So there you have it: one Linux server that used to run Sendmail, anti-virus, NIS and DNS get's replaced by 1 Exchange server, 2 AD servers, 1 IIS server, 1 anti-virus server. 1 linux box replaced by 6 Windows servers at considerable cost and we lost our ability to chose the right tool for the job for that whole chain.
Agreed - provisionally. You made a good point for the higher TCO of Outlook there though, which should push it to the bottom. Unless, of course, it turns out that your users are actually productive enough with the groupware functionality of Exchange to justify the expense of the additional servers, licenses and maintenance - which could be true or false, depending on your company. Everything is, after all, relative.
But this doesn't have to happen at all. OpenOffice allows you to set.doc as the default save format; resulting in a zero percent chance of files being saved incorrectly and your customers ever receiving unreadable documents.
Not quite true - a couple of times, the last time I tried to use Open Office, I opened a.DOC file, made some changes, saved it, and got ready to send it off. Being the trusting soul that I am, since I was just eval'ing OO, I checked it in Word. For some reason the bullets had been changed to little smiley faces - at least, when it was opened in Word (which is almost certainly what the recipient would do with it).
Seriously.
Why did this happen? I don't know. The other issue is that I don't care. I have better things to do with my time than to try to figure it out as well (at least at the moment). So I ditched the whole product. Was it because of something that Word did to the original document that OO didn't properly understand? Could be. Again, who knows? I do know that that wouldn't have made a good impression on our client though.
Saving $200 - good Showing poor QC to a multi-million dollar client - bad Any questions?
This is the reason IBM is behind Linux and therefore OSS, you can still make a hell of alot of money actually making the whole thing work. I hope your tech team is like most of the ones I work with; love to read and learn new things, enjoy long hours in the night and weekends...
You know, from the point of view of a company looking to adopt and use OSS, rather than develop and sell services around it, that's a fairly lousy way to sell the concept...
"Look, its cool! Other companies figure that they can make lots of money from you if you switch to OSS, and your technical staff will have to work long and hard to figure it all out. Plus, upgrades to customized software will be a real bitch!"
Not quite what the original poster was looking for, I think.
Do a genuine cost-benefit analysis, work out all this, especially support and training costs, and it will still be dramatically profitable to switch to Open Source.
Why? How do you know this? Personally, in many areas it has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with familiarity. If we have PowerPoint as a standard, I can expect anyone coming into the company as a manager to know how to use it. I expect anywhere I go to deliver a presentation to be able to accept a PPT file, and pretty much anyone who wants a copy of the presentation can read it - and if they can't, they're understanding since its the standard. My training costs are low to zero, my risk is low to zero. Saving a small number of dollars (and no, a 60,000+ person company is not paying retail prices for their software) isn't worth taking on the additional business risk.
In other words, don't go in to a project like this thinking "I just have to prove what I already know." Do the studies fairly. In some cases, open source alternatives may save the company money (and therefore have a strong chance of being accepted). In other cases, they won't. If you do what's best for the company, rather than what's best for your ego, your project will probably succeed.
Some open source projects are very well done, and provide clear and immediate benefits upon implementation - assuming that you have problems that they solve. Others are less so. In other words, don't try to sell "Open Source" as a fundamental concept. Sell specific open-source solutions to specific corporate problems.
Remember also that everything is relative. Let's say that you're working for a small software company. You need an office suite. You could use OpenOffice, which has no initial cost and a small but non-zero chance of incorrectly storing documents that get sent to potential customers and investors. Or you could go to Microsoft.com and get a ton of NFD software, including Office, for a couple of hundred bucks. Here, the open-source solution fails to be appealing. If you're developing J2EE applications and need a good app server though, its very possible that JBoss provides a compelling open-source alternative to expensive software like WebSphere.
But (and here I'm speaking as the CTO for a growing software company), if you start out with blanket statements like "Open source has lower TCO," without talking to the specific context of a business problem - I may agree in principle, but speaking as the company, "I don't care." Solve a problem, do it well, do it cheaply, and you'll find that the company execs don't care either - but that holds true in both directions. If the best solution happens to be open-source then they'll probably go for it, but not because its "k3wl" or open, but because its better for the business.
This is the time for open source to, as they say, put its cards on the table. The advocates feel that it does deliver lower TCO (and other advantages). I happen to lean that way myself. But that should mean, ironically enough, that the end product should be superior without including the specific point that its open source, any more than I would pick any other product because of the way that its built. The better building technique produces a better product, and that's why it gets used.
As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users. You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.
Er, so a cheap product can beat a free product because its, er, cheap? Yeah, sure, whatever...
by two dimensional characters who are either entirely good or entirely evil
Not quite - why do you think that Han was by far the most popular character in the films? Complexity, and reality. Of course, that can be changed through CGI these days.
Er, most popular human character, that is. The Falcon probably takes top honors overall... at least, it did when I was a kid...
I've been developing on LCDs for years now. When you adjust the resolution, set the monitor to just center it rather than trying to scale to fill the screen. That way, your 1600x1200 monitor just has a large black area surrounding the 640x480 test screen. Way simple.
Interestingly enough, you've just made the case for a lot of "downtown" and otherwise space-limited businesses. There are plenty of cases in the commercial world where saving an extra square foot of desk space, which allows thinner desks, etc, can end up saving quite a bit of money over the expected life of a monitor. Especially when you add in the electricity and cooling savings.
If they don't want it, don't just bitch and moan - pony up some cash (collectively, presumably) and buy the damn thing. We shouldn't force government agencies to keep large, expensive, hazardous equipment around for notstaligic reasons. That's what museums are for. Its the same with some "classic" buildings - for example, when the Dr. Pepper plant in Dallas was going to be knocked down by a developer, he offered to sell it back the "outraged community" for the bargain price that he paid for it - so that the new owner could do with it as they saw fit and, presumably, not demolish it. There were no takers. Funny how when its someone's money rather than just their signature, that support for these vague initiatives just dries up...
Besides, what would you do with it? Other than try hard to keep your liability insurance paid up while not letting anyone get to close to it, of course...
And a traffic-following radar will just mean that the cell-phone using right-lane passer doing 85 in his Escalade won't feel obliged to lift his right foot ever again.
Of course, if you're being passed by someone on your right, whether or not they were talking on a celphone, then you should probably have moved over a lane. Slower traffic keep right, and all that. If people follow all the guidelines, it makes for a safer overall environment.
You just described a stripped-down version of the adaptive cruise control that many fancier vehicles are now coming with. The only difference there is that they can automatically adjust the speed down, when appropriate, and then accelerate up when the annoying obstacle is out of the picture. Very nice for long highway drives, and your cruise speed becomes more of a "preferred speed" rather than an absolute. Incredibly nice when following someone who doesn't believe in constant velocity.
A test drive on crowded freeways near the Auburn Hills, Mich., headquarters of Valeo Raytheon demonstrated the system's effectiveness. From behind the wheel of a Cadillac CTS fitted with the detection radar, it was easy to spot the small amber warning signal on each mirror as S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks whizzed past in adjacent lanes.
Now, if they could set it up to be active only under certain situations, that would be good. I'd say, for starters, that it should be active whenever:
You're in reverse
You have your turn signal on
You start to turn more than lane-centering at 30mph or more
You're slower than 30mph
But I'd be pretty annoyed at seeing lights flick on and off during normal highway driving. Maybe make it switchable - always/sometimes/never - as well.
We use it - and we're a UNIX-loving software development company. Why? Its "good enough" and, oh, all of $45 per month for accounting, time entry, billing et cetera. Sure, its not perfect, but who gives a damn when its that cheap? It does everything we need it to do, and it allows us to do it from all over the country. And they provide backups, support, documentation, you name it.
As a webapp goes, its annoying at times, sure. We develop webapps, and there are definately some things that I would do differently. But who cares? It helps us run our business effectively with a minimum cash outlay. And that, my friends, is the bottom line.
Or you can do what lots of people do, and if you qualify you buy some NFD software from Microsoft. $350 gets you a 1 year subscription to everything you need for a 10 user business - Windows XP Professional, Small Business Server, office, visio, all of that stuff. For $350. As long as you have less than 10 employees and qualify for the most rudimentary level of MSFT partnership, which isn't terribly difficult.
Of course, like most things, its not rocket surgery if and only if you're doing the "basic" level of service. Which is all most OSS projects do - and which, honestly, is all most companies need as well. But when you get into the bigger situations, it at least rapidly approaches brain science. For example, I've worked on inventory apps in the 3+ million LOC range that were still considered "basic" in some functional areas. I'm sure that the other examples given are similar.
In all fairness, you can't get the Xserve to include dual power supplies for any amount of money. Or love, for that matter. In a machine of that nature, that's otherwise quite nice, this was an inexcusable lapse in design judgement - especially since its been complained about since the first Xserve. I mean, lose another one of the drives (still allowing for 250gb mirrored, for anything else there's Xserve RAID after all) for the space if you have to.
So when is amazon going to sue them for violating their sue-for-something-obvious-and-not-patentable patent? Not that they were the first to do such a thing, but hey, that never stopped them from getting patents before, right?
Its not as if its magically passing money around - its just passing an account number, that (in this case) is even more obscured since its linked to a (changable at will) credit card number.
So iPod's current distinguishing feature is that it doesn't do something? Come on. If Apple ever licenses its DRM to other companies, they will have lost an edge. If they reduce the stylishness of their product, or muddle the interface, they will have lost an edge.
Adding WMA to the iPod would reduce the appeal of the iTMS, that's true. However, since that exists purely as a loss-leader to sell iPods, that probably wouldn't be a terrible sacrifice. It would mean that more people might be using iPods without iTMS, which makes it possible for them to switch to another device in the future, but that's about it.
Unless you're part of the judicial system, *you* don't. If the other child's parents have been criminally negligent, they should be punished. It's your responsibility to make sure representatives are in place who will respect your interests - but, as I've already shown, you're blaming a symptom instead of the problem itself.
Let's explore that for a minute. I personally think that there's a problem when nobody is ultimately responsible for an action. There are many, many instances in which young children are held less responsible - sometimes not responsible - for their actions. How about legislation passed so that the "remainder" of the responsibility would be passed onto their legal guardians?
In other words, if Little Johnny can do something and get away with it because he's under 18, the difference between his slap-on-the-wrist and the adult sentence would be levied onto his parents/guardians, be it a fine or jail time. Sounds pretty harsh, but I bet you'd see a greatly renewed interest from the parents of "problem children"...
You are right, you are not a lawyer. For starters, ignorance and lack of control over the content is an excuse...
Er... when the homepage of the software claims that its designed for piracy, and the examples shown involve swapping pirated material - just how much ignorance can you claim? Remember, its "plausible deniability," not just "deniability." No ignorance, no excuse. Not that there should be for this, anyway. Either you have play-licenses (in the form of CDs/officialDownloads) for the music you have in other formats, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or you probably shouldn't be doing it.
Honestly, I don't think that the size of a (not-very-powerful) computer matters beyond thresholds. Ie:
Can it easily slip into my pocket? Yes: iPod, etc No: cube the size of an orange
Can I carry it around easily? Yes: cube, laptop No: server
Does it need reinforced flooring? Yes: mainframe No: server
So, basically, I'm not seeing much of a reason to go minimalistic on computers. If portability is a concern, that's already solved with modern laptops - which this isn't meaningfully smaller than (I mean, can't be treated much differently than). If it isn't a concern, then you don't need the extreme small size. And if density is a concern, you're better off with more powerful systems (per cubic whatever) than smaller ones.
The second point is that the smaller size of the digital detector really screws you with respect to wide angle lenses.
Not all of them. Canon, for example, makes a full 35mm sensor camera (the EOS-1D has an 11mp full frame CMOS sensor) and takes all modern Canon lenses with no focal length adjustments needed.
Slashdot Mirror
So there you have it: one Linux server that used to run Sendmail, anti-virus, NIS and DNS get's replaced by 1 Exchange server, 2 AD servers, 1 IIS server, 1 anti-virus server. 1 linux box replaced by 6 Windows servers at considerable cost and we lost our ability to chose the right tool for the job for that whole chain.
Agreed - provisionally. You made a good point for the higher TCO of Outlook there though, which should push it to the bottom. Unless, of course, it turns out that your users are actually productive enough with the groupware functionality of Exchange to justify the expense of the additional servers, licenses and maintenance - which could be true or false, depending on your company. Everything is, after all, relative.
But this doesn't have to happen at all. OpenOffice allows you to set .doc as the default save format; resulting in a zero percent chance of files being saved incorrectly and your customers ever receiving unreadable documents.
.DOC file, made some changes, saved it, and got ready to send it off. Being the trusting soul that I am, since I was just eval'ing OO, I checked it in Word. For some reason the bullets had been changed to little smiley faces - at least, when it was opened in Word (which is almost certainly what the recipient would do with it).
Not quite true - a couple of times, the last time I tried to use Open Office, I opened a
Seriously.
Why did this happen? I don't know. The other issue is that I don't care. I have better things to do with my time than to try to figure it out as well (at least at the moment). So I ditched the whole product. Was it because of something that Word did to the original document that OO didn't properly understand? Could be. Again, who knows? I do know that that wouldn't have made a good impression on our client though.
Saving $200 - good
Showing poor QC to a multi-million dollar client - bad
Any questions?
This is the reason IBM is behind Linux and therefore OSS, you can still make a hell of alot of money actually making the whole thing work. I hope your tech team is like most of the ones I work with; love to read and learn new things, enjoy long hours in the night and weekends...
You know, from the point of view of a company looking to adopt and use OSS, rather than develop and sell services around it, that's a fairly lousy way to sell the concept...
"Look, its cool! Other companies figure that they can make lots of money from you if you switch to OSS, and your technical staff will have to work long and hard to figure it all out. Plus, upgrades to customized software will be a real bitch!"
Not quite what the original poster was looking for, I think.
Do a genuine cost-benefit analysis, work out all this, especially support and training costs, and it will still be dramatically profitable to switch to Open Source.
Why? How do you know this? Personally, in many areas it has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with familiarity. If we have PowerPoint as a standard, I can expect anyone coming into the company as a manager to know how to use it. I expect anywhere I go to deliver a presentation to be able to accept a PPT file, and pretty much anyone who wants a copy of the presentation can read it - and if they can't, they're understanding since its the standard. My training costs are low to zero, my risk is low to zero. Saving a small number of dollars (and no, a 60,000+ person company is not paying retail prices for their software) isn't worth taking on the additional business risk.
In other words, don't go in to a project like this thinking "I just have to prove what I already know." Do the studies fairly. In some cases, open source alternatives may save the company money (and therefore have a strong chance of being accepted). In other cases, they won't. If you do what's best for the company, rather than what's best for your ego, your project will probably succeed.
Some open source projects are very well done, and provide clear and immediate benefits upon implementation - assuming that you have problems that they solve. Others are less so. In other words, don't try to sell "Open Source" as a fundamental concept. Sell specific open-source solutions to specific corporate problems.
Remember also that everything is relative. Let's say that you're working for a small software company. You need an office suite. You could use OpenOffice, which has no initial cost and a small but non-zero chance of incorrectly storing documents that get sent to potential customers and investors. Or you could go to Microsoft.com and get a ton of NFD software, including Office, for a couple of hundred bucks. Here, the open-source solution fails to be appealing. If you're developing J2EE applications and need a good app server though, its very possible that JBoss provides a compelling open-source alternative to expensive software like WebSphere.
But (and here I'm speaking as the CTO for a growing software company), if you start out with blanket statements like "Open source has lower TCO," without talking to the specific context of a business problem - I may agree in principle, but speaking as the company, "I don't care." Solve a problem, do it well, do it cheaply, and you'll find that the company execs don't care either - but that holds true in both directions. If the best solution happens to be open-source then they'll probably go for it, but not because its "k3wl" or open, but because its better for the business.
This is the time for open source to, as they say, put its cards on the table. The advocates feel that it does deliver lower TCO (and other advantages). I happen to lean that way myself. But that should mean, ironically enough, that the end product should be superior without including the specific point that its open source, any more than I would pick any other product because of the way that its built. The better building technique produces a better product, and that's why it gets used.
At least, that's my opinion.
As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users. You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.
Er, so a cheap product can beat a free product because its, er, cheap? Yeah, sure, whatever...
by two dimensional characters who are either entirely good or entirely evil
Not quite - why do you think that Han was by far the most popular character in the films? Complexity, and reality. Of course, that can be changed through CGI these days.
Er, most popular human character, that is. The Falcon probably takes top honors overall... at least, it did when I was a kid...
I've been developing on LCDs for years now. When you adjust the resolution, set the monitor to just center it rather than trying to scale to fill the screen. That way, your 1600x1200 monitor just has a large black area surrounding the 640x480 test screen. Way simple.
Interestingly enough, you've just made the case for a lot of "downtown" and otherwise space-limited businesses. There are plenty of cases in the commercial world where saving an extra square foot of desk space, which allows thinner desks, etc, can end up saving quite a bit of money over the expected life of a monitor. Especially when you add in the electricity and cooling savings.
If they don't want it, don't just bitch and moan - pony up some cash (collectively, presumably) and buy the damn thing. We shouldn't force government agencies to keep large, expensive, hazardous equipment around for notstaligic reasons. That's what museums are for. Its the same with some "classic" buildings - for example, when the Dr. Pepper plant in Dallas was going to be knocked down by a developer, he offered to sell it back the "outraged community" for the bargain price that he paid for it - so that the new owner could do with it as they saw fit and, presumably, not demolish it. There were no takers. Funny how when its someone's money rather than just their signature, that support for these vague initiatives just dries up...
Besides, what would you do with it? Other than try hard to keep your liability insurance paid up while not letting anyone get to close to it, of course...
And a traffic-following radar will just mean that the cell-phone using right-lane passer doing 85 in his Escalade won't feel obliged to lift his right foot ever again.
Of course, if you're being passed by someone on your right, whether or not they were talking on a celphone, then you should probably have moved over a lane. Slower traffic keep right, and all that. If people follow all the guidelines, it makes for a safer overall environment.
You just described a stripped-down version of the adaptive cruise control that many fancier vehicles are now coming with. The only difference there is that they can automatically adjust the speed down, when appropriate, and then accelerate up when the annoying obstacle is out of the picture. Very nice for long highway drives, and your cruise speed becomes more of a "preferred speed" rather than an absolute. Incredibly nice when following someone who doesn't believe in constant velocity.
Now, if they could set it up to be active only under certain situations, that would be good. I'd say, for starters, that it should be active whenever:
- You're in reverse
- You have your turn signal on
- You start to turn more than lane-centering at 30mph or more
- You're slower than 30mph
But I'd be pretty annoyed at seeing lights flick on and off during normal highway driving. Maybe make it switchable - always/sometimes/never - as well.We use it - and we're a UNIX-loving software development company. Why? Its "good enough" and, oh, all of $45 per month for accounting, time entry, billing et cetera. Sure, its not perfect, but who gives a damn when its that cheap? It does everything we need it to do, and it allows us to do it from all over the country. And they provide backups, support, documentation, you name it.
As a webapp goes, its annoying at times, sure. We develop webapps, and there are definately some things that I would do differently. But who cares? It helps us run our business effectively with a minimum cash outlay. And that, my friends, is the bottom line.
Or you can do what lots of people do, and if you qualify you buy some NFD software from Microsoft. $350 gets you a 1 year subscription to everything you need for a 10 user business - Windows XP Professional, Small Business Server, office, visio, all of that stuff. For $350. As long as you have less than 10 employees and qualify for the most rudimentary level of MSFT partnership, which isn't terribly difficult.
OpenOffice is a no-brainer, unless you need to exchange documents with other firms
Er, yes? I mean, doesn't pretty much everybody, at some point, exchange documents with other firms?
Of course, like most things, its not rocket surgery if and only if you're doing the "basic" level of service. Which is all most OSS projects do - and which, honestly, is all most companies need as well. But when you get into the bigger situations, it at least rapidly approaches brain science. For example, I've worked on inventory apps in the 3+ million LOC range that were still considered "basic" in some functional areas. I'm sure that the other examples given are similar.
In all fairness, you can't get the Xserve to include dual power supplies for any amount of money. Or love, for that matter. In a machine of that nature, that's otherwise quite nice, this was an inexcusable lapse in design judgement - especially since its been complained about since the first Xserve. I mean, lose another one of the drives (still allowing for 250gb mirrored, for anything else there's Xserve RAID after all) for the space if you have to.
So when is amazon going to sue them for violating their sue-for-something-obvious-and-not-patentable patent? Not that they were the first to do such a thing, but hey, that never stopped them from getting patents before, right?
[sigh]
The same way you cancel a magnetic strip.
Its not as if its magically passing money around - its just passing an account number, that (in this case) is even more obscured since its linked to a (changable at will) credit card number.
So iPod's current distinguishing feature is that it doesn't do something? Come on. If Apple ever licenses its DRM to other companies, they will have lost an edge. If they reduce the stylishness of their product, or muddle the interface, they will have lost an edge.
Adding WMA to the iPod would reduce the appeal of the iTMS, that's true. However, since that exists purely as a loss-leader to sell iPods, that probably wouldn't be a terrible sacrifice. It would mean that more people might be using iPods without iTMS, which makes it possible for them to switch to another device in the future, but that's about it.
In other words, if Little Johnny can do something and get away with it because he's under 18, the difference between his slap-on-the-wrist and the adult sentence would be levied onto his parents/guardians, be it a fine or jail time. Sounds pretty harsh, but I bet you'd see a greatly renewed interest from the parents of "problem children"...
Just something to ponder.
You are right, you are not a lawyer. For starters, ignorance and lack of control over the content is an excuse...
Er... when the homepage of the software claims that its designed for piracy, and the examples shown involve swapping pirated material - just how much ignorance can you claim? Remember, its "plausible deniability," not just "deniability." No ignorance, no excuse. Not that there should be for this, anyway. Either you have play-licenses (in the form of CDs/officialDownloads) for the music you have in other formats, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or you probably shouldn't be doing it.
Honestly, I don't think that the size of a (not-very-powerful) computer matters beyond thresholds. Ie:
Can it easily slip into my pocket?
Yes: iPod, etc
No: cube the size of an orange
Can I carry it around easily?
Yes: cube, laptop
No: server
Does it need reinforced flooring?
Yes: mainframe
No: server
So, basically, I'm not seeing much of a reason to go minimalistic on computers. If portability is a concern, that's already solved with modern laptops - which this isn't meaningfully smaller than (I mean, can't be treated much differently than). If it isn't a concern, then you don't need the extreme small size. And if density is a concern, you're better off with more powerful systems (per cubic whatever) than smaller ones.
Just MHO, of course.
The second point is that the smaller size of the digital detector really screws you with respect to wide angle lenses.
Not all of them. Canon, for example, makes a full 35mm sensor camera (the EOS-1D has an 11mp full frame CMOS sensor) and takes all modern Canon lenses with no focal length adjustments needed.