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Senior Navy Official Slams Microsoft
Here is a short article which indicates that the Navy is not happy with Microsoft. One paragraph: "There are shareware products that have better groupware features than those of Microsoft products, he said, drawing applause from the audience." ("He" is Undersecretary of the Navy Jerry MacArthur Hultin.)
Dude, people love to see bad things happen to people a lot more wealthy than themselves.
People who want bad things to happen to esr, please stand up.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Now people who want bad things to happen to this "ZicoKnows" (who is unlikely to be rich), please stand up...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I said to my wife at that time that Microsoft's monopoly is over, because the average person had finally acquired contempt for their shoddy products, even if they were still using them.
New XFMail home page
Not to mention how expensive NT is and that us US citizens get to pay for such an inferior product, when better, cheaper, more relaiable options exist. Its inexcusible that the Navy single sourced with NT. Totally inexecusible.
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Python
Python
But, if you insist on free groupware, I suggest looking at SourceForge, CODA, Global File System, Reliable Multicast File Transfer, VIC, RAT, CVS, any NNTP server plus XVNews or newsreader with similar level of functionality, IMAP, Postfix, any fully-featured MIME-compliant e-mail package, ICQ for Linux (or similar) and this news site's Very Own Slash!
If Exchange can match, 1:1, every scrap of functionality ovvered by the above setup, show me. If not, it's not worth wasting my time over. If I can do better, for less, using Industry-Standard Software and Protocols, I don't need to fork out large sums of money on something that doesn't offer anything else and throws away all the security I could have, using the free tools I've listed.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IMHO, the Navy needs Linux. Linux doesn't particularly need any of the military, but they DO need it, or at least some Open Source system. I imagine FreeBSD and OpenBSD would be two good alternatives to Linux. (NetBSD is, from what I've heard, a hotbed of politics, which might make the more discerning customers a little nervous.)
Open Source solutions provide the stability AND SECURITY that the Navy needs, both from a military and legal stand-point. There is also, as the gentleman pointed out (though mis-naming it "shareware"), the Groupware that he needs to operate an efficient service.
In my books, I'd say that Linux and the *BSD's would be hot-favourites, right now, to win a contract with the Navy. And, once they see the sheer quality, I suspect they'll stick with it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Department of Defense has already made a large commitment to using an Open Source groupware package called CVW, that was developed as an internal research project by MITRE. There's an article in the latest Linux Journal about it.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
Federal development has a long history of public disclosure, and Open Source development is well known for providing the widest possible exposure of the codebase to security audit.
The common weakness of Open Source projects is the limited bandwidth for integrating the influx of data, patches, and functionality requests. Good projects have, and need, that core group of developers to guide the flow of the code, and it's this behavior that lends legitimacy to claims of authorship long after others take over non-insignificant module implementation.
This is the most concentrated point of labor in the otherwise highly distributed architecture of open code evolution. This, combined with the Federal Government's prediliction for disclosure and concerns about (national!) security, would make it advisable for at least a few government contracters to consider integrating the GPL as a key win in their official project bids.
The timing is perfect: Microsoft's Worst-Case Scenario of the Sixty-Five Thousand Bug Operating System has deflated expectations of W2K considerably. Most governmental managers(decision makers) have just had a well-respected higher-up validate their employee's doubts in the "dominant paradigm". The market has fully validated Linux as a viable platform. And The Code Needs A Shepard.
Why not Open Outsource? So much of the resistance to bringing in outside workers is that the internal developers aren't confident outside workers are going to meet their specific user requirements. Internal resistance would be lessened considerably if employees knew they could always fix the problems in software they were being tasked with deploying--and they'd even get to have their fixes integrated into the next release! Various departments would be able to cease redundant development; critical fixes would be integrated, experimental forks would be both possible and feasable at a low cost of exploration, and outside developments would be integrated into the central source trees based upon the strength of functionality, not force.
Open Outsourcing is the answer to the question of how the code development house makes money in the essay <a href="http://www.doxpara.com/core.html">I published some time ago</a>, and should be considered by decision makers throughout the entire market. I was just recently working on integrating this information into my essay before the DDoS stuff hit; I'd be happy to have it ready as soon as possible if anybody wishes to take advantage of it to try to win a contract.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
This isn't "news for nerds". It's a suit using some speech for his own purpose -- be it a to get a discount from MS, join the bash MS bangwagon or whatever.
As it happens, groupware under Windows gets much better if you take a peep at Exchange 2000 or hire clueful developers to do cool things with Outlook...
>Microsoft is responsible for bugs in other companies' software?
Any decent OS is responsible for handling error messages from the client applications, & keeping the rest of the system chugging along.
Think about it: if you had just kicked off an application that would update records in a million-row DB table, & it could be destroyed by some newbie's error of forgetting to include a semicolon, would *YOU* trust your work to that OS?
Of course, someone in the Navy was just plain stupid for entrusting an entire ship's safety to just one computer. A single, lucky shot could disable the computer, & the warship would be just as dead in the water if it was running NT, UNIX, or some POS written by a crackhead in return for a case of Ripple. And some prime rock.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
O.k., so I exaggerated a bit -- make that a 4Mb quota.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
That's been around for over a year now. Just put in the # of characters after which the comment gets the +1 bonus. Putting in 0 disables it.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
He wasn't trying to knock down the price, he wasn't even warning the bidders that the days of "nobody was ever fired for buying Microsoft" are over.
The key is in the final paragraph of the story. There are four companies bidding on this job, and all have indicated they intend to use Microsoft products. Pure chance, of course, since everyone knows that Microsoft is not a monopoly (*cough*).
Since all bidders will use the same product, this is essentially a "single source" bid. Single source bids tend to make government agencies very nervous, esp. when that single source has a history of successful government prosecution for misdeeds. But the companies each fear that breaking from the non-opoly will is equivalent to voting for the libertarian candidate - it may make you feel better, but you don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of winning.
Enter the gentlemen and his comments. He is sending a clear signal to the companies that it is not immediate suicide to announce a plan that doesn't include set-asides for the impoverished communities outside Seattle. To retain credibility, the nature of the game requires that at least one of the two finalists include non-MS products (assuming it isn't *totally* DOA), otherwise the military will be getting straight MS bids for the next 30 years.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The government will only accept bids from companies that are certified as capable of satisfying the contract. This is a *huge* contract, and it's no coincidence that the companies listed include IBM, CSC, and a couple other large companies whose name escapes me at the moment.
This means that not only is no "young" company eligible to place a bid, even the senior project management is likely to be "highly experienced" at federal contracts. Read: expect everyone to have spent twenty years in the military, then another decade or two in defense contracts on the other side of the fence. I've known a few very cool project managers, but most of them seem stuck in the past century. Make that *two* centuries ago, now. Where you see a neat new technology, they will see buddies killed because the new-fangled M-16 rifle jammed in Vietnam.
(Just wait until a BoI finds that a ship was lost, with all hands, due to a stupid software error....)
That said, some groups might want to experiment with the hardware you describe. But this sounds more like a DARPA-funded research project than a billion dollar multi-year contract.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Except maybe Balmer will get shot, not Gates.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
They may be better in some respects but not overall. They may implement things that MS obviously could without any difficulty but haven't.
If MS is better overall, it doesn't mean that they haven't missed out on some really obvious features that people need.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
One of the ways the free market operates is that feedback about goods on sale becomes public knowledge. So if a company rips one person off, they can tell everyone else before the whole market gets ripped off. As far as I can see, the army guy is just exercising this right/responsibility.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Big organisations rarely buy 36000 copies of a piece of shrinkwrapped software. They negotiate a contract with the software house, whereby the software house guarantees that the software will serve its purpose (e.g.) 99.9% of the time. A "best endeavour" contract says that the software house will do everything in its power to make this happen, even if it bankrupts them to do it.
So the army bloke has probably got his fingers burnt in a contract like this.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
> slashdot is [turning into] a linuxuser vs msuser forum.
I don't agree. Many people here are very angry at MS for forcing shoddy software onto them for many years (via OEM sales, illegal monopoly activities etc.) and see linux as the first genuine choice for a long time. So naturally some people react (over-)violently to anti-linux FUD. But in general most posters give an informative statement of their informed opinion. Articles like this are an exception rather than a rule.
There are a lot of knowledgeable people here who lucidly expound their arguments. Try finding a similar level of informed discussion on a pro-MS site. (Here I discount grits/natalie portman trolls - browse at 0 if you don't want to see these).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
I think the anti-trust suit may have finally stripped M$ of its aura of invincibility in the public eye. For a long time, Joe Random Public thought that the world's largest software company must be just the greatest, particulary if J.R.P. never had the opportunity to see software from any other company. This is still true of a lot of people today, but I think that the general public is finally catching on to the astonishing idea that M$ may actually suck.
Many of those in charge of procurement in the military may have known this for a long time. But it may have only recently become possible for someone like this guy to say so in public.
So, what Linux groupware products can we turn the Navy on to?
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
If whatever shareware he's talking about is that good, he just might, but remember this is the Government we're talking about. There are layers upon layers upon sublayers upon strata of bureaucracy to plow through before you get to the point where you hand Joe Developer a check for his shareware text editor. However, since this IS the Government, that check could end up being for 100,000 copies of JoeDevWrite.
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Someone you trust is one of us.
FYI: Exchange 2000 ( in beta now) uses SQL server as database, btw.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I thought it was the new MSDE (m$ Data Engine, the single user SQL server that can be installed INSTEAD of Jet on Access 2k with a custom install). In this case the only "user" of the database is Exchange, so it's OK. MSDE is completely file compatible with SQL Server, you can turn a MSDE database to a SQL server just by using SQL's "attach database" statement. I might be wrong. It seems like the feature set of M$ products keeps changing every time I look. First COM+ is part of Win2k, then it's not, then it's back in......
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
In the interest of OpenSource, or the geek's right to reverse-engineer closed processes, I am posting my theories on the slashdot submission queue process:
$article{body} =~
{
post(%article);
}
Am I missing something?
(freedom of regular expression =anagram> so, exposing referred formulae)[
why was the 'smart' html/text hybrid removed? :|
I keep forgetting the default now is text not html
:P
The Undersecretary of the Navy is going to go to Redmond to tell Steve Ballmer that Microsoft's groupware products are terrible.
So? Does he think he's going to tell Ballmer something that Ballmer doesn't already know?
Quick Quiz Time: Name Microsoft's "groupware products" that we're talking about here. Ready? What's your answer?
Microsoft's answer to groupware is Microsoft Exchange. But what do you think of Exchange as being? An expensive Email server. What does the entire corporate marketplace think of Exchange as being? An expensive Email server. Perhaps a slow, difficult-to-administer, and expensive Email server. I run a small company, and we're a Microsoft ISV. We get Exchange for free (bundled with the rest of the software we license) and we're likely to toss it for a Linux server and SendMail. Build enterprise applications on top of Exchange? You must be joking....
But is that some revelation to the Navy? To the Undersecretary? To Steve Ballmer? To Bill? Nope. If Microsoft's corporate muscle, marketing prowess, and sheer evil were one-third of what the Dept. of Justice (and your typical Linux pre-teen) insist, Exchange would be ubiquitous. Lotus Notes is sold at very hefty prices--much higher prices than Microsoft charges for Exchange (if Microsoft charges anything for Exchange at all). Lotus is sold by IBM, which is the living embodiment of "ham-handed" sales. So why does Notes still exist? Because Microsoft has a turkey of a product, and they (and everybody else) knows it.
So why the story? And why post it here?
The policy, dubbed "Don't Ask, Don't Shell", promises that as long as Linux users don't make their preferences known, they won't be disciplined.
Bill Gates called the policy "...a poor compromise compared to the proper response of interrogation and dismissal of anyone with Open Source tendencies, given the importance of secrecy in military organizations."
Nor was Linus Torvalds happy with the outcome. "It is ridiculous to think that, in the year 2000 -- or, in Microsoft terms, 1980 2.0 -- soldiers have to worry about being open and honest about using Linux. It's not bash users, but Linux-using bashers who should be targeted as insufficiently American for the military", said the famous Finn.
Richard M. Stallman claims the policy is a strained attempt to solve a problem with military personnel using Linux. "GNU/Linux users in the military might make better soldiers in the long run, which should TCL the generals. But soldiers using proprietary software shouldn't be allowed to benefit from working arm-in-arm with GNU/Linux users. That'd be an unfair Scheme since the GNU/Linux software can be shared but the proprietary software cannot."
Military personnel asked about this new policy had a wide range of reactions:
The Linux and BSD Alliance, formed to combat source-bashing worldwide, claims the policy is a small first step towards widespread acceptance of consenting adults exchanging source code as they see fit. Spokesdeity Eric Raymond explains, "we've long felt that if every closet user of an Open Source(TM) product in the military suddenly turned blue, they'd look butt-ugly in those uniforms." (Raymond is a well-known supporter of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear source.)
On a more humorous note, the editor of Soldier of Fortune Magazine announced they were responding to the new policy by making a small change to their name. They'll now be known as "Soldier of fortune Magazine".
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.