Anecdote time. Early last year I sat across a conference table with the CTO of a medium-sized manufacturing company (~3,000 employees) trying to nail a contract req for a custom inventory control system. They had pretty weird needs that didn't fit into any of the OTS solutions they had evaluated, so they decided to hire someone to do it for them.
In this particular case they were already using Linux for a few things, so I figured I'd go with that. It's always a risk to recommend a FOSS stack at companies which are Windows/Commercial Unix heavy, but my Postgres/Python/Apache would have fit quite well with their infrastructure. Otherwise I would have gone with the MS-based solution.
Keep in mind that "using Linux" here was essentially a few of their sysadmins deploying them as file servers and prefab CMS platform, so they didn't have any actual applications running on the OS. Everything else was Windows, but they didn't have any custom apps on that either. Their business ran, predictably enough, on Excel.
Me: "Well, I would recommend using a database called Postgres and a language called Python, a framework called Django plus the Apache web server and yadda yadda sales pitch" CTO: "Hmmm, Linux. We already run some things on Linux, don't we?" OtherGuy: "Yeah" CTO: "What?" OtherGuy: "Well, the executive blogs and the product wiki and the defect tracking system and a few other things. It's just stuff we downloaded and installed, PHP, MySQL, that sort of thing." CTO: "Hmmmm. But I don't want to release this application" Me: "Release the application? You mean the code? Why would you do that?" CTO: "Well the other stuff we have running on Linux we downloaded it but this is something we're going to create from scratch" Me: "... and why would you be releasing the code?" CTO: "Because it has to run on Linux. Right? So it's open source and all that" Me: "Uh, no. You don't have to release anything." OtherGuy: "No" CTO: "Oh, OK then. I thought we had to let other people download it because it would use all that stuff you said and runs on Linux and is open source and all that"
I didn't get the gig, but adding up a few other experiences I'd say this is fairly common, especially at medium companies that don't have years and years of IT experience.
It already does that to a certain extent. This must be something different, designed to up the number of sponsored crap that shows up on their search results.
'high-quality news' to users who not actively searching for news
If I'm not actively searching for news it's probably because I'm not interested in news at that particular moment, whether they are high quality, sponsored or not.
It seems Google is actively trying to find exciting new ways to become annoying.
Interesting. I guess I prefer the keyboard rather than lots of menus and toolbars (except for the least used stuff), but we agree in that it should at least be an option, especially if they added it to the shell to begin with.
Bolivia cannot possibly pull that off, not in a million years. That country is way too corrupt, even by Latin American standards. And the current president is, to put it mildly, a populist idiot who thinks it's better to bedazzle the masses with short-term bullshit than to try to create foundations for long-term growth.
It's stupid to claim that the wealth is "staying here" when it's just being "stolen here" anyway.
Now most countries are corrupt, including mine of course. But Bolivia is especially special (sorry) in that department.
Many years ago one of my grandfather's companies had potassium nitrate concessions in the Atacama (after lots of acquisitions and whatnot most of that ended up with SQM and Codelco)... unfortunately they divested all that in the 80s because of sustainability concerns. Back when that wasn't even fashionable to do that sort of thing. I believe those are the same brine (?) deposits that yield the lithium.
If this really takes off --and your point about Bolivia and Super Evo is of course correct, no one's going to risk being suddenly nationalized-- I bet someone's going to regret that. Oh well:)
I use the desktop bars as well. I think I read somewhere once that they were going to remove them post-XP because the number of people who knew what the hell those were for and actually used them was vanishingly small, and they had some security problems (you can run an IE instance inside with a registry hack).
But at least for the way I used those things, the Vista start menu more than makes up for their loss. My personal view, of course.
Sure. People tend to fixate on "brand names" rather than what they need done.
I'm sure some do. The more intelligent ones tend to focus on the return on investment realized by their choices. This is true in technology as it is in most other areas.
If someone says "I use X because it's made by Y" then that person's opinion can be safely discarded. On the other hand if they say "I use X because it gives me foo/bar/baz and Y doesn't" that's quite a different thing.
I'm capable of differentiating between irrational "evangelists" and honest, truthful advocates. The former don't even qualify as 'zealots' in my opinion, they're just sad idiots.
Other than that, I agree. I was merely exercising the time-honored practice of responding to a generalization (by the OP) with another one.
You can tell that most Microsoft apologists haven't had any sort of role in supporting or managing IT in business.
Really? I personally find that here on Slashdot the opposite tends to be true rather consistently. The obnoxious "oh you can replace X with Y, no problem, and if you don't then you're an idiot" proclamations to excited claps from the peanut gallery usually underscore the deep misunderstanding people have about how corporations license and use software.
That and the constant and rather weak (by now) efforts to imply that Windows and other commercial software cannot be used without risking most horrible death and destruction (which frankly is rather dumb considering how most of you are just preaching to the choir anyway) leads me to think that it's actually the average FOSS "advocate" who tends to be completely out of touch with the realities of corporate software policies.
I remember the Chilean government used to require that passport photos show the right ear clearly (although the last time I renewed the photo had to be a normal front shot). I always assumed this was because the ear structure is unique, a sort of fingerprint.
It's frankly hilarious to see people rolling around thumping their chest over this. Is it so difficult to recognize that if a corporation is doing something like this, the corporation will certainly not try to find ways to promote or otherwise include their competition? Did they also exclude Oracle training? Sybase? What about Websphere? Of course they did.
What exactly were people expecting? Certainly the government sees some value in doing this, probably because the vast majority of corporations (and we're back to that) that employ people happen to run Microsoft software anyway.
The "Linux angle" here is just stupid, as if FOSS were the only other thing in the universe besides Microsoft.
Also, one of the reasons I've stopped using YouTube other than the occasional linked-from-some-other-website-or-email visit is the fact that they fucked up the favorites functionality. You used to be able to simply page through your list of favs, adding them to your quick list by simply clicking on the '+' widget on the video snapshot, but now you have to make a selection and then scroll back up and click on a button that then shows a dropdown menu. Then on to the next page. This loss of usability is completely idiotic, and it was even buggy at first because you would randomly lose selections when you switched to a new page.
Also, not that you could do this before, but you can't search your own favorites. Let me repeat that: Google, the search company, does not let me do a scoped search on a list of videos. They've "upgraded" that site so much over the past two years, adding and removing functionality in apparently random ways (see above), but they haven't been able to find the time to allow a favorite search. Am I the only person in the planet who's accumulated 500+ favorite videos in the past 4 years? Surely not.
When it first started, YouTube used to be the Napster of video - a place that you could explore and find amazing stuff and things you hadn't seen in freaking ages. It was wonderful. Thanks to the *AA and Google's expert ham-handedness though, all that is going away.
Oh wait, no. It doesn't. Because like Microsoft and HP and printers and every other company in the planet with a loss leader product, Google might very well be realizing additional profit from their unprofitable video experiment. For a company like this, nothing is as simple as simplistic per-visit loss analysis.
Does anyone have data on how many truly false predictions have been made? Because one out of X might not be enough to condemn the politicos and glorify the scientist. Clearly these things do need to be managed carefully.
If you manage to duplicate the functionality of VS in MonoDevelop/Linux, you'll have a huge hit on your hands. The *nix crowd is still living in the "if it was hard for me it should be for you too" hole and one of the areas where they've traditionally lagged has been IDEs and useful debuggers. Whatever else, they are a huge boon to productivity, especially for less experienced developers.
Maybe Emacs + bash is good enough for Joe Linux, but that doesn't mean it's good enough for everybody, even if it has proven to work just fine.
Most FOSS people are completely clueless about how software development happens in corporate environments. Sell them something that behaves like VS with some sort of commercial support behind it (open source or otherwise, that's mostly irrelevant) and you'll have your VB revolution on the Linux desktop.
They didn't "fight" it, they try to pressure Microsoft into a better licensing deal, Microsoft called their bluff, they got served. There was no way TomTom was going to carry this one under current IP law, and this was never about Linux (although that didn't stop the armchair advocates and their sisters from screaming it was).
Want to stop this? Lobby your representative to fix the patent system. Then you can stop the big boys (MS, IBM, Apple, Toshiba, etc) and the patent trolls from leaving a trail of shafted and bloodied small companies behind them. Until then, you better be ready to cough up some cash to license the technology you want to use.
Perhaps. My point is that for my decidedly limited purposes, yum got the job done, just as apt does now. I don't lose any sleep if my repo management application takes 2.4 additional seconds to resolve a dependency.
Hm, I don't remember yum being slow, but then I really didn't use it that often after first setting up a machine. Running an update or installing the odd package once in a while doesn't fall in my "things that must be really fast" category of computing. I prefer it to work correctly, especially when doing dependency resolutions.
I dropped CentOS a while ago for Debian (although I still use Fedora on the desktop, against my better judgment) but I have to ask... what's wrong with yum? I never really had any problems with it, at least in the past few years. Sure, in the early days it sucked, just like apt did in many ways, but now?
I'm just curious really. I don't consider apt or dpkg to be ENORMOUSLY SUPERIOR to yum, really. Probably a bit better in some ways, but not that much.
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdote time. Early last year I sat across a conference table with the CTO of a medium-sized manufacturing company (~3,000 employees) trying to nail a contract req for a custom inventory control system. They had pretty weird needs that didn't fit into any of the OTS solutions they had evaluated, so they decided to hire someone to do it for them.
In this particular case they were already using Linux for a few things, so I figured I'd go with that. It's always a risk to recommend a FOSS stack at companies which are Windows/Commercial Unix heavy, but my Postgres/Python/Apache would have fit quite well with their infrastructure. Otherwise I would have gone with the MS-based solution.
Keep in mind that "using Linux" here was essentially a few of their sysadmins deploying them as file servers and prefab CMS platform, so they didn't have any actual applications running on the OS. Everything else was Windows, but they didn't have any custom apps on that either. Their business ran, predictably enough, on Excel.
Me: "Well, I would recommend using a database called Postgres and a language called Python, a framework called Django plus the Apache web server and yadda yadda sales pitch"
CTO: "Hmmm, Linux. We already run some things on Linux, don't we?"
OtherGuy: "Yeah"
CTO: "What?"
OtherGuy: "Well, the executive blogs and the product wiki and the defect tracking system and a few other things. It's just stuff we downloaded and installed, PHP, MySQL, that sort of thing."
CTO: "Hmmmm. But I don't want to release this application"
Me: "Release the application? You mean the code? Why would you do that?"
CTO: "Well the other stuff we have running on Linux we downloaded it but this is something we're going to create from scratch"
Me: "... and why would you be releasing the code?"
CTO: "Because it has to run on Linux. Right? So it's open source and all that"
Me: "Uh, no. You don't have to release anything."
OtherGuy: "No"
CTO: "Oh, OK then. I thought we had to let other people download it because it would use all that stuff you said and runs on Linux and is open source and all that"
I didn't get the gig, but adding up a few other experiences I'd say this is fairly common, especially at medium companies that don't have years and years of IT experience.
It already does that to a certain extent. This must be something different, designed to up the number of sponsored crap that shows up on their search results.
Grammar aside, this is downright scary:
If I'm not actively searching for news it's probably because I'm not interested in news at that particular moment, whether they are high quality, sponsored or not.
It seems Google is actively trying to find exciting new ways to become annoying.
A division that is being actively exploited by Morales, unfortunately.
Interesting. I guess I prefer the keyboard rather than lots of menus and toolbars (except for the least used stuff), but we agree in that it should at least be an option, especially if they added it to the shell to begin with.
Bolivia cannot possibly pull that off, not in a million years. That country is way too corrupt, even by Latin American standards. And the current president is, to put it mildly, a populist idiot who thinks it's better to bedazzle the masses with short-term bullshit than to try to create foundations for long-term growth.
It's stupid to claim that the wealth is "staying here" when it's just being "stolen here" anyway.
Now most countries are corrupt, including mine of course. But Bolivia is especially special (sorry) in that department.
Many years ago one of my grandfather's companies had potassium nitrate concessions in the Atacama (after lots of acquisitions and whatnot most of that ended up with SQM and Codelco)... unfortunately they divested all that in the 80s because of sustainability concerns. Back when that wasn't even fashionable to do that sort of thing. I believe those are the same brine (?) deposits that yield the lithium.
If this really takes off --and your point about Bolivia and Super Evo is of course correct, no one's going to risk being suddenly nationalized-- I bet someone's going to regret that. Oh well :)
Saludos!
I use the desktop bars as well. I think I read somewhere once that they were going to remove them post-XP because the number of people who knew what the hell those were for and actually used them was vanishingly small, and they had some security problems (you can run an IE instance inside with a registry hack).
But at least for the way I used those things, the Vista start menu more than makes up for their loss. My personal view, of course.
What about ISPs that provide shell accounts or rely on virtualized Linux instances? Would this affect them?
That cool tech like this is being used to prevent "piracy" instead of something more useful.
I'm sure some do. The more intelligent ones tend to focus on the return on investment realized by their choices. This is true in technology as it is in most other areas.
If someone says "I use X because it's made by Y" then that person's opinion can be safely discarded. On the other hand if they say "I use X because it gives me foo/bar/baz and Y doesn't" that's quite a different thing.
I'm capable of differentiating between irrational "evangelists" and honest, truthful advocates. The former don't even qualify as 'zealots' in my opinion, they're just sad idiots.
Other than that, I agree. I was merely exercising the time-honored practice of responding to a generalization (by the OP) with another one.
Really? I personally find that here on Slashdot the opposite tends to be true rather consistently. The obnoxious "oh you can replace X with Y, no problem, and if you don't then you're an idiot" proclamations to excited claps from the peanut gallery usually underscore the deep misunderstanding people have about how corporations license and use software.
That and the constant and rather weak (by now) efforts to imply that Windows and other commercial software cannot be used without risking most horrible death and destruction (which frankly is rather dumb considering how most of you are just preaching to the choir anyway) leads me to think that it's actually the average FOSS "advocate" who tends to be completely out of touch with the realities of corporate software policies.
But that's just me.
I remember the Chilean government used to require that passport photos show the right ear clearly (although the last time I renewed the photo had to be a normal front shot). I always assumed this was because the ear structure is unique, a sort of fingerprint.
It's frankly hilarious to see people rolling around thumping their chest over this. Is it so difficult to recognize that if a corporation is doing something like this, the corporation will certainly not try to find ways to promote or otherwise include their competition? Did they also exclude Oracle training? Sybase? What about Websphere? Of course they did.
What exactly were people expecting? Certainly the government sees some value in doing this, probably because the vast majority of corporations (and we're back to that) that employ people happen to run Microsoft software anyway.
The "Linux angle" here is just stupid, as if FOSS were the only other thing in the universe besides Microsoft.
Also, one of the reasons I've stopped using YouTube other than the occasional linked-from-some-other-website-or-email visit is the fact that they fucked up the favorites functionality. You used to be able to simply page through your list of favs, adding them to your quick list by simply clicking on the '+' widget on the video snapshot, but now you have to make a selection and then scroll back up and click on a button that then shows a dropdown menu. Then on to the next page. This loss of usability is completely idiotic, and it was even buggy at first because you would randomly lose selections when you switched to a new page.
Also, not that you could do this before, but you can't search your own favorites. Let me repeat that: Google, the search company, does not let me do a scoped search on a list of videos. They've "upgraded" that site so much over the past two years, adding and removing functionality in apparently random ways (see above), but they haven't been able to find the time to allow a favorite search. Am I the only person in the planet who's accumulated 500+ favorite videos in the past 4 years? Surely not.
When it first started, YouTube used to be the Napster of video - a place that you could explore and find amazing stuff and things you hadn't seen in freaking ages. It was wonderful. Thanks to the *AA and Google's expert ham-handedness though, all that is going away.
Oh wait, no. It doesn't. Because like Microsoft and HP and printers and every other company in the planet with a loss leader product, Google might very well be realizing additional profit from their unprofitable video experiment. For a company like this, nothing is as simple as simplistic per-visit loss analysis.
Does anyone have data on how many truly false predictions have been made? Because one out of X might not be enough to condemn the politicos and glorify the scientist. Clearly these things do need to be managed carefully.
My sister can't even get FiOS where she lives.
If you manage to duplicate the functionality of VS in MonoDevelop/Linux, you'll have a huge hit on your hands. The *nix crowd is still living in the "if it was hard for me it should be for you too" hole and one of the areas where they've traditionally lagged has been IDEs and useful debuggers. Whatever else, they are a huge boon to productivity, especially for less experienced developers.
Maybe Emacs + bash is good enough for Joe Linux, but that doesn't mean it's good enough for everybody, even if it has proven to work just fine.
Most FOSS people are completely clueless about how software development happens in corporate environments. Sell them something that behaves like VS with some sort of commercial support behind it (open source or otherwise, that's mostly irrelevant) and you'll have your VB revolution on the Linux desktop.
Remember "OMG PONIES!!"?
I do... I still do.
They didn't "fight" it, they try to pressure Microsoft into a better licensing deal, Microsoft called their bluff, they got served. There was no way TomTom was going to carry this one under current IP law, and this was never about Linux (although that didn't stop the armchair advocates and their sisters from screaming it was).
Want to stop this? Lobby your representative to fix the patent system. Then you can stop the big boys (MS, IBM, Apple, Toshiba, etc) and the patent trolls from leaving a trail of shafted and bloodied small companies behind them. Until then, you better be ready to cough up some cash to license the technology you want to use.
Perhaps. My point is that for my decidedly limited purposes, yum got the job done, just as apt does now. I don't lose any sleep if my repo management application takes 2.4 additional seconds to resolve a dependency.
Hm, I don't remember yum being slow, but then I really didn't use it that often after first setting up a machine. Running an update or installing the odd package once in a while doesn't fall in my "things that must be really fast" category of computing. I prefer it to work correctly, especially when doing dependency resolutions.
I dropped CentOS a while ago for Debian (although I still use Fedora on the desktop, against my better judgment) but I have to ask... what's wrong with yum? I never really had any problems with it, at least in the past few years. Sure, in the early days it sucked, just like apt did in many ways, but now?
I'm just curious really. I don't consider apt or dpkg to be ENORMOUSLY SUPERIOR to yum, really. Probably a bit better in some ways, but not that much.