Believe it or not, a lot of users are still on dial-up. You run into the same situation, be it with Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat or MS, that you'll end up downloading well over 100 meg in updates/fixes.
If you're using any of Oracle's standard feature set, you'll have a tough time converting everything over. Oracle is much, much more SQL standards compliant (what's with MySQL's backticks anyway?). If your applications use stored procedures, triggers, primary and foreign keys, transaction-based recovery/redo, you're looking at a complete rewrite of your apps. Regardless of what database you choose to use, you're looking at at least a partial rewrite, but why complicate matters more than you need to?
Sorry, but my opinion is pretty strong on this. Going from anything Oracle to MySQL is NOT trivial.
I'm not fluent in any other language, but I know several well enough that I could produce a UI in them. And I have the sense to ask native speakers for criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (And I know how to find the native speakers.;-
I do translations as well as localization of software (very limitied). The translation business is very particular about who translates what into different languages. Because my primary language is English, that is pretty much the only target language I translate, although I speak Spanish (fluently) and Italian (near fluently).
When U.S. companies go looking to translate their software into other languages, they often go to U.S. translation agengies, who in turn outsource the work to either a) foreign companies with a substantial reduction in price, so as to keep their profit or b) native-speaking translators located either within the U.S. or abroad. It always comes down to cost. And many times they end up paying more in the long run.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been given a document that's already been "translated" by babelfish/google/whatever, and the customer (with good reason) thinks it's crap. So I end up retranslating it at a higher rate. These companies, whether corporate end-clients or naive agencies (plenty exist), would do well to realize that it's usually more productive to pay more upfront and have the job done right the first time.
Saint Louis - a bit easier for the middle of the country, a more even split for the coasts, decent airport, some good things to do locally.
With maybe one flight a day from major cities to get there. That's really not enough for big conventions (not that Linuxworld is classified as big - yet).
They don't provide full ISOs to download, true. But you can download a small ISO image that you can boot from which will then do an ftp install. I actually find this preferable to downloading an entire ISO only to find it may be corrupt.
You've never been through an MS audit, have you? Most corporate systems (from the likes of Dell, HP, etc) come bundled with an OEM version of Windows. It's pretty much hell trying to convince MS that you're legal with all your copies. Add to that the fact that MS will try to get into all sorts of corporate info that they have no business seeing.
The fact that Oracle's Austin office has switched everything over to Linux could have also played a part in it, considering there's probably some document exchange between the city and Oracle.
What i would love to see would be Corel open sourcing the Paradox db so it could be ported to Linux - that was a great platform...
Somewhat unrelated:
It's not opensource, but FileMaker now has the server portion available for Linux. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I plan to - we have a ton of tiny FM databases (with a browser frontend for the client) currently running on NT that I'd switch.
Agreed, but don't you think that state laws (if they exist) should carry more weight over federal? That way you'd be covered (at least basically) on a federal level, yet states that want to crack down further can do so.
because IBM and Co. will not have the benifit of the OS community to do leg work to find the credit for contributed code.
I don't see why IBM can't hire contractors... theye do it all the time in their global services division. Come to think of it, that would be fantastic if they subcontracted Linius et al for the discovery phase. Wouldn't you just love to see the look on the SCO reps' face when they walk in?
Installing new software, and upgrading current software is the one place linux needs help.
The only reason this is currently difficult is because of the difference in libraries depending on the distro used (I'm talking about RPMs here). RedHat places their libraries in one place and calls them one thing, Mandrake does something different and SuSE yet something else. In a perfect world, you could go to someplace like rpmfind.net and find an RPM for each distro and each version of each distro. That's a monumental task, to say the least. Add to that the fact that if you choose to go get software from sourceforge.net, you get sloppy documentation with the programs - they'll forget to tell you you need a (often very unrelated) package to complete the install.
True, Mandrake is easy to install. But I think in the last year/year and a half, the desktop playing field is more level than it's ever been. Take a look at Mandrake, RedHat/Fedora and SuSE - they ALL have easy and attractive install/configure programs now.
I guess my point was not so much American capitalism, but that capitalism in general is alive and and well in western Europe. If you're familiar with Spain at all, I'm sure you'll agree that there are plenty of VIPS and Corte Ingles outlets around. Those are decidedly not American.
I'm not European (I'm from the US), but I spend a fair amount of each year in both Spain and Italy.
I don't like seeing McDonands spread all across Europe either, but they are everywhere (it's not fun seeing a 7/11 in downtown Madrid either). People of my generation (40s) generally don't eat there, but you can bet you'll see plenty of young people eating there. Like it or not, capitalism is quite alive and well in western Europe.
That was my fist thought too. Any recent version of pretty much any OS, be it Linux, Windows, BSD or MacOS are going to require more hardware than their previous versions.
Problem is you can't call a for-sale package simply "Linux". You could say that it is built on Linux, uses the Linux kernel, is a Linux-based OS, etc. But you'd run into a trademark issue by calling it simply "Linux".
I'm betting those 6K HP boxes have things like SCSI , power redundancy, at least dual CPU, etc - things are that are much more important to Oracle than 64bit processing. Not to mention the fact that the emachines obviously have none of these.
... more important than value, quality, price, performance, or any of the kinds of things that users care about.
I would argue that the current crop of emachines offer all of these things. Look, just because they started out with a less than pristine reputation doesn't mean that they haven't changed. No one seems to remember that Dell started out with the same terrible reputation.
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Believe it or not, a lot of users are still on dial-up. You run into the same situation, be it with Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat or MS, that you'll end up downloading well over 100 meg in updates/fixes.
VMWare is one exmaple that comes to mind.
Sorry, but my opinion is pretty strong on this. Going from anything Oracle to MySQL is NOT trivial.
Your question is actually a valid one, but, come on... The names are PostgreSQL and Firebird.
I do translations as well as localization of software (very limitied). The translation business is very particular about who translates what into different languages. Because my primary language is English, that is pretty much the only target language I translate, although I speak Spanish (fluently) and Italian (near fluently).
When U.S. companies go looking to translate their software into other languages, they often go to U.S. translation agengies, who in turn outsource the work to either a) foreign companies with a substantial reduction in price, so as to keep their profit or b) native-speaking translators located either within the U.S. or abroad. It always comes down to cost. And many times they end up paying more in the long run.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been given a document that's already been "translated" by babelfish/google/whatever, and the customer (with good reason) thinks it's crap. So I end up retranslating it at a higher rate. These companies, whether corporate end-clients or naive agencies (plenty exist), would do well to realize that it's usually more productive to pay more upfront and have the job done right the first time.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true, but even if it were, who cares? It's a Linux convention, not a Mac convention.
With maybe one flight a day from major cities to get there. That's really not enough for big conventions (not that Linuxworld is classified as big - yet).
They don't provide full ISOs to download, true. But you can download a small ISO image that you can boot from which will then do an ftp install. I actually find this preferable to downloading an entire ISO only to find it may be corrupt.
Really? Aside from yast/yast2, what is proprietary about it? I'm not trolling, I really would like to know.
You've never been through an MS audit, have you? Most corporate systems (from the likes of Dell, HP, etc) come bundled with an OEM version of Windows. It's pretty much hell trying to convince MS that you're legal with all your copies. Add to that the fact that MS will try to get into all sorts of corporate info that they have no business seeing.
The fact that Oracle's Austin office has switched everything over to Linux could have also played a part in it, considering there's probably some document exchange between the city and Oracle.
Somewhat unrelated:
It's not opensource, but FileMaker now has the server portion available for Linux. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I plan to - we have a ton of tiny FM databases (with a browser frontend for the client) currently running on NT that I'd switch.
Agreed, but don't you think that state laws (if they exist) should carry more weight over federal? That way you'd be covered (at least basically) on a federal level, yet states that want to crack down further can do so.
Great. It's not even 12:01am Wed.
You realize you still have a few hours before you don that robe and staff, don't you?
I don't see why IBM can't hire contractors... theye do it all the time in their global services division. Come to think of it, that would be fantastic if they subcontracted Linius et al for the discovery phase. Wouldn't you just love to see the look on the SCO reps' face when they walk in?
The only reason this is currently difficult is because of the difference in libraries depending on the distro used (I'm talking about RPMs here). RedHat places their libraries in one place and calls them one thing, Mandrake does something different and SuSE yet something else. In a perfect world, you could go to someplace like rpmfind.net and find an RPM for each distro and each version of each distro. That's a monumental task, to say the least. Add to that the fact that if you choose to go get software from sourceforge.net, you get sloppy documentation with the programs - they'll forget to tell you you need a (often very unrelated) package to complete the install.
True, Mandrake is easy to install. But I think in the last year/year and a half, the desktop playing field is more level than it's ever been. Take a look at Mandrake, RedHat/Fedora and SuSE - they ALL have easy and attractive install/configure programs now.
Not to be too much of a troll, but it worked fine for me using SuSE 9 (of course I also had CrossOver Plugins installed for the Quicktime bit).
I guess my point was not so much American capitalism, but that capitalism in general is alive and and well in western Europe. If you're familiar with Spain at all, I'm sure you'll agree that there are plenty of VIPS and Corte Ingles outlets around. Those are decidedly not American.
See the following: http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/download. jsp
I'm not European (I'm from the US), but I spend a fair amount of each year in both Spain and Italy.
I don't like seeing McDonands spread all across Europe either, but they are everywhere (it's not fun seeing a 7/11 in downtown Madrid either). People of my generation (40s) generally don't eat there, but you can bet you'll see plenty of young people eating there. Like it or not, capitalism is quite alive and well in western Europe.
That was my fist thought too. Any recent version of pretty much any OS, be it Linux, Windows, BSD or MacOS are going to require more hardware than their previous versions.
Problem is you can't call a for-sale package simply "Linux". You could say that it is built on Linux, uses the Linux kernel, is a Linux-based OS, etc. But you'd run into a trademark issue by calling it simply "Linux".
I'm betting those 6K HP boxes have things like SCSI , power redundancy, at least dual CPU, etc - things are that are much more important to Oracle than 64bit processing. Not to mention the fact that the emachines obviously have none of these.
I would argue that the current crop of emachines offer all of these things. Look, just because they started out with a less than pristine reputation doesn't mean that they haven't changed. No one seems to remember that Dell started out with the same terrible reputation.