When's the last time you saw a BSOD during routine operation on WinXP
Three hours ago. I was browsing the web with malice aforethought and had three PuTTY sessions open as well. 256MB of RAM, XP Professional.
How much do you charge for installing Mandrake Linux 9.1?
For most things, exactly what I would charge for setting up the equivalent MS-Windows (XP|200[03]) box. Anything fancy goes to an hourly rate and MS-Windows rapidly racks up the dollars on those terms.
How much do you charge for supporting it for users that panic when they can't find the Any Key?
Exactly the same hourly rate (i.e., I wind up charging the MS-Windows users about three to five times as much). I don't change the keyboard when I install Linux, both systems lack an `Any' key, although I'm frequently tempted to paint one of the useless extra buttons bright red and label it `Any'.
Can you keep the sneer out of your voice? Can you bring yourself to talk down at their level without aggravating them? I'm betting not.
You lose. My users "love my ass" [name the movie]. I do stuff like installing Jump'n'Bump for them. (-:
I agree with them that for a typical desktop user, TCO is lower with Windows right now and likely to stay that way for some time.
It's kind of like switching from incandescent lighting to flourescent. The fitting soaks up a little more while it's starting, but that's quickly over and the rest is gravy. I've had MS-Windows users not notice that the machine was different, and that's with KDE - imagine what they'd be like under XPDE or with decent theming.
Speaking of which, I blew some users' minds by XP-theming the MS-Windows-98 running in Win4Lin windows on an XP-themed KDE session and lining up the w4l window so that the `Bliss' horizon crossed the window uninterrupted. I don't know whether I got a screenshot, but if I did I'll reply to this with a link. New users would sit down, glance at the screen, start to look away, kerb themselves and look back, stare at it for 20-30 seconds and then say something along the lines of `That's evil!'.
Sure, the patches come out fast, but who are you going to get to apply them?
URPMI, either completely automatically or via my own mirror (so I can release fixes for all of my users at once after checking them out). No worries, Mandrake rocks! (You could do the same easily with apt-get and probably also manage it with Red Carpet).
You asked two questions; Yes, that is the earliest that the Court could do it, and Yes, TSG are stringing things out as much as possible as well (but I doubt it had much impact here).
One WestOz minister had to stand up and explain that the Muja power station burned 4Mt of coal a year, at 3ppm Uranium (for the maths impared, equals 12t a year of Uranium up the stack, to say nothing of the radium and stuff). They went ahead a built a second coal power station, instead of one running off out abundant natural gas supplies (piped over from Canberra?:-) or a cleaner, cheaper nuke.
...and try a recent version of KDE. man:advmame - nice; audiocd:// - convenient; fish://your.server/ - simple. And an email client that's apleasure to use.
Time spent re-typing a document because it went blue just before you hit "Save"? Time spent finding out just who got hold of someone's documents because a fileshare happened to be too easy to expose? Or time spent fixing stuff that users just messed around with?
Put another way: install Mandrake Linux 9.1, then give me an argument that's not obsolete.
Sadly, the IT playing field has at least one proverbial 800lb gorilla on it, and a lot of smaller cheats and bullies as well. They all stand in the way of a natural functionality-based software ecology. We can't make the ecology fair, but we can make it better. The simplest, most achievable way of doing that is to prefer FOSS. That will make the big guys try harder and give the little guys the tools they need to even enter the playfield.
...that the likes of Microsoft will be constantly pushing the envelope WRT what "compatible" and "standard" is (think binaries amidst the XML, and that XML only available on the expensive version of MS-Office), and will lean heavily on the argument represented by an enormous number of "legacy"-format documents.
They will sell MS-Office as "compatible with the XML standard" when it's not (even in the professional incarnation), and the basic incarnation that they sell won't even do faux XML.
It's also likely that in the wonderful world of politics, you won't get everything you ask for, there will be some horse trading.
I think we have to start with a more aggressive entry, and give them something to wear down, some spare horses we can afford to trade for political favour. At the very least, any format proposed must be legally (ie, no patents or the like) readable and writable by at least one fully Open Source implementation.
The biggest factors are not the up-front ones, or even the standard TCO variables.
As many other posters have pointed out, there are factors like freedom from foreign control, boost to domestic employment, happier balance of trade, better security. But hidden behind those are some unique opportunities for synergy.
Australia used to be considered "the lucky country" and "the clever country" - an unending source of mental talent for other countries. We built Jindalee and the HoveRoc and other tech toys that no other country could match the performance or cost of.
But physicists move to the USA where they can use real colliders, manufacturers move to Argentina where workers are a dime a dozen and union or tax problems basically don't exist, and the Oka motor company gets bought by Malaysia because the Malaysians are better at recognising a good thing than the Australians are; our programmers move to England where the wages (and unfortunately also the cost of living) are amazing.
Using FOSS in Australian government will at least create a demand that plugs a few leaks in this brain drain. The long-term impact of that has to be good.
Compare Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org or KOffice. If the Australian Feral Gummint frees up $10M a year by not buying MS-Office, pockets half of the savings and puts the other half of that into 50 programmers (skilled domestic employment, remember?) working on one or both office suites from an Australian perspective, can you imagine how much of a rocket that would put up their rate of progress? And guess who's the first beneficiary of those improvements? Why, bless me, it seems to be Australia! And Australia also gains 50 experts in developing, extending and interfacing to office suites.
That's just two hidden benefits. There are dozens. Think it through.
Not sure about all of the details (or even where you'd look, maybe SCO or IBM have something up on a site) but the hearing for their permanent injuction is in 2005. SCO upped their original $1G claim to $3G too.
...after he dropped out of Harvard. It was called Xenix, there was one on every desktop in Microsoft, and it was the next Great White Hope. Being Microsoft, of course they passionfingered that as well - but you get that. (-:
...in fact, any of the top distros typically come with at least three of anything Miss Blonde Secretary might need, with the possible exception of stuff that cannot be GPLed (video codecs and the like), and even most of that's just a URPMI (or three clicks) away.
So you still say you can't patch windows but you can patch linux.
I never have said that. I guess you don't really read my posts either, just scan them for what you want to see.
If you want to make a patch for MS-Windows, here's a binary debugger, better hope the DLL or EXE has symbols, good luck, <shove>. If you don't want to make a patch for MS-Windows, better hope that Microsoft have done it, and not buggered something else up at the same time (like borking the WMP licence forever, or re-enabling Slammer vulnerability, to name a couple of real-world examples).
OTOH, on Linux patches provided by others are generally swift, effective, and you can see exactly what they've done. Making your own mods is no sweat, since you own all of the plans and your OS's hood ain't welded shut. Not only do you own all of the plans, but you can inspect everything the software interfaces to, if you're curious, and see exactly how it all interacts. Great for security and reliability, great for learning, great for auditability. And Joe Random User need never concern himself, just urpmi or apt-get the nice timely update (possibly automagically), sit back, and enjoy the ride.
...that before this the "My" in "My Computer" used to stand for William Henry "Trey" Gates III, so as far as the users are concerned, it's just a flag day. Swap one litigious, greedy control freak for another, big whoop-ti-doo.
...during the interview reported in this BYTE article. You can see here that Microsoft have updated the later builds of MS-Windows 2003 to reflect this.
...that what this whole argument is about. They are suing IBM for leaking TSG's IP when the contract IBM is operating under with TSG explicitly grants ownership of IBM derivatives from the USL source to IBM. And they still haven't shown that IBM have actually done what they're suing them for, and are blowing steam about why they're not doing that.
That's still not good faith (just fraud and/or extortion) but they have sued.
So linux crashes because of hardware failure and XP because of bad design ?
Oh, XP crashes for hardware as well, don't you worry about that. (-:
If hardware were the only problem, then at least 99% of all machines shipped with XP these days are flakey. And for the life of me I can only remember one occasion where a hardware failure leaked memory and wedged the machine (a Vax mounted on a marble slab floor at the New York Public Library, and that one was literally leaking memory, as in, leaking actual chips).
My linksys running linux is continually flakey.
So is my Billion not running Linux. I think you just underscored my point.
...and you can't even do that under XP (or any versions of MS-Windows). If stuff's broken and there's no magic binary patch to fix it (that doesn't break something else critical), under MS-Windows it stays broken. Under Linux, there's practically always a way - and that post demonstrates it.
Slashdot Mirror
About 30, and more than 60% of them understand what was done.
Under MS-Windows, that's evidently somewhere you don't want to go today. Under Linux, the option's always there. Caveat emptor.
Three hours ago. I was browsing the web with malice aforethought and had three PuTTY sessions open as well. 256MB of RAM, XP Professional.
For most things, exactly what I would charge for setting up the equivalent MS-Windows (XP|200[03]) box. Anything fancy goes to an hourly rate and MS-Windows rapidly racks up the dollars on those terms.
Exactly the same hourly rate (i.e., I wind up charging the MS-Windows users about three to five times as much). I don't change the keyboard when I install Linux, both systems lack an `Any' key, although I'm frequently tempted to paint one of the useless extra buttons bright red and label it `Any'.
You lose. My users "love my ass" [name the movie]. I do stuff like installing Jump'n'Bump for them. (-:
It's kind of like switching from incandescent lighting to flourescent. The fitting soaks up a little more while it's starting, but that's quickly over and the rest is gravy. I've had MS-Windows users not notice that the machine was different, and that's with KDE - imagine what they'd be like under XPDE or with decent theming.
Speaking of which, I blew some users' minds by XP-theming the MS-Windows-98 running in Win4Lin windows on an XP-themed KDE session and lining up the w4l window so that the `Bliss' horizon crossed the window uninterrupted. I don't know whether I got a screenshot, but if I did I'll reply to this with a link. New users would sit down, glance at the screen, start to look away, kerb themselves and look back, stare at it for 20-30 seconds and then say something along the lines of `That's evil!'.
URPMI, either completely automatically or via my own mirror (so I can release fixes for all of my users at once after checking them out). No worries, Mandrake rocks! (You could do the same easily with apt-get and probably also manage it with Red Carpet).
N E X T ! (-:
Yes. (-:
You asked two questions; Yes, that is the earliest that the Court could do it, and Yes, TSG are stringing things out as much as possible as well (but I doubt it had much impact here).
...oh, wait, that market-space is already filled by the BSAA.
...running a sweepstake on it. (-:
...to my Mandrake Linux system, which kind of undermines your first point. (-:
One WestOz minister had to stand up and explain that the Muja power station burned 4Mt of coal a year, at 3ppm Uranium (for the maths impared, equals 12t a year of Uranium up the stack, to say nothing of the radium and stuff). They went ahead a built a second coal power station, instead of one running off out abundant natural gas supplies (piped over from Canberra? :-) or a cleaner, cheaper nuke.
...and try a recent version of KDE. man:advmame - nice; audiocd:// - convenient; fish://your.server/ - simple. And an email client that's apleasure to use.
Time spent re-typing a document because it went blue just before you hit "Save"? Time spent finding out just who got hold of someone's documents because a fileshare happened to be too easy to expose? Or time spent fixing stuff that users just messed around with?
Put another way: install Mandrake Linux 9.1, then give me an argument that's not obsolete.
Sadly, the IT playing field has at least one proverbial 800lb gorilla on it, and a lot of smaller cheats and bullies as well. They all stand in the way of a natural functionality-based software ecology. We can't make the ecology fair, but we can make it better. The simplest, most achievable way of doing that is to prefer FOSS. That will make the big guys try harder and give the little guys the tools they need to even enter the playfield.
...that the likes of Microsoft will be constantly pushing the envelope WRT what "compatible" and "standard" is (think binaries amidst the XML, and that XML only available on the expensive version of MS-Office), and will lean heavily on the argument represented by an enormous number of "legacy"-format documents.
They will sell MS-Office as "compatible with the XML standard" when it's not (even in the professional incarnation), and the basic incarnation that they sell won't even do faux XML.
It's also likely that in the wonderful world of politics, you won't get everything you ask for, there will be some horse trading.
I think we have to start with a more aggressive entry, and give them something to wear down, some spare horses we can afford to trade for political favour. At the very least, any format proposed must be legally (ie, no patents or the like) readable and writable by at least one fully Open Source implementation.
The biggest factors are not the up-front ones, or even the standard TCO variables.
As many other posters have pointed out, there are factors like freedom from foreign control, boost to domestic employment, happier balance of trade, better security. But hidden behind those are some unique opportunities for synergy.
Australia used to be considered "the lucky country" and "the clever country" - an unending source of mental talent for other countries. We built Jindalee and the HoveRoc and other tech toys that no other country could match the performance or cost of.
But physicists move to the USA where they can use real colliders, manufacturers move to Argentina where workers are a dime a dozen and union or tax problems basically don't exist, and the Oka motor company gets bought by Malaysia because the Malaysians are better at recognising a good thing than the Australians are; our programmers move to England where the wages (and unfortunately also the cost of living) are amazing.
Using FOSS in Australian government will at least create a demand that plugs a few leaks in this brain drain. The long-term impact of that has to be good.
Compare Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org or KOffice. If the Australian Feral Gummint frees up $10M a year by not buying MS-Office, pockets half of the savings and puts the other half of that into 50 programmers (skilled domestic employment, remember?) working on one or both office suites from an Australian perspective, can you imagine how much of a rocket that would put up their rate of progress? And guess who's the first beneficiary of those improvements? Why, bless me, it seems to be Australia! And Australia also gains 50 experts in developing, extending and interfacing to office suites.
That's just two hidden benefits. There are dozens. Think it through.
Not sure about all of the details (or even where you'd look, maybe SCO or IBM have something up on a site) but the hearing for their permanent injuction is in 2005. SCO upped their original $1G claim to $3G too.
...after he dropped out of Harvard. It was called Xenix, there was one on every desktop in Microsoft, and it was the next Great White Hope. Being Microsoft, of course they passionfingered that as well - but you get that. (-:
...in fact, any of the top distros typically come with at least three of anything Miss Blonde Secretary might need, with the possible exception of stuff that cannot be GPLed (video codecs and the like), and even most of that's just a URPMI (or three clicks) away.
I never have said that. I guess you don't really read my posts either, just scan them for what you want to see.
If you want to make a patch for MS-Windows, here's a binary debugger, better hope the DLL or EXE has symbols, good luck, <shove>. If you don't want to make a patch for MS-Windows, better hope that Microsoft have done it, and not buggered something else up at the same time (like borking the WMP licence forever, or re-enabling Slammer vulnerability, to name a couple of real-world examples).
OTOH, on Linux patches provided by others are generally swift, effective, and you can see exactly what they've done. Making your own mods is no sweat, since you own all of the plans and your OS's hood ain't welded shut. Not only do you own all of the plans, but you can inspect everything the software interfaces to, if you're curious, and see exactly how it all interacts. Great for security and reliability, great for learning, great for auditability. And Joe Random User need never concern himself, just urpmi or apt-get the nice timely update (possibly automagically), sit back, and enjoy the ride.
So what if your ID is bigger than mine? I'm sure I've got something here in my Inbox which'll fix it! (-:
...that before this the "My" in "My Computer" used to stand for William Henry "Trey" Gates III, so as far as the users are concerned, it's just a flag day. Swap one litigious, greedy control freak for another, big whoop-ti-doo.
...during the interview reported in this BYTE article. You can see here that Microsoft have updated the later builds of MS-Windows 2003 to reflect this.
That's still not good faith (just fraud and/or extortion) but they have sued.
...about to sell a lot of SCOX shares. (-:
...it's working at least temporarily for TSG, too. From 80c to $14 in six months would be impressive if it hadn't been achieved fraudulently.
Do you ever read stuff you link to yourself? Or is that somewhere Microsoft doesn't want you to go today?
Oh, XP crashes for hardware as well, don't you worry about that. (-:
If hardware were the only problem, then at least 99% of all machines shipped with XP these days are flakey. And for the life of me I can only remember one occasion where a hardware failure leaked memory and wedged the machine (a Vax mounted on a marble slab floor at the New York Public Library, and that one was literally leaking memory, as in, leaking actual chips).
So is my Billion not running Linux. I think you just underscored my point.
...and you can't even do that under XP (or any versions of MS-Windows). If stuff's broken and there's no magic binary patch to fix it (that doesn't break something else critical), under MS-Windows it stays broken. Under Linux, there's practically always a way - and that post demonstrates it.