I find it interesting that Windows is so widely deployed, yet so few people are truly "in love" with the operating system.
Oddly enough, most people only use operating systems to facilitate whatever work it is they happen to be tasked with accomplishing. When it comes to love, passion, etc, these same weird folk usually look towards members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, even) and not penguins, devils, or peices of mealy fruit. Crazy, huh?
...Linux General Store lasted several years. The location was next to a University, and it was in a town with a very active and young Linux community, so that helped a lot.
"a lot" is a bit of a fucking understatement. The GT campus is ground zero for georgia nerds. With that location it should have been as successful as selling condoms in a whorehouse.
better documentation, including the availability of source code
Of what? The operating system? The compiler? Never really needed the source to either. If you have so be it. Never been important to me. As for tool documentation and sample source? Not really a shortage of that, really. MSDN is pretty damned good.
better languages
What better language is not availible in a windows flavor?
more readily available libraries
What is missing, in your opinion? About the only thing I have come up short on, recently, was a nice free X12N 827 library.
easier deployment mechanisms
Don't know much about that. I generally have my applications download themselves from a webserver. Sounds silly, but it works pretty well.
better code-editting environments
Can't get much more subjective than this, really. Do you mean makefiles, vim, etc? Download cygwin and be done with it. IDEs? Visual Studio generally gets the job done. Lots of people like Eclipse. I hear it write onces runs anywheres.
That included using Postgres instead of MS SQL Server
Requirements too steep for MSDE?
PHP Groupware instead of Exchange
You sold them on webmail? Why not just get them Yahoo email accounts and create an invite only Yahoo group for the entire company? Has spam filtering, calendaring, contact lists.
Linux PDF writer instead of Acrobat
I guess you got me there.
But really, how much of this (besides the SQL server, which can usually be replaced with MSDE for small to medium shops) savings really cut DEVELOPMENT costs?
There is always the odd case where the software that is commisioned to be written by a company provides said company with an advantage over their competitors by allowing them to deliver a better product or the same product at a lower cost. Somehow I don't see software development underwritten by these companies to ever be allowed to be open source. Not when the developer can simply walk across the street to a competitor and sell the thing to them.
I disagree. It takes us an average of 3 months to build and deploy applications using a single developer (by application I mean a self-contained web-based application that can be sold to other companies for use).
What makes them substantially faster or cheaper using linux, other than the cost of the OS license?
With the exception of hospitals, all of the company types you mention generally write a lot of their own software. Now, some of them have outsourced the actual program writing, but it is still custom software developed specifically for them, and would be cheaper done on Linux.
What makes linux cheaper in this regard? When it comes to the price of windows licenses they are a drop in the bucket when a company is paying a few folks 60k+ a year to write the application or tens to hundreds of thousands to outsource development. I'd expect the higher availibility of windows programmers to actually offset the cost of the licenses in the case of small to medium shops. Where does the cheap kick in?
I sale computers in a Mom & Pop shop for a living, and I almost pity the people who buy new machines, only to have the machine exploited 30 minutes later when they first hook it up to the Internet.
If I were selling boxes in a mom and pop type of establishment I tend to think that I'd have a ghosted install of XP home with all of the latest and greatest patches for the common hardware configurations I sold. Oh, and before the sale would diddle the registry to insert the proper serial for the OEM package you gave to the customer.
Demand from morons like you is turning our universities into tech prep schools.
Prep as in preparatory? In somewhere that prepares someone with the skills needed to perform an actual task? In the case of programmers you're goddamned right, thats EXACTLY what it should be. When it comes right down to it building a peice of software is like building a skyscraper. You need that one trained architect. You need that engineer to make sure it's not going to collapse under its own weight. AND you need 1000 blue collar slobs to actually build the thing. Universities are great at churning out the first two, but what about the other 1000?
I can say that Computer Engineering students at my university don't touch C/C++ until we have had a couple of terms with Assembly on the X86 platform, and we get embedded platforms after that.
All in all, I'd rather hire someone who spent the four years learning the language they are going to use after hire as opposed to those that learned 2 years of VAX assembly, 1 year of embedded systems, and then spent the last two semisters learning about C++, OOP principles, etc.
I don't want to hire a computer scientist or historian. What I need is a tech who is competent with the tools and languages that are in use here and now. Computer programmers are no different than air conditioning repairmen and carpenters. They need to know the skills to do the job today, not 20 years ago.
All encryption is ever good for is to make it more costly(for an attacker) to retrieve than the data than the data itself is worth.
Because really, a person with enough determination can break any form of encryption by simply heading to the hardware store, buying a pair of pliers, and using them on the testicles of whatever unlucky bastard happens to know the 'key'.
We live in a world were Joe user has the choise of buying a box with Winodws preinstalled, or building/having built a box without windows and then installing their pirate copy on it.
Joe user can also build/buy a box and install a legitimate copy of windows on it. Or Linux, for that matter. You have Linux on your machine, right? Oh, but you're not Joe User. Fine, I'm not a fly so I'll take a pass on eating that shit.
That my friend, is why windows is so popular.
I see. So all that needs to happen if for a few of the major box builders to offer consumers the chance to purchase computers with Linux pre-installed and the cream will rise to the top, eh? Quite a few have tried. What happened?
Now if you want to enter into a discussion about administering a windows box with GUI and 3rd party GUI tools vs. linux with CLI and vendor provided GUI tools, we can do that.
Not really. I don't care much for administering anything. The administration of my home network consists of making sure that the cheap linksys router has all incoming ports blocked. It works well, does not require tweaking kernel recompiles. Even my blockheaded SO with her UNPATCHED windows xp (sp zero) machine has not been hacked, infected with a virus, or worm. Some headache.
As I posted in an earlier thread. The Internet is the great equalizer. No network, Windows box is easier for Joe Sixpack to get and use.
Hey, you're right to an extent. Windows has a security problem. I see changes being made to fix this problem. Linux has a usability problem. I see nerds extolling the virtues of CLI applications and responding to any and all accusations that their beloved open source toy might need some polish with nothing but vitrol.
Plug it into the internet and all of a sudden, the maintanence tasks required to keep the linux box running and secure vs. what it takes to keep the Windows box running and secure, and Linux has the advantage. Mind you I am talking about running Xandros or Mandrake, not LSF, Gentoo or Slackware.
Dunno, seems much easier to me to spend 100 bucks and take 10 minutes to figure out how to plug network cables into routers than it does to trudge through man page and howto hell, but maybe it's just me.
But once again, due to Microsofts Monopoly, it is what is popular, not what is the easiest to use and administer.
Keep telling yourself that instead of acknowledging the problems.
Isn't it amazing how the solution to so many Windows problems is to jump through hoops, restrict what you can do, and generally make your life a hassle.
Yes, it makes it just like running Unix. It's the very thing that makes windows popular to the masses (easy to do anything without any education or forthought) that makes it vulnerable to a lot of these exploits. It's a case of giving the customer exactly what they want, but the very thing you give them turning around and biting them on the ass. Linux has a long way to go to make things as simple as windows while maintaining its security while windows has a long way to go to enhance its security while maintaining its ease of use.
I was acually going to take the time to respond to this in an intellegent and well thought out manner. But I'm *really* tired, so let me just say: What a complete and utter load of grabastical fucktarded bullshit.
I'll eat the 'flamebait' mod on this one and just go back to sleep.
Eternal Darkness
Mario Kart
Zelda: The Wind Waker
F-Zero
Super Monkey Ball
Wave Race
SSX Tricky
Super Smash Brothers Melee
Animal Crossing
Soulcalibur II
Really? Please please please show me the documentation or press releases or ANTYHING other than the typical slashdot "out of the ass, but since it's anti-ms it MUST be correct fact" where a new release version of windows broke the lastest version of word perfect.
You can find them on Ebay or EB Games. I got one in a shrink wrapped retail box off of Ebay about a year ago. The original GB Tetris is the one true Tetris. Nothing has been better since.
Heh. My dad bought me Turbo C (lack of ++ intentional) when I was 14 years old. If I had to guess I'd say he spent about 100 bucks on it. As a return on his investment he got a kid that moved out of the house at 18 and actually calls for things other than to ask for money.
I tend to think even the stupidest parent might jump at the chance to buy a kid something other than the fancy clothes they usually ask for.
People also tend to perputually generate the stuff. So if someone was in the position to spend 400 bucks on a computer, although that money is now gone, chances are that they will eventually have another 400 bucks.
Really, though it all comes down to priorities.
Reminds of a time when I walked into a Bally shoe store. Extremely overpriced footware that makes VS.NET enterprise edition seem like a bargin, in some cases. After browsing for a few minutes a salesman walked over and asked if I was interested in anything. I chuckled and made an offhand remark about the products being nice but not being able to afford anything. He chuckled back and said "You can afford as many pairs of these shoes as you want." I gave him a puzzled look and he replied "But only if you want them."
It took me a second for what he said to sink in, but by god, he was right. If I wanted those shoes I'd have a pair. Maybe not that day, but a week or a month down the road, I'd have them. Just like I have the pretty PDA phone I can't afford, the car I can't afford, the laptop I can't afford, the shed full of badass power tools I can't afford, and everything else that I have that cost a LOT more than shoes.
PS. Before you make a 'yanks love credit cards' or a 'you must have your mom wrapped around your finger' comment consider the fact that I a) have not gotten a dime from my parents since I turned 18 and b) have ZERO debt, save my house, which I simply could not attain (in a reasonable timeframe) without using credit.
A fair number of folks get into FOSS because they can't afford the dev tools.
If you can't afford to spend 91 dollars and 99 cents on a compiler + IDE I tend to wonder how you afforded the computer, the electricity to operate it, the desk it sits on, and the rent on the roof over that desk.
There are these things they call "marketing firms". You send them a money bag and they produce the other things knows as "marketing materials". When you send these "marketing firms" what a discription of what you want them to product the tool used to make it is usually not dictated.
And you'll notice that even though they don't use MS product they STILL didn't use the open source solution. What a bunch of mass market end user common deniminator mickysoft dumbfuckoids, eh? 'Course they got that bag of money and will probably get laid tonight.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting that Windows is so widely deployed, yet so few people are truly "in love" with the operating system.
Oddly enough, most people only use operating systems to facilitate whatever work it is they happen to be tasked with accomplishing. When it comes to love, passion, etc, these same weird folk usually look towards members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, even) and not penguins, devils, or peices of mealy fruit. Crazy, huh?
Does that taste good and is it nutritious?
Does it look good when your 13 year old daughter wears it to school on her first day or does she get to be the laughing stock?
Does it comfortably seat four? If not, how many?
Will it keep the rain off of my family members' heads?
It gets cold here, can you at least burn it for heat if the answer to the questions above happened to be no?
...Linux General Store lasted several years. The location was next to a University, and it was in a town with a very active and young Linux community, so that helped a lot.
"a lot" is a bit of a fucking understatement. The GT campus is ground zero for georgia nerds. With that location it should have been as successful as selling condoms in a whorehouse.
better documentation, including the availability of source code
Of what? The operating system? The compiler? Never really needed the source to either. If you have so be it. Never been important to me. As for tool documentation and sample source? Not really a shortage of that, really. MSDN is pretty damned good.
better languages
What better language is not availible in a windows flavor?
more readily available libraries
What is missing, in your opinion? About the only thing I have come up short on, recently, was a nice free X12N 827 library.
easier deployment mechanisms
Don't know much about that. I generally have my applications download themselves from a webserver. Sounds silly, but it works pretty well.
better code-editting environments
Can't get much more subjective than this, really. Do you mean makefiles, vim, etc? Download cygwin and be done with it. IDEs? Visual Studio generally gets the job done. Lots of people like Eclipse. I hear it write onces runs anywheres.
That included using Postgres instead of MS SQL Server
Requirements too steep for MSDE?
PHP Groupware instead of Exchange
You sold them on webmail? Why not just get them Yahoo email accounts and create an invite only Yahoo group for the entire company? Has spam filtering, calendaring, contact lists.
Linux PDF writer instead of Acrobat
I guess you got me there.
But really, how much of this (besides the SQL server, which can usually be replaced with MSDE for small to medium shops) savings really cut DEVELOPMENT costs?
There is always the odd case where the software that is commisioned to be written by a company provides said company with an advantage over their competitors by allowing them to deliver a better product or the same product at a lower cost. Somehow I don't see software development underwritten by these companies to ever be allowed to be open source. Not when the developer can simply walk across the street to a competitor and sell the thing to them.
I disagree. It takes us an average of 3 months to build and deploy applications using a single developer (by application I mean a self-contained web-based application that can be sold to other companies for use).
What makes them substantially faster or cheaper using linux, other than the cost of the OS license?
With the exception of hospitals, all of the company types you mention generally write a lot of their own software. Now, some of them have outsourced the actual program writing, but it is still custom software developed specifically for them, and would be cheaper done on Linux.
What makes linux cheaper in this regard? When it comes to the price of windows licenses they are a drop in the bucket when a company is paying a few folks 60k+ a year to write the application or tens to hundreds of thousands to outsource development. I'd expect the higher availibility of windows programmers to actually offset the cost of the licenses in the case of small to medium shops. Where does the cheap kick in?
No way. My problem is usually that I want to keep the width of lines to a reasonable length.
So to have statement spanning lines you have to introduct the abomination known as _ in VB.
I sale computers in a Mom & Pop shop for a living, and I almost pity the people who buy new machines, only to have the machine exploited 30 minutes later when they first hook it up to the Internet.
If I were selling boxes in a mom and pop type of establishment I tend to think that I'd have a ghosted install of XP home with all of the latest and greatest patches for the common hardware configurations I sold. Oh, and before the sale would diddle the registry to insert the proper serial for the OEM package you gave to the customer.
Demand from morons like you is turning our universities into tech prep schools.
Prep as in preparatory? In somewhere that prepares someone with the skills needed to perform an actual task? In the case of programmers you're goddamned right, thats EXACTLY what it should be. When it comes right down to it building a peice of software is like building a skyscraper. You need that one trained architect. You need that engineer to make sure it's not going to collapse under its own weight. AND you need 1000 blue collar slobs to actually build the thing. Universities are great at churning out the first two, but what about the other 1000?
I can say that Computer Engineering students at my university don't touch C/C++ until we have had a couple of terms with Assembly on the X86 platform, and we get embedded platforms after that.
All in all, I'd rather hire someone who spent the four years learning the language they are going to use after hire as opposed to those that learned 2 years of VAX assembly, 1 year of embedded systems, and then spent the last two semisters learning about C++, OOP principles, etc.
I don't want to hire a computer scientist or historian. What I need is a tech who is competent with the tools and languages that are in use here and now. Computer programmers are no different than air conditioning repairmen and carpenters. They need to know the skills to do the job today, not 20 years ago.
Could you explain to me how that's going to happen when he has a legit, patched copy?
All encryption is ever good for is to make it more costly(for an attacker) to retrieve than the data than the data itself is worth.
Because really, a person with enough determination can break any form of encryption by simply heading to the hardware store, buying a pair of pliers, and using them on the testicles of whatever unlucky bastard happens to know the 'key'.
We live in a world were Joe user has the choise of buying a box with Winodws preinstalled, or building/having built a box without windows and then installing their pirate copy on it.
Joe user can also build/buy a box and install a legitimate copy of windows on it. Or Linux, for that matter. You have Linux on your machine, right? Oh, but you're not Joe User. Fine, I'm not a fly so I'll take a pass on eating that shit.
That my friend, is why windows is so popular.
I see. So all that needs to happen if for a few of the major box builders to offer consumers the chance to purchase computers with Linux pre-installed and the cream will rise to the top, eh? Quite a few have tried. What happened?
Now if you want to enter into a discussion about administering a windows box with GUI and 3rd party GUI tools vs. linux with CLI and vendor provided GUI tools, we can do that.
Not really. I don't care much for administering anything. The administration of my home network consists of making sure that the cheap linksys router has all incoming ports blocked. It works well, does not require tweaking kernel recompiles. Even my blockheaded SO with her UNPATCHED windows xp (sp zero) machine has not been hacked, infected with a virus, or worm. Some headache.
As I posted in an earlier thread. The Internet is the great equalizer. No network, Windows box is easier for Joe Sixpack to get and use.
Hey, you're right to an extent. Windows has a security problem. I see changes being made to fix this problem. Linux has a usability problem. I see nerds extolling the virtues of CLI applications and responding to any and all accusations that their beloved open source toy might need some polish with nothing but vitrol.
Plug it into the internet and all of a sudden, the maintanence tasks required to keep the linux box running and secure vs. what it takes to keep the Windows box running and secure, and Linux has the advantage. Mind you I am talking about running Xandros or Mandrake, not LSF, Gentoo or Slackware.
Dunno, seems much easier to me to spend 100 bucks and take 10 minutes to figure out how to plug network cables into routers than it does to trudge through man page and howto hell, but maybe it's just me.
But once again, due to Microsofts Monopoly, it is what is popular, not what is the easiest to use and administer.
Keep telling yourself that instead of acknowledging the problems.
Isn't it amazing how the solution to so many Windows problems is to jump through hoops, restrict what you can do, and generally make your life a hassle.
Yes, it makes it just like running Unix. It's the very thing that makes windows popular to the masses (easy to do anything without any education or forthought) that makes it vulnerable to a lot of these exploits. It's a case of giving the customer exactly what they want, but the very thing you give them turning around and biting them on the ass. Linux has a long way to go to make things as simple as windows while maintaining its security while windows has a long way to go to enhance its security while maintaining its ease of use.
I was acually going to take the time to respond to this in an intellegent and well thought out manner. But I'm *really* tired, so let me just say: What a complete and utter load of grabastical fucktarded bullshit.
I'll eat the 'flamebait' mod on this one and just go back to sleep.
Name 10 other good games, please.
No problem.
Eternal Darkness
Mario Kart
Zelda: The Wind Waker
F-Zero
Super Monkey Ball
Wave Race
SSX Tricky
Super Smash Brothers Melee
Animal Crossing
Soulcalibur II
Really? Please please please show me the documentation or press releases or ANTYHING other than the typical slashdot "out of the ass, but since it's anti-ms it MUST be correct fact" where a new release version of windows broke the lastest version of word perfect.
Please.
You can find them on Ebay or EB Games. I got one in a shrink wrapped retail box off of Ebay about a year ago. The original GB Tetris is the one true Tetris. Nothing has been better since.
Heh. My dad bought me Turbo C (lack of ++ intentional) when I was 14 years old. If I had to guess I'd say he spent about 100 bucks on it. As a return on his investment he got a kid that moved out of the house at 18 and actually calls for things other than to ask for money.
I tend to think even the stupidest parent might jump at the chance to buy a kid something other than the fancy clothes they usually ask for.
People also tend to perputually generate the stuff. So if someone was in the position to spend 400 bucks on a computer, although that money is now gone, chances are that they will eventually have another 400 bucks.
Really, though it all comes down to priorities.
Reminds of a time when I walked into a Bally shoe store. Extremely overpriced footware that makes VS.NET enterprise edition seem like a bargin, in some cases. After browsing for a few minutes a salesman walked over and asked if I was interested in anything. I chuckled and made an offhand remark about the products being nice but not being able to afford anything. He chuckled back and said "You can afford as many pairs of these shoes as you want." I gave him a puzzled look and he replied "But only if you want them."
It took me a second for what he said to sink in, but by god, he was right. If I wanted those shoes I'd have a pair. Maybe not that day, but a week or a month down the road, I'd have them. Just like I have the pretty PDA phone I can't afford, the car I can't afford, the laptop I can't afford, the shed full of badass power tools I can't afford, and everything else that I have that cost a LOT more than shoes.
PS. Before you make a 'yanks love credit cards' or a 'you must have your mom wrapped around your finger' comment consider the fact that I a) have not gotten a dime from my parents since I turned 18 and b) have ZERO debt, save my house, which I simply could not attain (in a reasonable timeframe) without using credit.
A fair number of folks get into FOSS because they can't afford the dev tools.
If you can't afford to spend 91 dollars and 99 cents on a compiler + IDE I tend to wonder how you afforded the computer, the electricity to operate it, the desk it sits on, and the rent on the roof over that desk.
Amazon ASIN B000089GKV
There is unfortunately no option to "never trust this vendor" in IE.
They are finally adding this to XP SP2, thank god. RC1 is availible for download now.
It actually does, dave.
There are these things they call "marketing firms". You send them a money bag and they produce the other things knows as "marketing materials". When you send these "marketing firms" what a discription of what you want them to product the tool used to make it is usually not dictated.
And you'll notice that even though they don't use MS product they STILL didn't use the open source solution. What a bunch of mass market end user common deniminator mickysoft dumbfuckoids, eh? 'Course they got that bag of money and will probably get laid tonight.