Other than Sun's high licensing costs I'm at a loss on why Solaris would be so much higher.
That may be sinking in at Sun. They're now starting to bundle Solaris with Oracle. My guess is they're trying to get in the door with critical apps on Oracle and then make it up downstream with upgrades and support.
Low ball the OS cost to get in the door...where have we seen that before? Early 90's, some big company near Seattle, I forget their name.
I'm not a big company but I often choose slightly 'worse' free/open source software in comparison to closed source simply because I value and put a premium on freedom.
I put a premium on not needing to run programs on my network that scan for license violations, being audited by vendors or the necessity to "prove" I own software before it will work. I'm not at all sure most companies have a grip on how much time they spend with endless niggling license and compliance issues. I work in some offices that employees have to prove they have a license before someone else will install the software for them.
The real laugher for me is hearing someone express concern over the GPL. Hello, read those click through EULA's sometime. I think proprietary licenses are a far bigger minefield in business settinngs than the GPL ever will be. And that's getting worse almost by the day. I'm sure those costs don't turn up in anyone's TCO studies. The legal department suggesting just paying off a vendor with some bizarre terms in the EULA. It happens.
You've got to weigh the pros and cons and be pragmatic...
I'm very pragmatic, one reason I run all my web sites on a LAMP stack. It's far less trouble than any MSFT system, including and especially.NET.
So collecting of this garbage sure will be next big enterprise after opening civilian space flight.
Please have your satellites parked on the low earth orbit curb on Thursdays.
Seriously, if these can maneuver it would seem like there would be some type of de-oribt protocol for these little guys at EOM. Otherwise, yeah, one of them is going to come through the space shuttle window.
Not me. I'd trade for auto-drive in a second. I'm a good driver, but being able to read or sleep. Have the car pull over and wake me up for manual drive. Even if it was slower I'd opt for auto-drive. I'd especially like to see trucks automated. They're the scariest things on the road.
Maybe we could leave a lane for the people who really want to go manual. I don't think we need 100% to make it work.
Styles, tables, tabs, borders, etc. All of these things were not compatable between MS Word and OOo.
I use OO in my business and have never had a problem opening an MS document or sending one to a customer or coworker. Open a doc on one of the Linux boxes or open it on the Windows XP box, no difference.
I'm not doubting what you're saying, just trying to rationalize your experience with a product I use daily with very few problems and none of those that you mention.
My associates using Word don't get their work done any faster and it doesn't look any better going to the customer. Maybe there are differences in how people are using the product that account for the differences. It's interesting that people could use the exact same product and have such a wildly different user experience.
In other news today speculation abounds that Google is planning the development of a parallel universe. The company has been buying large blocks of so called dark matter, building blocks used in construction of parallel dimensions.
According to sources inside the company the new universe would be called a Googlelarity. Instead of marketing discrete groups of users, Google plans on marketing entire civilizations after seeding suitable planets with protolife and making content delivery part of the evolutionary process.
This is what happens when you stop making things and rely on brain share products to make a living.
We've outsourced most of our manufacturing other countries, so now companies are going collectively insane trying to protect their brain share products whether it's music, movies, software or patentable ideas. This is just extending that protectionist mind set to the employees who think up the ideas.
It's insane. And I'm afraid we're going to wake up in the middle of an economic Pearl Harbor depending on sales of products with no substance.
I know for a fact there are intangible costs associated with MSFT products that can't be documented in a TCO study.
For instance, one customer had SQL server go offline, taking down one of their primary applications, after the last round of security patches. I tell them to test the patches, but they don't want to spend the money. Go figure. Instead they pay me money to come in a fix what stops working. Every time there's a security patch update, I know I'm going to be busy.
For the Linux/MySQL installs I have to keep a book of SOP's next to the server because it's so seldom that anything goes wrong. If I don't make notes how to do stuff, I have to learn all over again the next time.
So, yeah, if you don't make notes then OSS does take more time because you forget what you did last year when X happened. And that information probably won't be on a tech support site somewhere.
With MSFT it seems like you're dorking with your servers all the time. I work on Windows and Linux servers and my opinion is that the Linux servers are more reliable and cost less to operate. That's hard to quantify but every time I see a MSFT TCO study I keep wondering how they get the numbers to come out in their favor.
I fail to see how vista, even if it weren't very convincing, will help linux getting on the desktop.
As long as MSFT owns the distribution pipeline none of the big three are going to make waves by offering alternate operating systems. Consumers can't make a choice when they don't have a choice.
Corporate and gouvernment desktops are an other story though and we'll see a lot of things happening there in the future, I'm sure.
Already happening. I already hear grumbling from my business customers that XP is, at best, an incremental improvement over Windows 2000. There is next to zero motivation for them to upgrade 2000. I'd say the majority of my customers are still running 2K on the desktop, intending to skip XP and upgrade to Vista (which was Longhorn when we had the discussions).
Now that Vista is starting to look like another incremental improvement of XP there is very palatable annoyance. My business users will grumble when pushed into an upgrade, but if the new product is a big improvement they don't really mind that much. But push them into an upgrade that doesn't add much perceived value, it really chaps their ass and they'll never forget it.
Strange how that works.
Most home users are clueless. They turn on their PC and it works and wouldn't know the difference between Windows, OSX and Linux. If it ran WeatherBug, their IM program and iTunes I doubt they'd even care.
Men are smarter because we have the knowledge key that unlocks the mechanical universe:
Righty tighty. Lefty loosey.
As long as we don't tell any of them then they're still dependent on us to change their tires.
Seriously, the smartest people I've met in my life was female. One of my old lab partners, a pre-med. She'd spend less than a 1/3 the time the rest of did studying and consistently score higher. A brilliant and insightful person.
I know, I know. If she was that smart why was she hanging around with me? Hahahahaha
I have one customer the IT head at least has a technical background. She's great to work with. Another has no IT background at all. Guess which shop runs smoother?
It's sort of like the signs that say you have to be this tall to go on this ride. You have to be smart enough to know who to listen to if you're going to run the IT department.
The lady with the technical background has a real enterprise architecture plan, understands the difference between the back end and middle tier and understands the value of that mid tier and what it does. She doesn't know how to program Big-IP or a router but she knows the difference and can explain what they do.
The other shop with the non-technical IT manager...and I wish I was making this up...shows us a 7 gig database with no relationships, no indexes, no stored procedures and no schema. But during the meeting he's absolutely insistent that we have to protect the data integrity of that application. Riiiiight. Does that mean we have to protect all those orphan records and corrupt calculations, too?
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that their network is a bug farm. It's like a spyware showcase. I'm surprised any of their desktops even boot.
It costs the theatre $14.00 for the rights to show you that movie, per person.
I didn't know that. Does help explain the commercials and concession prices, doesn't it?
But I'm still not letting Hollywood or the theater chains off the hook. Every business is feeling pricing pressure and I'd like to welcome the private jet flying, cocaine sniffing Hollywood fat butts to the party. Take some aspirin for that hangover and start figuring out how to make the deal better for everyone.
And theaters better come up with an experience that's better than what I can get at home with a 1,000 dollar video projector and surround sound system, otherwise they can kiss their business good bye.
Honestly, I don't feel a bit sorry for either of them. Get busy or start planning a smaller theater complex.
The policy probaby had something to do with rapidly declining customer numbers at AOL as more Americans switch to broadband.
I beg to differ. When big companies fall off the pinnacle, there's a tendency to blame some outside force, like broadband.
The truth is customers left because they didn't find any value in AOL's services, evidenced by the rapid non-adoption of AOL's broadband service. My mom had AOL for years, she switched because of all the silly ads she had to sit through.
AOL fell down because they were no longer relevant to their market. Same thing will happen to Microsoft, Intel and Dell. Any big company that starts treating their customers like a revenue stream. It'll take longer, but it'll happen.
The really strange thing is the people who ran AOL into the ground will all walk away with big, fat bonus checks and option buy outs. Just like in the Bush administration: Failure is not a problem.
Or will the US sink in to irrevelence through placing religious dogma before pragmatism.
I think we're pretty much already there. Not everywhere, but certainly in many places and that may be the dominant social trend.
It will be increasingly difficult to maintain economic superiority when we've almost completely off-shored our manufacturing capability. A great deal of the US economy today is centered around brain share products. We don't make anything tangible.
It's a bizarre and unholy union of religion and big business that's slowly turning us into the largest third world country on the planet.
You have pretty much hit on the key metric that is most often overlooked - the cost of the people running it.
A MSFT rep or a politically minded CIO. Looking at examples across my customer base the cost of support is not any higher for OSS applications, or applications built on open source products, exclusive of the licensing costs. I bill the same whether I'm supporting an application built with.NET and SQL Server or PHP and MySQL.
Provided you're not trying to support open source products with MCSE's there are very few instances where the cost of support is higher in either environment.
The minute you need to hire a new guy (or worse yet, a $160 / hour consultant or contractor) to support the environment - you can throw the cost of the package ($100 - $1,000 - even $25,000) right out the window...
You're assuming that you never have to pay a 160/hour consultant (which is a cheap consultant, btw) to support a proprietary environment. I spend more time fixing applications running on MSFT than OSS, using a per application comparison. A perfect example is the last security patch that went out. A customer called in panic mode because one of their critical applications was returning 401 errors. Auto-updates to the rescue. Now some are beginning to come to grips with the fact that apps designed in the current version of.NET may need to be rebuilt or modified to run on the next version of.NET.
Additionally, if you're counting on a vendor for support, you're likely to be disappointed. One customer uses a proprietary application for mapping that was developed in NY. If their system tanked tomorrow, they could get phone support tomorrow and they pay for that. If they need a body to do something, their choices are fly in a tech, at great cost, or call me, also at great cost. But at least I'm not billing for travel on top of that.
If you break down the hourly support cost in a MSFT environment, you'll be surprised that it's not that much less. And in many cases, I would argue, more. Then add licensing costs on top of that, way more.
What I'm even more surprised about is how MSFT PR media talking points tend to get passed around like established fact by people who couldn't figure out how to access a single machine in a room full of server racks. There's a reason I run all my personal projects on LAMP servers.
But, honestly, it doesn't bother me that much. As long as the bozos in charge keep parroting those talking points, I'm going to have a lot of billable hours.
Unfortunately, the majority of PC users have no idea that this issue even exists.
And it'll be a big surprise to the masses when it gets here. I can almost hear the calls now. "Hey, why won't this movie play? It ran alright on my old computer." Welcome to Windows World, buckwheat. They'll be offended, huffy for a little while, have a passive-aggressive little snit by complaining to people who can't do anything about it. But after a while they'll go on their grumbly way because they haven't been investing in any alternative, learning a different OS or trying out open source alternatives.
I see the same things in my business customers all the time. Except I get to remind them that I told them it was coming a year ago and they go, "Oh, right. But I thought they were going to extend support for that another year?" No, sorry. The next question is usually, "Well, how much is it going to cost?" Then I get to listen to their passive-aggressive snit aimed at me, like I have some command over what MSFT does.
If you want off the MSFT treadmill you have to plan it, start experimenting with alternatives and roll out the change in a controlled environment. Getting huffy when you plug your new PC in and something doesn't work anymore just annoys those of us in the business.
...when you vote for politicians that support narrow social issues instead of electing people who will do the best job for the country. Institutionalized insanity and the inmates are in charge of the asylum.
Charging high school kids with a felony for using the admin password taped on the back of the unit. Who was the brain dead prosecutor who looked at this case and thought it warranted felony charges? Just because you take an oath to uphold the law doesn't mean you also took an oath to leave your brain in a jar somewhere. Third degree felony...right up there with assault, petty burglary, and drug possession.
And what about the school administrators pressing charges? This is right up there with the asst. principal in that one school who had all the girls lift up their dresses to make sure none of them wearing thong underwear.
If you were in any way involved in this case and haven't stepped up and said this is wrong, then you're a f'ing idiot. And worse than just stupid, spineless and stupid. Come on, take a stand for common sense. I know it's rare in government these days, but just try. It'll feel good.
But they probably got elected to the school board because they support teaching intelligent design or putting labels in textbooks that call evolution a theory. I bet everyone in their church turned out to vote.
Pretty soon school uniforms will be the Christian Burqa. The only thing I'm wondering is who will be the first retard here to post, "They broke the law. If you don't like the laws vote for change."
I used to want a flying car. Then started looking around at how some of the dipshits we have around here drive on the ground. Then imagine all those assholes with flying cars. They'd be chasing flocks of geese trying to reach out and grab one, buzzing people's houses, cutting across controlled traffic flight patterns. No thanks. It's dangerous enough with those retards on the ground.
Unless it's strictly auto-pilot. Then the most damage they could do is flying is drinking beer and jerking off. A horror for anyone passing them but not a danger to anything but the inside of their own vehicle.
and says that those IT managers having trouble simply 'aren't looking hard enough.'
I would argue that they're not looking at all. Not only are they not looking, they're not taking sales calls from companies that do support and customize OSS apps. They're making an effort not to know.
I used to work at a contract research lab. Been there, done that. We did a mix of government and private side research, some animal studies, engineering, and materials science. The interesting thing about being a tech is you never knew what you'd be working on week to week.
And you'd be amazed what people got money to study. The pig farts was tongue in cheek, but not that far. We did get lots of money to study the change in the power flow into homes based on what appliances were on at the time. We got it down to the point we could tell, with a very fine level of detail, where people were in the house and what they were doing. There was a bit of backlash over privacy issues when that got out.
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If the entire country can deal with that every day, they can manage at one school in PA.
That may be sinking in at Sun. They're now starting to bundle Solaris with Oracle. My guess is they're trying to get in the door with critical apps on Oracle and then make it up downstream with upgrades and support.
Low ball the OS cost to get in the door...where have we seen that before? Early 90's, some big company near Seattle, I forget their name.
My apology for the oversight, I hereby spit on Illinois.
And for spelling propaganda with an "o"...because I'm always thinking about it as poopooganda.
What's even funnier is people parroting right wing propoganda. Observe the top ten states for taxing their residents as documented by CNN/Money:
And where does Massachusetts rank? Way down the list. Tied with the liberal sewer pits of Georgia and South Carolina:
30 Illinois 9.80%
31 Georgia 9.80%
32 Massachusetts 9.80%
33 South Carolina 9.70%
34 Virginia 9.70%
Source: http://money.cnn.com/pf/features/lists/taxesbystat e2005/
But why let facts intrude on your right wing talking points?
I put a premium on not needing to run programs on my network that scan for license violations, being audited by vendors or the necessity to "prove" I own software before it will work. I'm not at all sure most companies have a grip on how much time they spend with endless niggling license and compliance issues. I work in some offices that employees have to prove they have a license before someone else will install the software for them.
The real laugher for me is hearing someone express concern over the GPL. Hello, read those click through EULA's sometime. I think proprietary licenses are a far bigger minefield in business settinngs than the GPL ever will be. And that's getting worse almost by the day. I'm sure those costs don't turn up in anyone's TCO studies. The legal department suggesting just paying off a vendor with some bizarre terms in the EULA. It happens.
You've got to weigh the pros and cons and be pragmatic...
I'm very pragmatic, one reason I run all my web sites on a LAMP stack. It's far less trouble than any MSFT system, including and especially .NET.
Please have your satellites parked on the low earth orbit curb on Thursdays.
Seriously, if these can maneuver it would seem like there would be some type of de-oribt protocol for these little guys at EOM. Otherwise, yeah, one of them is going to come through the space shuttle window.
Not me. I'd trade for auto-drive in a second. I'm a good driver, but being able to read or sleep. Have the car pull over and wake me up for manual drive. Even if it was slower I'd opt for auto-drive. I'd especially like to see trucks automated. They're the scariest things on the road.
Maybe we could leave a lane for the people who really want to go manual. I don't think we need 100% to make it work.
I use OO in my business and have never had a problem opening an MS document or sending one to a customer or coworker. Open a doc on one of the Linux boxes or open it on the Windows XP box, no difference.
I'm not doubting what you're saying, just trying to rationalize your experience with a product I use daily with very few problems and none of those that you mention.
My associates using Word don't get their work done any faster and it doesn't look any better going to the customer. Maybe there are differences in how people are using the product that account for the differences. It's interesting that people could use the exact same product and have such a wildly different user experience.
The lead engineer was named Zeus?
According to sources inside the company the new universe would be called a Googlelarity. Instead of marketing discrete groups of users, Google plans on marketing entire civilizations after seeding suitable planets with protolife and making content delivery part of the evolutionary process.
We've outsourced most of our manufacturing other countries, so now companies are going collectively insane trying to protect their brain share products whether it's music, movies, software or patentable ideas. This is just extending that protectionist mind set to the employees who think up the ideas.
It's insane. And I'm afraid we're going to wake up in the middle of an economic Pearl Harbor depending on sales of products with no substance.
For instance, one customer had SQL server go offline, taking down one of their primary applications, after the last round of security patches. I tell them to test the patches, but they don't want to spend the money. Go figure. Instead they pay me money to come in a fix what stops working. Every time there's a security patch update, I know I'm going to be busy.
For the Linux/MySQL installs I have to keep a book of SOP's next to the server because it's so seldom that anything goes wrong. If I don't make notes how to do stuff, I have to learn all over again the next time.
So, yeah, if you don't make notes then OSS does take more time because you forget what you did last year when X happened. And that information probably won't be on a tech support site somewhere.
With MSFT it seems like you're dorking with your servers all the time. I work on Windows and Linux servers and my opinion is that the Linux servers are more reliable and cost less to operate. That's hard to quantify but every time I see a MSFT TCO study I keep wondering how they get the numbers to come out in their favor.
As long as MSFT owns the distribution pipeline none of the big three are going to make waves by offering alternate operating systems. Consumers can't make a choice when they don't have a choice.
Corporate and gouvernment desktops are an other story though and we'll see a lot of things happening there in the future, I'm sure.
Already happening. I already hear grumbling from my business customers that XP is, at best, an incremental improvement over Windows 2000. There is next to zero motivation for them to upgrade 2000. I'd say the majority of my customers are still running 2K on the desktop, intending to skip XP and upgrade to Vista (which was Longhorn when we had the discussions).
Now that Vista is starting to look like another incremental improvement of XP there is very palatable annoyance. My business users will grumble when pushed into an upgrade, but if the new product is a big improvement they don't really mind that much. But push them into an upgrade that doesn't add much perceived value, it really chaps their ass and they'll never forget it.
Strange how that works.
Most home users are clueless. They turn on their PC and it works and wouldn't know the difference between Windows, OSX and Linux. If it ran WeatherBug, their IM program and iTunes I doubt they'd even care.
Righty tighty. Lefty loosey.
As long as we don't tell any of them then they're still dependent on us to change their tires.
Seriously, the smartest people I've met in my life was female. One of my old lab partners, a pre-med. She'd spend less than a 1/3 the time the rest of did studying and consistently score higher. A brilliant and insightful person.
I know, I know. If she was that smart why was she hanging around with me? Hahahahaha
ha.
It's sort of like the signs that say you have to be this tall to go on this ride. You have to be smart enough to know who to listen to if you're going to run the IT department.
The lady with the technical background has a real enterprise architecture plan, understands the difference between the back end and middle tier and understands the value of that mid tier and what it does. She doesn't know how to program Big-IP or a router but she knows the difference and can explain what they do.
The other shop with the non-technical IT manager...and I wish I was making this up...shows us a 7 gig database with no relationships, no indexes, no stored procedures and no schema. But during the meeting he's absolutely insistent that we have to protect the data integrity of that application. Riiiiight. Does that mean we have to protect all those orphan records and corrupt calculations, too?
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that their network is a bug farm. It's like a spyware showcase. I'm surprised any of their desktops even boot.
I didn't know that. Does help explain the commercials and concession prices, doesn't it?
But I'm still not letting Hollywood or the theater chains off the hook. Every business is feeling pricing pressure and I'd like to welcome the private jet flying, cocaine sniffing Hollywood fat butts to the party. Take some aspirin for that hangover and start figuring out how to make the deal better for everyone.
And theaters better come up with an experience that's better than what I can get at home with a 1,000 dollar video projector and surround sound system, otherwise they can kiss their business good bye.
Honestly, I don't feel a bit sorry for either of them. Get busy or start planning a smaller theater complex.
I beg to differ. When big companies fall off the pinnacle, there's a tendency to blame some outside force, like broadband.
The truth is customers left because they didn't find any value in AOL's services, evidenced by the rapid non-adoption of AOL's broadband service. My mom had AOL for years, she switched because of all the silly ads she had to sit through.
AOL fell down because they were no longer relevant to their market. Same thing will happen to Microsoft, Intel and Dell. Any big company that starts treating their customers like a revenue stream. It'll take longer, but it'll happen.
The really strange thing is the people who ran AOL into the ground will all walk away with big, fat bonus checks and option buy outs. Just like in the Bush administration: Failure is not a problem.
I think we're pretty much already there. Not everywhere, but certainly in many places and that may be the dominant social trend.
It will be increasingly difficult to maintain economic superiority when we've almost completely off-shored our manufacturing capability. A great deal of the US economy today is centered around brain share products. We don't make anything tangible.
It's a bizarre and unholy union of religion and big business that's slowly turning us into the largest third world country on the planet.
A MSFT rep or a politically minded CIO. Looking at examples across my customer base the cost of support is not any higher for OSS applications, or applications built on open source products, exclusive of the licensing costs. I bill the same whether I'm supporting an application built with .NET and SQL Server or PHP and MySQL.
Provided you're not trying to support open source products with MCSE's there are very few instances where the cost of support is higher in either environment.
The minute you need to hire a new guy (or worse yet, a $160 / hour consultant or contractor) to support the environment - you can throw the cost of the package ($100 - $1,000 - even $25,000) right out the window...
You're assuming that you never have to pay a 160/hour consultant (which is a cheap consultant, btw) to support a proprietary environment. I spend more time fixing applications running on MSFT than OSS, using a per application comparison. A perfect example is the last security patch that went out. A customer called in panic mode because one of their critical applications was returning 401 errors. Auto-updates to the rescue. Now some are beginning to come to grips with the fact that apps designed in the current version of .NET may need to be rebuilt or modified to run on the next version of .NET.
Additionally, if you're counting on a vendor for support, you're likely to be disappointed. One customer uses a proprietary application for mapping that was developed in NY. If their system tanked tomorrow, they could get phone support tomorrow and they pay for that. If they need a body to do something, their choices are fly in a tech, at great cost, or call me, also at great cost. But at least I'm not billing for travel on top of that.
If you break down the hourly support cost in a MSFT environment, you'll be surprised that it's not that much less. And in many cases, I would argue, more. Then add licensing costs on top of that, way more.
What I'm even more surprised about is how MSFT PR media talking points tend to get passed around like established fact by people who couldn't figure out how to access a single machine in a room full of server racks. There's a reason I run all my personal projects on LAMP servers.
But, honestly, it doesn't bother me that much. As long as the bozos in charge keep parroting those talking points, I'm going to have a lot of billable hours.
And it'll be a big surprise to the masses when it gets here. I can almost hear the calls now. "Hey, why won't this movie play? It ran alright on my old computer." Welcome to Windows World, buckwheat. They'll be offended, huffy for a little while, have a passive-aggressive little snit by complaining to people who can't do anything about it. But after a while they'll go on their grumbly way because they haven't been investing in any alternative, learning a different OS or trying out open source alternatives.
I see the same things in my business customers all the time. Except I get to remind them that I told them it was coming a year ago and they go, "Oh, right. But I thought they were going to extend support for that another year?" No, sorry. The next question is usually, "Well, how much is it going to cost?" Then I get to listen to their passive-aggressive snit aimed at me, like I have some command over what MSFT does.
If you want off the MSFT treadmill you have to plan it, start experimenting with alternatives and roll out the change in a controlled environment. Getting huffy when you plug your new PC in and something doesn't work anymore just annoys those of us in the business.
Charging high school kids with a felony for using the admin password taped on the back of the unit. Who was the brain dead prosecutor who looked at this case and thought it warranted felony charges? Just because you take an oath to uphold the law doesn't mean you also took an oath to leave your brain in a jar somewhere. Third degree felony...right up there with assault, petty burglary, and drug possession.
And what about the school administrators pressing charges? This is right up there with the asst. principal in that one school who had all the girls lift up their dresses to make sure none of them wearing thong underwear.
If you were in any way involved in this case and haven't stepped up and said this is wrong, then you're a f'ing idiot. And worse than just stupid, spineless and stupid. Come on, take a stand for common sense. I know it's rare in government these days, but just try. It'll feel good.
But they probably got elected to the school board because they support teaching intelligent design or putting labels in textbooks that call evolution a theory. I bet everyone in their church turned out to vote.
Pretty soon school uniforms will be the Christian Burqa. The only thing I'm wondering is who will be the first retard here to post, "They broke the law. If you don't like the laws vote for change."
I used to want a flying car. Then started looking around at how some of the dipshits we have around here drive on the ground. Then imagine all those assholes with flying cars. They'd be chasing flocks of geese trying to reach out and grab one, buzzing people's houses, cutting across controlled traffic flight patterns. No thanks. It's dangerous enough with those retards on the ground.
Unless it's strictly auto-pilot. Then the most damage they could do is flying is drinking beer and jerking off. A horror for anyone passing them but not a danger to anything but the inside of their own vehicle.
I would argue that they're not looking at all. Not only are they not looking, they're not taking sales calls from companies that do support and customize OSS apps. They're making an effort not to know.
And you'd be amazed what people got money to study. The pig farts was tongue in cheek, but not that far. We did get lots of money to study the change in the power flow into homes based on what appliances were on at the time. We got it down to the point we could tell, with a very fine level of detail, where people were in the house and what they were doing. There was a bit of backlash over privacy issues when that got out.
Most scientists believe that science is a way to get huge federal grants for doing things like analyzing the composition of pig farts.