Funny how MS advocates always debunk myths that no one even claimed to be true in the first. Sure, actually using Linux costs money, as does using Windows. Did any serious Linux advocate ever claim the opposite? I can't remember, but I can remember a lot of claims from Microsoft supporters that all the "Linux guys" would constantly point out that Linux was absolutely free in every regard.
Another interesting thing to note is that many business people (including but by far not limited to Microsoft) understand "free software" only as free-as-in-beer, unable to imagine what free-as-in-speech may actually mean in the context of software. This leads to funny statements like "The GPL is not a viable business model.".
PS: You're a liar! J. Edgar Hoover did not marry Jeanne d'Arc!
Personally, I'd reverse the comparison and say the DOS prompt is "almost as good as a Unix shell."
Then you haven't actually used both (at least not as a "power user". *nix had real pipes from the beginning. DOS offered you a poor substitute (pseudopipes). Where's the tab completion, line history with command line editing, job control, aliases, `' and $() command quotes, the ~ shortcut for the home directory, procedural constructs that are actually useful for scripting etc. ad nauseam? Granted, doskey fixed at least some of this, but still, compared to e.g. bash, command.com (or cmd.exe as they now call it) sucks goat balls.
What's rather funny is that they finally plan to offer a decent shell bundled with Longhorn (MSH), but then they deride said powerful shells as "DOS prompts". The irony...
Because of this there are many many Windows developers who with limited skill can already contribute to the windows software pool, and thus making more software available for Windows, and making getting Windows developers cheaper then getting Linux developers.
That's exactly why they haven't been too enthusiastic about Java. A potential for a huge developer community, easy to use for even mediocre programmers (as opposed to C++) and it runs on any freaking OS that has some relevant market share.
Instead of those annoying blue screens, my system has a less intrusive way of alerting me to problems. It freezes the cursor and won't do anything until I hit the power button.
Your machine is broken. Take it back to IBM and demand they fix it, or refund your money.
Exactly... let's blame the hardware. But what if a Linux system on the same machine runs much smoother? Is it a hardware (or hardware only) problem in that case, too?
For example, I had a cheap Duron 800 machine with a rather crappy mobo I guess (I didn't really intend it to become my main machine at home, but so it did). It was configured for dual-boot with Windows 98 (yuck) and SuSE Linux 7.3. Under Linux, it would sometimes spontaneously freeze, forcing me to reset it. Because the same happened running Windows as well, I guess it was a hardware problem*. However, under Linux I would experience one lockup every few weeks. Under Windows, the machine would often freeze after no more than a quarter of an hour. It was a miracle I could actually use it for anything useful. Actually, I - for obvious reasons - avoided starting Windows at all, unless there was something I wanted to do that really didn't work under Linux. I didn't play any recent games at that time (and PrBoom and other Linux games were nice enough for me), plus it would hardly have been possibly to enjoy doing that given the frequent lockups. But I was forced to use Windows in order to copy files from my USB digicam and to my mp3 player, which Linux at the time didn't support properly (access worked somehow but was damn slow).** I tried reinstalling Windows several times, but this didn't improve the situation at all.
So yes, this was a hardware problem. But why was it that much worse under Windows than under Linux? If you ask me, Linux tends to handle flawed hardware way more gracefully than Windows. Ok, that was the 9x series, but from what I hear the same seems to be true of the NT series.
*) more specifically a mainboard problem since I actually used quality cards - Matrox Millenium, a TerraTec sound card, and a TerraTec TV/Radio adapter. The latter two run just fine in my current PC. LAN+USB were onboard.
**) Until that kernel 2.4.21 which I'll never forget, when suddenly all of my USB hardware worked perfectly, even better than under Windows! Kudos to the developers!
That's because Windows XP auto-reboots after a fatal error before you even see the BSoD. Clever trick by Microsoft, I have to admit. How often do you see a Linux box reboot itself because some daemon fucked up? Still, most people don't register it as a crash, but sort of a normal thing that just happens every few days or so (the frequency of course greatly depends on your system configuration, hardware and drivers etc.). Nothing to worry about...
Considering the fact that Athlon 64 FXs running at 2 to 2.4GHz beat the crap out of various P4 and P4EE with up to 3.4GHz, I can't really take your clockrate argument seriously. Ok, the P4 scored better on some closed-source renderers, but then consider that most applications in the benchmarks have not even been optimized for 64 bit yet!
A higher clockrate is ALWAYS better from a performance standpoint. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. If you know anything about synchronous logic design you would know there is no debate about this.
True, provided that you are comparing processors with identical design that only differ in clockrate. But of course this is by far not the case, the P4 and Athlon 64 are implemented in fundamentally different ways. For example, in order to achieve the high clockrates with which they want to market their products to the uninformed (obviously), the Intel guys have increased the pipeline length beyond good and bad, with the consequence that mispredictions for out-of-order execution cost some real time. HyperThreading was introduced as sort of a hack for reducing the negative effect of their long pipelines, at least for multi-threaded applications. Running only a single thread, the P4 just has trouble keeping its functional units busy.
The speed of a processor is not measured in GHz. It's measured by the amount of work it gets done in one second. This depends on the application, but it's no secret that AMD CPUs perform substantially more work per processor cycle than Intel CPUs. E.g. my Ahlon XP 2400+ operates at "only" 2GHz. However, I took a the results from comparative Benchmark tests from the German computer magazine c't, and averaged (over all tests) the clockspeed that a Pentium 4 would need in order to be as fast as the Athlon. The result was 2800MHz, so the Athlon XP is on the average 40% faster than a Pentium 4 operating at the same speed. In other words, clockrate isn't everything.
The main problem with your analysis is that there exist algorithms that mathmatically CANNOT be solved in parallel, making SMP, hyperthreading, clusters all useless.
Actually, that's a good argument against Intel's hyperthreading, though there's a problem with it anyway: In practice, the question is not "Is this problem serial or parallelizable?", but how well it can be parallelized. For example, going from 1 to 8 CPUs may allow you to speed up computation of a certain problem by factor 7, however going from 128 to 512 CPUs may give you a speed increase of only 3%, because the communication and syncrhonization overhead becomes the bottleneck.
Oh, and 64-bit only buys you a larger memory space.
First of all, this "only" is misleading since even desktop machines will soon reach the 4GB boundary (actually, the 4GB limit virtual memory, which is often required in substantially larger quantities than physical RAM). You can use PAE for up to 64 gigs, but it's a performance killer.
And second, this is not true. AMD64 allows you to use wider adresses as well as wider integers, and this is a great boon for certain types of application, most notably cryptography. I've seen a benchmark that showed an 2GHz Athlon 64 outperform a P4EE 3.4GHz by factor two in AES encryption. Obviously, 64-bit integer operations benefit AES greatly. On 32-bit machines, they have to be split up into sub-operations - e.g. a 64-bit multiplication (discarding the upper 64 bits of the result) requires 3 32-bit multiplications plus several additions. For comparison, the Athlon 64 requires 3 clock cycles for a 32-bit multiplication, but only 4 for a 64-bit multiplication! Compare this to about 11 or more cycles the CPU would have spent on an equivalent sequence of 32-bit operations, which also would have increased code size (more cache misses) and forced you to use more of the already scarce registers (AMD64 doubles the size and number of the general purpose registers, some of which aren't even that general-purpose...).
You know how many times I've gone to a German forum and started talking shit about Germans? Zero.
Oh come on, admit it! That's just because your German is worse than my English.:o)
I don't care about Germans, their country, their culture, or what have you.
What I always wonder is why Americans are seen to expose an arrogant sort of ignorance.
They can buy some of our goods, I can buy some of their goods, and maybe if we both have good years we might go vacation in each other's country for a week and enjoy many of the wonderful natural treasures we both surely possess. That's the extent that I give a fuck about Germany, France, Belgium,..., or Sweden.
Think about the amount of international influence that the USA wields on Sweden, as well as other regions of international interest (the Middle East, the Far East, South America etc.). Then, think about how much influence Sweden has on e.g. the Middle East. Notice a difference?
Next, consider other international questions. Which country poses 5% of the world population, but emits 25% of greenhouse gases, with a per-capita output 2 to 3 times that of European nations? Which of those countries - Sweden or the USA - has waged more wars in the last 15 years? These are international questions, and Europeans are interested in them, and should be allowed to.
That's about how much the average person I know cares about any of you, so we don't on average go to your forums and tell you that you're fucking retarded or that our media is better than yours or whatever.
Isn't the USA proud of being the last military superpower? Aren't you proud of being the economically most influential nation? Isn't it you who keep telling the world how free and brave and democratic your country is, and what a beacon for the rest of the world? Doesn't your government reiterate all.these things at any potential opportunity? And doesn't your president emphasize that in international affairs, the USA is all that matters ("America First")?
If so, why shouldn't others be allowed to measure your country by the standards you (claim to) set for yourselves? And isn't it legitimate to criticize an arrogant foreign president that gives so fucking little about international concerns? And aren't you yourself an arrogant nation if you elect people like Bush (ok, last time you didn't, but next time, you may) and deserve the due criticism. Not because some things go wrong in your own country, but because these very things affect ALL of Earth, and all nations, and so are the legitimate concern of all the nations?
Just imagine how it would be with roles reversed. That Germany had nukes and you don't. That Germany would plan to wage a war that you oppose, and that will affect you (including via oil prices), and that you had no way to stop it. That whenever you would mouth a concern regarding the Earth in total, the German chancellor would sneer at you, saying "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!" and "The USA? Now that's the old America. Countries like Brazil are much more interesting, and they support our war in the coalition of the willing.". Imagine that this coalition, on further research, looks more like a coalition of a few willing nation, and a dozen other bought & bullied nations.
And now please tell me with a straight face that given sufficient German language skills, you would leave their discussion boards alone and refrain from exercising your right to free speech. I mean: pardon?
You're contradicting yourself. If this company using GPL software depends so badly on the original developer(s), SHIT (she/he/it/they) can make money out of their jobs by simply charging this company for their time.
And if it doesn't, then your customer lock-in claim is moot, because there just is none. So which of the two applies in practice? Actually, it's something in between. Yes, there is some dependency on the original coder(s), because they have the experience, and since you need coders anyway if you want to add features or fix problems. But it's nowhere near the magnitude of "use MS Word and have your documents stored in a format that's more secret than the Pepsi recipe".
While widescale windows site licenses may be expensive, the productivity lost in having to retrain all your users in the intimate details of office software surely makes up for the nominal cost-savings of going with "free" software. This is how Microsoft is making its pitch vs open-source solutions, and it's not FUD - it's a damned good argument.
It is FUD since your argument mostly amounts to repeating an old fairy tale. First of all, Windows to non-Windows migration is not the only thing that causes training costs. Windows NT to Windows XP migration, for instance, is most definitely not free in this respect either. Every new Office version requires the user to learn new things and change their habits, which of course takes time.
Second, the real-world migrations hardly ever have anything to do with "from Outlook to mutt". It's "from one reasonably intuitive GUI app to another reasonably intuitive GUI app". Sure, there will be friction, and, as they say, the devil is in the details. However, these can usually be handled very well by in-house communication. To increase efficiency, it can help to provide some asynchronous and publicly viewable communication medium. This can include things like an FAQ, and an Intranet bulletin board, newsgroup or Wiki, if you don't already have one. Otherwise it may happen that e.g. the single person who's knowledgeable about the new software is busy just answering the requests of co-workers for days.
Given these aids, the cost for user training is, while not negligible, not a major obstacle. What matters more is typically the cost involved in porting specialized applications. This is to a significiant part owned to yesterday's shortsightedness, where things like portability and platform-independence were often overlooked, or treated as an unnecessary luxury. Also, good portability solutions were often missing, so the cost involved was considered too great.
A customer recently called in because his computer was running slow. After installing and running ad-aware and spybot, the customer had over 4600 spyware programs. Yes, you read that right, over 4600 spyware programs. It's a miracle that thing ran at all.
Microsoft would be in a position where it could compete for the position of supplying office software, but only if it ported their office software to the Open Source platform.
1. License cost is quite low, even Mandrake is more expensive
Err, does that mean that you can download Microsoft Windows for free and actually get money in return?
2. You are a liar. Upgrades are not mandatory. You clearly lie about that. The upgrade cycles are smaller than Linux upgrade cycles which is higher in quantity.
You do not get support for Windows NT 4 or even security patches anymore. For some new hardware devices, there are no NT drivers either. You're not forced to upgrade, but it's a necessity. It would actually be ok if they didn't charge that much money for it.
3. Open source lock in is worse, since you have to deal with many number of individuals. XFree86 problem? France can not deal with such stupid issues.
Guess what? Last week I fixed a bug in Gentoo Portage without ever having looked at the source before. Isolating the problem and fixing it too me less than an hour. Before that, I fixed a number of trivial bugs in other OSS. It's not really difficult, any capable developer can make use of the source code, although naturally it's easier for those experienced with the project. And you did notice that XFree86 has actually been forked because of a licensing dispute? OSS allows you to do that. Try it with MS Windows.
4. "Pissing off Bill Gates" This is only something an idiot like you will consider. Governments are not losers like you, they have a real business.
And Americans don't dub non-English films? Or watch them all with subtitles? Or not at all? What a stupid argument for "hate" when they just want to make the films understandable to their own viewers, which are, as you may be surprised, not native English speakers. Almost all non-German films and TV series are dubbed in Germany as well. So fscking what?
And a computer is called "ordinateur" in french.
So fscking what? Given that the computer was invented by a German, should I be upset that it has an English name in most countries?
They hate Americans. They hate the English.
Hardly any more than you hate the French. D'oh. What they really hate is Bush and Blair. And for good reasons.
They think "french" is the most sophisticated language in the world.
Ok. Imagine someone did a quick survey among US-Americans what the most sophisticated language in the world was. How many % do you think that the answer "English" would get?
You have some exceptions : their food is excellent, les femmes and the french soccer team (they are all black now- not a sign of a white player).
They are all black? WTF is this then? Sure, they have more blacks in their team than any other European nation I'm aware of. But no whites? Get a clue.
As a US law official just confirmed, Microsoft Corp. has now filed a libel lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., stating that their own legal actions against Sergio Amadeu will hurt their reputation much more badly than any of Mr. Amadeu's statements ever could.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how MS advocates always debunk myths that no one even claimed to be true in the first. Sure, actually using Linux costs money, as does using Windows. Did any serious Linux advocate ever claim the opposite? I can't remember, but I can remember a lot of claims from Microsoft supporters that all the "Linux guys" would constantly point out that Linux was absolutely free in every regard.
Another interesting thing to note is that many business people (including but by far not limited to Microsoft) understand "free software" only as free-as-in-beer, unable to imagine what free-as-in-speech may actually mean in the context of software. This leads to funny statements like "The GPL is not a viable business model.".
PS: You're a liar! J. Edgar Hoover did not marry Jeanne d'Arc!
which will lead directly to
7. Profit!!!
;-) In German, it would read
Erst ignorieren sie Dich,
dann lachen sie Dich aus,
dann bekämpfen sie Dich,
dann siegst Du.
Personally, I'd reverse the comparison and say the DOS prompt is "almost as good as a Unix shell."
Then you haven't actually used both (at least not as a "power user". *nix had real pipes from the beginning. DOS offered you a poor substitute (pseudopipes). Where's the tab completion, line history with command line editing, job control, aliases, `' and $() command quotes, the ~ shortcut for the home directory, procedural constructs that are actually useful for scripting etc. ad nauseam? Granted, doskey fixed at least some of this, but still, compared to e.g. bash, command.com (or cmd.exe as they now call it) sucks goat balls.
What's rather funny is that they finally plan to offer a decent shell bundled with Longhorn (MSH), but then they deride said powerful shells as "DOS prompts". The irony...
Because of this there are many many Windows developers who with limited skill can already contribute to the windows software pool, and thus making more software available for Windows, and making getting Windows developers cheaper then getting Linux developers.
That's exactly why they haven't been too enthusiastic about Java. A potential for a huge developer community, easy to use for even mediocre programmers (as opposed to C++) and it runs on any freaking OS that has some relevant market share.
Could somebody please post an ASCII art version of it?
Your machine is broken. Take it back to IBM and demand they fix it, or refund your money.
Exactly... let's blame the hardware. But what if a Linux system on the same machine runs much smoother? Is it a hardware (or hardware only) problem in that case, too?
For example, I had a cheap Duron 800 machine with a rather crappy mobo I guess (I didn't really intend it to become my main machine at home, but so it did). It was configured for dual-boot with Windows 98 (yuck) and SuSE Linux 7.3. Under Linux, it would sometimes spontaneously freeze, forcing me to reset it. Because the same happened running Windows as well, I guess it was a hardware problem*. However, under Linux I would experience one lockup every few weeks. Under Windows, the machine would often freeze after no more than a quarter of an hour. It was a miracle I could actually use it for anything useful. Actually, I - for obvious reasons - avoided starting Windows at all, unless there was something I wanted to do that really didn't work under Linux. I didn't play any recent games at that time (and PrBoom and other Linux games were nice enough for me), plus it would hardly have been possibly to enjoy doing that given the frequent lockups. But I was forced to use Windows in order to copy files from my USB digicam and to my mp3 player, which Linux at the time didn't support properly (access worked somehow but was damn slow).** I tried reinstalling Windows several times, but this didn't improve the situation at all.
So yes, this was a hardware problem. But why was it that much worse under Windows than under Linux? If you ask me, Linux tends to handle flawed hardware way more gracefully than Windows. Ok, that was the 9x series, but from what I hear the same seems to be true of the NT series.
*) more specifically a mainboard problem since I actually used quality cards - Matrox Millenium, a TerraTec sound card, and a TerraTec TV/Radio adapter. The latter two run just fine in my current PC. LAN+USB were onboard.
**) Until that kernel 2.4.21 which I'll never forget, when suddenly all of my USB hardware worked perfectly, even better than under Windows! Kudos to the developers!
That's because Windows XP auto-reboots after a fatal error before you even see the BSoD. Clever trick by Microsoft, I have to admit. How often do you see a Linux box reboot itself because some daemon fucked up? Still, most people don't register it as a crash, but sort of a normal thing that just happens every few days or so (the frequency of course greatly depends on your system configuration, hardware and drivers etc.). Nothing to worry about...
Considering the fact that Athlon 64 FXs running at 2 to 2.4GHz beat the crap out of various P4 and P4EE with up to 3.4GHz, I can't really take your clockrate argument seriously. Ok, the P4 scored better on some closed-source renderers, but then consider that most applications in the benchmarks have not even been optimized for 64 bit yet!
A higher clockrate is ALWAYS better from a performance standpoint. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS. If you know anything about synchronous logic design you would know there is no debate about this.
True, provided that you are comparing processors with identical design that only differ in clockrate. But of course this is by far not the case, the P4 and Athlon 64 are implemented in fundamentally different ways. For example, in order to achieve the high clockrates with which they want to market their products to the uninformed (obviously), the Intel guys have increased the pipeline length beyond good and bad, with the consequence that mispredictions for out-of-order execution cost some real time. HyperThreading was introduced as sort of a hack for reducing the negative effect of their long pipelines, at least for multi-threaded applications. Running only a single thread, the P4 just has trouble keeping its functional units busy.
The speed of a processor is not measured in GHz. It's measured by the amount of work it gets done in one second. This depends on the application, but it's no secret that AMD CPUs perform substantially more work per processor cycle than Intel CPUs. E.g. my Ahlon XP 2400+ operates at "only" 2GHz. However, I took a the results from comparative Benchmark tests from the German computer magazine c't, and averaged (over all tests) the clockspeed that a Pentium 4 would need in order to be as fast as the Athlon. The result was 2800MHz, so the Athlon XP is on the average 40% faster than a Pentium 4 operating at the same speed. In other words, clockrate isn't everything.
The main problem with your analysis is that there exist algorithms that mathmatically CANNOT be solved in parallel, making SMP, hyperthreading, clusters all useless.
Actually, that's a good argument against Intel's hyperthreading, though there's a problem with it anyway: In practice, the question is not "Is this problem serial or parallelizable?", but how well it can be parallelized. For example, going from 1 to 8 CPUs may allow you to speed up computation of a certain problem by factor 7, however going from 128 to 512 CPUs may give you a speed increase of only 3%, because the communication and syncrhonization overhead becomes the bottleneck.
Oh, and 64-bit only buys you a larger memory space.
First of all, this "only" is misleading since even desktop machines will soon reach the 4GB boundary (actually, the 4GB limit virtual memory, which is often required in substantially larger quantities than physical RAM). You can use PAE for up to 64 gigs, but it's a performance killer.
And second, this is not true. AMD64 allows you to use wider adresses as well as wider integers, and this is a great boon for certain types of application, most notably cryptography. I've seen a benchmark that showed an 2GHz Athlon 64 outperform a P4EE 3.4GHz by factor two in AES encryption. Obviously, 64-bit integer operations benefit AES greatly. On 32-bit machines, they have to be split up into sub-operations - e.g. a 64-bit multiplication (discarding the upper 64 bits of the result) requires 3 32-bit multiplications plus several additions. For comparison, the Athlon 64 requires 3 clock cycles for a 32-bit multiplication, but only 4 for a 64-bit multiplication! Compare this to about 11 or more cycles the CPU would have spent on an equivalent sequence of 32-bit operations, which also would have increased code size (more cache misses) and forced you to use more of the already scarce registers (AMD64 doubles the size and number of the general purpose registers, some of which aren't even that general-purpose...).
Yes, it now supports any file that fits under the 640k-boundary.
Sounds good, where can I download it?
Show me even a Slackware 5, and I'll believe that.
You know how many times I've gone to a German forum and started talking shit about Germans? Zero.
Oh come on, admit it! That's just because your German is worse than my English. :o)
I don't care about Germans, their country, their culture, or what have you.
What I always wonder is why Americans are seen to expose an arrogant sort of ignorance.
They can buy some of our goods, I can buy some of their goods, and maybe if we both have good years we might go vacation in each other's country for a week and enjoy many of the wonderful natural treasures we both surely possess. That's the extent that I give a fuck about Germany, France, Belgium, ..., or Sweden.
Think about the amount of international influence that the USA wields on Sweden, as well as other regions of international interest (the Middle East, the Far East, South America etc.). Then, think about how much influence Sweden has on e.g. the Middle East. Notice a difference?
Next, consider other international questions. Which country poses 5% of the world population, but emits 25% of greenhouse gases, with a per-capita output 2 to 3 times that of European nations? Which of those countries - Sweden or the USA - has waged more wars in the last 15 years? These are international questions, and Europeans are interested in them, and should be allowed to.
That's about how much the average person I know cares about any of you, so we don't on average go to your forums and tell you that you're fucking retarded or that our media is better than yours or whatever.
Isn't the USA proud of being the last military superpower? Aren't you proud of being the economically most influential nation? Isn't it you who keep telling the world how free and brave and democratic your country is, and what a beacon for the rest of the world? Doesn't your government reiterate all.these things at any potential opportunity? And doesn't your president emphasize that in international affairs, the USA is all that matters ("America First")?
If so, why shouldn't others be allowed to measure your country by the standards you (claim to) set for yourselves? And isn't it legitimate to criticize an arrogant foreign president that gives so fucking little about international concerns? And aren't you yourself an arrogant nation if you elect people like Bush (ok, last time you didn't, but next time, you may) and deserve the due criticism. Not because some things go wrong in your own country, but because these very things affect ALL of Earth, and all nations, and so are the legitimate concern of all the nations?
Just imagine how it would be with roles reversed. That Germany had nukes and you don't. That Germany would plan to wage a war that you oppose, and that will affect you (including via oil prices), and that you had no way to stop it. That whenever you would mouth a concern regarding the Earth in total, the German chancellor would sneer at you, saying "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!" and "The USA? Now that's the old America. Countries like Brazil are much more interesting, and they support our war in the coalition of the willing.". Imagine that this coalition, on further research, looks more like a coalition of a few willing nation, and a dozen other bought & bullied nations.
And now please tell me with a straight face that given sufficient German language skills, you would leave their discussion boards alone and refrain from exercising your right to free speech. I mean: pardon?
Then you're most likely comparing BBC and CNN Europe, which is nowhere comparable to CNN USA.
You're contradicting yourself. If this company using GPL software depends so badly on the original developer(s), SHIT (she/he/it/they) can make money out of their jobs by simply charging this company for their time.
And if it doesn't, then your customer lock-in claim is moot, because there just is none. So which of the two applies in practice? Actually, it's something in between. Yes, there is some dependency on the original coder(s), because they have the experience, and since you need coders anyway if you want to add features or fix problems. But it's nowhere near the magnitude of "use MS Word and have your documents stored in a format that's more secret than the Pepsi recipe".
It is FUD since your argument mostly amounts to repeating an old fairy tale. First of all, Windows to non-Windows migration is not the only thing that causes training costs. Windows NT to Windows XP migration, for instance, is most definitely not free in this respect either. Every new Office version requires the user to learn new things and change their habits, which of course takes time.
Second, the real-world migrations hardly ever have anything to do with "from Outlook to mutt". It's "from one reasonably intuitive GUI app to another reasonably intuitive GUI app". Sure, there will be friction, and, as they say, the devil is in the details. However, these can usually be handled very well by in-house communication. To increase efficiency, it can help to provide some asynchronous and publicly viewable communication medium. This can include things like an FAQ, and an Intranet bulletin board, newsgroup or Wiki, if you don't already have one. Otherwise it may happen that e.g. the single person who's knowledgeable about the new software is busy just answering the requests of co-workers for days.
Given these aids, the cost for user training is, while not negligible, not a major obstacle. What matters more is typically the cost involved in porting specialized applications. This is to a significiant part owned to yesterday's shortsightedness, where things like portability and platform-independence were often overlooked, or treated as an unnecessary luxury. Also, good portability solutions were often missing, so the cost involved was considered too great.
Say what you want, but I'll be watching Star Wreck on my GNU/HURD before they release Linux 3.
Sorry, I just have to think of this joke right now.
Not if 4550 of them were just browser cookies.
the Star Wreck movie?
Or they could have teamed up with Code Weavers.
Err, does that mean that you can download Microsoft Windows for free and actually get money in return?
You do not get support for Windows NT 4 or even security patches anymore. For some new hardware devices, there are no NT drivers either. You're not forced to upgrade, but it's a necessity. It would actually be ok if they didn't charge that much money for it.
Guess what? Last week I fixed a bug in Gentoo Portage without ever having looked at the source before. Isolating the problem and fixing it too me less than an hour. Before that, I fixed a number of trivial bugs in other OSS. It's not really difficult, any capable developer can make use of the source code, although naturally it's easier for those experienced with the project. And you did notice that XFree86 has actually been forked because of a licensing dispute? OSS allows you to do that. Try it with MS Windows.
Glasshouse. Stones.
And Americans don't dub non-English films? Or watch them all with subtitles? Or not at all? What a stupid argument for "hate" when they just want to make the films understandable to their own viewers, which are, as you may be surprised, not native English speakers. Almost all non-German films and TV series are dubbed in Germany as well. So fscking what?
So fscking what? Given that the computer was invented by a German, should I be upset that it has an English name in most countries?
Hardly any more than you hate the French. D'oh. What they really hate is Bush and Blair. And for good reasons.
Ok. Imagine someone did a quick survey among US-Americans what the most sophisticated language in the world was. How many % do you think that the answer "English" would get?
They are all black? WTF is this then? Sure, they have more blacks in their team than any other European nation I'm aware of. But no whites? Get a clue.
As a US law official just confirmed, Microsoft Corp. has now filed a libel lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., stating that their own legal actions against Sergio Amadeu will hurt their reputation much more badly than any of Mr. Amadeu's statements ever could.