TCO studies never capture the real costs of either a switch to Linux from Windows or a Windows upgrade. They invariably take the easy route, comparing only OS licensing costs, sysadmin/support salary, and training issues. They aren't "studies" in the academic sense, since the data they study are chosen to achieve a particular outcome.
In my practical experience as a Linux/Unix sysadmin and MCSE, the things they miss are:
Cost of viruses, spyware, and associated "security" software
There is a greater labor cost getting Linux to work right on initial implementation. After that, it just works forever, with less frequent patching needed.
There is a lower labor cost getting Windows to work right on initial implementation. After that, you have to keep watching it forever. Watching it is more labor-intensive, even with remote admin, etc.
Windows applications and utilities tend to cost money, while Linux applications are usually free.
There is a labor cost in dealing with proprietary software vendors in the financial decision making. It takes time from the calendar of the business manager as he or she tries to wrangle the best deal from the vendor.
There is a labor cost in dealing with proprietary software vendors in ongoing licensing support. It takes time from the calendar of the sysadmin; in my experience it takes as much time to deal with licensing hassles as it does to do the install and configure the application.
Against all the benefits of not having to hassle with licensing there is a balance, the ability to point the finger of blame at a vendor. With free software, all the blame goes to the internal champion of the software, usually the sysadmin.
I hope you get modded up. I would add that Microsoft is a top-down company, a cult of Gates and gold. The troops really believe in the vision of Windows and Office everywhere, and the culture refuses to accept anything else.
My life is complete. Now I don't even have to speak to bartenders! I can just use my mouth for its One True Purpose, the ingestion of sufficient quantities of "liquid bread".
Eolas has only 100 shareholders, so not counting legal fees that would mean $5.21 million each.
That assumes they all have an equal number of shares. I think one guy has a majority, a couple of others have good-sized chunks, and everyone else was optioned in in lieu of salary. There's probably a bank or two involved, and the lawyers will get half anyway.
In places where guns are outlawed, there is no decrease in the number of murder by guns, much less in the murder rate as a whole. Violent crime rises when the average Joe or Jane can't carry, and decreases when he or she can.
The bigger issue is not the practical effect of the freedom to keep and bear arms, it's the philosophical point. Who is responsible for your freedom, you or the government? If it's the government, then you are not free at all. You may be safe, but you won't be free.
It's not about criminals planning to get patched up after they get injured on the job. It's the actual effect of them getting patched up. They're free then to go pillage some more.
Does having a hostpital encourage crime? Doubtful, except in the limited sense above. Do they profit from crime? Yes. Sure, there's more money in the suburbs, but that's not the point.
Profiting from crime and encouraging it are two different things. One is legal as breathing, the other is not.
And guns don't kill people; people kill people. Take away the guns, and people will use knives, or Drano, or 9.8m/s^2.
Whether or not his business plans hinged on ease of infringement to gain popularity -- if he didn't promote it, and if he didn't distribute eDonkey with the expressed intent of promoting illegal filesharing, then he would not lose the case.
Suppose a for-profit hospital sets up a clinic in a high-crime area, despite the difficulty of operating a business there. Their business plan calls for them to make money from the crimes of their customer base. They report the evidence of crimes they find, but they can't police the neighborhood.
A pawn shop in that same neighborhood sells guns and ammo, despite the difficulty of operating a business there. Their business plan calls for them to make money from the crimes of their customer base. They report the evidence of crimes they find, but they can't police the neighborhood.
What do both of those businesses have in common? They both make crime more convenient. One sells the supplies, the other wipes up the mess (so you are less likely to die if your victim fights back). Both businesses serve the perps and the victims, and both discriminate as best they can between them.
What do they have in common with EDonkey? Either they all need to be shut down for capitalizing on human frailty, or none of them do.
Rocks has a great system for making high-performance clusters from similar machines. A Rocks cluster consists of a front-end ("master") node and a bunch of compute nodes (and I think special-purpose nodes).
The master gets a full Linux (RedHat-based) install. It's a NFS/DHCP/Kickstart server for the compute nodes, and runs whatever other services you want the compute nodes to use. The master has two network cards and acts as a firewall (NAT optional).
The compute nodes boot via DHCP and Kickstart, downloading their kernel and whatever other OS files you want to their local disk. You decide how much NFS or local disk to use.
Job queueing is handled by, e.g., Sun Grid Engine (an Open Source queueing package) or some other queueing software.
Here's the neat thing: to make a change to a compute node setup, you change the Kickstart config and reboot all the compute nodes (as they finish whatever queued work they're doing, or immediately if you want). That makes the sysadmin's life easy, while still maintaining the speed of having the OS on the local disk.
We haven't gained one "useful" bit of knowledge from our trip to the Moon in 1969, but we didn't know that would be the case until we actually went there.
It's posts like yours that keep me reading Slashdot.
Getting to the moon, in terms of the science of it, was a bit like Robert Powell's first voyage down the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869. People knew there were canyons there, and the Grand Canyon at the end, and that it was about a mile deep. They didn't have maps of the region at all, even to know where the Green and Grand meet to form the Colorado.
After that trip, people knew there were canyons there, and the Grand Canyon at the end. No gold, no lost native civilization, no huge waterfalls. Scientific anti-knowledge. But they had a map, and they knew they could get down the river.
People don't realize that until we actually went to the moon we weren't precisely sure what was there. There were all sorts of "green cheese" ideas floating around the common populace, like were there air pockets in caves or whatever. We could look at it from here, bounce lasers off it, and so forth. But seeing something and standing on it are two different things.
...if the only copy of your code is sitting on their machines and you aren't allowed near them and your network account was cancelled 5 minutes after you were terminated.
That falls under a decent backup policy. Remember, the guy's a sysadmin, so he presumably knows enough to keep a copy of his work offsite, like at home.
Asking the employer to grant him post-termination access is unreasonable. Sure, lots of people get asked to do consulting duty after leaving a job, but you don't know beforehand what the relationship will be.
"Secure" is both an adjective and a verb. We usually use it as an adjective, like "orange" or "happy".
I've had several discussions with my wife over the years about something being "orange". She insists that some maize-like color is truly orange, but the color of the University of Illinois' basketball jersey is more of a red.
Choose an algorithm that makes you feel secure. Understand that your chosen algorithm, whatever it may be, is not proved unbreakable. It's just that the work involved for someone to break it is greater than the value to them of doing so - and greater than the value to you.
An AC posted the following in a thread on the recent Thoughts on the Space Elevator story:
It's easy enough to build electronics into aircraft controls that would prevent them from ever flying near the elevator. In fact, I have no idea why current commercial aircraft don't have lock-out mechanisms that can prevent them from being controled from the cockpit in case of a hijacking. Control should be transfered to a ground controler if there is any indication that a plane is being flown by a malicious person.
A few seconds of warning would be enough to hit a Lockout button. There wouldn't be anything like enough time to land a plane or even change its position enough to bother a hijacker (terrorist or mere jet thief).
I didn't say BG's business plan was flawed. I implied it was doomed to eventual failure. He'll still make billions out of it, but at incalcuable cost to the rest of us.
Your plan to fix me has another flaw: my mother's been dead these 20 years.
The "perfect or perish" mentality just doesn't work. It doesn't work for factory workers, athletes, students, or politicians. When applied, all you get are a whole new crop of PhD's in CYA, each pointing the finger of blame at the next Doctor of Posterior Osculation.
The MM blogger seems very down on paying attention to "process", which tells me that A) the PHBs at Microsoft are all into process and B) this guy is a frustrated, unpromoted newbie, probably hired after XP was released.
Firing all the dead wood sounds nice, until you realize that means firing the people who wrote the cash cow.
The It they don't get is that Open Source Software is the future. They don't want to give up the golden dream, which means hiding their source, which means using a hierarchical development model, which means bureaucracy and inferior products.
I have tinnitus, "ringing in the ears". I hear a constant sound, like a high-pitched squeal, all the time. It's worse when the ambient noise is low, but I barely notice it when there's noise around. In a very quiet place the sound I perceive can be very intense.
It comes from damage to degeneration of the nerves in the inner ear, or so I've been told.
Any constant, low-level sound tends to "mask" the ringing, so I can ignore it. Riding in a car with the windows down or in an airplane I don't notice the sound at all.
Noise cancelling headphones are an ironic sort of hell for me. The sound is a lot better, but in the breaks between songs I hear the tinnitus sound, like a freight train braking for a herd of violin-screeching crickets in my head.
Tilted shelf above the bench with document clip, and a lip to hold a pen or a book.
channel in the front of the bench to catch rolling screws
4 RJ-45 ports on the wall at each area, connected to a patch panel on the wall near the bench. A gigabit switch with more ports "than you'll ever need", because you always need more.
Power supply with 120VAC, 5VDC and 12VDC outputs. UPS for the whole thing, unless you've got one for the whole building.
If you get done and the plan calls for anything to be stored on the bench surface, you're not done.
Tap and dye set, for those times when you strip a screw or hole.
"History" means writings about things. Pre-history is what archaelogists uncover. Obviously there are tendrils of history that extend into the prehistorical period and vice-versa.
Back on topic, as soon as they learned how to make wine and store it in a cool place, they learned that it didn't spoil. They also learned that mixing water and wine made the water good to drink, and didn't make you sick.
Diluted wine was the soft drink of the ancient world. Make wine from fruit, then mix in fruit juice(s). Maybe add some herbs. A big part of the vintners work was probably knowing how to mix it.
Slashdot Mirror
TCO studies never capture the real costs of either a switch to Linux from Windows or a Windows upgrade. They invariably take the easy route, comparing only OS licensing costs, sysadmin/support salary, and training issues. They aren't "studies" in the academic sense, since the data they study are chosen to achieve a particular outcome.
In my practical experience as a Linux/Unix sysadmin and MCSE, the things they miss are:
Against all the benefits of not having to hassle with licensing there is a balance, the ability to point the finger of blame at a vendor. With free software, all the blame goes to the internal champion of the software, usually the sysadmin.
I hope you get modded up. I would add that Microsoft is a top-down company, a cult of Gates and gold. The troops really believe in the vision of Windows and Office everywhere, and the culture refuses to accept anything else.
Free software will kick their assets.
My life is complete. Now I don't even have to speak to bartenders! I can just use my mouth for its One True Purpose, the ingestion of sufficient quantities of "liquid bread".
Germany is where?
I think XXX sort of explains itself.
That assumes they all have an equal number of shares. I think one guy has a majority, a couple of others have good-sized chunks, and everyone else was optioned in in lieu of salary. There's probably a bank or two involved, and the lawyers will get half anyway.
Are we for Microsoft because we hate software patents or are we for Eolas because we hate Microsoft?
Congress is too busy worrying about baseball players taking steroids to actually fix the system.
In places where guns are outlawed, there is no decrease in the number of murder by guns, much less in the murder rate as a whole. Violent crime rises when the average Joe or Jane can't carry, and decreases when he or she can.
The bigger issue is not the practical effect of the freedom to keep and bear arms, it's the philosophical point. Who is responsible for your freedom, you or the government? If it's the government, then you are not free at all. You may be safe, but you won't be free.
It's not about criminals planning to get patched up after they get injured on the job. It's the actual effect of them getting patched up. They're free then to go pillage some more.
Does having a hostpital encourage crime? Doubtful, except in the limited sense above. Do they profit from crime? Yes. Sure, there's more money in the suburbs, but that's not the point.
Profiting from crime and encouraging it are two different things. One is legal as breathing, the other is not.
And guns don't kill people; people kill people. Take away the guns, and people will use knives, or Drano, or 9.8m/s^2.
Suppose a for-profit hospital sets up a clinic in a high-crime area, despite the difficulty of operating a business there. Their business plan calls for them to make money from the crimes of their customer base. They report the evidence of crimes they find, but they can't police the neighborhood.
A pawn shop in that same neighborhood sells guns and ammo, despite the difficulty of operating a business there. Their business plan calls for them to make money from the crimes of their customer base. They report the evidence of crimes they find, but they can't police the neighborhood.
What do both of those businesses have in common? They both make crime more convenient. One sells the supplies, the other wipes up the mess (so you are less likely to die if your victim fights back). Both businesses serve the perps and the victims, and both discriminate as best they can between them.
What do they have in common with EDonkey? Either they all need to be shut down for capitalizing on human frailty, or none of them do.
Rocks has a great system for making high-performance clusters from similar machines. A Rocks cluster consists of a front-end ("master") node and a bunch of compute nodes (and I think special-purpose nodes).
The master gets a full Linux (RedHat-based) install. It's a NFS/DHCP/Kickstart server for the compute nodes, and runs whatever other services you want the compute nodes to use. The master has two network cards and acts as a firewall (NAT optional).
The compute nodes boot via DHCP and Kickstart, downloading their kernel and whatever other OS files you want to their local disk. You decide how much NFS or local disk to use.
Job queueing is handled by, e.g., Sun Grid Engine (an Open Source queueing package) or some other queueing software.
Here's the neat thing: to make a change to a compute node setup, you change the Kickstart config and reboot all the compute nodes (as they finish whatever queued work they're doing, or immediately if you want). That makes the sysadmin's life easy, while still maintaining the speed of having the OS on the local disk.
It's posts like yours that keep me reading Slashdot.
Getting to the moon, in terms of the science of it, was a bit like Robert Powell's first voyage down the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869. People knew there were canyons there, and the Grand Canyon at the end, and that it was about a mile deep. They didn't have maps of the region at all, even to know where the Green and Grand meet to form the Colorado.
After that trip, people knew there were canyons there, and the Grand Canyon at the end. No gold, no lost native civilization, no huge waterfalls. Scientific anti-knowledge. But they had a map, and they knew they could get down the river.
People don't realize that until we actually went to the moon we weren't precisely sure what was there. There were all sorts of "green cheese" ideas floating around the common populace, like were there air pockets in caves or whatever. We could look at it from here, bounce lasers off it, and so forth. But seeing something and standing on it are two different things.
Thanks again.
That falls under a decent backup policy. Remember, the guy's a sysadmin, so he presumably knows enough to keep a copy of his work offsite, like at home.
Asking the employer to grant him post-termination access is unreasonable. Sure, lots of people get asked to do consulting duty after leaving a job, but you don't know beforehand what the relationship will be.
"Secure" is both an adjective and a verb. We usually use it as an adjective, like "orange" or "happy".
I've had several discussions with my wife over the years about something being "orange". She insists that some maize-like color is truly orange, but the color of the University of Illinois' basketball jersey is more of a red.
Choose an algorithm that makes you feel secure. Understand that your chosen algorithm, whatever it may be, is not proved unbreakable. It's just that the work involved for someone to break it is greater than the value to them of doing so - and greater than the value to you.
An AC posted the following in a thread on the recent Thoughts on the Space Elevator story:
A few seconds of warning would be enough to hit a Lockout button. There wouldn't be anything like enough time to land a plane or even change its position enough to bother a hijacker (terrorist or mere jet thief).
I've never done crack.
I didn't say BG's business plan was flawed. I implied it was doomed to eventual failure. He'll still make billions out of it, but at incalcuable cost to the rest of us.
Your plan to fix me has another flaw: my mother's been dead these 20 years.
The "perfect or perish" mentality just doesn't work. It doesn't work for factory workers, athletes, students, or politicians. When applied, all you get are a whole new crop of PhD's in CYA, each pointing the finger of blame at the next Doctor of Posterior Osculation.
The MM blogger seems very down on paying attention to "process", which tells me that A) the PHBs at Microsoft are all into process and B) this guy is a frustrated, unpromoted newbie, probably hired after XP was released.
Firing all the dead wood sounds nice, until you realize that means firing the people who wrote the cash cow.
The It they don't get is that Open Source Software is the future. They don't want to give up the golden dream, which means hiding their source, which means using a hierarchical development model, which means bureaucracy and inferior products.
Oh well, caveat regnum.
when you're making it in the back seat?
I bet they get a kick out of that. "Hey everybody, listen to this!"
I have tinnitus, "ringing in the ears". I hear a constant sound, like a high-pitched squeal, all the time. It's worse when the ambient noise is low, but I barely notice it when there's noise around. In a very quiet place the sound I perceive can be very intense.
It comes from damage to degeneration of the nerves in the inner ear, or so I've been told.
Any constant, low-level sound tends to "mask" the ringing, so I can ignore it. Riding in a car with the windows down or in an airplane I don't notice the sound at all.
Noise cancelling headphones are an ironic sort of hell for me. The sound is a lot better, but in the breaks between songs I hear the tinnitus sound, like a freight train braking for a herd of violin-screeching crickets in my head.
By "some" I meant we might find some on a particular asteroid, not that there were only a few left.
"new chemical elements"
There aren't any elements left. We've filled in the chart already. Game over on that one.
There may be some compounds that we haven't seen, though.
"its name". Sorry.
The Japanese send a probe to an asteroid, and it's name is "Itokawa".
Our probes always land on places with names like "Titan" and "XJ-344b".
Obviously their technology is much more advanced than ours.
"History" means writings about things. Pre-history is what archaelogists uncover. Obviously there are tendrils of history that extend into the prehistorical period and vice-versa.
Back on topic, as soon as they learned how to make wine and store it in a cool place, they learned that it didn't spoil. They also learned that mixing water and wine made the water good to drink, and didn't make you sick.
Diluted wine was the soft drink of the ancient world. Make wine from fruit, then mix in fruit juice(s). Maybe add some herbs. A big part of the vintners work was probably knowing how to mix it.
>one registry key
And rebooting. Don't forget the rebooting.