How about the other question: is choosing Linux and be dammned as far as the applications are concerned the start of a trend? Does anybody have any (other) examples of this happening in "real life"?
Oraclesupports Linux for their basic database and application servers. I don't use the Oracle ERP products so I'm not sure, but they do not seem to be supported.
Some links to ERP vendors and what they have to say about Linux support:
SAP has announced Linux support and has been shipping since August 25. Their Linux page is here. (Check out the cool penguin:-))
Baan does not seem to have any public plans for Linux support. (Their web site does not have a search facility so it's hard to be sure, but they seem to be a Microsoft shop.) Does anybody know differently?
J. D. Edwards has a very frustrating site which will lead you to a search page which promises that "to find what J.D.Edwards position is on the Linux operating system, type Linux in the field below and click Search". When I did this I got "no matching documents", so I assume they don't have a position.
PeopleSoft does not mention Linux on their site, so it is probably safe to assume that they do not support it.
So, answering my previous question, it seems like Kenwood is limited to choose between SAP and SAP.
It makes an interesting read and basically argues the same point: you get more "bang for your hardware buck" with Linux.
All of this is an unfortunate distraction, because if you talk to IT managers who are actually deploying Linux in their businesses, they won't talk about software liberation or the defeat of Microsoft or the means of production being in the hands of the programmers. They'll talk pure capitalism: more value for less money.
Good stuff; should be required reading by all IT decision makers.
It seems that Kenwood chose Linux for all the right reasons, in particular:
it ran on their preferred hardware, and
they were already familiar and comfortable with it
The last point is, I think, interesting. Quoting from the article:
Another reason for picking Linux over traditional Unix was because the company was already familiar with Linux, having used it for four years for its DNS and some e-mail.
So, I wonder, is DNS and e-mail the ultimate "killer apps" for Linux that will finally propel it into the IT departments across United States and the rest of the world?
It seems to me that this is a very brave move by Kenwood. Quoting from the article:
Kenwood plans its ERP migration sometime in the next few months and has just begun evaluating the various systems.
In other words, they first decided on Linux and only then they try to find a software package. Very brave, given the uneven support for Linux among the vendors.
What ERP packages support Linux?
Is this the start of a new trend? Companies goes Linux for the OS and the software applications will have to follow? That would be a Good Thing.
"Using Samba" may be freely reproduced and distributed in any form, in any medium physical or electronic, in whole or in part, provided that the terms of this license are adhered to and that the reproduction includes this license or a reference to it...
I wonder how long time the virus had gone undetected? They recalled 12,000 units so if anybody knows approximately how many they make per day I guess we could figure it out. My guess would be 4-6 days?
It really leaves you wondering what they were doing. The issue does not, to me, seem to be one of current virus software. No virus software is current: there are always new, undetected viruses out there. Rather the issue seems to be that Dell had failed to isolate their production computers from the network the administrators used for surfing the web and installing unknown games (or whatever) on.
It could be a lot worse. Somebody could have installed a backdoor program and used this to change the configuration of all new Dell PCs such that they fail to work on Jan 1, 2000.
On the subject of the "dumb US export laws" discussed above, be aware that the restriction is on all export of crypto implementations.
So if you are in, say, Europe, and download the SSH implementaion to your laptop you are OK to travel to the USA. However, legally you can not leave until you have deleted SSH from your laptop.
I know they do not normally search your harddisks at the airport, but you might want to consider the implications if they make an exception for you.
(I remember this was a real problem fro a Swedish company who used strong encryption for their internal e-mail systems. Their executives had to wipe their laptops everytime they left JFK and then re-install back in Sweden. It really is a stupid law.)
I hope they concentrate on defining and documenting the interfaces (and debugging them, of course!) so that others can ork on the eye-candy.
To my mind those are different development tasks and should probably (as you suggest) be done by different people with experience in graphics design, HCI, typesetting, and much more.
It is hard to make a good UI and I think the KDE team deserves great credit for what they have accomplished in this area. Let's stabilise the code and the interfaces a bit, then let people "play" and come up with various suggestions, and then let us decide on one or two themes that we all like (fat chance!) and all will support.
Congratulations to the KDE team! I look forward to the 2.0 release.
It's great news (and I submitted it a week ago and got rejected - grrrrrr....:) but note that the experiment requires Lucent's new optical cables.
I doubt the mass market is going to re-lay their existing, im-pure cables anytime soon. So Doom fans take it easy.
However new corporations should look with interest. And investors may want a bet on Lucent: first a record fast switch and then a record fast cable. These guys are on to something.
De Icaza said he has been working on applications that run in the GNOME environment, such as a spreadsheet, called Gnumeric, which can now perform more financial functions that Microsoft's Excel, thanks to the vast network of programmers contributing to the code. He said he hopes to have the first batch of applications ready next March.
So he understands, or the article implies, that software development can only be done efficiently on a large scale in an open source community model. That is a good observation.
But then how is he going to make any money? If he can't develop he can't sell (the code is open source) so he'll have to rely on service contracts. Is that the deal? If so, do count me as an investor in the IPO. There can only be so many Red Hats, and the market is looking increasingly crowded.
We are creating applications like Microsoft Office, for GNOME
Is this a good idea? Do we really need yet another war over how the desktop should look, or could we please agree to disagree and make our applications independent of the window manager and GUI classes? Are we just re-inventing our own MFC with associated incomapabilities and holy wars?
When will Linux split into KDE/Gnome/whatever camps that are mutually exclusive and can not share applications?
Anyhow, who wants to pay for an office package when StarOffice is free???
If you offer something to sell on the internet, and you agree to sell it whilst you are standing in Germany, then you'll probably be subject to German contract law
Except, firstly, that this may be English law but it is possible that it is not German law so you, as the consumer, would have no rights! (How is this dealt with for faxes?) Secondly, there was an EU proposal that would make the jurisdiction of any internet transaction the country of the consumer, i.e. the direct opposite of English law. Of course only enforsable within the EU so I'd have to ask you for your nationality and deal with you differently (what if you lie!?). I guess US companies already have to do this with the silly export restrictions.
It all just goes to show that conventional notions fail in the internet world.
I'm going to stand with one leg on each side of a border, connect through my GSM cell-phone, and sell you something dodgy just to find out how the law is going to deal with that.
But thanks for the clarification. Oh, and I think it is now a Scottish ISP - I'm sure there are somebody who cares...:-)
Help me understand this one: I'm a Danish citizen who dials my UK ISP from Germany to read my e-mail on a Californian server (I'm not making this up!) : where "am" I, for the purpose of the law? Does it make a difference if I download the e-mail to my laptop before/after reading it?
Historically duties and sales taxes comes from the ancient marketplace. The sellers would pay a small fee to the market which would help to promote it and, crucially, guarantee and enforce a certain standard and a consistent set of rules for trade. (Big) Government has taken over the role as the overseer of trading standards and as the guarantoor of the order of the "marketplace". It has also taken the market tax.
However, in the internet age this approach is looking increasingly strange. I, as a consumer, can buy goods anywhere at the click of a mouse, and the government can not hope to regulate all and every market. And even if I knew the physical location of the seller (not a trivial thing) and even if the local government enforced a reasonable set of trading standards (obviously not true everywhere), it would be very difficult and expensive for me to actually seek redress in a local court.
The solution, in my opinion, is to return to the medieval market arrangement. Let us have private markets which regulate themselves, and let the consumers decide which markets to deal in. It is not a completely alien idea: most stock markets operate in this way (even if they are not exactly free from government regulation) and most of the online markets (e.g. e-bay, amazon,...) have at least some rules and attempts at consumer protection.
The bad news for govenrment is that it will loose a lot of revenue. But it will also loose some of the responsibility (if it can ever give up power!) and therefore, presumably, costs. In the future governments will increasingly have to rely on taxing immobile value like land and buildings. Trade and people are both becoming too mobile.
Incidently the UK has a funny half-way house where I as a consumer can choose to sue my UK credit card company instead of the retailer for any disputes over a purchase. Interesting: as money become increasingly a branded commodity is this the way forward?
It is difficult in particular, but not just, for novices. Given the dominance of Windows and the commitment of the hardware vendors to this platfor, a novice still has to worry about hardware compatability issues for Linux while this is largely a non-issue for Win98.
I don't think I'm a novice, but after three weekends I'm still trying to figure out how to get Linux onto my sexy new Sony Vaio N505X. It's an all singing, all USB and ilink, single PCMCIA slot laptop, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to plug and play the modem, the video controls only work in Windoze etc, etc. Even softboot from Win to Linux is more difficult than I thought. (But next weekend I'll get it working - I think...)
Enough about my woes: the point is that as a (novice) user you have to worry about compatability issues. People who are setting up servers are paid to worry about these issues - and presumably skilled - but my mom just wants to read e-mail. Linux is not a choice for her (yet!).
CNN has asked him for an interview, and he demanded $50,000
Hm, Mahir suddenly sounds like a clever guy.:-) Does anybody have a link to the real Mahir's page handy -- I couldn't find it?
Maybe there is a (very!) weak/. point in here about how to get rich and famous on the internet? But (a) I think we would all rather take a different path (somebody already did a journaling filesystem for Linux, so I guess I have to think of somehting else now) and (b) there are probably better ways to introduce it. Or maybe TurkishGeek is on to something:
Still it is a fascinating example of how the Internet has changed the world.
(Come on, everybody, we've got this thread so let's make the most of it:) How did the Internet change the world? I seem to remember a guy in England who put a shark up on his roof and got instant fame and interviews. How is that different from the fame of Mahir? People have always done stunts for publicity or otherwise. It is not clear to me that anything except the speed of communication has changed.
Not every stupid web page gets a million hits. What does this show, except that people are as silly as ever and still follow the herd, wherever it leads?
I'd say 3-4 years from now we'll all be buying coffee makers that are configurable from your PC
Why on Earth would you want to do this!? The household coffee machine has a perfectly good interface they way it is now, as far as I am concerned.
Now, if you were talking industrial coffee machines that would be another matter. I can see why it would be useful to monitor the vending machine in this office, so we don't run out of Coke again. Even with the possibility of the price increasing in hot weather (as was recently reported), I would probably think it is a good idea.
But Sony makes hosehold appliances. I may be weird, but I don't really want to boot Windows 98 (or even Linux) on my radio tuner - or even on my PC just so that I can change the station. I don't want to be unable to turn the cooker off because I f*cked up my network router configuration.
Some people seems to go overboard with technology (I suspect many of them are/. readers:-)) and forget that many devices have very useful interfaces as they are, and that it is difficult to design a realy good interface.
(Others could benefit: Sony has probably spent hundreds of man-years on the VCR interface and most people still cannot set the clock.)
As long as they keep innovating and produce useful products. How long did Adobe sell Photoshop before the Open Source GIMP solution came along?
GPL is not inconsistent with profits, as RMS has pointed out several times. It seems to me that HP is moving in the right direction: release the basic set of components so that everybody can agree at the low level and everybody is free to innovate and implement new solutions on top of the platform. Then bet their business that they are the better innovators, that they understand the customers better than anybody else.
It might be scary for some managers, but I think that is the way of the future. Organisations will differentiate themselves on how well they understand their cusomers, and on how well they ca build customer loyalty.
Slightly more serious: When did a product with "e-" in the name ever actually have to do anything useful or new for the stock price to go up? That seems to be the main point of these e-press e-releases. God knows HP needs all the good PR they can get these days.
More serious: I think you got the basic idea: interface to e-commerce sites. "What happened to mail-order?" -- where have you been the last few years!?:-)
An approach based on standard components is (almost) always a good idea, in e-business or elsewhere, as long as the components have widespread acceptance. The GPL of the source should help with this. In e-business, with many new and changing channels (WAP, voice services, your freezer...) we really need an approach that takes us away from HTML based solutions an into a content-rich environment. XML goes some way for the data, e-speak might go some way for the systems and processes.
Has anybody implemented this, and if so, do they knw what the impact on the biusiness processes are, if any? It seems to me like e-speak locks you down a bit - of course you can always change it but that kind of defeats the purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm answering one of my own questions in another thread.
How about the other question: is choosing Linux and be dammned as far as the applications are concerned the start of a trend? Does anybody have any (other) examples of this happening in "real life"?
Oops, I forgot
Some links to ERP vendors and what they have to say about Linux support:
(Check out the cool penguin
So, answering my previous question, it seems like Kenwood is limited to choose between SAP and SAP.
See also the article The "Lintel" Value Proposition on the same site.
It makes an interesting read and basically argues the same point: you get more "bang for your hardware buck" with Linux.
Good stuff; should be required reading by all IT decision makers.
The last point is, I think, interesting. Quoting from the article:
So, I wonder, is DNS and e-mail the ultimate "killer apps" for Linux that will finally propel it into the IT departments across United States and the rest of the world?
It seems to me that this is a very brave move by Kenwood. Quoting from the article:
In other words, they first decided on Linux and only then they try to find a software package. Very brave, given the uneven support for Linux among the vendors.
What ERP packages support Linux?
Is this the start of a new trend? Companies goes Linux for the OS and the software applications will have to follow? That would be a Good Thing.
Well said! Now if only a few tens of thousands of other companies would adopt the same attitude, then perhaps we could finally get rid of bloatware.
(And it isn't just Microsoft who are guilty, though they seem to have written bloat into their business model.)
The licence is kind of interesting.
Read the whole story at http://www.oreilly.co m/catalog/samba/chapter/licenseinfo.html.
I wonder how long time the virus had gone undetected? They recalled 12,000 units so if anybody knows approximately how many they make per day I guess we could figure it out. My guess would be 4-6 days?
It really leaves you wondering what they were doing. The issue does not, to me, seem to be one of current virus software. No virus software is current: there are always new, undetected viruses out there. Rather the issue seems to be that Dell had failed to isolate their production computers from the network the administrators used for surfing the web and installing unknown games (or whatever) on.
It could be a lot worse. Somebody could have installed a backdoor program and used this to change the configuration of all new Dell PCs such that they fail to work on Jan 1, 2000.
Oh. Maybe they have :-)
On the subject of the "dumb US export laws" discussed above, be aware that the restriction is on all export of crypto implementations.
So if you are in, say, Europe, and download the SSH implementaion to your laptop you are OK to travel to the USA. However, legally you can not leave until you have deleted SSH from your laptop.
I know they do not normally search your harddisks at the airport, but you might want to consider the implications if they make an exception for you.
(I remember this was a real problem fro a Swedish company who used strong encryption for their internal e-mail systems. Their executives had to wipe their laptops everytime they left JFK and then re-install back in Sweden. It really is a stupid law.)
I hope they concentrate on defining and documenting the interfaces (and debugging them, of course!) so that others can ork on the eye-candy.
To my mind those are different development tasks and should probably (as you suggest) be done by different people with experience in graphics design, HCI, typesetting, and much more.
It is hard to make a good UI and I think the KDE team deserves great credit for what they have accomplished in this area. Let's stabilise the code and the interfaces a bit, then let people "play" and come up with various suggestions, and then let us decide on one or two themes that we all like (fat chance!) and all will support.
Congratulations to the KDE team! I look forward to the 2.0 release.
It's great news (and I submitted it a week ago and got rejected - grrrrrr.... :) but note that the experiment requires Lucent's new optical cables.
I doubt the mass market is going to re-lay their existing, im-pure cables anytime soon. So Doom fans take it easy.
However new corporations should look with interest. And investors may want a bet on Lucent: first a record fast switch and then a record fast cable. These guys are on to something.
So he understands, or the article implies, that software development can only be done efficiently on a large scale in an open source community model. That is a good observation.
But then how is he going to make any money? If he can't develop he can't sell (the code is open source) so he'll have to rely on service contracts. Is that the deal? If so, do count me as an investor in the IPO. There can only be so many Red Hats, and the market is looking increasingly crowded.
Am I missing something obvious?
Only works with text. The point, surely, is to be able to drang-and-drop and cut-and-paste objects and components. Text is so old-fashioned.
Is this a good idea? Do we really need yet another war over how the desktop should look, or could we please agree to disagree and make our applications independent of the window manager and GUI classes? Are we just re-inventing our own MFC with associated incomapabilities and holy wars?
When will Linux split into KDE/Gnome/whatever camps that are mutually exclusive and can not share applications?
Anyhow, who wants to pay for an office package when StarOffice is free???
Except, firstly, that this may be English law but it is possible that it is not German law so you, as the consumer, would have no rights! (How is this dealt with for faxes?) Secondly, there was an EU proposal that would make the jurisdiction of any internet transaction the country of the consumer, i.e. the direct opposite of English law. Of course only enforsable within the EU so I'd have to ask you for your nationality and deal with you differently (what if you lie!?). I guess US companies already have to do this with the silly export restrictions.
It all just goes to show that conventional notions fail in the internet world.
I'm going to stand with one leg on each side of a border, connect through my GSM cell-phone, and sell you something dodgy just to find out how the law is going to deal with that.
But thanks for the clarification. Oh, and I think it is now a Scottish ISP - I'm sure there are somebody who cares... :-)
Help me understand this one: I'm a Danish citizen who dials my UK ISP from Germany to read my e-mail on a Californian server (I'm not making this up!) : where "am" I, for the purpose of the law? Does it make a difference if I download the e-mail to my laptop before/after reading it?
I'm not a lawyer so I'm confused.
Historically duties and sales taxes comes from the ancient marketplace. The sellers would pay a small fee to the market which would help to promote it and, crucially, guarantee and enforce a certain standard and a consistent set of rules for trade. (Big) Government has taken over the role as the overseer of trading standards and as the guarantoor of the order of the "marketplace". It has also taken the market tax.
However, in the internet age this approach is looking increasingly strange. I, as a consumer, can buy goods anywhere at the click of a mouse, and the government can not hope to regulate all and every market. And even if I knew the physical location of the seller (not a trivial thing) and even if the local government enforced a reasonable set of trading standards (obviously not true everywhere), it would be very difficult and expensive for me to actually seek redress in a local court.
The solution, in my opinion, is to return to the medieval market arrangement. Let us have private markets which regulate themselves, and let the consumers decide which markets to deal in. It is not a completely alien idea: most stock markets operate in this way (even if they are not exactly free from government regulation) and most of the online markets (e.g. e-bay, amazon, ...) have at least some rules and attempts at consumer protection.
The bad news for govenrment is that it will loose a lot of revenue. But it will also loose some of the responsibility (if it can ever give up power!) and therefore, presumably, costs. In the future governments will increasingly have to rely on taxing immobile value like land and buildings. Trade and people are both becoming too mobile.
Incidently the UK has a funny half-way house where I as a consumer can choose to sue my UK credit card company instead of the retailer for any disputes over a purchase. Interesting: as money become increasingly a branded commodity is this the way forward?
What's the point of source code I cannot use? This seems to be a non-event to me.
It is difficult in particular, but not just, for novices. Given the dominance of Windows and the commitment of the hardware vendors to this platfor, a novice still has to worry about hardware compatability issues for Linux while this is largely a non-issue for Win98.
I don't think I'm a novice, but after three weekends I'm still trying to figure out how to get Linux onto my sexy new Sony Vaio N505X. It's an all singing, all USB and ilink, single PCMCIA slot laptop, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to plug and play the modem, the video controls only work in Windoze etc, etc. Even softboot from Win to Linux is more difficult than I thought. (But next weekend I'll get it working - I think...)
Enough about my woes: the point is that as a (novice) user you have to worry about compatability issues. People who are setting up servers are paid to worry about these issues - and presumably skilled - but my mom just wants to read e-mail. Linux is not a choice for her (yet!).
Hm, Mahir suddenly sounds like a clever guy. :-) Does anybody have a link to the real Mahir's page handy -- I couldn't find it?
Maybe there is a (very!) weak /. point in here about how to get rich and famous on the internet? But (a) I think we would all rather take a different path (somebody already did a journaling filesystem for Linux, so I guess I have to think of somehting else now) and (b) there are probably better ways to introduce it. Or maybe TurkishGeek is on to something:
(Come on, everybody, we've got this thread so let's make the most of it:) How did the Internet change the world? I seem to remember a guy in England who put a shark up on his roof and got instant fame and interviews. How is that different from the fame of Mahir? People have always done stunts for publicity or otherwise. It is not clear to me that anything except the speed of communication has changed.
Not every stupid web page gets a million hits. What does this show, except that people are as silly as ever and still follow the herd, wherever it leads?
It's not just you.
HEMOS: What's your point????
Why on Earth would you want to do this!? The household coffee machine has a perfectly good interface they way it is now, as far as I am concerned.
Now, if you were talking industrial coffee machines that would be another matter. I can see why it would be useful to monitor the vending machine in this office, so we don't run out of Coke again. Even with the possibility of the price increasing in hot weather (as was recently reported), I would probably think it is a good idea.
But Sony makes hosehold appliances. I may be weird, but I don't really want to boot Windows 98 (or even Linux) on my radio tuner - or even on my PC just so that I can change the station. I don't want to be unable to turn the cooker off because I f*cked up my network router configuration.
Some people seems to go overboard with technology (I suspect many of them are /. readers :-)) and forget that many devices have very useful interfaces as they are, and that it is difficult to design a realy good interface.
(Others could benefit: Sony has probably spent hundreds of man-years on the VCR interface and most people still cannot set the clock.)
As long as they keep innovating and produce useful products. How long did Adobe sell Photoshop before the Open Source GIMP solution came along?
GPL is not inconsistent with profits, as RMS has pointed out several times. It seems to me that HP is moving in the right direction: release the basic set of components so that everybody can agree at the low level and everybody is free to innovate and implement new solutions on top of the platform. Then bet their business that they are the better innovators, that they understand the customers better than anybody else.
It might be scary for some managers, but I think that is the way of the future. Organisations will differentiate themselves on how well they understand their cusomers, and on how well they ca build customer loyalty.
Welcome to the New World (tm).
Use the Source, Luke. (Now that it is available.)
Slightly more serious: When did a product with "e-" in the name ever actually have to do anything useful or new for the stock price to go up? That seems to be the main point of these e-press e-releases. God knows HP needs all the good PR they can get these days.
More serious: I think you got the basic idea: interface to e-commerce sites. "What happened to mail-order?" -- where have you been the last few years!? :-)
An approach based on standard components is (almost) always a good idea, in e-business or elsewhere, as long as the components have widespread acceptance. The GPL of the source should help with this. In e-business, with many new and changing channels (WAP, voice services, your freezer...) we really need an approach that takes us away from HTML based solutions an into a content-rich environment. XML goes some way for the data, e-speak might go some way for the systems and processes.
Has anybody implemented this, and if so, do they knw what the impact on the biusiness processes are, if any? It seems to me like e-speak locks you down a bit - of course you can always change it but that kind of defeats the purpose.