If you have ever tried to use a tablet, you will probably come to the same conclusion we have. They suck as a form-factor. They are undoubtedly cool, but in the long run, they really don't let you do any serious work.
I have worked with both the Fujitsu-Siemens as well as the Compaq tablets, have run Linux as well as Windows on both, and they simply get in between yourself and serious work.
The interface requires too much attention of the user, and the handwriting recognition, while pretty good on Windows, also requires too much attention. On Linux you would have to use some palm-type strok business, or even better, the excellent Dasher application.
Besides specialist applications, such as in hospitals for example, the form factor only really comes into its own during meetings, but it simply does not (yet) offer the simplicity of the two primary office tools: The humble pen and paper.
This is not a marketing or cost issue, it is a form-factor issue. They are cool, but all our demo and test models have their novelty worn off, and are currently going unused. At least we did not pay for them.....
While on the face of it the report looks good, deeper reading reveals some serious flaws, besides the fact that the spreadsheet is in XLS format.
First of all, the report is factually incorrect in several areas. Netproject list the City of Turku as a case study, but the City of Turku turned out to be a turkey - they only used OSS as a driver for microsoft to lower rices, which they did, and Turku is now a well publicised MS case study. Not very clever to use that as advertisement for an OSS migration. The one thing PA officials do is check out case studies. It get numerous facts wrong about some of the software packages, and on the whole looks more like parroting of populist stances (exim is better and faster then postfix, for example) then real-life testing. At the very least, they should back these type of statements up with facts.
Secondly, this is so full of OSS politics, it is not even funny anymore. Take for example this little gem: "Of the session managers KDE's is the more mature but Gnome is catching up fast. Gnome is being supported by Sun Microsystems and members of the Gnome Foundation. netproject considers that it has a better architecture and believes it has a better future.". That initself should be the subject of a fine little flamewar..... Also, there are, again, no facts to support the supposition of a "better" architecture. Also, SUSE, for example, get very little to no airtime in the document, and the document is simply wrong about some of the issues discussed around SUSE. for example, the YAST discussion is plain wrong, and some highly popular prducst, such as openexchange, get no mention whatsoever. Granted, some components of SLOX are closed source, but that doesn't stop the authors from mentioning and even recommending other closed source products.
Finally, and perhaps the worst flaw of all, is the fact that despite its size, it is simply a (badly researched) list of products. This is not a HOWTO migrate, this is a list of "if you migrate, use these tools". There is no methodology, no method, not *system* to migrate. This is organisational masturbation, a big "look how l33t we are" kind of thing.
I can spend some more time ranting about this, but will be to no avail. It is published, and undoubtedly, many fools will brandish this as the final word in ridding the world of the closed source software scourge. To all our detriment......
Or maybe MERIT has simply discovered a serious discrepancy between their diverse interests, and are now going after the money. Don't forget that the patent-loving side of the EU seriously despises the "open source posse". Also remember that the whole premise of Open Source in Government is a serious nightmare for companies throughout Europe. Barring a good and plausible explanation, I figure they were simply bought out.....
ok, let me try and understand what you are saying (sorry to come across all daft, but I want to get this right) - are you saying that a manned space program has no value, that it has value, but it is too expensive, or that the shuttle is useless, or....
As to your point about costs of NASA developing any replacement - I quite agree - NASA spent a million dollars developing a pen that works in zero/micro gravity. The Russians just used a pencil......
yes, I agree, however, what alternative do you see right now? There is nothing on the table today that can be implemented in less then 10 / 15 years - what do you want to do until such time?
That would assume that the shuttle system is somehow deficient. It more or less serves its purposes, and it would be unwise to give up on it now. While I agree that a new method of spacetravel should be developed as fast as possible, realism dictates that this will take at the very least another 15 years, if not much longer then that.
what is truly disgusting though is the fact that this article, as well as almost all others written about the subject drive readers to the conclusion that the shuttle needs to be "fixed" somehow. That this was purely a technical issue. While it is true that at the end of the day, a hole in the wing caused the shuttle to disintegrate. While it is true that this is a mechenical issue that can be fixed, it is also true that this accident *may* have been avoidable, were it not for the utter, complete and total incompetence, dereliction of duty, mismanagement and criminal neglicence shown by NASA Shuttle management *during* the flight. While engineers *knew* the shuttle was in deep shit, continuous efforts by engineers to escalate the issue were consistently pushed down by NASA Shuttle management.
And rather then round up all of the incompetent management team that was at the heart of this tragedy, and sending them all to jail for a very long time for multiple manslaughter, if not murder, they were - in true PHB Politicking fashion - "relocated" to different positions within NASA. The fuckers were not even *fired*.
Well yes - for large databases Disk I/O is key, moreso then either CPU or Memory. However, depending on the type of apps your database is serving, you will probably stil get better price/performance from a non-Sun box, due to their ridiculous pricing. funnily enough, we have a 15k and two e10k in our test center to play with. Loading them with Linux increases performance over Solaris.....
Sorry - have you been smoking some of my crack? Sun hardware, especially the high-end stuff can *easily* be beat. Depending on the type of work you want you to do, you have basically two choices:
For calculations that do not have inter-calculation dependencies, you can spend your millions on a blade-based infrastrucuture, running your choice of x32, x64, or Power based blades, all depending on the type of work you want to do. you will run Linux on these blades, and can mix and match architectures as your requirements dictate. This solution will give you greater flexibility, significantly higher price performance (that only increases as you deploy more) and will allow you to design the infrastrucutre to your applications' needs, rather then designing your application to your infrastrucuture.
Alternatively, if you have higher NUMA or shared memory requirements, you can deploy a big-ass pc running Linux, also delivering you a higher price-performance then you can expect with Sun.
At the end of the day, the high-end Sun stuff, like the 15K etc, are expensive, fickle and frankly, not very fast. Check top500.org if you really want to know. In the past year, we have placed quite a few bids for large systems on a linux/blade architecture, and we win over Sun *every* *single* *time* - and that is based on the simple question: "how much processors power and real results will I get for my dollar?". Pharma, big finance houses - they are all running away from Sun as fast as they can.....
Re:Analyst's Perception is usually distored
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Merrill Lynch Rips Sun
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Bruce Perens? Chief Scientist? at Sun? You must be confused with one of the Founders - Bill Joy....
dude, where did you get the idea that I think all corporations are evil, and where did you get the idea that am a fanatic? talk about being a quick on the draw when it comes to stereotyping. Sheesh, this place gets to be more like slashdot every day...
Anyway, you miss the point - I feel they should not get on the whole indemnification bandwagon in the first place. It is a red herring - a scam put in place by SCO, and HP are simply giving the whole crazy "indemnification" story more credibility by pulling what are essentially empty, tacky marketing stunts like this. This is doing Linux adoption more harm then good. If you think I am wrong, please take a moment, and ask yourself why companies should be deploying linux in the first place.
well, I am not stating that HP should indemnify everyone, i am saying they should not get on the indemnification bandwagon in the first place. It lends cedibility to what is for all intents and purposes a scam to begin with. It also makes HP look tacky
pretty heavy usage - they are webservers, database engines, infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, Mail, etc) and aplication servers. We did not change the architecture as such - in fact the fact we were able to make this swap so easily shows what good architecture we put in there in the first place;-) just the OS and some servces. Linux and Open Source software offer tremendous flexibility and perfomance, and it really was a no-brainer getting this up and running. Then again, reading your website, I am not sure if you would understand that.
Proof of the fact that all commercial players are using scare tactics to sell kit, that is. Those vendors that offer "indemnification" provided you use their hardware or whatever catch there is, are just as bad as SCO.
Vendors are slowly realising that customers are increasingly clued-up about where, how, and on what they spend their money. I was with a customer recently that had been badgered and hammered around by Sun to upgrade their systems. The customer saw no good reason to do so, and subsequently, Sun came around to provide a "free systems review", with a resulting verdict that the software and (SPARC) hardware was out of date. The customer agreed about the software part, and deployed Linux across the ageing SPARC estate. The stuff is now faster, better, and easier to manage, and they recon they a have a few more years of life out of those systems.
Sun turned around and claimed that the systems are now unsupported - not a big deal, customer said. if it breaks we will buy new (Intel.... hehe). Sun then turned around and went to the CEO and the legal department, talking about indemnification, SCO, courtcases and the world coming to an end. Luckily, the customer was not fazed, and Sun lost a *lot* of goodwill in that place. However, other customers will be scared and bullied into going along.
If they only way you can flog your hardware is by using scare tactics, then you are *really* selling a pile of crap.....
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
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RFID Hell
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Raping little kids should be a capital offence. It has nothing to do with "talking" to kids, it is about about a guy forcing himself on a 3 year old. It is about 2 little 10 year old girls, abducted, raped and murdered. It is about little kids being abducted and forced into the child-porn industry. If you have kids, you will know *exactly* why I react the way I do. Wait until they want to move a sick monster like that a block away from your childs school - see how you feel about it then. This is not about suspected criminals, but about convicted child molesters.
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
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RFID Hell
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Erhm. That was exactly my point. It's called "sarcasm"....
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
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RFID Hell
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Point taken, but the PATRIOT act is a law granting vast powers to the government of the US (who had those powers already, anyway - otherwise they would not have been able to pass the PATRIOT act), this is an *improvement* of a technology that is already deployed today in the United Kingdom. In case you are not from around here, the UK has a surveillance camara on practically every streetcorner now, so it isn't something terribly groundshaking here.
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RFID Hell
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How is this simplistic? Because I feel that the *potential* for snooping and *potential* infringement of civil rights do not outweigh the *actual* benefits of keeping convicted paedophiles away from areas where they are liable to recommit their crime? If you read the article, you will find that they are discussing a "talk down" scenario, where offenders (who are on parole, I may add - not "free") that are spotted in a high risk area are phoned up to see what they are up to. How is the use of technology for prevention of crime to the most vulnarable members of our society a bad thing? Keep in mind that nobody is stating that the whole world is going to be implanted with RFIDs when they show up for work tomorrow, as the original, sort of hysterical, write up suggested. but that this is an *improvement* on an *already exisitng technique*. I am a rather privacy concious individual, but also realise whare the pragmatic boundaries are to privacy. Hurting people is one of those things where I personally find it acceptable to have you liable for close scrutiny, for example.
As a dad, I am happy that they are improving on this type of technology, as long as the use is "reasonable" in the eyes of overall society. The telephone has as much potential for abuse of civil rights, but I don't see you tossing away the phone, do I? Use credit cards? store cards? air miles? cell phone? internet? All these day to day items give away more about you, your location, and your day to day live then this device. So unless you are a card-carrying member of the Tin-Foil_Hatters-Club, I suggest you put things in perspective.
Simplistic? I find your obvious refusal to credit alternate opinions to your own with intellectual merit simplistic, not to mention a lot more dangerous then any kind of snooping technology.
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
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RFID Hell
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Not only that, but there is a slight difference between "social tendencies" and "convicted paedophiles". After raping little kids you give up *all* your rights, as far as I am concerned. As a dad, all I want is to be able to listen in to the frequency of this little toy, so that when one of these sick bastards comes near, I can take out the 12-gauge.....
half-witted Slashbot? I have done more for OpenOffice.org then you *ever* will.
The "vast improvement" in Gnome 2.x is somewhat of a debatable point to many, and I am sure that the nice people over at Ximian for example may have something to say about the "bunch of kids coding in their spare time". Been drinking from the McBride firehose too much lately? I personally know the people who have been "working feverishly" for Sun on the GNOME stuff, and know perfectly well the extent of work they have put in Gnome, and the purpose it serves.
Sun is no benefactor to the Open source community, not by a far stretch, and rather then the spasmic knee jerk reaction you exhibit here, why not consider the points I make and counter them rationally. Show me where Sun is so much of a benefactor to the community.
Don't talk about where they have dumped otherwise old and useless code in the public domain in the hope to piss off their competitors (like how they went out with OO, for example), but where they truly *add value* to the community. This is not about slapping the GPL on Java or somesuch rubbish, this is about Sun using the open source community as free labour. There is a fine line between volunteerism and free labour, and Sun crosses it with abondon.
Oh, and yes, I know the Orion and Mad Hatter stuff *intimately* and I can tell you that it is *all* about lock in.
Don't take the piss, please. I didn't say that. What I said is that one single example of a single contribution hardly constitutes a consitent commitment to the Open source development model....
I have given little, if any, reason for my "Sun Bashing", so the fact that you assume to know my motivation for my position must make you a clairvoyant. None of that has anything to do with what is popular on Slashdot these days. I think I have made it clear on which issues I disagree with Sun, and for what reasons. You chose to ignore them, and toss about the usual bunch of red herrings.
The usability work that Sun has put into Gnome is questioned by many, and can be said to only serve to confirm the long term position Sun wants to take with respect to desktop computing. That does not make their work wrong, it simply confirms my point of view that Sun does not do anything for the "community", and does not at any point act altruistically.
This isn't about whether or not Sun has the right to use open source code, far from it - nowhere do I state that they have been naughty or that they have been stealing - I simply point out that their relationship with the "community" is not all that good. Look into the mailarchives of the projects you mention to gauge that communities opinion of Sun. secondly, I point out that for all the posturing, Sun's new desktop is not Open source, and does not deliver to the customer those benefits that make open source such a good porposition for customers. In the long term, this could well turn out to be the most damaging effect for Open source. Finally, to say that this new desktop is going to be cheap in any way is ludicrous. the cost of migration to and implementation of this offering is going to be high, very high.
I don't give a rats about what sun does, as long as they don't make false claims and statements, and as long as they would stop posturing as some great "Open Source" benefactor. They are not a benefactor, (neither are IBM or any of the vendors for that matter, but that is a different story).
What is your point, anyhow? What did I say specifically that you disagree with? That is not very clear to me. On the other hand, you make it seem as if the way Sun is acting is the only way a company can interact with an Open Source community, which is a sad and blinkered view of the world. Look to Codewaevers, for an example of a truly symbiotic relationship between closed and open source. Look to Sun on the other hand, for a good example of as parasitic relationship.....
"Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price."
"If you use Linux on the server, even if we sold the distribution to you, you are on your own. If you buy our Java desktop solution you are completely indemnified as long as you run it as a desktop solution. And by the way, don't take our desktop product and put it on the server. We are indemnifying them for our products. If we incorporate someone else's component we will make sure that we can indemnify it. I have licenses to all those issues that SCO is suing IBM for. If I didn't have them, I certainly wouldn't indemnify them."
"eWEEK: So, does the uncertainty around Linux benefit Sun and Solaris?
Schwartz: We have an interesting migration opportunity now because we can go back with Unix that is familiar, we can deliver the Java Enterprise System pricing at $100 per employee, which allows them to run Solaris at infinite scale.
With friends like these, we don't need enemies....
I was responding to the original statement that Sun gives the community something special in terms of marketshare. Sun does not give the community any marketshare, it gives itself marketshare. All the products you mention are commercial, closed source offshoots based on an opensource equivalent. I have no problems with Sun wanting to make money - don't go flashing that red herring around, please. I do have a problem with the way Sun treats the community. Sun has a long history of fightingwith the community, because for sun, the community is about Free Labour, not Free Software.
To answer your question, Sun's desktop is, as far as I can tell, not open source, but closed source, just like all their other stuff. It is designed with a couple of goals in mind:
To drive MS off the desktop
To increase sparc/solaris server sales
To increase Sun's control over the customer
This is nothing new, and standard Sun M.O. Deploying Open Source for a customer is about delivering freedom, choice, independence, and reduction of cost to the customer. Sun's desktop has not been proven to do any of that.
OOo is only marginally open source, and there is a long history of friction within the OOo community. Sun has promised to donate all the OOo code to an independent, transparent, not for profit foundation, and then withdrew that promise when they realised people were actually using OOo - i.e. there was profit potential. Shows you how Sun thinks of Open Source in one fell swoop. They gave some bullshit reason about foundations not being realistic for OSS development, and used Mozilla as an example. Witness the irony of Mozilla formaing a foundation as soon as they lost their coprorate masters, never mind the highly successful Apache model (not relevant, they claimed).
Then there was the ill fated Community Council, that has been over a year and a half in the making and still is not fully formed and up to speed. Only when Sun could guarantee that the right political mix was found in the council (i.e. sun butt-lickers) would they proceed with the formation. They went so far as to put Sun contractors, posing as "independent contributors" up for election.
Staroffice is supposed to be based on OpenOffice, so why is StarOffice 7.0 released, while OOo 1.1 is still in "RC4" state? Why has the 2.0 roadmap been decided in a closed fashion, without any significant end-user input? The 2.0 roadmap was decided entirely by Sun and it's sycophants, and they even trampled all over all-community efforts such as the OSX project, who have a long history of trouble with Sun.
Don't get too hung up over the "freedom" of OOo - it is a free as the first shot of heroin the dope dealer around the corner will give you.
Don't confuse a little scrap of code that has been handed down with a significant, structural framework of mutual support. People may suspect you of having a Mac bias.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have ever tried to use a tablet, you will probably come to the same conclusion we have. They suck as a form-factor. They are undoubtedly cool, but in the long run, they really don't let you do any serious work.
I have worked with both the Fujitsu-Siemens as well as the Compaq tablets, have run Linux as well as Windows on both, and they simply get in between yourself and serious work.
The interface requires too much attention of the user, and the handwriting recognition, while pretty good on Windows, also requires too much attention. On Linux you would have to use some palm-type strok business, or even better, the excellent Dasher application.
Besides specialist applications, such as in hospitals for example, the form factor only really comes into its own during meetings, but it simply does not (yet) offer the simplicity of the two primary office tools: The humble pen and paper.
This is not a marketing or cost issue, it is a form-factor issue. They are cool, but all our demo and test models have their novelty worn off, and are currently going unused. At least we did not pay for them.....
While on the face of it the report looks good, deeper reading reveals some serious flaws, besides the fact that the spreadsheet is in XLS format.
First of all, the report is factually incorrect in several areas. Netproject list the City of Turku as a case study, but the City of Turku turned out to be a turkey - they only used OSS as a driver for microsoft to lower rices, which they did, and Turku is now a well publicised MS case study. Not very clever to use that as advertisement for an OSS migration. The one thing PA officials do is check out case studies. It get numerous facts wrong about some of the software packages, and on the whole looks more like parroting of populist stances (exim is better and faster then postfix, for example) then real-life testing. At the very least, they should back these type of statements up with facts.
Secondly, this is so full of OSS politics, it is not even funny anymore. Take for example this little gem: "Of the session managers KDE's is the more mature but Gnome is catching up fast. Gnome is being supported by Sun Microsystems and members of the Gnome Foundation. netproject considers that it has a better architecture and believes it has a better future.". That initself should be the subject of a fine little flamewar..... Also, there are, again, no facts to support the supposition of a "better" architecture. Also, SUSE, for example, get very little to no airtime in the document, and the document is simply wrong about some of the issues discussed around SUSE. for example, the YAST discussion is plain wrong, and some highly popular prducst, such as openexchange, get no mention whatsoever. Granted, some components of SLOX are closed source, but that doesn't stop the authors from mentioning and even recommending other closed source products.
Finally, and perhaps the worst flaw of all, is the fact that despite its size, it is simply a (badly researched) list of products. This is not a HOWTO migrate, this is a list of "if you migrate, use these tools". There is no methodology, no method, not *system* to migrate. This is organisational masturbation, a big "look how l33t we are" kind of thing.
I can spend some more time ranting about this, but will be to no avail. It is published, and undoubtedly, many fools will brandish this as the final word in ridding the world of the closed source software scourge. To all our detriment......
Or maybe MERIT has simply discovered a serious discrepancy between their diverse interests, and are now going after the money. Don't forget that the patent-loving side of the EU seriously despises the "open source posse". Also remember that the whole premise of Open Source in Government is a serious nightmare for companies throughout Europe. Barring a good and plausible explanation, I figure they were simply bought out.....
ok, let me try and understand what you are saying (sorry to come across all daft, but I want to get this right) - are you saying that a manned space program has no value, that it has value, but it is too expensive, or that the shuttle is useless, or....
As to your point about costs of NASA developing any replacement - I quite agree - NASA spent a million dollars developing a pen that works in zero/micro gravity. The Russians just used a pencil......
yes, I agree, however, what alternative do you see right now? There is nothing on the table today that can be implemented in less then 10 / 15 years - what do you want to do until such time?
That would assume that the shuttle system is somehow deficient. It more or less serves its purposes, and it would be unwise to give up on it now. While I agree that a new method of spacetravel should be developed as fast as possible, realism dictates that this will take at the very least another 15 years, if not much longer then that.
what is truly disgusting though is the fact that this article, as well as almost all others written about the subject drive readers to the conclusion that the shuttle needs to be "fixed" somehow. That this was purely a technical issue. While it is true that at the end of the day, a hole in the wing caused the shuttle to disintegrate. While it is true that this is a mechenical issue that can be fixed, it is also true that this accident *may* have been avoidable, were it not for the utter, complete and total incompetence, dereliction of duty, mismanagement and criminal neglicence shown by NASA Shuttle management *during* the flight. While engineers *knew* the shuttle was in deep shit, continuous efforts by engineers to escalate the issue were consistently pushed down by NASA Shuttle management.
And rather then round up all of the incompetent management team that was at the heart of this tragedy, and sending them all to jail for a very long time for multiple manslaughter, if not murder, they were - in true PHB Politicking fashion - "relocated" to different positions within NASA. The fuckers were not even *fired*.
Typical......
Well yes - for large databases Disk I/O is key, moreso then either CPU or Memory. However, depending on the type of apps your database is serving, you will probably stil get better price/performance from a non-Sun box, due to their ridiculous pricing. funnily enough, we have a 15k and two e10k in our test center to play with. Loading them with Linux increases performance over Solaris.....
- For calculations that do not have inter-calculation dependencies, you can spend your millions on a blade-based infrastrucuture, running your choice of x32, x64, or Power based blades, all depending on the type of work you want to do. you will run Linux on these blades, and can mix and match architectures as your requirements dictate. This solution will give you greater flexibility, significantly higher price performance (that only increases as you deploy more) and will allow you to design the infrastrucutre to your applications' needs, rather then designing your application to your infrastrucuture.
- Alternatively, if you have higher NUMA or shared memory requirements, you can deploy a big-ass pc running Linux, also delivering you a higher price-performance then you can expect with Sun.
At the end of the day, the high-end Sun stuff, like the 15K etc, are expensive, fickle and frankly, not very fast. Check top500.org if you really want to know. In the past year, we have placed quite a few bids for large systems on a linux/blade architecture, and we win over Sun *every* *single* *time* - and that is based on the simple question: "how much processors power and real results will I get for my dollar?". Pharma, big finance houses - they are all running away from Sun as fast as they can.....Bruce Perens? Chief Scientist? at Sun? You must be confused with one of the Founders - Bill Joy....
dude, where did you get the idea that I think all corporations are evil, and where did you get the idea that am a fanatic? talk about being a quick on the draw when it comes to stereotyping. Sheesh, this place gets to be more like slashdot every day...
Anyway, you miss the point - I feel they should not get on the whole indemnification bandwagon in the first place. It is a red herring - a scam put in place by SCO, and HP are simply giving the whole crazy "indemnification" story more credibility by pulling what are essentially empty, tacky marketing stunts like this. This is doing Linux adoption more harm then good. If you think I am wrong, please take a moment, and ask yourself why companies should be deploying linux in the first place.
well, I am not stating that HP should indemnify everyone, i am saying they should not get on the indemnification bandwagon in the first place. It lends cedibility to what is for all intents and purposes a scam to begin with. It also makes HP look tacky
pretty heavy usage - they are webservers, database engines, infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, Mail, etc) and aplication servers. We did not change the architecture as such - in fact the fact we were able to make this swap so easily shows what good architecture we put in there in the first place ;-) just the OS and some servces. Linux and Open Source software offer tremendous flexibility and perfomance, and it really was a no-brainer getting this up and running. Then again, reading your website, I am not sure if you would understand that.
Proof of the fact that all commercial players are using scare tactics to sell kit, that is. Those vendors that offer "indemnification" provided you use their hardware or whatever catch there is, are just as bad as SCO.
Vendors are slowly realising that customers are increasingly clued-up about where, how, and on what they spend their money. I was with a customer recently that had been badgered and hammered around by Sun to upgrade their systems. The customer saw no good reason to do so, and subsequently, Sun came around to provide a "free systems review", with a resulting verdict that the software and (SPARC) hardware was out of date. The customer agreed about the software part, and deployed Linux across the ageing SPARC estate. The stuff is now faster, better, and easier to manage, and they recon they a have a few more years of life out of those systems.
Sun turned around and claimed that the systems are now unsupported - not a big deal, customer said. if it breaks we will buy new (Intel.... hehe). Sun then turned around and went to the CEO and the legal department, talking about indemnification, SCO, courtcases and the world coming to an end. Luckily, the customer was not fazed, and Sun lost a *lot* of goodwill in that place. However, other customers will be scared and bullied into going along.
If they only way you can flog your hardware is by using scare tactics, then you are *really* selling a pile of crap.....
Raping little kids should be a capital offence. It has nothing to do with "talking" to kids, it is about about a guy forcing himself on a 3 year old. It is about 2 little 10 year old girls, abducted, raped and murdered. It is about little kids being abducted and forced into the child-porn industry. If you have kids, you will know *exactly* why I react the way I do. Wait until they want to move a sick monster like that a block away from your childs school - see how you feel about it then. This is not about suspected criminals, but about convicted child molesters.
Erhm. That was exactly my point. It's called "sarcasm"....
Point taken, but the PATRIOT act is a law granting vast powers to the government of the US (who had those powers already, anyway - otherwise they would not have been able to pass the PATRIOT act), this is an *improvement* of a technology that is already deployed today in the United Kingdom. In case you are not from around here, the UK has a surveillance camara on practically every streetcorner now, so it isn't something terribly groundshaking here.
How is this simplistic? Because I feel that the *potential* for snooping and *potential* infringement of civil rights do not outweigh the *actual* benefits of keeping convicted paedophiles away from areas where they are liable to recommit their crime? If you read the article, you will find that they are discussing a "talk down" scenario, where offenders (who are on parole, I may add - not "free") that are spotted in a high risk area are phoned up to see what they are up to. How is the use of technology for prevention of crime to the most vulnarable members of our society a bad thing? Keep in mind that nobody is stating that the whole world is going to be implanted with RFIDs when they show up for work tomorrow, as the original, sort of hysterical, write up suggested. but that this is an *improvement* on an *already exisitng technique*. I am a rather privacy concious individual, but also realise whare the pragmatic boundaries are to privacy. Hurting people is one of those things where I personally find it acceptable to have you liable for close scrutiny, for example.
As a dad, I am happy that they are improving on this type of technology, as long as the use is "reasonable" in the eyes of overall society. The telephone has as much potential for abuse of civil rights, but I don't see you tossing away the phone, do I? Use credit cards? store cards? air miles? cell phone? internet? All these day to day items give away more about you, your location, and your day to day live then this device. So unless you are a card-carrying member of the Tin-Foil_Hatters-Club, I suggest you put things in perspective.
Simplistic? I find your obvious refusal to credit alternate opinions to your own with intellectual merit simplistic, not to mention a lot more dangerous then any kind of snooping technology.
Not only that, but there is a slight difference between "social tendencies" and "convicted paedophiles". After raping little kids you give up *all* your rights, as far as I am concerned. As a dad, all I want is to be able to listen in to the frequency of this little toy, so that when one of these sick bastards comes near, I can take out the 12-gauge.....
half-witted Slashbot? I have done more for OpenOffice.org then you *ever* will.
The "vast improvement" in Gnome 2.x is somewhat of a debatable point to many, and I am sure that the nice people over at Ximian for example may have something to say about the "bunch of kids coding in their spare time". Been drinking from the McBride firehose too much lately? I personally know the people who have been "working feverishly" for Sun on the GNOME stuff, and know perfectly well the extent of work they have put in Gnome, and the purpose it serves.
Sun is no benefactor to the Open source community, not by a far stretch, and rather then the spasmic knee jerk reaction you exhibit here, why not consider the points I make and counter them rationally. Show me where Sun is so much of a benefactor to the community.
Don't talk about where they have dumped otherwise old and useless code in the public domain in the hope to piss off their competitors (like how they went out with OO, for example), but where they truly *add value* to the community. This is not about slapping the GPL on Java or somesuch rubbish, this is about Sun using the open source community as free labour. There is a fine line between volunteerism and free labour, and Sun crosses it with abondon.
Oh, and yes, I know the Orion and Mad Hatter stuff *intimately* and I can tell you that it is *all* about lock in.
Don't take the piss, please. I didn't say that. What I said is that one single example of a single contribution hardly constitutes a consitent commitment to the Open source development model....
I have given little, if any, reason for my "Sun Bashing", so the fact that you assume to know my motivation for my position must make you a clairvoyant. None of that has anything to do with what is popular on Slashdot these days. I think I have made it clear on which issues I disagree with Sun, and for what reasons. You chose to ignore them, and toss about the usual bunch of red herrings.
The usability work that Sun has put into Gnome is questioned by many, and can be said to only serve to confirm the long term position Sun wants to take with respect to desktop computing. That does not make their work wrong, it simply confirms my point of view that Sun does not do anything for the "community", and does not at any point act altruistically.
This isn't about whether or not Sun has the right to use open source code, far from it - nowhere do I state that they have been naughty or that they have been stealing - I simply point out that their relationship with the "community" is not all that good. Look into the mailarchives of the projects you mention to gauge that communities opinion of Sun. secondly, I point out that for all the posturing, Sun's new desktop is not Open source, and does not deliver to the customer those benefits that make open source such a good porposition for customers. In the long term, this could well turn out to be the most damaging effect for Open source. Finally, to say that this new desktop is going to be cheap in any way is ludicrous. the cost of migration to and implementation of this offering is going to be high, very high.
I don't give a rats about what sun does, as long as they don't make false claims and statements, and as long as they would stop posturing as some great "Open Source" benefactor. They are not a benefactor, (neither are IBM or any of the vendors for that matter, but that is a different story).
What is your point, anyhow? What did I say specifically that you disagree with? That is not very clear to me. On the other hand, you make it seem as if the way Sun is acting is the only way a company can interact with an Open Source community, which is a sad and blinkered view of the world. Look to Codewaevers, for an example of a truly symbiotic relationship between closed and open source. Look to Sun on the other hand, for a good example of as parasitic relationship.....
- "Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price."
- "If you use Linux on the server, even if we sold the distribution to you, you are on your own. If you buy our Java desktop solution you are completely indemnified as long as you run it as a desktop solution. And by the way, don't take our desktop product and put it on the server. We are indemnifying them for our products. If we incorporate someone else's component we will make sure that we can indemnify it. I have licenses to all those issues that SCO is suing IBM for. If I didn't have them, I certainly wouldn't indemnify them."
- "eWEEK: So, does the uncertainty around Linux benefit Sun and Solaris?
With friends like these, we don't need enemies....Schwartz: We have an interesting migration opportunity now because we can go back with Unix that is familiar, we can deliver the Java Enterprise System pricing at $100 per employee, which allows them to run Solaris at infinite scale.
To answer your question, Sun's desktop is, as far as I can tell, not open source, but closed source, just like all their other stuff. It is designed with a couple of goals in mind:
- To drive MS off the desktop
- To increase sparc/solaris server sales
- To increase Sun's control over the customer
This is nothing new, and standard Sun M.O. Deploying Open Source for a customer is about delivering freedom, choice, independence, and reduction of cost to the customer. Sun's desktop has not been proven to do any of that.OOo is only marginally open source, and there is a long history of friction within the OOo community. Sun has promised to donate all the OOo code to an independent, transparent, not for profit foundation, and then withdrew that promise when they realised people were actually using OOo - i.e. there was profit potential. Shows you how Sun thinks of Open Source in one fell swoop. They gave some bullshit reason about foundations not being realistic for OSS development, and used Mozilla as an example. Witness the irony of Mozilla formaing a foundation as soon as they lost their coprorate masters, never mind the highly successful Apache model (not relevant, they claimed).
Then there was the ill fated Community Council, that has been over a year and a half in the making and still is not fully formed and up to speed. Only when Sun could guarantee that the right political mix was found in the council (i.e. sun butt-lickers) would they proceed with the formation. They went so far as to put Sun contractors, posing as "independent contributors" up for election.
Staroffice is supposed to be based on OpenOffice, so why is StarOffice 7.0 released, while OOo 1.1 is still in "RC4" state? Why has the 2.0 roadmap been decided in a closed fashion, without any significant end-user input? The 2.0 roadmap was decided entirely by Sun and it's sycophants, and they even trampled all over all-community efforts such as the OSX project, who have a long history of trouble with Sun.
Don't get too hung up over the "freedom" of OOo - it is a free as the first shot of heroin the dope dealer around the corner will give you.
Don't confuse a little scrap of code that has been handed down with a significant, structural framework of mutual support. People may suspect you of having a Mac bias.