Microsoft bought mature ERP systems and made them their own. Axapta had all the features we wanted, but their asking price made us laugh a little, triple that of any of the dozens of competing quotes we've received. Their system looked good, but not that good.
There are a great number of ERP systems that only support Windows nowadays, some of then having even been initially developed for unix. This is especially true if you consider yourself to be a _small_ manufacturing company. If you can find an ERP that both meets your needs and runs on your favorite platform, that's great, but I wouldn't make the platform the top requirement.
I'm a little cautious when it comes to betting my career on anything proprietary, but unfortunately there are only a handful of good open source ERPs nowadays, they're not really strong in the manufacturing area. ERP a real gamble. We had been searching for the "right" ERP for quite a while. Two years, dozens of employees interviews, hundreds of product evaluations, dozens of live demonstrations, a few bad selections, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and half a dozen firings later, we finally found a system that matched our specs and went "live" this week. We have mostly Linux servers, and bought a new Windows server to run the ERP and nothing else (wouldn't want to overload the thing). I hope we have a happy new year this time around.
On x86 processors (and probably most others), the stack pushes backward in memory. Each function call pushes the return address onto the stack. Because the stack pushes backwards, a buffer overflow will overwrite the previously pushed values that follow it in memory. So when the overflowed function returns, it'll return to the new address that has been written by the overflowed buffer.
Good stack overflow exploit code is pretty reusable for exploiting newly discovered stack overflows with little modification, which makes these exploits appear so quickly after a new vulnerability is discovered. There's also something called a heap overflow, but using it to run executable code is quite a bit harder and must be tailered to each specific vulnerability.
Putting "protected by [insert alarm company name here]" stickers on the windows of my house will discourage most of the amateurs from breaking in, even if I don't really have an alarm. Even the pros may skip to the next house without looking, unless they know I have something they want. Not that I condone improper use of cryptography or anything, but you can use analogies to support any position.
I think they realized that IE:Mac is neither making them money nor is it tied to another product that's making them money. Besides, only Mac users will smell the rot. Mac users sometimes buy Office, and that's about it. Maybe they'll neglect to update Office for Mac when Office 2006/Vista comes out. Draconian IT policies attempt to mandate the use of Microsoft Office. College professors tend to mark down papers that look wrong when saved in OpenOffice and loaded in MS Office.
Microsoft has had a sort of friggemall attitude since Ballmer took over. They only care about short term gains and crushing competitors and partners (a Microsoft partner is just a competitor who doesn't know it yet). They're increasingly dividing up their products to take advantage of price tiering. Of course, the most popular editions will be the cheapest least common denominator, and those users will get the impression that Microsoft software is restricted and featureless. XP Home is missing a lot of features that were in Windows 98. They even dropped QBasic, without offering some sort of free Windows alternative. GWBasic replaced BASICA, QBasic replaced GWBasic, and then nothing. Poor kids wanting to learn to code had to download and learn to use open source development tools instead. With their crippling of Windows, Microsoft disowned a lot of teens that would have fed their future growth, and recently they've been frantic to win some back with free academic licensing deals and free Express editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server. Now their Express editions are scheduled to be discontinued, or at least no longer be free for download.
I saw someone fired for recommending Microsoft products. They just kept re-recommending a full migration to Office+Outlook+Exchange after having been denied. There were other factors, but that was a big one.
On my system, in the Gnome "Applications" menu, I see a shortcut called "Audio Player" under a submenu called "Sound & Video" which launches xmms. Clearly some work had been done by the distro maintainers to clear up any possible confusion, though it may lead a veteran user coming from another distro to wonder which audio player, until they click it. And if I'm looking for an image editor, I look in the "Graphics" submenu and click "GIMP Image Editor". Sure, it says "GIMP", but it also says "Image Editor". I doubt that'll cause a lot of heartache for new users.
Of course, on a plain Windows+Office install, I click "Start", and browsing through the menus I see highly descriptive names such as Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Outlook Express (which is very different from Outlook). A newcomer to Windows isn't going to have any idea what these do.
Everyone knows that Russia can't get enough American English music. Russians aren't spending nearly as much on American music as Americans, so they must be pirating the difference, unless perhaps some of them are pirating Russian music which the RIAA has little or no interest in.
I think most LCD displays are about 1280x1024 these days, so those users get a fuzzy display if they use anything else. During a quick walk through Office Depot, I noticed that they all but one of their dozens of LCD's were 1280x1024, as though they didn't expect anyone to pay for something bigger.
Some users will keep using 800x600 for a long while though, because they have vision problems and not every app looks great if you select large fonts, or they don't know larger fonts are an option.
It's a pretty safe assumption that the crippled databases ought to perform as well as the full versions when operating within the limits specified by the vendor. If some database vendor wants to go out of their way to trick me into thinking that their own database software is slower than the competition, I'm perfectly willing to let them do so.
I make a similar assumption about products with EULAs that prohibit publishing benchmarks. I understand the desire to keep people from manufacturing benchmarks that misrepresent the performance of their products, but if the only benchmarks I see are the ones they want me to see, my safe assumption is that they lack faith that their performance claims will survive public scrutiny, until I'm proven wrong.
If either assumption is ever wrong, it's the vendor's fault and their loss. I'd stand to lose a lot more by believing marketing hype without sufficient verifyable evidence to back it up. Without fail, the slowest database servers I've ever seen (all commercial, none mentioned in this article) have all claimed to be very fast and scalable.
I'm not sure about DB2, but Oracle and MSSQL forbid publishing benchmarks without written permission in their EULAs. I seriously doubt that'll stand up in court, but still I think many would-be benchmark publishers worry about it.
Some video cards/chipsets require a BIOS patch to get anything but the standard resolutions. Mine would require installing something called 855resolution to do this, if I wasn't satisfied with 1600x1200. I suspect the Windows drivers probably bypass the video BIOS to change the resolution.
Installing Linux isn't something most users do every day. Some are happy to take the long route, choose exactly which packages they want, watch everything built according to their favorite CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and LDFLAGS with their favorite release of gcc, and then configure every package by hand. I'm sure it gets faster and easier each time they do it. I'm happy to just pop in a CD and answer a few questions.
If someone has access to my gaim passwords, they already have access to the rest of my computer. Besides, unless I want to enter a master password each time I start gaim, the best it could do is scramble them a little. Some of the passwords can be pre-hashed, depending on the protocol, preventing the recovery of plaintext passwords, but someone who got a hold of those hashes could still take over your accounts.
My XP desktop looks a lot like my Windows 95 desktop did almost 10 years ago. My Linux desktop is a little different (default bluecurve theme), but the general concepts are the same. People like familiarity, and a 2D theme goes well with a 2D display.
What I expect in 10 years, if the past 10 years are any indication of the speed of desktop evolution: * Better displays on average. Big, crisp, bright, high resolution, high contrast, and especially wider. * Similar UI elements as today, plus a few new ones. People don't like change if it involves taking something away. * Faster response. Programs will load almost instantly. Maybe they'll just load when you install them, and be swapped out to non-volatile ram when not in use. Though 10 years ago I might have predicted we'd have this by now. * Resolution independence. Quality aside, programs will look the same no matter what your screen resolution, and you can smoothly scale them to any size. I'm tempted to say we'll have a lot more vector graphics, but a lot of lazy designers will probably just use high resolution rasters. * Mouseover/mouseout background window preview, maybe by alpha blending. If I move the mouse to a background window, I want it to somewhat show through the windows in front of it. Also, if I move the mouse away from a foreground window, I want to slightly see the windows behind it. I'm not 100% certain this'll look good though. * If I'm lucky, maybe we'll have a mouse button mapped to opening a system menu whereever your mouse might be on the screen, centered under your mouse. This menu will be multi-column, approximately square shaped to reduce mouse movement and make effective use of space. Holding this button down while turning the mouse wheel will ideally cycle through my virtual desktops, rather than popping up a menu. * Touchscreens may become standard, but many will still prefer mice for precision. I hope to see the ability to track multiple fingers/pointers dragging across the display. * Better autocomplete in many programs. Tab should become my favorite key. Voice will not replace the keyboard, but only complement it. You can take my keyboard away after you pry it from my cold, dead hands. When I speak into a computer microphone, it'll probably usually be to communicate with real people. * Better use of usage statistics. The desktop environment and programs will adapt so that most common actions require 1 click to initiate.
Because you're willing to. They know they can get customers who have more money to pay more. If they didn't have all these price tiers, CALs, and such, Windows for the end user would cost more and Microsoft's total profits would be less. The more they can divide up their licensing to discriminate between specific markets, the better they can optimize the pricing to maximize profit.
You don't have to buy what you don't want. If you don't need Active Directory, or you feel up to trying another LDAP solution, you can just use Linux (of *BSD) and Samba for file serving.
Slashdot Mirror
Charge replacement fees for scratched disks, then rebuff/polish the scratched disks instead of replacing them.
Microsoft bought mature ERP systems and made them their own. Axapta had all the features we wanted, but their asking price made us laugh a little, triple that of any of the dozens of competing quotes we've received. Their system looked good, but not that good.
There are a great number of ERP systems that only support Windows nowadays, some of then having even been initially developed for unix. This is especially true if you consider yourself to be a _small_ manufacturing company. If you can find an ERP that both meets your needs and runs on your favorite platform, that's great, but I wouldn't make the platform the top requirement.
I'm a little cautious when it comes to betting my career on anything proprietary, but unfortunately there are only a handful of good open source ERPs nowadays, they're not really strong in the manufacturing area. ERP a real gamble. We had been searching for the "right" ERP for quite a while. Two years, dozens of employees interviews, hundreds of product evaluations, dozens of live demonstrations, a few bad selections, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and half a dozen firings later, we finally found a system that matched our specs and went "live" this week. We have mostly Linux servers, and bought a new Windows server to run the ERP and nothing else (wouldn't want to overload the thing). I hope we have a happy new year this time around.
Loud stuff hurts ears.
On x86 processors (and probably most others), the stack pushes backward in memory. Each function call pushes the return address onto the stack. Because the stack pushes backwards, a buffer overflow will overwrite the previously pushed values that follow it in memory. So when the overflowed function returns, it'll return to the new address that has been written by the overflowed buffer.
Good stack overflow exploit code is pretty reusable for exploiting newly discovered stack overflows with little modification, which makes these exploits appear so quickly after a new vulnerability is discovered. There's also something called a heap overflow, but using it to run executable code is quite a bit harder and must be tailered to each specific vulnerability.
I'm pretty sure that disabling shimgvw.dll will disable more than WMF rendering.
Putting "protected by [insert alarm company name here]" stickers on the windows of my house will discourage most of the amateurs from breaking in, even if I don't really have an alarm. Even the pros may skip to the next house without looking, unless they know I have something they want. Not that I condone improper use of cryptography or anything, but you can use analogies to support any position.
Always confusing the observed universe with the real universe. The cat is alive, or it's dead.
I think they realized that IE:Mac is neither making them money nor is it tied to another product that's making them money. Besides, only Mac users will smell the rot. Mac users sometimes buy Office, and that's about it. Maybe they'll neglect to update Office for Mac when Office 2006/Vista comes out. Draconian IT policies attempt to mandate the use of Microsoft Office. College professors tend to mark down papers that look wrong when saved in OpenOffice and loaded in MS Office.
Microsoft has had a sort of friggemall attitude since Ballmer took over. They only care about short term gains and crushing competitors and partners (a Microsoft partner is just a competitor who doesn't know it yet). They're increasingly dividing up their products to take advantage of price tiering. Of course, the most popular editions will be the cheapest least common denominator, and those users will get the impression that Microsoft software is restricted and featureless. XP Home is missing a lot of features that were in Windows 98. They even dropped QBasic, without offering some sort of free Windows alternative. GWBasic replaced BASICA, QBasic replaced GWBasic, and then nothing. Poor kids wanting to learn to code had to download and learn to use open source development tools instead. With their crippling of Windows, Microsoft disowned a lot of teens that would have fed their future growth, and recently they've been frantic to win some back with free academic licensing deals and free Express editions of Visual Studio and SQL Server. Now their Express editions are scheduled to be discontinued, or at least no longer be free for download.
I saw someone fired for recommending Microsoft products. They just kept re-recommending a full migration to Office+Outlook+Exchange after having been denied. There were other factors, but that was a big one.
On my system, in the Gnome "Applications" menu, I see a shortcut called "Audio Player" under a submenu called "Sound & Video" which launches xmms. Clearly some work had been done by the distro maintainers to clear up any possible confusion, though it may lead a veteran user coming from another distro to wonder which audio player, until they click it. And if I'm looking for an image editor, I look in the "Graphics" submenu and click "GIMP Image Editor". Sure, it says "GIMP", but it also says "Image Editor". I doubt that'll cause a lot of heartache for new users.
Of course, on a plain Windows+Office install, I click "Start", and browsing through the menus I see highly descriptive names such as Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Outlook Express (which is very different from Outlook). A newcomer to Windows isn't going to have any idea what these do.
Everyone knows that Russia can't get enough American English music. Russians aren't spending nearly as much on American music as Americans, so they must be pirating the difference, unless perhaps some of them are pirating Russian music which the RIAA has little or no interest in.
Buzzwords for correctly using long existing browser features are what defined 2005?
Even slashdot.org is more popular than msnbc.com, according to Alexa.
I think most LCD displays are about 1280x1024 these days, so those users get a fuzzy display if they use anything else. During a quick walk through Office Depot, I noticed that they all but one of their dozens of LCD's were 1280x1024, as though they didn't expect anyone to pay for something bigger.
Some users will keep using 800x600 for a long while though, because they have vision problems and not every app looks great if you select large fonts, or they don't know larger fonts are an option.
It's a pretty safe assumption that the crippled databases ought to perform as well as the full versions when operating within the limits specified by the vendor. If some database vendor wants to go out of their way to trick me into thinking that their own database software is slower than the competition, I'm perfectly willing to let them do so.
I make a similar assumption about products with EULAs that prohibit publishing benchmarks. I understand the desire to keep people from manufacturing benchmarks that misrepresent the performance of their products, but if the only benchmarks I see are the ones they want me to see, my safe assumption is that they lack faith that their performance claims will survive public scrutiny, until I'm proven wrong.
If either assumption is ever wrong, it's the vendor's fault and their loss. I'd stand to lose a lot more by believing marketing hype without sufficient verifyable evidence to back it up. Without fail, the slowest database servers I've ever seen (all commercial, none mentioned in this article) have all claimed to be very fast and scalable.
I'm not sure about DB2, but Oracle and MSSQL forbid publishing benchmarks without written permission in their EULAs. I seriously doubt that'll stand up in court, but still I think many would-be benchmark publishers worry about it.
Pirates can just skip the DRM'd consumer electronics and use the professional stuff they probably already have.
It might be a good way to discourage others from using your system if your keys were not only unlabeled, but they were not even QWERTY.
Some video cards/chipsets require a BIOS patch to get anything but the standard resolutions. Mine would require installing something called 855resolution to do this, if I wasn't satisfied with 1600x1200. I suspect the Windows drivers probably bypass the video BIOS to change the resolution.
Installing Linux isn't something most users do every day. Some are happy to take the long route, choose exactly which packages they want, watch everything built according to their favorite CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and LDFLAGS with their favorite release of gcc, and then configure every package by hand. I'm sure it gets faster and easier each time they do it. I'm happy to just pop in a CD and answer a few questions.
If someone has access to my gaim passwords, they already have access to the rest of my computer. Besides, unless I want to enter a master password each time I start gaim, the best it could do is scramble them a little. Some of the passwords can be pre-hashed, depending on the protocol, preventing the recovery of plaintext passwords, but someone who got a hold of those hashes could still take over your accounts.
My XP desktop looks a lot like my Windows 95 desktop did almost 10 years ago. My Linux desktop is a little different (default bluecurve theme), but the general concepts are the same. People like familiarity, and a 2D theme goes well with a 2D display.
What I expect in 10 years, if the past 10 years are any indication of the speed of desktop evolution:
* Better displays on average. Big, crisp, bright, high resolution, high contrast, and especially wider.
* Similar UI elements as today, plus a few new ones. People don't like change if it involves taking something away.
* Faster response. Programs will load almost instantly. Maybe they'll just load when you install them, and be swapped out to non-volatile ram when not in use. Though 10 years ago I might have predicted we'd have this by now.
* Resolution independence. Quality aside, programs will look the same no matter what your screen resolution, and you can smoothly scale them to any size. I'm tempted to say we'll have a lot more vector graphics, but a lot of lazy designers will probably just use high resolution rasters.
* Mouseover/mouseout background window preview, maybe by alpha blending. If I move the mouse to a background window, I want it to somewhat show through the windows in front of it. Also, if I move the mouse away from a foreground window, I want to slightly see the windows behind it. I'm not 100% certain this'll look good though.
* If I'm lucky, maybe we'll have a mouse button mapped to opening a system menu whereever your mouse might be on the screen, centered under your mouse. This menu will be multi-column, approximately square shaped to reduce mouse movement and make effective use of space. Holding this button down while turning the mouse wheel will ideally cycle through my virtual desktops, rather than popping up a menu.
* Touchscreens may become standard, but many will still prefer mice for precision. I hope to see the ability to track multiple fingers/pointers dragging across the display.
* Better autocomplete in many programs. Tab should become my favorite key. Voice will not replace the keyboard, but only complement it. You can take my keyboard away after you pry it from my cold, dead hands. When I speak into a computer microphone, it'll probably usually be to communicate with real people.
* Better use of usage statistics. The desktop environment and programs will adapt so that most common actions require 1 click to initiate.
OS X Server runs Samba. You can set up Samba yourself on another OS for free, plus labor.
Because you're willing to. They know they can get customers who have more money to pay more. If they didn't have all these price tiers, CALs, and such, Windows for the end user would cost more and Microsoft's total profits would be less. The more they can divide up their licensing to discriminate between specific markets, the better they can optimize the pricing to maximize profit.
You don't have to buy what you don't want. If you don't need Active Directory, or you feel up to trying another LDAP solution, you can just use Linux (of *BSD) and Samba for file serving.
Is he not sure that the other two were faked?
I guess that means he's not fired.