in the first one you are an alien in the 50's fighting traveling across america fighting police, soldiers, and "men in black" agents called majestic. the game is full of sarcasm about how cold war americans in the "golden age" were all secretly gay, or on drugs, or worse.
in the second one you are an alien in the 60's fighting the KGB for world domination in america, britain, japan, and russia. the game is full of jokes about cultural stereotypes.
in both games, the governments hate you and want to destroy you, but harvest your technology and stuff to use against you and their enemies.
When you consider the the rights gaurenteed through the constitution applies to all people, not just citizens. On might say they are inaliable to all men.
one might say that, but one would be incorrect. one would be more correct if they were to say that the rights afforded by the constitution are inalienable to all caucasians over the age of 40 with an adjusted gross income over $50,000 annually ($75,000 for single income families) and sufficient legal representation to enforce said constitutional rights.
they will have about 16,000 employees using this new open desktop solution. It would seem like a hard solution to sell to other's if the company selling it will barley be using it.
are you kidding? 16,000 users would quadruple the apple and linux userbases overnight!
chrizzle's first law of chat: only dudes chat online with strangers. if you don't know a girl in real life and she's chatting with you... she's a dude. it's a science... regular as gravity.
You are the one claiming Microsoft - a publicly traded company - are spending disproportionate amounts of money to "make" Windows work in environments you allege it cannot. You are similarly implying Microsoft is the only company using Windows as an "Enterprise" platform.
come on dude, are you kidding me? "MS is the *only* company using windows as an enterprise platform"? show me where i said that. show me where i *hinted* at that. and if you say "jules winnfield" maybe you should go rent "pulp fiction" and watch the foot massage gag a few times. it's called levity... the world is a dull place without it. i can see why some of your conversations with other posters end with them calling you "obtuse".
did i say their spending is "disproportionate"? i said they can afford to spend "inefficiently" just to prove a point... you know, like all the money they lost on the original xbox trying to get into the console market. the point that they are trying to make is that windows is the best platform for the enterprise. and i think their own internal infrastructure is a good place to make that point... it's not like they have to pay for client access licenses or anything. i think that other companies that don't sell windows would have made a better choice to put forth as examples. i would be interested in those companies and the reasons they chose windows. unfortunately, you didn't mention any of those other companies nor their reasons.
there is a difference between inefficient spending and disproportionate spending, that's why i chose the word "inefficient" to describe the hypothetical allocation of their IT budget.
i said that MS is not a good example of a company that makes use of windows in the enterprise since that's what they sell for a living and they can afford to overspend on internal infrastructure in support of their external goal of selling software. if microsoft is a textbook case of sucess with windows in the enterprise, then steve ballmer thinking his kids shouldn't be allowed to use ipods is clear evidence that the ipod is inferrior to the zune inspite of the ipod's long history of success in the market compared to the short and somewhat tepid history of the zune.
much like the microsoft as a textbook case argument, the ballmer/zune argument doesn't take into account the fact that the zune is so new to the scene compared to the ipod (which is countered sufficiently by your inertia argument), nor does it take into account ballmer's monetary interest in the success of the zune (my conflict of interest argument). that's why GM doesn't give it's executives toyotas as company cars and why there are no pepsi machines at the coca-cola corporate headquarters. it has nothing to do with the quality of pepsis or toyotas and everything to do with projecting an image of confidence in your product.
my original assertion was in agreement with a person who asserted that many companies have huge investments and contracts with vendors like sun or IBM and that a likely role of windows and/or linux for those companies was to "expand" that investment. using windows on the front end is a good example of how companies "expand" thier commercial unix investment. i said that older companies tend to use sun/ibm at their dataserving cores (like the parent post states), and that i think that newer companies are more likely to make use of large numbers of lintel/wintel servers in a fashion similar to google's.
i think that you are put off by my assertion that windows is best suited for front end stuff. personally, i think that the front end and it's ability to serve the user is a very important piece of any application, since that is the piece that will be judged by so many. if you have pre-judged me as "against windows above all else" then there is not much that i can do to convince you otherwise.
i say that windows is best suited for the front end because that is where i see it in use the most. i suppose that it's possible that
Jeez, I can't imagine finding many of my colleagues alluring even after spending 6 months trapped in a submarine with them!
in the US army, non combat arms units are all co-ed. when i was in basic training, my unit was all male recruits, but my platoon had one female drill sergeant, and the company first sergeant was female as well. the first sergeant was a dead ringer for the wicked witch of the west (except that she was african american, not green).
after 8 weeks of life in the woods with a bunch of smelly grunts, any one of us would have gouged out an eye (or some other organ) if it meant a chance to get with the wicked first sergeant of the west... and that was just 2 months. i can't imagine what would happen if basic training lasted a year.
later in my tour, when we would go out to the field, all manner of crazy things would happen. the longest we ever went out was 6 weeks, again, i can't imagine what a year or more would be like. i was enlisted during the conflict in bosnia, and women would come back from hungary after 6 months because they were pregnant. desert war games at ft. irwin CA was like "soldiers gone wild", and that rotation was only a month. it seems that the further away from civilization you go, and the longer you are away, the crazier the behaviors become.
royal navy dudes buggering eachother after a year at sea doesn't surprise me in the least... i mean what do you expect? they're british. I KID! I KID!
i first interpreted it as "a random guy, of indeterminate european descent, took a step towards linux". in other news, i am thinking about switching to decaf.
Your supposition that they do, however, is neither proof nor evidence that they do.
and your supposition that they don't is neither proof nor evidence that they don't. it's a documented fact that MS hires the best people that money can buy... it's not a huge leap to think that, for better or worse, their staff can make make windows suit all of their needs, seeing has how it's windows that pays all of their salaries. it's not a much bigger leap to think that -if there is enough at stake- their leadership can make all of their needs suit windows. i don't have any more or less proof than you have.
You are apparently ignoring the effects of inertia.
that is true, i hadn't considered that. presented that way, intertia is a chicken and egg problem. "this place isn't built on windows because there was no windows when this place was built." just like microsoft got into the PC space because the midrange and mainframe business already had established players.
so then the question becomes "would big enterprises use wintel based systems if they were starting over today?"
i think the answer is a resounding "uhh... maybe?"
using examples of well-established unix systems that aren't being migrated to Windows is not evidence that Windows cannot perform the equivalent task
that is true but it doesn't change the fact that windows doesn't get invited to perform the equivalent task as often as IBM and sun do. on the flipside, all of the linux vendors combined don't get invited to the desktop party as much as MS does, and sun pretty much gets drunk on java and mutters about thin clients. as much as i love linux (or thin clients), it's tough to argue with that.
windows has it's place. right now, that place is serving up what people come into direct contact with (ASP, VB, XP, office, exchange, directX, etc). in that capacity, they are *really* tough to beat. windows and exchange get invited to replace novell and groupwise all the time. novell and it's offerings have way more direct contact with actual humans than the hugantic backend of a ERM/CRM/whateveRM database does, and that's why MS gets to sit at the head of that table.
but, once you take the human factor out of the equation, and "easy to use/easy to code for" are suddenly not the #1 and #2 most desired features, the landscape for wintel changes significantly.
i'll be the first to admit that i am a pretty serious google fanboy and i haven't used a fastmail account so proceed with caution.
i have two public access unix accounts, one on SDF and one on hobbiton (hobbiton stopped being public access like 6 years ago). two years ago there was a sudden astronomical increase in the amount of spam that i was getting on both accounts. both systems had not yet set up greylisting or some other anti-spam measures and so i was worried that i would have to abandon an email address that i have had for almost 10 years.
i got a gmail invite from a friend and set up my new account, and gmail has an option where you can choose to send mail as another account and make that the default method for sending mail, so i set up my gmail account to send as the two unix accounts and then added the gmail address to a.forward for each shell account.
so now i use gmail as the central store for all of my email. now that both shell accounts have graylisting and other spam filtering i take advantage of that PLUS gmail's ability to bucket spam, so i have not seen a spam email in something like 6 months. i could go back to the old way (i look really oldschool using ssh to check my mail with pine) but i have become so lazy and spoiled thanks to gmail that there is no real reason to go back.
so, if you want to keep your old address and switch to gmail, it is possible, provided your old provider has some means for you to forward your mail.
i don't think it's for show. windows really is a good tool for interfacing with humans (and vice versa). the front end can be a dynamic place, and a platform that is easy to develop for is a logical choice.
correct that... cisco acquired linksys... the point being that two companies who cater to the "money is no object" class picked up low cost players during the dotcom bubble in order to compete in that space.
going to the store would preclude you shopping for movies in your underwear in the middle of the night, that is ture. for me personally, the benefits of downloading a movie are that it's always available (vs. being checked out by someone else), that it's in a format that will (hopefully) never be obsoleted like the DVD or the vhs tape and is difficult to damage or misplace.
I'd be quite willing to bet money that Microsoft runs most - if not all - of their "enterprise" on Windows-based machines, and that they are not the only large organisation doing so.
you can't really count microsoft in that... they have enough money that they can spend it inefficiently just to make a point.
that said, i don't doubt that many organizations do just that... that was never a question, the question is how old and well established is the company? what roles in their enterprise are they using windows based servers for? and how critical are those roles?
take for example a large (probably the largest in the country) insulation manufacturer in north western ohio for whom i worked on their helpdesk. they were pretty much windows from top to bottom (AD, exchange, iis, you name it) there was only one major application that ran on sun... the SAP system. in terms of volume of machines and resources sun represented maybe 20% of the overall IT infrastructure. in terms of criticality (if such a word exists) the whole business depended on SAP above all else to track materials, production, shipping, etc.
the reason that i think the age of the enterprise is a factor is that sun really did a lot of marketing to dot coms during the bubble, and then acquired cobal networks and linksys... two makers of low cost server and networking equipment that i would imagine was very popular with the "fledgling" enterprise. i would imagine that newer companies are often a tough sell for sun and the other commercial unix vendors.
the popularity of piracy is proof enough that people want to download stuff despite all of the trouble associated with it and inspite what the movie industry says we want.
the movie industry would really like for us all to just return to going to the theater and buying or renting movies on factory pressed discs. they will continue to support half-assed download implementations until we all accept the "fact" that streamed or downloaded movies is not a sustainable business model(in their opinion).
Will they even be able to and still keep things in a DRM wrapper?
they won't do it. period. every implementation of downloadable movies is now, and will always be: 1)slow 2)low quality and 3) super encumbered by DRM and other restrictions. the industry does not want to allow movies on to the internet. they spent billions of dollars they have firmly established businesses with the studios, distributors, and television and cable companies and they do not want to change that business no matter how much we as consumers say that we want downloads.
I don't know this will win out over things like mail rental of discs unless DRM is abandoned.
mail rental of discs will be the closest any of us ever come to downloading movies at home on our terms.
if they could do away with netflix and their ilk, i am sure they would cuz "renting, ripping, and returning" is the reason that renting by mail works.
the VHS tape was the media standard for over a decade. the DVD has been around less than that and now we are moving to HD-DVD/BLU-ray. why? becuase the industry needs to keep file sizes up to discourage downloading and encourage us to go back to buying and renting discs or watching pay-per-view and premium cable channels. those are the options that they are giving us and they think that we should be happy to have them.
DRM is a symptom, not the disease itself. the industry's refusal to change and to share control with the consumer is the disease and the only cure that i can see is bankruptcy on the part of the industry itself.
downloadable movies are us saying to the industry "i bought a computer and internet access and i want to use that for my entertainment needs instead of buying another player or replacing my collection... again."
the weak sauce that the industry keeps giving us is them saying "you lose! you get nothing! good day sir!"
I've worked on some huge Unix systems (mostly for databases) and never once did anyone mention Windows without laughing.
i would imagine that is the case in many large datacenters. to paraphrase the great philosopher jules winnfield: mission critical enterprise applications are not in the same ballpark as windows and linux on x86. it's not even the same sport.
the one big shop i worked for in central ohio used mainframes, unix, and windows. mainframes for a lot of legacy data (like stuff from the 70's and 80's) unix for all things oracle, and oddly enough, windows for the front end web hosting. so all of the customer facing web front ends were windows based, but the data itself was hosted and served up from sun gear. inside the firewall, the company itself was seriously MS centric, being used for a number of MS case study/whitepapers on replacing X and Y with stuff from microsoft. i haven't worked there in several years, but i would imagine they are still all MS until you get to the data itself.
there was also a big project in the mid to late 90's to replace the aging development workstations. the sun workstations were replaced with windows NT4 running eXceed. again, windows on the front end, but the serious work is in unix. the support costs for having a sun on the desk for development and a wintel for office and email were offset significantly by replacing both with a powerful (for that time) PC and host emulation software. in all of the "unix substitutions" that i had seen, not once was the proprietary data hosted on anything but IBM mainframes or SUN unix.
No way are people with truely large-scale critical Unix servers considering switching to Windows. When you already own the hardware, paid for the software, and have huge support contracts, consider expansion with Linux. Windows is only intruding on the smaller scale Unix installations.
IBM will occasionally hit the IT trade rags with ads and op-ed pieces about "server sprawl"... a kind of out of control proliferation of low-end (in IBM's opinion) servers or even clusters that handle one or two tasks instead of running everything from a handful of multi-million dollar godlike servers. i would imagine that sun will eventually take the same approach.
i think that larger and more well established datacenters will always feature commercial unix at their cores thanks in large part to the investment and contracts that you mention. but i think newer companies will focus on large numbers of commodity servers (ala google). i think that is where MS and commercial unix will fight a pitched battle with linux.
blockbuster, wal-mart, and who knows else could benefit from a "no-internet" download service where you take your thing (laptop/usb harddrive/set top player/xbox) in to the store and snarf movies from the store's intranet at 100mbt/1000mbit. the store downloads movies and then sells them to you. there would be far fewer costs (intranet webserver + NAS + ecommerce app). the stores themselves may only need DSL internet connections.
you could even ship the movies to the store on a drive or disc to save on internet costs.
if i could go into the store and get super cheap movies (saving the draconian DRM discussion for another day) onto a drive in minutes rather than days then ultra-convenience might just rule over price, brand name, and quality.
i think that the super fast no-net option will be the saving grace of the brick and mortar shop when it comes to selling software, movies, and music. the stores can save shelf space for merchandise that cannot be downloaded, the retail chains can save fortunes on not hauling pressed discs around the country in trucks, and blockbuster, walmart, and the rest will finally have an edge over net-flix and iTunes.
I'm not surprised that corporations find themselves loathed by their employees and having to exert effort and money trying to protect themselves from their own people. What surprises me is that we don't see more all-out sabotage by disgruntled employees.
it happens all the time... but i'll bet it doesn't often make the papers.
the word sabotage comes from the french word "sabot" which is a kind of wooden shoe or clog. during the industrial revolution, angry workers would kick the machines they worked on or throw the shoes into them, resulting in a "clog" in the output.
in the intelligence community, disgruntled soldiers and public servants make some if the best moles or double agents. in government, many whistleblowers act not out of a sense of duty or responsability but as a means of exacting revenge.
well, i installed it because surfing the internet was slow for everyone when BT was up. as soon as i set it up the complaining about internet speeds went away. no one wishes he could add bandwidth to fix a problem more than i do, but a residential connection is not something you can upgrade at will.
i think that the focus on the enterprise is because THAT is where people learn about the computers they use at home.
unless you work with images, video, or music for a living, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to use a PC at work. there is a reason that apple runs those "i'm a pc and i'm a mac" commercials... apple wants people to equate PC's with boring work stuff.
the only hole in this whole thing is, of course, games. directX 10 is a vista exclusive... a clear indicator that while the enterprise side is where MS's bread is buttered, it's games that keep them alive at home. i would imagine that this is why bootcamp is such a big deal for apple.
The corporate desktop represents a large portion of their end user install base, and it's definitely a larger portion of the end user paying install base.
ahhh the crux of the issue... do we cater to the people who are required by fear of litigation to pay... or force more people who pirate to pony up? that appears to be the question.
i wonder how many people below class 3 geek can still pirate windows. isn't there a large portion of people who get windows with their new dells or hp's?
exactly. tho, i am thinking of QOSing my roommate's PC... he is a hardcore WOW addict and i think i can raise his rent obligation for priority access to the internets:-)
it true what they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Slashdot Mirror
ahhh, my life much easier now that i let tycho and gabe do all of my thinking for me.
in the first one you are an alien in the 50's fighting traveling across america fighting police, soldiers, and "men in black" agents called majestic. the game is full of sarcasm about how cold war americans in the "golden age" were all secretly gay, or on drugs, or worse.
in the second one you are an alien in the 60's fighting the KGB for world domination in america, britain, japan, and russia. the game is full of jokes about cultural stereotypes.
in both games, the governments hate you and want to destroy you, but harvest your technology and stuff to use against you and their enemies.
one might say that, but one would be incorrect. one would be more correct if they were to say that the rights afforded by the constitution are inalienable to all caucasians over the age of 40 with an adjusted gross income over $50,000 annually ($75,000 for single income families) and sufficient legal representation to enforce said constitutional rights.
are you kidding? 16,000 users would quadruple the apple and linux userbases overnight!
nah, it's the best early april fool's joke evar
chrizzle's first law of chat: only dudes chat online with strangers. if you don't know a girl in real life and she's chatting with you... she's a dude. it's a science... regular as gravity.
i talked the the one girl on live a few weeks ago... turns out she's actually a dude.
come on dude, are you kidding me? "MS is the *only* company using windows as an enterprise platform"? show me where i said that. show me where i *hinted* at that. and if you say "jules winnfield" maybe you should go rent "pulp fiction" and watch the foot massage gag a few times. it's called levity... the world is a dull place without it. i can see why some of your conversations with other posters end with them calling you "obtuse".
did i say their spending is "disproportionate"? i said they can afford to spend "inefficiently" just to prove a point... you know, like all the money they lost on the original xbox trying to get into the console market. the point that they are trying to make is that windows is the best platform for the enterprise. and i think their own internal infrastructure is a good place to make that point... it's not like they have to pay for client access licenses or anything. i think that other companies that don't sell windows would have made a better choice to put forth as examples. i would be interested in those companies and the reasons they chose windows. unfortunately, you didn't mention any of those other companies nor their reasons.
there is a difference between inefficient spending and disproportionate spending, that's why i chose the word "inefficient" to describe the hypothetical allocation of their IT budget.
i said that MS is not a good example of a company that makes use of windows in the enterprise since that's what they sell for a living and they can afford to overspend on internal infrastructure in support of their external goal of selling software. if microsoft is a textbook case of sucess with windows in the enterprise, then steve ballmer thinking his kids shouldn't be allowed to use ipods is clear evidence that the ipod is inferrior to the zune inspite of the ipod's long history of success in the market compared to the short and somewhat tepid history of the zune.
much like the microsoft as a textbook case argument, the ballmer/zune argument doesn't take into account the fact that the zune is so new to the scene compared to the ipod (which is countered sufficiently by your inertia argument), nor does it take into account ballmer's monetary interest in the success of the zune (my conflict of interest argument). that's why GM doesn't give it's executives toyotas as company cars and why there are no pepsi machines at the coca-cola corporate headquarters. it has nothing to do with the quality of pepsis or toyotas and everything to do with projecting an image of confidence in your product.
my original assertion was in agreement with a person who asserted that many companies have huge investments and contracts with vendors like sun or IBM and that a likely role of windows and/or linux for those companies was to "expand" that investment. using windows on the front end is a good example of how companies "expand" thier commercial unix investment. i said that older companies tend to use sun/ibm at their dataserving cores (like the parent post states), and that i think that newer companies are more likely to make use of large numbers of lintel/wintel servers in a fashion similar to google's.
i think that you are put off by my assertion that windows is best suited for front end stuff. personally, i think that the front end and it's ability to serve the user is a very important piece of any application, since that is the piece that will be judged by so many. if you have pre-judged me as "against windows above all else" then there is not much that i can do to convince you otherwise.
i say that windows is best suited for the front end because that is where i see it in use the most. i suppose that it's possible that
in the US army, non combat arms units are all co-ed. when i was in basic training, my unit was all male recruits, but my platoon had one female drill sergeant, and the company first sergeant was female as well. the first sergeant was a dead ringer for the wicked witch of the west (except that she was african american, not green).
after 8 weeks of life in the woods with a bunch of smelly grunts, any one of us would have gouged out an eye (or some other organ) if it meant a chance to get with the wicked first sergeant of the west... and that was just 2 months. i can't imagine what would happen if basic training lasted a year.
later in my tour, when we would go out to the field, all manner of crazy things would happen. the longest we ever went out was 6 weeks, again, i can't imagine what a year or more would be like. i was enlisted during the conflict in bosnia, and women would come back from hungary after 6 months because they were pregnant. desert war games at ft. irwin CA was like "soldiers gone wild", and that rotation was only a month. it seems that the further away from civilization you go, and the longer you are away, the crazier the behaviors become.
royal navy dudes buggering eachother after a year at sea doesn't surprise me in the least... i mean what do you expect? they're british. I KID! I KID!
i first interpreted it as "a random guy, of indeterminate european descent, took a step towards linux". in other news, i am thinking about switching to decaf.
and your supposition that they don't is neither proof nor evidence that they don't. it's a documented fact that MS hires the best people that money can buy... it's not a huge leap to think that, for better or worse, their staff can make make windows suit all of their needs, seeing has how it's windows that pays all of their salaries. it's not a much bigger leap to think that -if there is enough at stake- their leadership can make all of their needs suit windows. i don't have any more or less proof than you have.
that is true, i hadn't considered that. presented that way, intertia is a chicken and egg problem. "this place isn't built on windows because there was no windows when this place was built." just like microsoft got into the PC space because the midrange and mainframe business already had established players.
so then the question becomes "would big enterprises use wintel based systems if they were starting over today?"
i think the answer is a resounding "uhh... maybe?"
that is true but it doesn't change the fact that windows doesn't get invited to perform the equivalent task as often as IBM and sun do. on the flipside, all of the linux vendors combined don't get invited to the desktop party as much as MS does, and sun pretty much gets drunk on java and mutters about thin clients. as much as i love linux (or thin clients), it's tough to argue with that.
windows has it's place. right now, that place is serving up what people come into direct contact with (ASP, VB, XP, office, exchange, directX, etc). in that capacity, they are *really* tough to beat. windows and exchange get invited to replace novell and groupwise all the time. novell and it's offerings have way more direct contact with actual humans than the hugantic backend of a ERM/CRM/whateveRM database does, and that's why MS gets to sit at the head of that table.
but, once you take the human factor out of the equation, and "easy to use/easy to code for" are suddenly not the #1 and #2 most desired features, the landscape for wintel changes significantly.
it surprises me to learn of this. i am shocked. shocked! i say.
here are some other shocking things i have learned today:
i'll be the first to admit that i am a pretty serious google fanboy and i haven't used a fastmail account so proceed with caution.
i have two public access unix accounts, one on SDF and one on hobbiton (hobbiton stopped being public access like 6 years ago). two years ago there was a sudden astronomical increase in the amount of spam that i was getting on both accounts. both systems had not yet set up greylisting or some other anti-spam measures and so i was worried that i would have to abandon an email address that i have had for almost 10 years.
i got a gmail invite from a friend and set up my new account, and gmail has an option where you can choose to send mail as another account and make that the default method for sending mail, so i set up my gmail account to send as the two unix accounts and then added the gmail address to a .forward for each shell account.
so now i use gmail as the central store for all of my email. now that both shell accounts have graylisting and other spam filtering i take advantage of that PLUS gmail's ability to bucket spam, so i have not seen a spam email in something like 6 months. i could go back to the old way (i look really oldschool using ssh to check my mail with pine) but i have become so lazy and spoiled thanks to gmail that there is no real reason to go back.
so, if you want to keep your old address and switch to gmail, it is possible, provided your old provider has some means for you to forward your mail.
i don't think it's for show. windows really is a good tool for interfacing with humans (and vice versa). the front end can be a dynamic place, and a platform that is easy to develop for is a logical choice.
correct that... cisco acquired linksys... the point being that two companies who cater to the "money is no object" class picked up low cost players during the dotcom bubble in order to compete in that space.
going to the store would preclude you shopping for movies in your underwear in the middle of the night, that is ture. for me personally, the benefits of downloading a movie are that it's always available (vs. being checked out by someone else), that it's in a format that will (hopefully) never be obsoleted like the DVD or the vhs tape and is difficult to damage or misplace.
you can't really count microsoft in that... they have enough money that they can spend it inefficiently just to make a point.
that said, i don't doubt that many organizations do just that... that was never a question, the question is how old and well established is the company? what roles in their enterprise are they using windows based servers for? and how critical are those roles?
take for example a large (probably the largest in the country) insulation manufacturer in north western ohio for whom i worked on their helpdesk. they were pretty much windows from top to bottom (AD, exchange, iis, you name it) there was only one major application that ran on sun... the SAP system. in terms of volume of machines and resources sun represented maybe 20% of the overall IT infrastructure. in terms of criticality (if such a word exists) the whole business depended on SAP above all else to track materials, production, shipping, etc.
the reason that i think the age of the enterprise is a factor is that sun really did a lot of marketing to dot coms during the bubble, and then acquired cobal networks and linksys... two makers of low cost server and networking equipment that i would imagine was very popular with the "fledgling" enterprise. i would imagine that newer companies are often a tough sell for sun and the other commercial unix vendors.
that answer is simple: HELL NO.
the popularity of piracy is proof enough that people want to download stuff despite all of the trouble associated with it and inspite what the movie industry says we want.
the movie industry would really like for us all to just return to going to the theater and buying or renting movies on factory pressed discs. they will continue to support half-assed download implementations until we all accept the "fact" that streamed or downloaded movies is not a sustainable business model(in their opinion).
they won't do it. period. every implementation of downloadable movies is now, and will always be: 1)slow 2)low quality and 3) super encumbered by DRM and other restrictions. the industry does not want to allow movies on to the internet. they spent billions of dollars they have firmly established businesses with the studios, distributors, and television and cable companies and they do not want to change that business no matter how much we as consumers say that we want downloads.
mail rental of discs will be the closest any of us ever come to downloading movies at home on our terms.
if they could do away with netflix and their ilk, i am sure they would cuz "renting, ripping, and returning" is the reason that renting by mail works.
the VHS tape was the media standard for over a decade. the DVD has been around less than that and now we are moving to HD-DVD/BLU-ray. why? becuase the industry needs to keep file sizes up to discourage downloading and encourage us to go back to buying and renting discs or watching pay-per-view and premium cable channels. those are the options that they are giving us and they think that we should be happy to have them.
DRM is a symptom, not the disease itself. the industry's refusal to change and to share control with the consumer is the disease and the only cure that i can see is bankruptcy on the part of the industry itself.
downloadable movies are us saying to the industry "i bought a computer and internet access and i want to use that for my entertainment needs instead of buying another player or replacing my collection... again."
the weak sauce that the industry keeps giving us is them saying "you lose! you get nothing! good day sir!"
i would imagine that is the case in many large datacenters. to paraphrase the great philosopher jules winnfield: mission critical enterprise applications are not in the same ballpark as windows and linux on x86. it's not even the same sport.
the one big shop i worked for in central ohio used mainframes, unix, and windows. mainframes for a lot of legacy data (like stuff from the 70's and 80's) unix for all things oracle, and oddly enough, windows for the front end web hosting. so all of the customer facing web front ends were windows based, but the data itself was hosted and served up from sun gear. inside the firewall, the company itself was seriously MS centric, being used for a number of MS case study/whitepapers on replacing X and Y with stuff from microsoft. i haven't worked there in several years, but i would imagine they are still all MS until you get to the data itself.
there was also a big project in the mid to late 90's to replace the aging development workstations. the sun workstations were replaced with windows NT4 running eXceed. again, windows on the front end, but the serious work is in unix. the support costs for having a sun on the desk for development and a wintel for office and email were offset significantly by replacing both with a powerful (for that time) PC and host emulation software. in all of the "unix substitutions" that i had seen, not once was the proprietary data hosted on anything but IBM mainframes or SUN unix.
IBM will occasionally hit the IT trade rags with ads and op-ed pieces about "server sprawl"... a kind of out of control proliferation of low-end (in IBM's opinion) servers or even clusters that handle one or two tasks instead of running everything from a handful of multi-million dollar godlike servers. i would imagine that sun will eventually take the same approach.
i think that larger and more well established datacenters will always feature commercial unix at their cores thanks in large part to the investment and contracts that you mention. but i think newer companies will focus on large numbers of commodity servers (ala google). i think that is where MS and commercial unix will fight a pitched battle with linux.
blockbuster, wal-mart, and who knows else could benefit from a "no-internet" download service where you take your thing (laptop/usb harddrive/set top player/xbox) in to the store and snarf movies from the store's intranet at 100mbt/1000mbit. the store downloads movies and then sells them to you. there would be far fewer costs (intranet webserver + NAS + ecommerce app). the stores themselves may only need DSL internet connections.
you could even ship the movies to the store on a drive or disc to save on internet costs.
if i could go into the store and get super cheap movies (saving the draconian DRM discussion for another day) onto a drive in minutes rather than days then ultra-convenience might just rule over price, brand name, and quality.
i think that the super fast no-net option will be the saving grace of the brick and mortar shop when it comes to selling software, movies, and music. the stores can save shelf space for merchandise that cannot be downloaded, the retail chains can save fortunes on not hauling pressed discs around the country in trucks, and blockbuster, walmart, and the rest will finally have an edge over net-flix and iTunes.
it happens all the time... but i'll bet it doesn't often make the papers.
the word sabotage comes from the french word "sabot" which is a kind of wooden shoe or clog. during the industrial revolution, angry workers would kick the machines they worked on or throw the shoes into them, resulting in a "clog" in the output.
in the intelligence community, disgruntled soldiers and public servants make some if the best moles or double agents. in government, many whistleblowers act not out of a sense of duty or responsability but as a means of exacting revenge.
well, i installed it because surfing the internet was slow for everyone when BT was up. as soon as i set it up the complaining about internet speeds went away. no one wishes he could add bandwidth to fix a problem more than i do, but a residential connection is not something you can upgrade at will.
i think that the focus on the enterprise is because THAT is where people learn about the computers they use at home.
unless you work with images, video, or music for a living, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to use a PC at work. there is a reason that apple runs those "i'm a pc and i'm a mac" commercials... apple wants people to equate PC's with boring work stuff.
the only hole in this whole thing is, of course, games. directX 10 is a vista exclusive... a clear indicator that while the enterprise side is where MS's bread is buttered, it's games that keep them alive at home. i would imagine that this is why bootcamp is such a big deal for apple.
ahhh the crux of the issue... do we cater to the people who are required by fear of litigation to pay... or force more people who pirate to pony up? that appears to be the question.
i wonder how many people below class 3 geek can still pirate windows. isn't there a large portion of people who get windows with their new dells or hp's?
exactly. tho, i am thinking of QOSing my roommate's PC... he is a hardcore WOW addict and i think i can raise his rent obligation for priority access to the internets :-)
it true what they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely.