has no financial involvement in the SCO and BayStar agreement , and (Microsoft) has no financial relationship with BayStar
But they didn't say anything about RBC and RBC won't say who the big investor was. If MS funneled the money through RBC they could still claim not having any relationship with Baystar was the truth.
Bored? Make your own TV show and disseminate it online.
Outstanding idea. Doesn't cost that much for the gear, spread it out over a couple years. You'll meet some really interesting people and maybe, just maybe stumble on something that sells. We were kicking around an idea for a local soap opera where the story lines were distantly (insert innocent look here) drawn from the local rumor mill.
Here's another idea. Switch off the fucking TV and rejoin life, already in progress. That's why I've avoided installing MythTV. Just what I need, a reason to watch more TV.
ESR wasn't very smart. He shouldn't have publish this YET. Give them to IBM lawyers so they know what to look for and what they are fairly certain that they have it among their discovery material, THEN publish it.
How do you know that's not exactly what he did? Along with copies to the FTC and SEC? I don't know either and the article doesn't say. This material is months old and we don't know when ESR received it.
IBM may have known all along MS was working through a lackey and doesn't care. If it wasn't SCO it would've been someone else, maybe someone with a smarter CEO. Maybe IBM just decided to duke it out now and get it over with. I'm just speculating but it's not out of realm of possibility.
Overall this has been a positive for Linux. So it wouldn't surprise me if MS is behind it. They've become very adept at shooting themselves in the foot the last few years.
What's odd is when you look at Linux, it's taking the IT industry by storm. And look at all the new jobs being created. Whole new industries popping up all over in implementation, support, in new distributions, embedded applications. It's not just a software product, it's an economy unto itself.
I don't know how anyone makes the argument there's no money in FOSS. Whole industries exist because of free software.
But a lot of companies are using Email to fire people to avoid dealing with it face to face. I can understand it, but these people have invested 1/3 of their weekday lives working for your company. Time they can never get back. You'd think they'd at least be due the courtesy of hearing it directly. No outplacement assistance, nothing. Tossed aside like a used Kleenex.
I'd suggest start working on your own business. It's not that hard to do. And with companies pushing more of the grunt paperwork down on already over-worked people, you might find it's less work than some of you are doing now. The big expense for most people is health insurance.
How can you do a five-year projection on a product ('OpenOffice') which is fairly new on the scene?
The same way you do for any product on the market today. Who knows where Windows, Office, Exchange or anything else is going to be in five years. What the hell difference does it make in a cost projection?
There are a lot of loose ends you'd better tie up in your arguement.
Have you ever actually done a cost projection? Sometimes you use a 3 year life cycle window, sometimes five, depending on long you're guessing it will be until EOM (End of Mission), and that's always a guesstimate. Hardware used to be 3 automatically, now they want five.
Their core strength is in Server market...
Who are you talking about? Sun? OpenOffice isn't managed by Sun, you're comparing apples and oranges. You might be confusing OpenOffice with StarOffice.
and this 'desktop' redheaded stepchild they purchased from a failed German company is the 'flagship' that people are supposed to choose instead of Microsoft Office?
Spoken like someone who has never tried it. Unfortunately for MS swills like yourself it's becoming a very capable product. More than enough functionality for all but the top tier of productivity users in most organizations. And not even missing a whole lot on the top level. The biggest complaint from the power users was it needed something like Access. The DBA's were very happy it didn't have it because if you've ever actually worked in IT, you'd know that one of the things DBA's absolutely f'ing hate is trying to upsize some junior genius first Access database that the department now considers mission critical. Complete with tables that don't relate, zero normalization, nvarchar (50) for every char field, huge blocks of NULL values inside never ending do-all tables. But how would you know anything about that?
I think you're the one who needs to go back to school, Einstein. And, by the way, you spelled "argument" wrong.
I'm not sure what monkey boy's got to gloat about. I haven't seen any definitive comparison regarding what they would've paid to implement the Windows solution. 23 million...what did that include? More importantly, what was left out? Like there aren't cost overruns on Windows installations? HAHAHAHA! One thing I've seen consistently left out of Windows TCO comparisons are the costs of training on transition products, like a new version of Office. That training is expensive and if MS doesn't include it in your package it adds up to a significant expense. And let's compare the initial cost plus second, third and fourth year costs. Then see who's laughing.
Maybe I'm just really bad with spreadsheets, but I've never gotten a five year projection on Windows v Linux to come out in favor of Windows and positively never had OpenOffice come in as more expensive than Office on Windows.
Hey, if there any accounting types here maybe we could do kind of an open source TCO analysis. Make it public and let people comment on it. Pick a medium size business as a standard...say 500 work stations. Is that fair? Too big? Too small? It's hard because there are so many variables depending on what type of business it is. Ernie Ball was able to throw MS out. Be interesting to see how their IT costs have changed. And how do you include a $90,000 BSA fine in TCO calculations?
Might also consider that we have a lot better medical care available than in 1918. Due to the limited number of specimens (some frozen bodies in Norway, I believe) it's hard to say how many of the casualties were from the flu itself or secondary complications like pneumonia or bacterial follow-on.
But consider a scenario when a super bug from a lab gets out when medical services are already overwhelmed by a natural disaster or a break down in civil order. Or gets loose in countries with little existing medical care. That would be your nightmare scenario on steroids.
I built a Mini-ITX based massively parallel cluster named PROTEUS. I have 12 nodes using VIA EPIA V8000, 800 MHz motherboards.
I had this vision of builidng a solar powered cluster. But couldn't think of anything useful to do with it at home. If I could get it to render video, then it's useful. Solar power...just because I can. 200 watts isn't that expensive of a battery pack. Could probably calculate the panel size and cost but not until I can think of a reason to build one.
Sure seems like they're serious. It's possible that IBM simply discovered the obvious: OSS development methods are superior and more efficient than closed source. That's not a huge leap in logic, even for a corporation. Cooperate to make the pie (OSS), then compete for the pieces (implementation and support). The advantages are obvious.
A simple example. A company would like to adopt OpenOffice but are put off by one or even several minor things that OO doesn't do. Maybe another company in a similar business has the same issues. They team up and pay a couple programmers a small amount in comparison to their MS licensing costs to develop the features that OO lacks. Certainly other companies will benefit from their action, but everyone benefits by having commodity office productivity software they can use for free. Other companies add different features and again the core product gets better for everyone. Companies contributing are acting in their own self-interest by funding small changes that are important to them. Everyone pays a little, everyone gains a lot. Even the inevitable freeloaders don't upset the economics. The contributors are still saving vastly more in long term costs than they're throwing at the developers.
The reason that model works today where it didn't a few years ago is having very functional and mature OSS products to use as a starting point. And the cost of development is dropping with the influence of outsourcing. The model would break down if the project started from scratch at late 90's development costs because the sunk costs would be so much higher.
I think it's the future, maybe IBM does too. *shrug* One can hope.
...why I build my own computers. If I had an office with 500 people, I'd still build my own computers.
If there was a standard board and configuration for laptops that I could build myself, then I'd have a new laptop. Until then I'll get by without one. Is there one? Haven't checked recently. That would be cool.
If people are making money writing tripe like that then I'm working too hard for a living. He avoids any real discussion of the merits of SCO's case. Just read what Novell has been posting on their web site. Read the IP primers Groklaw has put online. Berlind, you're a fear mongering hack.
Certainly it's complicated but not beyond human reason to comprehend. Let's take just one line:
IBM's AIX has a different question mark over it. Nonetheless it's a question mark
This says one thing loud and clear: You've never worked with IBM on a project. They're as Death Star about IP as anyone I've ever worked with. And that was WAY before the SCO business ever surfaced. That's not even going into detail on the merits of SCO's case. But he didn't have to, so neither do I.
weigh the total cost of protection versus the risk of being sued by SCO (or maybe someone else).
Spoken like a true low-level pussy. You can get sued these days whether the other side has a case or not. Some cases are just to keep you distracted while one of their partners moves in on your deal. If the threat of litigation puts you off these days, you might as well consign yourself to a life of being someone else's bitch because that's all you're going to be. If the other side knows that's all it takes, they'll make it a reality.
And before anyone steps up and says that's easy for me to say because I've never been sued...screw you. I've been through it twice already. Litigation is just another business tool today so learn to deal with it. Best thing you can do is keep your professional liability insurance paid up and learn how to find the "oh, shit" lawyers (they're not even always the most expensive). The ones who send out a letter and the other side goes, "Oh, shit, not them." Just the name on the letterhead can make you a bigger pain in the ass than you're worth. I spend time down at the courthouse talking to lawyers, ask them who they hate to see coming. After a while a handful of names will surface. They're usually bastards, but they're your bastards. It makes a difference. Lot of firms just run up the charges and don't really do the work. You have to find the ones that actually work for their 300/hour. Talk to the court house people. Who files the most appeals when they lose, those people are motivated to win.
Plan for it. Budget for it. It's going to happen even if you're St. F'ing Peter. You'll get through it.
ROFL! That's a new one on me. I am an MS guy, respect me! Reminds me of Beavis going, "I am Corn Holio! I need TP for my Cisco bunghole!"
I know an airplane mechanic who started tech school with the same idea. About half-way through he switched to nursing. I'm not sure what scares me more: That he was working on airplanes or that he will be working on people with basically the same skill set. That would be f'ing great if you went to the hospital and needed a new set of turbine blades installed.
That can happen to anyone, it's what you did while you were laid off. You'll be a lot more interesting with an answer like, "I hiked across New Zealand and wrote a web blog about it." Or spent the summer storm chasing, shot a movie, anything that doesn't say, "It took me completely by surprise and I had no cash banked." Which really says you don't plan ahead, have a backup plan, or have any interests.
Another good thing to have is a real estate license. It can cover any gaps in your resumes by saying, "I worked a project for a commercial customer." They can't press you for details because that's confidential and they can't prove or disprove it. If they do want details you can be vague and say, "Their financing fell through." Which happens all the time. Best have a genuine real estate license, though. That can be expensive to get and costs money to maintain. But I find it very liberating to always have a fall back.
...that you can't add additional restrictions to it? Let's face it, this one is pretty benign and I'm guessing it's in response to SCO. You can't claim this work as yours. Hard to argue that's unreasonable.
The kicker is not this reasonable little change or the next one or the next, until the day when someone wants to add something that is a problem. So I can see why it's drawing a lot of reaction. It's not the nature of the change, it's the fact of the addition. I can kind of see where both sides are coming from.
Just fork 4.3 and get it over with. It's not worth everyone getting their knickers in a wad. My laptop can wait another year.
Remember that bullshit story? Piracy is costing all our legitimate users money. Anyone seen software prices going down because of product activation? Noooooo.
You get the burden of proof and exactly dick in return. Same with tax cheats. I like to see them get caught, too, but don't think for a second that means you pay less.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to feel taxed and regulated to freaking death. And I want all these "public" databases to go away, permanently. I liked the world better when we still had a little privacy.
Seems like a very valid observation. Pioneers are the people laying out in the prairie full of arrows. There are going to be rough spots in any migration. Sheesh. Give them a chance.
I have some minor annoyances to deal with using Linux, it is an adjustment. And I will be better off down the road.
Actually this has already started. X-rays are read by doctors in India and so are a lot of pathology slides these days. This is just the next step.
The same principle applies to programming as medicine and anything else we ship overseas. They can charge lower prices because it's cheaper to do business over there. They don't have US taxes, US work place regulations to deal with, US insurance rates or US courts. You make 900 a month over there you're upper middle class. 900 a month here you're sharing a trailer with three other people while riding your bike to work. And you're hungry most of the time because you're trying to figure out how to feed yourself on 200 a month.
I think some of the extra cost of doing business here happens to be worth it not to live in a cardboard box ghetto.
I'm wondering where this is all going to end and what's going to be left of our country when we get there.
Don't forget training costs, your workers will need to be retrained to learn how to use the new systems and this costs money.
Why do people always bring this up like it's unique to OSS? You'll end up paying money to train your staff on a new version of Office on top of the licensing costs. And that's expensive training. The bulk of support calls we get are related to Office. That's like 60% of what our help desk does anyway.
I did a back-of-the-envelope estimate for a customer that showed by replacing Office they could hire one full time person for the help desk and one full time staff trainer and still save one full FTE somewhere else. That was the first year and we did away with the full time staff trainer in year two (50% training, 50% help desk), then axed the position in year 3. This was for a 1,500 work station complex. And that was using the big customer upgrade cost, not the full retail version cost.
That was just based on Office licensing costs, leaving the question of the Outlook replacement on the sidelines. Also didn't add in the savings differential of the in-house trainer vs the outside training budget(most of which was related to Office), but threw that bullet point into the presentation (which I did on OO, btw). Now they ant the estimates re-calculated replacing Exchange with a different groupware solution. Haven't plugged those into the spreadsheet yet, but right off I think that will shave some of the savings because of data migration.
I don't know about the saving a document problem with OO, I've never experienced it personally. I'm sure their response would probably be along the lines of asking the staff if they want to re-type a letter once in a while or have a job.
Anybody else run these numbers for a customer? I'd be interested in comparing notes.
And how do you get a job writing that kind of unsupported inflammatory dribble? Does it pay well? He doesn't even cite any specific examples where something like he describes actually happened.
Government has the ability to review, or hire someone to review, the source code they're going to use for an implementation and there are even gov admins who know how to do source control and compile software (shock, gasp, disbelief). They also know how to monitor their systems for suspicious activity.
Unfortunately, the model breaks down as soon as the core group involved in a project or distribution decides to corrupt the source, because they simply won't make the corrupted version public
What's he trying to say? They're not going to release the code for a public version of...what? And if they don't make the corrupt version public, what's the problem? Are they going to sneak it in to a government office and while the admin is looking the other way jam a thumb drive on the server? A-ha! Gotcha! What are they going to release if not the source code? And when the checksums and file sizes don't match they'll cover that how? Here's a new version of Mozilla, don't worry about the source code, just install this...whatever...and trust us.
Maybe some of you closer to the daily process can help me think of a scenario where that could happen, because I can't.
If someone is making living writing crap like that, I'm definitely on the wrong end of the business.
There is nothing of concern other than the next quarter stock valuation...
Corporate favoritism in government is nothing new, it's been going on as long as this country's been around. The previous generation lived by the motto: If it's good for GM, it's good for the country. But lately it seems like government and business have teamed up in a tag team citizen smack down.
Unless we can put aside bickering over wedge issues long enough to put real reform candidates in Congress and the White House what's left of we the people are going to keep getting the poopy end of the stick.
Until people who steal millions in stock manipulation start doing hard time and actually have to pay the money back nothing is going to change. Unless we can separate Wall Street from the quarterly mentality and provide incentive for being good corporate citizens here, jobs will keep flowing out of the country.
None of that will happen until representatives that put special interests ahead of our interests start losing elections. Though the good news is it will only take three or four getting the boot for the rest to take notice. A couple political heads on pikes, from both parties, really does make a compelling statement.
I'm just not confident we can put aside our differences long enough to get it done.
Slashdot Mirror
But can we mount a "laser" on its nose? Come on, people, what good is a robot guard without a laser?
But they didn't say anything about RBC and RBC won't say who the big investor was. If MS funneled the money through RBC they could still claim not having any relationship with Baystar was the truth.
Outstanding idea. Doesn't cost that much for the gear, spread it out over a couple years. You'll meet some really interesting people and maybe, just maybe stumble on something that sells. We were kicking around an idea for a local soap opera where the story lines were distantly (insert innocent look here) drawn from the local rumor mill.
Here's another idea. Switch off the fucking TV and rejoin life, already in progress. That's why I've avoided installing MythTV. Just what I need, a reason to watch more TV.
How do you know that's not exactly what he did? Along with copies to the FTC and SEC? I don't know either and the article doesn't say. This material is months old and we don't know when ESR received it.
IBM may have known all along MS was working through a lackey and doesn't care. If it wasn't SCO it would've been someone else, maybe someone with a smarter CEO. Maybe IBM just decided to duke it out now and get it over with. I'm just speculating but it's not out of realm of possibility.
Overall this has been a positive for Linux. So it wouldn't surprise me if MS is behind it. They've become very adept at shooting themselves in the foot the last few years.
What's odd is when you look at Linux, it's taking the IT industry by storm. And look at all the new jobs being created. Whole new industries popping up all over in implementation, support, in new distributions, embedded applications. It's not just a software product, it's an economy unto itself.
I don't know how anyone makes the argument there's no money in FOSS. Whole industries exist because of free software.
I'd suggest start working on your own business. It's not that hard to do. And with companies pushing more of the grunt paperwork down on already over-worked people, you might find it's less work than some of you are doing now. The big expense for most people is health insurance.
The same way you do for any product on the market today. Who knows where Windows, Office, Exchange or anything else is going to be in five years. What the hell difference does it make in a cost projection?
There are a lot of loose ends you'd better tie up in your arguement.
Have you ever actually done a cost projection? Sometimes you use a 3 year life cycle window, sometimes five, depending on long you're guessing it will be until EOM (End of Mission), and that's always a guesstimate. Hardware used to be 3 automatically, now they want five.
Their core strength is in Server market...
Who are you talking about? Sun? OpenOffice isn't managed by Sun, you're comparing apples and oranges. You might be confusing OpenOffice with StarOffice.
and this 'desktop' redheaded stepchild they purchased from a failed German company is the 'flagship' that people are supposed to choose instead of Microsoft Office?
Spoken like someone who has never tried it. Unfortunately for MS swills like yourself it's becoming a very capable product. More than enough functionality for all but the top tier of productivity users in most organizations. And not even missing a whole lot on the top level. The biggest complaint from the power users was it needed something like Access. The DBA's were very happy it didn't have it because if you've ever actually worked in IT, you'd know that one of the things DBA's absolutely f'ing hate is trying to upsize some junior genius first Access database that the department now considers mission critical. Complete with tables that don't relate, zero normalization, nvarchar (50) for every char field, huge blocks of NULL values inside never ending do-all tables. But how would you know anything about that?
I think you're the one who needs to go back to school, Einstein. And, by the way, you spelled "argument" wrong.
Maybe I'm just really bad with spreadsheets, but I've never gotten a five year projection on Windows v Linux to come out in favor of Windows and positively never had OpenOffice come in as more expensive than Office on Windows.
Hey, if there any accounting types here maybe we could do kind of an open source TCO analysis. Make it public and let people comment on it. Pick a medium size business as a standard...say 500 work stations. Is that fair? Too big? Too small? It's hard because there are so many variables depending on what type of business it is. Ernie Ball was able to throw MS out. Be interesting to see how their IT costs have changed. And how do you include a $90,000 BSA fine in TCO calculations?
But consider a scenario when a super bug from a lab gets out when medical services are already overwhelmed by a natural disaster or a break down in civil order. Or gets loose in countries with little existing medical care. That would be your nightmare scenario on steroids.
I had this vision of builidng a solar powered cluster. But couldn't think of anything useful to do with it at home. If I could get it to render video, then it's useful. Solar power...just because I can. 200 watts isn't that expensive of a battery pack. Could probably calculate the panel size and cost but not until I can think of a reason to build one.
A simple example. A company would like to adopt OpenOffice but are put off by one or even several minor things that OO doesn't do. Maybe another company in a similar business has the same issues. They team up and pay a couple programmers a small amount in comparison to their MS licensing costs to develop the features that OO lacks. Certainly other companies will benefit from their action, but everyone benefits by having commodity office productivity software they can use for free. Other companies add different features and again the core product gets better for everyone. Companies contributing are acting in their own self-interest by funding small changes that are important to them. Everyone pays a little, everyone gains a lot. Even the inevitable freeloaders don't upset the economics. The contributors are still saving vastly more in long term costs than they're throwing at the developers.
The reason that model works today where it didn't a few years ago is having very functional and mature OSS products to use as a starting point. And the cost of development is dropping with the influence of outsourcing. The model would break down if the project started from scratch at late 90's development costs because the sunk costs would be so much higher.
I think it's the future, maybe IBM does too. *shrug* One can hope.
If there was a standard board and configuration for laptops that I could build myself, then I'd have a new laptop. Until then I'll get by without one. Is there one? Haven't checked recently. That would be cool.
Certainly it's complicated but not beyond human reason to comprehend. Let's take just one line:
IBM's AIX has a different question mark over it. Nonetheless it's a question mark
This says one thing loud and clear: You've never worked with IBM on a project. They're as Death Star about IP as anyone I've ever worked with. And that was WAY before the SCO business ever surfaced. That's not even going into detail on the merits of SCO's case. But he didn't have to, so neither do I.
weigh the total cost of protection versus the risk of being sued by SCO (or maybe someone else).
Spoken like a true low-level pussy. You can get sued these days whether the other side has a case or not. Some cases are just to keep you distracted while one of their partners moves in on your deal. If the threat of litigation puts you off these days, you might as well consign yourself to a life of being someone else's bitch because that's all you're going to be. If the other side knows that's all it takes, they'll make it a reality.
And before anyone steps up and says that's easy for me to say because I've never been sued...screw you. I've been through it twice already. Litigation is just another business tool today so learn to deal with it. Best thing you can do is keep your professional liability insurance paid up and learn how to find the "oh, shit" lawyers (they're not even always the most expensive). The ones who send out a letter and the other side goes, "Oh, shit, not them." Just the name on the letterhead can make you a bigger pain in the ass than you're worth. I spend time down at the courthouse talking to lawyers, ask them who they hate to see coming. After a while a handful of names will surface. They're usually bastards, but they're your bastards. It makes a difference. Lot of firms just run up the charges and don't really do the work. You have to find the ones that actually work for their 300/hour. Talk to the court house people. Who files the most appeals when they lose, those people are motivated to win.
Plan for it. Budget for it. It's going to happen even if you're St. F'ing Peter. You'll get through it.
I know an airplane mechanic who started tech school with the same idea. About half-way through he switched to nursing. I'm not sure what scares me more: That he was working on airplanes or that he will be working on people with basically the same skill set. That would be f'ing great if you went to the hospital and needed a new set of turbine blades installed.
...the electric field put out by my mon....mon thingy...this glowy thing next to my computer with the pretty pictures on it. Mon...mon something.
When legislatures start seriously considering this type of legislation, it's the lawmakers that need replacing, not your car.
I want government out of my house
I want government out of my car
And I really want government out of my data
Another good thing to have is a real estate license. It can cover any gaps in your resumes by saying, "I worked a project for a commercial customer." They can't press you for details because that's confidential and they can't prove or disprove it. If they do want details you can be vague and say, "Their financing fell through." Which happens all the time. Best have a genuine real estate license, though. That can be expensive to get and costs money to maintain. But I find it very liberating to always have a fall back.
The kicker is not this reasonable little change or the next one or the next, until the day when someone wants to add something that is a problem. So I can see why it's drawing a lot of reaction. It's not the nature of the change, it's the fact of the addition. I can kind of see where both sides are coming from.
Just fork 4.3 and get it over with. It's not worth everyone getting their knickers in a wad. My laptop can wait another year.
You get the burden of proof and exactly dick in return. Same with tax cheats. I like to see them get caught, too, but don't think for a second that means you pay less.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm starting to feel taxed and regulated to freaking death. And I want all these "public" databases to go away, permanently. I liked the world better when we still had a little privacy.
I have some minor annoyances to deal with using Linux, it is an adjustment. And I will be better off down the road.
The same principle applies to programming as medicine and anything else we ship overseas. They can charge lower prices because it's cheaper to do business over there. They don't have US taxes, US work place regulations to deal with, US insurance rates or US courts. You make 900 a month over there you're upper middle class. 900 a month here you're sharing a trailer with three other people while riding your bike to work. And you're hungry most of the time because you're trying to figure out how to feed yourself on 200 a month.
I think some of the extra cost of doing business here happens to be worth it not to live in a cardboard box ghetto.
I'm wondering where this is all going to end and what's going to be left of our country when we get there.
Why do people always bring this up like it's unique to OSS? You'll end up paying money to train your staff on a new version of Office on top of the licensing costs. And that's expensive training. The bulk of support calls we get are related to Office. That's like 60% of what our help desk does anyway.
I did a back-of-the-envelope estimate for a customer that showed by replacing Office they could hire one full time person for the help desk and one full time staff trainer and still save one full FTE somewhere else. That was the first year and we did away with the full time staff trainer in year two (50% training, 50% help desk), then axed the position in year 3. This was for a 1,500 work station complex. And that was using the big customer upgrade cost, not the full retail version cost.
That was just based on Office licensing costs, leaving the question of the Outlook replacement on the sidelines. Also didn't add in the savings differential of the in-house trainer vs the outside training budget(most of which was related to Office), but threw that bullet point into the presentation (which I did on OO, btw). Now they ant the estimates re-calculated replacing Exchange with a different groupware solution. Haven't plugged those into the spreadsheet yet, but right off I think that will shave some of the savings because of data migration.
I don't know about the saving a document problem with OO, I've never experienced it personally. I'm sure their response would probably be along the lines of asking the staff if they want to re-type a letter once in a while or have a job.
Anybody else run these numbers for a customer? I'd be interested in comparing notes.
Government has the ability to review, or hire someone to review, the source code they're going to use for an implementation and there are even gov admins who know how to do source control and compile software (shock, gasp, disbelief). They also know how to monitor their systems for suspicious activity.
Unfortunately, the model breaks down as soon as the core group involved in a project or distribution decides to corrupt the source, because they simply won't make the corrupted version public
What's he trying to say? They're not going to release the code for a public version of...what? And if they don't make the corrupt version public, what's the problem? Are they going to sneak it in to a government office and while the admin is looking the other way jam a thumb drive on the server? A-ha! Gotcha! What are they going to release if not the source code? And when the checksums and file sizes don't match they'll cover that how? Here's a new version of Mozilla, don't worry about the source code, just install this...whatever...and trust us.
Maybe some of you closer to the daily process can help me think of a scenario where that could happen, because I can't.
If someone is making living writing crap like that, I'm definitely on the wrong end of the business.
Necessary is a matter of opinion. But it certainly is fun.
Corporate favoritism in government is nothing new, it's been going on as long as this country's been around. The previous generation lived by the motto: If it's good for GM, it's good for the country. But lately it seems like government and business have teamed up in a tag team citizen smack down.
Unless we can put aside bickering over wedge issues long enough to put real reform candidates in Congress and the White House what's left of we the people are going to keep getting the poopy end of the stick.
Until people who steal millions in stock manipulation start doing hard time and actually have to pay the money back nothing is going to change. Unless we can separate Wall Street from the quarterly mentality and provide incentive for being good corporate citizens here, jobs will keep flowing out of the country.
None of that will happen until representatives that put special interests ahead of our interests start losing elections. Though the good news is it will only take three or four getting the boot for the rest to take notice. A couple political heads on pikes, from both parties, really does make a compelling statement.
I'm just not confident we can put aside our differences long enough to get it done.