I'm glad my post got to its intended audience at least a little bit.
When you have a free, real alternative to...
I'm going to talk about some non-free methods for solving this problem because it's a chicken and egg problem. You think you can't migrate because you have critical apps that run on Windows only. Just by saying this you admit that you're trapped and that's not a good place to be. Being open and free is a desirable goal you should willing to journey toward rather than insist on being teleported to. Once you admit to yourself that the destination is worth the journey the route to migration is pretty visible. Let me show you the way to the promised land:
To start with, let's talk about Citrix and all the other application servers out there. The workers can run GNU/Linux on their desktop and open applications on the server and use whatever software they must have running native on whatever OS it needs to be running on and it can be secured, maintained and accounted for most easily. The end users don't even need to know the application isn't running locally on their machine if you set it up right. The critical windows app objection is dead.
For workers on the go virtual machines are a good choice. You install Windows and whichever apps they need in the VM, and make the VM part of the image for the users who must have it -- but you keep as much as possible native to the Open environment. When the Windows environment fails in the VM at the critical moment, just like it always does on real hardware even for Bill Gates, your road warrior can still give their presentation from the F/OSS solution in their native environment because -- hey -- it's compatible. They'll discover this is like driving on the highway spare and keeping the good tire in the trunk. The road warrior objection is gone.
If you must have exchange and Outlook to synch with your PDAs (and I know what a hassle it can be to get a reluctant Blackberry to synch) keep it and use Outlook Web Access for your desktop mail. It works fine in Firefox on Linux. Remember that already ubiquitous cellular data coverage and powerful handheld platforms means you need to turn your PDA off to get away from your email. In the future it only gets harder to get away from it. Hey, we're almost there.
The idea is that you introduce people to being unchained, and they will like it. When people get used to the rich benefits of the F/OSS environment you can wean them off of other stuff one application at a time. You find free and open solutions that replace your non-free solutions gradually and test them thoroughly -- it's no more painful than the endless version march you're currently on. In the Free world when the package becomes mature the version march tends to end because there's no motivation to keep you coming back for a new version. Eventually the IT department gets away from overcoming the crippled platform and converts to actualizing the end user's potential. Along the way you quit paying people to preserve their revenue stream by crippling your software and start paying for someone to actually help you when you have issues and you still save money. Now we're free and open, and hey, once you're here you won't believe the cornucopia of free and commercial applications that work well and plug right into each other like they're going home to momma.
You see, it is possible to get off the train to crazy town.
Ok, you've got many PCs most of which run Windows XP. They've been crashing every Exploit Wednesday since October. Every one has a license that was paid for three times (six times under Software Assurance). You have seventeen core apps. Some of them are paid for several times. Some have a licensing server so that some people can use them when other people aren't, and come with a utility so that priority users can kick off nonpriority users. A couple of them are free. Four of them are nagware that came with your PCs or that you thought were a good idea at the time. One is an in-house app that only runs in a DOS box and accesses dBase files stored on your server. Every month a couple get pwned for no detectable reason.
Every software vendor you buy from makes it clear the software you bought is being split into "basic" versions that include most of the features you use, and an "Enterprise" version that includes must have features you can't live without. Both new versions will be annual subscriptions instead of purchases. Naturally, the Premium version you require will cost many times what you already paid and the cost will be annual rather than once each. Of course they're entitled to this conversion of your purchase into a "revenue stream" because they've upgraded their product from an application to a "platform framework" that "optimizes" your "TCO".
You're thinking about investigating this multicore thing that people are talking about, but it seems impossible to reconcile the software licenses with multiple "cores" on one or more CPUs. You want to do server consolidation, but every server app has to be evaluated both by a professional enginner and by a hideously expensive team of lawyers who also want to audit every piece of software you've purchased since 1974. Your CPA wants to know why you licensed the same software 3-6 times for each PC, and why you're buying licenses for software that won't run on the PCs they're purchased for. And what's this entry for "SCO Linux licenses"? You live in dread of being audited by jack-booted thugs, not because you're pirating but because the danger of a paperwork snafu that destroys your budget is nearly certain and the slightest discrepancy is going to get you canned.
I have one question: What the hell are you thinking? Get off the train to crazy town. The free stuff isn't just good, it's better. So much better that you're not going to believe you put up with this crap. If it's truly free you don't have to account for each copy/user/use/year/processor/incidence. It's not free because it's less worthy: it's free because you're not the first person to be disgusted by the experience you're having. Pay for support. Nobody ever got sued for terminating their support contract. Figure it out. The world has changed. The future is open.
These jerks think they define popular culture. They don't.
DRM doesn't work. People steal the stuff before it's encoded with the DRM. The key is always distributed with the content or recoverable.
DRM can't work. Their attempts are hilarious. In order to be perceived by a human it has to be rendered in analog format, at which point capturing and encoding it in an open format is trivial in all cases.
DRM shouldn't work. If they won't sell me the content for the device I want to play it on when I want to play it where I want to play it, I'll convert it and to hell with what they think I should be allowed to do. Fair use.
A point lost on most lawyers and businessment is that just because something evades the spirit of the law or isn't covered by existing law doesn't make it the Right Thing To Do.
Sham job ads exploit unemployed people. They're one of the most frustrating things about finding work, itself a dismal business. The fact that they go through the motions without even considering the possiblility that by fortuitous accident they might find someone better than the individual they want to get through the greencard process is counterproductive, stupid, dismissive and discriminatory. It's hateful. No decent person would go through with such a thing. If you're reading this and you've done it: you disgust me. I hope you get immigrants that seek to exploit you by conducting industrial espionage for your competitors. That's the moral equivalent or what you're doing and you deserve to reap what you sow.
I want to know who paid these creeps for this content, and what they did with it. Anybody who follows this plan should be run out of business.
Don't mention God. You'll start another flamewar and we'll have to hear about FSM vs Kthulu all over again for no good reason because TFA isn't about that. That nonsense is what fark comments are for.
Using M$ for Microsoft is pedantic. Don't do it. Lots of people hate the Beast but like money. Like the devil in old folk tales, don't name them but talk about them less directly. You see how I'm referring to them as if they were the culture assimilating soul destroying Borg without actually saying it? That lets other people know they want to be in on the joke. It's a subtlety thing. I like to call it "peer reference pressure."
One exclamation helps! Two don't?
Have a signature that tersely expresses your wry wit.
Location, location, location. Being frist psot seldom hurts.
When following up with a post like this one, be sure to mention that Mandriva is well supported by major vendors like HP (8 different models each of laptops and desktop/workstations). That way you won't be too far off topic.
If you use links, try to work in one that's funny and on point at the same time.
They get to be the hero of Linux, and that sells a lot of servers. They also get to remind the rest of the world very politely that if you're going to pick a fight with Big Blue you had better bring heavy weapons and iron underpants.
All MS can accomplish by these games is to drive up the value of the truly Free distros. Their partners are tainted. For the most part these distros are barely twitching.
By making Free distros more scarce they become more consolidated and supportable by the community. They can keep this up until eventually the remainder are too valuable for them to buy.
This strategy needs an end game to be effective, and I don't see it.
You know, I have a few experiences along this line, so I feel the pain of helpdesk helpers who've had to deal with customers who never even had a ticket on the clue train. Instead of sharing that with you, though, let me share this....
When one of my grateful customers expresses how they wish they knew stuff about computers too, my standard response is "oh, but I wish I could [do whatever the customer does] like you do."
Odd thing... when I say it it's usually true. I wish I had the time to learn more in depth about more things, but nobody can be skilled in everything.
These last few years I don't get a chance to help end users as often as I once did, but I still do it now and then and I always will. It's quite educational. I think if we made more engineers do this, computers would be easier to use. Techs who think they're the high priests of the occult binary science deserve to be screwed over on points and fees by their mortgage broker, on dealer options by their car dealer, and in every other field they're not skilled.
One of Microsoft's main marketing levers is piracy. Those darned Linux geeks just won't steal their technology when they can get better stuff for free.
The only way Microsoft can induce piracy in the FOSS community is to hire companies like these to insert their IP into their Linux distributions. That's why all of these deals have development components.
Thus, you see, Microsoft IP has negative value to the FOSS community.
That's a good start. If you're going to insist on using Windows, wiping and reinstalling on a regular basis is a must. I recommend at least annually. More often if you use Yahoo search, flash games or shareware. If you use AOL or MSN and chat or IRC, you may as well boot from the Windows install CD each day.
Getting it set up the way you like it, and creating an "image" file of that setup with Symantec Ghost or something like it makes the process a lot less painful.
Or you could try actually solving the problem, but I note from your post you don't care for that answer for some non-specified reason.
If you do ecommerce from a platform you know to be insecure, don't expect everyone here to lobby for legal solutions to your technical problem.
Isn't it nice that your GNU/Linux support team doesn't just wait for your emails, but rather services your call tickets on every random blog on the internet where you happen to leave them?
For example, my school required all students to take project courses (one where you work on a project the entire quarter rather than sit through lecture) and one course I took was software engineering.
We did this too in high school. We got the opposite result. Some of the projects became commercial products. Two of mine remained in use (and not by me) for more than a decade.
The trap of experience is thinking it's universal, or even representative of some nonexistent norm.
If you give them a computer with Windows and Office, you'll teach them to be a typist in a voice recognition world.
Give kids a real, free and open operating system with a compiler that's not programmed for obsolecence and some real tools constructed to international standards, not some fragile ornamental toy. Teach them how to use real tools. Start young. The result may be that they're not interested in programming. It may be they devise a cool shortcut for computing protein synthesis or AI, or something entirely unexpected. Do us all a favor and don't cheat the future of that protein synthesis shortcut. We may really need it when the population hits 9 billion.
Having read that article, and this one, I feel Albert Einstein and company were guilty of some flat thinking here. I hope this guy gets his bucks. I doubt he'll find what he's looking for, but even a negative result can add to the pool of human knowlege. Sometimes results can serendipitous.
With a read speed of 16 Megabytes (MBs) per second and a write speed of 6MB/s, Samsung's 8GB microSD card well exceeds the Speed Class 4 SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) standard
Darn, that's for mid-2008 production according to engadget.
Verizon and Samsung jointly announced a 4GB MicroSDHC for May 1 2007 release, but I can't find it.
Anyway, performance on these systems will be more than sufficient for regular office work on Linux or as a thin client, and they'll support video up to 1080p (with add-on lvds daughter card of course). I believe the chipset supports SATA, though they don't show a connector on the device. Watts are ridiculously low (system: 14W Idle, 16W running Memtest!) It will be interesting to see what people do with them.
I'll have to buy a few to play with when they're available. I could have fun with this.
Gumstix is cute, but I'll take that x86 instruction set for ready applications and standard interfaces for readily available attachable goodies by preference.
It must have some, but they haven't figured out how much. But you're right, if it doesn't have a slot, it's pointless.
I believe this device has USB. I would recommend the KingMax SuperStick 4GB. It's 4 gigs, and it's smaller than a single stick of Dentyne. I have a couple and my VIA systems boot from that just fine. It may require some rework, of course, but you would expect to customize something like this.
Make Net businesses compete on the same level as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
Brick and mortar stores just wish they could compete on a level field. Some advantages of online stores:
Price
Selection
24 hour operations, even on holidays, without attached payroll costs.
Low Overhead
Unlimited product line - You don't even have to touch the products you sell.
Safety - your workers and customers are never injured in a store that doesn't exist.
Insurance
Protestors and labor unions can't picket an online store; panhandlers can't hang out outside of it.
Noone ever gets shot in an online parking lot.
You're not exposed to harassment from local police, insane characters, gangs or mafia.
And on and on. The only advantage I can see for a physical store is an opportunity to fondle the product. Even that is a net cost, since you can't sell as new a display model and these days people will fondle your products and then buy them online.
Buying online is even eco-friendly. The UPS guy was coming to your neighborhood anyway; by driving to three stores to find something that approaches the product you want you're contributing about 50 Kilos of co2 unnecessarily to global warming.
It seems like the Goog is actually being more active in adopting smart new technologies and delivering them to the common geek than any other company out there. They build them and they buy them. They give them to us, without strings. Oh, and their search engine rocks.
What you don't read about here is Google entering into obscure secret deals to leverage their IP and jointly market their extortionate plans. Slashdot likes Google. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad my post got to its intended audience at least a little bit.
I'm going to talk about some non-free methods for solving this problem because it's a chicken and egg problem. You think you can't migrate because you have critical apps that run on Windows only. Just by saying this you admit that you're trapped and that's not a good place to be. Being open and free is a desirable goal you should willing to journey toward rather than insist on being teleported to. Once you admit to yourself that the destination is worth the journey the route to migration is pretty visible. Let me show you the way to the promised land:
To start with, let's talk about Citrix and all the other application servers out there. The workers can run GNU/Linux on their desktop and open applications on the server and use whatever software they must have running native on whatever OS it needs to be running on and it can be secured, maintained and accounted for most easily. The end users don't even need to know the application isn't running locally on their machine if you set it up right. The critical windows app objection is dead.
For workers on the go virtual machines are a good choice. You install Windows and whichever apps they need in the VM, and make the VM part of the image for the users who must have it -- but you keep as much as possible native to the Open environment. When the Windows environment fails in the VM at the critical moment, just like it always does on real hardware even for Bill Gates, your road warrior can still give their presentation from the F/OSS solution in their native environment because -- hey -- it's compatible. They'll discover this is like driving on the highway spare and keeping the good tire in the trunk. The road warrior objection is gone.
If you must have exchange and Outlook to synch with your PDAs (and I know what a hassle it can be to get a reluctant Blackberry to synch) keep it and use Outlook Web Access for your desktop mail. It works fine in Firefox on Linux. Remember that already ubiquitous cellular data coverage and powerful handheld platforms means you need to turn your PDA off to get away from your email. In the future it only gets harder to get away from it. Hey, we're almost there.
The idea is that you introduce people to being unchained, and they will like it. When people get used to the rich benefits of the F/OSS environment you can wean them off of other stuff one application at a time. You find free and open solutions that replace your non-free solutions gradually and test them thoroughly -- it's no more painful than the endless version march you're currently on. In the Free world when the package becomes mature the version march tends to end because there's no motivation to keep you coming back for a new version. Eventually the IT department gets away from overcoming the crippled platform and converts to actualizing the end user's potential. Along the way you quit paying people to preserve their revenue stream by crippling your software and start paying for someone to actually help you when you have issues and you still save money. Now we're free and open, and hey, once you're here you won't believe the cornucopia of free and commercial applications that work well and plug right into each other like they're going home to momma.
You see, it is possible to get off the train to crazy town.
Ok, you've got many PCs most of which run Windows XP. They've been crashing every Exploit Wednesday since October. Every one has a license that was paid for three times (six times under Software Assurance). You have seventeen core apps. Some of them are paid for several times. Some have a licensing server so that some people can use them when other people aren't, and come with a utility so that priority users can kick off nonpriority users. A couple of them are free. Four of them are nagware that came with your PCs or that you thought were a good idea at the time. One is an in-house app that only runs in a DOS box and accesses dBase files stored on your server. Every month a couple get pwned for no detectable reason.
Even if they don't run Windows you've paid over and over. You have to because they've made it happen what "enforcement" will happen if you don't.
Every software vendor you buy from makes it clear the software you bought is being split into "basic" versions that include most of the features you use, and an "Enterprise" version that includes must have features you can't live without. Both new versions will be annual subscriptions instead of purchases. Naturally, the Premium version you require will cost many times what you already paid and the cost will be annual rather than once each. Of course they're entitled to this conversion of your purchase into a "revenue stream" because they've upgraded their product from an application to a "platform framework" that "optimizes" your "TCO".
You're thinking about investigating this multicore thing that people are talking about, but it seems impossible to reconcile the software licenses with multiple "cores" on one or more CPUs. You want to do server consolidation, but every server app has to be evaluated both by a professional enginner and by a hideously expensive team of lawyers who also want to audit every piece of software you've purchased since 1974. Your CPA wants to know why you licensed the same software 3-6 times for each PC, and why you're buying licenses for software that won't run on the PCs they're purchased for. And what's this entry for "SCO Linux licenses"? You live in dread of being audited by jack-booted thugs, not because you're pirating but because the danger of a paperwork snafu that destroys your budget is nearly certain and the slightest discrepancy is going to get you canned.
I have one question: What the hell are you thinking? Get off the train to crazy town. The free stuff isn't just good, it's better. So much better that you're not going to believe you put up with this crap. If it's truly free you don't have to account for each copy/user/use/year/processor/incidence. It's not free because it's less worthy: it's free because you're not the first person to be disgusted by the experience you're having. Pay for support. Nobody ever got sued for terminating their support contract. Figure it out. The world has changed. The future is open.
These jerks think they define popular culture. They don't.
DRM doesn't work. People steal the stuff before it's encoded with the DRM. The key is always distributed with the content or recoverable.
DRM can't work. Their attempts are hilarious. In order to be perceived by a human it has to be rendered in analog format, at which point capturing and encoding it in an open format is trivial in all cases.
DRM shouldn't work. If they won't sell me the content for the device I want to play it on when I want to play it where I want to play it, I'll convert it and to hell with what they think I should be allowed to do. Fair use.
DRM is a security risk. I will not surrender control of my PC to render your content.
The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts get. People will listen to their popmart derivative garbage less.
I am personally opposed to straight pirating the stuff but I have to admit my conviction on the subject is wavering at this point.
A point lost on most lawyers and businessment is that just because something evades the spirit of the law or isn't covered by existing law doesn't make it the Right Thing To Do.
Sham job ads exploit unemployed people. They're one of the most frustrating things about finding work, itself a dismal business. The fact that they go through the motions without even considering the possiblility that by fortuitous accident they might find someone better than the individual they want to get through the greencard process is counterproductive, stupid, dismissive and discriminatory. It's hateful. No decent person would go through with such a thing. If you're reading this and you've done it: you disgust me. I hope you get immigrants that seek to exploit you by conducting industrial espionage for your competitors. That's the moral equivalent or what you're doing and you deserve to reap what you sow.
I want to know who paid these creeps for this content, and what they did with it. Anybody who follows this plan should be run out of business.
Forcing lawyers to do honest work is prohibited by the clause in the Constitution that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
Here's an example of this done goodlier: Thank goodness
They get to be the hero of Linux, and that sells a lot of servers. They also get to remind the rest of the world very politely that if you're going to pick a fight with Big Blue you had better bring heavy weapons and iron underpants.
All MS can accomplish by these games is to drive up the value of the truly Free distros. Their partners are tainted. For the most part these distros are barely twitching.
By making Free distros more scarce they become more consolidated and supportable by the community. They can keep this up until eventually the remainder are too valuable for them to buy.
This strategy needs an end game to be effective, and I don't see it.
Somebody has some sense! I was starting to wonder.
You know, I have a few experiences along this line, so I feel the pain of helpdesk helpers who've had to deal with customers who never even had a ticket on the clue train. Instead of sharing that with you, though, let me share this....
When one of my grateful customers expresses how they wish they knew stuff about computers too, my standard response is "oh, but I wish I could [do whatever the customer does] like you do."
Odd thing... when I say it it's usually true. I wish I had the time to learn more in depth about more things, but nobody can be skilled in everything.
These last few years I don't get a chance to help end users as often as I once did, but I still do it now and then and I always will. It's quite educational. I think if we made more engineers do this, computers would be easier to use. Techs who think they're the high priests of the occult binary science deserve to be screwed over on points and fees by their mortgage broker, on dealer options by their car dealer, and in every other field they're not skilled.
One of Microsoft's main marketing levers is piracy. Those darned Linux geeks just won't steal their technology when they can get better stuff for free.
The only way Microsoft can induce piracy in the FOSS community is to hire companies like these to insert their IP into their Linux distributions. That's why all of these deals have development components.
Thus, you see, Microsoft IP has negative value to the FOSS community.
It's right here.
That's a good start. If you're going to insist on using Windows, wiping and reinstalling on a regular basis is a must. I recommend at least annually. More often if you use Yahoo search, flash games or shareware. If you use AOL or MSN and chat or IRC, you may as well boot from the Windows install CD each day.
Getting it set up the way you like it, and creating an "image" file of that setup with Symantec Ghost or something like it makes the process a lot less painful.
Or you could try actually solving the problem, but I note from your post you don't care for that answer for some non-specified reason.
If you do ecommerce from a platform you know to be insecure, don't expect everyone here to lobby for legal solutions to your technical problem.
Hell, the first few hits are free! When you're hurtin' for more, come back and we'll take care of you real good.
Try and think ahead. You're supposed to be responsible for teaching small humans to do that. Set a good example.
Isn't it nice that your GNU/Linux support team doesn't just wait for your emails, but rather services your call tickets on every random blog on the internet where you happen to leave them?
We did this too in high school. We got the opposite result. Some of the projects became commercial products. Two of mine remained in use (and not by me) for more than a decade.
The trap of experience is thinking it's universal, or even representative of some nonexistent norm.
If you give them a computer with Windows and Office, you'll teach them to be a typist in a voice recognition world.
Give kids a real, free and open operating system with a compiler that's not programmed for obsolecence and some real tools constructed to international standards, not some fragile ornamental toy. Teach them how to use real tools. Start young. The result may be that they're not interested in programming. It may be they devise a cool shortcut for computing protein synthesis or AI, or something entirely unexpected. Do us all a favor and don't cheat the future of that protein synthesis shortcut. We may really need it when the population hits 9 billion.
That early this morning (long before I read this) while surfing an article about Google Scholar I happened across mention of the intriguing article Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?(PDF) by the aforementioned Einstein Podolsky and Rosen, and read it.
Having read that article, and this one, I feel Albert Einstein and company were guilty of some flat thinking here. I hope this guy gets his bucks. I doubt he'll find what he's looking for, but even a negative result can add to the pool of human knowlege. Sometimes results can serendipitous.
Very fine dust.
A very fine dust can settle in depressions and look very much like water in a black and white photo.
Soon eight. No kidding.
Wow. Ain't progress fabulous?
Darn, that's for mid-2008 production according to engadget.
Verizon and Samsung jointly announced a 4GB MicroSDHC for May 1 2007 release, but I can't find it.
Anyway, performance on these systems will be more than sufficient for regular office work on Linux or as a thin client, and they'll support video up to 1080p (with add-on lvds daughter card of course). I believe the chipset supports SATA, though they don't show a connector on the device. Watts are ridiculously low (system: 14W Idle, 16W running Memtest!) It will be interesting to see what people do with them.
I'll have to buy a few to play with when they're available. I could have fun with this.
Gumstix is cute, but I'll take that x86 instruction set for ready applications and standard interfaces for readily available attachable goodies by preference.
I believe this device has USB. I would recommend the KingMax SuperStick 4GB. It's 4 gigs, and it's smaller than a single stick of Dentyne. I have a couple and my VIA systems boot from that just fine. It may require some rework, of course, but you would expect to customize something like this.
Yeah, it's almost as if the images of Earth had been derezzed for some reason...
Brick and mortar stores just wish they could compete on a level field. Some advantages of online stores:
And on and on. The only advantage I can see for a physical store is an opportunity to fondle the product. Even that is a net cost, since you can't sell as new a display model and these days people will fondle your products and then buy them online.
Buying online is even eco-friendly. The UPS guy was coming to your neighborhood anyway; by driving to three stores to find something that approaches the product you want you're contributing about 50 Kilos of co2 unnecessarily to global warming.
It seems like the Goog is actually being more active in adopting smart new technologies and delivering them to the common geek than any other company out there. They build them and they buy them. They give them to us, without strings. Oh, and their search engine rocks.
What you don't read about here is Google entering into obscure secret deals to leverage their IP and jointly market their extortionate plans. Slashdot likes Google. Get over it.
IBM cannot be seen to be paying huge sums to Novell at the moment because it would be seen as a payoff for cooperation in certain ongoing litigation.
Your distrust of the IBM fanbois is misplaced. IBM is the real deal. The are not FOSS's only hero, but they are the biggest and they are committed.
To wallpaper Congress with Benjamins, because that's what it's going to take to put this over, and we really need it.
I'll rephrase your question and you can answer it yourself: "Why would it be bad for IBM to be seen handing a truckload of cash to Novell right now?"
Now to my subject line: what's your motive?