NMCI, just finished (or is real damn close to finishing)
About freaking time. NMCI is to technology what Iraq is to foreign policy. A bloody, never-ending contractor boondoggle that cost the taxpayers billions while providing no long term value. You could bury NMCI and SPAWAR in the same hole and the world would be a better place.
NMCI aside I think this is a positive development for both companies. It will provide an alternative to Dell Consulting and a big project support source that isn't married to MS. It's a real foot in the door for HP on a lot of big projects. Nicely done.
They should have made a reality show out of this. The school district could dart the truants from helicopters and put a tag in their ear and RF collar and track their movements.
Nice shot, Jim. Then throw a net over them. That would be funny. Truants Gone Wild. lol.
detect that your heartbeat has stopped, display targeted ads on billboards
I can just see it, you're having a heart attack and the billboard above you flashes an ad for Methodist Hospital cardiac unit. Got bypass? Tell the ambulance driver to take you to Methodist's state of the art cardiac acute care center. Surgeons are standing by.
When my cell phone starts analyzing my jokes is when I beat it to death with a hammer and dance naked around it until it loses all its power.
You can add almost any government office to that list. The ones I've worked in range from bland and sterile to hideous. The good ones are merely sterile. Endless gray cubicles and rarely anything resembling an amenity.
Actually, the best office on a military project was when we were stuck in a warehouse while the Navy remodeled the regular cubicle (which they call 'pookas') hell. We could push our desks around and arrange them the way we wanted. There was a bbq outside the back door and we could have our own mini refrigerators and coffee makers. It was also a good long walk from the main building so there wasn't any foot traffic through our office. In the main building there were so many people trafficking through our work space and idiots dialing with their speaker phone that trying to write code in that atmosphere was like trying to write music in a bus station.
If I had to choose between some of those offices and a government office, many of those on the worst list didn't look too bad. Even if it looks like a dump, if you can customize it to your own taste and arrange your work area so it's quiet, that's an improvement.
If all Blizzard manages to get is an injunction, however, cheat developers will likely just wait until they actually get sued before they bother to decide whether or not they will shut down their business.
Or operate out of some country where their activities wouldn't raise a copyright or contractual issue.
Ballmer took over in 2000. Here is Microsoft's stock performance since 2000:
I'd like to see that chart adjusted for inflation. Bet it tells an even more interesting tale.
Microsoft's corporate execution wasn't great before Ballmer got there, but since he took the reigns it's been positively dismal. There aren't many people who can run a multi-billion dollar software company into the ground, but he's managed it. Everything he touches turns to absolute crap.
Ballmer has been a complete failure in every single effort by Microsoft to create viable products outside of their core OS/office software/server software products.
I'd argue that he's turned Office into an expensive piece of bloatware. And Windows should have been replaced after XP with a more flexible and slimmer OS product.
Microsoft execution has been horrible and that includes their core profit centers. Instead of putting their efforts into producing the best software products available in the market (not the same as the most ubiquitous), Ballmer put his efforts into flying around trying to strong arm big cities and companies not to jump ship for Linux and OpenOffice.
he had bred a worm whose excrement made it possible to grow radishes in the dry desert sand.
And here I thought you always had to do a worm breeding apprenticeship before learning the radar absorbing paint trade. That's the way my college career councilor outlined it for me.
Amazon disagrees that it should be required to collect such tax without a physical presence in the state.
Perhaps it's time to think about a uniform VAT for online sales. That would eliminate the need for online retailers to calculate and collect a sales tax for every individual state and could be applied to overseas online sales.
Saddling an online retailer with 50 different collection accounts and a patchwork of taxable items is just wrong. Exempt food, apply a uniform VAT, form a quasi-government corporation to distribute the money to the individual states without strings attached.
You pay sales tax for sales in your own state and the VAT for everything else. It's simple and it's fair, which is why it'll probably never happen.
Although I'm not sure how financially well MySQL was doing before they sold out to Sun.
Still, you don't have to sell the PHB's on RedHat these days and no one questions whether you can get support. Now days fewer people question whether you can get support for MySQL and there are more PHP/MySQL jobs out there.
This is a good thing in my book. Being able to tell a company thinking about switching to Ubuntu and Google services that they can actually get as good or better support from Canonical than Google (sorry, Google but it's true...the plus side is you seldom much need service with Google products). Companies will pay a lot for a scapegoat. Even if they could hire in-house support for less. They'll still spend the bucks just to have a number to call and yell, "FIX IT OR YOU'RE FIRED!"
Have any of you been through this kind of career 'mid-life crisis?'
I don't know if it's a mid-life crisis, it could be good old fashioned burn out. I left a well paying IT job to strike out on my own. It's not easy and it's not for everyone, especially if you have kids.
There's never a good time from the standpoint of the economy. If you let that stop you, you'll never get anything going. Something else to consider, of people who are millionaires, only 25% of them got there by working for a salary. If you want to get rich, to build something, that means starting your own gig or partnering up with a small group. With another reminder that it's harder than you can possibly imagine.
Consider also that you may not need to quit. Explore taking an extended leave of absence. A month or two to de-stress, turn your alarm clock off and read the paper. Take the summer off and spend it with your kid, if your employer will allow you to do it. Three months is long enough to cure burn out. You'll come back refreshed and recharged.
I've made similar decisions in the past, my friends thought I was crazy and the timing was always bad for some reason. But it always worked out...so far anyway. But it's not without scary moments. There will be tense times. I haven't always ended up making more money, but did more often than not. And enjoying life a lot more even if I wasn't making more.
Lately I've been considering getting my welding certificate and just doing something different for a while. Hard, dirty work doesn't bother me and it's interesting to build things.
Don't let fear or the nay sayers keep you trapped in a miserable job. Most of the people telling you not to do it are stuck in a cubicle getting shit on in a million little ways by a company that couldn't care less whether they showed up the next day or not. Being an entrepreneur isn't easy but a bad day working for yourself is better than the best day as a lackey employee.
I think many of these observations were valid and maybe points up the need for a "New To Ubuntu" mode that provides extra assistance for common transitional tasks. But, please, in consideration for those of us a little more technically inclined, provide a way to turn the new user mode off. Or offer it as a separate distro.
I'd be willing to bet the larger fraction of Ubuntu users are fairly tech savvy. If the developers try to foist Ubuntu Bob on users that don't want or need it, they'll lose their most loyal users. Bad for all of us. But if there isn't some kind of transitional assistance for new users, that will inhibit getting users from other operating systems into the ark.
The great thing about Linux is that it doesn't have to be all things to all people. You can shape a distro to the specific needs of particular users.
But invest only 250 million in research that would help put soldiers back together. And the rest of you, those of you not in the military, well even though you're paying the bills, you get exactly dick.
Since it seems unlikely people on Facebook are going to confess to be being a major drug trafficker, or show video clips of their last home invasion rape and robbery, I can't really see the value to society of wasting law enforcement resources clogging up the criminal justice system with the parade of Facebook petty crimes.
I don't know about the UK, but here in the states our criminal justice system is full. We have enough people in jail, more than enough people getting tagged with arrest records over fairly minor infractions. We need law enforcement to focus on the big problems and not be looking for reasons to dump some otherwise law-abiding person into the criminal justice meat grinder because they copped to some petty crime in Facebook.
And we need to de-criminalize a wide swath of drug possession crimes. We're spending billions keeping people in jail for a few oz's of pot. It's really quite insane.
my last best hope is that there are a lot of decent, patriotic and reasonable people in military intelligence (and in the military generally), because the political branches of law enforcement and the justice department have been tainted for a generation by the last seven years.
There evidence that Rove has been using connections in the FBI for political purposes a lot longer than the last 7 years. Those rumors were circulating while Bush was campaigning for governor of Texas.
Funny no one thought it was any big deal when the FBI was showing up and intimidating political opposition in the run up to the '04 election. And that there was never any accountability for ignoring the field reports about suspicious people in flight school prior to 9/11. And now it's a big surprise they lied to Congress? I don't get it. Reminds me of the old phrase "strain out a gnat and swallow a camel".
I believe that most people at the FBI are there out of a genuine desire to do good. But there is a certain fraction of that population willing to use their official powers in pursuit of political gain. It's not the occasional misdeed that concerns me as much as the lack of independent oversight and accountability.
Does anyone know if the FBI is still like 40% Mormon? I know they used to account for a rather large fraction of the total but haven't seen any recent figures. Again, not a bad thing by itself but a tight knit religious community with that much influence over a law enforcement body with broad and loosely checked power should be cause for concern.
But, Microsoft can't ignore the prospect of small, cheap, low-end laptops becoming widespread which are being shipped with Linux by default.
Neither can Dell, HP or any other hardware manufacturer. This trend impacts them every bit as much as Microsoft, although on the whole I think hardware manufacturers should be able to adapt easier than Microsoft.
For decades we've been subject to the hardware/software upgrade circle jerk. When Vista hit the market millions of PC users, particularly in the enterprise, thought their hardware was still serviceable and Vista didn't represent any compelling value. Couple a grown up Linux, that's functional and modular, with low cost hardware and all of a sudden the cost of Vista became a very big issue. And the cost of the hardware to carry that bloatware created a reverse circle jerk vortex in the minds of many technology consumers.
I think a bigger question this begs is what if this isn't limited to motherboards? Remember the lead paint issue? And the tainted food? Once we started looking we found those problems went much deeper than the original discovery.
The potential is massive. Think of all the embedded systems manufactured overseas...flight control, car computers, radar, medical diagnostics. It's a really long list.
To me this is the real potential downside of outsourcing our manufacturing: Losing control of the QA/QC chain. It's already happened with food and toys and we still don't have the systems in place to be certain it's not going to happen again. I believe this just may be the next revelation that the dark side of outsourcing may be more costly than we believed.
Just more of the blurring of the lines between law enforcement and combating terrorism. This weekend there was a big law enforcement effort in the area aimed at combating terrorism. It was really hard to tell if this was a law enforcement exercise or anti-terror exercise. Particularly when the exercise spokesman goes on the news and says, "Any criminal activity can be used to support terrorism."
So that's where we are now. And any weapon in the anti-terror arsenal is now fair game for any criminal investigation. Wiretaps, satellites, National Security Letters, enhanced interrogation techniques, anything goes. We have banks spying on your financial transactions, telephone companies spying on your communications, the TSA spying on everyone....someone want to explain to me how deep this hole goes?
I believe history will pinpoint 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the United States.
this study notes that suicide rates actually decreased with increased Web usage in England
But here they put people in jail for posting information on suicide. Land of the free, provided you're not contemplating ending your life. And the apparent irony never seems to dawn on anyone. If someone really wants to off themselves, what's the problem?
If we really had a free country people would be able to kill themselves and broadcast it on national TV.
Sort of like a political ad I saw tonight where the candidate proclaimed he was "pro life and pro gun". I'm not entirely sure how you reconcile those positions.
I spent altogether perhaps 3 working days trying to remove stupid thing
Those programs are so complex, so woven in the fabric of Windows, I've never seen a repair work. You have to reformat the drive...not just reformat, but blow away the partitions and recreate them, then reinstal Windows, plus scanning the data files recovered with Knoppix.
Even then I won't warranty it. The hackers you're up against today are organized, professional programmers making big $$$ who do this for a living, not some 15 year old hack. They even know how to subvert security and anti-virus programs.
I'm not belittling you or anyone else when I suggest you may be a bit out of your league. Partition, reformat, reinstall.
Just like asking everyone to be frugal and reuse things as much as possible to cut down on overhead, you could also give people incentives to bring in free and open source alternatives to proprietary software you are using
That's a good way to bring it in. I'd suggest documenting the savings, comes in handy during bonus season. I was surprised the other day to run across a company running a survey application on PHP and Smarty. Apparently there was someone like you there.:)
MSFT was trying to sell litigation fear over Linux, all the while the BSA was handing out hundreds of thousands in fines. Maybe there's an IP risk for Linux but positively there's a risk of a BSA audit. I've never been in a Windows shop that would survive a 100% audit without finding something out of compliance. Even the Death Star security shops.
Product activation, DRM, dongles and a dozen other ways the proprietary model has shot themselves in the foot. If you need capacity on an open source platform, just stand it up. Fast and uncomplicated.
And the only machines I trust on the internet are my Linux boxes.
I'm starting my new businesses on Linux from the ground up. All the money I would have spent on software can now go to more productive expenses...like booze and strippers. Okay, that's not true but it's nice to have the option.
Slashdot Mirror
NMCI, just finished (or is real damn close to finishing)
About freaking time. NMCI is to technology what Iraq is to foreign policy. A bloody, never-ending contractor boondoggle that cost the taxpayers billions while providing no long term value. You could bury NMCI and SPAWAR in the same hole and the world would be a better place.
NMCI aside I think this is a positive development for both companies. It will provide an alternative to Dell Consulting and a big project support source that isn't married to MS. It's a real foot in the door for HP on a lot of big projects. Nicely done.
They should have made a reality show out of this. The school district could dart the truants from helicopters and put a tag in their ear and RF collar and track their movements.
Nice shot, Jim. Then throw a net over them. That would be funny. Truants Gone Wild. lol.
detect that your heartbeat has stopped, display targeted ads on billboards
I can just see it, you're having a heart attack and the billboard above you flashes an ad for Methodist Hospital cardiac unit. Got bypass? Tell the ambulance driver to take you to Methodist's state of the art cardiac acute care center. Surgeons are standing by.
When my cell phone starts analyzing my jokes is when I beat it to death with a hammer and dance naked around it until it loses all its power.
You can add almost any government office to that list. The ones I've worked in range from bland and sterile to hideous. The good ones are merely sterile. Endless gray cubicles and rarely anything resembling an amenity.
Actually, the best office on a military project was when we were stuck in a warehouse while the Navy remodeled the regular cubicle (which they call 'pookas') hell. We could push our desks around and arrange them the way we wanted. There was a bbq outside the back door and we could have our own mini refrigerators and coffee makers. It was also a good long walk from the main building so there wasn't any foot traffic through our office. In the main building there were so many people trafficking through our work space and idiots dialing with their speaker phone that trying to write code in that atmosphere was like trying to write music in a bus station.
If I had to choose between some of those offices and a government office, many of those on the worst list didn't look too bad. Even if it looks like a dump, if you can customize it to your own taste and arrange your work area so it's quiet, that's an improvement.
If all Blizzard manages to get is an injunction, however, cheat developers will likely just wait until they actually get sued before they bother to decide whether or not they will shut down their business.
Or operate out of some country where their activities wouldn't raise a copyright or contractual issue.
Ballmer took over in 2000. Here is Microsoft's stock performance since 2000:
I'd like to see that chart adjusted for inflation. Bet it tells an even more interesting tale.
Microsoft's corporate execution wasn't great before Ballmer got there, but since he took the reigns it's been positively dismal. There aren't many people who can run a multi-billion dollar software company into the ground, but he's managed it. Everything he touches turns to absolute crap.
Ballmer has been a complete failure in every single effort by Microsoft to create viable products outside of their core OS/office software/server software products.
I'd argue that he's turned Office into an expensive piece of bloatware. And Windows should have been replaced after XP with a more flexible and slimmer OS product.
Microsoft execution has been horrible and that includes their core profit centers. Instead of putting their efforts into producing the best software products available in the market (not the same as the most ubiquitous), Ballmer put his efforts into flying around trying to strong arm big cities and companies not to jump ship for Linux and OpenOffice.
he had bred a worm whose excrement made it possible to grow radishes in the dry desert sand.
And here I thought you always had to do a worm breeding apprenticeship before learning the radar absorbing paint trade. That's the way my college career councilor outlined it for me.
Amazon disagrees that it should be required to collect such tax without a physical presence in the state.
Perhaps it's time to think about a uniform VAT for online sales. That would eliminate the need for online retailers to calculate and collect a sales tax for every individual state and could be applied to overseas online sales.
Saddling an online retailer with 50 different collection accounts and a patchwork of taxable items is just wrong. Exempt food, apply a uniform VAT, form a quasi-government corporation to distribute the money to the individual states without strings attached.
You pay sales tax for sales in your own state and the VAT for everything else. It's simple and it's fair, which is why it'll probably never happen.
Although I'm not sure how financially well MySQL was doing before they sold out to Sun.
Still, you don't have to sell the PHB's on RedHat these days and no one questions whether you can get support. Now days fewer people question whether you can get support for MySQL and there are more PHP/MySQL jobs out there.
This is a good thing in my book. Being able to tell a company thinking about switching to Ubuntu and Google services that they can actually get as good or better support from Canonical than Google (sorry, Google but it's true...the plus side is you seldom much need service with Google products). Companies will pay a lot for a scapegoat. Even if they could hire in-house support for less. They'll still spend the bucks just to have a number to call and yell, "FIX IT OR YOU'RE FIRED!"
Have any of you been through this kind of career 'mid-life crisis?'
I don't know if it's a mid-life crisis, it could be good old fashioned burn out. I left a well paying IT job to strike out on my own. It's not easy and it's not for everyone, especially if you have kids.
There's never a good time from the standpoint of the economy. If you let that stop you, you'll never get anything going. Something else to consider, of people who are millionaires, only 25% of them got there by working for a salary. If you want to get rich, to build something, that means starting your own gig or partnering up with a small group. With another reminder that it's harder than you can possibly imagine.
Consider also that you may not need to quit. Explore taking an extended leave of absence. A month or two to de-stress, turn your alarm clock off and read the paper. Take the summer off and spend it with your kid, if your employer will allow you to do it. Three months is long enough to cure burn out. You'll come back refreshed and recharged.
I've made similar decisions in the past, my friends thought I was crazy and the timing was always bad for some reason. But it always worked out...so far anyway. But it's not without scary moments. There will be tense times. I haven't always ended up making more money, but did more often than not. And enjoying life a lot more even if I wasn't making more.
Lately I've been considering getting my welding certificate and just doing something different for a while. Hard, dirty work doesn't bother me and it's interesting to build things.
Don't let fear or the nay sayers keep you trapped in a miserable job. Most of the people telling you not to do it are stuck in a cubicle getting shit on in a million little ways by a company that couldn't care less whether they showed up the next day or not. Being an entrepreneur isn't easy but a bad day working for yourself is better than the best day as a lackey employee.
I think many of these observations were valid and maybe points up the need for a "New To Ubuntu" mode that provides extra assistance for common transitional tasks. But, please, in consideration for those of us a little more technically inclined, provide a way to turn the new user mode off. Or offer it as a separate distro.
I'd be willing to bet the larger fraction of Ubuntu users are fairly tech savvy. If the developers try to foist Ubuntu Bob on users that don't want or need it, they'll lose their most loyal users. Bad for all of us. But if there isn't some kind of transitional assistance for new users, that will inhibit getting users from other operating systems into the ark.
The great thing about Linux is that it doesn't have to be all things to all people. You can shape a distro to the specific needs of particular users.
If you have two networks sending massive amounts of useless data across the interweb.
They're called Facebook and MySpace.
But invest only 250 million in research that would help put soldiers back together. And the rest of you, those of you not in the military, well even though you're paying the bills, you get exactly dick.
It's just insane.
Since it seems unlikely people on Facebook are going to confess to be being a major drug trafficker, or show video clips of their last home invasion rape and robbery, I can't really see the value to society of wasting law enforcement resources clogging up the criminal justice system with the parade of Facebook petty crimes.
I don't know about the UK, but here in the states our criminal justice system is full. We have enough people in jail, more than enough people getting tagged with arrest records over fairly minor infractions. We need law enforcement to focus on the big problems and not be looking for reasons to dump some otherwise law-abiding person into the criminal justice meat grinder because they copped to some petty crime in Facebook.
And we need to de-criminalize a wide swath of drug possession crimes. We're spending billions keeping people in jail for a few oz's of pot. It's really quite insane.
"hey, if it works for IBM, maybe we should look at using Macs too"
Too late. A lot of places, I'd say most, already have a few Macs in the mix. Though it will validate the choice.
my last best hope is that there are a lot of decent, patriotic and reasonable people in military intelligence (and in the military generally), because the political branches of law enforcement and the justice department have been tainted for a generation by the last seven years.
There evidence that Rove has been using connections in the FBI for political purposes a lot longer than the last 7 years. Those rumors were circulating while Bush was campaigning for governor of Texas.
Funny no one thought it was any big deal when the FBI was showing up and intimidating political opposition in the run up to the '04 election. And that there was never any accountability for ignoring the field reports about suspicious people in flight school prior to 9/11. And now it's a big surprise they lied to Congress? I don't get it. Reminds me of the old phrase "strain out a gnat and swallow a camel".
I believe that most people at the FBI are there out of a genuine desire to do good. But there is a certain fraction of that population willing to use their official powers in pursuit of political gain. It's not the occasional misdeed that concerns me as much as the lack of independent oversight and accountability.
Does anyone know if the FBI is still like 40% Mormon? I know they used to account for a rather large fraction of the total but haven't seen any recent figures. Again, not a bad thing by itself but a tight knit religious community with that much influence over a law enforcement body with broad and loosely checked power should be cause for concern.
But, Microsoft can't ignore the prospect of small, cheap, low-end laptops becoming widespread which are being shipped with Linux by default.
Neither can Dell, HP or any other hardware manufacturer. This trend impacts them every bit as much as Microsoft, although on the whole I think hardware manufacturers should be able to adapt easier than Microsoft.
For decades we've been subject to the hardware/software upgrade circle jerk. When Vista hit the market millions of PC users, particularly in the enterprise, thought their hardware was still serviceable and Vista didn't represent any compelling value. Couple a grown up Linux, that's functional and modular, with low cost hardware and all of a sudden the cost of Vista became a very big issue. And the cost of the hardware to carry that bloatware created a reverse circle jerk vortex in the minds of many technology consumers.
I think a bigger question this begs is what if this isn't limited to motherboards? Remember the lead paint issue? And the tainted food? Once we started looking we found those problems went much deeper than the original discovery.
The potential is massive. Think of all the embedded systems manufactured overseas...flight control, car computers, radar, medical diagnostics. It's a really long list.
To me this is the real potential downside of outsourcing our manufacturing: Losing control of the QA/QC chain. It's already happened with food and toys and we still don't have the systems in place to be certain it's not going to happen again. I believe this just may be the next revelation that the dark side of outsourcing may be more costly than we believed.
deleting and reinstalling 50 libraries to fix a dependency hell broken by the aforementioned apt-get update
I'm running Ubuntu on five different machines and that's never happened on any of them.
Overall, the automatic apt-get updates on my Ubuntu boxes work better than Windows update.
Just more of the blurring of the lines between law enforcement and combating terrorism. This weekend there was a big law enforcement effort in the area aimed at combating terrorism. It was really hard to tell if this was a law enforcement exercise or anti-terror exercise. Particularly when the exercise spokesman goes on the news and says, "Any criminal activity can be used to support terrorism."
So that's where we are now. And any weapon in the anti-terror arsenal is now fair game for any criminal investigation. Wiretaps, satellites, National Security Letters, enhanced interrogation techniques, anything goes. We have banks spying on your financial transactions, telephone companies spying on your communications, the TSA spying on everyone....someone want to explain to me how deep this hole goes?
I believe history will pinpoint 9/11 as the beginning of the end of the United States.
this study notes that suicide rates actually decreased with increased Web usage in England
But here they put people in jail for posting information on suicide. Land of the free, provided you're not contemplating ending your life. And the apparent irony never seems to dawn on anyone. If someone really wants to off themselves, what's the problem?
If we really had a free country people would be able to kill themselves and broadcast it on national TV.
Sort of like a political ad I saw tonight where the candidate proclaimed he was "pro life and pro gun". I'm not entirely sure how you reconcile those positions.
I spent altogether perhaps 3 working days trying to remove stupid thing
Those programs are so complex, so woven in the fabric of Windows, I've never seen a repair work. You have to reformat the drive...not just reformat, but blow away the partitions and recreate them, then reinstal Windows, plus scanning the data files recovered with Knoppix.
Even then I won't warranty it. The hackers you're up against today are organized, professional programmers making big $$$ who do this for a living, not some 15 year old hack. They even know how to subvert security and anti-virus programs.
I'm not belittling you or anyone else when I suggest you may be a bit out of your league. Partition, reformat, reinstall.
Yahoo + AOL = Good
Yahoo + AOL + Microsoft = Bad
Yahoo + AOL + News Corp = Ugly
Just like asking everyone to be frugal and reuse things as much as possible to cut down on overhead, you could also give people incentives to bring in free and open source alternatives to proprietary software you are using
That's a good way to bring it in. I'd suggest documenting the savings, comes in handy during bonus season. I was surprised the other day to run across a company running a survey application on PHP and Smarty. Apparently there was someone like you there. :)
MSFT was trying to sell litigation fear over Linux, all the while the BSA was handing out hundreds of thousands in fines. Maybe there's an IP risk for Linux but positively there's a risk of a BSA audit. I've never been in a Windows shop that would survive a 100% audit without finding something out of compliance. Even the Death Star security shops.
Product activation, DRM, dongles and a dozen other ways the proprietary model has shot themselves in the foot. If you need capacity on an open source platform, just stand it up. Fast and uncomplicated.
And the only machines I trust on the internet are my Linux boxes.
I'm starting my new businesses on Linux from the ground up. All the money I would have spent on software can now go to more productive expenses...like booze and strippers. Okay, that's not true but it's nice to have the option.
Unless they're deductible.