Microsoft's popular with clueless university admins (and politicians for state schools) because they donate zillions of dollars worth of software.
If these guys donate Linux can they get as much credit by marking it up to the same huge numbers that clueless admins will be impressed by?
But, if you've ever given a presenation, then you *know* how tough it can be. Demos and talks which have been working fine for days, weeks, and months have a way of suddenly breaking down when you need them most. Don't know why this is.
There's something seriously wrong with your infrastructure (OS, application, hardware, etc) for that to be happening.
I really hope you never work on medical equipment or airlines or weapons systems or anything else that matters if you tolerate the attitude that "[anything] which has been working for days, weeks, and months [could] have a way of suddenly breaking down whhen you need it most".
It's fine if he's demoing a pre-release-prototype or something; but this was a supposedly "released" non-beta product that was screwing up whatever he was trying to accomplish.
Yes, I've given many many presentations before. What would I have done? Had a backup of the presentation on a CD or USB device so regardless of what failed in my laptop, I could have given it successfully by borrowing someone else's laptop.
In fact, Symantec does this to me (at work) all the time. I bought their product once; and every 6 months or however long it takes that license to expire; they keep spamming me with more emails that say if I want to keep my computer safe from all the stuff infectig it I need to pay them more protection money.
At home, I don't have the problem; since more honorable vendors that distribute their software via apt-get don't run these kinds of protection rackets.
Dear Microsoft - it's long been known by us shareholders that your stock has only flown so high because you understood the proper tradeoffs between security (slow and unprofitable) and time to market (== profit == shareholder value).
How can you be betraying your feduciary responsibilities to shareholders by delaying products in the name of security, which history has proven that your corporate customers don't give a damn about anyway.
To avoid shareholder lawsuits of you not acting in what has historically been shown to be the best for your shareholders, why don't you return to your security-be-damned buggy strategy and return your stock to the glorious heights it once held?
These regulations would ban non-Chinese firms from selling software to the Chinese government.
No problem for guys the size of IBM, who can simply create bizzare chimeras with guys like Lenovo to produce things that are Chinese and US companies at the same time.
however we have neither the budget or willingness to pay for such services. We make do with what we have, it works for us to this point, but things definitly could be better.
Do you have classes (in either IT, CS, MIS, or similar) that claim to teach real-world skills? If so, a project to automate such an effort would be a wonderful class project for you guys to undertake.
Even if the class isn't about IT, this project can be used as a case study - for example, a class about software methodologies and software lifecycle mangement - or even a business class evaluating build-vs-buy tradeffs.
Remember all the IP Microsoft licensed from SCO? Well, it seems there's mounting evidence that SCO didn't own all that stuff they claimed to own. Perhaps Microsoft thinks that by buying RedHat they could get access to the magic IP that makes Linux better than Windows.
At the colo, a surprisingly large amount of power is used running the aircondition system too. And with the filters, etc to keep dust down, it's a rather complex problem.
Back in the.COM days, I remember a great business plan that got funded to build the ultimate colo in Alaska. Features it was going to have were
Free air-conditioning - since cool, clean, dry air is a plentiful resource in alaska.
Unmatched power resources - They were going to build it & a refinery at an oil well so they had no concern for fuel delivery interruptions; and since you wouldn't be shipping oil across the oceans to feed their plant the fuel would be cheaper (no transportation costs) and cleaner environmentally (no oil slicks)
Unmatched physical security. - They had found a space with tens of miles of tundra in all directions, so their security force could see threats coming miles away.
I forgot their name, though. Wonder what ever happened to them.
With the GPL, it seems all the RHAT people could simply take Fedora, run, create RedWhiteAndBlueHat and make Microsoft buy them again and again and again.
Another reason to buy Sun - Microsoft likes preaching about security, and Sun actually has a server line that can deliver there -- with even higher government certifications than any of today's linuxes.
Of course you're trolling, because there is nothing about the GPL that would prevent Sun from defining the standard.
For an obvious example, consider C and C++, which are both supported by gcc (a GPL'd work), yet the ISO committees still are able to define the standards.
Sun has completely turned around their product portfolio in the past several years
Uh, yeah. They're now a Linux/AMD shop and can't figure out what to do with Slolaris. Yeah, they're financially better the same way that Carly was good for HP - they layed off anything that gave them intellectual property because it's easier to be a commodity seller.
The funniest thing is their OS strategy - lay off their OS engineers and hope the open source community will build their OS for them, and perhaps Sun'll just hire lawyers to patent parts of it or perhaps they'll just get their new IP partner Microsoft to do that part for them (and yes, Sun, through their agreement this article is talking about, is allowed to sell a Solaris that infringes on MSFT patents, but the rest of the Open Source community is not allowed to do so)..
McNealy is looking around for a life boat, and he thinks he has found one in Microsoft.
I think it's more than that. I think McNealey's not having fun anymore, and hasn't enjoyed himself since the.com bubble. He sees that Jonathan Schwartz sucks as a leader (offends people everytime he opens his mouth), and just wants a way out.
There aren't many ways out for a company the size of Sun; one is being bought by IBM, another is being bought by Microsoft, another is being bought by Fujitsu. I can't think of anyone else out there that would even want them.
Methinks Scott is hoping to sell the thing off and retire.
With Non-Free software (including patent-encumbered licenses like the CDDL) Balmer just needs to pay one guy $2Billion for smiles.
With GPL'd works like Linux, he can't just buy the redhat guy that he recently met; because unless he also buys all the rest of the RHAT devels, they'll simply find some new CEO & VC and start a new competitor (and it's pretty easy to find a VC and hire MBAs). Free software gives the power to the software engineer.
Now that all the Longhorn features were either delayed from Longhorn (WinFS) or backported to XP (Avalon, and whatever that "third pillar of Longhorn" was), they're probably just afraid that this product would compete successfully against Longhorn.
Since Longhorn's only remaining distinguishing feature from XP is that can only run on the most expensive hardware, this is a nice way of avoiding the compitition.
I think Microsoft is well aware of what it's doing.
It's the same as having MSDE being a crippled SQLServer that limits the nubmer of threads it can run. Surely the CPU could handle more threads; but they cripple it so that more people buy the bigger one.
This Pentium4/Athlon decision makes perfect sense - if someone can afford the higher-end processor, they can afford the higher priced OS.
If each of the 100,000+ machines in their cluster were running SQLServer Enterprise Edition (needed for clustering) and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise edition?
I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.
"Linux running at Microsoft? Isn't that sacrilege? Think of it more as a competitive advantage, said Hilf."
I read this to mean that Microsoft's competitive advantage against other proprietary software vendors like Apple is that Microsoft uses Linux internally.
Interesting! Makes you wonder exactly how this is their Linux use becomes their competitive advantage, though - is it through "borrowing" features (hope not code, though, because of the GPL) - or is it through running their enterprise systems on Linux. That would make more sense, you wouldn't want those running on windows, would you.
(at least not until Longhorn, which will fix all the Windows problems)
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Seems better to keep the long-hard passwords stored in an encrypted file protected by one good password that you remember.
Now we know what's replacing Microsoft Passport in Longhorn - pen&paper!
Microsoft's popular with clueless university admins (and politicians for state schools) because they donate zillions of dollars worth of software. If these guys donate Linux can they get as much credit by marking it up to the same huge numbers that clueless admins will be impressed by?
There's something seriously wrong with your infrastructure (OS, application, hardware, etc) for that to be happening.
I really hope you never work on medical equipment or airlines or weapons systems or anything else that matters if you tolerate the attitude that "[anything] which has been working for days, weeks, and months [could] have a way of suddenly breaking down whhen you need it most".
It's fine if he's demoing a pre-release-prototype or something; but this was a supposedly "released" non-beta product that was screwing up whatever he was trying to accomplish.
Yes, I've given many many presentations before. What would I have done? Had a backup of the presentation on a CD or USB device so regardless of what failed in my laptop, I could have given it successfully by borrowing someone else's laptop.
Perhaps he was being sincere - with interoperable software the bugs in windows are more tollerable.
At home, I don't have the problem; since more honorable vendors that distribute their software via apt-get don't run these kinds of protection rackets.
How can you be betraying your feduciary responsibilities to shareholders by delaying products in the name of security, which history has proven that your corporate customers don't give a damn about anyway.
To avoid shareholder lawsuits of you not acting in what has historically been shown to be the best for your shareholders, why don't you return to your security-be-damned buggy strategy and return your stock to the glorious heights it once held?
A "Not Invented Here" syndrome for software is very good for national security, as the Soviet Union learned the hard way
No problem for guys the size of IBM, who can simply create bizzare chimeras with guys like Lenovo to produce things that are Chinese and US companies at the same time.
Do you have classes (in either IT, CS, MIS, or similar) that claim to teach real-world skills? If so, a project to automate such an effort would be a wonderful class project for you guys to undertake.
Even if the class isn't about IT, this project can be used as a case study - for example, a class about software methodologies and software lifecycle mangement - or even a business class evaluating build-vs-buy tradeffs.
Remember all the IP Microsoft licensed from SCO? Well, it seems there's mounting evidence that SCO didn't own all that stuff they claimed to own. Perhaps Microsoft thinks that by buying RedHat they could get access to the magic IP that makes Linux better than Windows.
Back in the .COM days, I remember a great business plan that got funded to build the ultimate colo in Alaska. Features it was going to have were
- Free air-conditioning - since cool, clean, dry air is a plentiful resource in alaska.
- Unmatched power resources - They were going to build it & a refinery at an oil well so they had no concern for fuel delivery interruptions; and since you wouldn't be shipping oil across the oceans to feed their plant the fuel would be cheaper (no transportation costs) and cleaner environmentally (no oil slicks)
- Unmatched physical security. - They had found a space with tens of miles of tundra in all directions, so their security force could see threats coming miles away.
I forgot their name, though. Wonder what ever happened to them.With the GPL, it seems all the RHAT people could simply take Fedora, run, create RedWhiteAndBlueHat and make Microsoft buy them again and again and again.
Another reason to buy Sun - Microsoft likes preaching about security, and Sun actually has a server line that can deliver there -- with even higher government certifications than any of today's linuxes.
Why?
- Sun has valuable patents that fit Microsoft's new IP strategy.
- The can get their 2 billion back from Sun that way.
- Sun and Microsoft have a good working relationship; could be rephrased as McNealey makes Balmer Smile
- and most importantly, it
seems like McNealey wants to sell
Buying RedHat wouldn't hurt IBM at all considering that they're at least as much a SuSE/Novell partner as they are a redhat partner.For an obvious example, consider C and C++, which are both supported by gcc (a GPL'd work), yet the ISO committees still are able to define the standards.
Uh, yeah. They're now a Linux/AMD shop and can't figure out what to do with Slolaris. Yeah, they're financially better the same way that Carly was good for HP - they layed off anything that gave them intellectual property because it's easier to be a commodity seller.
The funniest thing is their OS strategy - lay off their OS engineers and hope the open source community will build their OS for them, and perhaps Sun'll just hire lawyers to patent parts of it or perhaps they'll just get their new IP partner Microsoft to do that part for them (and yes, Sun, through their agreement this article is talking about, is allowed to sell a Solaris that infringes on MSFT patents, but the rest of the Open Source community is not allowed to do so)..
I think it's more than that. I think McNealey's not having fun anymore, and hasn't enjoyed himself since the .com bubble. He sees that Jonathan Schwartz sucks as a leader (offends people everytime he opens his mouth), and just wants a way out.
There aren't many ways out for a company the size of Sun; one is being bought by IBM, another is being bought by Microsoft, another is being bought by Fujitsu. I can't think of anyone else out there that would even want them.
Methinks Scott is hoping to sell the thing off and retire.
So what does that make McNealey? That little annoying kid who always wanted to play with Bevis&Butthead (was he called Stuart?)?
With GPL'd works like Linux, he can't just buy the redhat guy that he recently met; because unless he also buys all the rest of the RHAT devels, they'll simply find some new CEO & VC and start a new competitor (and it's pretty easy to find a VC and hire MBAs). Free software gives the power to the software engineer.
Now that all the Longhorn features were either delayed from Longhorn (WinFS) or backported to XP (Avalon, and whatever that "third pillar of Longhorn" was), they're probably just afraid that this product would compete successfully against Longhorn. Since Longhorn's only remaining distinguishing feature from XP is that can only run on the most expensive hardware, this is a nice way of avoiding the compitition.
It's the same as having MSDE being a crippled SQLServer that limits the nubmer of threads it can run. Surely the CPU could handle more threads; but they cripple it so that more people buy the bigger one.
This Pentium4/Athlon decision makes perfect sense - if someone can afford the higher-end processor, they can afford the higher priced OS.
I don't know their pricing, but I guess cost does matter as you scale up.
I read this to mean that Microsoft's competitive advantage against other proprietary software vendors like Apple is that Microsoft uses Linux internally.
Interesting! Makes you wonder exactly how this is their Linux use becomes their competitive advantage, though - is it through "borrowing" features (hope not code, though, because of the GPL) - or is it through running their enterprise systems on Linux. That would make more sense, you wouldn't want those running on windows, would you.
(at least not until Longhorn, which will fix all the Windows problems)