What I am saying is that banks might require some for education or training, or even just provide literature, something, ANYTHING to let people know that it's probably not the best idea to do your internet banking from KINKOS!.
You'll love this then: a major bank here (The Netherlands) was running a commercial for internet banking a year ago where it shows some people in an internet cafe sending money to their broke daughter... Education eh?
Iraqis do not have vast territory to retreat from. They don't have cold winter to try to freeze unprepared enemys. They don't have woods to hide partisans in. Lines of supply are fine to target, but coalition have transport aviation to resupply remote troops.
They do have some hard and useless terrain to retreat from (desert). They do have some nice climatologic things coming up: sandstorms, a nice sunny and dry summer... And transport aviation is nice, but useless in sandstorm season...
Most hostels I've been in while I was in Australia have a book trading corner. That way, backpackers can read loads of books while only carrying a single book, so they can travel light. You can leave a book and take another one if you're finished.
I know I've enjoyed the possibility to read books I would normally not risk spending hard earned cash on, exposing myself to new authors. Just a pity there wasn't usually a good selection of scif-fi and fantasy around.
I'm just wondering, we're always saying that all forms of opt-out are inherently bad in the case of spamming. Why is this any different for phone-spammers?
Getting listed on a DNC list is obviously an opt-out scheme. I can't help wondering what makes this such a good thing and DM people advocating a national/worldwide opt-out list evil at the same time.
Customers (not necessarily end-users but same thing applies to them) are unable to accurately specify their needs. This is not a problem, but just be aware that this happens a lot.
The customer is not an evilly whimsical person. He usually has needs that he tries to formulate by stating a possible solution. This is a natural reaction, since people solve problems with solutions. Only, it's not the customer's job (and often not in his ability) to specify a good solution: this is the job of either a "system analyst" or the programmer, depending on size of assignment etc. This is the reason that customers seem to change their minds on a whim, the "That's not it, but I'll know it when I see it" attitude. He's doing his best to help you, but in the process is misrepresenting the problem he has and actually making it harder for you to come up with the right solution.
Bottom line: good software people help the customer formulate their problem. It's an essential part of the job!
Basically, the.NET framework evolved from the COM+ framework earlier and is Microsoft's answer to middleware..NET's biggest competitor is the J2EE specification, with implementations from BEA (WebLogic), IBM (WebSphere) and Oracle (iAS) the biggest names in the business. Apart from J2EE, there's always custom middleware, forex building your own CORBA components and custom data access code. More control over the stuff, but more bug prone as well.
Technologies included in the.NET framework:
CRI(?) The Common Runtime layer. The thing which runs the compiled code, sort of comparable to a Java runtime environment.
Several languages: C#, VB.NET, C++.net, J#, maybe some other language I forgot. They all run on the Common Runtime layer and therefore 100% interoperable. A C# module can call a VB.NET module.
ASP.NET: ASP as it should have been done. Brings it up to par with JSP.
Support for XML Web services. Calling modules over a http call using XML/SOAP.
...
Basically, anyone who imlements a CRI will be able to run.NET applications, so theoretically it's not a Microsoft only platform. I seem to remember that Microsoft also released a beta for BSD just to make that point. But so far, as expected, there's no real serious alternative to the.NET platform released by Microsoft for Windows.
Primers:
For a Java oriented serverside programming site: The Serverside
Several O'Reilly titles:.NET framework (more general), Programming C#, Programming ASP.NET (last two specific for the languages)
Wrox has a good set of.NET books that are worth looking into
Caveat when buying books: see that they cover the latest release and not forex the beta release!
The concern here is well overblown. There little reason to believe that true brainwashing by ads is possible. Yes, they will be more effective if this technique works. But really, is this any different than marketeers hiring a psychologist to research the response of target audiences on candidate ads using test persons. The only difference is that they're using a neuroscientist instead of a psychologist!
The potential benefits are good though. Neuroscience is getting more funding, so there's a real possibility that scientists will find out a bit more about the way the brain reacts to certain stimuli.
More understanding of the human brain == Good Thing in my book.
When I pointed out to him that putting big bright orange notes on windshields might make the cars slightly bigger targets, he scratched his head and just stood there, silent.
Actually, police officers do the same things sometimes where I live. Only, they're a bit smarter about it and leave notes on all cars. Good cars get a note saying "Nothing in sight" and targets get a note saying "Next time, you may just want to cover up that cellphone of yours!"
Imagine a story where the opposite is true: a Windows Network Admin who asks how to secure a few Macs from the rest of the Win network. Be honest, the bloke would be flamed to a cinder, and rightly so, because securing a network should be part of a Network Admin's daily job!
So why is the majority of the reactions like, "Oh, poor Mac Network Admin, those Win users deserve any shit they get!" Why not subtly reminding him what the fsck his job is in the first place?
Oh wait, I see: he needs to maintain a few WinXP boxes in a *nix environ, so when he bitches he must be right. Because it's Microsoft. Right?
I can't count the number of times last minute feature requests are required to be in a build. As software developers, we just deal with it. But quality suffers because of it. And the engineers get the bad wrap.
Perhaps the next stage in the advance of software development will be when the engineers say, "No, that's not realistic. I will not build this under these constraints."
I know, there's fear of being fired, yadda yadda yadda. But it's part of the coming-of-age of the software developer. The point is, many developers just do what they're told or give unrealistic estimates. This gives managers little trust in what actually is possible and lead to stupid promises to customers.
The professional attitude should be: let managers shield me from stuff I don't want to know about, and I'll tell the manager what he needs to know (not: what he wants to hear) to do his job properly.
Sure software development has improved. People have been trying different things in the past two decade-and-a-half.
Things like RAD has helped a lot of customers in formulating their needs. This is another step into the realisation that users are not really aware of what they want. Keep in mind that in most industries, it's not really the end-users who need to formulate what the requirements are, but are perfectly capable of deciding whether what is being offered is good (relative to what they already have).
Awareness of the limitations of the developers is growing and developers themselves are growing out of their endless optimism. Yes, developers do have their share of blame on the poor perception on software development.
There is progress. That progress is mostly in the way of growing awareness of the reality of the environment in which software is being built.
For a construction project all of these elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the construction industry can work on lower margins.
Ah, the inevitable comparison with the construction world... Just keep in mind how many of the larger construction projects (focus is on the larger projects, because the problems for software development are also on the front of the larger projects) are delivered on-time, on-budget.
Among other categories: Non-Traditional Religion, Drugs, Alternative Journals, Political Groups, Financial Services, and Activist Groups.
Excuse me? Non-traditional religion? Political Groups? What does that mean?
Only "traditional" religions are allowed? What is a traditional religion? I might add that Christianity (probably a traditional religion) was considered non-traditional some 2000 years ago.
And political groups? Pah. If you're not part of the ruling order, please stop publishing on the Web, we don't need you. Long live the status quo!
The US of A seems to be forgetting its most important of roots: Freedom.
The lack of PR is strange, even more when you consider it's stuck between a couple of heavy hitters like James Bond, LotR and Harry Potter.
Sure, ST will get its traditional crowd to the theaters, but to get the mainstream to watch, it needs to contend with the aforementioned which are well hyped up. If people decide to go to one movie this Christmas period, it would probably be a toss up between LotR (great movie last time round) and Harry Potter (for both kids and adults). It looks like ST will lose out big time...
[Apologies for the poor translation, no time for a better attempt]
The burning building contains the IT department and a part of the faculty of Business Administration [Closest I could come up with: Bestuurskunde]. The building has three storeys.
The university fears the loss of its network facilities and is trying to save the main computer. According to a spokesman this network is amongst the fastest in Europe. Most classes are expected to resume as normal today. [According to other sources, this is an exam week, meaning few classes anyway. This is also a reason that few students were around so chances were that this also reduced potential casualties]
The fire department is fighting the fire with 25 firefighters and expects to need the entire day to extinguish the fire. No dangerous materials have been released by the fire at this point. At the moment nothing is known about the cause of this fire.
If Blizzard is going to get this right, they are going to have to get it right the first time.
The console environment is easier to develop on though: a stable end-user configuration drastically reduces complexity. Less complexity, less bugs. Bug free software is of course a myth, but consoles have a certain advantage when it comes to quality upon delivery.
So many languages to choose from, why use Java. You're unlikely to be able to explain the uses and benefits of OO in the first classes, better stick to the easier to explain benefits of good structured programming and progress from there.
Use good strict languages to enforce good behaviour (I was taught using Modula-2) before letting students tackle something as loose as C. It doesn't matter that the language for teaching programming skill is not your fanciest and hottest language, if creating a good programmer is the goal, learning a new language within the same paradigm should be easy!
Progress from one paradigm to another. Put things like OO, functional, logic, procedural in relation to each other. What are the benefits, what are the drawbacks, etc. Also a historical overview is important. Much more important than simply using the fashionable language and paradigm in a 101 course.
What about 'System.out' isn't OO? There is an object called 'out', which is of type 'PrintWriter', and a member of the class 'System', and we are calling its method 'println', passing it an object of type 'String'.
Arguably, this is the wrong abstraction. It's the choice between:
OutputMedium.print(Object.toString());
and
Object.printOn(OutputMedium);
In most cases, the Object being printed is the more imortant of the two and the one which knows in which form it wants to be printed, so it might be a better abstraction to put the printing functionality in the Object ot be printed.
The "System.out.println(...)" way may induce a more procedural way to code things than putting the printing methods in the Object itself.
A couple of recommendations (if you're looking for a new position)
1: Never work for a non-technical manager.
Rather: never work for a manager who doesn't know that your tech abilities are more up to date than his.
3: Make sure (s)he does at least some of the software.
No no no! A manager does not have to do software. In fact, it's almost better if he doesn't do it. He needs to trust you and your estimates, he needs to spend his time talking to the customer with your estimates in hand, educate the customer with respect to the risks, and manage the expectations when the customer decides that other aspects than the technical ones have a higher priority.
4: Make sure (s)he has a spine, and is capable of forming relationships with other human beings.
This one is very important. He needs to work on a level of mutual respect with the customer. Sure, try and be friendly, but when he stoops to kissing ass, respect will be lost and the customer will not accept any negative reports, estimates or risk analysis.
I've found that if you are in an engineering field, competent former engineers make the best managers. They have first hand experience about what it takes to do a job and do it correctly. Of course, not all engineers make good managers, but most good managers were at one point a good engineer. This applies equally well to other diciplines, of course.
That's not entirely true I think. The best managers know where their knowledge stops. There are two kinds of bad managers really: managers with a management education but poor tech training, but wanting to control the tech issues. About as bad as managers with a tech background but no management training, who just want their old job but have to steer people instead.
A good manager knows when to ask the employees for their opinion and trusts them. A manager with a tech background can make some educated guesses himself, but his role is so different, that he should try and distance himself from those tech issues. His greatest asset is perhaps that he is able to judge the ability of his team and therefore more likely to respect the team's opinion.
Respecting the opinion of the employees does not necessarily mean that a manager should always defer to them. After all, he is the boss. But he should explain, "Yes, you are right, this cannot be done in three weeks. But give it your best anyway, the budget at the customer's has run out, and I have told them that we need six weeks. But they told us to go ahead on the current schedule with all the risks"
The key is that it should be brought in a way that the team knows their opinion did count, but other aspects had a higher priority, that the risks have been acknowledged and accepted.
I find this statement terribly interesting. This implies that opensource software is more heavily auditted by the US government than closed source software.
Does anyone else find this ludicrous ?
This is actually quite sensible. Someone has to pay for the audits. In commercial applications, it will be the vendor.
But with OSS, it isn't clear who is the one responsible for the audits. And it isn't clear which version will be audited (with a theoretically possible fix made every minute). So, it will probably have to be the version to be implemented. Since there is no clear responsible party who can fund the audit, it will have to be the customer.
So in that sense, it is the customer who winds up for the cost of the audit directly, while with commercial products, it will be the vendor who winds up for the cost (and calculates that back into the price of the product).
In one sense, the customer paying for it is preferable, since they can now see how the money is being spent, on the other hand, having the customer pay for it prevents the spreading of the cost. In commercial products, every customer pays for a part of the costs, in OSS, every customer has to pay for the complete audit again unless the results are frozen.
This is good news for the Open Source community. It's great to see a company making OSS the core of its business. However, the article also points out some of the traditional weak points of OSS.
One is that OSS focusses much more on technical prowess than on anything resembling a workable UI. For the true geek, no more than a command line is necessary for a UI. However, in the "real world" a user will not even consider touching the best software around if his only UI is a command line or a bad looking bunch of poorly designed widgets. It matters. Perhaps more than it should, but it is the reality. If functionality is (for the user) more or less comparable, the sleeker look will win.
Another point is of course the traditional lack of a single support channel. There is simply no guarantee for support for most OSS and face it, the actual software is at most half of the total cost, support being one of the largest money sinks. To a true company, the guarantees of support are much more important. And saying that they can do their own support (it's Open Source, right?) is simply no alternative, and neither is waiting for the whim of the masses to get round to their bug (yes, I know, they are now dependent on the whim of the supplier. But at least there's a binding support contract there).
Finally, for more critical applications, there are certain audits and certificates. I've rarely considered that with respect to OSS, but it does raise an interesting point. Especially with government applications and more critical applications, there will be a need for certain certificates. The Open Source community just hasn't got the money to fund such audits.
So, what can a company like Guardent do to repell these fears?
First off, as commercial suppliers, they can actually sign the support contracts and be held responsible for timely updates and fixes. Also, fixes now will be gathered and maintained by a single body, which is much preferable from a customer's point of view than scanning the Nets blindly every day for new updates.
Second, as suppliers, Guardent can create the UI necessary when packaging and integrating the seperate applications. This makes the package accessible to the users. Again, I cannot stress how important this is!
And finally, as a commercial company, they may be able to raise the cash necessary to get the necessary certificates and maintain them. Without these, a whole market segment will be closed to them no matter how well the software performs.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am saying is that banks might require some for education or training, or even just provide literature, something, ANYTHING to let people know that it's probably not the best idea to do your internet banking from KINKOS!.
You'll love this then: a major bank here (The Netherlands) was running a commercial for internet banking a year ago where it shows some people in an internet cafe sending money to their broke daughter... Education eh?
Just like Capcom, Sony can't count past 2...
Iraqis do not have vast territory to retreat from.
They don't have cold winter to try to freeze unprepared enemys.
They don't have woods to hide partisans in.
Lines of supply are fine to target, but coalition have transport aviation to resupply remote troops.
They do have some hard and useless terrain to retreat from (desert). They do have some nice climatologic things coming up: sandstorms, a nice sunny and dry summer... And transport aviation is nice, but useless in sandstorm season...
Most hostels I've been in while I was in Australia have a book trading corner. That way, backpackers can read loads of books while only carrying a single book, so they can travel light. You can leave a book and take another one if you're finished.
I know I've enjoyed the possibility to read books I would normally not risk spending hard earned cash on, exposing myself to new authors. Just a pity there wasn't usually a good selection of scif-fi and fantasy around.
I'm just wondering, we're always saying that all forms of opt-out are inherently bad in the case of spamming. Why is this any different for phone-spammers?
Getting listed on a DNC list is obviously an opt-out scheme. I can't help wondering what makes this such a good thing and DM people advocating a national/worldwide opt-out list evil at the same time.
Customers (not necessarily end-users but same thing applies to them) are unable to accurately specify their needs. This is not a problem, but just be aware that this happens a lot.
The customer is not an evilly whimsical person. He usually has needs that he tries to formulate by stating a possible solution. This is a natural reaction, since people solve problems with solutions. Only, it's not the customer's job (and often not in his ability) to specify a good solution: this is the job of either a "system analyst" or the programmer, depending on size of assignment etc. This is the reason that customers seem to change their minds on a whim, the "That's not it, but I'll know it when I see it" attitude. He's doing his best to help you, but in the process is misrepresenting the problem he has and actually making it harder for you to come up with the right solution.
Bottom line: good software people help the customer formulate their problem. It's an essential part of the job!
Thanks :) I knew it was something else (notice the questionmark in the posting) but was too busy to look it up...
Basically, the
Technologies included in the
Basically, anyone who imlements a CRI will be able to run
Primers:
Caveat when buying books: see that they cover the latest release and not forex the beta release!
The concern here is well overblown. There little reason to believe that true brainwashing by ads is possible. Yes, they will be more effective if this technique works. But really, is this any different than marketeers hiring a psychologist to research the response of target audiences on candidate ads using test persons. The only difference is that they're using a neuroscientist instead of a psychologist!
The potential benefits are good though. Neuroscience is getting more funding, so there's a real possibility that scientists will find out a bit more about the way the brain reacts to certain stimuli.
More understanding of the human brain == Good Thing in my book.
When I pointed out to him that putting big bright orange notes on windshields might make the cars slightly bigger targets, he scratched his head and just stood there, silent.
Actually, police officers do the same things sometimes where I live. Only, they're a bit smarter about it and leave notes on all cars. Good cars get a note saying "Nothing in sight" and targets get a note saying "Next time, you may just want to cover up that cellphone of yours!"
Imagine a story where the opposite is true: a Windows Network Admin who asks how to secure a few Macs from the rest of the Win network. Be honest, the bloke would be flamed to a cinder, and rightly so, because securing a network should be part of a Network Admin's daily job!
So why is the majority of the reactions like, "Oh, poor Mac Network Admin, those Win users deserve any shit they get!" Why not subtly reminding him what the fsck his job is in the first place?
Oh wait, I see: he needs to maintain a few WinXP boxes in a *nix environ, so when he bitches he must be right. Because it's Microsoft. Right?
I can't count the number of times last minute feature requests are required to be in a build. As software developers, we just deal with it. But quality suffers because of it. And the engineers get the bad wrap.
Perhaps the next stage in the advance of software development will be when the engineers say, "No, that's not realistic. I will not build this under these constraints."
I know, there's fear of being fired, yadda yadda yadda. But it's part of the coming-of-age of the software developer. The point is, many developers just do what they're told or give unrealistic estimates. This gives managers little trust in what actually is possible and lead to stupid promises to customers.
The professional attitude should be: let managers shield me from stuff I don't want to know about, and I'll tell the manager what he needs to know (not: what he wants to hear) to do his job properly.
Sure software development has improved. People have been trying different things in the past two decade-and-a-half.
Things like RAD has helped a lot of customers in formulating their needs. This is another step into the realisation that users are not really aware of what they want. Keep in mind that in most industries, it's not really the end-users who need to formulate what the requirements are, but are perfectly capable of deciding whether what is being offered is good (relative to what they already have).
Awareness of the limitations of the developers is growing and developers themselves are growing out of their endless optimism. Yes, developers do have their share of blame on the poor perception on software development.
There is progress. That progress is mostly in the way of growing awareness of the reality of the environment in which software is being built.
For a construction project all of these elements are mapped out well in advance, which is why the construction industry can work on lower margins.
Ah, the inevitable comparison with the construction world... Just keep in mind how many of the larger construction projects (focus is on the larger projects, because the problems for software development are also on the front of the larger projects) are delivered on-time, on-budget.
Excuse me? Non-traditional religion? Political Groups? What does that mean?
Only "traditional" religions are allowed? What is a traditional religion? I might add that Christianity (probably a traditional religion) was considered non-traditional some 2000 years ago.
And political groups? Pah. If you're not part of the ruling order, please stop publishing on the Web, we don't need you. Long live the status quo!
The US of A seems to be forgetting its most important of roots: Freedom.
The lack of PR is strange, even more when you consider it's stuck between a couple of heavy hitters like James Bond, LotR and Harry Potter.
Sure, ST will get its traditional crowd to the theaters, but to get the mainstream to watch, it needs to contend with the aforementioned which are well hyped up. If people decide to go to one movie this Christmas period, it would probably be a toss up between LotR (great movie last time round) and Harry Potter (for both kids and adults). It looks like ST will lose out big time...
[Apologies for the poor translation, no time for a better attempt]
The burning building contains the IT department and a part of the faculty of Business Administration [Closest I could come up with: Bestuurskunde]. The building has three storeys.
The university fears the loss of its network facilities and is trying to save the main computer. According to a spokesman this network is amongst the fastest in Europe. Most classes are expected to resume as normal today. [According to other sources, this is an exam week, meaning few classes anyway. This is also a reason that few students were around so chances were that this also reduced potential casualties]
The fire department is fighting the fire with 25 firefighters and expects to need the entire day to extinguish the fire. No dangerous materials have been released by the fire at this point. At the moment nothing is known about the cause of this fire.
And then you grew up and found the shocking truth that pretty much everyone smokes weed at one time or another despite prohibition...
Which is all fine and dandy, as long as you didn't inhale...
If Blizzard is going to get this right, they are going to have to get it right the first time.
The console environment is easier to develop on though: a stable end-user configuration drastically reduces complexity. Less complexity, less bugs. Bug free software is of course a myth, but consoles have a certain advantage when it comes to quality upon delivery.
So many languages to choose from, why use Java. You're unlikely to be able to explain the uses and benefits of OO in the first classes, better stick to the easier to explain benefits of good structured programming and progress from there.
Use good strict languages to enforce good behaviour (I was taught using Modula-2) before letting students tackle something as loose as C. It doesn't matter that the language for teaching programming skill is not your fanciest and hottest language, if creating a good programmer is the goal, learning a new language within the same paradigm should be easy!
Progress from one paradigm to another. Put things like OO, functional, logic, procedural in relation to each other. What are the benefits, what are the drawbacks, etc. Also a historical overview is important. Much more important than simply using the fashionable language and paradigm in a 101 course.
Arguably, this is the wrong abstraction. It's the choice between: and In most cases, the Object being printed is the more imortant of the two and the one which knows in which form it wants to be printed, so it might be a better abstraction to put the printing functionality in the Object ot be printed.
The "System.out.println(...)" way may induce a more procedural way to code things than putting the printing methods in the Object itself.
A couple of recommendations (if you're looking for a new position)
1: Never work for a non-technical manager.
Rather: never work for a manager who doesn't know that your tech abilities are more up to date than his.
3: Make sure (s)he does at least some of the software.
No no no! A manager does not have to do software. In fact, it's almost better if he doesn't do it. He needs to trust you and your estimates, he needs to spend his time talking to the customer with your estimates in hand, educate the customer with respect to the risks, and manage the expectations when the customer decides that other aspects than the technical ones have a higher priority.
4: Make sure (s)he has a spine, and is capable of forming relationships with other human beings.
This one is very important. He needs to work on a level of mutual respect with the customer. Sure, try and be friendly, but when he stoops to kissing ass, respect will be lost and the customer will not accept any negative reports, estimates or risk analysis.
I've found that if you are in an engineering field, competent former engineers make the best managers. They have first hand experience about what it takes to do a job and do it correctly. Of course, not all engineers make good managers, but most good managers were at one point a good engineer. This applies equally well to other diciplines, of course.
That's not entirely true I think. The best managers know where their knowledge stops. There are two kinds of bad managers really: managers with a management education but poor tech training, but wanting to control the tech issues. About as bad as managers with a tech background but no management training, who just want their old job but have to steer people instead.
A good manager knows when to ask the employees for their opinion and trusts them. A manager with a tech background can make some educated guesses himself, but his role is so different, that he should try and distance himself from those tech issues. His greatest asset is perhaps that he is able to judge the ability of his team and therefore more likely to respect the team's opinion.
Respecting the opinion of the employees does not necessarily mean that a manager should always defer to them. After all, he is the boss. But he should explain, "Yes, you are right, this cannot be done in three weeks. But give it your best anyway, the budget at the customer's has run out, and I have told them that we need six weeks. But they told us to go ahead on the current schedule with all the risks"
The key is that it should be brought in a way that the team knows their opinion did count, but other aspects had a higher priority, that the risks have been acknowledged and accepted.
I find this statement terribly interesting. This implies that opensource software is more heavily auditted by the US government than closed source software.
Does anyone else find this ludicrous ?
This is actually quite sensible. Someone has to pay for the audits. In commercial applications, it will be the vendor.
But with OSS, it isn't clear who is the one responsible for the audits. And it isn't clear which version will be audited (with a theoretically possible fix made every minute). So, it will probably have to be the version to be implemented. Since there is no clear responsible party who can fund the audit, it will have to be the customer.
So in that sense, it is the customer who winds up for the cost of the audit directly, while with commercial products, it will be the vendor who winds up for the cost (and calculates that back into the price of the product).
In one sense, the customer paying for it is preferable, since they can now see how the money is being spent, on the other hand, having the customer pay for it prevents the spreading of the cost. In commercial products, every customer pays for a part of the costs, in OSS, every customer has to pay for the complete audit again unless the results are frozen.
This is good news for the Open Source community. It's great to see a company making OSS the core of its business. However, the article also points out some of the traditional weak points of OSS.
One is that OSS focusses much more on technical prowess than on anything resembling a workable UI. For the true geek, no more than a command line is necessary for a UI. However, in the "real world" a user will not even consider touching the best software around if his only UI is a command line or a bad looking bunch of poorly designed widgets. It matters. Perhaps more than it should, but it is the reality. If functionality is (for the user) more or less comparable, the sleeker look will win.
Another point is of course the traditional lack of a single support channel. There is simply no guarantee for support for most OSS and face it, the actual software is at most half of the total cost, support being one of the largest money sinks. To a true company, the guarantees of support are much more important. And saying that they can do their own support (it's Open Source, right?) is simply no alternative, and neither is waiting for the whim of the masses to get round to their bug (yes, I know, they are now dependent on the whim of the supplier. But at least there's a binding support contract there).
Finally, for more critical applications, there are certain audits and certificates. I've rarely considered that with respect to OSS, but it does raise an interesting point. Especially with government applications and more critical applications, there will be a need for certain certificates. The Open Source community just hasn't got the money to fund such audits.
So, what can a company like Guardent do to repell these fears?
First off, as commercial suppliers, they can actually sign the support contracts and be held responsible for timely updates and fixes. Also, fixes now will be gathered and maintained by a single body, which is much preferable from a customer's point of view than scanning the Nets blindly every day for new updates.
Second, as suppliers, Guardent can create the UI necessary when packaging and integrating the seperate applications. This makes the package accessible to the users. Again, I cannot stress how important this is!
And finally, as a commercial company, they may be able to raise the cash necessary to get the necessary certificates and maintain them. Without these, a whole market segment will be closed to them no matter how well the software performs.