I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I think that they're so good, that I have discontinued all of our Yellow Pages listings. In fact, last time I spoke with a Yellow Pages salesperson, she said that not only has she gotten the same response from many businesses, but she's not surprised because xx% of people now go online to find phone numbers, hours, and other business info before they think about using Yellow Pages. Phone books are dead. Stick a fork in 'em.
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.
All levels of government is run almost exclusively on a seniority basis. Not only that, but it's next to impossible to fire most government employees. That's why government workers tend to be some of the most dim-witted people you've ever met. They're the people who have or would be fired from jobs in the private sector, and have gotten to the positions that they hold simply because they're a warm body that has managed to show up to work for an extended period of time.
Well, I will say that if you go back into development, it'll make you a MUCH better developer. That's the problem with most developers... they have no idea who their customers are and what they need. That's why so many software products are ridiculously bad. Salespeople are selling one thing, and developers are developing something else. Experience dealing with customers is never a bad thing, and can only help you in whatever your next career is. Do it. If you have the opportunity to break out of the tiny box that developers live and work in, take it. I've seen lots of people who have done nothing but program for 40 years, and it's not a pretty sight... they tend to end up like that mumbling guy with the stapler in Office Space.
It's still a silly decision to try to use Macs for mission-critical business machines for just this reason. In my business, if I have a machine go down, I either run down to my local parts store to get the part I need, or I run down to the thrift store and pick up another used beige box for $50. Having a machine down for weeks in not an option. Having a machine down for days, even, is unacceptable in my small business.
Now, if you have some fancy design business, where deadlines are measured in weeks or months, as opposed to minutes as they are in retail, then sure, you can probably afford to ship off a box and wait for a few weeks until it gets fixed. Unfortunately, that's not a luxury that many smaller businesses can afford.
This is what true "lock-in" (hardware AND software) looks like in the IT industry, and it's not pretty.
While factually correct I don't think either of these moves by Dell was anything approaching altruistic, let alone an honest effort to promote software written outside of Redmond. Did you ever try to navigate from Dell.com to one of these machines? Nigh on impossible.
Dell.com > type "linux workstations" in the search box. If that's "nigh on impossible", then you need a brain transplant, buddy.
Also, once you do find one, did you also notice that the price was *higher* than if you had ordered the exact same machine with Windows? What is the motivation here for the customer?
"Motivation for the customer"? Are you serious? Let me make it simple for you... There's a total cost for configuring and testing an OS with each of their boxes. Divide that cost by the number of units you expect to sell, multiply it by some profit number, and that's the price.
Also, as I recall, the only Linux distro ever offered by Dell was Redhat Enterprise, which is a very expensive distribution and it was only offered on their business line machines.
Business people pay more and require less support than individuals. They can make a larger profit selling business machines, when compared to what tiny profit they *might* make from consumer versions.
Why not use something like CentOS (if it must be RH based) and pass the savings on to the customer? Or, better yet, use a totally free distribution and pass the savings on.
They can't use just any half-assed version... unless they want their reputation to go the way of Packard-Bell, they have to use the most professionally supported and developed OS available. A multibillion dollar company can't afford to rely on some volunteer group of people that use a donated web server. Are you crazy?
Dell's "attempts" at selling no-OS/Free-OS machines was half-hearted at best; more than likely a public relations move to appease a certain software company concerned with anti-trust issues.
No, if it wasn't an attempt to sell more boxes, then at the least it was an attempt to shut up some of the loudest, most annoying Linux zealots. Dell selling other OS's wouldn't have anything to do with trust issues.
Your lack of any fundamental understanding of basic business principles is exceeded only by your the "badness" of your writing. "Nigh"? "Night"? Who do you think you are, Shakespeare?
Actually, I disagree. I find real life to be MUCH more interesting than fiction. I've seen, heard, and experienced things in real life that I could *never* have imagined, and have never seen in a movie. Watch some good documentaries. I guarantee that you'll see stuff that you've never seen in Hollywood movies. Sure, in movies, you have space ships and supermen, but they're silly ideas used to dress up stories and characters that would completely bore you to tears, otherwise. Heck, watch "American Movie" or "Brothers Keeper" or "Jesus Camp", and tell me that real life isn't more interesting than fiction.
No, I'd never seen that before. Looks promising. The only big sticker I'm seeing with it right off the bat is I don't see payroll support. Calculating all of the various tax withholding stuff by hand is damn near impossible... Looks like it might be worth taking a look at, especially as cheap as it is.
We fall into the category of having some customized apps that won't port (or aren't worth taking the time to re-write). But more importantly, there's not a single decent financial app (ie: Quickbooks functionality) that runs on Linux. That's kinda' basic, to say the least. Until the day comes when there are a bunch of good ones to choose from, Linux isn't an option for most small to medium sized businesses.
It's how Microsoft usually innovates. Buy in a product and repackage it as MS whatever.
I couldn't care if it was made by a team of trained squirrels. As long as it works and it's a reasonable price, I'll buy it. I really don't care if it was bought, stolen, borrowed, or anything else. Do you know where the rubber comes from that goes into your car tires?
The Linux/OSS zealots aren't getting it... MS won't care if everybody uses the ODF standard, because at the end of the day, just like with Windows, people will continue buying their software in large numbers because it simply works better than the OSS/Free alternatives out there. People have been saying the same thing about Linux for more than a decade, and Linux hasn't taken more than a negligible chunk of the small to medium server from MS (most was cannibalized from other *nix variants), and virtually none of the desktop market. A free screwdriver is useless if you need a hammer to do the job.
People *may*, if this thing actually has any legs to it, end up continuing to use Office and saving docs as "ODF", which won't impact MS if the OSS/Free office alternatives remain distant runners-up in terms of quality, performance, and bells-and-whistles.
Well, there is the possibility that if enough altruists and idealists open up their own WAP's, then there would be literally nothing that anybody could do about it. The local telcos and governments and companies could battle all they want, but there'd be no point if smart people at least in larger cities formed their own ad-hoc networks. Who wouldn't use free ad-hoc networks? Just about anything you want to do is encryptable these days, anyway.
That's simple. Life's a bitch. It's comforting to tell yourself that no matter how shitty your life gets, that you have something to look forward to. The reality is that we probably have nothing to look forward to after we die. That can be overwhelmingly depressing for most people who are just trying to get through each day, dealing with their own problems. It's a coping mechanism, is all.
VB6, in and of itself, doesn't do a whole lot. The strength is in the ability to very, very easily be able to glue different components together. It can do all kinds of sysadmin stuff, *if* you have the right COM object to drop into it. It can use any kind of data access you want. OLEDB replaced ODBC for a good reason, but there's no reason that you have to use OLEDB if you need better performance, either, although I will say that I've used OLEDB to access multi-terabyte databases with pretty good results.
Also, VB6 has hands-down, the best way to do RAD GUI stuff.
All species reach a critical mass at which point disease of some point knocks 'em down to a naturally sustainable level. On the east coast of the US, we have a massive deer overpopulation due to massive amounts of new suburban sprawl, and along came a previously rare disease a few years ago, to kill off a lot of them (which is why you can't buy and human-grade venison that is produced in the US... it all comes out of New Zealand). Parts of the planet are quickly reaching (or have already reached) population levels that are not sustainable. Disease WILL kill a lot of people... it's just a matter of when.
The Big Thing that's gonna take humans down a notch won't be nuclear attack. It won't be global warming. It'll be a simple bacteria, maybe a version of something common like strep or staph that doctors just can't kill because of simple resistance. I can't wait.
I know, I know, it's "unsupported", but if I need a quick and dirty app, I usually end up doing it in VB6. I've never seen a framework that allows for such quick development, and such flexibility. If I need a web browser for displaying info, you just click and drag a web browser into the environment. And of course, you have instant access to all other Win32 objects as well. It's great for tying together disparate systems, and you need a GUI.
How many different things can you do with email? Send messages. Receive messages. What kind of specialization could possibly be done to email, other than offering a POP3, IMAP, and web interface? And, I wouldn't lump in Exchange/Outlook in with regular ol' email. Email is just a tiny fraction of what Exchange does.
It's ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, and corrupt to save money by outsourcing a commodity service like email? I'd say it's stupid NOT to. Is it also "ludicrous, idiotic, stupid and corrupt" is a university outsourced, oh, I don't know... electricity generation?
You make a good point. Even though I generate more tax revenue than even the most wealthy homeowner, I can't vote in my town because I live in the next town over. It seems kinda' silly.
Eh. Anybody who wants a gun can already get one. It's not hard. I got mine by walking into a "Dick's Sporting Goods" and asking for "the cheapest gun that will blow a big hole in someone". I walked out 5 minutes later with a Mossberg 20 gauge 6 shot short barrel pump shotgun and a few hundred shells.
The idea behind everybody being able to own guns is that if the government ever becomes opporessive (some would argue we're close to that already), that people can fight back (ie: revolution). As is right now, the police are armed so heavily, that they can put down any kind of protest that they'd like to with ease. We're already past the point where the people could rise up against the government if they wanted to. You know, the whole "When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." thing.
Even the most ardent Libertarians believe that a common police force is necessary to maintain order. I've never heard any serious Libertarian saying that we should privatize the police.
But hey, what do I know? Just keep voting Coke or Pepsi (oh, I'm sorry...Republican or Democrat). That seems to be working out pretty well for everybody, right?
What you say may be valid, but it doesn't change the fact that many MS products are significantly cheaper than the competition. I'm getting ready to move my small business to MS Dynamics because even with all of the fees, and ongoing support, their product is much cheaper (and better) than comparable competing products. So, while sure, it's not free, I know that many companies, large and small, still look at the bottom line, and aren't just buying MS products because they're Microsoft.
The whole "lock-in" thing is really just a straw man. Data is data. If you don't like whatever product you're using for whatever application, just move the damn data to a new product. MS is certainly not holding guns to anybody's head to keep them using their products, and they don't hold data hostage. Heck, another part of the major software move I'm about to do is because MS Dynamics actually provides much easier, more transparent access to the raw data than competitors products allow.
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Hey, hey, hey now. There's no reason to call your mom a "dog". That's rude to dogs.
I couldn't disagree more. In fact, I think that they're so good, that I have discontinued all of our Yellow Pages listings. In fact, last time I spoke with a Yellow Pages salesperson, she said that not only has she gotten the same response from many businesses, but she's not surprised because xx% of people now go online to find phone numbers, hours, and other business info before they think about using Yellow Pages. Phone books are dead. Stick a fork in 'em.
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.
All levels of government is run almost exclusively on a seniority basis. Not only that, but it's next to impossible to fire most government employees. That's why government workers tend to be some of the most dim-witted people you've ever met. They're the people who have or would be fired from jobs in the private sector, and have gotten to the positions that they hold simply because they're a warm body that has managed to show up to work for an extended period of time.
Well, I will say that if you go back into development, it'll make you a MUCH better developer. That's the problem with most developers... they have no idea who their customers are and what they need. That's why so many software products are ridiculously bad. Salespeople are selling one thing, and developers are developing something else. Experience dealing with customers is never a bad thing, and can only help you in whatever your next career is. Do it. If you have the opportunity to break out of the tiny box that developers live and work in, take it. I've seen lots of people who have done nothing but program for 40 years, and it's not a pretty sight... they tend to end up like that mumbling guy with the stapler in Office Space.
It's still a silly decision to try to use Macs for mission-critical business machines for just this reason. In my business, if I have a machine go down, I either run down to my local parts store to get the part I need, or I run down to the thrift store and pick up another used beige box for $50. Having a machine down for weeks in not an option. Having a machine down for days, even, is unacceptable in my small business.
Now, if you have some fancy design business, where deadlines are measured in weeks or months, as opposed to minutes as they are in retail, then sure, you can probably afford to ship off a box and wait for a few weeks until it gets fixed. Unfortunately, that's not a luxury that many smaller businesses can afford.
This is what true "lock-in" (hardware AND software) looks like in the IT industry, and it's not pretty.
While factually correct I don't think either of these moves by Dell was anything approaching altruistic, let alone an honest effort to promote software written outside of Redmond. Did you ever try to navigate from Dell.com to one of these machines? Nigh on impossible.
Dell.com > type "linux workstations" in the search box. If that's "nigh on impossible", then you need a brain transplant, buddy.
Also, once you do find one, did you also notice that the price was *higher* than if you had ordered the exact same machine with Windows? What is the motivation here for the customer?
"Motivation for the customer"? Are you serious? Let me make it simple for you... There's a total cost for configuring and testing an OS with each of their boxes. Divide that cost by the number of units you expect to sell, multiply it by some profit number, and that's the price.
Also, as I recall, the only Linux distro ever offered by Dell was Redhat Enterprise, which is a very expensive distribution and it was only offered on their business line machines.
Business people pay more and require less support than individuals. They can make a larger profit selling business machines, when compared to what tiny profit they *might* make from consumer versions.
Why not use something like CentOS (if it must be RH based) and pass the savings on to the customer? Or, better yet, use a totally free distribution and pass the savings on.
They can't use just any half-assed version... unless they want their reputation to go the way of Packard-Bell, they have to use the most professionally supported and developed OS available. A multibillion dollar company can't afford to rely on some volunteer group of people that use a donated web server. Are you crazy?
Dell's "attempts" at selling no-OS/Free-OS machines was half-hearted at best; more than likely a public relations move to appease a certain software company concerned with anti-trust issues.
No, if it wasn't an attempt to sell more boxes, then at the least it was an attempt to shut up some of the loudest, most annoying Linux zealots. Dell selling other OS's wouldn't have anything to do with trust issues.
Your lack of any fundamental understanding of basic business principles is exceeded only by your the "badness" of your writing. "Nigh"? "Night"? Who do you think you are, Shakespeare?
Actually, I disagree. I find real life to be MUCH more interesting than fiction. I've seen, heard, and experienced things in real life that I could *never* have imagined, and have never seen in a movie. Watch some good documentaries. I guarantee that you'll see stuff that you've never seen in Hollywood movies. Sure, in movies, you have space ships and supermen, but they're silly ideas used to dress up stories and characters that would completely bore you to tears, otherwise. Heck, watch "American Movie" or "Brothers Keeper" or "Jesus Camp", and tell me that real life isn't more interesting than fiction.
No, I'd never seen that before. Looks promising. The only big sticker I'm seeing with it right off the bat is I don't see payroll support. Calculating all of the various tax withholding stuff by hand is damn near impossible... Looks like it might be worth taking a look at, especially as cheap as it is.
We fall into the category of having some customized apps that won't port (or aren't worth taking the time to re-write). But more importantly, there's not a single decent financial app (ie: Quickbooks functionality) that runs on Linux. That's kinda' basic, to say the least. Until the day comes when there are a bunch of good ones to choose from, Linux isn't an option for most small to medium sized businesses.
It's how Microsoft usually innovates. Buy in a product and repackage it as MS whatever.
I couldn't care if it was made by a team of trained squirrels. As long as it works and it's a reasonable price, I'll buy it. I really don't care if it was bought, stolen, borrowed, or anything else. Do you know where the rubber comes from that goes into your car tires?
The Linux/OSS zealots aren't getting it... MS won't care if everybody uses the ODF standard, because at the end of the day, just like with Windows, people will continue buying their software in large numbers because it simply works better than the OSS/Free alternatives out there. People have been saying the same thing about Linux for more than a decade, and Linux hasn't taken more than a negligible chunk of the small to medium server from MS (most was cannibalized from other *nix variants), and virtually none of the desktop market. A free screwdriver is useless if you need a hammer to do the job.
People *may*, if this thing actually has any legs to it, end up continuing to use Office and saving docs as "ODF", which won't impact MS if the OSS/Free office alternatives remain distant runners-up in terms of quality, performance, and bells-and-whistles.
Well, there is the possibility that if enough altruists and idealists open up their own WAP's, then there would be literally nothing that anybody could do about it. The local telcos and governments and companies could battle all they want, but there'd be no point if smart people at least in larger cities formed their own ad-hoc networks. Who wouldn't use free ad-hoc networks? Just about anything you want to do is encryptable these days, anyway.
That's simple. Life's a bitch. It's comforting to tell yourself that no matter how shitty your life gets, that you have something to look forward to. The reality is that we probably have nothing to look forward to after we die. That can be overwhelmingly depressing for most people who are just trying to get through each day, dealing with their own problems. It's a coping mechanism, is all.
VB6, in and of itself, doesn't do a whole lot. The strength is in the ability to very, very easily be able to glue different components together. It can do all kinds of sysadmin stuff, *if* you have the right COM object to drop into it. It can use any kind of data access you want. OLEDB replaced ODBC for a good reason, but there's no reason that you have to use OLEDB if you need better performance, either, although I will say that I've used OLEDB to access multi-terabyte databases with pretty good results. Also, VB6 has hands-down, the best way to do RAD GUI stuff.
All species reach a critical mass at which point disease of some point knocks 'em down to a naturally sustainable level. On the east coast of the US, we have a massive deer overpopulation due to massive amounts of new suburban sprawl, and along came a previously rare disease a few years ago, to kill off a lot of them (which is why you can't buy and human-grade venison that is produced in the US... it all comes out of New Zealand). Parts of the planet are quickly reaching (or have already reached) population levels that are not sustainable. Disease WILL kill a lot of people... it's just a matter of when.
The Big Thing that's gonna take humans down a notch won't be nuclear attack. It won't be global warming. It'll be a simple bacteria, maybe a version of something common like strep or staph that doctors just can't kill because of simple resistance. I can't wait.
Your post makes no sense, whatsoever.
I know, I know, it's "unsupported", but if I need a quick and dirty app, I usually end up doing it in VB6. I've never seen a framework that allows for such quick development, and such flexibility. If I need a web browser for displaying info, you just click and drag a web browser into the environment. And of course, you have instant access to all other Win32 objects as well. It's great for tying together disparate systems, and you need a GUI.
How many different things can you do with email? Send messages. Receive messages. What kind of specialization could possibly be done to email, other than offering a POP3, IMAP, and web interface? And, I wouldn't lump in Exchange/Outlook in with regular ol' email. Email is just a tiny fraction of what Exchange does.
Nah, some guy said you could find somebody to do it at 1/10 of the price $4K. This guy is offering to update my entire network for $400.
It's ludicrous, idiotic, stupid, and corrupt to save money by outsourcing a commodity service like email? I'd say it's stupid NOT to. Is it also "ludicrous, idiotic, stupid and corrupt" is a university outsourced, oh, I don't know... electricity generation?
I think you should be shot in the face for using GMail. I use Yahoo.
See how much sense that makes?
You make a good point. Even though I generate more tax revenue than even the most wealthy homeowner, I can't vote in my town because I live in the next town over. It seems kinda' silly.
Eh. Anybody who wants a gun can already get one. It's not hard. I got mine by walking into a "Dick's Sporting Goods" and asking for "the cheapest gun that will blow a big hole in someone". I walked out 5 minutes later with a Mossberg 20 gauge 6 shot short barrel pump shotgun and a few hundred shells.
The idea behind everybody being able to own guns is that if the government ever becomes opporessive (some would argue we're close to that already), that people can fight back (ie: revolution). As is right now, the police are armed so heavily, that they can put down any kind of protest that they'd like to with ease. We're already past the point where the people could rise up against the government if they wanted to. You know, the whole "When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." thing.
Even the most ardent Libertarians believe that a common police force is necessary to maintain order. I've never heard any serious Libertarian saying that we should privatize the police.
But hey, what do I know? Just keep voting Coke or Pepsi (oh, I'm sorry...Republican or Democrat). That seems to be working out pretty well for everybody, right?
What you say may be valid, but it doesn't change the fact that many MS products are significantly cheaper than the competition. I'm getting ready to move my small business to MS Dynamics because even with all of the fees, and ongoing support, their product is much cheaper (and better) than comparable competing products. So, while sure, it's not free, I know that many companies, large and small, still look at the bottom line, and aren't just buying MS products because they're Microsoft.
The whole "lock-in" thing is really just a straw man. Data is data. If you don't like whatever product you're using for whatever application, just move the damn data to a new product. MS is certainly not holding guns to anybody's head to keep them using their products, and they don't hold data hostage. Heck, another part of the major software move I'm about to do is because MS Dynamics actually provides much easier, more transparent access to the raw data than competitors products allow.