* US retailer W2 processing (maintenance - rules changed annually for all 50 states; some Mainframe Assembler; Documentation long since lost) * US Union Workgang Bumping application (build - COBOL/CICS/DB2; database schema changed daily). * UK Bioinformatics application; (build - JAVA/Oracle; database schema changed daily; DBA didnt use views because "they are inefficient". * UK telecoms billing (maintenance - Death by documentation) * UK logistics (recode; COBOL programmer who taught himself C. Liberal use of goto and longjmp; all data global; no structures or pointers; no memsets; RDBMS to store AND access a graph)
But, the best one has to be the job where I spent 3 months (weekends and evenings) hitting the salesman's mad deadline. I got a crate of beer. The salesman got a weekend in Paris with his wife. Still, all is forgiven because the company in question is in the process of destroying SCO.
The question should really be "What the the world be like without Microsoft in it's current form, where the new form would be multiple mini-MS with responsibilities for the OS, Desktop Apps, Server Apps, Embedded/Realtime, MSN, Services and so on.
This would force more transparent accounting practices, would give more choice to consumers (Office on Linux, anyone?*) and would rein in some of the more "exotic" competitive practises.
However, stood alone, most of the their products (eg WindowsOS, IIS, SQLServer, Exchange, CE etc etc) are IMHO technically inferior to other offerings. Its therefore hard to see how any of the baby-MS' would thrive. They would have to improve (price / quality / portability) or die.
I can't see a downside to that for anyone.
If a mistake has been made it is for Microsoft to be allowed to become so big. Here we have a company that is sytematically cocking a snook at the world's two major trading blocs - 500 MILLION people. Remedies of $600M dollars sound great but at Redmond the conversation will be simple:
Gates: "How much to settle?"
Ballmer: "600M"
Gates: "How much to hire 10 top lawyers for 5 years?"
Ballmer: "50M"
Where most companies would shiver at the thought of rotting away in a courtroom for 5 years, for these guys its an economic no-brainer. That's the scale of the issue and the nub of my argument. Microsoft are now LITERALLY untouchable in their current form.
Anyone who contends that Microsoft should be permitted to continue should consider what would happen if there were only one oil company in the world. $20 a gallon? $30? $50? I rest my case.
Back in the day, bank ATMs were dumb 3270 type "greenscreen" monitors invariably hard linked via leased line running CICS to an IBM mainframe running some transaction processing application written in COBOL with DL/1 or VSAM storage. Something like that anyway. Such architectures were not everyone's cup of tea but they were tuned to be extremely efficient and to handle vast throughput hence the fast response times.
The old green screens were the ultimate thin clients. The only code physically at the client end was in the monitor's electronics. It never went wrong because, erm, there wasn't anything to go wrong with. New applications were simply installed centrally et voila. Again, not the sexiest, but super-reliable.
So, to an ex-mainframer like me, the idea of having an ENTIRE XP image at the client end for what is basically a EPOS terminal sounds totally OTT, not to mention hard work - thats a LOT of deployed systems to look after. It wouldnt be so bad if the XP image was stripped down to reduce entropy, or if Microsoft didn't get to dictate it's update/patch/retirement schedule.
Re your OS/2 observation, big blue's desktop disappointment was able to routinely run as a CICS client hence leverage the same fast network and TP applications. The XP ATM is probably using TCPIP via application servers before your data gets to the big iron. Add in the modern prevalence of online banking transactions and you start to see why latency might start to increase.
Also, I imagine modern back-end systems are doing more that just checking/amending your balance these days. Anyone who has had a credit card stopped because they had the temerity to use it on a foreign holiday without informing the credit card company first will know all about that.
Dry stuff. Wiggle. Rub. Static. Clumping?
Also, someone asked "if you took an earth extremeophile and plonked it mars, what would happen".
It might burst and die. It might dry out and die. It might use its energy reserve and die. Its innards might freeze and die. Its DNA and proteins might get fried by the radiation and die. (Notice how many of these involve the word "die"?).
There are one or two genera that might just have time to kick their sporolation apparatus into action and retreat their important bits (mostly tightly packed DNA) into a dry, tough husk. But thats as good as its going to get I would think.
I like the Beatles. I was even born in the 1960's in Liverpool so that kinda makes it obligatory. Not a big fan, but I like the music, especially the early stuff.
Lots of other people like the Beatles too. Like Oasis and Straw.
OK, so far so good.
Now Im guessing here but I suspect Mr DJ Danger Mouse is not the leader of a beat combo (for examples see above), but rather someone of more "modern" tastes.
Right. So how does EMI think that DJ Mouse is interfering with their market for Beatles sales? I am pretty confident here that DJ Mouse fans are unlikely to have come across the Beatles if it were not for him. Likewise I until five minutes ago have never heard of the Murine Maestro.
We all see further by standing on the soldiers of giants. I think EMI in this case could acknoeledge that and be a little less heavy handed. Particularly given that the Beatles themselves regularly borrowed from 50's pioneers.
Mind you to be fair to them they have to been seen to defend their copyright otherwise it in the future becomes undefendable. Catch 22 for them.
I think engaging some common sense and granting DJDM some limited rights is the right thing to do here given the limited circulation. In fact they have to if only to show an increasingly cynical music buying public that they really aren't all bad.
I complained. Both ways. So did loads of other people.
I have a feeling the beeb is going to find out about the benefits of "lots of eyeballs". It is my hope that they are capable of the mental leap to help them see that suspect software gets the same treatment.
Gah! Who am I kidding, they will probably blame the OSS community for crushing their mail server!
There's a chunk of companies who said, "We're not going to use Linux. So move on." And there's a large chunk that said, "Before we pay for a license agreement, we want to see a settlement or a court decision out of the IBM case. Or if you have some other settlement or court decision out there that we can rely on, we'll consider doing that." /QUOTE
And that concludes's Darl McBride's advice on what your reply should be if you get the dreaded letter.
I understand this is a largely American forum and news story, but I feel its worth pointing out to the good congressman that he can do what he likes with the GPL because that is not going to stop open source here in Europe or (more to the point) in Asia .
The US needs to be on the bus ASAP IMHO. If anything threatens the US economy its guys like this who use money, influence and dirty tricks to maintain the status quo. It didnt work for the British Empire did it?
I couldnt read the PDF past the second page. It made me feel physically sick. I have never seen such a bare-faced collection of out-and-out lies in a "professional" communication in my life.
A child of six could rebut evey single point made in this pathetic dross.
I sincerely hope the recipient reads it, checks up on it and tears the author a new arsehole for wasting his time.
my personal belief for some time is that the answer lies in the use of linked ontological domains coupled with bayesian stats overlying graph based storage. Graph theory stuff.
Lots of technical issues to get it implemented but I think this is the way to go. Of anyone IBM have the resources to make it go.
Anyone interested might want to look at DAML + OIL www.daml.org.
You know, that creature that mostly eats all
the really useful bits like wheels, axles,
long beams, windows and lights, or that one last
4x2 you needed when you had to use a different
colour or worse still, two 2x2's together.
The creature is, I believe, related to those species
that consume Bic biros and socks in order to
produce endless wire coathangers.
Lego is brilliant in a biotech lab. Anytime
you want some mad thermometer/test-tube/ph-meter/
Nitrogen/water-bath/timer thingy that floats
OR sinks depending on how you make it - BOSH!
Labels stick to it, so does tape, parafilm,
felt tip and its colour coded so your bloody
supervisor doesnt nick your stocks.
Then you can clean it in pretty much anything you
want. Not sure about autoclaving though.
You wouldnt believe the trouble I went to to get
my 5-year old basic blocks to play with. Eventually
had to mail order Lego themselves - shops full of
"Mindstorms" garbage.
I'm sorry but an Obi Wan Kenobi figure with one
connector on his head is NOT a piece of Lego.
The whole point is that "Its a new toy every day"
(Great for making biochemistry lab apparatus too!)
We all know big blue will support Linux.
The big news here is INTEL.
Since SCO runs on Intel CPUs, we can reason that Intel are saying this to SCO:
"Up yours, Darl. Linux is going to crap all over you and your sh*tty OS. We are backing the winner. We are backing Linux".
Next, consider these observations:
Microsoft OS' also use Intel CPUs
Microsoft are "involved some way" with SCO
This being the case, can we infer that Intel are saying this to Microsoft:
"Up yours, Bill. Linux is going to crap all over you and your sh*tty OS. We are backing the winner. We are backing Linux".
Any firm that has already committed to a Linux/BSD/OSS strategy will have done so some time ago.
Turning a big firm like IBM, Ford or Unilever around (recent Linux converts) is a big, big task that needs a lot of planning and manpower. Any way up you put it, its an expensive undertaking. Such undertakings are made at board level and after a lot of due diligence.
A little company like SCO throwing its toys out of the pram will not be enough to reverse such a decision. A sysadm somewhere may have been asked to write a plan B and/or imapct analysis if the decision went SCO's way.
If I was CIO of IBFordLever (thought Im far from it TBH) these would be my four ways to go:
a) BSD or other decent Intel OS
b) Let SCO take me to court ( I have deep pockets)
c) Sue SCO into oblivion (ditto)
d) Pay the SCO tax
All of these options will cost me additional money and therefore are not going to happen.
The only valid option is a wait-and-see. Such a strategy has advantages:
SCO's case gets eroded for me by IBM
I get my improved TCO
I avoid my vendor lock-in
The last one is the key as it promotes competition and therefore reduces my costs when the SCO thing shakes out.
The only technical point that is important here is that "OSS" products such as Apache, MySQL, Java, StarOffice, Mozilla, Postfix, gcc et al are all so good and so portable now that the OS is not even the issue any more. I can develop and deploy on Linux and change over later by simply sliding another OS in between the apps and the iron.
Like I always said - its easy to start on Linux then change to Solaris, HPUX, AIX, even Windows but its very hard to go the other way. Big installations and clued-up SMEs know this and will therefore hedge.
I think the one thing that is certain is that SCO are going to be waiting a VERY long time for their license revenues. If/when the bill does come a simple question will be asked in the boardroom:
"Is it cheaper to have our day in court?"
For a bioinformatics firm I know with upwards of 1000 CPUs, the answer will almost certainly be "Yes".
Confession: Many years ago I was a COBOL programmer at several big mainframe shops.
And I gotta tell you folks, Microsoft are welcome to it. It's a God-Awful language fit only for financial and other business applications. And for those who think financial applications are trivial, hence worth the pain of COBOL's God-Awfulness - think again. Financial apps are always having to react to changing rules, regulations and the latest fad from sales and marketing. Believe me (I have done both) molecular simulation is EASY compared to a large corporations general ledger. At least the value of PI never changes.
Example: A well-known US retail company's W10(? - USA tax) program comes to mind that I worked on briefly before skilfully offloading to some other poor sucker.
Check this out:
No specs
No doco
Some of it was in mainframe assembler
Object orientated? ha ha ha
Structured programming? oh my god ha ha ha
Code re-use? stop it! im pi**ing myself!
Variable names like W88_REC (erm, thats it) and code that was all over the place. GOTOs. GOTOs!
Example - every year the US states tinker with their tax levels. Sometimes, especially in the smaller states one guy is taxed in one state, but works in another, except on wednesdays if its raining and so on. So we had code everywhere that looked like this:
IF WS-STATE = 'TX'
THEN PERFORM U201-STATE-TX-W10 ELSE IF WS-STATE = 'NH' AND WS-HOME = 'NY'
THEN... (and so on for 48 other states)
I think you get the picture.
Screw that.
Then there is that reliability issue. Microsoft OSs struggle to match Linux/BSD when the going gets a bit sticky. The level of reliability expected from a mainframe is another world altogether. I remember an old story about an IBM engineer who somehow managed to yank a whole chunk of memory from an OS390 core. Apparently that old chunk of iron soldiered bravely on for TWENTY minutes before ops' screens went red and it finally gave up the ghost, having cleanly swapped out all running processes and parked all the disks. Now THAT is a stable operating system and Im not even an IBM fan.
It is possible that some technical users might be more comfortable taking the plunge with Linux/BSD than having to buy a Symantec license. Im not condoning piracy, far from from it, but the reality is that most home Windows/Office/Outlook/Antivirus users out there today do, or at least have in the past, used a pirate copy of (insert product name here).
In fact, there is evidence that the big players even tolerate a bit of this kind of thing because they recognise that to penetrate this "lower end" of the market, "free" is the way to go. (The subtext here is the recognition that today's Business Studies student with a bent copy of Office is tomorrow's Managing Director of Ford. - IBM failed to recognise this with OS/2 - and said future MD will go gut/comfort-zone when buying IT systems: guess where the comfort zone will be at).
I am therefore hoping that some of these users on a tight budget will find themselves squeezed by a pricey antivirus solution to a (mostly) windows-only problem and see Linux as a viable alternative due to its price (nil), security (better IMHO) and the number of pathogens out there (minimal).
First it was 186,000 then 892,000 now "over a million". Hmm, conflicts. There are other conflicts. For example, SCO wont show the code for fear that the OSS community will write round it, then we hear that it is so intertwined that rewriting would not be practical. Then there's the claim that "rocket scientists using advanced [data mining] tools" are credited with finding the in-doubt code.
Hmm. Students of data mining will be aware that given the right circumstances, "advanced [data mining] tools" will find evidence of Space Invaders code in MySQL and carrot DNA in the human genome - buts thats another story; after all there are only so many ways to implement an insertion sort or a tyrosine kinase.
It all backs up my suspicion that this SCO thing is all pretty dubious stuff.
As an aside: I have a simple technique to see if my kids have been naughty. I ask them what happened a couple of times and if the stories change or differ then I know theyve been up to no good. It never fails.
Messrs McBride and Sontag will therefore go to bed early tonight without a story.
One benefit i noticed with my domestic plastic fuse box was the ungodly stench it made when it and the wire sheathing started to melt/burn thus alerting me to the problem.
Im serious. LEAVE IT ALONE. You can only lose. Possible scenarios include breaking something, getting fired, get put in prison and maybe death. I cannot believe your "management" are letting you attempt this. It is tantamount to gross negligence. A clever person can fix things, yes. But an even more clever person knows when to quit. This, my friend is the time to quit. Honest, mate: Walk away NOW.
anything to get round the SCO suit...
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
* US retailer W2 processing (maintenance - rules changed annually for all 50 states; some Mainframe Assembler; Documentation long since lost)
* US Union Workgang Bumping application (build - COBOL/CICS/DB2; database schema changed daily).
* UK Bioinformatics application; (build - JAVA/Oracle; database schema changed daily; DBA didnt use views because "they are inefficient".
* UK telecoms billing (maintenance - Death by documentation)
* UK logistics (recode; COBOL programmer who taught himself C. Liberal use of goto and longjmp; all data global; no structures or pointers; no memsets; RDBMS to store AND access a graph)
But, the best one has to be the job where I spent 3 months (weekends and evenings) hitting the salesman's mad deadline. I got a crate of beer. The salesman got a weekend in Paris with his wife. Still, all is forgiven because the company in question is in the process of destroying SCO.
..is that they "tried Windows".
Thats GOT to have been a management decision.
Good for the Aussies.
This would force more transparent accounting practices, would give more choice to consumers (Office on Linux, anyone?*) and would rein in some of the more "exotic" competitive practises.
However, stood alone, most of the their products (eg WindowsOS, IIS, SQLServer, Exchange, CE etc etc) are IMHO technically inferior to other offerings. Its therefore hard to see how any of the baby-MS' would thrive. They would have to improve (price / quality / portability) or die.
I can't see a downside to that for anyone.
If a mistake has been made it is for Microsoft to be allowed to become so big. Here we have a company that is sytematically cocking a snook at the world's two major trading blocs - 500 MILLION people. Remedies of $600M dollars sound great but at Redmond the conversation will be simple:
Gates: "How much to settle?"
Ballmer: "600M"
Gates: "How much to hire 10 top lawyers for 5 years?"
Ballmer: "50M"
Where most companies would shiver at the thought of rotting away in a courtroom for 5 years, for these guys its an economic no-brainer. That's the scale of the issue and the nub of my argument. Microsoft are now LITERALLY untouchable in their current form.
Anyone who contends that Microsoft should be permitted to continue should consider what would happen if there were only one oil company in the world. $20 a gallon? $30? $50? I rest my case.
*I use OpenOffice.
Back in the day, bank ATMs were dumb 3270 type "greenscreen" monitors invariably hard linked via leased line running CICS to an IBM mainframe running some transaction processing application written in COBOL with DL/1 or VSAM storage. Something like that anyway. Such architectures were not everyone's cup of tea but they were tuned to be extremely efficient and to handle vast throughput hence the fast response times.
The old green screens were the ultimate thin clients. The only code physically at the client end was in the monitor's electronics. It never went wrong because, erm, there wasn't anything to go wrong with. New applications were simply installed centrally et voila. Again, not the sexiest, but super-reliable.
So, to an ex-mainframer like me, the idea of having an ENTIRE XP image at the client end for what is basically a EPOS terminal sounds totally OTT, not to mention hard work - thats a LOT of deployed systems to look after. It wouldnt be so bad if the XP image was stripped down to reduce entropy, or if Microsoft didn't get to dictate it's update/patch/retirement schedule.
Re your OS/2 observation, big blue's desktop disappointment was able to routinely run as a CICS client hence leverage the same fast network and TP applications. The XP ATM is probably using TCPIP via application servers before your data gets to the big iron. Add in the modern prevalence of online banking transactions and you start to see why latency might start to increase.
Also, I imagine modern back-end systems are doing more that just checking/amending your balance these days. Anyone who has had a credit card stopped because they had the temerity to use it on a foreign holiday without informing the credit card company first will know all about that.
Having read Mr Anderer's comments I realise that the world is indeed what we each as individuals make of it.
Dry stuff. Wiggle. Rub. Static. Clumping?
Also, someone asked "if you took an earth extremeophile and plonked it mars, what would happen".
It might burst and die. It might dry out and die. It might use its energy reserve and die. Its innards might freeze and die. Its DNA and proteins might get fried by the radiation and die. (Notice how many of these involve the word "die"?).
There are one or two genera that might just have time to kick their sporolation apparatus into action and retreat their important bits (mostly tightly packed DNA) into a dry, tough husk. But thats as good as its going to get I would think.
Here are some facts to kick off.
I like the Beatles. I was even born in the 1960's in Liverpool so that kinda makes it obligatory. Not a big fan, but I like the music, especially the early stuff.
Lots of other people like the Beatles too. Like Oasis and Straw.
OK, so far so good.
Now Im guessing here but I suspect Mr DJ Danger Mouse is not the leader of a beat combo (for examples see above), but rather someone of more "modern" tastes.
Right. So how does EMI think that DJ Mouse is interfering with their market for Beatles sales? I am pretty confident here that DJ Mouse fans are unlikely to have come across the Beatles if it were not for him. Likewise I until five minutes ago have never heard of the Murine Maestro.
We all see further by standing on the soldiers of giants. I think EMI in this case could acknoeledge that and be a little less heavy handed. Particularly given that the Beatles themselves regularly borrowed from 50's pioneers.
Mind you to be fair to them they have to been seen to defend their copyright otherwise it in the future becomes undefendable. Catch 22 for them.
I think engaging some common sense and granting DJDM some limited rights is the right thing to do here given the limited circulation. In fact they have to if only to show an increasingly cynical music buying public that they really aren't all bad.
I have a feeling the beeb is going to find out about the benefits of "lots of eyeballs". It is my hope that they are capable of the mental leap to help them see that suspect software gets the same treatment.
Gah! Who am I kidding, they will probably blame the OSS community for crushing their mail server!
QUOTE
/QUOTE
There's a chunk of companies who said, "We're not going to use Linux. So move on." And there's a large chunk that said, "Before we pay for a license agreement, we want to see a settlement or a court decision out of the IBM case. Or if you have some other settlement or court decision out there that we can rely on, we'll consider doing that."
And that concludes's Darl McBride's advice on what your reply should be if you get the dreaded letter.
The US needs to be on the bus ASAP IMHO. If anything threatens the US economy its guys like this who use money, influence and dirty tricks to maintain the status quo. It didnt work for the British Empire did it?
A child of six could rebut evey single point made in this pathetic dross.
I sincerely hope the recipient reads it, checks up on it and tears the author a new arsehole for wasting his time.
the answer lies in the use of linked ontological
domains coupled with bayesian stats overlying
graph based storage. Graph theory stuff.
Lots of technical issues to get it implemented
but I think this is the way to go. Of anyone
IBM have the resources to make it go.
Anyone interested might want to look at
DAML + OIL www.daml.org.
The creature is, I believe, related to those species that consume Bic biros and socks in order to produce endless wire coathangers.
Labels stick to it, so does tape, parafilm, felt tip and its colour coded so your bloody supervisor doesnt nick your stocks.
Then you can clean it in pretty much anything you want. Not sure about autoclaving though.
I'm sorry but an Obi Wan Kenobi figure with one connector on his head is NOT a piece of Lego.
The whole point is that "Its a new toy every day"
(Great for making biochemistry lab apparatus too!)
We all know big blue will support Linux.
The big news here is INTEL.
Since SCO runs on Intel CPUs, we can reason that Intel are saying this to SCO:
"Up yours, Darl. Linux is going to crap all over you and your sh*tty OS. We are backing the winner. We are backing Linux".
Next, consider these observations:
Microsoft OS' also use Intel CPUs
Microsoft are "involved some way" with SCO
This being the case, can we infer that Intel are saying this to Microsoft:
"Up yours, Bill. Linux is going to crap all over you and your sh*tty OS. We are backing the winner. We are backing Linux".
Oh please, someone tell me that they own the copyright to VMS and that they are going to
go after Redmond!
Turning a big firm like IBM, Ford or Unilever around (recent Linux converts) is a big, big task that needs a lot of planning and manpower. Any way up you put it, its an expensive undertaking. Such undertakings are made at board level and after a lot of due diligence.
A little company like SCO throwing its toys out of the pram will not be enough to reverse such a decision. A sysadm somewhere may have been asked to write a plan B and/or imapct analysis if the decision went SCO's way.
If I was CIO of IBFordLever (thought Im far from it TBH) these would be my four ways to go:
a) BSD or other decent Intel OS
b) Let SCO take me to court ( I have deep pockets)
c) Sue SCO into oblivion (ditto)
d) Pay the SCO tax
All of these options will cost me additional money and therefore are not going to happen.
The only valid option is a wait-and-see. Such a strategy has advantages:
SCO's case gets eroded for me by IBM
I get my improved TCO
I avoid my vendor lock-in
The last one is the key as it promotes competition and therefore reduces my costs when the SCO thing shakes out.
The only technical point that is important here is that "OSS" products such as Apache, MySQL, Java, StarOffice, Mozilla, Postfix, gcc et al are all so good and so portable now that the OS is not even the issue any more. I can develop and deploy on Linux and change over later by simply sliding another OS in between the apps and the iron.
Like I always said - its easy to start on Linux then change to Solaris, HPUX, AIX, even Windows but its very hard to go the other way. Big installations and clued-up SMEs know this and will therefore hedge.
I think the one thing that is certain is that SCO are going to be waiting a VERY long time for their license revenues. If/when the bill does come a simple question will be asked in the boardroom:
"Is it cheaper to have our day in court?"
For a bioinformatics firm I know with upwards of 1000 CPUs, the answer will almost certainly be "Yes".
And I gotta tell you folks, Microsoft are welcome to it. It's a God-Awful language fit only for financial and other business applications. And for those who think financial applications are trivial, hence worth the pain of COBOL's God-Awfulness - think again. Financial apps are always having to react to changing rules, regulations and the latest fad from sales and marketing. Believe me (I have done both) molecular simulation is EASY compared to a large corporations general ledger. At least the value of PI never changes.
Example: A well-known US retail company's W10(? - USA tax) program comes to mind that I worked on briefly before skilfully offloading to some other poor sucker.
Check this out:
No specs
No doco
Some of it was in mainframe assembler
Object orientated? ha ha ha
Structured programming? oh my god ha ha ha
Code re-use? stop it! im pi**ing myself!
Variable names like W88_REC (erm, thats it) and code that was all over the place. GOTOs. GOTOs!
Example - every year the US states tinker with their tax levels. Sometimes, especially in the smaller states one guy is taxed in one state, but works in another, except on wednesdays if its raining and so on. So we had code everywhere that looked like this:
IF WS-STATE = 'TX'
THEN PERFORM U201-STATE-TX-W10
ELSE
IF WS-STATE = 'NH'
AND WS-HOME = 'NY'
THEN...
(and so on for 48 other states)
I think you get the picture.
Screw that.
Then there is that reliability issue. Microsoft OSs struggle to match Linux/BSD when the going gets a bit sticky. The level of reliability expected from a mainframe is another world altogether. I remember an old story about an IBM engineer who somehow managed to yank a whole chunk of memory from an OS390 core. Apparently that old chunk of iron soldiered bravely on for TWENTY minutes before ops' screens went red and it finally gave up the ghost, having cleanly swapped out all running processes and parked all the disks. Now THAT is a stable operating system and Im not even an IBM fan.
It is possible that some technical users might be more comfortable taking the plunge with Linux/BSD than having to buy a Symantec license. Im not condoning piracy, far from from it, but the reality is that most home Windows/Office/Outlook/Antivirus users out there today do, or at least have in the past, used a pirate copy of (insert product name here).
In fact, there is evidence that the big players even tolerate a bit of this kind of thing because they recognise that to penetrate this "lower end" of the market, "free" is the way to go. (The subtext here is the recognition that today's Business Studies student with a bent copy of Office is tomorrow's Managing Director of Ford. - IBM failed to recognise this with OS/2 - and said future MD will go gut/comfort-zone when buying IT systems: guess where the comfort zone will be at).
I am therefore hoping that some of these users on a tight budget will find themselves squeezed by a pricey antivirus solution to a (mostly) windows-only problem and see Linux as a viable alternative due to its price (nil), security (better IMHO) and the number of pathogens out there (minimal).
Hmm. Students of data mining will be aware that given the right circumstances, "advanced [data mining] tools" will find evidence of Space Invaders code in MySQL and carrot DNA in the human genome - buts thats another story; after all there are only so many ways to implement an insertion sort or a tyrosine kinase.
It all backs up my suspicion that this SCO thing is all pretty dubious stuff.
As an aside: I have a simple technique to see if my kids have been naughty. I ask them what happened a couple of times and if the stories change or differ then I know theyve been up to no good. It never fails.
Messrs McBride and Sontag will therefore go to bed early tonight without a story.
Does anyone know what format(s) this software uses? MS-based, OpenOffice, XML, open, closed, binary, easy, hard, portable, parseable??
One benefit i noticed with my domestic plastic fuse box was the ungodly stench it made when it and the wire sheathing started to melt/burn thus alerting me to the problem.
Im serious. LEAVE IT ALONE. You can only lose. Possible scenarios include breaking something, getting fired, get put in prison and maybe death. I cannot believe your "management" are letting you attempt this. It is tantamount to gross negligence. A clever person can fix things, yes. But an even more clever person knows when to quit. This, my friend is the time to quit. Honest, mate: Walk away NOW.
...right?