the loss of US civil rights - and probably got laid as well.
Well, now I'm offering the same deal for Bill Gates! Give me just $100 million dollars, and I'll take out Microsoft within five years for a net profit to everyone of $9.9 billion times forever! Such a deal I make you!
Where are my mod points?
MOD THIS +5, Funny!
Wait a minute, shouldn't that be:
Don't make me bash a pipe in your grep, fool!
OR:
Don't make me bash a pipe in your fork, fool!
OR:
Fork this, muthafucka!
How about a nerd that robbed a bank? Two banks?
Does that help?
As for no hot women in IT, well, I STILL like Kim Polese. And she does jazz dance as well as being smart, so she's hot.
Otherwise, of course, you're entirely correct. Nerdcore rap is just pathetic. And women who like bad boys are equally pathetic.
Of course, nigger rap is pathetic, too, as you'd know if you'd seen all these guys in Leavenworth as I have. Which is where it originated by the way - in prison. If you babes knew how niggers (and white rednecks, not to leave anyone out) talk about women amongst themselves, you'd kick their fucking asses out of your life in a heartbeat. Never mind what they tell YOU - in reality, to any street nigger, you're a bitch, a ho, and a way to get some money on their books.
And that, babe, is not exactly what women are looking for from men. Not in this evolutionary sequence, anyway.
Do these nerdcore boys LOOK GOOD?
(To someone other than another
Are there any nerdcore rap BABES?
(Who can actually play instruments, write songs AND lyrics?)
Hah! I pass! Except for comic relief, of course.
Heh, I wish I could get this level of "disagreement" to most of my
Well, other people have pointed out your error, so I'll only add that I'm running Mandrake 10.1 and it hasn't cost me a penny.
I agree they make it a little hard to see that you DON'T have to spend money to get it. But that's not quite the same as, say, Microsoft refusing to give you an update until they examine your PC down to the chipset to see that you don't have a "pirated" copy.
Not to mention that with Microsoft, you get an OS for the money - and that's it. With ANY Linux distro, you get TONS of free software that would cost you ten grand in the Windows world (or at least a lot of hours finding, downloading and installing freeware.)
So comparing Mandriva to Microsoft is overstating the case a bit.
"Also in the latest version (2005LE) they have a convenient button in the software sources manager to setup all these free repos automatically."
Aah, now THAT was what I was asking for just the other day here! I complained about the easyurpmi bit just showing you the command lines you need to type to get the free repositories. I'm glad to see someone at Mandrake realized that wasn't the best approach.
Guess I should wait for the 2006 Mandriva and upgrade for sure. I'm still not doing enough with Linux on a day-to-day basis to upgrade to the 2005LE right now, might as well wait.
Well, while I agree with your points, there ARE other programs that do what the KDE/GNOME-based ones do and aren't dependent on the KDE/GNOME libraries.
He just has to be aware that these programs may not have been as heavily developed or feature-rich as the big boys. They might even be older or no longer under development.
For learning purposes, they might suit him very well.
The important thing would be, once his distro is selected (or before), to visit some of the forums related to the distro or distros he's considering and see who's using what for which distro to do what tasks. If a distro is seriously lacking a common utility (unlikely at this stage of Linux, I suspect), that would weed out that distro from consideration.
I'll mention it, but I doubt it.
These machines are imaged, and unless the tech screwed up while trying to fix the problem the first couple times (where it might have been some other problem to begin with), the system should have been imaged with the correct settings. All he had to do was rename my new machine with the same name as the old one, shut down my old one, hook up the new one, and log on.
We actually logged on with no problem when we first booted the machine after he hooked it up. After I installed the ZipGenius archive utility, I rebooted (on the stupid request from ZipGenius) and haven't been able to get on the domain since no matter what tweaks he's done, including Sysprep'ing the machine again.
The replication delay issue was suggested by somebody else in the IT office he called. Who knows if it makes any sense?
If we don't get on tomorrow, I'm going to tell him to start from square one and ask, "What do you need to be true to join a domain?" - and start checking every aspect of the answer. In my opinion, it pretty much has to be something wrong with that single machine, not the AD setup because everybody else works fine.
But then, this IS Windows - where everything is connected to everything in ways nobody but Microsoft knows.
I suspect for some speakers that may be the case.
I'm one of the others. When I say it, I mean I literally don't give a rat's ass.
I use "couldn't" only if I suspect somebody might actually not understand me - which is almost never, which is why I don't feel the need to correct the usage - most people understand what you mean when you say it.
As I say, I don't doubt the ITS people at the top here at City College aren't slightly incompetent, but I suspect the problem is that they are average Windows sys admins and that Microsoft has produced those sorts of people by their system design decisions.
I think if you factor out the sys admin ability, you still end up with more complexity in administering Windows than you do with UNIX/Linux while paradoxically you have sys admins with less knowledge and control over Windows boxes than UNIX/Linux sys admins do on their boxes.
I'd like to see a study where a Windows 2003 Server and a Linux server are set up as default installs - NO tweaking at all.
Load the same set of automated scripts that do a fair number of different tasks. Use the same language (probably Perl) - and the same tasks for both. Vary the tasks enough to exercise the various subsystems - IP stack, DHCP, Web page serving, user logons, database access, whatever - but run the exact same tasks on each.
Let them run for a month.
See which one is in better condition at the end of that time in terms of performance of those tasks and system status.
My guess is the Windows server will be hosed and the Linux server will be cranking along (unless
No sys admin excuses would be relevant there.
I think matching a smart Windows sys admin up against a smart Linux sys admin misses the point. The AVERAGE sys admin isn't smart or highly experienced. And I suspect part of the reason is that Microsoft's design on the one hand dumbs down the SYSTEM knowledge a sys admin needs and at the same time complicates his job by adding ever more "features" he needs to learn to coordinate himself.
The funny thing is, I was complaining to the tech who set me up about the situation and how I have had various problems with XP at home, and he basically said the same thing: "must be something wrong with how you set up your home machine."
What's wrong with this picture?
Well, 20% I agree is pushing it.
I think 10% is doable in five years. Look where Linux was five years ago in usability. Red Hat 6.2 or 7.0 vrs Fedora Core 4? No comparison. (And I have 7.0 on my old Compaq vrs Mandrake 10.1 on my newer machine.)
20% is possible in perhaps ten years. 20% is a LOT of machines being switched - hundreds of millions. So maybe I would downgrade that to 10% as being doable, 15% as possible and 20% as unlikely but not impossible. The concept of "tipping point" might apply here, but I don't know where that point might be for Linux - 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%?
My experience is similar vis-a-vis home vrs work.
My work XP machine seems to be very stable - even after I installed Firefox, Thunderbird, jEdit, SQLTools, Winamp, a bunch of codecs, WallMaster (a wallpaper changer) and a small number of other things.
However, while I play some music videos on my work machine, and do some Web surfing, and do editing of programs FTP'd down using a jEdit plugin, most of the time I've either been buried in jEdit or actually been working via the Reflection terminal emulator on the HP/UX servers here. I don't do Microsoft Office stuff, and I don't install many programs. I don't constantly switch around from one thing to another like I do on the home machine.
Problem is - all of that stuff was installed on my home XP machine. And it behaves wierdly at times, mostly during third party app lockups. So I think it's not so much what was installed as it is the work habits on the different machines. I push the home machine more than I do the work machine.
And I suspect that's true for most office workers vrs geek home users. Office workers do the same things over and over, and as long as spyware doesn't get on the machine, it really isn't being pushed. Home users, OTOH, do all sorts of wildly different things - running videos, surfing, playing video-intensive games, pushing the memory and speed limits of the OS.
But I haven't had to reinstall the home XP yet, after seven months, whereas when I first installed Windows 2000, it hosed the Registry once itself and again by a third party app within the first three months.
So, I agree that XP is better than 2000, which is way better than 98.
Your stories about the servers matches others I've heard here and elsewhere. I just don't buy that Windows servers are as reliable as Linux servers, no matter what the Windows shills say.
And to the degree that it's the administrators fault, well, you know, who made it that way? The admins - or Microsoft for dumbing down (and simultaneously complicating with ever more "features") the interface so that the admins are simultaneously less knowledgable and less powerful than the equivalent UNIX admin?
I'm sure a sharp Windows admin with lots of experience with Windows can set up a Windows server that is very reliable and has long uptimes. I'm also sure he got that way by having a lot of experience with how Windows DOESN'T work and thus knows how to avoid the gotchas. Does that mean Microsoft is better in that scenario? If you compared how much knowledge that MS admin needs to do his job with how much a Linux admin needs, who actually spent more time getting the same level of knowledge and experience? I suspect it was MORE work for the Windows guy to get to the same level of reliability as the Linux guy.
So I think to say that a smart Windows admin can get as much uptime as a smart Linux admin doesn't say much about the overall differences between Windows and UNIX/Linux in terms of reliability. Comparing the AVERAGE sys admin on each side might be more revealing, if that could somehow be done.
In other words, factor OUT the sys admin somehow and see how the two OS's compare.