Scott McNealy takes a crap he considers it a standard. Sun claims anything they do is automaticly a standard and anything they don't like is non-standard.
If AOL is involved you have the next evil empire just waiting to take over MS's reign. AOL is a hydra far worse than MS or IBM or any previous holder of the title.
"It is one thing for a university to claim ownership of work produced by their employees; it is quite another for a university to claim ownership of work produced by people who are paying to be there."
Do you have a clue what you pay to go to school and what it costs to run the university. The money the university makes helps run the school and keep tutions down.
If you voted for Bush you're getting what you wanted. He's a puppet for his father and the far right. So as your civil liberites slip away, as MS only gets a slap on the hand, and as we spend billions on a undeclared war in the middle east, say to yourself that's my Bush.
Sure I know you're saying, with 9/11/01 would you want Gore. I say if Gore was elected would there of even been a 9/11/01. Bush Jr is out to fix his daddy's mistakes and go back after Iraq and the middle east.
Stallman is a software facist. His views make the GPL a virus. Next thing he will decree a jihad on developers and users of non-GPL software. Bin Laden and Stallman aren't that different when you think about it.
The great thing about open standards is there
are so many to choose from. -- A. Tannenbaum
There are so many "Standards" they cancel each other out. To be worthwhile you need a single standard. Then all others are deemed non-standard and you use them with that understanding.
People want more powerful laptops so they can be desktop replacements, not just because Windows needs more horsepower. People who want smaller devices use PDAs, ultra-lites and similar. I use my old laptop for all the reasons you do and want a new more powerful laptop. Why, so I only have to deal with one computer for most work.
Like others have said, for you want buy a old used laptop, the battery life will be the only thing you won't get, but buy a second battery and your set. Also check out an Apple iBook small inexpensive and runs Debian just fine.
Your mistake was trying to speak for a community instead of yourself. If your going to speak for the community, do your research first.
We run our Oracle databases on Sun hardware from small E420's though 6800's with gigabytes of RAM for performance. There's nothing in the Intel world on that scale, not to mention fault tolerance, scalability, support and so on. No one is going to run Linux on one of these Sun boxes. You need Solaris in order to support the fault tolerance and scalability features of the hardware. Linux will have trouble in the big leagues because on that level the hardware and OS are made by the same company for the reasons above. Even NT DataCenter is hardware vendor specific in order to support the hardwares fault tolerance feature.
Borland has been on life support and barely hanging on for years. They chase any buzzword they think will attract a customer and still only a handful of consultants use their products. They have lost all their real talent and there current products are showing it. They jumped on the Linux bandwagon, but forgot to check Linux user don't like to spend money for products. Linux users will spend on services and support, but not products, and they aren't too interested in high end enterprise tools, but because Linux isn't a high end enterprise OS yet. Linux market is web servers and related services.
Borland go buy another magazine and find another buzzword to chase. Linix isn't your life preserver.
If the states don't go along with the agreement they are shotting themselves in the foot. They should take what they can and be happy otherwise it will drag on and probably get watered down more. The longer it goes on the less that it matters especially the industry is changing rapidly and MS continues to diversify. Then with the war going on the public in general who don't see how this even effects them in the first place will care less and less. In reality the only people who really care are the McNealy's and Ellison's and AOL-Time Warner's who only want to replace MS with themselves. They only care about Linux/Open Source as a bunch of free protestors for the propaganda war against MS. When they become the new 800 pound gorilla they will tell you to go pound sand. So states take what you can get now and be happy. The alternative is AOL-Time Warner replacing MS as the new bully. I guanantee you'll want Bill Gate back after AOL bends you over.
SGI was financial deep sneakers and in worse shape now. Open Source was just a jump on the band wagon move they hoped to saves thier ass. Same with Borland and most of the other large corporation "supporting" open source. Many are just offering lip service and waiting to see if supporting open source will generate sales of other products. IBM is the same thing, but they have very deep pockets and using them to look like they care. But if supporting open source doesn't sell hardware it will go the way of OS/2.
Bottom line big companies aren't going to use products they can't get support contracts for. When things go wrong, they have to have someone feet to hold to the fire. Also open source doesn't have the facilities for research and testing on enterprise level systems. No, open source is going to be good for international users and companies where costs are prohibitive. It will help smaller companies with tight budgets, but that will be limited when they realize open source cost more over the long run than commericial software. A software support contract is cheaper than the salary for developers and QA staff to support open source. Open source has a place, but not the big place you think.
Basically no need for training since most people know how to use Windows. The means companies can pickup the phone call an employment agency and ask for anything from a receptionist who knows Word to a SA to help do a roll out or maintain some sysems. Training costs a lot of time and money and with the business world using MS Office as a unofficial standard those costs are almost nil. Same for administing NT there are lots of MCSEs begging for jobs and will work cheap. Some really small businesses just assign one of their office regular staff to do it. Now I know that we're not talking experts or best SA practices, but money talks. That is another point Windows employees don't cost as much.
Now with Unix it is much harder to get employees. This is either because there are less available already trained. Why because if you have real experience, you are probably working. That leaves companies many times having to train people to run the specific Unix app's or flavor of Unix to SA. Also Unix takes a techincally savy person, unlike the ex-burger flipper with his new MCSE.
Salary for Unix people are higher. A experienced Windows SA will cost $60-$70K, but a similar Unix SA double that. They know there are less of them, so they want and get more. Plus usually Unix is run on higher end equipment so most training has to be on the job, unlike Windows that most have at home already to learn on.
One more differene is the available books on Windows, there are thousands of them. Just about any info you need to get someone through a Windows task. Plus MS has boatloads of info on their web site. Unix espescially the SA side is still pretty much a black art handed down by master to student. Some books, but most are very general not very detailed.
These are all major factors in why business and schools use Windows versus Unix. They will put up with reboots and lack of security to save money.
Okay I hear it now, but Linix and open source is free. Not for experienced SAs to properly run IT shop. Again you're talking experienced Unix SAs. Most Linux SA's have little or no experience working in large IT shops and don't know the issues and problems. Then open source and the if it don't work fix it story. The salary for developers and QA staff good enough to study, debug and fix open source far exceeds the cost of a commericial package that has support contract.
Its all about money. For small shops it's about trying to save it, and for big shops spending it to insure the business is up and making it.
KDE would be nicer, but Sun bulks at the QT Developer's License. Solaris focus changed from a workstation to a server OS a few version back since that is what most people use it for, so need for a GUI is minimal. I wish they would ship WindowMaker instead. It runs fine on Solaris and is lightweight enough for a server.
All it is, is a ease of use feature Apple did with the Macintosh even before MS did it with Windows. The Mac was the first computer I remember that would open an application based on the data file. Don't bitch about something till you make sure you have your fact right.
Large commericial products like Watcom was are usually fully of licensed code. Then being that probably hundreds of programmers have come and gone probably those left aren't too sure which code belongs to who. In our litigous world you just can't take a chance and put our the code and hope not to get sued. Then all the code they have to remove has to be replaced so not a fast process. Just look how long it took SGI to release the XFS filesystem for the same licensing issues. So I wouldn't say its a hoax, and a waste of time to release code before its ready.
Anyway Watcom was only a good C compiler in the DOS days. It was a only so-so Windows and C++ compiler. Watcom is probably just the internel compiler for Sybase products and hoping by going "open" to get some free QA and maybe some usable bug fixes. Same thing Borland did with Interbase.
There's so much more to popular software and operating systems than cool algorithms and features only a geek can appreciate. As I've said in other posts I was a marketing slime in the early days of my career. As a product manager I had to try and get the engineers to add features, that users asked for. Boy what a nightmare. The common response was "we don't do things like that, so real user don't need it." I'd have mountains of user requests for a feature and they'd say the same thing over and over. Since then it becomes easy to spot software designed by engineers and not marketing user research. Mac and Windows do lots of things that don't make sense to Open source crowd, but they are things users want. MS would of not of got the market share they have on arm twisting alone, they had to have a product people wanted in the first place. So even if you think you have the greatest software and developers around, it won't do you any good unless you're filling the needs of the masses, and that takes listening to them, not dictating what you thing they should like. At this time KDE and Mandrake are only ones trying to give users what they want, but their software still has a lot more maturing to do, before they are going to get the masses coming to them.
People love to bitch about privacy and goverment monitoring, but what are you doing that you're afraid for them to see. I'd say for most of you nothing, is just malcontent rubbish. Like the Linux groups I belong to, people bitch that its against the law to port scan, but go nuclear if someone port scans them.
Freedom is not free, we make have to give up some privacy to insure the greater Freedom. If I'm not doing or saying anything illegal the goverment monitoring me will just get bored. If goverment monitoring stops more terririst attacts, then losing some privacy was worth it.
For many companies their mailing list is the most valuable asset they have. I hate to admit to being a marketing slime in my past, but I was. One of the companies I was with had a up and coming product, but little cash in the bank for advertising. We traded our mailing list for ad's in magazines. We would also rent the mailing list of the magazines and other software companies and visa versa. Nowadays with scanners and "discount cards", and on and on not only your idenity is being swap, but your buying habits. An that's all legit. Now with phreaks sniffing phone systems. At most stores when you swipe your credit card to pay for something unless a major chain your info is going out in clear text over modem lines. You info belongs to the world.
What we saw on TV and things we read on sites like/. will remain with us the rest of our lives. Thanks for all the work you did to keep/. up Tuesday and thanks for summarizing what it took so we can all learn as well.
Those numbers are so off base its funny. Try to purchase an IBM mainframe and install it for anywhere near that, maybe an AS400, but no mainframe. Then the staffing and salary mainframe takes a bigger more expensive staff.
In MS defense those are list prices and NO ONE PAYS LIST. Then what idiot would have what was it four NT SA's for ten servers, boy what a gravy gig. Where I'm at now four people support about 60 NT servers. The ratio is about the same for out Unix servers.
People, spewing out bogus facts only make you look bad and you lose credibility.
This is how things work and quanity of work generating revenue is all that the managers and above care about. Worst yet it doesn't get better. I've been in this industry for over 15 years and feel like you, but management never give more time. I keep thinking it will change and it doesn't.
My suggestion is take a little extra time, but don't jepardizing your job. At same time the more you code the faster you can code, which means in the same amount of time you can write better code. Bottom line you put out better code and gain managements respect. Then they might listen to you some, because your work is gaining them a better reputation and they charge more.
Backwards compatibility is a necessary evil, but at some point you have to say that it time to move on. In my past I worked for companies that made Mac and Windows products. Both Apple and MS would give plenty of warnings that things are changing and to start getting ready. And still many would ignore the warning and whine that their product don't work with the new OS version. Solaris really needs to realize that its growing too fat trying to be backwards compatible for too many versions back. I remember at one UG meeting for a product I worked on it was about 1994 and Pentium and Windows and NT were the typical setup. A couple guys going nuclear because we had finally dropped support for DOS and 8088 CPU's. They wouldn't understand they got a decade of support, it is time to move forward.
Sun, Compaq, IBM, and all the rest in one article or another said for them Linux is just a tool to get people off Windows and over to some from of Unix. Then once they have customers moved to Linux they will then start to convince them now they need to move up a their commericial Unix with enterprise features and real support. So Linux is going to move people off Windows, but then same user will be moved over to Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, Tru64.
The EU has already said they will block the merger. Yes, they have a say in it, they stopped the GE-Semmins? merger. Then I'm not sure the U.S. will allow it. Sure IBM will still be bigger, but it really will throw the market out of kilter for Dell, Gateway, and rest. Then the customer bases of the companies aren't excited about this merger. As to Linux both companies have talked more than they have actually done.
This trial would of been over months and months ago if they had made the suit on business practices. Focusing on IE was BS there is nothing wrong moving parts of the browser to the OS. Just ask Linus he has parts of a web server in the kernal now with TUX. Giving away IE had nothing to do with it, Netscape did that first. They didn't charge for old versions or beta of current versions. Play with words if you like but Netscape started the whole world of giving away browsers.
Bottom line MS would be under scantions now if the DOJ lawsuit had been strictly on business practices.
Slashdot Mirror
Give the database to the goverment, then make big bucks on development tools, support, and maintenance contracts.
Scott McNealy takes a crap he considers it a standard. Sun claims anything they do is automaticly a standard and anything they don't like is non-standard.
If AOL is involved you have the next evil empire just waiting to take over MS's reign. AOL is a hydra far worse than MS or IBM or any previous holder of the title.
"It is one thing for a university to claim ownership of work produced by their employees; it is quite another for a university to claim ownership of work produced by people who are paying to be there."
Do you have a clue what you pay to go to school and what it costs to run the university. The money the university makes helps run the school and keep tutions down.
If you voted for Bush you're getting what you wanted. He's a puppet for his father and the far right. So as your civil liberites slip away, as MS only gets a slap on the hand, and as we spend billions on a undeclared war in the middle east, say to yourself that's my Bush.
Sure I know you're saying, with 9/11/01 would you want Gore. I say if Gore was elected would there of even been a 9/11/01. Bush Jr is out to fix his daddy's mistakes and go back after Iraq and the middle east.
What is freedom without choice?
Stallman is a software facist. His views make the GPL a virus. Next thing he will decree a jihad on developers and users of non-GPL software. Bin Laden and Stallman aren't that different when you think about it.
The great thing about open standards is there
are so many to choose from. -- A. Tannenbaum
There are so many "Standards" they cancel each other out. To be worthwhile you need a single standard. Then all others are deemed non-standard and you use them with that understanding.
People want more powerful laptops so they can be desktop replacements, not just because Windows needs more horsepower. People who want smaller devices use PDAs, ultra-lites and similar. I use my old laptop for all the reasons you do and want a new more powerful laptop. Why, so I only have to deal with one computer for most work.
Like others have said, for you want buy a old used laptop, the battery life will be the only thing you won't get, but buy a second battery and your set. Also check out an Apple iBook small inexpensive and runs Debian just fine.
Your mistake was trying to speak for a community instead of yourself. If your going to speak for the community, do your research first.
We run our Oracle databases on Sun hardware from small E420's though 6800's with gigabytes of RAM for performance. There's nothing in the Intel world on that scale, not to mention fault tolerance, scalability, support and so on. No one is going to run Linux on one of these Sun boxes. You need Solaris in order to support the fault tolerance and scalability features of the hardware. Linux will have trouble in the big leagues because on that level the hardware and OS are made by the same company for the reasons above. Even NT DataCenter is hardware vendor specific in order to support the hardwares fault tolerance feature.
Borland has been on life support and barely hanging on for years. They chase any buzzword they think will attract a customer and still only a handful of consultants use their products. They have lost all their real talent and there current products are showing it. They jumped on the Linux bandwagon, but forgot to check Linux user don't like to spend money for products. Linux users will spend on services and support, but not products, and they aren't too interested in high end enterprise tools, but because Linux isn't a high end enterprise OS yet. Linux market is web servers and related services.
Borland go buy another magazine and find another buzzword to chase. Linix isn't your life preserver.
If the states don't go along with the agreement they are shotting themselves in the foot. They should take what they can and be happy otherwise it will drag on and probably get watered down more. The longer it goes on the less that it matters especially the industry is changing rapidly and MS continues to diversify. Then with the war going on the public in general who don't see how this even effects them in the first place will care less and less. In reality the only people who really care are the McNealy's and Ellison's and AOL-Time Warner's who only want to replace MS with themselves. They only care about Linux/Open Source as a bunch of free protestors for the propaganda war against MS. When they become the new 800 pound gorilla they will tell you to go pound sand. So states take what you can get now and be happy. The alternative is AOL-Time Warner replacing MS as the new bully. I guanantee you'll want Bill Gate back after AOL bends you over.
SGI was financial deep sneakers and in worse shape now. Open Source was just a jump on the band wagon move they hoped to saves thier ass. Same with Borland and most of the other large corporation "supporting" open source. Many are just offering lip service and waiting to see if supporting open source will generate sales of other products. IBM is the same thing, but they have very deep pockets and using them to look like they care. But if supporting open source doesn't sell hardware it will go the way of OS/2.
Bottom line big companies aren't going to use products they can't get support contracts for. When things go wrong, they have to have someone feet to hold to the fire. Also open source doesn't have the facilities for research and testing on enterprise level systems. No, open source is going to be good for international users and companies where costs are prohibitive. It will help smaller companies with tight budgets, but that will be limited when they realize open source cost more over the long run than commericial software. A software support contract is cheaper than the salary for developers and QA staff to support open source. Open source has a place, but not the big place you think.
Basically no need for training since most people know how to use Windows. The means companies can pickup the phone call an employment agency and ask for anything from a receptionist who knows Word to a SA to help do a roll out or maintain some sysems. Training costs a lot of time and money and with the business world using MS Office as a unofficial standard those costs are almost nil. Same for administing NT there are lots of MCSEs begging for jobs and will work cheap. Some really small businesses just assign one of their office regular staff to do it. Now I know that we're not talking experts or best SA practices, but money talks. That is another point Windows employees don't cost as much.
Now with Unix it is much harder to get employees. This is either because there are less available already trained. Why because if you have real experience, you are probably working. That leaves companies many times having to train people to run the specific Unix app's or flavor of Unix to SA. Also Unix takes a techincally savy person, unlike the ex-burger flipper with his new MCSE.
Salary for Unix people are higher. A experienced Windows SA will cost $60-$70K, but a similar Unix SA double that. They know there are less of them, so they want and get more. Plus usually Unix is run on higher end equipment so most training has to be on the job, unlike Windows that most have at home already to learn on.
One more differene is the available books on Windows, there are thousands of them. Just about any info you need to get someone through a Windows task. Plus MS has boatloads of info on their web site. Unix espescially the SA side is still pretty much a black art handed down by master to student. Some books, but most are very general not very detailed.
These are all major factors in why business and schools use Windows versus Unix. They will put up with reboots and lack of security to save money.
Okay I hear it now, but Linix and open source is free. Not for experienced SAs to properly run IT shop. Again you're talking experienced Unix SAs. Most Linux SA's have little or no experience working in large IT shops and don't know the issues and problems. Then open source and the if it don't work fix it story. The salary for developers and QA staff good enough to study, debug and fix open source far exceeds the cost of a commericial package that has support contract.
Its all about money. For small shops it's about trying to save it, and for big shops spending it to insure the business is up and making it.
KDE would be nicer, but Sun bulks at the QT Developer's License. Solaris focus changed from a workstation to a server OS a few version back since that is what most people use it for, so need for a GUI is minimal. I wish they would ship WindowMaker instead. It runs fine on Solaris and is lightweight enough for a server.
All it is, is a ease of use feature Apple did with the Macintosh even before MS did it with Windows. The Mac was the first computer I remember that would open an application based on the data file. Don't bitch about something till you make sure you have your fact right.
Yes you are missing something...
Large commericial products like Watcom was are usually fully of licensed code. Then being that probably hundreds of programmers have come and gone probably those left aren't too sure which code belongs to who. In our litigous world you just can't take a chance and put our the code and hope not to get sued. Then all the code they have to remove has to be replaced so not a fast process. Just look how long it took SGI to release the XFS filesystem for the same licensing issues. So I wouldn't say its a hoax, and a waste of time to release code before its ready.
Anyway Watcom was only a good C compiler in the DOS days. It was a only so-so Windows and C++ compiler. Watcom is probably just the internel compiler for Sybase products and hoping by going "open" to get some free QA and maybe some usable bug fixes. Same thing Borland did with Interbase.
There's so much more to popular software and operating systems than cool algorithms and features only a geek can appreciate. As I've said in other posts I was a marketing slime in the early days of my career. As a product manager I had to try and get the engineers to add features, that users asked for. Boy what a nightmare. The common response was "we don't do things like that, so real user don't need it." I'd have mountains of user requests for a feature and they'd say the same thing over and over. Since then it becomes easy to spot software designed by engineers and not marketing user research. Mac and Windows do lots of things that don't make sense to Open source crowd, but they are things users want. MS would of not of got the market share they have on arm twisting alone, they had to have a product people wanted in the first place. So even if you think you have the greatest software and developers around, it won't do you any good unless you're filling the needs of the masses, and that takes listening to them, not dictating what you thing they should like. At this time KDE and Mandrake are only ones trying to give users what they want, but their software still has a lot more maturing to do, before they are going to get the masses coming to them.
People love to bitch about privacy and goverment monitoring, but what are you doing that you're afraid for them to see. I'd say for most of you nothing, is just malcontent rubbish. Like the Linux groups I belong to, people bitch that its against the law to port scan, but go nuclear if someone port scans them.
Freedom is not free, we make have to give up some privacy to insure the greater Freedom. If I'm not doing or saying anything illegal the goverment monitoring me will just get bored. If goverment monitoring stops more terririst attacts, then losing some privacy was worth it.
For many companies their mailing list is the most valuable asset they have. I hate to admit to being a marketing slime in my past, but I was. One of the companies I was with had a up and coming product, but little cash in the bank for advertising. We traded our mailing list for ad's in magazines. We would also rent the mailing list of the magazines and other software companies and visa versa. Nowadays with scanners and "discount cards", and on and on not only your idenity is being swap, but your buying habits. An that's all legit. Now with phreaks sniffing phone systems. At most stores when you swipe your credit card to pay for something unless a major chain your info is going out in clear text over modem lines. You info belongs to the world.
What we saw on TV and things we read on sites like /. will remain with us the rest of our lives. Thanks for all the work you did to keep /. up Tuesday and thanks for summarizing what it took so we can all learn as well.
Those numbers are so off base its funny. Try to purchase an IBM mainframe and install it for anywhere near that, maybe an AS400, but no mainframe. Then the staffing and salary mainframe takes a bigger more expensive staff.
In MS defense those are list prices and NO ONE PAYS LIST. Then what idiot would have what was it four NT SA's for ten servers, boy what a gravy gig. Where I'm at now four people support about 60 NT servers. The ratio is about the same for out Unix servers.
People, spewing out bogus facts only make you look bad and you lose credibility.
This is how things work and quanity of work generating revenue is all that the managers and above care about. Worst yet it doesn't get better. I've been in this industry for over 15 years and feel like you, but management never give more time. I keep thinking it will change and it doesn't.
My suggestion is take a little extra time, but don't jepardizing your job. At same time the more you code the faster you can code, which means in the same amount of time you can write better code. Bottom line you put out better code and gain managements respect. Then they might listen to you some, because your work is gaining them a better reputation and they charge more.
Backwards compatibility is a necessary evil, but at some point you have to say that it time to move on. In my past I worked for companies that made Mac and Windows products. Both Apple and MS would give plenty of warnings that things are changing and to start getting ready. And still many would ignore the warning and whine that their product don't work with the new OS version. Solaris really needs to realize that its growing too fat trying to be backwards compatible for too many versions back. I remember at one UG meeting for a product I worked on it was about 1994 and Pentium and Windows and NT were the typical setup. A couple guys going nuclear because we had finally dropped support for DOS and 8088 CPU's. They wouldn't understand they got a decade of support, it is time to move forward.
Sun, Compaq, IBM, and all the rest in one article or another said for them Linux is just a tool to get people off Windows and over to some from of Unix. Then once they have customers moved to Linux they will then start to convince them now they need to move up a their commericial Unix with enterprise features and real support. So Linux is going to move people off Windows, but then same user will be moved over to Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, Tru64.
The EU has already said they will block the merger. Yes, they have a say in it, they stopped the GE-Semmins? merger. Then I'm not sure the U.S. will allow it. Sure IBM will still be bigger, but it really will throw the market out of kilter for Dell, Gateway, and rest. Then the customer bases of the companies aren't excited about this merger. As to Linux both companies have talked more than they have actually done.
This trial would of been over months and months ago if they had made the suit on business practices. Focusing on IE was BS there is nothing wrong moving parts of the browser to the OS. Just ask Linus he has parts of a web server in the kernal now with TUX. Giving away IE had nothing to do with it, Netscape did that first. They didn't charge for old versions or beta of current versions. Play with words if you like but Netscape started the whole world of giving away browsers.
Bottom line MS would be under scantions now if the DOJ lawsuit had been strictly on business practices.