build from source people tend to install things in a way that's completely different than anyone else
DUH! Maybe that's why they prefer to install from source? For instance some distros like to install all config files in/etc, all binaries in/usr/local/bin, all libs in/usr/libs, etc. Some people would rather have everything separated by topic or by package, for instance everything pertaining to apache goes to/usr/local/apache, everything that belogs to PostgreSQL goes to/usr/local/postgres, etc.
This is not a problem, as long as it's documented and one single policy is adopted.
I've spent most of my professional life in Brazil, where people speak Portuguese. My feelings about localization are similar to my feelings about GUIS. It seems to be done just because it's possible and wanted just because it's there.
In the 80's, when I started, secretaries and clerks who didn't know 2 words in English were happily and productively using WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3, despite the fact that there was no Portuguese version. Both were extremely easy to teach because they only needed to memorize sequences of oft-used commands.
In the early 90's Portuguese language support was available on Windows, including accented characters. Now everybody wanted to have Windows not because they could write correct Portuguese but because their friend/correspondent/competitor was writing papers with correct Portuguese. However I still had the same problems as ever supporting users and it was definitely harder for them to remember a sequence of point and click gestures that depends on the location of the dialog box than a simple sequence of keystrokes that always work.
In 96 the company would only allow us to install software that supported the Portuguese language, but take e-mail as an example: to use an e-mail client you basically need to understand 3 English words: "Send", "Compose" and "Inbox". A "power user" would learn "Reply", "Forward" and "Outbox" quick enough. As it turns out, having it all translated didn't stop people from misunderstanding e-mail and, ie, "replying to all" instead of just the original sender.
Language is also used as an excuse for not getting things done. For instante, many times I heard the complaint "My job description doesn't include knowing English. Now there's some error message in English in my screen and I'm not working until you fix it - and I'll tell my boss it's your fault". Some of this people would refuse to read the English message back to me because English is not in their job descriptions - no matter if I said that I didn't care about pronunciation, I just needed to understand the error itself. No, these people would want me to go down and sit at their computers, the language barrier was just an excellent excuse to get me to do that.
OTOH, these exact same persons had absolutely no problem with a game written (and even spoken) completely in English. They also didn't have any problem at all with an American CD full of porn. They would happily use these things without the need for me to come down and "translate the error message for them", mostly because they knew what they were doing was against company policy - but the point is that when a user really wants to make something work, they will. If language is not a barrier for gaming or porn, why should it be for email?
I hear you. I'm also on comcast cable. OTOH, I manage a mail server for a company in Brazil and my policy there is to reject mail from comcast cable clients. Besides comcast, I block a few hundred broadband providers all over the world. Being on both sides of this creates a dilemma, but frankly I prefer to route my mail through somewhere else than to cope with thousands more of spam messages. I don't like it, but it's a necessity.
Microsoft working on an open standard with Sendmail? Maybe they just figured a way to bring "embrace and extend" to Open Source. You know, get Sendmail to agree to a standard but then change the standard subtly on Exchange in a couple of years. If I were Sendmail, I'd frankly be scared.
When will I learn? You really can't try simplify something to drive across a point without someone calling you a liar. OK, here goes a point-by-point reply:
Based on your assertion that you previously ran nearly everything on a single linux server - implying a fairly small company - I'd just like to make a few observations that point to you having made the whole story up.
Actually the company was a bank. Granted, a fairly small bank, but I don't think it qualifies as a small company. About using a single server, that's not entirely acurate. We had two for failover, even if the second one was never used because we never needed to use it.
Primary and Secondary Servers: There is no such thing as Primary and Secondary Active Directory servers in a domain. There are just ADS servers, which hold the distributed ADS database, and member servers, which don't. Master/Slave or Primary/Secondary was NT 4.0.
Fortunately, I'm not a Windows administrator. Anyway I apologize for incorrect use of Microsoft terminology. The bank hired Microsoft itself to perform the installations and Microsoft suggested we used 2 AD servers.
DNS is integral to Active Directory. You don't have a seperate DNS server. You could easily have made the Exchange server an ADS server in case of failure on the primary - or, considering you imply you were running everything on one linux server, just run Exchange on a machine that's also the domain controller.
Again, not my call. Microsoft suggested that we have should have a server per service, as they put it. That goes for the antivirus too. We ended up with another windows server for that function because Microsoft said they wouldn't accept responsibility for the antivirus stuff if every mail was forwarded from an open source machine.
You have to balance the time savings the company made by using the Outlook Groupware functions against the cost of any additional machines or software. This is why the actual difference to the bottom line of a company that Open Source makes is so negligible.
I already replied to that. The same functions could have been implemented with alternative solutions, including open source and proprietary such as Lotus. Outlook is not the only possible way to achieve that.
1 Exchange Server + 2 ADS Servers + 1 IIS Server + 1 AV Server is five Windows Servers, not six. If you can't do basic Maths, I'm not suprised your boss over-ruled you. If it was true, I agree with you: You should have stuck with Linux, because you clearly know nothing about Windows Servers.
Oops, I'm sorry: 5 servers, not 6, you are correct. Actually my boss did not overrule me, he agreed with me. We were both overruled by HIS boss. You are also partly correct regarding my Windows knowledge: I don't have a lot, that's why I hired Microsoft for the consulting job and we followed their specifications to the letter. After the whole experience I decided I really didn't want to know a lot about Windows servers, that's why I don't work there anymore.
Of course the productivity gain could compensate for a higher TCO. But you will notice I was carefull to say the users didn't ask for the productivity features. They asked for the Outlook buttons to be enabled. By the time that request reached our group and we tried to propose alternative productivity tools it was impossible to explain that using a different tool would be easier and cheaper that "just enabling a couple of buttons". You know how PHBs sometimes behave. The point is, any productivity gains could have been achieved with alternative tools that would have been cheaper in our case than Outlook and all that comes with it.
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. I tend to agree with you in principle - just pick the right tool for the job, it shouldn't matter if it's open source or not. On the other hand, You must remember that there is a lot of pressure against anything Open Source (in the form of marketing from Microsoft, conservatism inside the organization, end-user unwillingness to learn something different) and this pressure should be balanced with an equal force and opposite direction if your Open Source implementation is to be successfull. More and more it becomes hard to chose the right tool for the job because Microsoft tools, Microsoft proponents and Microsoft consultants don't want you to integrate.
I had this discussion with my boss where I used to work a few years ago. He felt that it was OK to include Outlook as an option for a mail client for users alogside Eudora and Netscape Mail, I felt it was risky. This is how it went:
- User starts using Outlook, notices the groupware functions - Instead of asking for the functions, they ask that those buttons in their Outlook clients "be enabled" - The only way to do that was (at the time) to replace Sendmail with MS Exchange - Exchange doens't integrate with current NIS+ servers unless it's through AD + Windows Services for Unix - That requires master and slave AD servers; - AD + Exchange will be happier with their own DNS server - No real Open Source anti-virus software to talk to Exchange while running on Linux, so there's another Windows server
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.
In the end what I'm saying is that while choosing for the right tool for the job you should be careful not to be locked into something that will force you to pick a lot of tools not so right for the job!
OK, I'll bite on the chance that you really mean it. Unlike Windows, Linux has multiple distributions, each with their own notion of what a complete GNU/Linux system should have and where everything should go. Each distribution caters to different audiences and that means people using Linux have a lot more choices as to what their systems should have and how they should work. Unfortunately, that also means that it's very hard to come up with a (clueless) user friendly way to install and remove programs. RedHat has its way of doing that, called RPM. Debian's is called DEB. Of course you can usually download the source, compile it and install it manually regardless of the distribution you run, but that means the user doing that can't afford to be _that_ clueless. Hope this helps.
Two vintage starship models from the 70's - Millenium Falcon and an X-Wing fighter (both unassembled) - for our wedding anniversary. And a bunch of Star Treck action figures for Christmas. Not bad for a 32 year old wife of a 38 year old geek:)
Orson Scott Card did exactly that on "Shadow of the Hegemon". A lot of the book is comprised by e-mail exchanged by the characters. The format he used was "user%key@domain". If you have the key you go through, if you don't have it you get rejected. This might work, but it would just make the spammer's job harder, not impossible.
I think the system would have to be insecure but not because of the underlying infrastructure. Probably what they want is for the system not only to be secure, but to be also easy to use. For good measure, they'd probably want some eye candy too. These objectives are mutually incompatible. We don't need better technology, we need better users. People willing to give enough of a damn to learn about the machines they use instead of relying on "one click", "My this-and-that" and pretty pictures.
Why to South America? I'm from South America (Brazil, although I live in the US now) and I assure you no one there wants someone like Mr. McBride. We already have our share of greedy self-proclaimed businessmen there and we're trying to get them OUT of the country, not import some more!
I own a small consulting and development Linux company in Brazil (although I live in Colorado). None of our 100+ consulting clients has asked us about the SCO case and we don't feel any slowing in Linux deployments in all those clients. We're even expanding our client base. Our biggest development customer has asked me personally if they should be worried about it (they're betting the company's future in a new product that has Linux as an embedded OS). After I explained what the whole think is about (with no little help from/. and groklaw) they went back to business as usual and haven't questioned the decision to use Linux again.
Sim, poderia server para outros paises - se esses outros paises tivessem um banco de dados publico de enderecos por CEP tao bom quanto o americano. De qualquer forma, pra mim e interessante: moro no Colorado, EUA.
Translation from Portuguese:
Yes, it might be useful in other countries, if said countries had a public ZIP code database as good as the American one. Anyway, it's interesting to me: I live in Colorado, USA.
Having relocated to the US 2 monthes ago to be with my wife while she pursues her PhD at Colorado State and still waiting for a reply on my application for a work permit, I can't really sympathize with Mr. Soong. I certainly understand that any country should protect their own work force but it's only fair it should work both ways...
The situation you described matches exactly what happened in the company I worked for 4 years ago. Our group was called the "Technology Division" and we provided 100% of the technology services to the whole company (Brazilian branch of a multinational bank). For years life was good. We were 7 well-respected, well-payed professionals. Then suddenly we were 4 overworked, underpayed geeks. The 4 of us got together and 3 of us decided to walk - the 4th was afraid to take the risk. We opened our consulting company and the bank became our first client. We were very happy for 3 years after that. We were still overworked, not as much underpayed but we had a lot more freedom. These days the situation is not a bed of roses, though. The bank finally went over (well, almost) and we don't get nearly as much contracts from them any longer. Through the years we have put together a nice client roster, though. We are still struggling but our heads are above the water line. We now have 4 employees, we own the building where we work and have put together a nice, lean technology consulting company. Most of all: it's been a lot of fun!
It's a simple strategy. First MS targeted developers, creating an environment that is easy to setup and run without sys admins then putting an easy to use "development environment". That's what's getting them more and more space in the corporation. Of course, such systems don't scale at all and at some point people realise they need sys admins more than ever, only there just aren't many good sys admins for Windows environments - and the few there are cost even more than Unix sys admins. So Linux starts creeping back into the server farms. The next step seems obvious: make sys admins unnecessary! Let's go one more step before sys admins are required. Make the environment self-healing, space self-allocating, generaly automate the sys admin job. Why all this? Because sys admins are the people knowleadgeable enough to actually test features before implementing and spotting the ugly marketing plot behind the shiny pretty color interface. Fellow sys admins, beware: MS has decided we should be extinct and is working towards this end.
I'm in Brazil. I've 2 DSL connections, one at home, another at the office. Both are provided by one of the local phone companies. Telefonica's DSL offer is called "Speedy" and comes in one of two flavors:
The "domestic" Speedy grants me a static IP address and is supposed to have the low ports (0-1024) blocked - but they aren't. It costs around US$ 45,00/month in total. The one I have at home is 128 Kbps.
The "business" Speedy at the office gives me 5 static addresses (although not in the same net block) and is currently 256 Kbps. It costs around US$ 80,00 and is promised to never have any ports blocked.
Both flavors can be juiced up to 2 Mbps if I'm willing to pay up to US$ 400,00/month.
Technically the service is provided by the phone company and you shouldn't need a specific ISP for it to work. Legislation, though, forces customers to sign up with the provider of their choice for what is essentially an "Internet tax" - it's the workaround found to resolve jurisdiction over the service.
I call it a tax because the ISP side of the equation is totally unnecessary. The thing works equally well with or without the ISP. All the ISPs
do for Speedy customers is to provide support - which I don't need anyway.
Anyway, the formula seems to be working and a big portion of my city's Internet connection has become DSL lines, both for home and for business purposes.
I've read some of what people had to say here, but it seems to me most people are missing the point.
For me the only reason to break backwards compatibility is "when you absolutely have to".
That usually means one of two things: there's something new I can't afford not to support (like the Linux kernel 2.4.x's new routing and firewalling goodies) or there's a new security bug fix that requires compatibility breaking.
"because MS (or any other company or person) wants me to" or "because new is better" are not strong enough reasons.
Re:it's as good as they want to pay for it
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 1
No... That's not what I mean. The construction
workers union is not very strong in my country. What I mean is users in general must try to understand the techonology at least as well as they understand construction. And we must stop giving what they think they want and start being fundamentally honest with that: "what you want is this, it'll cost this much and it'll take this long. On the other hand, maybe what you really need is this, it'll be this less expensive and take this less time."
And then, of course, we must deliver.
it's as good as they want to pay for it
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
software is just as good as people are willing to
pay for. I'm building a house right now and the
contractors showed me the bottomline: cheap, fast
or durable: pick any two. People don't want good
or safe code. They want code to be cheap, sexy
looking and more importantly, they want it now. Or
If.NET really succeeds and becomes as ubiquitous as Windows desktops, which is still to be seen, some open source version of it is inevitable, just as something like Samba was inevitable because of Windows desktop ubiquity.
As for Microsoft being able to change stuff to frustrate open source.NET clients, this ability will be limited because they will want to remain compatible with their own clients.
In short, if Andrew & friends can keep up to the point of making it possible to run a PDC on Linux and serve a bunch of W/2000, I'm sure it will be possible to do the same to.NET.
The real issue is, however, that we would still be delegating centralized control over the Internet to one private corporation which is Real Bad no matter what OS you have on your desktop.
I'm not in Canada, but I'm also not in the US. I can say the main motive people in this country (Brazil) have to d/l music from the net instead of purchading CDs is availability. Outside the US in general, it's very hard to find the title you want unless it happens to be in the hit parade or it's considered a "classic" (such as Beatles albums). What appeals to people here is the ability to get older stuff, very new stuff or maybe a single appealing track instead of a full CD. I and most of the people I know would be willing to pay a reasonable price to get these, but the recording industry would rather keep the shelves full of sure sellers and then undermine our ability to buy anything else. That's the real issue here. It's the same with books, by the way.
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DUH! Maybe that's why they prefer to install from source? For instance some distros like to install all config files in
This is not a problem, as long as it's documented and one single policy is adopted.
In the 80's, when I started, secretaries and clerks who didn't know 2 words in English were happily and productively using WordStar and Lotus 1-2-3, despite the fact that there was no Portuguese version. Both were extremely easy to teach because they only needed to memorize sequences of oft-used commands.
In the early 90's Portuguese language support was available on Windows, including accented characters. Now everybody wanted to have Windows not because they could write correct Portuguese but because their friend/correspondent/competitor was writing papers with correct Portuguese. However I still had the same problems as ever supporting users and it was definitely harder for them to remember a sequence of point and click gestures that depends on the location of the dialog box than a simple sequence of keystrokes that always work.
In 96 the company would only allow us to install software that supported the Portuguese language, but take e-mail as an example: to use an e-mail client you basically need to understand 3 English words: "Send", "Compose" and "Inbox". A "power user" would learn "Reply", "Forward" and "Outbox" quick enough. As it turns out, having it all translated didn't stop people from misunderstanding e-mail and, ie, "replying to all" instead of just the original sender.
Language is also used as an excuse for not getting things done. For instante, many times I heard the complaint "My job description doesn't include knowing English. Now there's some error message in English in my screen and I'm not working until you fix it - and I'll tell my boss it's your fault". Some of this people would refuse to read the English message back to me because English is not in their job descriptions - no matter if I said that I didn't care about pronunciation, I just needed to understand the error itself. No, these people would want me to go down and sit at their computers, the language barrier was just an excellent excuse to get me to do that.
OTOH, these exact same persons had absolutely no problem with a game written (and even spoken) completely in English. They also didn't have any problem at all with an American CD full of porn. They would happily use these things without the need for me to come down and "translate the error message for them", mostly because they knew what they were doing was against company policy - but the point is that when a user really wants to make something work, they will. If language is not a barrier for gaming or porn, why should it be for email?
I hear you. I'm also on comcast cable. OTOH, I manage a mail server for a company in Brazil and my policy there is to reject mail from comcast cable clients. Besides comcast, I block a few hundred broadband providers all over the world. Being on both sides of this creates a dilemma, but frankly I prefer to route my mail through somewhere else than to cope with thousands more of spam messages. I don't like it, but it's a necessity.
Microsoft working on an open standard with Sendmail? Maybe they just figured a way to bring "embrace and extend" to Open Source. You know, get Sendmail to agree to a standard but then change the standard subtly on Exchange in a couple of years. If I were Sendmail, I'd frankly be scared.
When will I learn? You really can't try simplify something to drive across a point without someone calling you a liar. OK, here goes a point-by-point reply:
Based on your assertion that you previously ran nearly everything on a single linux server - implying a fairly small company - I'd just like to make a few observations that point to you having made the whole story up.
Actually the company was a bank. Granted, a fairly small bank, but I don't think it qualifies as a small company. About using a single server, that's not entirely acurate. We had two for failover, even if the second one was never used because we never needed to use it.
Primary and Secondary Servers: There is no such thing as Primary and Secondary Active Directory servers in a domain. There are just ADS servers, which hold the distributed ADS database, and member servers, which don't. Master/Slave or Primary/Secondary was NT 4.0.
Fortunately, I'm not a Windows administrator. Anyway I apologize for incorrect use of Microsoft terminology. The bank hired Microsoft itself to perform the installations and Microsoft suggested we used 2 AD servers.
DNS is integral to Active Directory. You don't have a seperate DNS server.
You could easily have made the Exchange server an ADS server in case of failure on the primary - or, considering you imply you were running everything on one linux server, just run Exchange on a machine that's also the domain controller.
Again, not my call. Microsoft suggested that we have should have a server per service, as they put it. That goes for the antivirus too. We ended up with another windows server for that function because Microsoft said they wouldn't accept responsibility for the antivirus stuff if every mail was forwarded from an open source machine.
You have to balance the time savings the company made by using the Outlook Groupware functions against the cost of any additional machines or software. This is why the actual difference to the bottom line of a company that Open Source makes is so negligible.
I already replied to that. The same functions could have been implemented with alternative solutions, including open source and proprietary such as Lotus. Outlook is not the only possible way to achieve that.
1 Exchange Server + 2 ADS Servers + 1 IIS Server + 1 AV Server is five Windows Servers, not six. If you can't do basic Maths, I'm not suprised your boss over-ruled you. If it was true, I agree with you: You should have stuck with Linux, because you clearly know nothing about Windows Servers.
Oops, I'm sorry: 5 servers, not 6, you are correct. Actually my boss did not overrule me, he agreed with me. We were both overruled by HIS boss. You are also partly correct regarding my Windows knowledge: I don't have a lot, that's why I hired Microsoft for the consulting job and we followed their specifications to the letter. After the whole experience I decided I really didn't want to know a lot about Windows servers, that's why I don't work there anymore.
Of course the productivity gain could compensate for a higher TCO. But you will notice I was carefull to say the users didn't ask for the productivity features. They asked for the Outlook buttons to be enabled. By the time that request reached our group and we tried to propose alternative productivity tools it was impossible to explain that using a different tool would be easier and cheaper that "just enabling a couple of buttons". You know how PHBs sometimes behave. The point is, any productivity gains could have been achieved with alternative tools that would have been cheaper in our case than Outlook and all that comes with it.
I had this discussion with my boss where I used to work a few years ago. He felt that it was OK to include Outlook as an option for a mail client for users alogside Eudora and Netscape Mail, I felt it was risky. This is how it went:
- User starts using Outlook, notices the groupware functions
- Instead of asking for the functions, they ask that those buttons in their Outlook clients "be enabled"
- The only way to do that was (at the time) to replace Sendmail with MS Exchange
- Exchange doens't integrate with current NIS+ servers unless it's through AD + Windows Services for Unix
- That requires master and slave AD servers;
- AD + Exchange will be happier with their own DNS server
- No real Open Source anti-virus software to talk to Exchange while running on Linux, so there's another Windows server
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.
In the end what I'm saying is that while choosing for the right tool for the job you should be careful not to be locked into something that will force you to pick a lot of tools not so right for the job!
OK, I'll bite on the chance that you really mean it. Unlike Windows, Linux has multiple distributions, each with their own notion of what a complete GNU/Linux system should have and where everything should go. Each distribution caters to different audiences and that means people using Linux have a lot more choices as to what their systems should have and how they should work. Unfortunately, that also means that it's very hard to come up with a (clueless) user friendly way to install and remove programs. RedHat has its way of doing that, called RPM. Debian's is called DEB. Of course you can usually download the source, compile it and install it manually regardless of the distribution you run, but that means the user doing that can't afford to be _that_ clueless. Hope this helps.
Two vintage starship models from the 70's - Millenium Falcon and an X-Wing fighter (both unassembled) - for our wedding anniversary. And a bunch of Star Treck action figures for Christmas. Not bad for a 32 year old wife of a 38 year old geek :)
Orson Scott Card did exactly that on "Shadow of the Hegemon". A lot of the book is comprised by e-mail exchanged by the characters. The format he used was "user%key@domain". If you have the key you go through, if you don't have it you get rejected. This might work, but it would just make the spammer's job harder, not impossible.
I think the system would have to be insecure but not because of the underlying infrastructure. Probably what they want is for the system not only to be secure, but to be also easy to use. For good measure, they'd probably want some eye candy too. These objectives are mutually incompatible. We don't need better technology, we need better users. People willing to give enough of a damn to learn about the machines they use instead of relying on "one click", "My this-and-that" and pretty pictures.
Why to South America? I'm from South America (Brazil, although I live in the US now) and I assure you no one there wants someone like Mr. McBride. We already have our share of greedy self-proclaimed businessmen there and we're trying to get them OUT of the country, not import some more!
I own a small consulting and development Linux company in Brazil (although I live in Colorado). None of our 100+ consulting clients has asked us about the SCO case and we don't feel any slowing in Linux deployments in all those clients. We're even expanding our client base. Our biggest development customer has asked me personally if they should be worried about it (they're betting the company's future in a new product that has Linux as an embedded OS). After I explained what the whole think is about (with no little help from /. and groklaw) they went back to business as usual and haven't questioned the decision to use Linux again.
Florida? Oh, now I believe the cost analysis... After all this is Florida, know for its high standards in politics.
Translation from Portuguese:
Yes, it might be useful in other countries, if said countries had a public ZIP code database as good as the American one. Anyway, it's interesting to me: I live in Colorado, USA.
Having relocated to the US 2 monthes ago to be with my wife while she pursues her PhD at Colorado State and still waiting for a reply on my application for a work permit, I can't really sympathize with Mr. Soong. I certainly understand that any country should protect their own work force but it's only fair it should work both ways...
The situation you described matches exactly what happened in the company I worked for 4 years ago. Our group was called the "Technology Division" and we provided 100% of the technology services to the whole company (Brazilian branch of a multinational bank). For years life was good. We were 7 well-respected, well-payed professionals. Then suddenly we were 4 overworked, underpayed geeks. The 4 of us got together and 3 of us decided to walk - the 4th was afraid to take the risk. We opened our consulting company and the bank became our first client. We were very happy for 3 years after that. We were still overworked, not as much underpayed but we had a lot more freedom. These days the situation is not a bed of roses, though. The bank finally went over (well, almost) and we don't get nearly as much contracts from them any longer. Through the years we have put together a nice client roster, though. We are still struggling but our heads are above the water line. We now have 4 employees, we own the building where we work and have put together a nice, lean technology consulting company. Most of all: it's been a lot of fun!
nuff said
It's a simple strategy. First MS targeted developers, creating an environment that is easy to setup and run without sys admins then putting an easy to use "development environment". That's what's getting them more and more space in the corporation. Of course, such systems don't scale at all and at some point people realise they need sys admins more than ever, only there just aren't many good sys admins for Windows environments - and the few there are cost even more than Unix sys admins. So Linux starts creeping back into the server farms. The next step seems obvious: make sys admins unnecessary! Let's go one more step before sys admins are required. Make the environment self-healing, space self-allocating, generaly automate the sys admin job. Why all this? Because sys admins are the people knowleadgeable enough to actually test features before implementing and spotting the ugly marketing plot behind the shiny pretty color interface. Fellow sys admins, beware: MS has decided we should be extinct and is working towards this end.
The "domestic" Speedy grants me a static IP address and is supposed to have the low ports (0-1024) blocked - but they aren't. It costs around US$ 45,00 /month in total. The one I have at home is 128 Kbps.
The "business" Speedy at the office gives me 5 static addresses (although not in the same net block) and is currently 256 Kbps. It costs around US$ 80,00 and is promised to never have any ports blocked.
Both flavors can be juiced up to 2 Mbps if I'm willing to pay up to US$ 400,00/month.
Technically the service is provided by the phone company and you shouldn't need a specific ISP for it to work. Legislation, though, forces customers to sign up with the provider of their choice for what is essentially an "Internet tax" - it's the workaround found to resolve jurisdiction over the service.
I call it a tax because the ISP side of the equation is totally unnecessary. The thing works equally well with or without the ISP. All the ISPs do for Speedy customers is to provide support - which I don't need anyway.
Anyway, the formula seems to be working and a big portion of my city's Internet connection has become DSL lines, both for home and for business purposes.
I've read some of what people had to say here, but it seems to me most people are missing the point.
For me the only reason to break backwards compatibility is "when you absolutely have to".
That usually means one of two things: there's something new I can't afford not to support (like the Linux kernel 2.4.x's new routing and firewalling goodies) or there's a new security bug fix that requires compatibility breaking.
"because MS (or any other company or person) wants me to" or "because new is better" are not strong enough reasons.
No... That's not what I mean. The construction
workers union is not very strong in my country. What I mean is users in general must try to understand the techonology at least as well as they understand construction. And we must stop giving what they think they want and start being fundamentally honest with that: "what you want is this, it'll cost this much and it'll take this long. On the other hand, maybe what you really need is this, it'll be this less expensive and take this less time."
And then, of course, we must deliver.
software is just as good as people are willing to
pay for. I'm building a house right now and the
contractors showed me the bottomline: cheap, fast
or durable: pick any two. People don't want good
or safe code. They want code to be cheap, sexy
looking and more importantly, they want it now. Or
yesterday. As businesses and individuals, we
should stop behaving like whores and selling
whatever the customer will pay for and be more
like my construction contractors.
As for Microsoft being able to change stuff to frustrate open source .NET clients, this ability will be limited because they will want to remain compatible with their own clients.
In short, if Andrew & friends can keep up to the point of making it possible to run a PDC on Linux and serve a bunch of W/2000, I'm sure it will be possible to do the same to .NET.
The real issue is, however, that we would still be delegating centralized control over the Internet to one private corporation which is Real Bad no matter what OS you have on your desktop.
I'm not in Canada, but I'm also not in the US. I can say the main motive people in this country (Brazil) have to d/l music from the net instead of purchading CDs is availability. Outside the US in general, it's very hard to find the title you want unless it happens to be in the hit parade or it's considered a "classic" (such as Beatles albums). What appeals to people here is the ability to get older stuff, very new stuff or maybe a single appealing track instead of a full CD. I and most of the people I know would be willing to pay a reasonable price to get these, but the recording industry would rather keep the shelves full of sure sellers and then undermine our ability to buy anything else. That's the real issue here. It's the same with books, by the way.