As I replied to another post elsewhere, I am well aware of the cost of migration
Which is why I said there are no shortage of morons in business (and IT).
You don't use proprietary languages (and in this case, we are referring to Access as a development platform, not merely a database - data can be migrated easily, application code cannot) if you want to keep your options open.
Businesses need to be educated to use second-sourced technology (preferably technology with some backing by standards) or, failing that, open source technology to develop their apps.
However, it is possible to plan a gradual re-engineering of ANY app or group of apps, and that is the intelligent approach to this issue.
However, like I said, there are no shortage of morons, so the intelligent approach is rarely attempted.
And to avoid losing one week in soft costs, you sell your ass to Bill who will charge you hard money every year.
Right, really makes sense to me.
It's like the ASP TCO studies. Everybody says a PC and its apps cost $15K/year. So if we outsource to an ASP, it'll cost us $8K/year.
Right. Which is better? Have a $15K/year TCO that is YOUR FAULT and is something you can do something about - or outsource to Bill or Larry or Carly and incur an $8K/year TCO (which over time will begin to rise to $10K and eventually back to $15K as they raise the rates once your business is in hock to their apps)?
It begins to look to me that the software business is essentially a protection/extortion racket - starting with the "licensing" notion and proceeding to "give us the core of your business and we'll let you use it - it'll cost less than our breaking your legs with high fees".
Anybody who buys into this is a moron.
Of course, there is no shortage of morons in business.
If you're trying to say that most people are morons, I agree with you.
Which is why Linux (or something better than Linux) will win.
Because we ARE smarter than you.
And that is proven by the fact that you don't realize that the "big bad ogre" is ALWAYS "eaten up from within". And it starts with his first meal of the "losers".
And user training costs are what they are because no company I've ever heard of or been in knows how to train users.
"User training" is an oxymoron in most companies either because the "training" is incompetent or there IS no training.
In the latter case, open source is STILL cheaper than the alternative because the users won't get trained anyway, and they'll muddle through just like they always have.
It's only when a company feels it has to piss away X thousands of dollars on idiot third-party "trainers" that they then feel they'd rather save those X thousands of dollars and stay with what they've got.
In other words, they decide not to train people to use something which is cheaper because it would be cheaper not to train people.
What's wrong with this picture?
"Training costs" are a red herring. It's used to justify Not-Invented-Here and We-Don't-Want-To-Change syndromes. It has nothing to do with whether open source is "usable" or anything else rational.
Migration costs are real, but one time, so they're irrelevant as well (unless for some reason they're really huge.)
Some of don't live at the Slashdot URL waiting for a new story so we can be the "first post".
Especially at 4 in the morning.
Especially since first post is usually lame and subjects one to insults for the next three pages of posts, therefore reducing the value of/. which is nominally supposed to be "informed comment."
"One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns"
You have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about.
The Simpson trial? Are you serious? That was a circus.
Try looking into the details of the Winona Ryder railroading. Start with Joel Mowbray's article on it. (Of course her big mistake was using that idiot spin-doctor-cum-lame-trial-lawyer Geragos as her attorney.)
As for the rest, the judge can certainly hold a juror in contempt or declare a mistrial if he thinks a juror is attempting to throw a case. Of course if he can't produce any rational reason why he believes this, the juror might get away with it. But it's hardly a revolutionary method - which was the original point.
You used the term "jury nullification" which means a jury can find in opposition to the facts of a case. Judges do NOT like this and will do everything possible - which is a lot, including declaring a mistrial - to prevent this from happening. And if you advocate jury nullification as a juror or attorney before the bench, your ass is grass. The judge will remove you or find you in contempt.
That would be the rational response - Bush is a failure. He failed in Afghanistan, he failed in Iraq, he's failing in the so-called "War on Terror" according to just about every expert on terrorism, and now we have another incident.
And that's how the Democrats would phrase it.
But it wouldn't matter.
Because Bush will suspend the elections if the incident is significant enough - and it has to be to get him his "bounce" from the fear the attack will generate. Even if he doesn't suspend the elections, he'll get a "bounce" which would probably be enough to get him over the top if the race is at all close - and Kerry is making sure the race will be close because there isn't a penny's worth of difference in their policies on the issues of Iraq, etc.
Look at the chart those guys did - every single time for the last two years that Bush has been in trouble, we get a terror alert. And his numbers stabilize.
The only thing better for him than an alert is an actual incident.
Because the morons in this country are NOT rational.
Fine - don't believe me. Watch what happens.
If Bush is defeated in November, I'm wrong. And I'm happy.
If we have an incident and Bush gets elected, I'll accept money, pizza, Corr's and Tori Amos videos, and of course, porn.
And the morons on/. will never EVER hear the end of it.
Ah, then any time the system detects that five responses have come in from five different people within, say, two seconds, they should ALL get the
"SLOW DOWN, COWBOY!"
response!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Maybe that will keep the servers up long enough to be able to send in a response, too.
How about this? Nobody should be allowed to send more than one response within a twenty-four period?
See - we can make the Net look like snail mail if we try!
Now if we can just figure out a way to put AI into the moderators (since they don't seem to have any "real" intelligence), we could make/. into somethin' cookin'!
I was referring to the overall user interface as well as the overall design of OS's - which by the way does indeed include how the kernel interacts with the user interface level.
I can never figure out why terrorism is - in this country, at least - CHRONIC terrorism.
Blowing up a building once every ten years is not exactly effective. The odds of being killed or injured by a terrorist in this country is probably far lower than being hit by lightning.
I realize it takes a long time and much resources to put together a coordinated operation like 9/11, but you'd think they could at least do it once a year.
I don't think it's because the counterintelligence in the US is particularly effective - or even CIA surveillance overseas. I suspect it is because the local authorities in the countries from which these people operate are more effective in keeping them hopping. That and the general lack of resources that terrorists have. bin Laden may have a lot of money personally, but it's not clear how much of it can be channeled into effective funding of major operations.
Like the article on the laptop computer the other day, it seems most of these guys spend their time arguing over what to do next and how to do it rather than actually doing anything.
I've known for years that most terrorists, going back as far as Carlos and even farther to Che Guevara in Bolivia, are not terribly effective.
Only when a movement gets local support - as the Red Brigades had in Italy in the 1970's or the IRA in Ireland - do they seem able to mount continuous and chronic operations which are overall reasonably effective.
It's actually a good reason to NOT want to limit civil liberties under the guise of "terrorism" since the "terrorism" is so limited in effect anyway.
Particularly when the whole 9/11 operation stinks of a "false-flag" operation which only worked because somebody at the top wanted it to work. Had the FBI agents in the field been heeded and the intelligence agency warnings about Al Qaeda's intentions been heeded, the operation could have been stopped. But it wasn't. And Coleen Rowly, the FBI whistleblower, was once quoted IIRC as saying she couldn't understand it - unless somebody simply wanted it to happen.
And that goes back to the PNAC documents where it was plainly stated that the US needed a "Pearl Harbor" to put the neocon plans into operation.
That's a quick way to get a contempt of court charge.
The last thing a judge wants to hear from a juror is he has the right to vote his conscience against the judge's instructions or the law as enacted.
Jury nullification is for rightwing nuts who think they can redefine the way the state operates in their favor. Like the tax refusers who claim the laws establishing the income tax are illegal and therefore null and void and they can just ignore them. Right, tell it to the Marshals.
Anybody who thinks being a juror is relevant to making change in this country is in a state of delusion so serious they need to be restrained in case they walk in front of a bus.
The average juror has no clue to what degree the judge, prosecution and law enforcement can manipulate the evidence and court procedure to make the phrase "fair trial" a fucking joke.
"Apathy" has nothing to do with it. You want to deal with the problem, do something effective. Advocating moaning, voting, and jury duty is merely supporting the system. The people in government LOVE guys like you - you're so totally ineffective they don't have to worry about anything going wrong with their little schemes.
How about something that works instead of drivel that doesn't and also has the side effect of removing even more civil liberties in this country?
As for "not hearing of the successes", what we heard last week was the "success" of arresting terrorists in London and Pakistan.
Then what we heard was that "success" was in fact an outing for political reasons of a Pakistani double agent that blew the British attempt to obtain further info on said terrorists.
Some "success". A few guys arrested, the rest scattered and went further underground and the US's best chance to penetrate Al Qaeda blown.
Jumpstart the election process in Iraq? Yeah, right. If you're dumb enough to buy that one - with a CIA thug in charge in Iraq - you're dumb enough to buy anything the US does.
"Why are people on here so frictional? You got modded as insightful, but all you do is flame me."
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! THIS IS/.!
Good politicians? Jesus, that's the lamest oxymoron I've heard in a year!
How is an ID card going to give you a paper trail back to a terrorist's money?
Are you five year's old or what? Your logic is unbelievably poor.
Finally, don't assume that just because I'm against privacy invasion that I don't care about fighting more important battles. In fact, I fight the most important battle of all - getting rid of primates that have no clue.
Slashdot Mirror
As I replied to another post elsewhere, I am well aware of the cost of migration
Which is why I said there are no shortage of morons in business (and IT).
You don't use proprietary languages (and in this case, we are referring to Access as a development platform, not merely a database - data can be migrated easily, application code cannot) if you want to keep your options open.
Businesses need to be educated to use second-sourced technology (preferably technology with some backing by standards) or, failing that, open source technology to develop their apps.
However, it is possible to plan a gradual re-engineering of ANY app or group of apps, and that is the intelligent approach to this issue.
However, like I said, there are no shortage of morons, so the intelligent approach is rarely attempted.
I'm well aware of the cost of migrating apps written in proprietary languages.
Which is why I said there is no shortage of morons in business.
You don't write apps in proprietary languages if you want to keep your options open for the future.
If the apps had been written in a second-sourced language, they could be ported to a variant of that language with much less cost.
Anybody using VB is a moron.
And to avoid losing one week in soft costs, you sell your ass to Bill who will charge you hard money every year.
Right, really makes sense to me.
It's like the ASP TCO studies. Everybody says a PC and its apps cost $15K/year. So if we outsource to an ASP, it'll cost us $8K/year.
Right. Which is better? Have a $15K/year TCO that is YOUR FAULT and is something you can do something about - or outsource to Bill or Larry or Carly and incur an $8K/year TCO (which over time will begin to rise to $10K and eventually back to $15K as they raise the rates once your business is in hock to their apps)?
It begins to look to me that the software business is essentially a protection/extortion racket - starting with the "licensing" notion and proceeding to "give us the core of your business and we'll let you use it - it'll cost less than our breaking your legs with high fees".
Anybody who buys into this is a moron.
Of course, there is no shortage of morons in business.
If you're trying to say that most people are morons, I agree with you.
Which is why Linux (or something better than Linux) will win.
Because we ARE smarter than you.
And that is proven by the fact that you don't realize that the "big bad ogre" is ALWAYS "eaten up from within". And it starts with his first meal of the "losers".
Have a nice day, FUD troll.
Precisely.
They never got any "training" in the first place.
Now the FUD trolls claim it costs too much to "train" them to use OO or Linux or whatever.
It's FUD, nothing more.
You shut up.
If one is a competent sys admin, one doesn't run Windows in the first place.
How ya like them apples?
Retard.
And user training costs are what they are because no company I've ever heard of or been in knows how to train users.
"User training" is an oxymoron in most companies either because the "training" is incompetent or there IS no training.
In the latter case, open source is STILL cheaper than the alternative because the users won't get trained anyway, and they'll muddle through just like they always have.
It's only when a company feels it has to piss away X thousands of dollars on idiot third-party "trainers" that they then feel they'd rather save those X thousands of dollars and stay with what they've got.
In other words, they decide not to train people to use something which is cheaper because it would be cheaper not to train people.
What's wrong with this picture?
"Training costs" are a red herring. It's used to justify Not-Invented-Here and We-Don't-Want-To-Change syndromes. It has nothing to do with whether open source is "usable" or anything else rational.
Migration costs are real, but one time, so they're irrelevant as well (unless for some reason they're really huge.)
"I can't see switching being that bad if you do it right."
That's the problem.
IT departments do not do "right".
Some of don't live at the Slashdot URL waiting for a new story so we can be the "first post".
/. which is nominally supposed to be "informed comment."
Especially at 4 in the morning.
Especially since first post is usually lame and subjects one to insults for the next three pages of posts, therefore reducing the value of
"Informed comment?"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! At "+5", maybe.
"One final point to note is that Newham will be using Internet Explorer. Steel explained that this is because Microsoft is very serious about addressing security concerns"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Let me repeat that!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
They can't - they're color blind.
You have absolutely no fucking clue what you're talking about.
The Simpson trial? Are you serious? That was a circus.
Try looking into the details of the Winona Ryder railroading. Start with Joel Mowbray's article on it. (Of course her big mistake was using that idiot spin-doctor-cum-lame-trial-lawyer Geragos as her attorney.)
As for the rest, the judge can certainly hold a juror in contempt or declare a mistrial if he thinks a juror is attempting to throw a case. Of course if he can't produce any rational reason why he believes this, the juror might get away with it. But it's hardly a revolutionary method - which was the original point.
You used the term "jury nullification" which means a jury can find in opposition to the facts of a case. Judges do NOT like this and will do everything possible - which is a lot, including declaring a mistrial - to prevent this from happening. And if you advocate jury nullification as a juror or attorney before the bench, your ass is grass. The judge will remove you or find you in contempt.
Jury nullification is rightwing bullshit.
That would be the rational response - Bush is a failure. He failed in Afghanistan, he failed in Iraq, he's failing in the so-called "War on Terror" according to just about every expert on terrorism, and now we have another incident.
/. will never EVER hear the end of it.
And that's how the Democrats would phrase it.
But it wouldn't matter.
Because Bush will suspend the elections if the incident is significant enough - and it has to be to get him his "bounce" from the fear the attack will generate. Even if he doesn't suspend the elections, he'll get a "bounce" which would probably be enough to get him over the top if the race is at all close - and Kerry is making sure the race will be close because there isn't a penny's worth of difference in their policies on the issues of Iraq, etc.
Look at the chart those guys did - every single time for the last two years that Bush has been in trouble, we get a terror alert. And his numbers stabilize.
The only thing better for him than an alert is an actual incident.
Because the morons in this country are NOT rational.
Fine - don't believe me. Watch what happens.
If Bush is defeated in November, I'm wrong. And I'm happy.
If we have an incident and Bush gets elected, I'll accept money, pizza, Corr's and Tori Amos videos, and of course, porn.
And the morons on
You still have no clue what I'm talking about.
Try learning English first before bothering to comment further.
If you're dumb enough to pay for a /. subscription, you SHOULD see stories like this.
Ah, then any time the system detects that five responses have come in from five different people within, say, two seconds, they should ALL get the
/. into somethin' cookin'!
"SLOW DOWN, COWBOY!"
response!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Maybe that will keep the servers up long enough to be able to send in a response, too.
How about this? Nobody should be allowed to send more than one response within a twenty-four period?
See - we can make the Net look like snail mail if we try!
Now if we can just figure out a way to put AI into the moderators (since they don't seem to have any "real" intelligence), we could make
"I'm a subscriber (read: I pay money to see slashdot)"
Why?
To see ads?
You've misunderstood me.
I'm quite aware of how Linux is constructed.
I was referring to the overall user interface as well as the overall design of OS's - which by the way does indeed include how the kernel interacts with the user interface level.
Good question.
I can never figure out why terrorism is - in this country, at least - CHRONIC terrorism.
Blowing up a building once every ten years is not exactly effective. The odds of being killed or injured by a terrorist in this country is probably far lower than being hit by lightning.
I realize it takes a long time and much resources to put together a coordinated operation like 9/11, but you'd think they could at least do it once a year.
I don't think it's because the counterintelligence in the US is particularly effective - or even CIA surveillance overseas. I suspect it is because the local authorities in the countries from which these people operate are more effective in keeping them hopping. That and the general lack of resources that terrorists have. bin Laden may have a lot of money personally, but it's not clear how much of it can be channeled into effective funding of major operations.
Like the article on the laptop computer the other day, it seems most of these guys spend their time arguing over what to do next and how to do it rather than actually doing anything.
I've known for years that most terrorists, going back as far as Carlos and even farther to Che Guevara in Bolivia, are not terribly effective.
Only when a movement gets local support - as the Red Brigades had in Italy in the 1970's or the IRA in Ireland - do they seem able to mount continuous and chronic operations which are overall reasonably effective.
It's actually a good reason to NOT want to limit civil liberties under the guise of "terrorism" since the "terrorism" is so limited in effect anyway.
Particularly when the whole 9/11 operation stinks of a "false-flag" operation which only worked because somebody at the top wanted it to work. Had the FBI agents in the field been heeded and the intelligence agency warnings about Al Qaeda's intentions been heeded, the operation could have been stopped. But it wasn't. And Coleen Rowly, the FBI whistleblower, was once quoted IIRC as saying she couldn't understand it - unless somebody simply wanted it to happen.
And that goes back to the PNAC documents where it was plainly stated that the US needed a "Pearl Harbor" to put the neocon plans into operation.
Well, they got one.
That in itself is suspicious.
One word: technology.
And more specifically: nanotechnology (although some others will probably be helpful as well.)
JURY NULLIFICATION? Are you serious?
That's a quick way to get a contempt of court charge.
The last thing a judge wants to hear from a juror is he has the right to vote his conscience against the judge's instructions or the law as enacted.
Jury nullification is for rightwing nuts who think they can redefine the way the state operates in their favor. Like the tax refusers who claim the laws establishing the income tax are illegal and therefore null and void and they can just ignore them. Right, tell it to the Marshals.
Anybody who thinks being a juror is relevant to making change in this country is in a state of delusion so serious they need to be restrained in case they walk in front of a bus.
You really don't have a clue as to what science is, right? As opposed to floating abstractions?
Have a nice day.
The average juror has no clue to what degree the judge, prosecution and law enforcement can manipulate the evidence and court procedure to make the phrase "fair trial" a fucking joke.
"Apathy" has nothing to do with it. You want to deal with the problem, do something effective. Advocating moaning, voting, and jury duty is merely supporting the system. The people in government LOVE guys like you - you're so totally ineffective they don't have to worry about anything going wrong with their little schemes.
What do we do in the meantime?
How about something that works instead of drivel that doesn't and also has the side effect of removing even more civil liberties in this country?
As for "not hearing of the successes", what we heard last week was the "success" of arresting terrorists in London and Pakistan.
Then what we heard was that "success" was in fact an outing for political reasons of a Pakistani double agent that blew the British attempt to obtain further info on said terrorists.
Some "success". A few guys arrested, the rest scattered and went further underground and the US's best chance to penetrate Al Qaeda blown.
Jumpstart the election process in Iraq? Yeah, right. If you're dumb enough to buy that one - with a CIA thug in charge in Iraq - you're dumb enough to buy anything the US does.
"Why are people on here so frictional? You got modded as insightful, but all you do is flame me."
/.!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! THIS IS
Good politicians? Jesus, that's the lamest oxymoron I've heard in a year!
How is an ID card going to give you a paper trail back to a terrorist's money?
Are you five year's old or what? Your logic is unbelievably poor.
Finally, don't assume that just because I'm against privacy invasion that I don't care about fighting more important battles. In fact, I fight the most important battle of all - getting rid of primates that have no clue.