The issue of better identification of people comes up again and again, but I always have to wonder - what criminal acts are these guys planning that they protest so loudly to being able to be identified by the authorities?
Let's look at this another way. I don't worry about the government knowing that I exist, how tall I am, what color my eyes are, or how many whirls and whorls my thumbprint has. I'm not a criminal. I don't plan on being one.
However, for those that do enjoy the occasional snatch & grab, if the police really had everyones fingerprints and pictures in a big database, don't you think that would reduce a lot of crime? And I don't mean just because they'd catch a lot more people - it would serve as an effective deterrent to crime, which seems to be in short supply nowadays.
So go ahead, fingerprint everybody. Take a DNA sample. If it means that 20 years from now, my children will be growing up in a society free of random murders, pedophilia, assault, and all the rest, I'm for it. That's idealistic, but I'll take just 20%.
2) He stated during the lecture that despite having spent less than $1 million on advertising, RedHat is the 12th most recognized brand name in technology.
12th? While I certainly know RedHat, as would anyone reading this, this seems like a bit of a stretch to believe for the general populous. Perhaps this is also why RedHat is now targetting other IT die-hards (current "real" unix users) rather than going for the desktop, which seemed to be a focus at the start - at least that was the message they let out.
So back to my original point. Let me spot 12 other companies that I would think undoubtedly are better known: Apple, Sun, MS, Adobe, IBM, AT&T, Lucent, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Palm, Cisco, Compaq, HP, Sharp, Sony, NEC,...
Oops, did I get to more than 12 that fast? What criteria did he munge to manage 12th?
Apple currently has people working on porting Tk to Aqua (based on Tcl first, which ships default with OS X). Once that is done, whichever languages hook into Tk through Tcl will get native Aqua L&F (i.e. Python, Ruby). Perl still uses a modified Tk 8.0 (pre-unicode days), so I don't know what effort it would take to update Perl/Tk to a modern Tk. I've heard from Nick Ing-Simmons about the possibility a while ago, but he's gone quiet in the interim...
BTW, Tk does work on OS X natively now, just via X.
(1) NuSphere probably figured they could probably violate the GPL and MySQL would not have the resources to sue them. This is probably true of most free software developers who have not assigned their copyrights to the FSF. After watching this hearing, it seems to me imperative that developers assign their copyrights to some party that will have the resources to enforce it (whether the FSF or some other organization). These violations can only become more common as GPL software becomes more powerful and widespread, and it is quite expensive to litigate against them.
Uh, say what? Does he mean that the FSF has no legal right to assist another party monetarily in courst unless the FSF has the assigned copyright? I somehow don't think legal rules are that restrictive. I read that as, "if you don't give your code to us (the "free" world)", we don't care spit about you if someone hijacks it, GPL or no."
I work at a web-design company, and the web-designers are starting to realise this. Mozilla is the ONLY browser that gets this close to standards compliance, IE6 is still al LONG way behind. NS 4.7 just plain sucks at modern HTML/CSS; Opera doesn't cut it either. Konqueror is pretty impressive, giving IE a run for it's money.
That may be your opinion, but what's more important is what people use. I wandered into the google zeitgeist page a while ago, and was amazed to how pitifully unimportant anything that isn't IE showed up the in the web browser stats. Mozilla, Netscape6, Galeon,... all these are lumped together into the steeply declining "Other" line.
So Mozilla may be closest to true standards-compliance, but IE is "standard", and that makes a difference when you are building commercial websites, but can't test against each and every browser.
On my Windows machines, I have IE and Mozilla (using a post0.9.8 nightly), and I still have to rely on IE for several big sites like Yahoo where Mozilla just doesn't show things right.
Hardware == Cheap. Humans == Expensive.
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Macintosh Clustering
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've just read the article, and added my grain of salt for bias, but most people here fail to realize that hardware costs are *very cheap* in relation to human costs. If what they say is true, it's worth the extra price on hardware.
While the images are truly beautiful, I also wanted to note that ESO's VLT system is driven by Tcl/Tk (95% of the UI for the instruments are Tk-based, with Tcl being the scripting glue language for the instruments, connecting C++ libraries). While the machines are mostly HP-UX, they are transitioning to Linux (they are almost wholy a non-MS shop).
People don't trust free because on the whole (outside the computer world) free is equivalent to "crap". If you pay real money, then you have the expectation of real service and at the very least, when things go to hell, you can sue someone.
The funny thing is, people think that paying for software gives them the right to "sue someone." Um, nope. Does the following look familiar? It should. It's attached to just about every commercial software package license agreeement:
[insert standard disclaimer]
My guess is you've never seen a contract written for one of these 5 or 6 figure sales. You include the above clause, and they put in all the extra clauses that mean they don't have to pay unless they are satisfied - and they really won't pay (lots of cases for that). Sometimes they will sue you anyway, standard disclaimer or no, because in the US legal system, it usually comes down to the best paid lawyer(s) win.
brought on behalf of 300,000 American Indians whose assets are housed on a computer infrastructure so easily penetrable that a court investigator and his team of security experts were able to break in and repeatedly access, modify and even create trust data -- all without raising a response from the government.
It basically points at gross (security) negligence on the part of some gov't types that are supposed to be responsible for sensitive data. It's not like they aren't allowed to maintain the data - just that they are supposed to secure it appropriately.
It may seem a bit extreme to make the ruling so pervasive, but then again that may be the only way to get those brain-dead govt managers to create a real system (like perhaps without MS software to start).
This is of course an x86 box, and has a different target market from even regular x86 boxes. These are popular with the marketing people and those who demo stuff at shows and the like. They look nice and are smaller (good to ship around).
I see that you have a sensitivity towards solving the current AIDs problems, but smallpox was a major epidemic. According to this article about stockpiling vaccine in Canada, it states:
Smallpox claimed around one billion lives before being declared eradicated in 1980.
That's not a small number, which is indicative of how dangerous it can be. Also in the same article, it notes that it would cost less than CAD$400 million (~US$250mil) to stockpile for Canada. The US could presumably make it cheaper for the enormous scale.
Then you have to think like a taxpayer. Do I spend my equiv US$8 for my dose of smallpox vaccine against a potential epidemic, or do I spend it on people I'll never see in Africa? Then remember that a large population of the States lives in what's termed the "Bible Belt"...
It's not speed that makes wireless a toy. It's the cost! I don't consider an 11mbps wireless connection a "toy" and if it wasn't for the costs associated, I'd jump on right now.
I believe that Intel and whoever enters this newly expanded area will first be looking at the business sector as customers. From that viewpoint, 11mbmps is rather slow. Most of these guys are running 100mbps, if not gigabit in some newer places.
At work I can set systems up doing parallel builds, all drawing sources from one or more other computers, and blasting others that are used for testing GUIs. This causes my 100mb hub to hit max capacity frequently. As the manufacturers of these devices try and sell more and more businesses on the "convenience" and "no-wire-maintenance" aspect of these devices, speed becomes more important. Sure, noone cares at home sharing 2-3 machines on their broadband link, but 50 or 500 people working together with T1 access to the world can push a lot of bits around.
Note that the FSF, which does like all things free, is more concerned about the possible GNU GPL violations that might be occuring, and "appropriation" of contributors' work. While I'm not an GPL-junkie, this does seem to be a valid point from the FSF, with SF walking a thin, grey line.
Re:Spelling/Grammer Nazis...
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Looking At Gobe
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· Score: 1
For those of you who don't normally read osnews and Eugenia's reviews, she continually gets crap over her spelling and grammer. Specifically, she gets a lot more whenever they are linked by/. so I'm going to go out on a limb and say its generally/.'ers that are dishing the crap
<flame>
Maybe if she used full featured word processors that have spelling and grammar correction in many languages, she wouldn't have that problem.
</flame>
Really though, doesn't that in-and-of-itself show why MS is still ahead with consumers for product popularity?
Smugness was all part of the marketing, and if anything, you can say they were more of a marketing success than anything else. Remember all the smugness surrounding all those Linux vendors going IPO just a couple years ago? And in what state are they?
While that of course is good for the IPO, if you don't start to *produce* something worthy of that smugness, you get spanked (and we have been seeing that more and more often of late).
Well, what about MacOS X?
Anybody know anything about future Python support for the X as well as this anygui?
Tk in 8.4 has a native Aqua port (Oct 16 news) in beta, from the guys at Apple. All languages binding to Tk can take advantage of OS X now.
In any case, this has been said, but the idea of anygui being the lowest common denominator of toolkits seems like a bad idea being repeated. Tk has been inflicted by this sometimes, but more and more pressure is on Tk development to add more single-platform support bits in the core.
Preface - I am fairly agnostic to what is on my desktop, although I do prefer Unix to Windows.
Reading this article, being a very informed technical user (one who has done both Uni unix sysadmining and Windows sysadmining because, well, what Windows machine hasn't needed it?), I found it very hard to buy any of Murphy basic assumptions or trade-offs.
First off, why does a Dell 2100 cost so much in the Windows solution? I went to www.dell.com to price the same thing and got US$1262.11 (40GB HDD, 256MB, 1.1Ghz Celeron, 17in head, net card, 2000/XP with Office academic). Mind you, I went in the Academic pricing door, because he is pricing for a school. The Office/2K software adds about $280 to the bill. Thus, the only thing he should have noted is that each computer buyer shells out $280 more for Windows. In other words, for the 900 computers (500 school, 400 home) in his first example, that's $252K - no chump change). That assumes no school licensing. If he isn't getting those basic numbers right, you know the rest of the article is bent...
The idea that "Smart Displays" would cut it in school is OK for some (terminal rooms, where many go to just read mail and surf), but forget it for heavy work. I've not heard of these being satisfactorily used in practice.
Also, I hate to say it, but I don't think this guy has ever seriously used Win2K. Many may not like to hear it - but I've only seen the BSOD once while using it. I've been actually pleasantly surprised myself at its reliability. I am now able to run these things for months without reboot (OK, so I had a solaris machine that went for a little over a year once until we upgraded the memory...). In any case, either system properly maintained is fairly reliable.
Point 2 - administration. At my old Uni, the CS systems (not the general machines) were maintained by 2 full time Unix sysadmins (we actually had very few Windows machines at the time) and a horde of cheap or free volunteers. The systems ran 24 hours, but only with help (because beginning CS programmers can do all sorts of weird things you don't anticipate). Either way, it's at least one full time person for Unix or Windows. I think the real cost will be in all the tech support needed for these students that grew up on Windows at home (at least 95% of them). That will need 4 full time people in and of itself.
I'll buy point 3, but everyone likes to upgrade.
I'm a little less able to gripe about his assumptions in the 5,000 manufacturing environment, but I'll add in some thoughts...
The last company I worked at had over 5000 all over the world. It was a mixed Unix and Windows (mostly Windows, since tech is always smaller than marketing and sales), and the whole organization didn't have but 50 tech support total. They worked hard, but they had a pretty efficient setup, and things went pretty smoothly. I'm going to assume he got his 30:1 Windows user:support ratio from some informed source, but he doesn't cite one, and I've never seen it that bad in practice.
Anyway, no need to beat the horse. There is one reason I do like the article. It is totally biased for Unix to win. However, there is so much crap that says the opposite (in Windows favor), that I guess you have to have the CIOs read both poles of crap to come to a decision in the middle.
It's interesting that you point out SuSE was "in trouble" for the CEO leaving - 2 days before this announcement was made. My brother manages a tech fund, and he has stated that a common thing he (and others managing such investments) expects is the ability to shake out management as a contigency to investing (also like requesting a board seat or three). My bet is the CEO's leaving was directly tied to SuSE getting $$$.
That does not make sense. QT is already on Windows - something much closer in terms of video production capabilities off-the-shelf than Linux. Apple still has some authoring software that is only on the Macs - I can understand that. You have to buy a Mac to author, but then anyone can view. I don't see where making a *viewer* available on all platforms makes for anything more than business sense (so more people want to author).
Jay Greenspan is... the "industry thought leader"
If I needed a reason to totally ignore this article, there it is. WTF does an "industry thought leader" do, besides stroke his on ego?
Hmmmm, I get the idea that you haven't been on the other side of the OSS wall (that is, in a company trying to make products and a profit). Thought leaders, whether self-appointed (a point I'll skip) or otherwise, are key people in getting new technology adopted. They are better writers than coders. Of course, they don't have to be bad coders - just the better the writer (= charisma on paper), the better your thought leadership.
These are the guys and gals that get the message to the C?O level.
Besides, what is peoples obsessions with writing dull essays and "papers" about the topic du jour. Write some bloody code, instead of feeding the techie webs insatiable appetite for content, usually (as in this case) the same six or seven ideas endlessly rehashed.
It takes endless writing to get the message through. Has the MS marketing machine not convinced you that yet that thought leadership is more important than good code?
The best thing OSS projects can do is to get "thought leaders" to write about them - again and again and again and again....
I chose the high-end of Sony's mid-range line (STR-DE945) to complement the same Sony DVD player. Unless you are really trying to save money, the first thing you notice is that having the DD decoder in the DVD isn't worth anything because any receiver that's worth buying has one built in. In retrospect, I might have even got a lower-end DVD player, but oh well.
I get a warm and fuzzy feeling going with all the same components (you already Sony for TV and DVD), and Sony makes good components. It replaced a Denon receiver which was actually slightly better, but not DD ready. I notice that you didn't mention speakers. If $1500 is really your remaining budget, think about spending at least half on speakers, unless you already have some good ones. Speakers are one of the most essential parts of the system - never skimp.
Actually, thinking a bit more, it may be a good idea. Rail transport is surely cheaper than freighter. And there are a pile of Chinese folk just starting to get their shit together to become the biggest consumer market in the world. Might be nice to transport stuff to them cheaply.
Is it really all that much cheaper? I've moved back and forth to Europe, and I was quite surprised at how inexpensive the freighter (shipped via Panama) portion moving goods was. However, if it really is cheaper, it's isn't Siberia, but China and Korea that may be where the key is. Looking at a world map, it's quite a long way to ship goods, but China is supposed to become a massive economic powerhouse in the next couple of decades (to surpass Europe and possibly the US - well, that's what some say). Trade to China was almost $60billion in 1995 alone (and growing quickly) - that makes the cost of such a project seem not so large in retrospect.
And what with global warming and all, maybe Siberia ain't such a bad spot to visit after all.
Actually, everyone I know that has travelled to Eastern Siberia (about a half dozen, always in the summer), all say that it's worth the trip.
I actually went through this myself, and ended up working in Germany (Munich) for a few years. To sum it up - I had a blast, I'm sorry I left, and I'm looking to get back.
Now for the in-depth... I was looking to get out of the States (no, I didn't have a criminal record, I just think this country sucks on many points and I was looking for a little diversity). My language at the time was French, so I figured that a job in France was a good idea. I didn't look too hard, because I was picky and already had a good job. I applied to a couple of places (one was the ESO, the other a smaller tech company), and on both cases lost because I wasn't an EU citizen. Note that many European countries have since relaxed such rules for techies (this was a few years ago). Then an interesting position was offered in Munich. OK, I didn't speak German, but that wasn't a problem (they wanted my skills - you know, shut up and code;^) ). Again, not being an EU citizen caused problems, but they were a large company that had American offices. In the end I was technically employeed in the States and became a permanent expat to Germany.
The pluses of that situation was that I paid American taxes (and no state income tax), the minus was that I didn't get the usual 6 weeks of vacation. BTW, another post mentioned that you pay higher taxes and get nothing for it. That's only partly true. If you aren't employed as an expat, you will pay local taxes (actually, even if you are expat you do, but it's magically equalized - very high tax math that I don't want to go into here). However, if you are there for a short time and move back to the States, you actually have the right to get back some of the taxes you paid (for certain services). OK, it's a pain in the ass, but it's not all lost if you are determined to mitigate the lost taxes.
OK, so about the language barrier. I am quick with languages (even natural ones). The company offered to pay for language lessons (I did twice a week after work). I worked with people who all knew English, but not natively. I was also determined to learn German properly, and they were helpful in my resolve. Add to that the fact that I was a single guy (keyword: *was*), and was making German friends. That combination led to me picking up the language quite quickly, much faster than the family guys who didn't go out much, or those who worked in groups where they spoke too much English. After only 4 months of twice/weekly evening sessions, I dropped that class since it was too slow and commited myself to mostly German daily. After 2 years I was still learning, but well before that I was confidently fluent in most conversations.
Ummm, so what was the point anyway? Ah, yes - do go for it. Your best bet is to find a larger company, or at least one that has had numerous dealings with hirings non-EU types. Also, if you are going fully local, get to know the lay of the land before accepting any offers. For example, in most European countries, it's common for even engineers to make deals that include a car. Analyze the benefits. For all that you pay higher taxes, you really do get more back (doesn't always offset, but if you go in with the American view that the gov't just takes, you're going to miss out some).
I could go on and on, but your questions weren't that specific. Again, your best bet is to go with a company that in multinational. In fact, an American company in Europe might be a really good idea. Personally, I think not enough Americans get a real view of the world, and more people should be willing to take a few years out somewhere else (anywhere not in the US!).
Sure, hackability may affect performance - in fact it may improve it. Take a known business in another sector - cars and Dinan. Among other things, Dinan is known for reengineering (read: rewriting) the software that controls your car - engine timing and the like. In doing this, they squeeze out the last ounce of performance from the car.
I'm assuming that over time people will share libraries of code for writing games on the Indrema (or whatever box). Letting people in to start tweaking the assembly for the fastest possible operation is a Good Thing(tm).
When you think about it, your logic is the same that some would argue to keep <insert favorite monopoly here> code private. However, I believe the open eyes, many hands approach has many more positives than negatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, turn the $1000 Linux box + $300 accelerated video card with TV tuner into a $400 TiVo. Rock on!
The issue of better identification of people comes up again and again, but I always have to wonder - what criminal acts are these guys planning that they protest so loudly to being able to be identified by the authorities?
Let's look at this another way. I don't worry about the government knowing that I exist, how tall I am, what color my eyes are, or how many whirls and whorls my thumbprint has. I'm not a criminal. I don't plan on being one.
However, for those that do enjoy the occasional snatch & grab, if the police really had everyones fingerprints and pictures in a big database, don't you think that would reduce a lot of crime? And I don't mean just because they'd catch a lot more people - it would serve as an effective deterrent to crime, which seems to be in short supply nowadays.
So go ahead, fingerprint everybody. Take a DNA sample. If it means that 20 years from now, my children will be growing up in a society free of random murders, pedophilia, assault, and all the rest, I'm for it. That's idealistic, but I'll take just 20%.
So back to my original point. Let me spot 12 other companies that I would think undoubtedly are better known: Apple, Sun, MS, Adobe, IBM, AT&T, Lucent, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Palm, Cisco, Compaq, HP, Sharp, Sony, NEC, ...
Oops, did I get to more than 12 that fast? What criteria did he munge to manage 12th?
Apple currently has people working on porting Tk to Aqua (based on Tcl first, which ships default with OS X). Once that is done, whichever languages hook into Tk through Tcl will get native Aqua L&F (i.e. Python, Ruby). Perl still uses a modified Tk 8.0 (pre-unicode days), so I don't know what effort it would take to update Perl/Tk to a modern Tk. I've heard from Nick Ing-Simmons about the possibility a while ago, but he's gone quiet in the interim...
BTW, Tk does work on OS X natively now, just via X.
(1) NuSphere probably figured they could probably violate the GPL and MySQL would not have the resources to sue them. This is probably true of most free software developers who have not assigned their copyrights to the FSF. After watching this hearing, it seems to me imperative that developers assign their copyrights to some party that will have the resources to enforce it (whether the FSF or some other organization). These violations can only become more common as GPL software becomes more powerful and widespread, and it is quite expensive to litigate against them.
Uh, say what? Does he mean that the FSF has no legal right to assist another party monetarily in courst unless the FSF has the assigned copyright? I somehow don't think legal rules are that restrictive. I read that as, "if you don't give your code to us (the "free" world)", we don't care spit about you if someone hijacks it, GPL or no."
Please tell me I missed something here...
I work at a web-design company, and the web-designers are starting to realise this. Mozilla is the ONLY browser that gets this close to standards compliance, IE6 is still al LONG way behind. NS 4.7 just plain sucks at modern HTML/CSS; Opera doesn't cut it either. Konqueror is pretty impressive, giving IE a run for it's money.
That may be your opinion, but what's more important is what people use. I wandered into the google zeitgeist page a while ago, and was amazed to how pitifully unimportant anything that isn't IE showed up the in the web browser stats. Mozilla, Netscape6, Galeon, ... all these are lumped together into the steeply declining "Other" line.
So Mozilla may be closest to true standards-compliance, but IE is "standard", and that makes a difference when you are building commercial websites, but can't test against each and every browser.
On my Windows machines, I have IE and Mozilla (using a post0.9.8 nightly), and I still have to rely on IE for several big sites like Yahoo where Mozilla just doesn't show things right.
I've just read the article, and added my grain of salt for bias, but most people here fail to realize that hardware costs are *very cheap* in relation to human costs. If what they say is true, it's worth the extra price on hardware.
While the images are truly beautiful, I also wanted to note that ESO's VLT system is driven by Tcl/Tk (95% of the UI for the instruments are Tk-based, with Tcl being the scripting glue language for the instruments, connecting C++ libraries). While the machines are mostly HP-UX, they are transitioning to Linux (they are almost wholy a non-MS shop).
My guess is you've never seen a contract written for one of these 5 or 6 figure sales. You include the above clause, and they put in all the extra clauses that mean they don't have to pay unless they are satisfied - and they really won't pay (lots of cases for that). Sometimes they will sue you anyway, standard disclaimer or no, because in the US legal system, it usually comes down to the best paid lawyer(s) win.
It may seem a bit extreme to make the ruling so pervasive, but then again that may be the only way to get those brain-dead govt managers to create a real system (like perhaps without MS software to start).
This is of course an x86 box, and has a different target market from even regular x86 boxes. These are popular with the marketing people and those who demo stuff at shows and the like. They look nice and are smaller (good to ship around).
Then you have to think like a taxpayer. Do I spend my equiv US$8 for my dose of smallpox vaccine against a potential epidemic, or do I spend it on people I'll never see in Africa? Then remember that a large population of the States lives in what's termed the "Bible Belt" ...
I believe that Intel and whoever enters this newly expanded area will first be looking at the business sector as customers. From that viewpoint, 11mbmps is rather slow. Most of these guys are running 100mbps, if not gigabit in some newer places.
At work I can set systems up doing parallel builds, all drawing sources from one or more other computers, and blasting others that are used for testing GUIs. This causes my 100mb hub to hit max capacity frequently. As the manufacturers of these devices try and sell more and more businesses on the "convenience" and "no-wire-maintenance" aspect of these devices, speed becomes more important. Sure, noone cares at home sharing 2-3 machines on their broadband link, but 50 or 500 people working together with T1 access to the world can push a lot of bits around.
Note that the FSF, which does like all things free, is more concerned about the possible GNU GPL violations that might be occuring, and "appropriation" of contributors' work. While I'm not an GPL-junkie, this does seem to be a valid point from the FSF, with SF walking a thin, grey line.
<flame> Maybe if she used full featured word processors that have spelling and grammar correction in many languages, she wouldn't have that problem. </flame>
Really though, doesn't that in-and-of-itself show why MS is still ahead with consumers for product popularity?
Smugness was all part of the marketing, and if anything, you can say they were more of a marketing success than anything else. Remember all the smugness surrounding all those Linux vendors going IPO just a couple years ago? And in what state are they?
While that of course is good for the IPO, if you don't start to *produce* something worthy of that smugness, you get spanked (and we have been seeing that more and more often of late).
Anybody know anything about future Python support for the X as well as this anygui?
Tk in 8.4 has a native Aqua port (Oct 16 news) in beta, from the guys at Apple. All languages binding to Tk can take advantage of OS X now.
In any case, this has been said, but the idea of anygui being the lowest common denominator of toolkits seems like a bad idea being repeated. Tk has been inflicted by this sometimes, but more and more pressure is on Tk development to add more single-platform support bits in the core.
Preface - I am fairly agnostic to what is on my desktop, although I do prefer Unix to Windows.
Reading this article, being a very informed technical user (one who has done both Uni unix sysadmining and Windows sysadmining because, well, what Windows machine hasn't needed it?), I found it very hard to buy any of Murphy basic assumptions or trade-offs.
First off, why does a Dell 2100 cost so much in the Windows solution? I went to www.dell.com to price the same thing and got US$1262.11 (40GB HDD, 256MB, 1.1Ghz Celeron, 17in head, net card, 2000/XP with Office academic). Mind you, I went in the Academic pricing door, because he is pricing for a school. The Office/2K software adds about $280 to the bill. Thus, the only thing he should have noted is that each computer buyer shells out $280 more for Windows. In other words, for the 900 computers (500 school, 400 home) in his first example, that's $252K - no chump change). That assumes no school licensing. If he isn't getting those basic numbers right, you know the rest of the article is bent...
The idea that "Smart Displays" would cut it in school is OK for some (terminal rooms, where many go to just read mail and surf), but forget it for heavy work. I've not heard of these being satisfactorily used in practice.
Also, I hate to say it, but I don't think this guy has ever seriously used Win2K. Many may not like to hear it - but I've only seen the BSOD once while using it. I've been actually pleasantly surprised myself at its reliability. I am now able to run these things for months without reboot (OK, so I had a solaris machine that went for a little over a year once until we upgraded the memory...). In any case, either system properly maintained is fairly reliable.
Point 2 - administration. At my old Uni, the CS systems (not the general machines) were maintained by 2 full time Unix sysadmins (we actually had very few Windows machines at the time) and a horde of cheap or free volunteers. The systems ran 24 hours, but only with help (because beginning CS programmers can do all sorts of weird things you don't anticipate). Either way, it's at least one full time person for Unix or Windows. I think the real cost will be in all the tech support needed for these students that grew up on Windows at home (at least 95% of them). That will need 4 full time people in and of itself.
I'll buy point 3, but everyone likes to upgrade.
I'm a little less able to gripe about his assumptions in the 5,000 manufacturing environment, but I'll add in some thoughts...
The last company I worked at had over 5000 all over the world. It was a mixed Unix and Windows (mostly Windows, since tech is always smaller than marketing and sales), and the whole organization didn't have but 50 tech support total. They worked hard, but they had a pretty efficient setup, and things went pretty smoothly. I'm going to assume he got his 30:1 Windows user:support ratio from some informed source, but he doesn't cite one, and I've never seen it that bad in practice.
Anyway, no need to beat the horse. There is one reason I do like the article. It is totally biased for Unix to win. However, there is so much crap that says the opposite (in Windows favor), that I guess you have to have the CIOs read both poles of crap to come to a decision in the middle.
It's interesting that you point out SuSE was "in trouble" for the CEO leaving - 2 days before this announcement was made. My brother manages a tech fund, and he has stated that a common thing he (and others managing such investments) expects is the ability to shake out management as a contigency to investing (also like requesting a board seat or three). My bet is the CEO's leaving was directly tied to SuSE getting $$$.
But then again, maybe not...
That does not make sense. QT is already on Windows - something much closer in terms of video production capabilities off-the-shelf than Linux. Apple still has some authoring software that is only on the Macs - I can understand that. You have to buy a Mac to author, but then anyone can view. I don't see where making a *viewer* available on all platforms makes for anything more than business sense (so more people want to author).
These are the guys and gals that get the message to the C?O level.
It takes endless writing to get the message through. Has the MS marketing machine not convinced you that yet that thought leadership is more important than good code?The best thing OSS projects can do is to get "thought leaders" to write about them - again and again and again and again....
I get a warm and fuzzy feeling going with all the same components (you already Sony for TV and DVD), and Sony makes good components. It replaced a Denon receiver which was actually slightly better, but not DD ready. I notice that you didn't mention speakers. If $1500 is really your remaining budget, think about spending at least half on speakers, unless you already have some good ones. Speakers are one of the most essential parts of the system - never skimp.
Is it really all that much cheaper? I've moved back and forth to Europe, and I was quite surprised at how inexpensive the freighter (shipped via Panama) portion moving goods was. However, if it really is cheaper, it's isn't Siberia, but China and Korea that may be where the key is. Looking at a world map, it's quite a long way to ship goods, but China is supposed to become a massive economic powerhouse in the next couple of decades (to surpass Europe and possibly the US - well, that's what some say). Trade to China was almost $60billion in 1995 alone (and growing quickly) - that makes the cost of such a project seem not so large in retrospect.
And what with global warming and all, maybe Siberia ain't such a bad spot to visit after all.
Actually, everyone I know that has travelled to Eastern Siberia (about a half dozen, always in the summer), all say that it's worth the trip.
I actually went through this myself, and ended up working in Germany (Munich) for a few years. To sum it up - I had a blast, I'm sorry I left, and I'm looking to get back.
;^) ). Again, not being an EU citizen caused problems, but they were a large company that had American offices. In the end I was technically employeed in the States and became a permanent expat to Germany.
Now for the in-depth... I was looking to get out of the States (no, I didn't have a criminal record, I just think this country sucks on many points and I was looking for a little diversity). My language at the time was French, so I figured that a job in France was a good idea. I didn't look too hard, because I was picky and already had a good job. I applied to a couple of places (one was the ESO, the other a smaller tech company), and on both cases lost because I wasn't an EU citizen. Note that many European countries have since relaxed such rules for techies (this was a few years ago). Then an interesting position was offered in Munich. OK, I didn't speak German, but that wasn't a problem (they wanted my skills - you know, shut up and code
The pluses of that situation was that I paid American taxes (and no state income tax), the minus was that I didn't get the usual 6 weeks of vacation. BTW, another post mentioned that you pay higher taxes and get nothing for it. That's only partly true. If you aren't employed as an expat, you will pay local taxes (actually, even if you are expat you do, but it's magically equalized - very high tax math that I don't want to go into here). However, if you are there for a short time and move back to the States, you actually have the right to get back some of the taxes you paid (for certain services). OK, it's a pain in the ass, but it's not all lost if you are determined to mitigate the lost taxes.
OK, so about the language barrier. I am quick with languages (even natural ones). The company offered to pay for language lessons (I did twice a week after work). I worked with people who all knew English, but not natively. I was also determined to learn German properly, and they were helpful in my resolve. Add to that the fact that I was a single guy (keyword: *was*), and was making German friends. That combination led to me picking up the language quite quickly, much faster than the family guys who didn't go out much, or those who worked in groups where they spoke too much English. After only 4 months of twice/weekly evening sessions, I dropped that class since it was too slow and commited myself to mostly German daily. After 2 years I was still learning, but well before that I was confidently fluent in most conversations.
Ummm, so what was the point anyway? Ah, yes - do go for it. Your best bet is to find a larger company, or at least one that has had numerous dealings with hirings non-EU types. Also, if you are going fully local, get to know the lay of the land before accepting any offers. For example, in most European countries, it's common for even engineers to make deals that include a car. Analyze the benefits. For all that you pay higher taxes, you really do get more back (doesn't always offset, but if you go in with the American view that the gov't just takes, you're going to miss out some).
I could go on and on, but your questions weren't that specific. Again, your best bet is to go with a company that in multinational. In fact, an American company in Europe might be a really good idea. Personally, I think not enough Americans get a real view of the world, and more people should be willing to take a few years out somewhere else (anywhere not in the US!).
I'm assuming that over time people will share libraries of code for writing games on the Indrema (or whatever box). Letting people in to start tweaking the assembly for the fastest possible operation is a Good Thing(tm).
When you think about it, your logic is the same that some would argue to keep <insert favorite monopoly here> code private. However, I believe the open eyes, many hands approach has many more positives than negatives.