You might be joking about the hardware, but ebook readers need more and cheaper content to become popular. People want books where they only pay for the content and delivery costs. Not publishers setting artificially high prices to not compete with paper based books. Not to mention that we need significantly more books in the catalog. Only a small percentage of the books available on Amazon have ebook peers.
Seriously, there are companies that do HR and can probably take over in a month. I don't understand why government organizations are the only ones that still have pensions and refuse to outsource tasks they don't do well. Payroll is simple and the deductions possible are well established any professional HR outsourcing company can handle it, plus be able to cleanly pass it to another company when their contract is up.
The Linux/Unix world has done a great job making AD work in their world. Just like we can read mail off an Exchange server and use Sharepoint. They are easy on day one, but like most products from MS, there are a million hidden costs as you grow and expand. If you start with a standards based LDAP directory server like 389-ds (Fedora-ds new name) you can grow into RHDS if you need support. It is cheaper than AD as your environment grows plus if you decide to migrate to another DS, it is reasonably easy because it implemented an open standard. Don't fall into the trap like so many did with Exchange and so many are with Sharepoint.
XenServer is a great product and has many skilled developers. The "from Citrix" really gives me a queasy feeling. I know the products are solid and innovative, but so many people I hear out in the wild, scream and run from Citrix. It might be behind the reason Ubuntu and Red Hat are backing KVM for virtualization. Even to the point where RH bought Qumarant (KVM "owners").
This is slightly off the server virtualization topic, but I had a similar experience with LTSP and some costly competitors. Using LTSP we were able to put up 5X the number of stable Linux desktops on the same hardware. I'd tell every organization out there to do a pilot bake-off as often as possible. It won't happen all the time, but I suspect that more often than not, the free open solution, properly setup will beat the slickly marketed, closed proprietary solution.
Ironically, banning these communication tools will more likely hinder dissidents in those countries far more than government. The dictatorial governments already have control over many traditional forms of communication and by introducing these new forums, the US would actually make it harder for them to control their population.
The reason education shifted to producing knowledge workers over trade skills is because those jobs were disappearing in the 80's and 90's. They haven't come back and are still shrinking as a part of the economy. When we had a construction boom, much labor was imported. Our desire for cheap meat means most of the employees at meat packing plants are immigrants. Automation and cost effective foreign labor is driving most factory jobs away. Technology in autos is creating a situation where you rely on computer diagnostics to fix cars. The slack from not having trade in high school is being taken up by community colleges, and most HS graduates need strong math and verbal skills to do the remaining blue collar jobs. Now that a large number of knowledge worker jobs can and are being outsourced because it is cheaper, we must adjust education again to create the next generation of workers once we figure out what they are. The early 80's made us shift education in the 90's, the late 00's will make us shift in the late 10's. We'll have to wait to see what innovations come out of this downturn to figure out what the next job boom will be. Sorry, there are just not enough plumber, mechanic, or carpenter jobs being created that we can all move back to the 1960's.
Maybe Miss South Carolina would be an advocate of using the XO. I grew up and was educated in South Carolina and it is a unique place. I had the opportunity to build an IT infrastructure for an urban district. Some of the kids would skip breakfast for the opportunity of free time on the computer. These aren't for people that have technology at home. If only 5% of the kids that get these laptops improve their lot in life it is well worth the cost (50K laptops at $200 is only $10 million). Do they have the infrastructure or teacher training to take full advantage of this? Probably not. Will innovative teachers and good, but poor parents take advantage of this? Definitely. Why doesn't everyone help? Go to laptopsc.org and give $5 dollars. If you live in SC volunteer some time to build the infrastructure. Sure you'll have to buck the bureaucracy, but try.
With something like bootcamp or virtualization Mac can run windows apps but Linux needs to market itself more like Mac. Different with its own set of applications, tools and unique way of doing things. That of course includes Wine as a seamless way to run legacy apps without buying a copy of Windows.
Seriously, how to you define desktop today? Linux holds a decent share of the POS/retail market. Are point of sale devices desktops? How about thin-clients? Some have a small Linux OS that RDP's to a Windows server. Is that a Linux or Windows desktop? I just finished a project where the thin clients were diskless and hosted totally on servers. Do I count the servers or the thin clients as desktops? At home I'm 80% Linux, 10% Mac and 10% Windows, but from the outside how am I counted.
If they would have used an open source operating system the results would have already been released to the public. Government money spent on an operating system is wasted when the same money contributed to open source helps citizens and indirectly the world.
Solaris was made usable by GNU software but by trying to lock Unix into a proprietary environment SUN, IBM and HP nearly caused it to fail when Microsoft came out with a good enough solution with NT. Sure first they started killing of Novell with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups but the Wintel model worked from the ground up. Sun grew to its peak during the dotcom era where Lintel started undercutting the rest of the Unix business around the edges. Maybe if Sun had freed Solaris right after the bust and rode the x86 space with more effort, maybe Solaris would be what Linux is today. The only way to succeed as a technology company in the long run it to put effort into undercutting your own market before someone else does. They figured out what to do, just six years too late. Now we'll see if Oracle is willing to undercut some of its established high margin database market with low margin MySQL. Its going to happen anyway, the question is will they lead and profit from it or just let the business disappear.
By definition, conservatives are always looking to the past for future solutions. While I'm sure the Republican party has a number of hypocrites, a significant portion believe the lives of the unborn are as important as the lives of the elderly. To them it is no different than killing one person to save another. The question that needs to be answered is when does human life begin? Another interesting point from this subject is China's draconian reproductive laws. One child per couple, especially in a country that is 60-70% rural, likely produces a huge number of stem cells. Would you rather the 75+ year old politicians pass laws like that to add another 20 years to life span? Are you that greedy to live longer that the government starts harvesting unused eggs and sperm to create stem cells? Can we as a nation handle people in the work force for another 20 years? What about cost of treatment? Will life extension be covered by universal health care?
The corporation is just using the tools available to them to maintain a favorable condition. I've seen Time Warner use its 24 hour news program to push its agenda in a dispute with content providers over fees. Same with the content providers scrolling messages at the bottom of the screen. While questionable ethically, the real problem is we have a government structure where it is too easy to "bribe" legally. Campaign donations and lobbyist activity craft nearly every bill, and when something passes that isn't liked by some group or institution, conflicting legislation soon follows forcing courts to decide. If we had a culture of common sense and integrity in our legislators then we would have to come up with a way to by-pass "free speech rights" of corporations and collective organizations to give the right back to individuals.
If you are still running everything locally then 'good enough' is a moving target. I've found that my desktop requirements are dropping as I move my storage to a NAS appliance, my applications to server class hardware, etc. In business it is very much the same. Doesn't have to be the cloud.
Sales dollars, marketing dollars, kickbacks to ISV's for using the product (all major software vendors do this, MS offers up to 12% for initial sale and 6% on renewals). Market share isn't overwhelming on servers where customers are asking for open source. In retail, education and call centers deploying Linux on the desktop is often more cost effective because of the limited software mix and lockdown. On a general purpose desktop, the proprietary solution is currently the (often subsidized) most cost effective. People want to play games or use locked down codecs, or what they are familiar with.
Open source software is often the better option both on cost and quality. As a consultant, I've found that when you stand up open source and proprietary solutions side by side for a customer, the open source solution wins most of the time. Now ISV's prefer the kickbacks, training and marketing support they get from proprietary vendors, so the customer has to ask for the open solution to be compared, but when they do the results are significant.
While I like the efficiency of trains, the US moved freight traffic to the highways because it created more flexibility in placement of factories and retail outlets. We built our houses and our lifestyle in a manner that took advantage of individual transportation vehicles. We don't have the density or the lifestyle desire to move to a hub and spoke system of fast rail. Air traffic has a better ROI for moving people over large distances in a largely rural nation. For high speed rail to work it has to link urban cores where the flexibility of driving or the speed of flying are compromised. The northeast corridor can support rail inflexibility because it can be faster than flying and as flexible as driving because you are moving between urban cores with solid public transportation. It won't gain critical mass between NYC and Chicago because it is faster and cheaper to fly. It won't work between Atlanta and Birmingham because limited pubic transit in those cities make driving more flexible. Unless there is the willingness of the local communities to rezone around transit, invest in dense public transit, increase the cost of flying and decrease the flexibility of driving then high speed rail will only work where it works now. In other words you have to invest in more than the track to make high speed rail work. Effort, money and time have to be spend rebuilding the nation to fit the hub and spoke infrastructure of rail traffic.
Thanks to the stimulus input, Medbook Space, the social network for medical records will be the next online sensation. X-rays, videos of prostrate exams, drug history... all available to employers, insurance agencies and interested voyeurs.
With the proliferation of online degrees and most people moving their social interaction to social networking sites, college may soon be an extension of Facebook. 50 years from now Facebook University may be the most prestigious college in the United States. I don't know if I'm being funny or insightful, but all of a sudden I feel depressed.
One thing you should do is thank Linux for forcing MS to keep XP available for you at $15 instead of the normal OEM of $70. It is better for customers and hardware manufacturers that Linux is available as a viable alternative.
LED is a viable option in 40 Watt replacement
on
CFLs Causing Utility Woes
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While a little more expensive they last even longer (20 years?). They really aren't available much greater than 40 watt replacements but I've been happy with the performance. Not effected by cold and come on instantly.
A more important question is why Android? To answer my own question, it is marketing and the value of attaching Google to the phone. Doesn't matter that the phone runs Linux, what matters is the phone is attached to Google. It is an interesting shift in ownership of mobile phones. The iPhone is an Apple product, not an AT&T phone. Will Google follow the MS PC model and like Windows PC by Dell will become Android phone by Samsung?
Despite his skin color I'd think his Kenyan background would indicate a present commemorating decolonization of Africa and creation of the Commonwealth as opposed to the elimination of the west African slave trade to North America. Unless of course the present was to the United States and not Obama specifically. Wonder how re-gifting works in this case?
Slashdot Mirror
You might be joking about the hardware, but ebook readers need more and cheaper content to become popular. People want books where they only pay for the content and delivery costs. Not publishers setting artificially high prices to not compete with paper based books. Not to mention that we need significantly more books in the catalog. Only a small percentage of the books available on Amazon have ebook peers.
Seriously, there are companies that do HR and can probably take over in a month. I don't understand why government organizations are the only ones that still have pensions and refuse to outsource tasks they don't do well. Payroll is simple and the deductions possible are well established any professional HR outsourcing company can handle it, plus be able to cleanly pass it to another company when their contract is up.
The Linux/Unix world has done a great job making AD work in their world. Just like we can read mail off an Exchange server and use Sharepoint. They are easy on day one, but like most products from MS, there are a million hidden costs as you grow and expand. If you start with a standards based LDAP directory server like 389-ds (Fedora-ds new name) you can grow into RHDS if you need support. It is cheaper than AD as your environment grows plus if you decide to migrate to another DS, it is reasonably easy because it implemented an open standard. Don't fall into the trap like so many did with Exchange and so many are with Sharepoint.
XenServer is a great product and has many skilled developers. The "from Citrix" really gives me a queasy feeling. I know the products are solid and innovative, but so many people I hear out in the wild, scream and run from Citrix. It might be behind the reason Ubuntu and Red Hat are backing KVM for virtualization. Even to the point where RH bought Qumarant (KVM "owners").
This is slightly off the server virtualization topic, but I had a similar experience with LTSP and some costly competitors. Using LTSP we were able to put up 5X the number of stable Linux desktops on the same hardware. I'd tell every organization out there to do a pilot bake-off as often as possible. It won't happen all the time, but I suspect that more often than not, the free open solution, properly setup will beat the slickly marketed, closed proprietary solution.
Ironically, banning these communication tools will more likely hinder dissidents in those countries far more than government. The dictatorial governments already have control over many traditional forms of communication and by introducing these new forums, the US would actually make it harder for them to control their population.
The reason education shifted to producing knowledge workers over trade skills is because those jobs were disappearing in the 80's and 90's. They haven't come back and are still shrinking as a part of the economy. When we had a construction boom, much labor was imported. Our desire for cheap meat means most of the employees at meat packing plants are immigrants. Automation and cost effective foreign labor is driving most factory jobs away. Technology in autos is creating a situation where you rely on computer diagnostics to fix cars. The slack from not having trade in high school is being taken up by community colleges, and most HS graduates need strong math and verbal skills to do the remaining blue collar jobs. Now that a large number of knowledge worker jobs can and are being outsourced because it is cheaper, we must adjust education again to create the next generation of workers once we figure out what they are. The early 80's made us shift education in the 90's, the late 00's will make us shift in the late 10's. We'll have to wait to see what innovations come out of this downturn to figure out what the next job boom will be. Sorry, there are just not enough plumber, mechanic, or carpenter jobs being created that we can all move back to the 1960's.
Maybe Miss South Carolina would be an advocate of using the XO. I grew up and was educated in South Carolina and it is a unique place. I had the opportunity to build an IT infrastructure for an urban district. Some of the kids would skip breakfast for the opportunity of free time on the computer. These aren't for people that have technology at home. If only 5% of the kids that get these laptops improve their lot in life it is well worth the cost (50K laptops at $200 is only $10 million). Do they have the infrastructure or teacher training to take full advantage of this? Probably not. Will innovative teachers and good, but poor parents take advantage of this? Definitely. Why doesn't everyone help? Go to laptopsc.org and give $5 dollars. If you live in SC volunteer some time to build the infrastructure. Sure you'll have to buck the bureaucracy, but try.
With something like bootcamp or virtualization Mac can run windows apps but Linux needs to market itself more like Mac. Different with its own set of applications, tools and unique way of doing things. That of course includes Wine as a seamless way to run legacy apps without buying a copy of Windows.
Seriously, how to you define desktop today? Linux holds a decent share of the POS/retail market. Are point of sale devices desktops? How about thin-clients? Some have a small Linux OS that RDP's to a Windows server. Is that a Linux or Windows desktop? I just finished a project where the thin clients were diskless and hosted totally on servers. Do I count the servers or the thin clients as desktops? At home I'm 80% Linux, 10% Mac and 10% Windows, but from the outside how am I counted.
If they would have used an open source operating system the results would have already been released to the public. Government money spent on an operating system is wasted when the same money contributed to open source helps citizens and indirectly the world.
Solaris was made usable by GNU software but by trying to lock Unix into a proprietary environment SUN, IBM and HP nearly caused it to fail when Microsoft came out with a good enough solution with NT. Sure first they started killing of Novell with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups but the Wintel model worked from the ground up. Sun grew to its peak during the dotcom era where Lintel started undercutting the rest of the Unix business around the edges. Maybe if Sun had freed Solaris right after the bust and rode the x86 space with more effort, maybe Solaris would be what Linux is today. The only way to succeed as a technology company in the long run it to put effort into undercutting your own market before someone else does. They figured out what to do, just six years too late. Now we'll see if Oracle is willing to undercut some of its established high margin database market with low margin MySQL. Its going to happen anyway, the question is will they lead and profit from it or just let the business disappear.
By definition, conservatives are always looking to the past for future solutions. While I'm sure the Republican party has a number of hypocrites, a significant portion believe the lives of the unborn are as important as the lives of the elderly. To them it is no different than killing one person to save another. The question that needs to be answered is when does human life begin? Another interesting point from this subject is China's draconian reproductive laws. One child per couple, especially in a country that is 60-70% rural, likely produces a huge number of stem cells. Would you rather the 75+ year old politicians pass laws like that to add another 20 years to life span? Are you that greedy to live longer that the government starts harvesting unused eggs and sperm to create stem cells? Can we as a nation handle people in the work force for another 20 years? What about cost of treatment? Will life extension be covered by universal health care?
The corporation is just using the tools available to them to maintain a favorable condition. I've seen Time Warner use its 24 hour news program to push its agenda in a dispute with content providers over fees. Same with the content providers scrolling messages at the bottom of the screen. While questionable ethically, the real problem is we have a government structure where it is too easy to "bribe" legally. Campaign donations and lobbyist activity craft nearly every bill, and when something passes that isn't liked by some group or institution, conflicting legislation soon follows forcing courts to decide. If we had a culture of common sense and integrity in our legislators then we would have to come up with a way to by-pass "free speech rights" of corporations and collective organizations to give the right back to individuals.
If you are still running everything locally then 'good enough' is a moving target. I've found that my desktop requirements are dropping as I move my storage to a NAS appliance, my applications to server class hardware, etc. In business it is very much the same. Doesn't have to be the cloud.
Sales dollars, marketing dollars, kickbacks to ISV's for using the product (all major software vendors do this, MS offers up to 12% for initial sale and 6% on renewals). Market share isn't overwhelming on servers where customers are asking for open source. In retail, education and call centers deploying Linux on the desktop is often more cost effective because of the limited software mix and lockdown. On a general purpose desktop, the proprietary solution is currently the (often subsidized) most cost effective. People want to play games or use locked down codecs, or what they are familiar with.
I did say OFTEN the better solution, not ALWAYS.
Open source software is often the better option both on cost and quality. As a consultant, I've found that when you stand up open source and proprietary solutions side by side for a customer, the open source solution wins most of the time. Now ISV's prefer the kickbacks, training and marketing support they get from proprietary vendors, so the customer has to ask for the open solution to be compared, but when they do the results are significant.
While I like the efficiency of trains, the US moved freight traffic to the highways because it created more flexibility in placement of factories and retail outlets. We built our houses and our lifestyle in a manner that took advantage of individual transportation vehicles. We don't have the density or the lifestyle desire to move to a hub and spoke system of fast rail. Air traffic has a better ROI for moving people over large distances in a largely rural nation. For high speed rail to work it has to link urban cores where the flexibility of driving or the speed of flying are compromised. The northeast corridor can support rail inflexibility because it can be faster than flying and as flexible as driving because you are moving between urban cores with solid public transportation. It won't gain critical mass between NYC and Chicago because it is faster and cheaper to fly. It won't work between Atlanta and Birmingham because limited pubic transit in those cities make driving more flexible. Unless there is the willingness of the local communities to rezone around transit, invest in dense public transit, increase the cost of flying and decrease the flexibility of driving then high speed rail will only work where it works now. In other words you have to invest in more than the track to make high speed rail work. Effort, money and time have to be spend rebuilding the nation to fit the hub and spoke infrastructure of rail traffic.
Thanks to the stimulus input, Medbook Space, the social network for medical records will be the next online sensation. X-rays, videos of prostrate exams, drug history ... all available to employers, insurance agencies and interested voyeurs.
With the proliferation of online degrees and most people moving their social interaction to social networking sites, college may soon be an extension of Facebook. 50 years from now Facebook University may be the most prestigious college in the United States. I don't know if I'm being funny or insightful, but all of a sudden I feel depressed.
One thing you should do is thank Linux for forcing MS to keep XP available for you at $15 instead of the normal OEM of $70. It is better for customers and hardware manufacturers that Linux is available as a viable alternative.
While a little more expensive they last even longer (20 years?). They really aren't available much greater than 40 watt replacements but I've been happy with the performance. Not effected by cold and come on instantly.
A more important question is why Android? To answer my own question, it is marketing and the value of attaching Google to the phone. Doesn't matter that the phone runs Linux, what matters is the phone is attached to Google. It is an interesting shift in ownership of mobile phones. The iPhone is an Apple product, not an AT&T phone. Will Google follow the MS PC model and like Windows PC by Dell will become Android phone by Samsung?
Despite his skin color I'd think his Kenyan background would indicate a present commemorating decolonization of Africa and creation of the Commonwealth as opposed to the elimination of the west African slave trade to North America. Unless of course the present was to the United States and not Obama specifically. Wonder how re-gifting works in this case?