No unitaskers in my toolkit!
Never overlook the power of nylon tie wraps for bundling stuff up either. Cheap to make mistakes with.
Second that about the "gardening" hook and loop . I bought some to tie back the Dahlias and said "darn, this would work great for other stuff." The best part is that it does not stick as tenacioiusly as standard hook and loop stuff so when you're standing on your head trying to untie something it's not nearly as annoying. Just cut off a bunch, wind it in a tight spiral to overlap 3/4 of the layer below, voila.
If you put a drop of super-runny CA glue (get it at hobby shops) in the right place, it becomes a lot more permanent. Need to be careful not to glue the cable casing unless that's what you wanted but it works.
Goldberg, amen. Many of the posters to/. need to be watered to be sentient. I've flown planes at 600MPH plus and have raced cars at 180MPH. The car thing is WAY more attention-getting. I still fly planes that go high and fast. Common sense caused me to give up the racing cars. (that, and one too many "if it gets quiet don't unbuckle your belts - you might be flying through the air." incidents and weariness in turning money into noise.)
Actually, rich people are the lousiest charitable givers. Those below the poverty line in the US give a much higher percentage of their earnings to social good. I've been on several boards for charitable organizations and trying to pry money out of rich people directly is impossible. If they have a trust set up, you have a much better chance. I'd sit in the office of one of my causes and folks would walk in off the street and give us crumpled up $5 and $10 bills because the organization helped a friend or relative out.
What a jackass. I've dealt with folks like him and the best thing I can possibly say is he's a slaver. It's likely his company takes passports away from outsourced individuals and thinks fear is the best management technique. They deliver adequate product against Moore's Law and think that's that's intelligence. Listen up, mister idiot. We invented most of the tools you rely on to drive your Dilbertspace. You've pissed me off enough to think about a tool that will replace you. You are a fly waiting for the windshield to come.
Any contribution is good. I encourage small IT shops to do things like correct or illuminate documentation, contribute to relevant forums, and contribute any tools you've created or extended. You don't have to be a code hero to contribute to OSS.
Hmm. Seems someone hijacked this acct to say bad things. Trying to figure out who/what/why. FWIW I bear no malace towards Stuart or Dan. Both good OSS advocates.
Stuart Cohen is a hole. I don't say this lightly because he "laid me off." After building OSDL in his addled image that didn't get it, does not get it, and is entirely involved in being involved with himself; not to mention Daniel Frye's relentless preening and internal positioning.
It wasn't a hard thing for me to adopt OSS. It was a marketing idea that brought Cohen and Frye to this. They are both relentless fools.
It is Microsoft's board goodbye to Ballmer. He could not exist outside of Microsoft so giving him half of their cash to watch him go down in a self-involved ball of flames is reasonable. The bleeding will stop far short of that.
His ego will not let him do something else. After all, he never dated. He married an employee. He is a weak thinker and undisciplined, at best.
I keep remembering the desparate "I need a boot loader" email I got from his sorry ass via UUCP. I contributed one out of common grace. And in that he fucked me. At that point I came to realize the poor quality of many people in our business and Ballmer in particular.
My butt still hurts.
It is time for you to go, Ballmer. You are not interesting, you were never interesting, you are a clown that makes development at Microsoft incredibly difficult if for no other reason than you are an incompetent developer.
This keeps coming up in various shapes and forms but the fact of the matter is that brilliant, high producers aggregate in places; and so do idiots.
Tom DeMarco ran a study of this in the 80s wherein teams were asked to solve the same problem. He expected a scatter-plot. It was a 45 degree line between the people who knocked the problem off and those who were clueless.
What didn't matter:
Platform.
Language (except assembler, those folks were _lost_.)
Operating System.
What did matter:
Team coherence and capability.
Design and planning; raw ability to design and plan as a coherent team. And not just a bunch of losers following a Pythonesque "Book of Common Knowledge."
(I have been to many "Does the witch weigh less than wood" meetings...)
Look at the back cover of Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics." What he _measured_ was that team capability overarchs everything. Period.
I would also ask you to look at the surface exposure of development. Folks who develop on the shoulders of many giants can and should be trying lots of stuff, because that's why platforms are built.
Folks working closer to the core (the OS, drivers, fundamental code) don't change as quickly, nor should they.
I've worked as a hatmaker (sheer, unbridled creativity with fancy ribbons and flowers and such) for high-end ladies and I've sat, confounded by bad documentation for UARTS.
Absolutely. The "Advocate" thing is something I do locally for folks who get poor customer service and I have a couple of ex-JAGs as friends. Definitely tap on them.
First of all, I'm a member of the EFF and I believe in your mission. When Ray told me what he and Mitch were up to, it was a cheap donation. I'm one of the folks who wore a munition through customs in many countries. I do not lack for logical bravado.
But you're factually incorrect and I would submit, clueless.
If you simply do the right things, the problem fixes itself.
I hear these hyperbolic "it's an immense project"
, "it's boiling the ocean" nonsense all the time. It is crap, it has been crap, it will always be crap. (Actually, crap is part of the solution.)
I would recommend visiting Portland and rather than spouting Lambda calculus or whatever actually talk to folks who think about these things as a profession. We take urban planning seriously. Your statement that "no urban planners take this seriously" is just plain wrong and illiterate.
So get off your fucking high horse and actually study the problem rather than draw cheap graphs and write masturbatory prose about discardable solutions like the San Jose railroad.
I could burn your sorry ass down with all manner of Poisson Distributions and haughty rhetoric. Don't do nothin'. What did I do today?
I just got done putting in a garden for a family, free of charge, and they'll have enough green stuff and kids interested in fresh, organic foods to inculcate a revolution.
"In your own back yard, in your own home town. The revolution starts... Now" - Steve Earle
I find these arguments pretty amusing if for no other reason than humans are a cussed lot and desire their individual freedom more than anything. So corner-case arguments like this are precisely that - corner case. I pity the fools who have to put up with tripe like this "lecturer" spits out. I posit that to understand Moore, you must understand Amdahl as well to balance the argument. That seems to have been lost.
These "arguments" ignore a fundamental thing. Urban design. The reason why people need cars in the first place is because their city design sucks. Visit Houston. Visit Atlanta. These are "cities" with the heart of a cherry pit, no observable culture and no sense of community. That's not living, it's existing.
I've done some back of the envelope and if you simply demolish urban sprawl and inculcate density and community lots of magic things happen. Involvement. Culture. Spontaneous block parties. Fun.
I live in Portland, OR. There's actually a book about how the city was designed: "The Portland Experiment" and it's fundamental reading, reading that Brad and others seem to think irrelevant. It is one of the most livable cities anywhere. Unfortunately most techies experience it via a visit to Intel out in Hillsboro and that's just wrong. When I worked for a server company in Beaverton I insisted that prospects and customers stay downtown and gave them a map of things that might interest them that they could walk to.
This mates with one of my rules. It's called the Mile Rule. If it's less than a mile from my house, I walk or ride my bike. It gets me off my fat ass, improves my cardio, alla that. So what does 1 mile buy me?
Several nice shopping districts. 2 farmer's markets, lots of cafes and coffee shops where I can hang out and discuss the world. I shop the way everyone but folks in the US shop - for today and tomorrow. I have a tiny refrigerator but counters full of some of the best fruits and veggies anywhere. Try finding that in Cumming, GA.
Oh yeah, and the always-full (both ways) bus to and from downtown's about 3 minutes walk from me. I camp on the Tri-Met pop-up, walk out the door, and the bus is there.
So Brad and others - stop criticizing our transportation system. Criticize our out of control cities. Fix the actual problem.
As for "sleeper cars". You're out of your fucking mind. I sleep very lightly if you're telling me that you can create a magic carpet ride that'll let me sleep soundly, I'll listen. But for now I think you're just full of academic shit.
If you want to get him something really special, find an ergonomics specialist locally and have them consult with your husband to find a perfect solution. I do this work locally and it involves stuff like measuring the distance from your elbows to the ground, adjusting working surface heights, and suggesting things like footrests (I have one and it's really helped my lower back). I find the choice of chair to be relatively unimportant as long as you're comfortable. I have one client that uses an old wooden roller chair. Another with a fancy-dancy Aeron. (I had one and got rid of it. I found it impossible to be comfortable in.) I use either an old Hon chair with or without arms depending on which one the cats have occupied. It really does not matter as long as your workspace is organized so you're not all torqued around while working or leaning on your elbows all day or...
Insist they use a client that can behave itself. I believe that Azeurus and MicroTorrent are in that category - and require they tune it down to a responsible level.
I've used OnTrack numerous times and they really know their stuff. I know there are other recovery services out there but these folks have earned my business.
Basically, you pay a bench fee to get the drive examined, and then they send you the costs for recovery - for a desktop HD $500-$1500 depending on the problem. The cool part is that they send you a manifest of the recoverable files/directories so you can make an informed decision.
And they _can_ perform miracles. Including dealing with bent platters. Just depends on what you want to pay.
I must say it's been a great instructional tool for people who've neglected backups. They become wild operational militants after these episodes.
Just remember that the ONLY way to ensure data cannot be recovered on a HD is to raise the drive temp past the Curie Point for the magnetics. (A charcoal BBQ works really well for this. Just pull the electronics and wrap the drive in heavy foil unless you like the smell of roasted phenolic.)
Even if you "format" a drive it means that the waveforms coming off the heads can be interpreted as a certain, predictable value - but also remember that at root, it's an analog system and so artifacts from the prior contents are around, it's just a question of finding and interpreting them... That's why the DoD and other "erase" things are so comprehensive. Trying to obliterate all artifacts.
Here's an interesting data point for you. I type about 15-25% faster if I wear earplugs. When I tune out the noise it shuts off some fundamental and unwanted feedback loop, which was probably useful when I learned how to type but now not so.
Also, some stutterers benefit by _not_ listening to themselves speak.
Oracle is an expert at 3 things:
The not game. What are they _not_ telling me?
The relentless pursuit of nothing. Our aspirin is better than yours.
Fear, fear, always. Because that's their organizational model and you must be fearful, too!
Our sales people are scared shitless, they feed off pointy-haired execs, ideologues sans reason, and now you must be afraid, too.
Reason is not sense. Sense is not reason. Yield to our reality.
BTW, Dick Cheney's been appointed to their board.
You're correct. It is basically IPMI and OOB, but apparently without requiring a separate LAN port for OOB (out of band, sorry) communications.
I install this on all servers I install and it's wild greatness. When I figure out how to deploy Mindstorms (tm) robot to do parts swap, I need never leave the house except to market myself.:->
The concern I have about vPro is that it seems tied into Intel's LANdesk product, which is proprietary and IMHO expensive for what you get.
As a person who works small IT shops, it's out of my range and of course Intel's always exacted a pound of flesh to operate with their platform.
Intel should be giving LANdesk away. Period. Their current marketing position is an impedement to sales, not an enhancement, as the value equation (what am I paying for here?) has never been clearly articulated to me, even by senior LANdesk management./
Given how reliable PCs are these days and Windows (not one single non-hardware BSOD in _years_ of properly managed PCs) it's not worth it for me, ut for big biz, yes.
Where Intel's got its marketing head up its arse is that this should be sold to the PC makers as a standard. It can't cost very much for this technology at the end of the day, no matter what Intel puffs itself up to represent.
The raw fact of the matter is that jumping to the consumer side is probably about 1000 miles, bureucratically, away from the "biz" side and thus Intel, as usual with bigCOs is its own worst enemy.
If Dell, HP, Lenovo, et. al. would put this into EVERYTHING it would be a potentially huge market for remote support.
I get along fine with VNC and LogMeIn (cool, IMHO, evalling others - perhaps a good/. topic?)
This is an ancillary system to the main trading system. The system that does real-time trading is still Tandem iron and likely will always be. Nothing else is as reliable and scalable, and nothing else will run their custom code.
Perhaps if you would stop calling the 6B people on this planet "users", a term popular among two industries - the drug trade and computers - you might find your way into thinking better about this situation.
Both hold their customers at arm's length and benefit, similarly.
I'm not sure this business actually understands the critical difference.
My challenge to OSS is that it has a _lack_ of actual challenge.
Linux is doing just fine, thank you, as a platform up and down the back-end line. The concept fits very well into vendors' needs to operate in their own interests - because they must, as profitable businesses.
It is also true that profits directly ascribed to Linux really do not exist if you compare direct Linux (or OSS) revenues (and profits) to those of SAP, Oracle, et. al. They are a _nit_.
You'd be hallucinating to not understand that Linux has compressed $$$ for the bottom bits of the stack and fulfilled the wishes of every proprietary software vendor: "the less for them, the more for me." And _may_ have made CIOS and CFOs happier. The next 2 years will codify this.
But its penetration into the actual mass market in any way that might enlighten most individuals has been pitiful. The faithful are still regarded, in general, as the crowd that believes Men in Black is a documentary.
Why?
There's a lot of value line chasing and not enough actual innovation.
So far, the examples are KDE and Gnome, two maturing projects that are _still_ chasing Microsoft and Apple. From what I've seen of Vista and Apple's latest, I think Gnome and KDE will catch up as an adequate substitute but not as a must-have innovation. That just means the whole keyboard/mouse/display thing's pretty much been wrung out.
The next great MRP system as OSS? Nope. The next great decision support innovation that drags value out of places in the organization nobody understood? Fat chance, except perhaps in miniature.
So for OSS to gain its wings it needs to stop chasing the dragon.
It needs to find its own place for wild innovation with a large, diverse, international community behind it; recognizing its strengths versus the titans.
So what to do?
A Grand Challenge; not some sort of hokey X-prize nonsense but a challenge that would galvanize the OSS community to take on the titans and force them to contribute and play nicely at the most personal level possible.
My idea of a challenge to the OSS community?
Moving to a next-generation user interface that works for people of all languages, cultures, abilities, disabilities, and modes of operation.
One that actually fulfills the promise of computation, rather than mire us further into ******* around with mouse, keyboard, and screen. That's what KDE and Gnome seem to want to do.
That, to me, is a suitable grand challenge for a life-force as large and diverse as OSS and perhaps a challenge that will show OSS's worth or finally discard it into the place the industry sees it - as lacking vision, innovation, and ability to deliver profit (not expense reduction) to organizations.
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No unitaskers in my toolkit! Never overlook the power of nylon tie wraps for bundling stuff up either. Cheap to make mistakes with. Second that about the "gardening" hook and loop . I bought some to tie back the Dahlias and said "darn, this would work great for other stuff." The best part is that it does not stick as tenacioiusly as standard hook and loop stuff so when you're standing on your head trying to untie something it's not nearly as annoying. Just cut off a bunch, wind it in a tight spiral to overlap 3/4 of the layer below, voila. If you put a drop of super-runny CA glue (get it at hobby shops) in the right place, it becomes a lot more permanent. Need to be careful not to glue the cable casing unless that's what you wanted but it works.
Goldberg, amen. Many of the posters to /. need to be watered to be sentient. I've flown planes at 600MPH plus and have raced cars at 180MPH. The car thing is WAY more attention-getting. I still fly planes that go high and fast. Common sense caused me to give up the racing cars. (that, and one too many "if it gets quiet don't unbuckle your belts - you might be flying through the air." incidents and weariness in turning money into noise.)
Actually, rich people are the lousiest charitable givers. Those below the poverty line in the US give a much higher percentage of their earnings to social good. I've been on several boards for charitable organizations and trying to pry money out of rich people directly is impossible. If they have a trust set up, you have a much better chance. I'd sit in the office of one of my causes and folks would walk in off the street and give us crumpled up $5 and $10 bills because the organization helped a friend or relative out.
What a jackass. I've dealt with folks like him and the best thing I can possibly say is he's a slaver. It's likely his company takes passports away from outsourced individuals and thinks fear is the best management technique. They deliver adequate product against Moore's Law and think that's that's intelligence. Listen up, mister idiot. We invented most of the tools you rely on to drive your Dilbertspace. You've pissed me off enough to think about a tool that will replace you. You are a fly waiting for the windshield to come.
Any contribution is good. I encourage small IT shops to do things like correct or illuminate documentation, contribute to relevant forums, and contribute any tools you've created or extended. You don't have to be a code hero to contribute to OSS.
Cool. Can figure 8 be next?
Hmm. Seems someone hijacked this acct to say bad things. Trying to figure out who/what/why. FWIW I bear no malace towards Stuart or Dan. Both good OSS advocates.
It wasn't a hard thing for me to adopt OSS. It was a marketing idea that brought Cohen and Frye to this. They are both relentless fools.
Indeed. Thank you. There's a palpable difference between "what if" and "what if _we_" in the group politique. Once you get to _we_ it gets fun.
It is Microsoft's board goodbye to Ballmer. He could not exist outside of Microsoft so giving him half of their cash to watch him go down in a self-involved ball of flames is reasonable. The bleeding will stop far short of that. His ego will not let him do something else. After all, he never dated. He married an employee. He is a weak thinker and undisciplined, at best. I keep remembering the desparate "I need a boot loader" email I got from his sorry ass via UUCP. I contributed one out of common grace. And in that he fucked me. At that point I came to realize the poor quality of many people in our business and Ballmer in particular. My butt still hurts. It is time for you to go, Ballmer. You are not interesting, you were never interesting, you are a clown that makes development at Microsoft incredibly difficult if for no other reason than you are an incompetent developer.
This keeps coming up in various shapes and forms but the fact of the matter is that brilliant, high producers aggregate in places; and so do idiots.
Tom DeMarco ran a study of this in the 80s wherein teams were asked to solve the same problem. He expected a scatter-plot. It was a 45 degree line between the people who knocked the problem off and those who were clueless.
What didn't matter:
Platform. Language (except assembler, those folks were _lost_.) Operating System.
What did matter:
Team coherence and capability.
Design and planning; raw ability to design and plan as a coherent team. And not just a bunch of losers following a Pythonesque "Book of Common Knowledge."
(I have been to many "Does the witch weigh less than wood" meetings...)
Look at the back cover of Boehm's "Software Engineering Economics." What he _measured_ was that team capability overarchs everything. Period.
I would also ask you to look at the surface exposure of development. Folks who develop on the shoulders of many giants can and should be trying lots of stuff, because that's why platforms are built.
Folks working closer to the core (the OS, drivers, fundamental code) don't change as quickly, nor should they.
I've worked as a hatmaker (sheer, unbridled creativity with fancy ribbons and flowers and such) for high-end ladies and I've sat, confounded by bad documentation for UARTS.
Two different regimes.
Absolutely. The "Advocate" thing is something I do locally for folks who get poor customer service and I have a couple of ex-JAGs as friends. Definitely tap on them.
But you're factually incorrect and I would submit, clueless.
If you simply do the right things, the problem fixes itself.
I hear these hyperbolic "it's an immense project" , "it's boiling the ocean" nonsense all the time. It is crap, it has been crap, it will always be crap. (Actually, crap is part of the solution.)
I would recommend visiting Portland and rather than spouting Lambda calculus or whatever actually talk to folks who think about these things as a profession. We take urban planning seriously. Your statement that "no urban planners take this seriously" is just plain wrong and illiterate.
So get off your fucking high horse and actually study the problem rather than draw cheap graphs and write masturbatory prose about discardable solutions like the San Jose railroad.
I could burn your sorry ass down with all manner of Poisson Distributions and haughty rhetoric. Don't do nothin'. What did I do today?
I just got done putting in a garden for a family, free of charge, and they'll have enough green stuff and kids interested in fresh, organic foods to inculcate a revolution.
"In your own back yard, in your own home town. The revolution starts... Now" - Steve Earle
I find these arguments pretty amusing if for no other reason than humans are a cussed lot and desire their individual freedom more than anything. So corner-case arguments like this are precisely that - corner case. I pity the fools who have to put up with tripe like this "lecturer" spits out. I posit that to understand Moore, you must understand Amdahl as well to balance the argument. That seems to have been lost.
These "arguments" ignore a fundamental thing. Urban design. The reason why people need cars in the first place is because their city design sucks. Visit Houston. Visit Atlanta. These are "cities" with the heart of a cherry pit, no observable culture and no sense of community. That's not living, it's existing.
I've done some back of the envelope and if you simply demolish urban sprawl and inculcate density and community lots of magic things happen. Involvement. Culture. Spontaneous block parties. Fun.
I live in Portland, OR. There's actually a book about how the city was designed: "The Portland Experiment" and it's fundamental reading, reading that Brad and others seem to think irrelevant. It is one of the most livable cities anywhere. Unfortunately most techies experience it via a visit to Intel out in Hillsboro and that's just wrong. When I worked for a server company in Beaverton I insisted that prospects and customers stay downtown and gave them a map of things that might interest them that they could walk to.
This mates with one of my rules. It's called the Mile Rule. If it's less than a mile from my house, I walk or ride my bike. It gets me off my fat ass, improves my cardio, alla that. So what does 1 mile buy me?
Several nice shopping districts. 2 farmer's markets, lots of cafes and coffee shops where I can hang out and discuss the world. I shop the way everyone but folks in the US shop - for today and tomorrow. I have a tiny refrigerator but counters full of some of the best fruits and veggies anywhere. Try finding that in Cumming, GA.
Oh yeah, and the always-full (both ways) bus to and from downtown's about 3 minutes walk from me. I camp on the Tri-Met pop-up, walk out the door, and the bus is there.
So Brad and others - stop criticizing our transportation system. Criticize our out of control cities. Fix the actual problem.
As for "sleeper cars". You're out of your fucking mind. I sleep very lightly if you're telling me that you can create a magic carpet ride that'll let me sleep soundly, I'll listen. But for now I think you're just full of academic shit.
If you want to get him something really special, find an ergonomics specialist locally and have them consult with your husband to find a perfect solution. I do this work locally and it involves stuff like measuring the distance from your elbows to the ground, adjusting working surface heights, and suggesting things like footrests (I have one and it's really helped my lower back). I find the choice of chair to be relatively unimportant as long as you're comfortable. I have one client that uses an old wooden roller chair. Another with a fancy-dancy Aeron. (I had one and got rid of it. I found it impossible to be comfortable in.) I use either an old Hon chair with or without arms depending on which one the cats have occupied. It really does not matter as long as your workspace is organized so you're not all torqued around while working or leaning on your elbows all day or...
Insist they use a client that can behave itself. I believe that Azeurus and MicroTorrent are in that category - and require they tune it down to a responsible level.
Basically, you pay a bench fee to get the drive examined, and then they send you the costs for recovery - for a desktop HD $500-$1500 depending on the problem. The cool part is that they send you a manifest of the recoverable files/directories so you can make an informed decision.
And they _can_ perform miracles. Including dealing with bent platters. Just depends on what you want to pay.
I must say it's been a great instructional tool for people who've neglected backups. They become wild operational militants after these episodes.
Just remember that the ONLY way to ensure data cannot be recovered on a HD is to raise the drive temp past the Curie Point for the magnetics. (A charcoal BBQ works really well for this. Just pull the electronics and wrap the drive in heavy foil unless you like the smell of roasted phenolic.)
Even if you "format" a drive it means that the waveforms coming off the heads can be interpreted as a certain, predictable value - but also remember that at root, it's an analog system and so artifacts from the prior contents are around, it's just a question of finding and interpreting them... That's why the DoD and other "erase" things are so comprehensive. Trying to obliterate all artifacts.
Can you say Toady? Sure, I knew you could.
Also, some stutterers benefit by _not_ listening to themselves speak.
Oracle is an expert at 3 things: The not game. What are they _not_ telling me? The relentless pursuit of nothing. Our aspirin is better than yours. Fear, fear, always. Because that's their organizational model and you must be fearful, too! Our sales people are scared shitless, they feed off pointy-haired execs, ideologues sans reason, and now you must be afraid, too. Reason is not sense. Sense is not reason. Yield to our reality. BTW, Dick Cheney's been appointed to their board.
You're correct. It is basically IPMI and OOB, but apparently without requiring a separate LAN port for OOB (out of band, sorry) communications.
:->
/. topic?)
I install this on all servers I install and it's wild greatness. When I figure out how to deploy Mindstorms (tm) robot to do parts swap, I need never leave the house except to market myself.
The concern I have about vPro is that it seems tied into Intel's LANdesk product, which is proprietary and IMHO expensive for what you get.
As a person who works small IT shops, it's out of my range and of course Intel's always exacted a pound of flesh to operate with their platform.
Intel should be giving LANdesk away. Period. Their current marketing position is an impedement to sales, not an enhancement, as the value equation (what am I paying for here?) has never been clearly articulated to me, even by senior LANdesk management./
Given how reliable PCs are these days and Windows (not one single non-hardware BSOD in _years_ of properly managed PCs) it's not worth it for me, ut for big biz, yes.
Where Intel's got its marketing head up its arse is that this should be sold to the PC makers as a standard. It can't cost very much for this technology at the end of the day, no matter what Intel puffs itself up to represent.
The raw fact of the matter is that jumping to the consumer side is probably about 1000 miles, bureucratically, away from the "biz" side and thus Intel, as usual with bigCOs is its own worst enemy.
If Dell, HP, Lenovo, et. al. would put this into EVERYTHING it would be a potentially huge market for remote support.
I get along fine with VNC and LogMeIn (cool, IMHO, evalling others - perhaps a good
This is an ancillary system to the main trading system. The system that does real-time trading is still Tandem iron and likely will always be. Nothing else is as reliable and scalable, and nothing else will run their custom code.
Perhaps if you would stop calling the 6B people on this planet "users", a term popular among two industries - the drug trade and computers - you might find your way into thinking better about this situation.
Both hold their customers at arm's length and benefit, similarly.
I'm not sure this business actually understands the critical difference.
My challenge to OSS is that it has a _lack_ of actual challenge.
Linux is doing just fine, thank you, as a platform up and down the back-end line. The concept fits very well into vendors' needs to operate in their own interests - because they must, as profitable businesses.
It is also true that profits directly ascribed to Linux really do not exist if you compare direct Linux (or OSS) revenues (and profits) to those of SAP, Oracle, et. al. They are a _nit_.
You'd be hallucinating to not understand that Linux has compressed $$$ for the bottom bits of the stack and fulfilled the wishes of every proprietary software vendor: "the less for them, the more for me." And _may_ have made CIOS and CFOs happier. The next 2 years will codify this.
But its penetration into the actual mass market in any way that might enlighten most individuals has been pitiful. The faithful are still regarded, in general, as the crowd that believes Men in Black is a documentary.
Why?
There's a lot of value line chasing and not enough actual innovation.
So far, the examples are KDE and Gnome, two maturing projects that are _still_ chasing Microsoft and Apple. From what I've seen of Vista and Apple's latest, I think Gnome and KDE will catch up as an adequate substitute but not as a must-have innovation. That just means the whole keyboard/mouse/display thing's pretty much been wrung out.
The next great MRP system as OSS? Nope. The next great decision support innovation that drags value out of places in the organization nobody understood? Fat chance, except perhaps in miniature.
So for OSS to gain its wings it needs to stop chasing the dragon.
It needs to find its own place for wild innovation with a large, diverse, international community behind it; recognizing its strengths versus the titans.
So what to do?
A Grand Challenge; not some sort of hokey X-prize nonsense but a challenge that would galvanize the OSS community to take on the titans and force them to contribute and play nicely at the most personal level possible.
My idea of a challenge to the OSS community?
Moving to a next-generation user interface that works for people of all languages, cultures, abilities, disabilities, and modes of operation.
One that actually fulfills the promise of computation, rather than mire us further into ******* around with mouse, keyboard, and screen. That's what KDE and Gnome seem to want to do.
That, to me, is a suitable grand challenge for a life-force as large and diverse as OSS and perhaps a challenge that will show OSS's worth or finally discard it into the place the industry sees it - as lacking vision, innovation, and ability to deliver profit (not expense reduction) to organizations.
ROFL
"Granted, all of this will need proper tuning."