Kev's Development Toolbox

Yesterday Apple announced a 30 day money back guarantee, basically a 30 day free trial of their entry level Mac Mini, but pulled the offer within hours of announcing it.

There has not been an official statement from Apple, but the speculation is that the offer was too successful and they had too many Mini’s going out the door. The drawback of the offer would have been that any that were returned during the 30 days would have to have been refurbished and could not have been sold as new.

Microsoft have long been playing up the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) of installing and running Linux based systems, claiming that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Windows based systems is lower than Linux.

IBM has just reported that from their own analysis and study with 20 companies with more that 250 employees using Linux based systems that the TCO is indeed lower.

The sad thing is that I know people who bought into the Microsoft propaganda, which as it turns out, is nothing but just that.

Floyd Marinescu is leaving TheServerSide.com after 6 years – you may recognize his name as one of the editors (Editorial Director) of the posts on the site.

The number of articles and posts to TheServerSide is nowhere near the volume that it was from about 5 years ago when I first reading their site, but even still the posts are always informative and their articles are very well written. TheServerSide.com has defintely been slowing down recently over the past couple of years, and I hope this is not an indication that the current owners (media company TechTarget) are losing interest in this valuable community, that was founded originally by The Middleware Company and Ed Roman (author in my opinion of the first best books on EJBs).