1. I get a huge kick out of this Shel person quote. Since when is plain-speaking rewarded or even sanctioned in big-school politics? Shel must be planning to move onto a much smaller school.
2. Shel's got it right in the sense that public-ish universities like Berkeley are the softest target for the RIAA. It's the public money and accompanying political pressure the media conglomerates can easily exert that will win the RIAA another battle.
3. If the RIAA's behavior is so offensive, then what exactly will anyone do about it? You'll keep buying their movies, keep buying their media with rare exceptions, keep watching their entertainment spew on the rented cable/satellite device.
Bottom Line: The moral indignation is ridiculous. Grow a pair and stop consuming their products.
Most of the 40-somethings around me are stick-in-the-muds who have no interest in change or taking any risks.
As one of those 40-somethings, it depends on the environment in which they work and the risks they've taken. In the bigger places I've worked, blame-shifting and doing nothing was the standard operating procedure. It's a very corrosive environment that has little to do with age. For some do-nothings, they've got a significant other they'd like to stay married to, a family to feed and educate and a mortgage too. That can chill the entrepreneurial spirit.
Most of the responsible adventurers have got a really good pad to fall back on or have a failure path more or less worked out. If they go the VC route, they'll get a sexy start up story made up, or even a young face to act as the "sexy startup" proxies while the old guys actually get the work done. (Though, they usually provide the cash)
'Wunderkinds' type founder stories make better story telling than "I started my hosted application business in my garage after putting in my time at the DWP and seeing a need."
Some of the most ridiculous startup fiction that come to mind,
-Michael Dell. Both Mom and Dad Dell had the deeep pockets, knowledge, connections to grow their son's so-called dorm-room start up. Reselling PC's is very capital intensive for those who aren't aware of the business problems.
-Cisco. After the guy who founded cisco stole/borrowed/whatever the IP from the university he worked for, the sexier fiction to cover up the legal gray area and ethical skulduggery was he used was to claim the networking technology was used to talk to his future wife. (or something like that) Meanwhile the guy who -actually- did all the work and seemed to have an ethical bone in his body, retired from the university in relative anonymity.
Along with all of the VC money comes the story tellers to paper over most of ethically challenging details.
The last I checked in with the Nexenta project they were in violation of the GPL because the Sun license IP conflicts directly with the letter of GPL. When I asked on list, I got no response. Huh. Imagine that.
Here's a link to somewhat inflamatory summary of their license issues. Look for the comment titled "Nexenta devs = liars and thieves" http://www.osnews.com/comments/12569
Ignoring the fact that there are applications where a session cannot be interrupted does not validate your opinion. Telephony applications are also this way.
And THIS is how you perform upgrades. You split the cluster, upgrade one half, verify that the upgrade worked, then roll the cluster over to that node, and upgrade the second portion of the cluster. If you have more machines in the cluster, you do 'round-robin' upgrades
Hmmm. I happen to live by your words in an environment where this is theoretically possible, but practically impossible. Why? Because when the cluster rolls to a passive node, the application times out on the existing connections. The time outs have business ($$$$) implications. I wish it were okay to have infinite retries, but it's viewed as a violation of the service agreement. Telephony is like this too.
An academic ideal for sure, but please speak more humbly because it is no silver bullet.
There are applications where this is simply not possible and I happen to admin some applications like that. This is what active passive clustering is all about. Even then minor updates of any kind are a long, carefully practiced, high-anxiety events.
Another informative post mentioned telphony as the perfect application, I copied it as an FYI
"Its very difficult to take over the termination of a circuit switched system without some interruption for the end user. And its also not aways easy to busy out all channels on a line as calls drop off so you can free up a machine for patching."
free to bring those files... or use the long existing free "Viewer" versions
But, not edit them or otherwise legitimately salvage your data.
It's easy to brush the idea that Microsoft holds your data hostage. Just don't think beyond your current PC. It doesn't bother you, but some of us WANT to open our children's mishmash of pictures and letters when we are old and gray.
This is the classic strategy where dumb money thinks it's wise to pay month-to-month.
I forsee upgrade problems that require extra support that one must pay for among a whole slew of gotchas.
Personally, you and I know that the judge in this case has heard about the stories of the **AA's actions around the country
That's not likely. First and foremost he's vested in keeping his job so that means he's up to his eyeballs in the political machinations of his region and processing cases as quickly as possible. Unless it's some sort of hobby for him like it is for NewYorkCountryLawyer.
Which takes less time, giving prosecutors a free-pass or generating MORE work calling the RIAA lawyers out on their shennanigans? Which one gets him re-elected?
We're talking about "The Law" and intellectual property machinations where 2 + 2 can equal 5. It's quite likely he's vested in the RIAA's pablum.
Seagate fears the market potential STEC has. The simplest path is to litigate STEC to death over patents or trademark.
It's happened to every small company I've worked for. Most of them closed up shop because the big fish buried them in Trademark and Patent litigation over and over again.
1. The computer desktop is not a major source of revenue for anyone. Don't whip out Microsoft on me here because their desktop business is through resellers like DELL and HP. Their retail product is costly as hell compared to a reseller like HP or Dell. Compare Vista sales through Dell versus how many retail licenses were purchased at Worst Buy.
2. Backend/Big Iron is where the most dollar opportunity are with Linux.
3. The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
There are *still* new and interesting things happening on the server side in storage, virtual machines, memory, you name it. Desktops? Not so much. What's the last legitimately different desktop environment you, or anyone else has tried?
We work in a healthcare organization and having people develop applications on our servers can potentially cause huge issues.
And why exactly would dev's get to touch production? This is the reason why change control , documentation and good service topography is so vital. Your dev system should be a snapshot of production minus personal data. Your infrastructure should support that all the way back to the dev shop. Anything less is laziness. Most of which is probably way outside of your control. I gave management the options and rationale and they make poor choices. Don't lose too much sleep over it.
While it's possible to create little sandbox areas for them, it's an administrative hassle
In theory, that's your job. You and I both know in practice, the reality is much uglier, but this gets back to having an appropriate test environment....their applications can't cross security lines... Then there's the support issues - who fixes their business critical application when they've left or are on vacation?
Get out of the blame-shifing game. Make the issue sknown and go on with your day. If management doesn't want to spend the money and time to manage contingencies well, then it's their fault not yours.
Comments like this are my #1 pet peeve. Get in front of these issues by communicating well and if nothing changes it's a no-win situation where blame default shifts to IT. Move on. There are greener pastures.
On the one hand, it's nice to see some analysis on more loosely organized software projects. It's definitely not something that the average corporate sponsored University department would do.
It's also funny to see how short most enthusiasts memories are. Pre-Sarge, Debian was being criticized for everything under the sun.
As an off-topic FYI, Debian Testing is in fine shape for a KDE desktop. I'm running two simple servers on testing and there are no show-stopper bugs. Get your Beta installation disk today! http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
The last time I checked, a company (versus an OSS software project) needs, to pay someone to answer the phone. (Pay the phone bill too.)
Yes, there are exceptions when it's a *really* small business, but we're talking about company sizes that include paying an accountant and have many talented employees.
It's a marketing angle to create some differentiation. Whole Foods Markets is a very well-known example. Guess what? Investors were mad as hell when their profits did not come in as targeted.
**Every** company in the contracts procurement game would probably run afoul of these and numerous other rules. In gov't contracting the rules are there to ensure contracts go to the largest contractors.
SmallContractor wins? Fine. Step 1. BigContractor appeals the award on technicalities like this. Step 2. While the appeal is on, BigContractor uses the appeal as a stick to extract some of the awarded value from the SmallContractor. Step 3. Profit! When they get their vig, BigContractor drops appeal.
In principal, I agree that viable competitors to Google is a common good. Looking at it from a business acquisition perspective, you would be wrong though.
-As a general rule, upwards of 80% of acquisitions fail to bring "synergies" that are referenced as justification for mergers public relations. Most of them are done to eliminate competition and grow a balance sheet to fund the next acquisition.
-The scale and managerial mediocrity of all companies in your post suggest that nothing viable would come out of a merger, regardless of the acquirer. (sp) Google has a goose that's laid maybe two golden eggs on which an empire has been built. (search and sensible adverts) Yahoo probably has a couple of golden eggs too. Like all of the companies mentioned, the managerial layer at Yahoo has more than likely declared the golden eggs non-viable products and stuck them on the shelf.
My own opinion is they should try to go private as employee financed/employee-owned. But that doesn't net the investment banks any service fees, so it will never see the light of day.
When you take ou a loan, "new money" is created as debt from that loan.
Even more off-topic, "new money" can be simplified into artificial gdp growth. It elegantly explains the economic expansion that took place a few years ago that had no real wage increases.
The risk is that the deflation of the asset bubble slows economic activity because the only people with any money will wait around for things to get even cheaper. Hence a downward spiral that is very hard to stop.
This is one of the rationale behind lowering interest rates and opening TAF's for any red-headed step child in the financial community. The wisdom of these moves will be argued for some time to come.
Complaining about taxes is one of those stupid things that everyone does while they drive to work on roads funded by taxes, with sewage systems created and maintained with taxes and so on.
Even if you live in a country with the lowest tax rate in the world, I'm sure there are people complaining about taxes while the air is thick with the stench of human waste among other niceties that go along with a low tax burden.
There is no correlation between low tax burden and prosperous business environment either. The Business community *loves* to abuse what seems like common sense, but historical observation suggests tax burden is a very small component in the overall business climate in a given country.
Even more off topic, why do stories like this get tagged "democrats"? I can't seem to recall any current Republocrats who are fiscally responsible. We're going on our third decade of deficit spending, funding a war on two fronts via foreign debt and the Federal budget continues to grow right along with our the debt burden. It seems to me, the economic magic of lower taxes for the wealthies magically increasing the tax receipts is another hoax that everyone but the richest 5% will end up paying for their crackpot tax schemes.
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1. I get a huge kick out of this Shel person quote. Since when is plain-speaking rewarded or even sanctioned in big-school politics? Shel must be planning to move onto a much smaller school.
2. Shel's got it right in the sense that public-ish universities like Berkeley are the softest target for the RIAA. It's the public money and accompanying political pressure the media conglomerates can easily exert that will win the RIAA another battle.
3. If the RIAA's behavior is so offensive, then what exactly will anyone do about it? You'll keep buying their movies, keep buying their media with rare exceptions, keep watching their entertainment spew on the rented cable/satellite device.
Bottom Line: The moral indignation is ridiculous. Grow a pair and stop consuming their products.
Most of the 40-somethings around me are stick-in-the-muds who have no interest in change or taking any risks.
As one of those 40-somethings, it depends on the environment in which they work and the risks they've taken.
In the bigger places I've worked, blame-shifting and doing nothing was the standard operating procedure. It's a very corrosive environment that has little to do with age.
For some do-nothings, they've got a significant other they'd like to stay married to, a family to feed and educate and a mortgage too. That can chill the entrepreneurial spirit.
Most of the responsible adventurers have got a really good pad to fall back on or have a failure path more or less worked out. If they go the VC route, they'll get a sexy start up story made up, or even a young face to act as the "sexy startup" proxies while the old guys actually get the work done. (Though, they usually provide the cash)
'Wunderkinds' type founder stories make better story telling than "I started my hosted application business in my garage after putting in my time at the DWP and seeing a need."
Some of the most ridiculous startup fiction that come to mind,
-Michael Dell. Both Mom and Dad Dell had the deeep pockets, knowledge, connections to grow their son's so-called dorm-room start up. Reselling PC's is very capital intensive for those who aren't aware of the business problems.
-Cisco. After the guy who founded cisco stole/borrowed/whatever the IP from the university he worked for, the sexier fiction to cover up the legal gray area and ethical skulduggery was he used was to claim the networking technology was used to talk to his future wife. (or something like that) Meanwhile the guy who -actually- did all the work and seemed to have an ethical bone in his body, retired from the university in relative anonymity.
Along with all of the VC money comes the story tellers to paper over most of ethically challenging details.
It seems Sun is doing everything in its power to alienate a developer community.
-Wouldn't let the opensolaris board call the project opensolaris. Probably a legal quagmire of their own creation. The consequences of that lead to this resignation. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html
-There's this gem, most of which I don't pretend to understand. The punchline is on the bottom. http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
-There's this gem, where even Ian Murdock links in suggesting the difficulty is happening above his level. http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/a-solution-for-suns-os-community-problems/#comment-17418
The last I checked in with the Nexenta project they were in violation of the GPL because the Sun license IP conflicts directly with the letter of GPL. When I asked on list, I got no response. Huh. Imagine that.
Here's a link to somewhat inflamatory summary of their license issues. Look for the comment titled "Nexenta devs = liars and thieves" http://www.osnews.com/comments/12569
1-2 second lag
Oh if only I were streaming video.
Ignoring the fact that there are applications where a session cannot be interrupted does not validate your opinion. Telephony applications are also this way.
If the number of Mac units sold is accurate, then Vista is absolutely killing HP and Dell unit sales.
That would suggest that Dell and HP's consumer PC business will show unit and dollar sales declines.
And THIS is how you perform upgrades. You split the cluster, upgrade one half, verify that the upgrade worked, then roll the cluster over to that node, and upgrade the second portion of the cluster. If you have more machines in the cluster, you do 'round-robin' upgrades
Hmmm. I happen to live by your words in an environment where this is theoretically possible, but practically impossible. Why? Because when the cluster rolls to a passive node, the application times out on the existing connections. The time outs have business ($$$$) implications. I wish it were okay to have infinite retries, but it's viewed as a violation of the service agreement. Telephony is like this too.
An academic ideal for sure, but please speak more humbly because it is no silver bullet.
There are applications where this is simply not possible and I happen to admin some applications like that. This is what active passive clustering is all about. Even then minor updates of any kind are a long, carefully practiced, high-anxiety events.
Another informative post mentioned telphony as the perfect application, I copied it as an FYI
"Its very difficult to take over the termination of a circuit switched system without some interruption for the end user. And its also not aways easy to busy out all channels on a line as calls drop off so you can free up a machine for patching."
free to bring those files ... or use the long existing free "Viewer" versions
But, not edit them or otherwise legitimately salvage your data.
It's easy to brush the idea that Microsoft holds your data hostage. Just don't think beyond your current PC. It doesn't bother you, but some of us WANT to open our children's mishmash of pictures and letters when we are old and gray.
This is the classic strategy where dumb money thinks it's wise to pay month-to-month.
I forsee upgrade problems that require extra support that one must pay for among a whole slew of gotchas.
Personally, you and I know that the judge in this case has heard about the stories of the **AA's actions around the country
That's not likely. First and foremost he's vested in keeping his job so that means he's up to his eyeballs in the political machinations of his region and processing cases as quickly as possible. Unless it's some sort of hobby for him like it is for NewYorkCountryLawyer.
Which takes less time, giving prosecutors a free-pass or generating MORE work calling the RIAA lawyers out on their shennanigans? Which one gets him re-elected?
We're talking about "The Law" and intellectual property machinations where 2 + 2 can equal 5. It's quite likely he's vested in the RIAA's pablum.
It's a shakedown.
Seagate fears the market potential STEC has. The simplest path is to litigate STEC to death over patents or trademark.
It's happened to every small company I've worked for. Most of them closed up shop because the big fish buried them in Trademark and Patent litigation over and over again.
Every small company I've worked for has been shaken down this way.
Step 1: Giant company sees small company as a real or imagined threat.
Step 2: Initiate patent or Trademark litigation.
Step 3: Repeat step 2 until small company is sunk under a mountain of legal bills.
Step 4: Profit!
1. The computer desktop is not a major source of revenue for anyone. Don't whip out Microsoft on me here because their desktop business is through resellers like DELL and HP. Their retail product is costly as hell compared to a reseller like HP or Dell. Compare Vista sales through Dell versus how many retail licenses were purchased at Worst Buy.
2. Backend/Big Iron is where the most dollar opportunity are with Linux.
3. The desktop problems are much more difficult to solve and the payoff in dollars is worth maybe a nice dinner.
There are *still* new and interesting things happening on the server side in storage, virtual machines, memory, you name it. Desktops? Not so much. What's the last legitimately different desktop environment you, or anyone else has tried?
We work in a healthcare organization and having people develop applications on our servers can potentially cause huge issues.
...their applications can't cross security lines... Then there's the support issues - who fixes their business critical application when they've left or are on vacation?
And why exactly would dev's get to touch production? This is the reason why change control , documentation and good service topography is so vital. Your dev system should be a snapshot of production minus personal data. Your infrastructure should support that all the way back to the dev shop. Anything less is laziness. Most of which is probably way outside of your control. I gave management the options and rationale and they make poor choices. Don't lose too much sleep over it.
While it's possible to create little sandbox areas for them, it's an administrative hassle
In theory, that's your job. You and I both know in practice, the reality is much uglier, but this gets back to having an appropriate test environment.
Get out of the blame-shifing game. Make the issue sknown and go on with your day. If management doesn't want to spend the money and time to manage contingencies well, then it's their fault not yours.
Comments like this are my #1 pet peeve. Get in front of these issues by communicating well and if nothing changes it's a no-win situation where blame default shifts to IT. Move on. There are greener pastures.
Rumor. Even if the BIOS has a TPM feature, Linux still runs on top just fine as control has to pass to whatever OS you choose.
I just reconfigured a brand new Dell to Debian/Vista a couple of weeks ago.
http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
HP is rumored to ship a Linux laptop.
Here's a decent list that's a bit dated, but probably helpful http://lxer.com/module/forums/t/23168
Finally, blow away that Microsoft partition and install it yourself!
Postgresql does indeed kick ass.
On the one hand, it's nice to see some analysis on more loosely organized software projects. It's definitely not something that the average corporate sponsored University department would do.
It's also funny to see how short most enthusiasts memories are. Pre-Sarge, Debian was being criticized for everything under the sun.
As an off-topic FYI, Debian Testing is in fine shape for a KDE desktop. I'm running two simple servers on testing and there are no show-stopper bugs. Get your Beta installation disk today! http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
The last time I checked, a company (versus an OSS software project) needs, to pay someone to answer the phone. (Pay the phone bill too.)
Yes, there are exceptions when it's a *really* small business, but we're talking about company sizes that include paying an accountant and have many talented employees.
It's a marketing angle to create some differentiation. Whole Foods Markets is a very well-known example. Guess what? Investors were mad as hell when their profits did not come in as targeted.
**Every** company in the contracts procurement game would probably run afoul of these and numerous other rules. In gov't contracting the rules are there to ensure contracts go to the largest contractors.
SmallContractor wins? Fine.
Step 1. BigContractor appeals the award on technicalities like this.
Step 2. While the appeal is on, BigContractor uses the appeal as a stick to extract some of the awarded value from the SmallContractor.
Step 3. Profit! When they get their vig, BigContractor drops appeal.
In principal, I agree that viable competitors to Google is a common good. Looking at it from a business acquisition perspective, you would be wrong though.
-As a general rule, upwards of 80% of acquisitions fail to bring "synergies" that are referenced as justification for mergers public relations. Most of them are done to eliminate competition and grow a balance sheet to fund the next acquisition.
-The scale and managerial mediocrity of all companies in your post suggest that nothing viable would come out of a merger, regardless of the acquirer. (sp) Google has a goose that's laid maybe two golden eggs on which an empire has been built. (search and sensible adverts) Yahoo probably has a couple of golden eggs too. Like all of the companies mentioned, the managerial layer at Yahoo has more than likely declared the golden eggs non-viable products and stuck them on the shelf.
My own opinion is they should try to go private as employee financed/employee-owned. But that doesn't net the investment banks any service fees, so it will never see the light of day.
-
Really.
When you take ou a loan, "new money" is created as debt from that loan.
Even more off-topic, "new money" can be simplified into artificial gdp growth. It elegantly explains the economic expansion that took place a few years ago that had no real wage increases.
The risk is that the deflation of the asset bubble slows economic activity because the only people with any money will wait around for things to get even cheaper. Hence a downward spiral that is very hard to stop.
This is one of the rationale behind lowering interest rates and opening TAF's for any red-headed step child in the financial community. The wisdom of these moves will be argued for some time to come.
Complaining about taxes is one of those stupid things that everyone does while they drive to work on roads funded by taxes, with sewage systems created and maintained with taxes and so on.
Even if you live in a country with the lowest tax rate in the world, I'm sure there are people complaining about taxes while the air is thick with the stench of human waste among other niceties that go along with a low tax burden.
There is no correlation between low tax burden and prosperous business environment either. The Business community *loves* to abuse what seems like common sense, but historical observation suggests tax burden is a very small component in the overall business climate in a given country.
Even more off topic, why do stories like this get tagged "democrats"? I can't seem to recall any current Republocrats who are fiscally responsible. We're going on our third decade of deficit spending, funding a war on two fronts via foreign debt and the Federal budget continues to grow right along with our the debt burden. It seems to me, the economic magic of lower taxes for the wealthies magically increasing the tax receipts is another hoax that everyone but the richest 5% will end up paying for their crackpot tax schemes.