Linux and OSS destroys even more of the value still left in the country
How on earth can you claim this? I've been writing OSS for eleven years, what value have I destroyed? It is as meaningful as claiming that free energy or lower taxes or free transport would destroy value...
The fact is that cheaper technology is an inevitable consequence of any process of development, which is why you can today afford to throw away items like plastic drink bottles which were incredibly valuable only 50 years ago.
OSS is symptomatic of the technology curve, and the point of my post is this: if you are too stupid or tradition-bound to make use of the technology curve, you will, inevitably, die.
I assume when you go to work that you drive a car, and you don't ride a horse?
I assume that you use a computer to post to/., and you don't send your comments in by paper.
I assume that your entire home is filled with the cheap near-disposable products of modern industrial society.
Why, please, should software be exempt from this general rule?
But it's going to take more than a faster CPU to kick-start the IT industry in the West.
Right now, IT is a sunset industry, serving a market that is itself rapidly becoming extinct as entire business chains get automated in foreign countries. Within five years the famous Western IT industry will become a thin service layer reselling products (hard and soft) developed and produced elsewhere.
Building yet faster CPUs does not alter this. There is no way new generations of faster hardware can pull the industry out of its situation.
What can?
Possibly two things. First, to realise that the market for IT is rapidly globalising, and that western technology will have to sell to China and India if it is to sell at all.
Secondly, to realise that this means extraordinary cost efficiency, based on a true understanding of the nature of today's technology, rather than an attempt to shoehorn today's reality into yesterday's way of working. Technology - such as operating systems that was a luxury item only ten years ago is now not only a commodity, it is basically free. The same applies to so many technologies that a business which does not take advantage of this simply will not be able to compete.
Guess what I'm saying is: switch to Linux and OSS before you croak, folks. It just seems to make so much sense.
Ah, of course.NET is internally _totally_ different from COM, has no similarities at all, and my comments about the headaches of COM simply don't apply to.NET.
Thank you for that clarification. I stupidly assumed that.NET was simply one more layer around the old COM code, thus actually adding more to the problem than it took away. Silly, silly me!
Look: my company designs transactional web processing applications.
In 1996 we built a portable transaction monitor that is used today in several very large web applications that run on Linux. The entire TP monitor is only several thousand lines of C, the applications are extremely simple, and it all works beautifully.
In 1998 we were asked to make something very similar, but using MTS and COM+. The animal works, but it is incredibly complex, slow, unstable, and frankly impossible to control totally. When we approach the limits of the system in any sense, it collapses, and we cannot do anything to discover why.
It's not about Windows vs. Linux, this is a stupid misdirection on your part. COM is not simple, it is a mass of layers which can be simplified with the appropriate packaging (as can any technology), but which remains complex, slow, and unreliable at the core.
Now explain once again why I personally am part of the reason for what exactly? Or HIBT?
Indeed, conventional rocket design is pretty brute-force. Big engine, hunking mechanical control systems with minimal intelligence.
Given the capabilities of modern IT, it makes much more sense to use software as the core of the system, in the same was as software is the core of a device like the Segway, or the stair-climbing robot, or the telescopes that consist of a thousand small mirrors, not one large one.
Rocket science has not changed significantly since 1950, and needs a rethink. I believe this project is a solid approach that has good chances of succeeding, and if so, will redefine the way we conceive of this kind of engineering project in the future.
An irrelevant review about an irrelevant book about an irrelevant technology.
Just how is this long informercial supposed to interest us? Go ahead, mod me down, flame me for my lack of understanding, but I have worked extensively with COM+ over the last years and I regret ever starting with the stuff.
Am I the only one detecting a current of counter-revolution in Slashdot? Negative moderations of eminently reasonable comments by pro-MS and pro-RIAA voices we can't identify?
A small voice says: stick to the point, people, or the point will stick it to you.
Often, taking the blame is part of one's job. This is especially true for external consultants.
Secondly, assuming blame is an excellent way of actually fixing problems, since it avoids the "it can't be me" blindspot many people suffer from.
Thirdly, unless you actually make many mistakes, you will inevitably discover the real culprit, and clear yourself. After a few such scenarios, people will come to (a) believe you and (b) stop accusing you because the know you will dig until you find the truth.
I've tried this, it works amazingly well, but you must actually be good enough to avoid making too many mistakes.
Accepting the assumption of blame until proven innocent is also an excellent tool for defusing hostile client-supplier relations.
If you take the easy route and deny blame, people will come to think of you as a cheat and a liar and you will be the first out of the door when the hard choices are made.
Bosses and clients like having people around who they can pass the buck onto.
Interestingly, in cultures with pure oral traditions, singers and musicians (the good ones) are highly respected and can be incredibly wealthy. A musician's place in a culture based on oral transmission is one of record keeper, propagandist, salesman, flatterer, geneologist, and much more. People always appreciate and reward those who contribute to the quality of their lives. The problem is when a middleman decides to cash-in on that chain and take a large % for himself. It does not work, never did, except when the means are tightly controlled by law and circumstance. Those means are failing now, and it's not surprising to see the reaction of the music "industry" as one of fury (judging by the sponsored comments here today). But again, pity is the only appropriate sentiment. Dead man walking...
The statue sits there, the result of laborious work by its creator (made possible thanks to a decade of training at the hands of other masters, but that's another story).
Now the statue is in the hands of a private collector who charges people to view it. He claims he owns it, but the state decides that the statue is far too important. They buy it, and put it on public display. Now everyone can see it, be inspired by it, make rough imitations, photos, even tiny or full-scaled replicas.
Which is preferrable? Which results in a better and richer culture?
Clearly no theft occurs by looking at the statue, except that the original owner cannot claim his viewing rights any longer.
This is the best metaphor for digital culture. totally intangible, yet very important. The discussion of "rights" and "theft" and "ownership" is meaningful only insofar as the direct artist is concerned. All other parties are unavoidably biased, and finally it is the common interest that must prevail.
It is clearly impossible to restrict all creations to "pey per view". Impossible and stupid, for people will simply turn elsewhere and make their own, or steal to view. Culture does want to be free, as you know very well because you are here on Slashdot, proving that point exactly.
Comparing Kazaa users with suicide bombers, burglars, and corporate thieves is fanciful slander, and you know it.
Actually it's a cliche to assume that in Soviet Russia there was no private property. There was, it just belonged to a very small group of people.
Culture is not property, luckily. You cannot own an idea, and you cannot create an idea except by drawing on the millions of ideas passed to you.
Whatever. Make fun of my writing, it does not matter, the simple fact is that even Britney Spears represents culture, and that the ever-faster exchange of culture and ideas is not exclusive with capitalism at all, only with one particular model of capitalism. You may be surprised to discover that it's not the only one, and even more surprised to discover that the alternative is not Soviet Russia.
It is really _so_ 1950's to claim that such-and-such is communism. File-sharing is communism? Kazaa users are heralding the new Soviet Russia? Are you totally and completely insane, or just trolling? It's hard to tell.
Interesting, since I don't actually download much myself. I have a large and rich CD collection I bought in the late 1990s, all encoded on my computers, and this is enough for me.
Nor do I download movies, since I find the cinema to be great fun.
So you may want to read my comment, not attack me for something I've not done.
Perhaps you have no culture. But I doubt that. You most certainly do, and ask yourself how you got it. Was it bought? Was it given? Was it stolen? Most likely you found it, like the air you breath, to be all around you, free and taken for granted.
Artists create, but their creations are 99% built on existing work. How can I state this?
Because since 1992 I've written free software. I've always felt the distribution of my work to be part of a distribution of culture, and it has never felt like robbery when someone took something I made, for no cost, and used it. Perhaps I'm just stupid. But I make a very good living doing other things.
You should stop insulting people (although "hippie" is a strange and contorted insult, the only hippies I know are my parents' generation, all in their 60's now), and you should think for a few minutes.
You're exactly right. The IP laws are becoming as outdated as the English bylaw that prohibits the sale of imported junkets on Sundays.
There is an African proverb: "it takes a village to educate a child", meaning that we are all the sum of a rich and complex cultural heritage. You can't price this, you can't own it, and you can't stop people from accessing it except by force.
IP laws have always been of dubious social value, and today's situation merely highlights this.
Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture, just like when my grandfather leant me some old Jazz records and said, "here, you might like this".
Today culture moves at the speed of light and the RIAA believes it has the right to tax this movement. It cannot succeed except by destroying the Internet.
I'm starting to believe, watching this debate evolve over many years, that the file traders are right, for the wrong reasons.
Human culture depends on exchange of ideas and information, and music and films are a large part of this in today's world. No album, no movie scene, no written text is a personal creation, they are all taken from the pool of common culture, modified, and redistributed.
Seeking all means to do this faster than ever - and ignoring the barriers, such as "ownership", that stand in the way - is the prerrogative of today's world. We simply can't put the genie back into the bottle and start exchanging pieces of paper and vinyl discs again.
The debate is huge, but the results already seem clear: any laws designed to stop the process from continuing will be further and further ignored until they are seen by a majority of people to be useless vestiges of a material-obsessed past.
We bought Symantec licenses for our Windows workstations last year, and despite keeping everything up to date, several PCs got infected (silly people clicking on attachments, mainly). We switched to Grisoft's AVG. Free, simple, and very good. This move by Symantec is an attempt to bolster revenue, and it will fail. They should (a) improve the quality of their product and (b) provide a free version for home users. If they do not do both of these, they will simply drop into obscurity, and this copy-protection move will speed-up their demise.
I totally agree about having processes, what I said was "project management software does not do it for me".
What we do in our company is to move to an 'operational' model (in which planning is easy) as fast as possible. But it's only possible in a mature game, where estimates make some kind of sense.
E.g. if installing a new PC takes 2 hours, it is totally OK to plan an installation of 100 PCs. But if fixing one bug takes 2 hours, no way can you schedule fixing 100 bugs on that basis.
Software development (as compared to operational maintenance) is inherently chaotic not because of the lack of process but because small unmeasured factors (such as the relative skill of perhaps just one person) can have huge impacts on the cost and time.
In my company, a software development firm, our processes are almost entirely driven by the need to manage this uncertainty and reduce it to the bare minimum.
As the article mentions, Lindows appears to be selling mainly to Windows users, which is not surprising.
What's remarkable, though, is that a site like OpenLindows seems quite weak, with no strong community and strange discussions between bewildered users and pseudo-geeks who are assumed to be Microsoft shims stirring up the mud.
Q: "Why can't I access my second partition?"
A: "Since ext2fs does not allow fsck, you will find that only RedHat lets you check the free space on your partitions. Note that there are other disk systems, you might find that ext3fs works better for you."
(I'm not quoting, just imitating).
Why is this interesting to the Linux community? Because use of Linux on the desktop is less of a technical issue than a social issue. Here we have an operating system package squarely aimed and marketed at Windows users, and here we have the beginnings of a web site community that uses it.
It's easy to laugh, but we also laughed when ten million AOL users joined "the Internet". If a significant number of Windows users switched to Linux, for whatever reason, we would see dozens of sites like this.
Perhaps what Linux needs - to convince Windows users to switch - is not one more application, but a community model that actually works for ex-Windows users.
This is one of the basic rules of consulting (before there were IT consultants), and it applies as well to employees as independent contractors.
How to refuse work...
Never say "no" to a client, since you will lose the client. To refuse work, raise the cost until the client decides it is not worthwhile. It is not a problem to appear "expensive" so long as this is always related to "quality" and "performance" in the mind of the client. Perception is everything.
For an employee, the pressures are different ("do this or I fire your ass") but the trick is the same: make your boss responsible for the tradeoffs that too much work implies. Give him a choice: "OK, I can do this or that, which do you prefer?"
Don't complain about getting too much work. It's really a much, much better situation to be in than to have too little work, and you will often find that many "urgent" issues get relegated and finally abandoned when the boss actually has to make a choice.
Lastly, always appear to make the best effort you can, since what counts at the end of the day is not how you actually performed, but how people perceived your performance. Smile, agree, react quickly and professionally, work well with your colleagues, never blame others but be quick to take blame on yourself, and you will find that your boss / clients respect you and value you.
Personally I have not found project management software any use at all, software projects being far too chaotic (in the mathematical sense of being unpredictable due to complex interactions) to be planned. But in more operational work, scheduling tools are indeed very useful.
They're not funny any longer. Please, slashdot editors, stop it. It is hurting when I breath. I get these terrible urges to say rude things about SCO's scumbag evil lawyer execs. My wife thinks I'm having an affair with a girl called "sco", because in my nightmares I repeat, over and over again, "sco sucks, sco sucks!"
Please, slashdot, no more. For the love of god, for the sake of civilisation and the rapid ending of this post, apply self-censorship and perhaps, perhaps, make a mention in slashback. If you really have to.
It's almost as bad as the polite elevators ("Which floor would you like to go to today") in the HHGTTG.
Software should be like God made it: rude, difficult, and flaky. The users need their daily dosage of pain and whom are we to deny this to them? It's the endorphins, man!
Slashdot Mirror
Archos seem to be offering good value for money, and lots of add-on options.
What I'd like to see:
1. Linux
2. Camera plugin
3. Foldable Wifi keyboard
4. General slot for GPS cards, etc.
5. More disk space
Then we have something that looks pretty much like my ideal portable device, and for which $600 is not a lot.
Linux and OSS destroys even more of the value still left in the country
/., and you don't send your comments in by paper.
How on earth can you claim this? I've been writing OSS for eleven years, what value have I destroyed? It is as meaningful as claiming that free energy or lower taxes or free transport would destroy value...
The fact is that cheaper technology is an inevitable consequence of any process of development, which is why you can today afford to throw away items like plastic drink bottles which were incredibly valuable only 50 years ago.
OSS is symptomatic of the technology curve, and the point of my post is this: if you are too stupid or tradition-bound to make use of the technology curve, you will, inevitably, die.
I assume when you go to work that you drive a car, and you don't ride a horse?
I assume that you use a computer to post to
I assume that your entire home is filled with the cheap near-disposable products of modern industrial society.
Why, please, should software be exempt from this general rule?
Sure, the machine will work.
But it's going to take more than a faster CPU to kick-start the IT industry in the West.
Right now, IT is a sunset industry, serving a market that is itself rapidly becoming extinct as entire business chains get automated in foreign countries. Within five years the famous Western IT industry will become a thin service layer reselling products (hard and soft) developed and produced elsewhere.
Building yet faster CPUs does not alter this. There is no way new generations of faster hardware can pull the industry out of its situation.
What can?
Possibly two things. First, to realise that the market for IT is rapidly globalising, and that western technology will have to sell to China and India if it is to sell at all.
Secondly, to realise that this means extraordinary cost efficiency, based on a true understanding of the nature of today's technology, rather than an attempt to shoehorn today's reality into yesterday's way of working. Technology - such as operating systems that was a luxury item only ten years ago is now not only a commodity, it is basically free. The same applies to so many technologies that a business which does not take advantage of this simply will not be able to compete.
Guess what I'm saying is: switch to Linux and OSS before you croak, folks. It just seems to make so much sense.
Just one.
Ah, of course .NET is internally _totally_ different from COM, has no similarities at all, and my comments about the headaches of COM simply don't apply to .NET.
.NET was simply one more layer around the old COM code, thus actually adding more to the problem than it took away. Silly, silly me!
Thank you for that clarification. I stupidly assumed that
I don't really understand your comment.
Look: my company designs transactional web processing applications.
In 1996 we built a portable transaction monitor that is used today in several very large web applications that run on Linux. The entire TP monitor is only several thousand lines of C, the applications are extremely simple, and it all works beautifully.
In 1998 we were asked to make something very similar, but using MTS and COM+. The animal works, but it is incredibly complex, slow, unstable, and frankly impossible to control totally. When we approach the limits of the system in any sense, it collapses, and we cannot do anything to discover why.
It's not about Windows vs. Linux, this is a stupid misdirection on your part. COM is not simple, it is a mass of layers which can be simplified with the appropriate packaging (as can any technology), but which remains complex, slow, and unreliable at the core.
Now explain once again why I personally am part of the reason for what exactly? Or HIBT?
Indeed, conventional rocket design is pretty brute-force. Big engine, hunking mechanical control systems with minimal intelligence.
Given the capabilities of modern IT, it makes much more sense to use software as the core of the system, in the same was as software is the core of a device like the Segway, or the stair-climbing robot, or the telescopes that consist of a thousand small mirrors, not one large one.
Rocket science has not changed significantly since 1950, and needs a rethink. I believe this project is a solid approach that has good chances of succeeding, and if so, will redefine the way we conceive of this kind of engineering project in the future.
An irrelevant review about an irrelevant book about an irrelevant technology.
Just how is this long informercial supposed to interest us? Go ahead, mod me down, flame me for my lack of understanding, but I have worked extensively with COM+ over the last years and I regret ever starting with the stuff.
Am I the only one detecting a current of counter-revolution in Slashdot? Negative moderations of eminently reasonable comments by pro-MS and pro-RIAA voices we can't identify?
A small voice says: stick to the point, people, or the point will stick it to you.
... and I for one welcome our new posthuman overlords. :)
Even if they do have six legs.
To be honest, I disagree entirely.
Often, taking the blame is part of one's job. This is especially true for external consultants.
Secondly, assuming blame is an excellent way of actually fixing problems, since it avoids the "it can't be me" blindspot many people suffer from.
Thirdly, unless you actually make many mistakes, you will inevitably discover the real culprit, and clear yourself. After a few such scenarios, people will come to (a) believe you and (b) stop accusing you because the know you will dig until you find the truth.
I've tried this, it works amazingly well, but you must actually be good enough to avoid making too many mistakes.
Accepting the assumption of blame until proven innocent is also an excellent tool for defusing hostile client-supplier relations.
If you take the easy route and deny blame, people will come to think of you as a cheat and a liar and you will be the first out of the door when the hard choices are made.
Bosses and clients like having people around who they can pass the buck onto.
Interestingly, in cultures with pure oral traditions, singers and musicians (the good ones) are highly respected and can be incredibly wealthy. A musician's place in a culture based on oral transmission is one of record keeper, propagandist, salesman, flatterer, geneologist, and much more.
People always appreciate and reward those who contribute to the quality of their lives.
The problem is when a middleman decides to cash-in on that chain and take a large % for himself.
It does not work, never did, except when the means are tightly controlled by law and circumstance.
Those means are failing now, and it's not surprising to see the reaction of the music "industry" as one of fury (judging by the sponsored comments here today).
But again, pity is the only appropriate sentiment. Dead man walking...
An excellent example.
The statue sits there, the result of laborious work by its creator (made possible thanks to a decade of training at the hands of other masters, but that's another story).
Now the statue is in the hands of a private collector who charges people to view it. He claims he owns it, but the state decides that the statue is far too important. They buy it, and put it on public display. Now everyone can see it, be inspired by it, make rough imitations, photos, even tiny or full-scaled replicas.
Which is preferrable? Which results in a better and richer culture?
Clearly no theft occurs by looking at the statue, except that the original owner cannot claim his viewing rights any longer.
This is the best metaphor for digital culture. totally intangible, yet very important. The discussion of "rights" and "theft" and "ownership" is meaningful only insofar as the direct artist is concerned. All other parties are unavoidably biased, and finally it is the common interest that must prevail.
It is clearly impossible to restrict all creations to "pey per view". Impossible and stupid, for people will simply turn elsewhere and make their own, or steal to view. Culture does want to be free, as you know very well because you are here on Slashdot, proving that point exactly.
Comparing Kazaa users with suicide bombers, burglars, and corporate thieves is fanciful slander, and you know it.
Actually it's a cliche to assume that in Soviet Russia there was no private property. There was, it just belonged to a very small group of people.
Culture is not property, luckily. You cannot own an idea, and you cannot create an idea except by drawing on the millions of ideas passed to you.
Whatever. Make fun of my writing, it does not matter, the simple fact is that even Britney Spears represents culture, and that the ever-faster exchange of culture and ideas is not exclusive with capitalism at all, only with one particular model of capitalism. You may be surprised to discover that it's not the only one, and even more surprised to discover that the alternative is not Soviet Russia.
It is really _so_ 1950's to claim that such-and-such is communism. File-sharing is communism? Kazaa users are heralding the new Soviet Russia? Are you totally and completely insane, or just trolling? It's hard to tell.
Interesting, since I don't actually download much myself. I have a large and rich CD collection I bought in the late 1990s, all encoded on my computers, and this is enough for me.
Nor do I download movies, since I find the cinema to be great fun.
So you may want to read my comment, not attack me for something I've not done.
Perhaps you have no culture. But I doubt that. You most certainly do, and ask yourself how you got it. Was it bought? Was it given? Was it stolen? Most likely you found it, like the air you breath, to be all around you, free and taken for granted.
Artists create, but their creations are 99% built on existing work. How can I state this?
Because since 1992 I've written free software. I've always felt the distribution of my work to be part of a distribution of culture, and it has never felt like robbery when someone took something I made, for no cost, and used it. Perhaps I'm just stupid. But I make a very good living doing other things.
You should stop insulting people (although "hippie" is a strange and contorted insult, the only hippies I know are my parents' generation, all in their 60's now), and you should think for a few minutes.
Thank you very much for this.
You're exactly right. The IP laws are becoming as outdated as the English bylaw that prohibits the sale of imported junkets on Sundays.
There is an African proverb: "it takes a village to educate a child", meaning that we are all the sum of a rich and complex cultural heritage. You can't price this, you can't own it, and you can't stop people from accessing it except by force.
IP laws have always been of dubious social value, and today's situation merely highlights this.
Did you buy AVG, because the free version is for non-commercial use only. You need to pay if you're using it in a business.
We actually moved to Debian and the issue became moot. But AVG is a product that we would happily have paid for.
They are really fighting a losing battle.
Exchanging music is not about piracy, it is about exchanging culture, just like when my grandfather leant me some old Jazz records and said, "here, you might like this".
Today culture moves at the speed of light and the RIAA believes it has the right to tax this movement. It cannot succeed except by destroying the Internet.
I'm starting to believe, watching this debate evolve over many years, that the file traders are right, for the wrong reasons.
Human culture depends on exchange of ideas and information, and music and films are a large part of this in today's world. No album, no movie scene, no written text is a personal creation, they are all taken from the pool of common culture, modified, and redistributed.
Seeking all means to do this faster than ever - and ignoring the barriers, such as "ownership", that stand in the way - is the prerrogative of today's world. We simply can't put the genie back into the bottle and start exchanging pieces of paper and vinyl discs again.
The debate is huge, but the results already seem clear: any laws designed to stop the process from continuing will be further and further ignored until they are seen by a majority of people to be useless vestiges of a material-obsessed past.
We bought Symantec licenses for our Windows workstations last year, and despite keeping everything up to date, several PCs got infected (silly people clicking on attachments, mainly). We switched to Grisoft's AVG. Free, simple, and very good.
This move by Symantec is an attempt to bolster revenue, and it will fail. They should (a) improve the quality of their product and (b) provide a free version for home users. If they do not do both of these, they will simply drop into obscurity, and this copy-protection move will speed-up their demise.
I totally agree about having processes, what I said was "project management software does not do it for me".
What we do in our company is to move to an 'operational' model (in which planning is easy) as fast as possible. But it's only possible in a mature game, where estimates make some kind of sense.
E.g. if installing a new PC takes 2 hours, it is totally OK to plan an installation of 100 PCs. But if fixing one bug takes 2 hours, no way can you schedule fixing 100 bugs on that basis.
Software development (as compared to operational maintenance) is inherently chaotic not because of the lack of process but because small unmeasured factors (such as the relative skill of perhaps just one person) can have huge impacts on the cost and time.
In my company, a software development firm, our processes are almost entirely driven by the need to manage this uncertainty and reduce it to the bare minimum.
- It can lurk in the dark corners at night and photograph burglars using its infrared lights.
- It can monitor the light levels and tell the lights to brighten or dim accordingly.
- I can surf to it (of course it has wifi and an IP address) and if we get two of them, we can play "robowars" in the hallway.
- The camera can rotate upwards and
"Just cleaning the floor, boss!"
As the article mentions, Lindows appears to be selling mainly to Windows users, which is not surprising.
What's remarkable, though, is that a site like OpenLindows seems quite weak, with no strong community and strange discussions between bewildered users and pseudo-geeks who are assumed to be Microsoft shims stirring up the mud.
Q: "Why can't I access my second partition?"
A: "Since ext2fs does not allow fsck, you will find that only RedHat lets you check the free space on your partitions. Note that there are other disk systems, you might find that ext3fs works better for you."
(I'm not quoting, just imitating).
Why is this interesting to the Linux community? Because use of Linux on the desktop is less of a technical issue than a social issue. Here we have an operating system package squarely aimed and marketed at Windows users, and here we have the beginnings of a web site community that uses it.
It's easy to laugh, but we also laughed when ten million AOL users joined "the Internet". If a significant number of Windows users switched to Linux, for whatever reason, we would see dozens of sites like this.
Perhaps what Linux needs - to convince Windows users to switch - is not one more application, but a community model that actually works for ex-Windows users.
This is one of the basic rules of consulting (before there were IT consultants), and it applies as well to employees as independent contractors.
How to refuse work...
Never say "no" to a client, since you will lose the client. To refuse work, raise the cost until the client decides it is not worthwhile. It is not a problem to appear "expensive" so long as this is always related to "quality" and "performance" in the mind of the client. Perception is everything.
For an employee, the pressures are different ("do this or I fire your ass") but the trick is the same: make your boss responsible for the tradeoffs that too much work implies. Give him a choice: "OK, I can do this or that, which do you prefer?"
Don't complain about getting too much work. It's really a much, much better situation to be in than to have too little work, and you will often find that many "urgent" issues get relegated and finally abandoned when the boss actually has to make a choice.
Lastly, always appear to make the best effort you can, since what counts at the end of the day is not how you actually performed, but how people perceived your performance. Smile, agree, react quickly and professionally, work well with your colleagues, never blame others but be quick to take blame on yourself, and you will find that your boss / clients respect you and value you.
Personally I have not found project management software any use at all, software projects being far too chaotic (in the mathematical sense of being unpredictable due to complex interactions) to be planned. But in more operational work, scheduling tools are indeed very useful.
There are perfectly good - and fast - multithreaded web servers that will run on SCO, at least as fast or faster than Apache.
Xitami (which I admit I wrote huge chunks of) is one such beast.
SCO are stupider than I thought.
NO MORE DAMN SCO STORIES.
They're not funny any longer. Please, slashdot editors, stop it. It is hurting when I breath. I get these terrible urges to say rude things about SCO's scumbag evil lawyer execs. My wife thinks I'm having an affair with a girl called "sco", because in my nightmares I repeat, over and over again, "sco sucks, sco sucks!"
Please, slashdot, no more. For the love of god, for the sake of civilisation and the rapid ending of this post, apply self-censorship and perhaps, perhaps, make a mention in slashback. If you really have to.
NO... MORE... SCO... OR.... I.... WILL... SHOOT... THE... BUNNY...!
Helpful software everywhwre? Sweet Jesus!
It's almost as bad as the polite elevators ("Which floor would you like to go to today") in the HHGTTG.
Software should be like God made it: rude, difficult, and flaky. The users need their daily dosage of pain and whom are we to deny this to them? It's the endorphins, man!