there are plenty of IBM types weighing in that they can easily see this happening - some have already left or been informed they will be terminated - and they know the company is having serious trouble with its Global Services division.
So I suspect it's all true - although the actual count of employees to be outsourced might be speculative at this point since it appears IBM is keeping that number close to its vest.
Copyright needs to be abolished, as do patents and all IP law.
Then the GPL would not be needed at all.
I've said repeatedly that people like Lawrence Lessig are fighting with both hands tied behind them because they support the oxymoronic notion of "intellectual property". No matter what they do, they will always be forced to concede that anybody owning IP can do anything they want with it. Stating that IP owners should be "more open" about their property or that IP laws should be "limited" simply isn't going to work.
There IS NO "balance" here. IP law was NEVER about "stimulating invention". It was ALWAYS about monopoly and control. It has never been established by logic, or by any other evidence, that IP law is required for human invention or human economics to succeed. That has always been a "theory" used as cover for enabling the control of people's behavior over and above property considerations. It is an extension of contract law over and above property law. There is no economic justification - as an extension of economic theory - for it.
Something like the SCT Banner system which runs many universities and community colleges like City College of San Francisco. City College paid something like $1.5 million dollars for this POS. They pay around $150,000 for "support" - then have to pay another $200,000 or more for consultants to actually provide "support".
Banner is based on Oracle technology, using a Java-based front-end. Interestingly, it includes openEAI, an open source Enterprise Application Integration project to which SCT contributes, supposedly. But mostly, it appears to be an old mainframe application "downsized" first to a client-server architecture and now to a Java-based architecture. The screen layouts are a nightmare, and the documentation is pathetic, despite being several hundred megabytes of PDF files.
Worse, the product is "upgraded" practically every year and every college is forced to upgrade as support for the previous version is dropped within a year - and you NEED support for this thing. Thus the colleges IT departments are in a constant state of "churn" - either finalizing the installation of the previous version or preparing for the installation of the next version.
Having worked with Banner, I see no reason why it couldn't be completely reproduced as a much better open source project using PostgreSQL, and the same Java technology it uses now - but with more modern development methods and user interface design.
Such a project would not be trivial. Banner has a couple thousand data entry screen Oracle forms, and is a huge and complex application that has to deal with an incredible variety of legal, financial and educational requirements involved in running a large university or college.
However, anybody developing such a project which could compete reasonably with Banner could make a ton of money providing support and custom modifications. And the colleges using it would save a ton of money every year.
This is the kind of open source enterprise infrastructure project which could really make a difference in a given market.
irrelevant to anybody with a brain (which leaves out the FSF fanatics, of course), this Dell deal is irrelevant to anything as well - except possibly that it might indicate Dell is more interested in distributing Linux than it was previously.
OTOH, as others have suggested, it may simply be that Microsoft made noises at Dell about the Ubuntu deal, so Dell's lawyers came up with a way to blunt that somewhat.
In the end, it's all corporate bullshit and means nothing to anybody else.
"Dude, you bought a Dell" (with or without Ubuntu) is still relevant.
While it is true that the original viruses developed by Dr. Fred Cohen were developed and tested - easily - on UNIX systems, it is also true that UNIX sys admins learned (most of them, anyway.)
In recent years - say, the last ten or 15 - UNIX has definitely been more secure than any version of Windows.
A comparative analysis of the methods UNIX uses to defend itself - such as SELinux and App Armor - vs the nonsense Microsoft has added to Vista, for example, the stupid UAC, pretty much demonstrates where significant security lies.
Americans are ball-less wonders with no guts who live in fear for their jobs and their lives, and who live at the pleasure of the US government who can arrest and imprison them at any time for any trumped-up reason. This is driven home to them nightly by cop and lawyer TV shows and movies where "civil rights" and "due process" are routinely ignored in order to ensure that nobody gets out of line.
Further, this behavioral code is enforced at the church, corporate, university, high school, and grammar school level by every known form of authority.
I learned this when in grammar school. One day it was raining and I was standing at the bottom of the stairs at the entrance to the school waiting for class to start. We were futzing around making noise and somebody had grabbed my hat. A teacher came to the top of the stairs and ordered everyone to be quiet. I then (quietly) asked the other student to give me back my hat. Because I had "disobeyed" the order to keep quiet, I was sent outside to wait in the rain. This was my first lesson in "arbitrary authority" - if you don't want to count the time I was beat up in the street by the two sons of the mayor of the town who had learned to be bullies because of their father's position.
Later, in church, a couple of kids were fooling around a drink fountain and spilled water on the floor. The preacher comes up and blames me for not PREVENTING them from doing this. Thus I learned about the church's view of justice.
I could go on about high school, college, work environments, the US Army, and so on. But the point should be obvious. Primates view authority as a means of establishing dominance over other members of their species that they fear. There is no more sophisticated reason for its existence.
You're right. Americans are peasants who nonetheless believe that they are better than everyone else in the world precisely because of their servilism to their masters.
This is why America is in for a rude shock when the rest of the world takes down the "American Empire" over the next fifty years. First, Iran will bleed the US to death for the next ten years militarily, economically, and geopolitically when Bush starts his war there. Then China will dump the US dollar, finishing off the US economy. The rest of the world - with the possible exceptions of "poodles" like Britain - will get in line to finish off the US - without a shot being fired, I might add - it will all be done via economics. If the US attempts to use its military and nuclear might to re-establish itself, it will discover how easy it is to smuggle in nuclear weapons and wipe its major cities off the map without anyone knowing who did it or why.
As Dorian Gray put it in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", "I've lived long enough to know that empires crumble. There are no exceptions."
I'm waiting for the news story that says the Department of Homeland Security just lost a hard drive with the personal information of every Federal agent in the government and all the White House security information on it.
These people are morons. Their sole purpose in life is to screw up while pushing other people around with self-righteous notions that THEY are the ones "protecting" everybody else.
It's the "cop mentality" writ large - which is the same basic mentality as a Mafia protection racket.
The US military is getting its ass kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan, its troops are committing war crimes in both countries, and the entire military is at the breaking point. They're sending guys with injuries and fifty-year-old retirees back to "the front".
Oh, and let's not forget the troops crippled and dying in mold-infested hospital rooms, and the one third who aren't getting PTS help - oh, wait, we did forget them already. Never mind.
Meanwhile, Our Leader is planning to throw them at Iran where they will ALL get killed - except our glorious pilots like McCain who bomb civilians from the air. At least the pilots don't have to worry about Third World countries having decent air defenses - so send them to North Korea.
Meanwhile Halliburton rolls in dough, making Dick Cheney's stock portfolio look good.
Suckers.
Andrea Corr's new "Shame On You" song covers the results pretty well: "Happy faces go to war/and dance upon the mines...Close your eyes to seeing/lock your heart to feeling/[You] change his name to number/but he's somebody's child".
"And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."
Why the hell doesn't IBM, which makes billions off Linux, at least pay this guy a frikkin' salary?
Better, why doesn't IBM and HP, both of whom make billions off Linux, start pressuring - or even paying for - certified drivers for Linux by every company that supplies peripherals and chipsets to their machines?
Now that Dell is selling Ubuntu, will Dell pressure its peripheral and chipset makers to provide certified drivers for Linux?
to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in "The Departed": "You all are [on your way out]. Act accordingly."
Advances in nanotech will obsolete the human brain and body probably within fifty years. So if you're younger than forty, you'll probably see it. If you're between forty and sixty, you might or might not depending on how close you are to the upper end of the range and whether you can take advantage of life extension technologies over the next twenty years or so. If you're over sixty - arrange for a suspension contract with a cryonics firm.
Again, Serdar is not a Windows shill. He may not be completely familiar with Linux, but he's partial to free/open source software and recommends a lot of free stuff in his columns for one of the IT newsletter subscriptions I get.
In all, I considered the review pretty fair considering.
His reference to Add/Remove is probably correct, except he said "Vista" when he meant "Windows". Windows Add/Remove DOES predate Ubuntu and any other Linux. That was the first thing I thought when I first saw Kubuntu's Add/Remove.
And he said GIMP was better than Paint.
You all know I hunt down and kill Windows shills as much as anybody here, but Serdar isn't a shill.
Serdar is not a Windows fanboy. He's partial to free/open source software. I read his stuff all the time on Techtarget newsletters. I'd say his comparison is about as fair and balanced as you're likely to see from somebody who probably isn't a full-time Linux user - which by definition would be biased as well.
I agree that Serdar dropped the ball on that one. However, he's known to be partial to free/open source stuff, so it wasn't shilling on his part anyway.
It's a pretty good comparison article compared to what we usually see.
"promising in return a cut of any winnings stemming from the lawsuit. The payout is based on a formula that grants Altitude a percentage that decreases with a bigger award."
This sort of thing - creating "nuisance patents" and bringing nuisance lawsuits for a cut of the winnings - should be illegal.
The latter offers modified routers to small businesses like restaurants and cafes that would like to offer free WiFi to attract foot traffic. It's paid for by advertising which appears in a banner above the actual Web page as you surf. The advertising is entirely local businesses to local users.
Their concept is that the Net should be like TV - free with advertising - but non-intrusive advertising.
They're only in a few smaller cities at this point, but the business model is interesting. In a way, it's similar to the way the Opera browser used to be ad-supported - a small banner ad at the top of the page. No popups or mods to Web pages. The difference here is that the ads are all for local businesses targeted to local users.
If the Fon guys and the PWFP hooked up, everybody could offer free WiFi and get a little revenue from advertising provided by their router and external servers.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Linux community happens to feel that it would be nice if ordinary people could use Linux.
Self-centered morons like yourself are in the minority in the Linux community.
Sorry to burst your ego-inflated bubble but nobody gives a shit what you think. Especially not the people putting out Linux distros or writing code.
As for what I'm doing, I'm promoting Linux to new business clients, not hiding in/. pretending I'm one of the "elite". That shit went out with the movie "Hackers" years ago.
Oh, yeah, Microsoft is the poster child for this sort of thing. But that's why I expect better of Linux (silly me).
As for the first service pack, which will come first - the one for Vista or the one for Feisty? And which one will be bigger?:-) You gotta go with Vista on that last one! And if Feisty is first, well, that just means Linux fixes its screwups faster than Microsoft does!
It's the basic reasons for screwups that no one seems to want to fix - in either Microsoft or OSS.
It didn't work for a client I had. I had a HELL of a time getting the right drivers to work - there were problems with both NDISWrapper and the native drivers. Once I was using an older native driver, the wireless card at least communicated with the AP. But then the Wireless Assistant didn't want to work with WEP. And don't even think about WPA or WPA2. (This was on Kubuntu Edgy, BTW, not Fawn.)
The wireless problems are real - go research the Ubuntu forums as I did while trying to solve that issue.
The other new features aren't relevant to my point - which is that a lot of effort went into Beryl while people still complain about wireless and laptop support. To some degree, the latter is not Ubuntu's fault - or any Linux distro. As long as the manufacturers don't do certified Linux drivers, this will continue. But releasing Wireless Assistant when it was KNOWN to have problems with WEP was simply incorrect.
I don't know about Beryl but I tried Compiz some months back and it simply didn't work on my older 64MB GeForce.
Now, my machine is a bit over four years old (AMD 1.67GHz, 512MB RAM), so I didn't really expect it to work. But I suspect quite a few people are running machines of that age these days. What I call "high-end" is anything 3GHz CPU or better, over 512MB RAM and over 64-128MB of VRAM. Your machine beats those specs handily. It may not be "high end" compared to what is selling today, but I'm talking about what people OWN, not what they bought in the last 12 months.
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there are plenty of IBM types weighing in that they can easily see this happening - some have already left or been informed they will be terminated - and they know the company is having serious trouble with its Global Services division.
So I suspect it's all true - although the actual count of employees to be outsourced might be speculative at this point since it appears IBM is keeping that number close to its vest.
Copyright needs to be abolished, as do patents and all IP law.
Then the GPL would not be needed at all.
I've said repeatedly that people like Lawrence Lessig are fighting with both hands tied behind them because they support the oxymoronic notion of "intellectual property". No matter what they do, they will always be forced to concede that anybody owning IP can do anything they want with it. Stating that IP owners should be "more open" about their property or that IP laws should be "limited" simply isn't going to work.
There IS NO "balance" here. IP law was NEVER about "stimulating invention". It was ALWAYS about monopoly and control. It has never been established by logic, or by any other evidence, that IP law is required for human invention or human economics to succeed. That has always been a "theory" used as cover for enabling the control of people's behavior over and above property considerations. It is an extension of contract law over and above property law. There is no economic justification - as an extension of economic theory - for it.
"Just say NO" to intellectual property.
Something like the SCT Banner system which runs many universities and community colleges like City College of San Francisco. City College paid something like $1.5 million dollars for this POS. They pay around $150,000 for "support" - then have to pay another $200,000 or more for consultants to actually provide "support".
Banner is based on Oracle technology, using a Java-based front-end. Interestingly, it includes openEAI, an open source Enterprise Application Integration project to which SCT contributes, supposedly. But mostly, it appears to be an old mainframe application "downsized" first to a client-server architecture and now to a Java-based architecture. The screen layouts are a nightmare, and the documentation is pathetic, despite being several hundred megabytes of PDF files.
Worse, the product is "upgraded" practically every year and every college is forced to upgrade as support for the previous version is dropped within a year - and you NEED support for this thing. Thus the colleges IT departments are in a constant state of "churn" - either finalizing the installation of the previous version or preparing for the installation of the next version.
Having worked with Banner, I see no reason why it couldn't be completely reproduced as a much better open source project using PostgreSQL, and the same Java technology it uses now - but with more modern development methods and user interface design.
Such a project would not be trivial. Banner has a couple thousand data entry screen Oracle forms, and is a huge and complex application that has to deal with an incredible variety of legal, financial and educational requirements involved in running a large university or college.
However, anybody developing such a project which could compete reasonably with Banner could make a ton of money providing support and custom modifications. And the colleges using it would save a ton of money every year.
This is the kind of open source enterprise infrastructure project which could really make a difference in a given market.
irrelevant to anybody with a brain (which leaves out the FSF fanatics, of course), this Dell deal is irrelevant to anything as well - except possibly that it might indicate Dell is more interested in distributing Linux than it was previously.
OTOH, as others have suggested, it may simply be that Microsoft made noises at Dell about the Ubuntu deal, so Dell's lawyers came up with a way to blunt that somewhat.
In the end, it's all corporate bullshit and means nothing to anybody else.
"Dude, you bought a Dell" (with or without Ubuntu) is still relevant.
Obi Wan: What I told you was true - from a certain point of view.
Luke: From a certain point of view?! You fruitcake! The motherfucker is MY FATHER! Your lousy training fucked up MY FATHER!
[insert lightsaber hum here]
While it is true that the original viruses developed by Dr. Fred Cohen were developed and tested - easily - on UNIX systems, it is also true that UNIX sys admins learned (most of them, anyway.)
In recent years - say, the last ten or 15 - UNIX has definitely been more secure than any version of Windows.
A comparative analysis of the methods UNIX uses to defend itself - such as SELinux and App Armor - vs the nonsense Microsoft has added to Vista, for example, the stupid UAC, pretty much demonstrates where significant security lies.
Americans are ball-less wonders with no guts who live in fear for their jobs and their lives, and who live at the pleasure of the US government who can arrest and imprison them at any time for any trumped-up reason. This is driven home to them nightly by cop and lawyer TV shows and movies where "civil rights" and "due process" are routinely ignored in order to ensure that nobody gets out of line.
Further, this behavioral code is enforced at the church, corporate, university, high school, and grammar school level by every known form of authority.
I learned this when in grammar school. One day it was raining and I was standing at the bottom of the stairs at the entrance to the school waiting for class to start. We were futzing around making noise and somebody had grabbed my hat. A teacher came to the top of the stairs and ordered everyone to be quiet. I then (quietly) asked the other student to give me back my hat. Because I had "disobeyed" the order to keep quiet, I was sent outside to wait in the rain. This was my first lesson in "arbitrary authority" - if you don't want to count the time I was beat up in the street by the two sons of the mayor of the town who had learned to be bullies because of their father's position.
Later, in church, a couple of kids were fooling around a drink fountain and spilled water on the floor. The preacher comes up and blames me for not PREVENTING them from doing this. Thus I learned about the church's view of justice.
I could go on about high school, college, work environments, the US Army, and so on. But the point should be obvious. Primates view authority as a means of establishing dominance over other members of their species that they fear. There is no more sophisticated reason for its existence.
You're right. Americans are peasants who nonetheless believe that they are better than everyone else in the world precisely because of their servilism to their masters.
This is why America is in for a rude shock when the rest of the world takes down the "American Empire" over the next fifty years. First, Iran will bleed the US to death for the next ten years militarily, economically, and geopolitically when Bush starts his war there. Then China will dump the US dollar, finishing off the US economy. The rest of the world - with the possible exceptions of "poodles" like Britain - will get in line to finish off the US - without a shot being fired, I might add - it will all be done via economics. If the US attempts to use its military and nuclear might to re-establish itself, it will discover how easy it is to smuggle in nuclear weapons and wipe its major cities off the map without anyone knowing who did it or why.
As Dorian Gray put it in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", "I've lived long enough to know that empires crumble. There are no exceptions."
Uh, you left out the part about how he's also a GREEDY bully...
But, yeah, that pretty much sums up Bill.
HE is "the dumbest fucking idea he's seen at Microsoft". HE is why Microsoft will go down.
I'm waiting for the news story that says the Department of Homeland Security just lost a hard drive with the personal information of every Federal agent in the government and all the White House security information on it.
These people are morons. Their sole purpose in life is to screw up while pushing other people around with self-righteous notions that THEY are the ones "protecting" everybody else.
It's the "cop mentality" writ large - which is the same basic mentality as a Mafia protection racket.
It's obvious.
The US military is getting its ass kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan, its troops are committing war crimes in both countries, and the entire military is at the breaking point. They're sending guys with injuries and fifty-year-old retirees back to "the front".
Oh, and let's not forget the troops crippled and dying in mold-infested hospital rooms, and the one third who aren't getting PTS help - oh, wait, we did forget them already. Never mind.
Meanwhile, Our Leader is planning to throw them at Iran where they will ALL get killed - except our glorious pilots like McCain who bomb civilians from the air. At least the pilots don't have to worry about Third World countries having decent air defenses - so send them to North Korea.
Meanwhile Halliburton rolls in dough, making Dick Cheney's stock portfolio look good.
Suckers.
Andrea Corr's new "Shame On You" song covers the results pretty well: "Happy faces go to war/and dance upon the mines...Close your eyes to seeing/lock your heart to feeling/[You] change his name to number/but he's somebody's child".
"And none of the major Linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate world's coffers."
Why the hell doesn't IBM, which makes billions off Linux, at least pay this guy a frikkin' salary?
Better, why doesn't IBM and HP, both of whom make billions off Linux, start pressuring - or even paying for - certified drivers for Linux by every company that supplies peripherals and chipsets to their machines?
Now that Dell is selling Ubuntu, will Dell pressure its peripheral and chipset makers to provide certified drivers for Linux?
Exactly.
This whole affair is so fucking stupid it reminds me of the line:
Why is academic infighting so vicious? Because the stakes are so small.
Humans. They will do literally ANYTHING to prove they're better than someone else - even if means proving they're actually worse.
to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in "The Departed": "You all are [on your way out]. Act accordingly."
Advances in nanotech will obsolete the human brain and body probably within fifty years. So if you're younger than forty, you'll probably see it. If you're between forty and sixty, you might or might not depending on how close you are to the upper end of the range and whether you can take advantage of life extension technologies over the next twenty years or so. If you're over sixty - arrange for a suspension contract with a cryonics firm.
Again, Serdar is not a Windows shill. He may not be completely familiar with Linux, but he's partial to free/open source software and recommends a lot of free stuff in his columns for one of the IT newsletter subscriptions I get.
In all, I considered the review pretty fair considering.
His reference to Add/Remove is probably correct, except he said "Vista" when he meant "Windows". Windows Add/Remove DOES predate Ubuntu and any other Linux. That was the first thing I thought when I first saw Kubuntu's Add/Remove.
And he said GIMP was better than Paint.
You all know I hunt down and kill Windows shills as much as anybody here, but Serdar isn't a shill.
Serdar is not a Windows fanboy. He's partial to free/open source software. I read his stuff all the time on Techtarget newsletters. I'd say his comparison is about as fair and balanced as you're likely to see from somebody who probably isn't a full-time Linux user - which by definition would be biased as well.
I agree that Serdar dropped the ball on that one. However, he's known to be partial to free/open source stuff, so it wasn't shilling on his part anyway.
It's a pretty good comparison article compared to what we usually see.
"it shouldn't be discounted simply because it's from Microsoft."
Yes, it should.
don funding a hijacking operation?
"promising in return a cut of any winnings stemming from the lawsuit. The payout is based on a formula that grants Altitude a percentage that decreases with a bigger award."
This sort of thing - creating "nuisance patents" and bringing nuisance lawsuits for a cut of the winnings - should be illegal.
Choice is bad - obeying is good.
Linux bad, Windows good.
I don't care if he's talking development environments, that's what he's saying.
Windows shill.
Nothing to see here, move along.
with the Public WiFi Project.
The latter offers modified routers to small businesses like restaurants and cafes that would like to offer free WiFi to attract foot traffic. It's paid for by advertising which appears in a banner above the actual Web page as you surf. The advertising is entirely local businesses to local users.
Their concept is that the Net should be like TV - free with advertising - but non-intrusive advertising.
They're only in a few smaller cities at this point, but the business model is interesting. In a way, it's similar to the way the Opera browser used to be ad-supported - a small banner ad at the top of the page. No popups or mods to Web pages. The difference here is that the ads are all for local businesses targeted to local users.
If the Fon guys and the PWFP hooked up, everybody could offer free WiFi and get a little revenue from advertising provided by their router and external servers.
"our companies are having difficulty finding Americans with the background,"
Yeah, right.
You're having difficulty because the hiring process is broken beyond repair. not because there are no Americans with "the background".
Hire cheap-ass stupid bastards as management and you'll continue to "have difficulty".
I'm glad you feel better, self-masturbating dolt.
/. pretending I'm one of the "elite". That shit went out with the movie "Hackers" years ago.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Linux community happens to feel that it would be nice if ordinary people could use Linux.
Self-centered morons like yourself are in the minority in the Linux community.
Sorry to burst your ego-inflated bubble but nobody gives a shit what you think. Especially not the people putting out Linux distros or writing code.
As for what I'm doing, I'm promoting Linux to new business clients, not hiding in
Grow up.
Oh, yeah, Microsoft is the poster child for this sort of thing. But that's why I expect better of Linux (silly me).
As for the first service pack, which will come first - the one for Vista or the one for Feisty? And which one will be bigger?
It's the basic reasons for screwups that no one seems to want to fix - in either Microsoft or OSS.
Fine - wireless worked for you.
It didn't work for a client I had. I had a HELL of a time getting the right drivers to work - there were problems with both NDISWrapper and the native drivers. Once I was using an older native driver, the wireless card at least communicated with the AP. But then the Wireless Assistant didn't want to work with WEP. And don't even think about WPA or WPA2. (This was on Kubuntu Edgy, BTW, not Fawn.)
The wireless problems are real - go research the Ubuntu forums as I did while trying to solve that issue.
The other new features aren't relevant to my point - which is that a lot of effort went into Beryl while people still complain about wireless and laptop support. To some degree, the latter is not Ubuntu's fault - or any Linux distro. As long as the manufacturers don't do certified Linux drivers, this will continue. But releasing Wireless Assistant when it was KNOWN to have problems with WEP was simply incorrect.
I don't know about Beryl but I tried Compiz some months back and it simply didn't work on my older 64MB GeForce.
Now, my machine is a bit over four years old (AMD 1.67GHz, 512MB RAM), so I didn't really expect it to work. But I suspect quite a few people are running machines of that age these days. What I call "high-end" is anything 3GHz CPU or better, over 512MB RAM and over 64-128MB of VRAM. Your machine beats those specs handily. It may not be "high end" compared to what is selling today, but I'm talking about what people OWN, not what they bought in the last 12 months.