Global Warming News

[dave1949]

I agree and wish to withdraw my flippant remark at the end`of my post. My apologies

I've been snippy tonight, no offense taken. I do wish I knew how to use a spell checker with the forum reply window. I can't spell anymore after years of writing with spell checkers.
Dave.

 

[aczlan]

Even if you lose nothing, the expense of tracking and applying endless updates is atrocious. If Bill had to give a dime to every user for every nonsense reboot, he would be broke.

Have you counted the number of updates on a Ubuntu platform lately? There are a few here, a few there and at the end of the week you have 15 updates and a reboot needed. To make things even more fun, any one of them can make things suddenly stop working (such as X or VMWare).
[rant]And on the "working" end of things, there is something to be said for software that "just works" out of the box, without having to spend 2-3 days trying to get X on Centos 5.2 to work with your graphics card, giving up, installing Ubuntu and finding that VMWare will not work on the Linux kernel that fixes the display card issues. As someone who has spent a lot of time calling various Linux distros names trying to get things to "just work" I have to say most of the time on windows platforms things "just work" or can be made to work in a reasonable amount of time. That is why we went to Server 2008 when we upgraded from a NT4 domain controller last year, while the MS license was expensive, so is a month of my time to get a *nix server up and working as a domain controller. Could we have made it work? Probably if we were willing to switch everyone from XP to Linux and retrain everyone to use Linux on their desktops and if we were comfortable with Linux on the desktop (which we are not for our users).
Does *nix have its place? Yes, we use it on wireless boxes in all of our libraries (OpenWRT is great, it can make a $50 Linksys wireless access point work like a $500 Cisco one) and we use CentOS on most of our internal servers, but IMO, on the desktop you cannot yet replace windows with Linux except for as a kiosk (and if you are paying for a license with the computer, why not use it?)[/rant]

I've been snippy tonight, no offense taken. I do wish I knew how to use a spell checker with the forum reply window. I can't spell anymore after years of writing with spell checkers.
Dave.

Firefox has a spellchecker built into it that will show a red line under words in your posts that are misspelled.


Aaron Z

 

[FallbrookFarmer]

Bill Gates made much his money the old fashioned way, lying, cheating and stealing.
United States v. Microsoft - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Microsoft has been in and out of court in the US and Europe for years. Most of the charges revolve around anti-trust and monopoly laws. Microsoft repeated some of the IBM bundling tactics used to dominate the commercial mainframe market in the late 1970's and early 1980's - which put them in court too.

Okay, so alls fair in war and business. The real issue to me is the number of better quality products developed by software entrepreneurs that Microsoft, due to it's market position, was able to scuttle, or incorporate a similar but of poorer quality product into Windows OS, and give away for free - just to keep any competition away. Sure Bill made many millionaires, he also made money on every one of them by keeping it all in house.

If you take a clear eyed view at the reliability and stability of Microsoft products, they are on a par well below industry software performance standards. Add in the security flaws and you have even more to object to. How much has Microsoft's sloppy security cost the business world - to date? Even if you lose nothing, the expense of tracking and applying endless updates is atrocious. If Bill had to give a dime to every user for every nonsense reboot, he would be broke. It was not technical excellence that got Bill where he is.

Bill and Melinda Gates are doing great charity work. I think you will find that the foundation and active philanthropy began after they married in 1993.

Yes, Bill and Waltons are out there redistributing the wealth they chiseled out of hard working Americans.
Dave.

In reading the wiki in would seem to me that the score at the end would be Microsoft 1/DOJ 0
There was an old saying back when I was a cop, You could indict a ham sandwich. Just because somebody gets sued a lot doesn't necessarily equate to you did something wrong.
Some surgeons, who take on what are called "hopeless" cases have a tendency to get sued a lot, does that make them inferior surgeons?
While I would agree that Windows is sometimes maddening, let me tell you about my first computer ,a Radio Shack TRS-80 w 16K of memory and whose storage medium was a cassette recorder, you want to talk about frustration!
I have no great love for Bill Gates or the Walton's for that matter. My point was that both, were able enhance our economy by increasing it in the whole.
I do not see economics as a zero sum game(If I make money, I must be taking it from somebody else)If you make the pie bigger, everybody gets more.
If you were to go to a Wal-Mart and question, whether the people walking in the door as to they felt they were about to get "Chiseled" ,l don't think you would get too many positive replies.
That would apply to the front entrance AND the employee entrance

 

[dave1949]

Have you counted the number of updates on a Ubuntu platform lately? There are a few here, a few there and at the end of the week you have 15 updates and a reboot needed. To make things even more fun, any one of them can make things suddenly stop working (such as X or VMWare).
[rant]And on the "working" end of things, there is something to be said for software that "just works" out of the box, without having to spend 2-3 days trying to get X on Centos 5.2 to work with your graphics card, giving up, installing Ubuntu and finding that VMWare will not work on the Linux kernel that fixes the display card issues. As someone who has spent a lot of time calling various Linux distros names trying to get things to "just work" I have to say most of the time on windows platforms things "just work" or can be made to work in a reasonable amount of time. That is why we went to Server 2008 when we upgraded from a NT4 domain controller last year, while the MS license was expensive, so is a month of my time to get a *nix server up and working as a domain controller. Could we have made it work? Probably if we were willing to switch everyone from XP to Linux and retrain everyone to use Linux on their desktops and if we were comfortable with Linux on the desktop (which we are not for our users).
Does *nix have its place? Yes, we use it on wireless boxes in all of our libraries (OpenWRT is great, it can make a $50 Linksys wireless access point work like a $500 Cisco one) and we use CentOS on most of our internal servers, but IMO, on the desktop you cannot yet replace windows with Linux except for as a kiosk (and if you are paying for a license with the computer, why not use it?)[/rant]


Firefox has a spellchecker built into it that will show a red line under words in your posts that are misspelled.


Aaron Z

Thanks for the Firefox tip, I will try it out. We use both IE and Firefox browsers.

The work I used to do about nine years ago was Oracle datatbases on unix/Solaris. Running on Sun servers, it was very stable, >99.95%, and very fast. I have also tended Oracle on an IBM mini running a derivative of At&T Unix, that was back in the mid 1990's It was also very stable and amazingly fast given the hardware it was running on. As of ~2000, any flavor of Linux wasn't a good choice for large commercial operations, except the IBM adapted version running on their mainframes. Doesn't sound like a lot has changed for the environment you are in.

My wife has had good results with linux in a school environment where the complexities and performance pressures are much lower. They adopted it when MS licences just became too expensive to justify in a school. She says now MS Office and Windows costs around $75 per year per desktop with 'university site' pricing.

I think you can get a lot done cheaply with an open source type of distribution under the right conditions such as a prototype system or some kinds of development environments. Or the uses you described above. If you are brave, talented and the risk warrants it, you can do much more.

I have never worked on SQLServer. Looked at it a couple times but couldn't locate the OS command line or the vi editor

My point is that you pay well for MS products, they portray themselves as playing in the commercial enterprise zone, yet their software is a lot less stable than what I worked with 10 years ago when compared to Solaris or Oracle. And those were multi-user systems. The Solaris system peaked at around 4000 concurrent users and usually had about 2500 concurrent users.

IE tells me it has to 'recover' the program at least every other day. That's an improvement over BSofD, but not what I would call great software. If a*nix variant desktop suite can even come close to giving them a run for their money, that says something. Without *nix breathing on their necks, MS products probably would be worse than they are.

Well, that's all in the past for me. Can't say I really miss it either.
Dave.

 

[aczlan]

Thanks for the Firefox tip, I will try it out. We use both IE and Firefox browsers.

I only use IE when forced to by a lazy web-developer

My wife has had good results with linux in a school environment where the complexities and performance pressures are much lower. They adopted it when MS licences just became too expensive to justify in a school. She says now MS Office and Windows costs around $75 per year per desktop with 'university site' pricing.

I think you can get a lot done cheaply with an open source type of distribution under the right conditions such as a prototype system or some kinds of development environments. Or the uses you described above. If you are brave, talented and the risk warrants it, you can do much more.

It CAN be done with a *nix platform, but for us, the benefit of converting from Windows to *nix is not there. We run *nix on the backend, but our desktops (and all of the desktops we support) are Windows, so switching to *nix on the desktop would cost us more than we would gain.

IE tells me it has to 'recover' the program at least every other day. That's an improvement over BSofD, but not what I would call great software. If a*nix variant desktop suite can even come close to giving them a run for their money, that says something.

I run Firefox and it likes to be closed and re-opened once a week, but other than that it runs fine. I do run AdBlockPlus on it and I would not be without it. I love not seeing all the ads on webpages.

Without *nix breathing on their necks, MS products probably would be worse than they are.

Yep, look at how long IE6 lasted, then FF (and others) started adding features and we have had IE7 and 8 in short order. Competition is a good thing.

Aaron Z

 

[Pilot]

Ah, yes, bad, bad business people, we gotta have government to save us from them.

That's the attitude that comes across in much of the media and from many people of a certain political philosophy. But think about this:

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of businesses in this country, each of them competing for your dollars. That competition spurs them to work harder to bring you the best goods and services at the lowest prices they can. And the fact that they don't always succeed is simply an aspect that they are run by people. But the system is basically the best there is even though once in awhile we hear about some business person screwing his/her customers or the general public. And with so many people in business, and the anti-business attitude of many in the media, it's amazing we don't hear about unscrupulous behavior more often.

What if the government ran or regulated everything?

Years ago, before the commies went under in the USSR, we had some Soviet foresters visit the Mt. Hood National Forest. They couldn't understand why they saw some log trucks going one way on a highway and others going in the opposite direction hauling to different mills. "How inefficient!" What they didn't understand was that our timber sales, which usually amounted to 5-10 million board feet at a time were sold at different times and market conditions were not constant; that mills had different capabilities, some optimized for old growth (back when it wasn't a sin to cut an old tree), some were optimized for second growth. The log haul was only a tiny part of the total cost picture and was insignificant when compared to other factors.

A few years later I participated in a forestry tour of Russia. When the government still owned the mills. The mills looked like something you might see here in the 1930's, very dangerous working conditions, very inefficient. Yup, government sure was looking out for those women who were pushing the logs into the saws by hand. Their only safety equipment was their own good sense and luck. In the USA, the machinery pulled the logs into the saws--safer, more efficient--and the mills could cut many times the volume per day than what the Russian mills could cut. In fact, with competition, a Russian mill couldn't survive in the USA. Our mills were bringing you a 2 X 4 at much lower cost--lower cost to your wallet as well as to worker's bodies.

In India just a few years ago, the government prohibited imports of cars and many other manufactured goods in order to protect their own industries. Kind of like some politicians here want to restrict imports of products similar to those made in their districts. The cars you could buy were pieces of crap. Same in Russia. When both countries opened up their markets, the products had to improve or perish. The USSR collapsed in 1991, and as early as 1993, most of the cars you saw in Moscow were BMW's, Volvo's, Saab's, Fiats, VW's. A friend had a Russian built car that hadn't run in years. The few Russian built cars were copies of '60's vintage Fiats, built under license, a result of lack of competition and desire for profit. In India, due to competition and the profit motive, Tata Motors is now selling a car for $2250--yes a brand new car. Doesn't have all our safety features, doesn't go very fast, but it's better and cheaper than anything they sold just a few years ago. When the people get wealthier, their values will change and they will demand more safety features, but right now, just having a car is a great thing.

Before you bash businesses consider all the good stuff business, even big businesses, have brought you and me. We are wealthy in this country because of the combination of business, our free enterprise system, the profit motive, and yes, government. But most of our wealth results from business, not government.

 

[keegs]

Thanks for the Firefox tip, I will try it out. We use both IE and Firefox browsers.

The work I used to do about nine years ago was Oracle datatbases on unix/Solaris. Running on Sun servers, it was very stable, >99.95%, and very fast. I have also tended Oracle on an IBM mini running a derivative of At&T Unix, that was back in the mid 1990's It was also very stable and amazingly fast given the hardware it was running on. As of ~2000, any flavor of Linux wasn't a good choice for large commercial operations, except the IBM adapted version running on their mainframes. Doesn't sound like a lot has changed for the environment you are in.

My wife has had good results with linux in a school environment where the complexities and performance pressures are much lower. They adopted it when MS licences just became too expensive to justify in a school. She says now MS Office and Windows costs around $75 per year per desktop with 'university site' pricing.

I think you can get a lot done cheaply with an open source type of distribution under the right conditions such as a prototype system or some kinds of development environments. Or the uses you described above. If you are brave, talented and the risk warrants it, you can do much more.

I have never worked on SQLServer. Looked at it a couple times but couldn't locate the OS command line or the vi editor

My point is that you pay well for MS products, they portray themselves as playing in the commercial enterprise zone, yet their software is a lot less stable than what I worked with 10 years ago when compared to Solaris or Oracle. And those were multi-user systems. The Solaris system peaked at around 4000 concurrent users and usually had about 2500 concurrent users.

IE tells me it has to 'recover' the program at least every other day. That's an improvement over BSofD, but not what I would call great software. If a*nix variant desktop suite can even come close to giving them a run for their money, that says something. Without *nix breathing on their necks, MS products probably would be worse than they are.

Well, that's all in the past for me. Can't say I really miss it either.
Dave.

We're running Solaris on about 80% of our servers now Dave, down from about 95% over the past five years or so. It's always been very stable although some of their T series machines have had some issues. Virtualization is cutting into hardware sales (while saving the environment ) big time though. I imagine the Oracle takeover will give SUN a few more years than it otherwise had.

You can look at ieSpell for you IE browser. I've used it in the past.

OK....Fallbrook, Loren, Pilot, Mike, Dave....let's have a group hug now..

 

[SpringHollow]

It is unbelievably naive to think that business/free markets would make the world wonderful if unfettered by government. There are so many examples throughout history that show this is not true. And the reverse is also true, a government run economy/society does not work well either. What is hard is to find the best mix of oversight/freedom.

Ken

 

[MossRoad]

Thread is closed.