SCO v. IBM

Message ID: 79324 Posted By: bill_beebe Posted On: 2004-01-10 23:12:00 Subject: Re: I don't like the IBM Linux commerci Recs: 0 << They're lame and they don't tell me anything about the product. I don't buy it. >> I agree. Marketing is not IBM's forte. Merrill Chapman, in his book "In Search Of Stupidity", devotes an entire chapter to IBM's singular marketing disaster, OS/2. That chapter, titled "The Idiot Piper: OS/2 and IBM", gives great details on how IBM killed OS/2 and led a lot of other companies over the cliff at the same time. The section on Warp was tragic and funny: "The result was that IBM ended up creating a very odd advertising and marketing campaign redolent of hash brownies and magic mushrooms. Twisty "Age of Aquarius" type was splashed across ad posters all over the land, proclaiming that people were "Warping" their computers. Edwin Black, publisher of OS/2 Professional ma...

Message ID: 31782 Posted By: bill_beebe Posted On: 2003-08-22 21:00:00 Subject: I Believe In Paying For Linux Recs: 4 < rant> I buy a new copy of SuSE ($79) every time they make a major release, and then upgrade my SuSE development and test system with it. I pay Redhat $60/year for a modest support subscription, and download their releases. It's installed on a second development and test system. I have a subscription with BSD Mall so I can get FreeBSD releases on CD-ROM (about $26/release, two to three times a year). I install and run it on yet another machine. In the past I've purchased software from Ximian, Borland, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, and others over the last few decades. Note, however, what I pay for my software. I am quite willing to pay up to the low hundreds for my choice in software (yeah, I'm a geek). But I'm not going to pay high extortionist prices to SCO. I voted with my wallet long ago against the original SCO by first going to ...

Message ID: 27837 Posted By: bill_beebe Posted On: 2003-08-13 23:10:00 Subject: Dear ANALyst ledite: Recs: 15 You are, as usual, delusional. Many of us do indeed own stocks (outright or through other means) and we've taken time over the years to educate ourselves to the workings of the market in order to better profit from it. In fact it might interest you to know that IT technology plays a critical role the modern stock markets, technology built with and on top of Unix and similar operating systems. I have been programming systems since I was a junior in high school (1971). My first language was APL, and my first "personal computer" was an IBM 360 with a Dec printer/keyboard combination attached via a 300 bd acoustic coupled modem. From that simple time I've been both witness to and participant in the ongoing evolution of IT. During that time I have paid my dues and I have also paid (sometimes dearly) cold hard cash for goods and services rendered t...