We won. Isn't it weird, the moment you realize the outcome of the battle is no longer in doubt? There is joy but tinged with a little sadness. No more war. Sort of the way Patton felt when WWII was over. It's been an epic battle, David and Goliath all over again. Oh, the giant's not dead yet, but it's only a matter of time. Between India, China, Japan and Korea about half the world's population just switched to Linux. O-ver. Between Asia and Europe they'll back us into switching at some point.
I don't feel a bit sorry for MS. I've never seen a company work so hard to fuck themselves since the AutoDesk days. Over the years they'll fade into the IT background. They'll probably survive in some fashion, look at Novel.
Man, it was fun there for a while. Aren't you going to miss the battle, just a little?
Big surprise, huh? That SCO filed for an extension to Feb. 2004 so they can keep posturing in the meantime. What scumbags.
Some of you have expressed sympathy for SCO employees, but I don't have much. If you're employer is that unscrupulous, it's time to change jobs. Yes, the job market is tight, but not THAT tight. It's been worse. I remember the 80's, near 9% unemployment. That was bad. We had to walk barefoot in the snow to the interviews, up hill in both directions. Okay, not that bad, but worse than now.
I always keep an emergency back-up career around for just such an emergency. You can't count on anyone but number one anymore. If my employer was the pariah of the IT world, I'd jump over to my sideline job and tell them to cram it. As it is my current day job is almost fanatical in the opposite direction. They're frighteningly scrupulous. You'd never hear them talk like McBride. In fact, you don't ever hear from them at all, about anything. And that's one of the reasons they keep getting business. Because they keep quiet and get the job done. Maybe SCO could learn from them.
The only reason that number would be a surprise is that it's so low. The worst thing you can do with Linux is to let MCSE's implement it with the same habits they learned as Windows admins. In which case it can be the worst of both worlds. Of course shops that let their MS certified people implement Linux are going to have a switch-back rate. The surprise is that it's only 5%. I would've guessed a bunch of Wintel techs installing Lintel servers would have a much higher rate of revision.
Instead of being bad news, I think those stats speak volumes about how good Linux really is. That means a bunch of those Wintel techs discovered Linux is really pretty good. 5% could also be the SCO effect, giving the gutless CIO's and convenient excuse to justify the expense of 2003 servers. Again, a surprise only because the number is so low. I don't know what some of you are chomping at the bit about anyway. Look at the stock market: It's not the occasional up or down tick you're concerned about, it's the average over time. And over time Linux is going to stomp all over everything else, not just Windows. There are going to be a lot of proprietary casualties burning in the ditch of the Operating System Highway in the future.
In what it says about organizational dynamics. What's most interesting to me is to see what sometimes happens in big corporations happen to NASA. These are my own observations, not a scientific study. But it seems like the same qualities that make a company or organization great sometimes disappear when they arrive at bigdom, where ever that is in their growth cycle. NASA didn't achieve greatness with a bunch of mid-level political managers. They came in after NASA was an institution. They weren't part of the organizational history.
That would be a good example of irony. Another good example is Microshaft and Intel farming out their programming overseas, then whining like a bitch when a those very same nations collaborate to cut them out of the equation. Or is that hypocrisy? I get confused myself sometimes.:)
Is that the Chinese risk not recognizing DRM and other media control technologies. If 1/3 of the planet's population opts out, how are they ever going to be able to stuff digital rights management down the rest of our throats? The nerve of those people throwing a crimp in those carefully crafted plans! I somehow don't think the Chinese are going to lay awake nights worrying about being marginalized.
And of course Intel welcomes the Chinese production of high-quality, low-cost computer chips.
In the US, most likely from a coal or nuclear power plant.
That would be true but on the other side of that coin we're not dependent on a bunch of psychopathic goat herders at the ass end of the world for coal.
And with an electric vehicle there is also the possibility of using alternative energy sources for charging. Solar, wind turbine, small project hydro. Those systems get better every day and in areas where electricity is 12-16 cents a Kwhr the break even point can be very attractive.
But you are correct that until we can utilize alternate energy on a broader scale the only real benefit is being able to relax our dependence on foreign oil.
so why wouldn't they have figured this out as well?
Point taken. There are other possibilities. It could be a diversion of some sort while they're working on another legislative angle. Or some type of a delay action while they're working on an alternate technical fix. It's not necessarily a conspiracy, just other possible motivations.
But I have seen collective stupidity take root in executive offices. The air is different up there and it's hard to be objective about your own ideas when people are kissing your ass. The underlings aren't inclined to stand up and tell you you're doing something really stupid, if anyone asks their opinion at all. They might voice mild objections then put their big concerns in a memo to legal figuring they just covered their ass.
The people running Enron and WorldCom weren't stupid either, but they still engaged in a series of incremental moves that eventually occasioned a major disaster. Collective stupidity from people who are pretty smart. All I'm saying is it happens. Look a SCO.:)
StarOffice is developed from the open-source OpenOffice.org suite which as of this writing is still in beta.
Beta? What beta? I'm using OO 1.1 RC4, which seems like a pretty advanced beta. Beats the snot out of any beta software I've ever produced. Besides, I thought it was the other way around. Didn't OO start out life as StarOffice?
I'd buy a copy just to help keep Sun in the office suite competition except for them giving money to SCO. They soiled themselves on that one. I'll probably buy more of their stuff, some day. Just not today.
And neither will any attempts to stop file trading. Even if you could make the penalties draconian enough to make people stop in this country, it'll still be going on in the rest of the world where many get a kind of perverse delight in thumbing their nose at US interests. Even though the music business is hardly a US enterprise, the way Congress bends over for them it's hard not to see it that way sometimes. RIAA might as well be trying to control the tides. Besides, the music industry is so hypocritical the way they treat their artists who feels any sympathy for them?
Tn the meantime they will succeed in breeding a smarter generation of file traders. Wireless AP's, encryption, private music rings...only the naive will get caught. Pathetic. Makes you wonder how stupidity seems to get such a grip on corporate entities. Talk to them individually and they're pretty smart, but group up and the collective intelligence takes a nose dive.
You'd think there'd be some type of liability for loss if a company knowingly picks an insecure operating system for a cash machine. Oh, wait, I forgot where I was. The land of the corporate free.
It's more than just file swapping music under copyright, it's also the Internet as an enabler for independent groups to make money without the support of big labels.
You can set up a pretty decent home recording studio these days for a couple grand. A really nice one for maybe five or six thou. Okay, maybe not a true professional studio but damn close enough for all but a highly trained ear. That's within the range of people willing to scrimp and save for it. You can get a master CD copied with jewel cases and inserts for around a dollar each in lots of 1,000.
If you have friends with DVX1000 or VX2000 and a carload of gear you can add music videos to go with the songs. Okay, not as good as film but still nice looking on a computer monitor or big screen TV if it's shot right. Vertical integration at a price point that's affordable.
I think it's that more than file trading that's the real worry. Those that are persistent, post a really good web site, offer a few songs for download have a chance at making money...and keeping most of it. Without ever setting foot in a major label. I think music has the potential to shift to a ground up industry faster than film.
Two challenges with that: One is air play. As long as Clear Channel is in bed with the big labels on the payola merry go round you're not going to hear many unsigned bands on the air. Hence the fight against Internet radio. The other challenge is the signal to noise ratio. Weeding out the bad music and letting the really talented float above the fray.
Still, those are solvable. I bet a handful of people with the time, talent and a few grand in gear could get together today and build themselves a new star.
For the Economist that was a pretty honest article. Considering the crowd that was about as close to a rousing endorsement as you're likely to see.
It's interesting to see the US being backed into positions by the rest of the world. Like foreign governments latching on to open source. Makes it glaringly obvious that our recalcitrance is a thinly veiled concession to corporate interests. That would make open source software doubly inviting overseas. In one move they can hit back at the US and Microsoft. Pretty tempting just for the value of the political statement, technology justifications aside.
We really are our own worst enemy sometimes. I really hope we can heal the rift some day. We'll get a chance at a good start in Nov. '04, but it's going to be a long road.
Many of us here grew up with very real looking toy guns, army guys, GI Joe and a host of other war-toys and look at how we came out. No side-side-side effects.
Okay, bad example, but you get the idea. Blaming a video game for your child's conduct is right up there with saying the devil made me do it. The video game convinced me to go out and start shooting at people. Yeah, and the neighbor's dog told Son of Sam to go kill people. He should have sued the neighbors! The dog made me do it!
I'd like to say more but my dogs are telling me it's time to go outside and throw the ball.
t did.but I am about to break even on the cost within the month.
How long was your payback horizon? Usually the cost/benefit doesn't really kick in until you're over 12.5 cents Kw. We're at 6.5 here, so my break even is farther out.
My sister's house next door is on the system,with 15 kw to spare.
Sweet. You could run another house with what you have left over. Gotta be nice having capacity to burn.
Hydro-power(Never has went dry yet)
That's a big bonus.
Solar(power storage for 7 days average use.The Batteries are huge.)
Which brand? Some of the big boys are upwards of 200 lbs each. You keep them in their own shed or did you spring for battery boxes? To keep them in our (attached) garage I'd have to get boxes. Adds a lot to the cost and then if we move...whew, lot of weight to haul around.
Granted,I have gone to extremes...
Well, I don't think so, but some people might. Unless you live in town I don't see any reason to depend on the grid anymore and there are a lot of good reasons not to. Ever consider doing a write-up on how you developed your system? I'll bet there's plenty of interest now.
That's like trusting DirecTV or SCO. Why would you enter into a business relationship with any organization or company using thermonuclear litigation as a business tool? If they'd do it to other people, they'd do it you. I think consumers have a responsibility to stand up for what is right by not doing business with companies doing business that way.
Just my 0.02.
The software and management side don't tell the whole story. Combine that with the power grid physical security and infrastructure issues and then you have a glimmer of how thin the electric thread we depend on really is. That's not being paranoid, that's being practical.
It's a challenge from a cost position to be completely grid independent, no matter where you live. But it is feasible, at least technically, to be less grid dependent. The best cost/benefit balance I've found is to have enough wattage to run the refrigerator, water pump, computer (of course), furnace fan and some lights. Doesn't leave enough juice to run a central A/C, clothes drier, or the other big draws. You really learn just how much electricity we use when you design an alternative power system. And it costs a lot of money.
Windows Server 2003 took longer to release because of the re-written IIS and.NET layers. Security was also a main concern, but not because XP or 2000 were insecure.
Holy crap my bullshit meter just went off the scale. XPee and 2000 are secure? HAHAHAHAHA!
Holy crap it's getting to be like prescription medications. Going to Canada and Mexico to get a better deal.
Isn't it hilarious that drug companies claim people shouldn't do that because of quality issues. What? Like the drugs they sell in Canada and Mexico are the ones they scraped off the floor of the factory?
Text book companies are a far, far worse racket. Those fuckers should be investigated under RICO. It was easier to put up with being boned at the book store when tuition was low, but now that cost pressures on tuition are going through the roof it's a lot harder to take.
What's happening in the IT world is painful, no way around it. I've seen good people, talented people on the bench for 8 or 9 months at a pop lately. It's ugly out there.
Like some of the others here I've started moving towards running my own business, a non-tech business. My technical knowledge got me a plum contract in that non-technical field. Strange how it worked out. I've been telling people for years how technology can make them more effecient. Now I'm using technology to make me more efficient. Because I'm good at applying technology I can out-compete my peers in the same business. And the barrier to entrance, the cost of implementing new technology, is a non-factor. I don't need to pay someone to set up a network for me, hook up a DSL connection, install and configure a firewall, set up a web site, improve rankings in a search engine or use a new piece of software. It's a huge advantage. People in complementary services are recommending me to their customers because I use technology to make working with me easy for them.
What I'm getting at in a round-about way is that I was surprised how much technical skill was an advantage in a non-technical field. That can work for you, too. So the $60,000 a year programmer jobs might be disappearing, but you can still take what you know and put it to practical use for yourself in a different area.
...when the space program is being run by pilots. And as long as the space program is training pilots to be astronauts there's going to be a push to keep wings on space ships. The bottom line from an engineering standpoint is that it costs more to boost wings into orbit than a "spam can" ballistic re-entry vehicle. The shuttle was a bad engineering design but politically sexy.
Interestingly, one of the justifications for the horribly inefficient glide-to-landing design was the necessity of sending out a Navy task force to collect a ballistic craft after splash down. But these days who needs a fighter CAP for recovery? A converted cargo ship would do the job. Couple cranes and helo deck.
Also funny was the supposed safety factor a winged spacecraft had in case of an aborted launch. Allegedly the shuttle could glide to a safe landing. Hahahahaha! The orbiter has a glide ratio a little better than a brick. In the event of a low-speed abort, your winged spacecraft is a dirt dart.
If we're going to move forward in space it's going to be in ballistic re-entry vehicles. I just can't find a way to make the cost numbers for wings really work.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't feel a bit sorry for MS. I've never seen a company work so hard to fuck themselves since the AutoDesk days. Over the years they'll fade into the IT background. They'll probably survive in some fashion, look at Novel.
Man, it was fun there for a while. Aren't you going to miss the battle, just a little?
Some of you have expressed sympathy for SCO employees, but I don't have much. If you're employer is that unscrupulous, it's time to change jobs. Yes, the job market is tight, but not THAT tight. It's been worse. I remember the 80's, near 9% unemployment. That was bad. We had to walk barefoot in the snow to the interviews, up hill in both directions. Okay, not that bad, but worse than now.
I always keep an emergency back-up career around for just such an emergency. You can't count on anyone but number one anymore. If my employer was the pariah of the IT world, I'd jump over to my sideline job and tell them to cram it. As it is my current day job is almost fanatical in the opposite direction. They're frighteningly scrupulous. You'd never hear them talk like McBride. In fact, you don't ever hear from them at all, about anything. And that's one of the reasons they keep getting business. Because they keep quiet and get the job done. Maybe SCO could learn from them.
Or a very large homosexual rapist. Let's see him spam his way out of that.
Instead of being bad news, I think those stats speak volumes about how good Linux really is. That means a bunch of those Wintel techs discovered Linux is really pretty good. 5% could also be the SCO effect, giving the gutless CIO's and convenient excuse to justify the expense of 2003 servers. Again, a surprise only because the number is so low. I don't know what some of you are chomping at the bit about anyway. Look at the stock market: It's not the occasional up or down tick you're concerned about, it's the average over time. And over time Linux is going to stomp all over everything else, not just Windows. There are going to be a lot of proprietary casualties burning in the ditch of the Operating System Highway in the future.
In what it says about organizational dynamics. What's most interesting to me is to see what sometimes happens in big corporations happen to NASA. These are my own observations, not a scientific study. But it seems like the same qualities that make a company or organization great sometimes disappear when they arrive at bigdom, where ever that is in their growth cycle. NASA didn't achieve greatness with a bunch of mid-level political managers. They came in after NASA was an institution. They weren't part of the organizational history.
That would be a good example of irony. Another good example is Microshaft and Intel farming out their programming overseas, then whining like a bitch when a those very same nations collaborate to cut them out of the equation. Or is that hypocrisy? I get confused myself sometimes. :)
And of course Intel welcomes the Chinese production of high-quality, low-cost computer chips.
That would be true but on the other side of that coin we're not dependent on a bunch of psychopathic goat herders at the ass end of the world for coal.
And with an electric vehicle there is also the possibility of using alternative energy sources for charging. Solar, wind turbine, small project hydro. Those systems get better every day and in areas where electricity is 12-16 cents a Kwhr the break even point can be very attractive.
But you are correct that until we can utilize alternate energy on a broader scale the only real benefit is being able to relax our dependence on foreign oil.
Point taken. There are other possibilities. It could be a diversion of some sort while they're working on another legislative angle. Or some type of a delay action while they're working on an alternate technical fix. It's not necessarily a conspiracy, just other possible motivations.
But I have seen collective stupidity take root in executive offices. The air is different up there and it's hard to be objective about your own ideas when people are kissing your ass. The underlings aren't inclined to stand up and tell you you're doing something really stupid, if anyone asks their opinion at all. They might voice mild objections then put their big concerns in a memo to legal figuring they just covered their ass.
The people running Enron and WorldCom weren't stupid either, but they still engaged in a series of incremental moves that eventually occasioned a major disaster. Collective stupidity from people who are pretty smart. All I'm saying is it happens. Look a SCO. :)
Disallow: /
Castle Redmondore can keep their greedy lard ass out of my site.
Beta? What beta? I'm using OO 1.1 RC4, which seems like a pretty advanced beta. Beats the snot out of any beta software I've ever produced. Besides, I thought it was the other way around. Didn't OO start out life as StarOffice?
I'd buy a copy just to help keep Sun in the office suite competition except for them giving money to SCO. They soiled themselves on that one. I'll probably buy more of their stuff, some day. Just not today.
Tn the meantime they will succeed in breeding a smarter generation of file traders. Wireless AP's, encryption, private music rings...only the naive will get caught. Pathetic. Makes you wonder how stupidity seems to get such a grip on corporate entities. Talk to them individually and they're pretty smart, but group up and the collective intelligence takes a nose dive.
Auntie M? Toto?
No wonder they didn't want to release the company name when the licensing agreement was reached. All the trash in one pile now.
You can set up a pretty decent home recording studio these days for a couple grand. A really nice one for maybe five or six thou. Okay, maybe not a true professional studio but damn close enough for all but a highly trained ear. That's within the range of people willing to scrimp and save for it. You can get a master CD copied with jewel cases and inserts for around a dollar each in lots of 1,000.
If you have friends with DVX1000 or VX2000 and a carload of gear you can add music videos to go with the songs. Okay, not as good as film but still nice looking on a computer monitor or big screen TV if it's shot right. Vertical integration at a price point that's affordable.
I think it's that more than file trading that's the real worry. Those that are persistent, post a really good web site, offer a few songs for download have a chance at making money...and keeping most of it. Without ever setting foot in a major label. I think music has the potential to shift to a ground up industry faster than film.
Two challenges with that: One is air play. As long as Clear Channel is in bed with the big labels on the payola merry go round you're not going to hear many unsigned bands on the air. Hence the fight against Internet radio. The other challenge is the signal to noise ratio. Weeding out the bad music and letting the really talented float above the fray.
Still, those are solvable. I bet a handful of people with the time, talent and a few grand in gear could get together today and build themselves a new star.
It's interesting to see the US being backed into positions by the rest of the world. Like foreign governments latching on to open source. Makes it glaringly obvious that our recalcitrance is a thinly veiled concession to corporate interests. That would make open source software doubly inviting overseas. In one move they can hit back at the US and Microsoft. Pretty tempting just for the value of the political statement, technology justifications aside.
We really are our own worst enemy sometimes. I really hope we can heal the rift some day. We'll get a chance at a good start in Nov. '04, but it's going to be a long road.
McBride is what you get when DNA goes bad.
Okay, bad example, but you get the idea. Blaming a video game for your child's conduct is right up there with saying the devil made me do it. The video game convinced me to go out and start shooting at people. Yeah, and the neighbor's dog told Son of Sam to go kill people. He should have sued the neighbors! The dog made me do it!
I'd like to say more but my dogs are telling me it's time to go outside and throw the ball.
How long was your payback horizon? Usually the cost/benefit doesn't really kick in until you're over 12.5 cents Kw. We're at 6.5 here, so my break even is farther out.
My sister's house next door is on the system,with 15 kw to spare.
Sweet. You could run another house with what you have left over. Gotta be nice having capacity to burn.
Hydro-power(Never has went dry yet)
That's a big bonus.
Solar(power storage for 7 days average use.The Batteries are huge.)
Which brand? Some of the big boys are upwards of 200 lbs each. You keep them in their own shed or did you spring for battery boxes? To keep them in our (attached) garage I'd have to get boxes. Adds a lot to the cost and then if we move...whew, lot of weight to haul around.
Granted,I have gone to extremes...
Well, I don't think so, but some people might. Unless you live in town I don't see any reason to depend on the grid anymore and there are a lot of good reasons not to. Ever consider doing a write-up on how you developed your system? I'll bet there's plenty of interest now.
That's like trusting DirecTV or SCO. Why would you enter into a business relationship with any organization or company using thermonuclear litigation as a business tool? If they'd do it to other people, they'd do it you. I think consumers have a responsibility to stand up for what is right by not doing business with companies doing business that way. Just my 0.02.
The software and management side don't tell the whole story. Combine that with the power grid physical security and infrastructure issues and then you have a glimmer of how thin the electric thread we depend on really is. That's not being paranoid, that's being practical. It's a challenge from a cost position to be completely grid independent, no matter where you live. But it is feasible, at least technically, to be less grid dependent. The best cost/benefit balance I've found is to have enough wattage to run the refrigerator, water pump, computer (of course), furnace fan and some lights. Doesn't leave enough juice to run a central A/C, clothes drier, or the other big draws. You really learn just how much electricity we use when you design an alternative power system. And it costs a lot of money.
Holy crap my bullshit meter just went off the scale. XPee and 2000 are secure? HAHAHAHAHA!
Two shows a night, he's here 'till Thursday....
Holy crap it's getting to be like prescription medications. Going to Canada and Mexico to get a better deal. Isn't it hilarious that drug companies claim people shouldn't do that because of quality issues. What? Like the drugs they sell in Canada and Mexico are the ones they scraped off the floor of the factory? Text book companies are a far, far worse racket. Those fuckers should be investigated under RICO. It was easier to put up with being boned at the book store when tuition was low, but now that cost pressures on tuition are going through the roof it's a lot harder to take.
Like some of the others here I've started moving towards running my own business, a non-tech business. My technical knowledge got me a plum contract in that non-technical field. Strange how it worked out. I've been telling people for years how technology can make them more effecient. Now I'm using technology to make me more efficient. Because I'm good at applying technology I can out-compete my peers in the same business. And the barrier to entrance, the cost of implementing new technology, is a non-factor. I don't need to pay someone to set up a network for me, hook up a DSL connection, install and configure a firewall, set up a web site, improve rankings in a search engine or use a new piece of software. It's a huge advantage. People in complementary services are recommending me to their customers because I use technology to make working with me easy for them.
What I'm getting at in a round-about way is that I was surprised how much technical skill was an advantage in a non-technical field. That can work for you, too. So the $60,000 a year programmer jobs might be disappearing, but you can still take what you know and put it to practical use for yourself in a different area.
...when the space program is being run by pilots. And as long as the space program is training pilots to be astronauts there's going to be a push to keep wings on space ships. The bottom line from an engineering standpoint is that it costs more to boost wings into orbit than a "spam can" ballistic re-entry vehicle. The shuttle was a bad engineering design but politically sexy.
Interestingly, one of the justifications for the horribly inefficient glide-to-landing design was the necessity of sending out a Navy task force to collect a ballistic craft after splash down. But these days who needs a fighter CAP for recovery? A converted cargo ship would do the job. Couple cranes and helo deck.
Also funny was the supposed safety factor a winged spacecraft had in case of an aborted launch. Allegedly the shuttle could glide to a safe landing. Hahahahaha! The orbiter has a glide ratio a little better than a brick. In the event of a low-speed abort, your winged spacecraft is a dirt dart.
If we're going to move forward in space it's going to be in ballistic re-entry vehicles. I just can't find a way to make the cost numbers for wings really work.