How can you make a statement on
Windows security based on idiot users opening nasty attachments and not keeping their systems patched? If an idiot user opens malware contained in an email attachment and doesn't keep their system patched it has nothing to do with Windows. It is just an idiot user being an idiot, completely unrelated to Linux...
I could go on, but I've already dipped way to far into troll-land...;-)
I bet your are one of their paid monkeys that are hired to comment on these types of sites in favor of MS.
Now THAT would be a job.;-) Sorry to burst your bubble, but -- incomprehensible as it is, I know -- I post here just for fun.
I understand your beef wrt development on Windows... it makes complete sense, though I think that you said it best when you said that MS is good for some things, other stuff is good for others. My point, in general, is that it's unfair to categorically besmirch Microsoft products based solely on your view of MS as a corporation.
I guess reading/. has left me a bit jaded. While I know this site doesn't at all claim to be "fair and balanced" (like a certain "news source" that entertains the hell outta me), I guess I'm just a little tired of the Windows bashing that goes on here. There's a lotta shitty things about MS, but I think they only deserve about 75% of the trashing they get here.
I'm SO looking forward to scrolling down and reading about how those defacements were results of irresponsible administration or loose apps... But it's going to be hard for me to remember that I'm reading about Linux and not Windows.
Jeez... What the hell happened to the/. I know and love? Another article like this and the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" might have to change to "Fair and Balanced".
Please. While you try to come off as being even-handed, it's clear that you suffer from the same zealotry-induced ignorance that so many others on/. do. And "That means each server needs some monkey to sit there an point and click." ??? Clearly, you're either misrepresenting your experiences, or you're just plain incompetent. Either way, you're wrong, and given that your views are biased to the point of irrelevance, I'm finding it difficult to care enough about your under-informed opinions to write this reply.
But, I'll try my best: While I can understand your point about Palladium (really "trusted computing" as a concept, both within MS and otherwise), I'm not sure what idea you're trying to sell me on with the rest of your post. But I know I see the same old tired, ill-informed, poorly constructed arguments that everybody has made before, with little (read: no) effect. And, I see your true colors with this: "To me the are nothing more than a nasty monopoly..." blah blah blah, which to me translates to: "To me they are nothing more than a nasty monopoly, so while I'm too impassioned to bother to understand what I'm talking about, I'll pretend/lie to make it seem that I do when criticizing the very products I, for the political reasons just mentioned, will likely refuse to use.".
Oh, and if you could, I'd like to check out Longhorn too. Can you send me some examples of your work? I'd really like to see what you're doing with it... you know... since it hasn't even had a developers preview released yet, your work must be cutting-edge.
1. Longhorn/Aero is for the desktop, only (the server version is codenamed "Blackcomb"). So while you're right that "This Fisher Price GUI just doesn't sit well for a server OS", it doesn't matter.
2. I think Microsoft, with $49 billion in the bank, could probably stand to simultaneously develop a new GUI, and work on security, stability, functionality, etc. etc. Microsoft is no small company, and to think that Aero is all they're working in is idiotic.
3. "Limited functionality"? Clearly, you know verylittle about Longhorn and the functionality it introduces. WinFS, anti-virus APIs, 15 minute OS install, Palladium security... come on. Try on some knowledge before just looking at pictures to found your weak and poorly stated opinions.
You're right, and for larger enterprise clients it's even easier, in that the actual forms aren't even necessary. In my company's case, with our ELA (~20,000 instances of Windows, Office, etc.), we can log into a site run by MS to see how many licenses we've purchased. Combine that with SMS's Software Inventory DB (or your systems management package of choice) and a 20-minutes-to-write ASP/PHP/Whatever, and you've got yourself real-time license compliance tracking. No paper necessary.
I'm not sure if MS offers the same resource (the web site) to smaller, non-ELA customers, but if they don't, they should. If they do (and IMHO, even if they don't -- but that's a longer argument), there's really no excuse for an organization going non-compliant with their licenses. It's really not the nightmare some underinformed OSS zealots would try to make one believe.
Thanks so much to the company that has been so innovative in so many ways, yet is the same company to release quite possibly the most unstable and unreliable NOS client ever in the history of enterprise computing. Thanks for telling us that you're about to blow off what is quite possibly the best-equipped product to do the job you've been claiming to try to do for years while at the same time telling us you're going to continue to support a proprietary product that you're still struggling to really make work with the world's most popular desktop OS. Thanks for letting us know that you're not a forward-thinking organization and that you're not discarding your now-bordering-on-irrelevant past products in favor of the open source future. Thanks for shit-ifying your client to the point that we're forced to use AD. Thanks for 20% (NDS for NT) of my helpdesk calls. Thanks for giving me something other than mainframe to call "legacy". Thanks for being self-destructive, and for keeping me employed, you irrelevant, unimportant, ancient, ack-basswards thinking morons. Oh, and thanks for the inadvertent tip to sell the shares of your company I bought a few days ago.
I have to agree with you. Anyone that's ever been involved in "objective" evaluations of any product will tell you that there is little -- if any -- objectiveness in them, especially with such a small sample.
The city of Munich (am I right? I'm trying to recall a previous/. article here) recently spent more on a SuSE implementation than renewal of their MS contract would have cost. While I respect (and somewhat apprehensively applaud) their decision, I have to call into question the possible political motivations behind any and all US-related decisions -- business and otherwise -- made in Germany.
If this was an American company that used a larger sample as the basis of their findings, I'd give the referenced report much more credence. But, given both the potential political influence and the small samples, I have to conclude that the Relevantive report is just about entirely baseless.
As I've posted many times before here, OS or fundamental bias isn't going to help anyone. Anyone who takes this report as IT Law should really re-examine their motives and take an honest look at why they make the conclusions they do.
This is a Microsoft problem how? Sounds more like a "piss-poor administration" problem to me. There are plenty of tools available to track licenses across your enterprise, and if you had to resort to going "...to the branches and examine each computer for Office" then your organization was doing something wrong. I also work for a bank, with ~20,000 wintel seats across North America, and I can tell management exactly how many copies of Office, Access, Publisher, etc. etc. etc. are installed right now and how that compares to the number of licenses we own. If your organization didn't have that capability, that's their f-up, not MS's. And the lack of that capability probably why they got audited in the first place.
Not to mention the fact that I think your entire story is fantasy. If you'd ever been audited by Microsoft, you'd know you don't need to provide the actual, physical copies of each license (at least it's never been necessary in my experiences w/MS audits). "hunt for the licenses at the branches"? Come on.
Simply put, the choice of OS to use or what piece of software to implement in a specific instance should be left ONLY to the engineers/administrators responsible for the solution. Mandating -- or even using legislative influence to sway -- technology decisions sets a dangerous precedent in that it hurts the innovative nature of creating effective IT solutions and stifles creativity.
I'm a Linux and OSS fan, but thinking that OSS is the only choice out there for every solution is an ineffective methodology and often leads to poor solutions. Ultimately, the decision of what technologies to use for a specific solution can only be made by those responsible for designing/implementing it, and should not be dictated or influenced by legislators. Any time any legislation or management takes a tool out of IT professionals' tool box (or frowns on its use), it has a decidedly deleterious effect on any evenutal solutions created without a full set of tools and options available. Regardless of what tool it is, no tool should ever be completely ignored.
Any professional takes much, much more than licensing costs into consideration in choosing an OS for a specific solution, and that a government would make that a more significant factor than it should be is deplorable. Thankfully, I work in an environment where the options I have to execute my job aren't decided in some sub-committee, and I'm allowed (and respected enough) to choose what I believe to be the right technologies with which to do it.
I asked a MS SQL Server DBA about real-time replication across multiple servers and his remark was "it doesn't work, don't use it."
Not to mention that's about the least detailed and unprofessional analysis that I've heard this week, but also his characterization isn't accurate. Transactional replication (that's the actual term... if you/he have expert knowledge of the platform you know that) works quite well. In my environment we use it in a number of applications, and though it's not as robust as, say, Oracle, it still does the job more than satisfactorily. I'd say a good first step in scaling your apps is to find a new DBA.
Absolutely RedHat could've underbid them for licensing costs.
But unless you put Linus himself and about 500 other OSS developers all to work at DHS for 5 years to re-engineer and re-do just about everything IT (apps, infrastructure, support, user training, etc.) in the entire department for free, the MS solution comes out much cheaper overall.
Yeah, ~$642 per PC in a 5-year contract. So really, it's ~$128.57 per PC per year, likely including basic management (prolly packaging of OS updates, patches, etc.), Software Assurance (all new versions of s/w are free through the life of the contract), licenses for standard software (Office, Access, etc. also likely with the aforementioned Software Assurance), premium Microsoft Support and implementation/rollout/whatever.
The management piece I mentioned may not be included, but still, I don't see $128/yr/PC as exorbitant. Plus, since as the Register says, "it seems to be more a case of Microsoft holding onto business it's already got", the total cost of this contract is a fraction of what an enterprise OS migration project would cost.
So, is there a gripe in your post or am I missing something?
Heh... Any idea how many "IT Managers" there are at Fortune 100 companies? If your guess is correct, my guess is that we have about 99,880 left to post a comment. Mmkay?
It's a test for 95% of a controlled population. The project is currently for members of the Armed Services and some civilians living abroad only, not the entire general population (though granted, that's the next logical step, albeit likely to occur years or decades from now).
That fact notwithstanding, the idea that people without Windows would be completely precluded from voting is preposterous. So you'll have to go to a friend or neighbor's house or work or a library etc. to vote if you only run something non-Windows? Boo-hoo. It's not like you're going to have what OS you use stamped on your voter's registration card. And let's be honest: making voting much much easier for 90% of the people in this country where less than 50% of the population votes is certainly a good idea. If part of the cost of that benefit is that it's initially a little harder (but still easier than it is now -- and certainly not impossible) for a small minority of people who don't run Windows, so be it, though I completely agree with the notion that everyone should eventually have equal accessibility to voting methods.
And it's a 10% who are generally better educated and possibly even more politically savvy than the general population.
I really hope you're not specifically intimating that all people who don't run Windows are smarter and more politically savvy than people who do...
Great idea. Please, PLEASE flood the government with your feedback. The government, with all its spare funding and plentiful resources -- not to mention its renowned aptitude for quickly and effectively completing projects -- will benefit greatly from your input.
Berating the government for its choice to limit the testing of a new project to a limited field of test candidates is a fantastic idea (especially considering they "limited" the test to the most prevalent and ubiquitous OS possible... Ludicrous!). I think you should email the government every time you disagree with their testing procedures.
/sarcasm
The project is called "The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment". It's just a TEST for God's sake. Did you read the article or were you just playing with your Jump to Conclusions Mat (tm)? Save your bias-based rancor for when it's officially Windows-only in production, OR when your operating system of choice has 95% of the desktop market share. Without either of those two things being true, what you're suggesting is near-pointless whining.
No, it's not a cheap shot. It's the truth. Though I can agree with you about the world not wanting to standardize on proprietary web services, the standardization efforts behind web services have been an absolutely assinine circus.
The issue is evidenced here, and here, and here. (I think/. might have had a article on it too, but I can't find it...) Those are just the first articles I was able to find, and I recall reading many others. This has been a pretty widely-reported and well-known issue.
You can debate who's to blame, but the SOAP standard has taken a long time in coming. Version 1.2 was FINALLY released like a week ago, but the W3C has been running around like idiots with it for half of forever. I can tell you from personal experience that corporations want to use web services now but are really hesitant to start using web services to build enterprise apps without real standardization. What it comes down to, in my view, is that as a developer, I need these tools now, and I've been waiting for them for far too long because Tim Berners - Lee has been stroking his Semantic Web pipe dream for more than like 3 years.
What Mr. Helms had to say wasn't a cheap shot at open standards. It was a shot at some serious problems with the drafting of these specific standards, and he has a lot of well-documented history to back him up. IMHO, calling the web services standards "immature" was pretty gracious of Mr. Helms.
You should really read up on the topics you post about so you have some better knowledge of what you're saying before you start taking "cheap shots" at someone simply because of where they're employed.
I'm no history buff, but it seems to me we might have done just that... maybe not just several times through history, but perhaps also very recently... I could be wrong.
Maybe you wouldn't call underbidding your competitor healthy, pro-competitive behavior. But construction contractors, defense contractors, government project contractors, advertising agencies, web development companies, and consultancies, along with basically every company involved in bidding for work anywhere on the face of the planet do it every day. And my guess is that if you don't consider underbidding your competitors "healthy" and "pro-competitive", you probably wouldn't last too long in a competitive business environment.
It's sad that Linux doesn't have the juice to do the same thing, but them's the breaks. Welcome to business-land, kid.
You can argue the minutial points of that survey, and that's fine. But even if those statistics are really, really skewed, the original point ("I'll guarantee you there's far more Win 2000 boxes out there than any of the Free OSes...") is still clearly valid. And you'd have to be completely delusional to think Windows doesn't have the VAST majority of marketshare.
"And before others do, I remind you that my browser can tell a webserver that it is whatever OS I want it to be"
So what are you saying? Do you think one of the counts is inflated? Are you implying people are spoofing their HTTP headers to show they run Windows when in fact they don't? Or are you implying that the real count of OSS systems is actually lower than it is?
Slashdot Mirror
I bet your are one of their paid monkeys that are hired to comment on these types of sites in favor of MS.
;-) Sorry to burst your bubble, but -- incomprehensible as it is, I know -- I post here just for fun.
/. has left me a bit jaded. While I know this site doesn't at all claim to be "fair and balanced" (like a certain "news source" that entertains the hell outta me), I guess I'm just a little tired of the Windows bashing that goes on here. There's a lotta shitty things about MS, but I think they only deserve about 75% of the trashing they get here.
Now THAT would be a job.
I understand your beef wrt development on Windows... it makes complete sense, though I think that you said it best when you said that MS is good for some things, other stuff is good for others. My point, in general, is that it's unfair to categorically besmirch Microsoft products based solely on your view of MS as a corporation.
I guess reading
I'm SO looking forward to scrolling down and reading about how those defacements were results of irresponsible administration or loose apps... But it's going to be hard for me to remember that I'm reading about Linux and not Windows.
/. I know and love? Another article like this and the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" might have to change to "Fair and Balanced".
Jeez... What the hell happened to the
*grin*
You've been using Longhorn? That's awesome. How'd you get it so early?
/. do. And "That means each server needs some monkey to sit there an point and click." ??? Clearly, you're either misrepresenting your experiences, or you're just plain incompetent. Either way, you're wrong, and given that your views are biased to the point of irrelevance, I'm finding it difficult to care enough about your under-informed opinions to write this reply.
*chuckle*
Please. While you try to come off as being even-handed, it's clear that you suffer from the same zealotry-induced ignorance that so many others on
But, I'll try my best: While I can understand your point about Palladium (really "trusted computing" as a concept, both within MS and otherwise), I'm not sure what idea you're trying to sell me on with the rest of your post. But I know I see the same old tired, ill-informed, poorly constructed arguments that everybody has made before, with little (read: no) effect. And, I see your true colors with this: "To me the are nothing more than a nasty monopoly..." blah blah blah, which to me translates to: "To me they are nothing more than a nasty monopoly, so while I'm too impassioned to bother to understand what I'm talking about, I'll pretend/lie to make it seem that I do when criticizing the very products I, for the political reasons just mentioned, will likely refuse to use.".
Oh, and if you could, I'd like to check out Longhorn too. Can you send me some examples of your work? I'd really like to see what you're doing with it... you know... since it hasn't even had a developers preview released yet, your work must be cutting-edge.
1. Longhorn/Aero is for the desktop, only (the server version is codenamed "Blackcomb"). So while you're right that "This Fisher Price GUI just doesn't sit well for a server OS", it doesn't matter.
2. I think Microsoft, with $49 billion in the bank, could probably stand to simultaneously develop a new GUI, and work on security, stability, functionality, etc. etc. Microsoft is no small company, and to think that Aero is all they're working in is idiotic.
3. "Limited functionality"? Clearly, you know verylittle about Longhorn and the functionality it introduces. WinFS, anti-virus APIs, 15 minute OS install, Palladium security... come on. Try on some knowledge before just looking at pictures to found your weak and poorly stated opinions.
You're right, and for larger enterprise clients it's even easier, in that the actual forms aren't even necessary. In my company's case, with our ELA (~20,000 instances of Windows, Office, etc.), we can log into a site run by MS to see how many licenses we've purchased. Combine that with SMS's Software Inventory DB (or your systems management package of choice) and a 20-minutes-to-write ASP/PHP/Whatever, and you've got yourself real-time license compliance tracking. No paper necessary.
I'm not sure if MS offers the same resource (the web site) to smaller, non-ELA customers, but if they don't, they should. If they do (and IMHO, even if they don't -- but that's a longer argument), there's really no excuse for an organization going non-compliant with their licenses. It's really not the nightmare some underinformed OSS zealots would try to make one believe.
Thanks so much to the company that has been so innovative in so many ways, yet is the same company to release quite possibly the most unstable and unreliable NOS client ever in the history of enterprise computing. Thanks for telling us that you're about to blow off what is quite possibly the best-equipped product to do the job you've been claiming to try to do for years while at the same time telling us you're going to continue to support a proprietary product that you're still struggling to really make work with the world's most popular desktop OS. Thanks for letting us know that you're not a forward-thinking organization and that you're not discarding your now-bordering-on-irrelevant past products in favor of the open source future. Thanks for shit-ifying your client to the point that we're forced to use AD. Thanks for 20% (NDS for NT) of my helpdesk calls. Thanks for giving me something other than mainframe to call "legacy". Thanks for being self-destructive, and for keeping me employed, you irrelevant, unimportant, ancient, ack-basswards thinking morons. Oh, and thanks for the inadvertent tip to sell the shares of your company I bought a few days ago.
</drunken post>
I have to agree with you. Anyone that's ever been involved in "objective" evaluations of any product will tell you that there is little -- if any -- objectiveness in them, especially with such a small sample.
/. article here) recently spent more on a SuSE implementation than renewal of their MS contract would have cost. While I respect (and somewhat apprehensively applaud) their decision, I have to call into question the possible political motivations behind any and all US-related decisions -- business and otherwise -- made in Germany.
The city of Munich (am I right? I'm trying to recall a previous
If this was an American company that used a larger sample as the basis of their findings, I'd give the referenced report much more credence. But, given both the potential political influence and the small samples, I have to conclude that the Relevantive report is just about entirely baseless.
As I've posted many times before here, OS or fundamental bias isn't going to help anyone. Anyone who takes this report as IT Law should really re-examine their motives and take an honest look at why they make the conclusions they do.
This is a Microsoft problem how? Sounds more like a "piss-poor administration" problem to me. There are plenty of tools available to track licenses across your enterprise, and if you had to resort to going "...to the branches and examine each computer for Office" then your organization was doing something wrong. I also work for a bank, with ~20,000 wintel seats across North America, and I can tell management exactly how many copies of Office, Access, Publisher, etc. etc. etc. are installed right now and how that compares to the number of licenses we own. If your organization didn't have that capability, that's their f-up, not MS's. And the lack of that capability probably why they got audited in the first place.
Not to mention the fact that I think your entire story is fantasy. If you'd ever been audited by Microsoft, you'd know you don't need to provide the actual, physical copies of each license (at least it's never been necessary in my experiences w/MS audits). "hunt for the licenses at the branches"? Come on.
Simply put, the choice of OS to use or what piece of software to implement in a specific instance should be left ONLY to the engineers/administrators responsible for the solution. Mandating -- or even using legislative influence to sway -- technology decisions sets a dangerous precedent in that it hurts the innovative nature of creating effective IT solutions and stifles creativity.
I'm a Linux and OSS fan, but thinking that OSS is the only choice out there for every solution is an ineffective methodology and often leads to poor solutions. Ultimately, the decision of what technologies to use for a specific solution can only be made by those responsible for designing/implementing it, and should not be dictated or influenced by legislators. Any time any legislation or management takes a tool out of IT professionals' tool box (or frowns on its use), it has a decidedly deleterious effect on any evenutal solutions created without a full set of tools and options available. Regardless of what tool it is, no tool should ever be completely ignored.
Any professional takes much, much more than licensing costs into consideration in choosing an OS for a specific solution, and that a government would make that a more significant factor than it should be is deplorable. Thankfully, I work in an environment where the options I have to execute my job aren't decided in some sub-committee, and I'm allowed (and respected enough) to choose what I believe to be the right technologies with which to do it.
I asked a MS SQL Server DBA about real-time replication across multiple servers and his remark was "it doesn't work, don't use it."
Not to mention that's about the least detailed and unprofessional analysis that I've heard this week, but also his characterization isn't accurate. Transactional replication (that's the actual term... if you/he have expert knowledge of the platform you know that) works quite well. In my environment we use it in a number of applications, and though it's not as robust as, say, Oracle, it still does the job more than satisfactorily. I'd say a good first step in scaling your apps is to find a new DBA.
Absolutely RedHat could've underbid them for licensing costs.
But unless you put Linus himself and about 500 other OSS developers all to work at DHS for 5 years to re-engineer and re-do just about everything IT (apps, infrastructure, support, user training, etc.) in the entire department for free , the MS solution comes out much cheaper overall.
That's ~$642 per PC
Yeah, ~$642 per PC in a 5-year contract. So really, it's ~$128.57 per PC per year, likely including basic management (prolly packaging of OS updates, patches, etc.), Software Assurance (all new versions of s/w are free through the life of the contract), licenses for standard software (Office, Access, etc. also likely with the aforementioned Software Assurance), premium Microsoft Support and implementation/rollout/whatever.
The management piece I mentioned may not be included, but still, I don't see $128/yr/PC as exorbitant. Plus, since as the Register says, "it seems to be more a case of Microsoft holding onto business it's already got", the total cost of this contract is a fraction of what an enterprise OS migration project would cost.
So, is there a gripe in your post or am I missing something?
Troll? Maybe. Does sound like he could be a real Fortune 100 "IT Manager" though... Bill? That you?
Heh... Any idea how many "IT Managers" there are at Fortune 100 companies? If your guess is correct, my guess is that we have about 99,880 left to post a comment. Mmkay?
It's a test for 95% of a controlled population. The project is currently for members of the Armed Services and some civilians living abroad only, not the entire general population (though granted, that's the next logical step, albeit likely to occur years or decades from now).
That fact notwithstanding, the idea that people without Windows would be completely precluded from voting is preposterous. So you'll have to go to a friend or neighbor's house or work or a library etc. to vote if you only run something non-Windows? Boo-hoo. It's not like you're going to have what OS you use stamped on your voter's registration card. And let's be honest: making voting much much easier for 90% of the people in this country where less than 50% of the population votes is certainly a good idea. If part of the cost of that benefit is that it's initially a little harder (but still easier than it is now -- and certainly not impossible) for a small minority of people who don't run Windows, so be it, though I completely agree with the notion that everyone should eventually have equal accessibility to voting methods.
And it's a 10% who are generally better educated and possibly even more politically savvy than the general population.
I really hope you're not specifically intimating that all people who don't run Windows are smarter and more politically savvy than people who do...
Great idea. Please, PLEASE flood the government with your feedback. The government, with all its spare funding and plentiful resources -- not to mention its renowned aptitude for quickly and effectively completing projects -- will benefit greatly from your input.
/sarcasm
Berating the government for its choice to limit the testing of a new project to a limited field of test candidates is a fantastic idea (especially considering they "limited" the test to the most prevalent and ubiquitous OS possible... Ludicrous!). I think you should email the government every time you disagree with their testing procedures.
The project is called "The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment". It's just a TEST for God's sake. Did you read the article or were you just playing with your Jump to Conclusions Mat (tm)? Save your bias-based rancor for when it's officially Windows-only in production, OR when your operating system of choice has 95% of the desktop market share. Without either of those two things being true, what you're suggesting is near-pointless whining.
I don't normally do the "I was thinking the same thing" post, but I feel obligated to here.
"Of course! Abolute zero!"
Ability to use TCP/IP on 17 year old computer: Done.
Linux Desktop Market share: What, 3%? 4%?
Cure for cancer: Not found.
Reasons anyone should care about this story: 0
Possible value of other things the talent required to do this took: Priceless.
I'd like to know how much time and talent was wasted on this. Are there really THAT many talented-but-unemployed IT professionals out there?
No, it's not a cheap shot. It's the truth. Though I can agree with you about the world not wanting to standardize on proprietary web services, the standardization efforts behind web services have been an absolutely assinine circus.
/. might have had a article on it too, but I can't find it...) Those are just the first articles I was able to find, and I recall reading many others. This has been a pretty widely-reported and well-known issue.
The issue is evidenced here, and here, and here. (I think
You can debate who's to blame, but the SOAP standard has taken a long time in coming. Version 1.2 was FINALLY released like a week ago, but the W3C has been running around like idiots with it for half of forever. I can tell you from personal experience that corporations want to use web services now but are really hesitant to start using web services to build enterprise apps without real standardization. What it comes down to, in my view, is that as a developer, I need these tools now, and I've been waiting for them for far too long because Tim Berners - Lee has been stroking his Semantic Web pipe dream for more than like 3 years.
What Mr. Helms had to say wasn't a cheap shot at open standards. It was a shot at some serious problems with the drafting of these specific standards, and he has a lot of well-documented history to back him up. IMHO, calling the web services standards "immature" was pretty gracious of Mr. Helms.
You should really read up on the topics you post about so you have some better knowledge of what you're saying before you start taking "cheap shots" at someone simply because of where they're employed.
(Mods: "Interesting"?!? Come ON...)
I'm no history buff, but it seems to me we might have done just that... maybe not just several times through history, but perhaps also very recently... I could be wrong.
I agree 100%. This will likely dead-end like so many similar projects before it. What a waste of time and money.
Here's a question? Why haven't we built conventional (non-nuclear) ICBMs? Seems like it'd be cheaper to me...
Maybe you wouldn't call underbidding your competitor healthy, pro-competitive behavior. But construction contractors, defense contractors, government project contractors, advertising agencies, web development companies, and consultancies, along with basically every company involved in bidding for work anywhere on the face of the planet do it every day. And my guess is that if you don't consider underbidding your competitors "healthy" and "pro-competitive", you probably wouldn't last too long in a competitive business environment.
It's sad that Linux doesn't have the juice to do the same thing, but them's the breaks. Welcome to business-land, kid.
*yawn*
You can argue the minutial points of that survey, and that's fine. But even if those statistics are really, really skewed, the original point ("I'll guarantee you there's far more Win 2000 boxes out there than any of the Free OSes...") is still clearly valid. And you'd have to be completely delusional to think Windows doesn't have the VAST majority of marketshare.
"And before others do, I remind you that my browser can tell a webserver that it is whatever OS I want it to be"
So what are you saying? Do you think one of the counts is inflated? Are you implying people are spoofing their HTTP headers to show they run Windows when in fact they don't? Or are you implying that the real count of OSS systems is actually lower than it is?
Applied it to 23 workstations and 10 servers today. No problems. (knocking on wood)