Besides the obvious answer of "it saves energy and thus money" what other reason is there? It doesn't save that much money on a monthly basis
Either you've got fantastically cheap energy bills or you've never worked out how much power your PC draws when it's turned on. 80-120 watts is fairly average IME - let's take the middle figure of 100 watts, or 2.4KW per day.
This is only true if you blame the costs for incompatibility on the part following open standards.
Out here in the real world, you have to be pragmatic.
Granted, incompatibility is Microsoft's fault. But I'd be more concerned with answering the question "what works?" rather than "whose fault is it?".
Re:Dificult to say...
on
Sun Buys MySQL
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ESR was on the nail. You can't defeat open source by buying the company IF the product has enough people who care about it enough to maintain it, have the appropriate expertise and aren't employed by the company.
There are a lot of important open source projects for which at least one of the above requirements is not true.
I'd be interested to see some evidence that there's a difference in IT costs between the different suites, and, if there is, is it greater than the total licensing costs.
These tend to amount to two things:
1. Office has a plethora of management tools to ease rollout and configuration. When was the last time you saw end-users expected to configure Outlook themselves?
2. An assumption that the installation and management of a complete rollout of OpenOffice across a large business is significantly more complicated than the installation and management of a major Microsoft Office upgrade. (It probably isn't because most of the issues are more to do with "how can we manage this project with minimum disruption to the business?" rather than "I can't figure out how to use the product", but analysts seldom live in the real world).
I can guarantee right now that, from a training perspective, for anyone familiar with Office 97 through Office 2003, OO.org is going to be a helluva lot cheaper than Office 2007.
You can guarantee all you like, but there are two things that you don't have:
1. The management tools that Microsoft provide for automatically rolling out and configuring Office through things like GPO. 2. A 15 page typed report (which could easily be condensed into 1 page) from some random organisation calling itself "The ---- Group" which agrees with you.
The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"
Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone become a corporate high flyer without knowing that there's no such thing as a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"?
1. 99% accuracy rate is actually pretty bad in the real world. In a typical document, you might expect 12-15 words per line - so you have one error every 7 lines or so. 2. 99% accuracy rate is only achievable under ideal circumstances - ie. using a top quality microphone hooked up to a good soundcard in an environment with very little background noise and no echo. Basically, circumstances you only get in a half-decent recording studio. In the real world, you seldom get this. 3. Unless you happen to be blessed with amazing self-discipline (and/or can guarantee that nobody is going to approach you while you're working). Otherwise you get back to work after a distraction and find yourself having to delete a conversation you just had with a co-worker. 4. If you're in an open-plan office (that's probably about 99% of UK offices these days) your colleagues will not thank you for spending all day talking.
Do you think the PHBs will ever learn that using proprietary systems like Windows may seem cheaper in the short term but in the long run you open your wallet and let them take take take?
Doesnt the DPA expressly forbid transferring data to roganisations whose data protection laws are not as least as stringent as the DPA?
The DPA has a number of getouts:
- An organisation isn't obliged to give you information you request if doing so might compromise a criminal investigation. - An organisation can't send data to countries without similar protections in place without your consent. Note that they are not obliged to have procedures (other than "Fine, you don't have to deal with us if you don't want to") to deal with anyone who doesn't consent.
Plus a few others I can't remember right now.
Frankly, it's not a particularly strong law. Its purpose seems more to ensure due diligence on the part of anyone dealing with data, not to expressly prohibit data transfer.
Still though, that's a 1 in 11,000 (I think?) chance of dying by terrorist in 30 years. Just at thought.
If the numbers at http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volcanoes/vrisk.html are even remotely accurate, it's significantly more likely you'll die of cancer, in a car crash, of heart failure or be murdered in the next year.
The only reason terrorism gets so much publicity is that successful attacks are apparently random and kill a large number of people simultaneously.
Ah well, I suppose this is how an empire declines. What's sad is the up-and-coming empires seem to have even less faith in liberty than the American aristocracy does.
Historically, democracy has never been a particularly common form of government - and certainly not amongst empire builders. The earliest democracies existed in ancient Greece; they seldom lasted over a century.
The Roman empire was ruled over by one man - after Julius, the word "Caesar" came to (broadly) mean "Emperor".
The Roman empire eventually fell, and as Europe descended into the dark ages areas were ruled by kings. Similarly, the Catholic church (which emerged from the ruins of the Roman Empire) has never been run across democratic lines.
France only adopted democracy after their revolution in the 18th century. They didn't do away with kings until the latter part of the revolution. At around the same time, the French empire started to fall apart.
Germany had democracy foisted upon them after the First World War. Frankly, Germany wasn't ready for it - the National Socialist German Workers' party was elected to power (though they had been playing very dirty for some time). And if the Second World War wasn't about empire building, I don't know what was.
Russia was for centuries ruled by Czars. They got rid of one bunch of dictatorial leaders during the Russian revolution - and replaced it with another, the Communist leaders. Nevertheless, for many years they controlled vast areas of land - but not since the collapse of Communism.
The British empire was, to be fair, ruled by a democracy. It's about the only empire I can think of that was. But we certainly didn't run our colonies on democratic lines - indeed, it was a desire on the part of the colonies to be run as democracies which led to the collapse of the British empire.
And you could argue that the church has a vested interest in making sure very few people ever get a halfway decent education - that way, their senior members remain the one-eyed man in the proverbial kingdom of the blind.
The "make children so unattractive that nobody will go near them" idea was mooted on UK documentary series "Brass Eye" some years ago.
Their idea was a canister filled with raw sewage connected to a paedophile detector. When a paedophile was detected in the area, the canister was released covering the child, thus deterring the paedophile.
That would explain rather a lot, but given the pace at which these things happen (we probably won't see a resolution this side of 2010) I don't really see how it can possibly prevent future infractions.
It looks like the company has reached the point where it's effectively immune to any cashflow problems which may arise as a result of legal sanctions, regardless of whether or not it has friends in high places. Ouch.
Particularly interesting is the number of awards they've won. Considering they don't appear to have a product, it just shows how easy it is to fool the people who make these awards.
Sure, they've been forced to hand over cash in fines - but fines aren't terribly effective against companies that can make more money in 3 hours than they are likely to be fined in 3 years.
As far as I can tell, every antitrust suit (in the EU at least) has focused on punishing specific actions rather than preventing general behaviour - for instance, "you bundled media player, don't do it" rather than "you systematically use your existing monopoly in one product to try and establish monopolies in other products, don't do it". That may be because Microsoft isn't an EU-based company, so the EU couldn't break them up regardless of whether or not laws to do so exist on the statute books.
IANAL, but I wouldn't think you could. Generally, the copyright for your work is owned by your employer and even if they go bankrupt, there's a possibility that someone else will buy up the rights for all their code.
The best you could do would be to try to talk your employer into either distributing their changed source and/or sending it upstream to the project maintainer.
Been happily using one since 2004 and it's the best investment ever. For some pretty horrible time I thought I was going to have to leave IT in search of some other profession - not particularly comforting as I'd only graduated two years earlier.
It's expensive, but a lot cheaper than learning a new job - particularly when the NHS's attitude was "Oh, your wrists hurt. That's a shame. Spend the rest of your life taking ibuprofen and give us a shout if you develop a stomach ulcer."
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Besides the obvious answer of "it saves energy and thus money" what other reason is there? It doesn't save that much money on a monthly basis
Either you've got fantastically cheap energy bills or you've never worked out how much power your PC draws when it's turned on. 80-120 watts is fairly average IME - let's take the middle figure of 100 watts, or 2.4KW per day.
Multiply that by 30, that's 72KW per month.
suspend/resume was (half-ass) working since nt4.0 and first acpi systems
NT4 didn't support power management.
This is only true if you blame the costs for incompatibility on the part following open standards.
Out here in the real world, you have to be pragmatic.
Granted, incompatibility is Microsoft's fault. But I'd be more concerned with answering the question "what works?" rather than "whose fault is it?".
ESR was on the nail. You can't defeat open source by buying the company IF the product has enough people who care about it enough to maintain it, have the appropriate expertise and aren't employed by the company.
There are a lot of important open source projects for which at least one of the above requirements is not true.
That extra 1% is the part that's difficult to get.
If you'd said "I got 98.995% accuracy with the included microphone", I'd be more interested.
I'd be interested to see some evidence that there's a difference in IT costs between the different suites, and, if there is, is it greater than the total licensing costs.
These tend to amount to two things:
1. Office has a plethora of management tools to ease rollout and configuration. When was the last time you saw end-users expected to configure Outlook themselves?
2. An assumption that the installation and management of a complete rollout of OpenOffice across a large business is significantly more complicated than the installation and management of a major Microsoft Office upgrade. (It probably isn't because most of the issues are more to do with "how can we manage this project with minimum disruption to the business?" rather than "I can't figure out how to use the product", but analysts seldom live in the real world).
I can guarantee right now that, from a training perspective, for anyone familiar with Office 97 through Office 2003, OO.org is going to be a helluva lot cheaper than Office 2007.
You can guarantee all you like, but there are two things that you don't have:
1. The management tools that Microsoft provide for automatically rolling out and configuring Office through things like GPO.
2. A 15 page typed report (which could easily be condensed into 1 page) from some random organisation calling itself "The ---- Group" which agrees with you.
The real problem is that corporate high fliers will read it & take it for a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"
Perhaps I've had a very sheltered life, but how in God's name does someone become a corporate high flyer without knowing that there's no such thing as a "reasoned & studied, impartial report"?
A few things became of the technology:
1. 99% accuracy rate is actually pretty bad in the real world. In a typical document, you might expect 12-15 words per line - so you have one error every 7 lines or so.
2. 99% accuracy rate is only achievable under ideal circumstances - ie. using a top quality microphone hooked up to a good soundcard in an environment with very little background noise and no echo. Basically, circumstances you only get in a half-decent recording studio. In the real world, you seldom get this.
3. Unless you happen to be blessed with amazing self-discipline (and/or can guarantee that nobody is going to approach you while you're working). Otherwise you get back to work after a distraction and find yourself having to delete a conversation you just had with a co-worker.
4. If you're in an open-plan office (that's probably about 99% of UK offices these days) your colleagues will not thank you for spending all day talking.
Do you think the PHBs will ever learn that using proprietary systems like Windows may seem cheaper in the short term but in the long run you open your wallet and let them take take take?
They haven't yet.
Doesnt the DPA expressly forbid transferring data to roganisations whose data protection laws are not as least as stringent as the DPA?
The DPA has a number of getouts:
- An organisation isn't obliged to give you information you request if doing so might compromise a criminal investigation.
- An organisation can't send data to countries without similar protections in place without your consent. Note that they are not obliged to have procedures (other than "Fine, you don't have to deal with us if you don't want to") to deal with anyone who doesn't consent.
Plus a few others I can't remember right now.
Frankly, it's not a particularly strong law. Its purpose seems more to ensure due diligence on the part of anyone dealing with data, not to expressly prohibit data transfer.
Still though, that's a 1 in 11,000 (I think?) chance of dying by terrorist in 30 years. Just at thought.
If the numbers at http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/volcanoes/vrisk.html are even remotely accurate, it's significantly more likely you'll die of cancer, in a car crash, of heart failure or be murdered in the next year.
The only reason terrorism gets so much publicity is that successful attacks are apparently random and kill a large number of people simultaneously.
Ah well, I suppose this is how an empire declines. What's sad is the up-and-coming empires seem to have even less faith in liberty than the American aristocracy does.
Historically, democracy has never been a particularly common form of government - and certainly not amongst empire builders. The earliest democracies existed in ancient Greece; they seldom lasted over a century.
The Roman empire was ruled over by one man - after Julius, the word "Caesar" came to (broadly) mean "Emperor".
The Roman empire eventually fell, and as Europe descended into the dark ages areas were ruled by kings. Similarly, the Catholic church (which emerged from the ruins of the Roman Empire) has never been run across democratic lines.
France only adopted democracy after their revolution in the 18th century. They didn't do away with kings until the latter part of the revolution. At around the same time, the French empire started to fall apart.
Germany had democracy foisted upon them after the First World War. Frankly, Germany wasn't ready for it - the National Socialist German Workers' party was elected to power (though they had been playing very dirty for some time). And if the Second World War wasn't about empire building, I don't know what was.
Russia was for centuries ruled by Czars. They got rid of one bunch of dictatorial leaders during the Russian revolution - and replaced it with another, the Communist leaders. Nevertheless, for many years they controlled vast areas of land - but not since the collapse of Communism.
The British empire was, to be fair, ruled by a democracy. It's about the only empire I can think of that was. But we certainly didn't run our colonies on democratic lines - indeed, it was a desire on the part of the colonies to be run as democracies which led to the collapse of the British empire.
Aren't both generally the religious nutters?
Yes.
And you could argue that the church has a vested interest in making sure very few people ever get a halfway decent education - that way, their senior members remain the one-eyed man in the proverbial kingdom of the blind.
The "make children so unattractive that nobody will go near them" idea was mooted on UK documentary series "Brass Eye" some years ago.
Their idea was a canister filled with raw sewage connected to a paedophile detector. When a paedophile was detected in the area, the canister was released covering the child, thus deterring the paedophile.
Something that might work would be to make the fines increase as the process drags on (like that 2 million per day fine they got once)
It didn't work last time.
That would explain rather a lot, but given the pace at which these things happen (we probably won't see a resolution this side of 2010) I don't really see how it can possibly prevent future infractions.
It looks like the company has reached the point where it's effectively immune to any cashflow problems which may arise as a result of legal sanctions, regardless of whether or not it has friends in high places. Ouch.
Particularly interesting is the number of awards they've won. Considering they don't appear to have a product, it just shows how easy it is to fool the people who make these awards.
It's difficult to say.
Sure, they've been forced to hand over cash in fines - but fines aren't terribly effective against companies that can make more money in 3 hours than they are likely to be fined in 3 years.
As far as I can tell, every antitrust suit (in the EU at least) has focused on punishing specific actions rather than preventing general behaviour - for instance, "you bundled media player, don't do it" rather than "you systematically use your existing monopoly in one product to try and establish monopolies in other products, don't do it". That may be because Microsoft isn't an EU-based company, so the EU couldn't break them up regardless of whether or not laws to do so exist on the statute books.
When in doubt, watch a commercial for the product. The manufacturer rarely pronounces their own product's name incorrectly.
That's interesting because there have been at least two different pronunciations of Hyundai on UK TV adverts:
1. Hi-un-die
2. Hun-dee (with a short U)
IANAL, but I wouldn't think you could. Generally, the copyright for your work is owned by your employer and even if they go bankrupt, there's a possibility that someone else will buy up the rights for all their code.
The best you could do would be to try to talk your employer into either distributing their changed source and/or sending it upstream to the project maintainer.
They also missed the Goldtouch adjustable keyboard:
http://www.keyovation.com/pc-65-2-goldtouch-ergonomic-adjustable-keyboard-white.aspx
Been happily using one since 2004 and it's the best investment ever. For some pretty horrible time I thought I was going to have to leave IT in search of some other profession - not particularly comforting as I'd only graduated two years earlier.
It's expensive, but a lot cheaper than learning a new job - particularly when the NHS's attitude was "Oh, your wrists hurt. That's a shame. Spend the rest of your life taking ibuprofen and give us a shout if you develop a stomach ulcer."
Shouldn't that be:
RVER! Ce bac ere! ws tg dar !
You are one sick puppy, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
This way in theory anybody could participate in the Tour de France
Provided they can afford the surgery. Even in countries with free/cheap healthcare, this kind of thing won't be available cheap.