[Novalug] Install/Tweak Fest at Oct Meeting?

ethan@757.org ethan@757.org
Thu Oct 1 17:41:23 EDT 2009


> The entire Microsoft Solutions Provider profit model is to force businesses
> to upgrade every two years, four at a minimum.  They break their own APIs
> and prevent things from working, because they don't care.  They want to

Well there is a lot of people still running XP, which came out in 2001. 
It's 2009 now. That's quite a long time.

You take modern software for Linux/Unix and you will be lucky to get it to 
compile on an old system without having to recompile the supporting 
libraries. I remember the days of trying to get the stuff from the linux 
world to compile on standard ANSI C compilers. Trying to compile open 
source stuff on MIPS Pro on IRIX or on Sun. Ouch.

At some point you have to move forward or not.

Lots of businesses run on old versions of Exchange.

> force upgrades.  They want to keep people moving and buying new. It's a
> self-fulling industry of hardware, peripheral, platform and applications.  And
> in this decade, they added infrastructure which has to be updated, or it
> doesn't work or at least not efficiently, before we even talk security.  That's
> the problem.

Yea, some of that is annoying. I have no intention to run Vista or Windows 
7, and don't like all the authentication garbage. Microsoft knows people 
would steal it, and they're right. In their world they assume that if a 
computer doesn't ship with a legal copy of Windows then it's likely to get 
a pirated copy. They're probably right.

> I don't mind proprietary companies as long as they deliver value and
> maintain their standards long-term.  Microsoft does not and has never.  Any
> company who based their intranet on MS IE 6 has had fits trying to port to
> MS IE 7 or, now, 8.  If they would have adopted Mozilla back during MS IE
> 6, they'd be fine with their existing code, styles, templates and script today.
> So even when it's web-centric, Microsoft cannot even maintain even
> proprietary standards.

Sometimes I think the browsers let you get away with things that are 
incorrect, but they render properly. I probably break this stuff all the 
time making my own little project sites. I never validate it. So perhaps 
moving forward the sites would break.

Company I work for writes to Mozilla/web standards then has to go back and 
correct everything for IE. It's a pain, but it's 80% of the browser market 
or so.

But the great part about standards are there are so many. Some web treds 
live, some die. Shockwave. Flash. VRML. etc. There have been a million 
more. All those browser plugins that went away. Now browsers are adding 
their own media players and other stuff.

> So you put it in terms of risk and you win.  Community almost always wins,
> or at least open standards are the common denominator.  Sure, there are
> proprietary pieces of software that do open standards and there are good
> ones that compete well or best some open source solutions, but they are
> still based on open standards.  I have no problem with that, as long as
> there are open source solutions that can interface with a fully documented
> and understood standard.
>
> Microsoft has never offered even anything remotely proprietary standard,
> it's all been abandonware, so it's easy to argue against more so than, say,
> Adobe.

Technology moves forward.

> P.S.  Until PostgreSQL has a sustainable, commercial model, people are
> going to look to MySQL AB or Oracle.  That's just reality.  I'd love to see
> PostgreSQL have a sustainable, commercial effort behind it, but there have
> been too many shifts.  You're better off getting PostgreSQL as part of a
> platform like those from Red Hat or Novell than via others.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/

We had a commercial postgresql startup vendor in my area called 
GreatBridge, but they went under. Founded by a dude that made billions off 
of RedHat.




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