The boss has certain tasks to accomplish as part of his job and he gets evaluated on them. If he can accomplish those tasks while spending most of his time playing Solitaire on his computer, then either the tasks are very light or he is very efficient when he isn't playing Solitaire.
If the tasks are very simple, it's not his fault: that sometimes happens in government--people get stranded in jobs where they don't have to do much yet they can't get fired.
Either way, evaluating the performance and effectiveness of his boss is not the systems manager's task. If the boss did something illegal on the computer, that might be the systems manager's business, but nothing beyond that.
The very FIRST issue you have with OpenOffice, whether it's a formatting issue, file conversion, or other imcompatiblity, will cost MORE than Microsoft Office in the loss of productivity and IT staff.
And the very FIRST Word virus you are going to have will cost you even MORE than any conversion costs from using OpenOffice. And that isn't even counting the additional costs of installing and maintaining MS Office relative to the much easier-to-deply and maintain OpenOffice.
And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough.
The "world" doesn't use MS Office formats, many institutions do. Many others don't.
If you use MS Office, you save on the format conversion costs. You pay a price, however, in terms of functionality: OpenOffice's XML formats give you today what MS Office still just promises.
Prions are hard to transmit, and that's no accident: naked proteins don't make it to your brain very easily.
The precursor proteins to prions appear to have important functions in your brain. The fact that they sometimes can harm you should be no more mysterious or scary than the fact that occasionally even a safety belt or air bag may be responsible for your death. On balance, you are still far better off with them.
The 1bn Indians might think that it is already unfair that they are making so much less money. In any case, the Europeans have the same argument, as do the Chinese, as do the Japanese, and they do have the purchasing power.
Whichever way you look at it, other nations are buying far more high tech goods from the US than they are getting in high tech jobs. As soon as those nations become capable of doing the high-tech work, those jobs are going to move. It's not only fair, it's economics in action.
A 250 GB USB 2.0 disk with enclosure and power supply costs about $170. That's $0.68/GB. If you want 1Tb of storage, that's by far the cheapest way to go. FireWire is not significantly more expensive either. Furthermore, Linux lets you do software RAID across those devices.
A 1TB PenguinComputing RAID server with SATA and 1G of RAM will set you back about $4200, still a lot cheaper than Apple with academic prices, let alone Apple's regular price of $6000. And the Linux machine will come with a choice of easy-to-use web-based configuration utilities, time-tested remotely accessible graphical administration utilities, and command line administration utilities. Furthermore, it has high-quality server software for SMB, Webdav, and NFS.
So, yes, it really is "just you". The XServe is nearly 50% more expensive than the comparable Linux machine and comes with much less software and much less choice in software. And the XServe is more than 4x as expensive as adding disk enclosures to an existing machine, which also can be configured as RAID drives under Linux.
India is a country of 1bn people. If Microsoft wants equal access to the Indian market, it seems only fair that they have proportional numbers of developers in India, which means that you would expect 3x as many Microsoft developers in India than in the US.
No, he didn't have to do it, but he did at private expense, so he gets to do it any way he wants. [...] Private works get to do things the way they see fit.
You are confusing means and ends. The purpose of a free market is an efficient allocation of resources. But that doesn't mean that just because the market does something, it is efficient--it often fails.
No, he didn't have to do it, but he did at private expense, so he gets to do it any way he wants. The fact that he used his own dna does NOT invalidate the results.
Nor does any of what you say invalidate Angry Toad's statement that "Venter is a grandstander and a media whore."
Your "what if's" are utterly devoid of fact and ignore reality entirely. "What if" doesn't mean shit.
This wasn't a "what if". Apple's corporate behavior was a blatant and reprehensible attack on the ability of other people to write software and innovate. The only reason Apple's actions didn't have more serious consequences because Apple didn't even own the intellectual property and because the company eventually just became irrelevant. See here for some background info.
Every company tries to lock in, that's what companies do.
So, you are saying Apple really is just like any other company. But they actually are not: their behavior was far worse. Apple's 1989 lawsuit was a kind of legal attack on the ability of people to write software that has been unmatched to this day.
Where's the innovation? With Tiger, you are getting NeXTStep running on Mach and BSD, with some updated graphics and toolkit tweaks.
think different: They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
Quite ironic, given that Apple prizes the uniformity of its user experience so much, a user experience that is determined by "usability experts" based on focus group testing to see what causes the least amount of confusing to the most average people.
You are quite right: Real is like Microsoft, but in a good way. Today, Microsoft may be an annoying monopoly that produces flaky software, but it was Microsoft that killed IBM's monopoly and opened up PC hardware. Without Microsoft's actions, we wouldn't be running Linux today. Apple, in contrast, has always been happy to sell overpriced, proprietary machines.
I don't think that iPod matters enough for Real's actions to amount to much, but if iPod was important, then Real's actions would be quite positive.
So, Real Networks takes it into their owns hands, and provides a hack to allow.rm on the iPod. This violates a whole lot of things, besides just common cortesy: DMCA, copyright, a few others.
Well, golly gee. If it weren't for companies doing just that and violating "common courtesy", you'd be typing at an IBM mainframe terminal right now. Apple is on the side of old stogy corporation--the only problem they have is--they aren't the monopoly or power.
Yes, but that's not for lack of trying. If Apple actually managed to get the kind of marketshare that Microsoft has, Apple would be far worse than Microsoft.
At one point, Apple tried to claim ownership of all GUIs, which was particularly ironic because they themselves didn't invent the technology.
No, he didn't have to use anybody's. He didn't even have to do it at all because he didn't have to sequence the human genome--another project was already well underway. Ventner's contribution was to create a lot of unnecessary problems.
I don't see the problem with it. Would you have preferred a "perfect human specimen"?
A scientifically careful approach to sequencing the human genome wouldn't have used any single individual's DNA--it would have selected the fragments and individuals it uses on a case-by-case basis, as work progressed. In the end, you would have ended up with sequences from many individuals covering many genes.
People have done both sorts of things with database and metadata file systems: there have been entire product lines built around it.
We had GUI systems of various sorts for about ten years when the Macintosh was released, but the technology was hardly proven either as something people would want to use or as something you could make money off of.
That's not true: there were commercial GUI products before Macintosh, but they were expensive--properly engineering such a system just is expensive.
What Apple did was cut a lot of corners and hit the market just when hardware reached the right price/performance ratio to support GUIs. That was good business sense, but it wasn't "innovation".
All indications are that Linux, Windows, and Mac OS are moving in a common direction with filesystem innovation
Whether or not it is useful, one thing is clear: this sort of thing is not "innovation". Databases as file systems have been around for decades, as has the question of file system metadata. The UNIX choices in this area are by design, not by an accident of history, and the motivations behind those choices are as valid today as they were several decades ago.
Linux is a ways yet from having a fully attributed, database-driven, journaling filesystem. The direction of future development looks promising, though. Linux will certainly compete as the search wars come to the desktop. Linux's value to the enterprise depends on it.
There are two things one needs to keep apart: what functionality do we want to support and how do we want to support it. Search clearly is important. Metadata clearly is important. However, whether a "fully attributed, database-driven, journaling filesystem" is the best way of implementing those features is an open question. There are many possible alternative designs.
And, in fact, it seems right now as if Microsoft is, in fact, not building what the author seems to think they are building, but is choosing an implementation strategy that combines a more traditional file system with user-level databases.
Hmm. No, it isn't his business. There's a world of difference between "the right to free speech" (a protection against forcibly imposed silence) and "minding your own business" (a moral constraint on civilised behavior).
Well, it seems observing that "moral constraint on civilized behavior" would be much more opportune for you than for van Allen, the latter being a well-known, mature, distinguished, and qualified scientist.
and when I hear a rocket scientist opining "end manned space flight", I fear I will be trapped dirtside.
Actually, he is just telling you that you will be trapped dirtside no matter what. You may not want to hear that, just like the Pope didn't want to hear that the eart wasn't flat, but that's your problem, not his.
Well, you are wrong. I like rocks (I am a geologist).
I see. So, would you willing to give up all your research funding and all the resarch funding in your particular field so that NASA has the funds to send a manned mission to Mars? Because that's the kind of tradeoff this comes down to.
but the only way to be sure of what is there is to go look at it/bring it back to be studied. Humans ARE needed for that.
No, they are not needed for that. Unmanned sample return missions have been carried out before, and for the cost of a manned mission, we can send large numbers of unmanned probes and sample return missions. And within the solar system, communication delays are still small enough to let people supervise robotic missions effectively.
Would Van Allen really prefer a nation of couch potatoes?
That's what you get with the space program: a billion people glued to their television sets, and a few people flying through space.
Why on earth would these be considered obfuscations? Especially the explorers!
Because Van Allen correctly recognizes that dreams of space colonization are premature. Let's spend our resources on robotic exploration for now. When human space exploration becomes useful, we will know it. Right now, human space exploration is a waste of money.
You can learn a lot via robot, but there are some things you just won't learn that way.
And when we get to "those things", then we can worry about them again. For now, robotic space exploration still gives us the best bang for the buck by far.
Especially if we run across any form of life much more advanced than a simple, single-cell form.
Well, so far, we haven't. And if we waste all our money on flying people to Mars, it will be many decades longer before we even know about single celled life.
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The boss has certain tasks to accomplish as part of his job and he gets evaluated on them. If he can accomplish those tasks while spending most of his time playing Solitaire on his computer, then either the tasks are very light or he is very efficient when he isn't playing Solitaire.
If the tasks are very simple, it's not his fault: that sometimes happens in government--people get stranded in jobs where they don't have to do much yet they can't get fired.
Either way, evaluating the performance and effectiveness of his boss is not the systems manager's task. If the boss did something illegal on the computer, that might be the systems manager's business, but nothing beyond that.
The very FIRST issue you have with OpenOffice, whether it's a formatting issue, file conversion, or other imcompatiblity, will cost MORE than Microsoft Office in the loss of productivity and IT staff.
And the very FIRST Word virus you are going to have will cost you even MORE than any conversion costs from using OpenOffice. And that isn't even counting the additional costs of installing and maintaining MS Office relative to the much easier-to-deply and maintain OpenOffice.
And, like it or not, the world uses MS Office formats. OO.o isn't good enough.
The "world" doesn't use MS Office formats, many institutions do. Many others don't.
If you use MS Office, you save on the format conversion costs. You pay a price, however, in terms of functionality: OpenOffice's XML formats give you today what MS Office still just promises.
Sun has traditionally been a high-margin hardware company; the Sun Java Desktop isn't going to keep them alive.
We consider business apps where I work:
Bioinformatic software
Data Analysis software
specialized inventory management software
There is plenty of all of those for Linux, generally more heavy-duty than its Windows counterparts.
Sorry if you can't be bothered to find out about it.
Actually no one knows what the precursor protein does in the brain.
I didn't say people knew, I said that they appear to have important functions.
Prions are hard to transmit, and that's no accident: naked proteins don't make it to your brain very easily.
The precursor proteins to prions appear to have important functions in your brain. The fact that they sometimes can harm you should be no more mysterious or scary than the fact that occasionally even a safety belt or air bag may be responsible for your death. On balance, you are still far better off with them.
It's not a given that he favored the project in the way in which it was carried out.. Does anybody know what his actual position was?
The 1bn Indians might think that it is already unfair that they are making so much less money. In any case, the Europeans have the same argument, as do the Chinese, as do the Japanese, and they do have the purchasing power.
Whichever way you look at it, other nations are buying far more high tech goods from the US than they are getting in high tech jobs. As soon as those nations become capable of doing the high-tech work, those jobs are going to move. It's not only fair, it's economics in action.
A 250 GB USB 2.0 disk with enclosure and power supply costs about $170. That's $0.68/GB. If you want 1Tb of storage, that's by far the cheapest way to go. FireWire is not significantly more expensive either. Furthermore, Linux lets you do software RAID across those devices.
A 1TB PenguinComputing RAID server with SATA and 1G of RAM will set you back about $4200, still a lot cheaper than Apple with academic prices, let alone Apple's regular price of $6000. And the Linux machine will come with a choice of easy-to-use web-based configuration utilities, time-tested remotely accessible graphical administration utilities, and command line administration utilities. Furthermore, it has high-quality server software for SMB, Webdav, and NFS.
So, yes, it really is "just you". The XServe is nearly 50% more expensive than the comparable Linux machine and comes with much less software and much less choice in software. And the XServe is more than 4x as expensive as adding disk enclosures to an existing machine, which also can be configured as RAID drives under Linux.
Many DVDs these days are double capacity (nearly 10G).
India is a country of 1bn people. If Microsoft wants equal access to the Indian market, it seems only fair that they have proportional numbers of developers in India, which means that you would expect 3x as many Microsoft developers in India than in the US.
No, he didn't have to do it, but he did at private expense, so he gets to do it any way he wants. [...] Private works get to do things the way they see fit.
You are confusing means and ends. The purpose of a free market is an efficient allocation of resources. But that doesn't mean that just because the market does something, it is efficient--it often fails.
No, he didn't have to do it, but he did at private expense, so he gets to do it any way he wants. The fact that he used his own dna does NOT invalidate the results.
Nor does any of what you say invalidate Angry Toad's statement that "Venter is a grandstander and a media whore."
Your "what if's" are utterly devoid of fact and ignore reality entirely. "What if" doesn't mean shit.
This wasn't a "what if". Apple's corporate behavior was a blatant and reprehensible attack on the ability of other people to write software and innovate. The only reason Apple's actions didn't have more serious consequences because Apple didn't even own the intellectual property and because the company eventually just became irrelevant. See here for some background info.
Every company tries to lock in, that's what companies do.
So, you are saying Apple really is just like any other company. But they actually are not: their behavior was far worse. Apple's 1989 lawsuit was a kind of legal attack on the ability of people to write software that has been unmatched to this day.
actual innovation
Where's the innovation? With Tiger, you are getting NeXTStep running on Mach and BSD, with some updated graphics and toolkit tweaks.
think different: They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
Quite ironic, given that Apple prizes the uniformity of its user experience so much, a user experience that is determined by "usability experts" based on focus group testing to see what causes the least amount of confusing to the most average people.
You are quite right: Real is like Microsoft, but in a good way. Today, Microsoft may be an annoying monopoly that produces flaky software, but it was Microsoft that killed IBM's monopoly and opened up PC hardware. Without Microsoft's actions, we wouldn't be running Linux today. Apple, in contrast, has always been happy to sell overpriced, proprietary machines.
I don't think that iPod matters enough for Real's actions to amount to much, but if iPod was important, then Real's actions would be quite positive.
So, Real Networks takes it into their owns hands, and provides a hack to allow .rm on the iPod. This violates a whole lot of things, besides just common cortesy: DMCA, copyright, a few others.
Well, golly gee. If it weren't for companies doing just that and violating "common courtesy", you'd be typing at an IBM mainframe terminal right now. Apple is on the side of old stogy corporation--the only problem they have is--they aren't the monopoly or power.
The difference is you aren't locked in to Apple.
Yes, but that's not for lack of trying. If Apple actually managed to get the kind of marketshare that Microsoft has, Apple would be far worse than Microsoft.
At one point, Apple tried to claim ownership of all GUIs, which was particularly ironic because they themselves didn't invent the technology.
and this jealous hoarding of a good idea will cause them to lose it...
I agree with your statements, but I would also ask: what "good idea"? Apple didn't invent on-line music sales or portable players.
He had to use someone's!
No, he didn't have to use anybody's. He didn't even have to do it at all because he didn't have to sequence the human genome--another project was already well underway. Ventner's contribution was to create a lot of unnecessary problems.
I don't see the problem with it. Would you have preferred a "perfect human specimen"?
A scientifically careful approach to sequencing the human genome wouldn't have used any single individual's DNA--it would have selected the fragments and individuals it uses on a case-by-case basis, as work progressed. In the end, you would have ended up with sequences from many individuals covering many genes.
People have done both sorts of things with database and metadata file systems: there have been entire product lines built around it.
We had GUI systems of various sorts for about ten years when the Macintosh was released, but the technology was hardly proven either as something people would want to use or as something you could make money off of.
That's not true: there were commercial GUI products before Macintosh, but they were expensive--properly engineering such a system just is expensive.
What Apple did was cut a lot of corners and hit the market just when hardware reached the right price/performance ratio to support GUIs. That was good business sense, but it wasn't "innovation".
All indications are that Linux, Windows, and Mac OS are moving in a common direction with filesystem innovation
Whether or not it is useful, one thing is clear: this sort of thing is not "innovation". Databases as file systems have been around for decades, as has the question of file system metadata. The UNIX choices in this area are by design, not by an accident of history, and the motivations behind those choices are as valid today as they were several decades ago.
Linux is a ways yet from having a fully attributed, database-driven, journaling filesystem. The direction of future development looks promising, though. Linux will certainly compete as the search wars come to the desktop. Linux's value to the enterprise depends on it.
There are two things one needs to keep apart: what functionality do we want to support and how do we want to support it. Search clearly is important. Metadata clearly is important. However, whether a "fully attributed, database-driven, journaling filesystem" is the best way of implementing those features is an open question. There are many possible alternative designs.
And, in fact, it seems right now as if Microsoft is, in fact, not building what the author seems to think they are building, but is choosing an implementation strategy that combines a more traditional file system with user-level databases.
Hmm. No, it isn't his business. There's a world of difference between "the right to free speech" (a protection against forcibly imposed silence) and "minding your own business" (a moral constraint on civilised behavior).
Well, it seems observing that "moral constraint on civilized behavior" would be much more opportune for you than for van Allen, the latter being a well-known, mature, distinguished, and qualified scientist.
and when I hear a rocket scientist opining "end manned space flight", I fear I will be trapped dirtside.
Actually, he is just telling you that you will be trapped dirtside no matter what. You may not want to hear that, just like the Pope didn't want to hear that the eart wasn't flat, but that's your problem, not his.
Well, you are wrong. I like rocks (I am a geologist).
I see. So, would you willing to give up all your research funding and all the resarch funding in your particular field so that NASA has the funds to send a manned mission to Mars? Because that's the kind of tradeoff this comes down to.
but the only way to be sure of what is there is to go look at it/bring it back to be studied. Humans ARE needed for that.
No, they are not needed for that. Unmanned sample return missions have been carried out before, and for the cost of a manned mission, we can send large numbers of unmanned probes and sample return missions. And within the solar system, communication delays are still small enough to let people supervise robotic missions effectively.
Would Van Allen really prefer a nation of couch potatoes?
That's what you get with the space program: a billion people glued to their television sets, and a few people flying through space.
Why on earth would these be considered obfuscations? Especially the explorers!
Because Van Allen correctly recognizes that dreams of space colonization are premature. Let's spend our resources on robotic exploration for now. When human space exploration becomes useful, we will know it. Right now, human space exploration is a waste of money.
You can learn a lot via robot, but there are some things you just won't learn that way.
And when we get to "those things", then we can worry about them again. For now, robotic space exploration still gives us the best bang for the buck by far.
Especially if we run across any form of life much more advanced than a simple, single-cell form.
Well, so far, we haven't. And if we waste all our money on flying people to Mars, it will be many decades longer before we even know about single celled life.