Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?

zymano writes "This yahoo article says that almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices and that in a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that about 25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows servers with Linux."

Comments

other people need to buy microsoft

[Brian Boitano]

to give us someone to look down on

One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

Re:One reason:

[Pingular]

White hat hacktvists?

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but who bought Microsoft?

Re:One reason:

[DeBeuk]

Maybe they should !

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno, but Forbes says that buying Microsoft is common practice. (Yeah, I get the joke)

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

eh?

Go ask the guy that replaced some of the servers in one of the branch offices of my company. Guess what I did to him for replacing the mail servers with win2000 because of ease of maintenance. Guess what happened after almost a week of no mail and numerous calls to M$ with "please try rebooting" answers.

Re:One reason:

[debrain]

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

Yeah but lots of companies went out of business for doing it (one of my former included) ...

Re:One reason:

[sql*kitten]

Yeah but lots of companies went out of business for doing it (one of my former included)

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

Re:One reason:

[griann]

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

Yet

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you got an admin with a clue?

Re:One reason:

[griann]

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.

Of course this homily was coined in the day when you actually could buy Microsoft Software.

With licensing considerations including non transferability clauses, it's only a matter of time before even upper management or (may the spirits of Turing and von Neumann forgive me) the board of directors reviews an annual report and notices that the value spent of "purchasing" software does not appear on the asset register or depreciated assets.

I predict that someone will turn to the financial controller and say something along the lines of:

"So. Let me get this straight. We spent $150,000 this year buying office software and we don't own it?"

caveat IANAA (I am not an accountant).

Re:One reason:

[debrain]

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

A company's choice of server OS, web server, and database may, in my experience, significantly contribute to their untimely demise.

To follow this thread, up to your argument:
1. (original thread) Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft.
2. (my reply) Companies have gone bankrupt for buying Microsoft.
3. (your reply) Companies don't go bankrupt for buying MS Word.

Do you not see any logical fallacy here? That being, your implication that the only software Microsoft offers that may possibly contribute to a company's demise is the choise of word processor. This is most certainly not the case.

What's more, your assertion that MS Word would not contribute to a company's demise is unsatisfied; I find it fairly likely that MS Word would cost more than any other word processing solution given the plethora of bugs, crashes, worms and viri targeting it. In a competitive scenario, a company not hindered by these costs would have a strategic, and hence competitive, advantage over one that is, and hence have greater survivability. Most (All?) Federal Banks use Lotus Notes for a damned fine reason (it's not a big target).

Cheers.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're an ass.

Grow up.

Re:One reason:

[neuroticia]

Err. That seems more like a story of professional incompetence than it does of crap software. MS software (aside from putting their settings in half a freaking million places) is fairly easy to use when you know which buttons to press. It's just a bad idea for other reasons. Take your "points" where you can score them, and don't try to bash every single aspect of MS--it just makes you seem like a lunatic zealot, and makes people less likely to believe anything positive about whatever platform you do advocate.

The proper way of going about it is to say "yeah, MS software does some cool stuff, and has some cool features. BUT it's unstable and insecure--and those are the two primary concerns when you're running a server." That's something people can't really argue with (although they try. ;) ) and it makes them think rather than chalking you up as a nutcase dirty-hippie Linux/BSD/OS X freak.

It also gives you more weight in the tech world. I mean. "Moron A can't set up a Windows server and make it work" isn't really a news-breaking story. I mean. Moron A probably can't set up any other server and have it work, either. In fact, Moron A probably can't tie his shoes or walk in a straight line--that doesn't mean the shoes he's wearing are a bad product, it merely means he's an idiot. The shoes might be a bad product in ADDITION to his being an idiot, but.. Err. It's much more impressive when someone who's bright and intelligent and wonderful can't set up the OS. Really.

-Sara

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Federal banks use Lotus Notes since like most things in the government, they don't change unless absolutely necc.

Re:One reason:

[bluGill]

Ahh, but that was the point: they had a working setup that was replaced by someone buying MS, and that person got fired for it. That fact that that person was incompitent and would have been fired soon for a different reason doesn't change the fact that people get fired for buying Microsoft.

I'm always amused by people who think GUI configured servers are easier to admin than other ways of configuing it. The asumption is always that the hard part is the interface, when in fact the hard part is knowing how to make it work right for your enviorment, anyone who can get that part right is smart enough to learn the interface. I'm not saying that GUIs are not easier, cause a well designed GUI is easy (but a well designed command line is easy too, perhaps easier if you need to script something), but the config interface is not the hard part. The Moron we are talking about made this mistake and lost his job for it.

Re:One reason:

[RoLi]

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

Actually, the only company that I know personally and used ASP went out of business last year (all other companies I know use either PHP or have only static pages).

Of course Microsoft was not the only reason, but in that case it was the primary reason. The company was selling credit-card connectivity (to be used with online-shops) and lost many customers because of the bad security of IIS, also the company was a little - well incompetent. (I had to tell them that the referer sent by a browser can't be trusted. They sell so-called secure payment and didn't know that the referer can be faked.)

It works both ways: Microsoft drives up costs and is bought mostly by incompetent people (especially on servers). Incompetence is a major reason for corporate failure.

Microsoft might merely be a symptom, not the reason for that companie's failure.

The Slammer worm or the numerous IIS worms have hit a lot of companies, including MS itself. A company stupid enough to use MS IIS and/or MS SQL probably doesn't have a backup solution at hand (only MS-software is good, right?) and such a worm can essentially shut the company down for days or even weeks. And such interruptions can easily lead to the company failing.

To go back on topic: I run a business - I don't have any employees yet (and won't for some years) but as soon as I have any and someone thinks any one-vendor solution (like MS) is better when a multi-vendor standard solution (like Linux) is available he will get fired immedeately. One-vendor solutions should be avoided at all costs, it's bad for business to be dependent on any other company.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. You run 2 typical peice o shit linux boxes in your folk's basement.

Re:One reason:

[the eric conspiracy]

Err. That seems more like a story of professional incompetence than it does of crap software.

Could be, but I've seen some pretty horrific stuff happen to Exchange servers. I even saw a case where a large company I worked for had to fly two Microsoft engineers out from Redmond to troubleshoot one of these things. It never really ran right despite spending a buttload of money on licenses, hardware and expensive support on it.

Re:One reason:

[shokk]

Keep in mind that the people doing the buying are not the people doing the administration. The business people buy the wrong packages and then hand them down the hall for implementation, and it's not always an MS application. These people get a great big light bulb popping up over their head when they hear the latest buzzword and request it regardless of real need or the available manpower to properly manage it. Those CDW commercials are funny because they're true.

Re:One reason:

[Dynedain]

If your business model is so fragile that licensing fees and bugs/worms/crackers (which should be factored in, regardless of the supplier) are sufficient to bring it crashing down, then there are some other things wrong that you should be looking at. Most companies should not be relying on their IT department to keep them in the black.

Re:One reason:

[Megor1]

What's more, your assertion that MS Word would not contribute to a company's demise is unsatisfied; I find it fairly likely that MS Word would cost more than any other word processing solution given the plethora of bugs, crashes, worms and viri targeting it. In a competitive scenario, a company not hindered by these costs would have a strategic, and hence competitive, advantage over one that is, and hence have greater survivability. Most (All?) Federal Banks use Lotus Notes for a damned fine reason (it's not a big target).

Your solution seems rather self defeating, would you stop using OS Y if it became popular to avoid attacks/virii? Then would you switch to new fangled OS N until that also became popular?

Please note choice of letters are purely random and are not meant to reflect any OS, (I used to use X as my variable...)

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

Interesting story: A company I work for runs usability tests on Microsoft software. These usability guys have watched Windows Server Administrators with very little experience set up a DHCP server in less than 15 minutes, and almost nobody fails to complete this task when given an hour to work on it. Even novice unix admins can set up a windows DHCP server in under an hour.

Then, they decides to try the same thing with Linux, putting users in groups, with internet access, and after more than a day's worth of man-hours (and several real hours) most of the groups still hadn't been able to configure a linux box to be a functioning DHCP server.

With the 10 hours I'm paying the linux admin to figure out how to do it in linux, I could have paid my Windows Admin to configure DHCP on a Windows box while saving enough money in time to pay for the copy of Windows too!

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Even small business need an OS and wordprocessor. (Small businesses are in greater quantity than you might think.)

Re:One reason:

[antiMStroll]

Don't believe it. My company's national network was shut down last week by the Slammer Worm. Yes, the IT department was behind in patches (not that it's difficult, MS released 25 + SP3 by our count since last October), but you can bet someone's chestnusts are roasting on an open fire back at head office as a direct consequence of using Microsoft product.

Re:One reason:

[soloport]

You didn't really expect a Windows Sys. Ad. to be able to configure a Unix system, did you? When your IBM PC (compatible) breaks, do you take it back to Apple for repair?

Look, a PC may look like a Mac, in a way -- it has a Hard Drive and Memory, requires a monitor, keyboard and mouse. But, do you know that they are really two very different systems? They use entirely different CPU's, for one thing (that's short for Central Processing Unit -- the thing that is central to all the work your PC or Mac does).

I understand your confusion on the OS side, as well (that stands for Operating System -- central to all the software programs that run on your PC or Mac). You see the Windows platform is a whole other animal compared to a Unix system. The architectures are vastly different.

Bottom line: If you had matched a Unix or Linux Sys. Ad. against a Windows Sys. Ad., you probably world have still come out slightly ahead on the Windos side -- to begin with. However, over time, your Windows Sys. Ads. would be working more hours per box than your Unix Sys. Ad.

I know this to be true because I employ both kinds of Sys. Ads. ;-) And the fact is, for every Unix (or Linux) Sys. Ad., I have to hire about three Windows Sys. Ads. to keep the workload managed evenly. (Thank goodness there are more Windows Sys. Ads. to employ.)

We have Unix systems that have been running for more than three years without a re-boot; Linux systems with an average up-time of more than a year; Windows systems that must be re-booted nearly every week.

Our patch-cycle for Windows is at least weekly; Our patch-cycle for Linux is, on average, monthly; I can't think of when we've had to patch our Unix systems. The Unix/Linux systems do all the "heavy lifting". Windows is used only when a software vendor supports that platform, exclusively. (Are you listenning, software vendors?!)

By the way, we serve financial institutions (e.g. Wells Fargo), CPA offices and a variety of other types of businesses -- quite a mix, actually. We see the trends, first hand, in our little circle of clients and they aren't headded in the Redmond direction. I'm constantly surprised at how tech-savy clients can be, these days.

Another surprise: Unit cost isn't ever the issue! What my clients want are servers, hidden away, quietly doing their job without having to be mucked with. They will pay more for that!

There's a big wide world of alternatives out there that offers exciting new prospects. One only needs to look to discover.

Re:One reason:

[G27 Radio]

Sorry, but I'm pretty skeptical about your story. Mostly because that type of usability test would be a complete waste of time and money since it completely ignores major factors.

For one thing, I haven't met a Linux (or *BSD) admin that wasn't proficient with Windows as well. By proficient, I don't necessarily mean a proficient Windows admin, but proficient in using Windows.

Now, take your average "Windows Server Administrator"--most have no experience with other operating systems. For the most part, novice MCSA's are one-trick ponies that only know how to do things within their niche.

It's easy to see why a Linux admin would perform better in a Windows environment than an MS admin would in any non-Windows evironment.

The first time I set up DHCP in Linux it took me about 20 minutes including download and compile time. I could probably do it in less than 10 minutes now that I've already done it a couple times.

I've never set up a DHCP server in Windows, but I have needed to make configuration changes to one that was already set up. I can see why you chose MS DHCP for your example. It's pretty intuitive to use, and would be pretty easy for anyone to use that understands DHCP.

Still, having used both, I much prefer the Linux configuration. In Windows, you have the little tree on the left with expandable branches and the objects on the right. It only takes 4 or 5 clicks to get just about anywhere. In Linux it's a single text file with comments and examples interspersed. If you know how to use a text editor it's pretty simple. In fact, it's easier than clicking around a bunch of eye candy, just not as sexy looking. But it's a DHCP server so who cares if it looks sexy?

Your last line is completely ridiculous. It's not going to take any Linux admin 10 hours to set up DHCP. Get a grip.

Re:One reason:

[shaitand]

Why shouldn't they? Are you saying there are very many companies out there today that could survive long if they had to go back to pen and paper? How far do you think a pen and paper only company would get in todays world in most business types?

Face it, the IT department is the most important sector in any business these days. Without them every other department would fold in a heartbeat.

Re:One reason:

[madmancarman]

Still, having used both, I much prefer the Linux configuration. In Windows, you have the little tree on the left with expandable branches and the objects on the right. It only takes 4 or 5 clicks to get just about anywhere. In Linux it's a single text file with comments and examples interspersed. If you know how to use a text editor it's pretty simple. In fact, it's easier than clicking around a bunch of eye candy, just not as sexy looking. But it's a DHCP server so who cares if it looks sexy?

At the high school where I teach, we would have moved to DHCP much more quickly if our NT 4.0 server hadn't kept producing Dr. Watson reports whenever we tried to start the DHCP server (this was a couple years ago). For a while, we stuck with static IPs, which was a pain considering the hundreds of machines on our network.

After a while, we found a spare machine we had laying around (a P166, I think), installed Mandrake on it and had DHCP up and running that afternoon. None of us were really that experienced with Linux at the time, either, but it wasn't too hard for a high school teacher and a couple students to get it running with the help of some online HOWTOs. Now we run DHCP as a process on our school's web server because it doesn't cause a performance hit and that server is more likely to stay up than the previous machine.

These days it's even easier to set up DHCP in Linux because you can do it through Webmin or any number of other graphical tools. Any Linux admin that requires 10 hours to set up DHCP is either incompetent or ripping you off.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi

Re:One reason:

[G27 Radio]

Good point. I just wanted to mention that the phrase used to be "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." This was back in the days when IBM was engaging in anti-competitive practices and the DOJ put the smackdown on them.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Administrators with very little experience"

"Even novice unix admins"

I think you are missing the point this guys is trying to make. He is not saying that Windows admin should be able to configure Linux boxes. What he is saying is that, in regards to inexperienced and/or untrained users, the Windows system was faster and easier to set up. This guy was doing usability tests, and when people NOT trained in a package can still set it up, that speaks volumes for the packages usability.

One of the major problems with Linux is that to get anything done you have to be a well trained admin. This pushes the cost of ownership (in man hours and salary) up, even though the original purchase price was $0.00

Re:One reason:

[Dynedain]

Pen and paper is a little extreme in comparison

But if the difference between OpenOffice.org and MS Office is enough to break your business, then there are some other serious issues you need to be working out.

Re:One reason:

[10am-bedtime]

but conversely, most companies should not have to fear that their information technology drags them into the red (such is the case when you succumb to proprietary software). how to reduce fear? reduce risk. how to reduce risk? reduce dependence on uncontrollable externalities.

"but i'm a lazy SOB of a CIO who doesn't want to sport an in-house free software expert (aka Programmer), preferring instead to "lead" the cheers by putting into place a sea of sharp-suited dull-witted adminis-traitors, so we can all wet our pants discussing the latest boob-tube butterfly-placebo instead of doing that other stuff. doing a good job is Hard."

well then, let's hope your CEO is similarly short-sighted so that your company can be boarded and looted by those who respond to challenges in a more entrepreneurial fashion. otherwise, how can you justify your department? what do you bring to the table besides false fuzzies? why shouldn't your department be out-sourced? immediately?

in the end, free software is helpful to the CIO who knows how to protect the department by means of quality instead of deceit. that's all there is to it. choose wisely.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, it has nothing to do with the web server or the platform. It has to do with how dedicated the company staff is towards contributing to the company instead of spending 4 hours a day bitching about the choice of web server.

Companies that choose Linux sometimes go out of business because their staff does nothing but bitch about wanting to use Microsoft.

Companies that choose Microsoft sometimes go out of business because their staff does nothing but bitch about wanting to use Linux.

What you need as a team XXX that is fully behind XXX, whatever XXX may be.

Re:One reason:

[WindBourne]

Not entirely. Licensing, Hardware, and Support costs can add anywhere from 500 - 5000 / employee / year. It is the IT ppl who make that descision.
In this economy, that is the difference between staying in business and going out.

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

Sorry if I wasn't clear in the original message, but the linux systems were tested with experienced Linux admins.

The Linux admins could configure Windows more quickly than they could configure Linux!

Re:One reason:

[bellings]

Please give more information. There have been companys that have taken a huge financial hit from bad software, but I'd be very suprised if Microsoft has made any of that software. I mean, until recently nothing from Microsoft has really been all that expensive, and very little of it was really business critical.

And, lets be really honest -- none of the software Microsoft has recently started selling for building enterprise systems is really all that bad. It's usually not best-of-breed stuff, but it's never been show-stopping-kill-your-business bad, either. The support costs aren't horrible, the prices are cheap, and the stuff works no worse than most software out there.

At least tell us what software from Microsoft failed so badly your company went bankrupt, and give us some of the ballpark costs involved.

Re:One reason:

[bellings]

The Linux admins could configure Windows more quickly than they could configure Linux!

In your original message, you made it very clear that your admins failed to configure Windows for over a week. Are you saying that your Linux admins take over a week to configure a box to run email in an already existing email infrastructure?

If you really have managed to hire such a group of incompent people then I think its time that your boss looks at where the real problems are in your department. Here's a hint -- the Operating System is not the problem.

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

I didn't get a chance to meet these linux "admins" perhaps they didn't know what they were doing, but they were managing several linux boxes as a part of their regular work responsibilities. The same class of people (linux "admins") peformed much better when configuring Windows servers.

Maybe the people in this group were ripping people off...I don't know for sure.

At the same time, I remember spending several weeks configuring a linux box to dial on demand and route local network traffic to the internet so that I could share my dialup network connection with my roommates. Granted, I wouldn't claim that I am an experienced admin even though I have installed, configured, and run my own servers for the last 8 years.

Windows NT 4.0 was better than Win95, but it still wasn't up to snuff as a server. However, compare Linux with Windows Server 2003 and I'd go for Windows.

And for the comment about a text file making configuration easy, I don't think you ever looked at a sendmail config file.

Re:One reason:

[dasunt]

I had the opposite experience. I was using a windows (win98, so this probably wasn't fair) to try to ICS a dialup line. Turned a rather stable machine (by win98 standards) into a machine that would frequently drop the internet connect and crash.

A week later, a hardware modem I bought for linux had arrived ($50 for the USR hardware modem, compared to $25 for the Intel software modem). Shut down, plugged it into a free pci slot, booted back up, apt-getted the ppp packages, and I could connect. A quick glance at the NAT and IPTABLES howtos, and I had a shared NAT connection that works without a problem.

Re:One reason:

[bratmobile]

The main reason that there are so many viruses written for Microsoft products (mainly Word, Windows, and Outlook) is that they are the most common products in their niches.

If Linux became the most popular desktop OS, then it would become the target of the virus writers. Same for any other competitor to Microsoft products.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Specious reasoning...and a tired argument.

Re:One reason:

[debrain]

Please give more information.

Sure, this is what I recollect; I can't go into too much detail, but I can give you a gloss over some of the cruxes we encountered.

The software in question was a combination of IIS, SQL Server, and Windows NT. First, as a startup, the cost of this software was enormous. The money we spent on licensing alone would have afforded us another 6-9 developers (there were only 10 at peak, IIRC) for a year. I should point out that developers were subsidized by the federal government for our work and cost the company roughly $24,000 annually. Let me only imply the time lost to development from the overhead of administrating these machines.

Given our choice of software, we were unable to distribute our database across multiple machines, for security, cost and technical reasons (according to paid technical support from Microsoft), and as such we had a single point of failure. We designed with this expectation, and had hoped for reasonable monolithic vertical expansion with more customers.

Let me explain the process of running data locally. My contribution was a transparent OpenBSD bridge/firewall, which served as an ingress filter to our paying clients and TCP filter to relevant ports, without which we would have suffered tremendously from the worms of passing (particularly the SQL worm) and plethora of root exploits in NT/IIS at the time. We did suffer from some of these worms, and we spent many an hour overnight reinstalling our live box. Our choice of Microsoft software precluded a choice to use fewer boxes, and in particular, one large production server rather than multiple redundant and swappable smaller ones.

One large local box was a tremendous cost in that we were forced on more than one occasion to cut off paying clients as a result of it going down. This did not happen often, mind you. But when it went down, it went down hard. I recall several occasions of it going down with a GPF in IIS, and no application or reapplication of restarting IIS would bring it back up, so we would have to reboot, a process that took no less than 10 minutes. This does not bode well when investors come asking your trial clients their impressions. This application was 24x7x365 for very specific paying clients who indeed demanded, for their own livelihood, 24x7x365 service.

Given the design of the software we had chosen, it quickly became obvious that it would not scale vertically. Our $40,000 box would accomodate *maybe* 150 clients. The insanity of this began to sink in, as our target market was in the hundreds of thousands of clients. In a vain effort to save our development, we explored alternatives. We ported a good chunk of what we did to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, Php), and based on what we could ascertain on the limited, but fairly indicative, subset of our software, it would scale much better, on an order of 200x. Better still, LAMP could be spread horizontally, across a farm of boxes, at no cost beyond hardware. The other alternative, which was even more successful, but harder to explain in this limited context was J2EE/JBoss. A port to J2EE/JBoss did not take place, but had we started with it, we would not have needed to explore alternatives, I can assure you. We also explored IBM solutions (less than I would have liked, mind you), and Oracle (more than I would have liked). They both came up short, for lack of our and their efforts, respectively.

At this point, however, having precluded that we would only ever be a monolithic operation due to the cost of the software we run upon, a total redesign would have been necessary to split out into an alternative. Our investors pulled out (and rightly so), and the company was liquidated. It sold its assets for around $150,000 on $1.5 million in development. Active Server Pages do not have much redeeming value beyond function, I must add. Had we used Java, I must emphasize, we would have gotten much closer to the investment price, in the reusability and design inherent. There would have been little, i

Re:One reason:

[Jason Earl]

Actually, IBM won their suit. Not that it helped them in the long run. Customers, generally speaking, find ways out of abusive relationships, and Big Blue's old relationship with their customers certainly qualified.

The market is currently correcting itself in regards to Microsoft's current monopoly as well, and the DOJ has almost nothing to do with this correction. The reason that Linux and Free Software are becoming so popular is that there are a lot of companies that are looking for a way out of their current abusive relationship with Microsoft. If Microsoft spent more time worrying about their customers and less time worrying about their bottom line then the Linux threat would disappear overnight.

Of course, MSFT would lose over 66% of its value in the process, but that's going to happen anyhow. Microsoft is no longer a growth company, and their Price/Earnings ratio will come down one way or another.

Re:One reason:

[bluGill]

Ahh, but did they do it RIGHT? Now did they do it right by design, or accident? Do they even know the difference? Novice admins should never be left loose on a production network. Therefore you choice of target users is incorrect and any results you draw from them are inapplicable. Your target users for configuring DHCP are expirenced admins, who mostly have done it before on this server and need to update something. I don't want a novice messing with my dhcp server configuration, I want one of the few guys I work with who know our particular network's configuration.

DHCP is simple at first, it didn't take me an hour to set it up at my home. (I don't count time to download and install, since I just did "cd /usr/ports/network/ ; ls *dhcp* ; cd dhcp-foo, make install, and then went to lunch) I'm sure I could have done my simple home network in less time in windows. I don't think I could have done a complex corporate network in that time. In the real world you have to enter each non-dhcp configed machine manually (and we had plenty of them).

I should also point out that in my hour of configuring dhcp I saw lots of options that I could provide. How many of them could have dhcp return which font server to use, just to point out one? (Note, picked because it is X11 specific and therefore windows only sites don't need it) I doupt windows provides that option easially.

And DHCP is simple to configure compared to some things I've worked with.

Start picking the right users for your focus group and I'll pay more attention to your results.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, grow up! It's not your place to fire someone who set up an inferior mail system that didn't work! Who the hell do you think you are, the boss??

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Addendum:

It is also worthy to note that the people who made the bad managerial mistakes in deciding on Microsoft left, and the development environment improved drastically. However, we were "locked in" at that point, and suffering the consequences.

Cheers,
d-n

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Then, they decides to try the same thing with Linux, putting users in groups, with internet access, and after more than a day's worth of man-hours (and several real hours) most of the groups still hadn't been able to configure a linux box to be a functioning DHCP server.

Funny that, and yet I (not even a professional admin, just a linux hobbyist) managed to configure dhcpd in under an hour for my home network with no issues whatsoever. I didn't even need internet access, just a quick browse through a goddamn man page.

If these so-called professional admins didn't know enough to check a man page and edit a text file, I have to question just how professional they were.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

However, compare Linux with Windows Server 2003 and I'd go for Windows.

For what reason?

What I mean is, if you'd pick linux over NT4 and 2k, what amazing tech is included in 2k3 that would change your mind?

Re:One reason:

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Frankly, when I hire a Windows or a Unix sysadmin, I ask if they have done it before.

Asking someone to do something new cold SHOULD take 10 hours. And double that to test.

That said, I spent a total of 10 minutes configuring my first Linux dhcp server.

rpm -ivh dhcp-2.0.i386.rpm

man dhcp

pico /etc/dhcpd.conf

/etc/rc.d/init.d/dhcpd start

I did this back in 1998. Since then we've gone from the NT 3.5 interface to the NT 4.0 interface, to the MMC, and now whatever monstrosity they call the thingy under XP.

Under linux, the text file is still in the same place. In fact, it's still largely in the same format.

And also, my experience setting up DHCP for my apartment did a lot more to prepare me for my present 200 node network than a point and drool interface ever would.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

At the same time, I remember spending several weeks configuring a linux box to dial on demand and route local network traffic to the internet so that I could share my dialup network connection with my roommates. Granted, I wouldn't claim that I am an experienced admin even though I have installed, configured, and run my own servers for the last 8 years.

Then you must not be a very good admin are you? When I was 15 my friend gave me a copy of linux (RedHat3 or 4, I think?). The first thing I did with it is setup an Internet NAT router. Took me 2 days to do it. And this was with 0% linux experience. I had more trouble figuring out VI then the NAT stuff.

Windows NT 4.0 was better than Win95, but it still wasn't up to snuff as a server. However, compare Linux with Windows Server 2003 and I'd go for Windows.

And I don't care what version of Windows it is, I have never met a Windows box that could compare to a Linux box. My personal experience with uptime is 2 years, 3 months for my Linux server, and 2 months with my Windows Server. Now, I only run Linux. You should really grow up and use a real server instead of some pretty eye candy server that crashes constantly and has no support. (Troll intended!)

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

I'm sorry, I think you are confusing the posts from two different people.

In your original message, you made it very clear that your admins failed to configure Windows for over a week. Are you saying that your Linux admins take over a week to configure a box to run email in an already existing email infrastructure?

My original post talked about configuring DHCP, and in my example, both the linux and windows admins could configure DHCP on Windows in under an hour, where linux admins in groups mostly failed to configure linux as a DHCP server in a several hour study.

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

I would agree that Win98 isn't a stable system. I wouldn't use anything from the Win9x line on my machines.

I can see significant improvements in many scenarios when moving up the NT line. Today, I wouldn't use NT4.0, and Windows 2000 is significantly better than NT4.0, and Windows 2003 is significantly better than Windows 2000 (from the parts that I have looked at).

And to be fair, my connection sharing experience with linux was 4 or 5 years ago, and linux may have improved significantly since my horror experiences of needing to customize a network driver to coax two identical NICs to work at the same time under linux, how to get dial on demand working, and how to get routing to work with dial on demand.

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

The target users won't necessarily be experienced admins. Think home networks, small business networks, branch office networks, etc.

I'm fairly certain that the usability engineer verified that the configuration was correct for the scenario that was given, although the scenario might have been very simple (I don't know).

Your point about by design or by accident, is well taken. Additionally, if you are large enough to have a "production network" I would agree that I would rather not have a novice admin working on it. At the same time, many organizations do not have good IT processes or controls, and sometimes the novice admin is the only one available to solve the problem (I have been in that situation several times in several different organizations...and once I did make the problem worse).

If you are fortunate enough to have the luxury of hiring experienced admins, good for you. Too many organizations hire the cheapest person with the lowest minumum qualifications, and expect them to make do.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason that there are so many viruses written for Microsoft products (mainly Word, Windows, and Outlook) is that they are the most common products in their niches. If Linux became the most popular desktop OS, then it would become the target of the virus writers. Same for any other competitor to Microsoft products.

This is just such a stupid statement that I'm amazed it's even still trotted out. There is one significant, concrete example which competely and totally destroys this argument.

Apache.

Apache is the single most popular web server in existence. Yet, there is very rarely any worm or virus that affects it. IIS, by constrast, owns a minority and thankfully shrinking section of the market, but is the single largest spreader of virii and destructive code out there.

Quite clearly, this obliterates the argument that simply because something is used the most often it will be the least secure. It's a falsity spread by morons and marketeers.

Re:One reason:

[pacman on prozac]

What about your staff wasting large amounts of their time with lost data, recovering information, making extra backups due to system problems, losing their workstation for a reinstall one day out of every X, spending lots of extra money and time to upgrade and fix problems that should never have been present in the first place....

Most companies SHOULD be relying on their IT department to keep them in the black since it is probably their largest investment other than properties and wages.

Re:One reason:

[_Bucktooth_]

Wow! This is such a weird story! Totally against what I experienced.

I'm no linux admin but I had to configure DHCP on linux (among other things) for my very small office because no-one else could.

I don't have a stopwatch, but using the documentation, I set it all up in what must have been less than 30 minutes. Maybe it's because I actually RTFM.

It's true I figured it out faster with Windows and I didn't have to read any documentation, but our office got really fed-up with the instability. Monthly crashes were the norm. I set up our little linux server 14 months ago, and rebooted only once, in January, because I installed a new hard disk.

Re:One reason:

[sgtrock]

Actually, I thought that was the point of the story; the company had a working email system that a sysadmin swapped out for a broken one. It was broken BECAUSE the sysadmin was a doorknob, granted. He still deserved to be fired for such an incompetent email migration.

Re:One reason:

[bratmobile]

I never said that the most common products are the least secure. I said they are the MOST LIKELY TO BE ATTACKED.

Learn to read. Then learn to think.

Also, there is a WORLD of difference between products intended for the desktop (where usability and performance are *usually* a higher priority than security) and server environments, where security and stability should be a higher priority than features.

A SINGLE example (Apache) does not disprove the general trend! Look at Sendmail, arguably the most common UNIX mailer in existence, for all time. Sendmail has had more root-compromise security bugs than ANY PRODUCT IN HISTORY. Sure, it may be relatively secure now, but it has taken MANY years, and I would argue that there are STILL bugs lurking in it.

Again, LEARN TO READ. I said that there is a SIGNIFICANT CORRELATION between how popular a product is, and how likely it is to be the target of a virus/worm/whatever author.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

*cricket chirping*

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to hire better admins

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you ever looked at a sendmail config file.

Not to dispute your claim of having 8 years experience (okay, I dispute it), but you don't need to look at sendmail.cf ever. (I assume that's what you mean by a sendmail config file.) Use a .mc file instead. Don't make the problem seem hard just to criticize one part of UNIX, especially a part for which there are so many easy alternatives. Some distros use alternatives to sendmail as the default mail system. There's a concept, having a choice.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience with setting up dial on demand on Linux was more than 5 years ago. It took a morning, not weeks. Did you not consider changing IRQs from the factory default like the Firewall How-To said 5 years ago before rewriting the device driver? Not that you need two nics for dial on demand.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to question your need for "hiring experienced admins". With Linux, the experienced admin has to come in once to set up DHCP and test the configuration (did your test subjects do that). There's no need for the admin to stay on staff. The same is true of DHCP on NetWare from what I've seen. The same is true of web servers, mail servers, file servers, firewalls, routers, etc. Speaking from experience, it's easy enough to show in-house staff how to use sudo for simple tasks like managing user accounts. There is no reason for a company with a small number of servers to need an admin permanently on staff. It's cheaper to call in the outside expert for a half day as needed.

Re:One reason:

[neuroticia]

Err. The sysadmin took a working email system and swapped it out for a working email system that the syadmin was incompentent to set up. If the sysadmin had taken a working MS solution and swapped it out for a non-working qmail solution, then he would have been just as much a moron. But because it was a non-MS->MS migration, somehow it's MS's fault? Nah, I'm not saying that MS software is fault-free, they've got some pretty interesting bugs and issues. I'm just saying that if you take a moron and put him/her on even the best most stable most fantastic software that is so easy to use that a monkey will be at home... They'll still fuck it up. It's not an MS thing. It's a moron thing. MS just seems to attract more than its fair share of morons because they think "Oh. I don't have to read a configuration file".

The parent of this thread was a post that said "No one ever got fired for buying MS". And this guy didn't get fired for buying MS. He got fired for not being able to do his job. Even if he hadn't bought into the whole MS thing, he probably STILL would have gotten fired.

-Sara

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

Good point, I guess the way I always looked at it is: Can I take the in-house staff that normally works as a salesperson or a stock-boy, but who has a bit of computer experience, and let them spend a few hours on it at $8.50/hr rather than call in the local computer company for $50/hr with a 1 hour minimum.

Re:One reason:

[deranged unix nut]

I had a number of things going on that box, initially I wanted a dual-nic router so I could have more than one networked computer in my dorm...the dual-nic issue wasn't resolved by changing IRQs, etc. In fact, the dual nics worked perfectly in windows, but required a bit of code tweaking in linux to make it work. And yes, I read all of the FAQs I could find at least a dozen times.

Then I moved out of the dorm and into an apartment, and it took another couple weeks (a few hours each day) to get dial on demand working correctly. ...no configuration changes on that system were ever simple with linux.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no linux admin but I had to configure DHCP on linux (among other things) for my very small office because no-one else could.

I think you accidentally proved the guy's point here. You had to do it because no one else could. (Or, possibly, because no one else was willing to slog through unbelievably user-hostile documentation to figure out how.)

It's true I figured it out faster with Windows and I didn't have to read any documentation, but our office got really fed-up with the instability. Monthly crashes were the norm.

There's nothing normal about monthy crashes on a Windows NT/2000/2003 server. Maybe you were using another flavor of Windows, or maybe you were using boggy hardware. But uptimes measured in months is normal for an NT-class server that's not got some kind of hardware fault or buggy driver in it.

Re:One reason:

[Anonymous Coward]

Your last line is completely ridiculous. It's not going to take any Linux admin 10 hours to set up DHCP.

Depends. Let's say you want to configure your DHCP server to serve out not only IP addresses but also other bits of data, such as proxy server settings and hostnames and DNS configuration and all the other neato stuff that a DHCP server can provide to clients. Setting all of these things up with ISC DHCPD is not trivial. It can easily take ten man-hours or more to figure out what all the little fiddly settings need to be, more if your server is also a router that serves multiple subnets.

If you already know what you're doing, or if you're quick on your feet, AND if what you want to do is simple, setting up ISC DHCPD on a distribution like Red Hat that's already got it packaged for you is pretty easy. If you have to download and compile it yourself, add an hour; twenty minutes of that will be just writing the start and stop scripts. If you have to do something even slightly complex, add more hours. You can easily get it up to a point where configuring a Linux DHCP server is a multi-day task replete with trial and error.

MS consistency

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two reasons we're staying with MS. First off is the consistency across the board. It's not just a glib overgeneralisation to say that it helps admin, and from what I've seen of OSX server it has much the same advantages. To Admin one system is to admin another. To update, run, install and fix a service is consistent, and the need to retrain when a service is added just isn't there. We DO use Linux and BSD in some of our systems, and while the people exist who can administer those, the configuration for say, Apache, is wildly different to just about anything else, and anything else from each other. Just an observation.

The 2nd point is support. It's impeccable, and having guaranteed 24-hour help for those times when things foo bar up so badly we can't repair things is essential to running a service for our clients.

Those are two features of "going MS" that are important to us. Some people will not find they need both, or even either. I won't comment on their business practices, but suffice it to say that's their choice.

Re:MS consistency

[Realistic_Dragon]

"The 2nd point is support. It's impeccable, and having guaranteed 24-hour help for those times when things foo bar up so badly we can't repair things is essential to running a service for our clients."

Yes, but who supplies your support? If it was Microsoft there would be no market for the likes of CSC and EDS who make a fortune out of support contracts because Microsoft support is not adequate.

If you have to pay someone for 24x7 support you may as well pay them for support no a reliable platform that is far better suited for 24x7 operations.

The fact that OSS has worse support is a myth - OSS comes with a good developer base that you (or your support contractor) can tap into, and Windows comes with the somewhat inferior MSDN _and that's about it_. Everything else you have to pay for one way or another.

Re:MS consistency

[Billly Gates]

Yes MS has great support. ***chuckles.

Re:MS consistency

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that OSS has worse support is a myth

No, OSS has support from the OSS community and Microsoft software has support from the MS community. Now you may judge one as being worse than another, but in reality I've found they're both as useful as one another. There are hundreds of thousands of each type of people and I only need an answer from one when I ask online. I always get that

Re:MS consistency

[phaze3000]

Yes, the configuration of Apache is quite different to many other programs ('wildly different' is somewhat over the top - at heart, configuring almost all Unix programs invloves editing text files).

But is the configuration process for IIS really that similar to Exchange? Not really - they're very different tasks, so in many ways this isn't really surprising.

As for support, IBM and many others will be happy to offer 24-hour help at the right-price - Free software might not cost anything to get, but it's certainly not free to run. Of course, you don't get 24-hour help for Windows by default either.

The major difference between Microsoft solutions and Open Source solutions is in terms of flexibility - instead of getting a 'black box' which you can do little to change, you can adapt the software to your business. There's no way Microsoft can compete with this under the terms of their current licensing, and ultimately this is why Open Souce software will come to dominate computing.

Re:MS consistency

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the unix configuration far more logical than that in Windows.

Finding a Windows setting is, to me, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Webserver settings may be spread across a dozen modules in various parts of the OS

For apache, it's almost all in httpd.conf (or your local flavours version).

That theme is spread across the entirety of Windows. It's like options are sprayed around the OS like dogshit. Text files in UNIX systems are generally local to their own area, and that makes more sense to me.

Re:MS consistency

[g4dget]

First off is the consistency across the board.

Yes, Microsoft gives you consistently gray-and-blue dialog boxes. Lots of them. You can click around in them for hours trying to get anything done. But it's consistent.

and while the people exist who can administer those, the configuration for say, Apache, is wildly different to just about anything else, and anything else from each other. Just an observation.

And you think that the configuration of different Windows utilities is consistent just because you see them all through dialog boxes? Underneath that "consistent" veneer of Windows is the same variety of configuration semantics as exists for Linux. But, hey, it appears consistent.

The 2nd point is support. It's impeccable, and having guaranteed 24-hour help for those times when things foo bar up so badly we can't repair things is essential to running a service for our clients.

Support costs money. If you pay enough for Windows support, you get "impeccable" Windows support. If you pay enough for Linux support, you get "impeccable" Linux support. However, if you are any reasonably sized business, you are big enough to have enough Linux expertise in-house so that you don't need any outside support.

I won't comment on their business practices, but suffice it to say that's their choice.

I won't comment on your business practices. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of companies like yours that have way too much money and don't know what they are doing.

Re:MS consistency

[timotten]

I'll bite! :)

To update, run, install and fix a service is consistent ... the configuration for say, Apache, is wildly different to just about anything else, and anything else from each other.

That's an illusion. A good deployment requires a firm understanding of what is being deployed, and that requires the same amount of work for Apache or IIS. Your employee just feels more secure about configuring IIS with a GUI because it seems to require less creative input, and it allows him to deflect creative mistakes onto Microsoft rather than accept them himself.

Re:MS consistency

[JohnFluxx]

This reminds me of databases.

When I started off in the database field, I developed a few databases for about 4-5 companies, using MS-Access. It was all gui, click and play..

Then I went to university, and learnt database theory, and use oracle. At first I thought it was a step back, since it wasn't as easy any more to produce a database. Then I realised that far more of the effort goes into designing the database than implementing it, and that the GUI almost discourages designing first.

Re:MS consistency

[bigman2003]

Webserver settings may be spread across a dozen modules in various parts of the OS

I don't know about this- although I guess you got yourself off the hook by using 'may'. Like "Webserver setting may (but I really don't know) be spread across a dozen modules..."

Other than my network settings, the only things I ever touch on my webservers is the Internet Services Manager. If you can figure out how to use the MMC, and right-click, you can find all of the settings you need right there.

Do you have examples of these wide-spread settings, or did this comment fit into the may/might category of stuff you don't know?

Re:MS consistency

[Sajarak]

A good deployment requires a firm understanding of what is being deployed, and that requires the same amount of work for Apache or IIS.

Plus you have a much better idea of what you've done with a config file. Try working out what's been done to an IIS server without having to click through endless dialogue boxes. If you're not prepared to invest some time in learning how to write a script that queries the metabase, that's about your only choice.

IIS's design is targeted at people who don't know what they're doing, and aren't willing to learn. The problem is that this is exactly what you don't want when you're exposing your information systems to the rest of the world.

Admittedly they've improved things in this regard with IIS 6 and its XML config file, but I haven't checked it out yet and remain to be convinced...

Re:MS consistency

[actor_au]

I won't comment on your business practices. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of companies like yours that have way too much money and don't know what they are doing.

I'll help them get rid off it if you like..

Re:MS consistency

[mousse-man]

You can have that with AIX, Solaris or MacOS X as well, and very very possibly also with the Redhat AS platform.

What you have with MS, and not yet with other vendors, is an integration of the platform. Just think of Active Directory, MS Exchange 2000, Sharepoint, Internet Explorer etc.

If there's a Linux distro that does something like Active Directory, provides a enterprise messaging platform integrated into the first with all gimmicks like instant messenger, and then provides a desktop OS with the applications a company needs, then something unsatisfactory might happen to Microsoft.

And Novell isn't a contender as it does not supply the whole gamut of software I described that extends to the desktop OS.

Re:MS consistency

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can pretend that companies view private newsgroups as support then sure you can pretend that OSS has better support.

Re:MS consistency

[Badanov]

Open source or closed source, there is NO WAY I would buy any new software product without also purchasing some kind of support.

If MS doesn't provide adequete software support, some of their vendors or independant consultants can supply such support. The same goes for open source vendors. They know they are selling something which is free, but it is the support I purchase from them, not necessarily the software itself.

Re:MS consistency

[Reziac]

Outfits like EDS aren't making a fortune because M$'s and HP's support is inadequate. Outfits like EDS make a fortune because they've conviced techcorp managers that it would be *cheaper* to outsource. The *quality* of tech support is not a deciding factor (observationally, whenever support it outsourced, there follows a sharp *drop* in the quality of support, because it means a switch to minwage script monkey rather than being supported by someone who really knows the product).

I suspect that in terms of total cost of support and user satisfaction vs. users who say to hell with it and go with a different product (not to mention some "interesting" billing and accounting processes by these support outfits), outsourcing support is costing techcorps WAY more than it's saving, but it looks better on paper when that bottom line comes up in front of the Board of Directors.

Re:MS consistency

[Anonymous Coward]

"Support costs money. If you pay enough for Windows support, you get "impeccable" Windows support. If you pay enough for Linux support, you get "impeccable" Linux support. However, if you are any reasonably sized business, you are big enough to have enough Linux expertise in-house so that you don't need any outside support."

Same goes true for corps that are a MS shop, they should, and can, afford to have in-house support staff knowledgeable enough to keep things on the up-and-up. What makes Linux any different?

Re:MS consistency

[raju1kabir]

Other than my network settings, the only things I ever touch on my webservers is the Internet Services Manager. If you can figure out how to use the MMC, and right-click, you can find all of the settings you need right there.

No you can't. Though, contrary to the poster you responded to, I wouldn't say it's because they are hidden elsewhere. I'd say it's just because IIS is about as configurable as a light bulb.

Apache provides an amazingly rich set of options allowing all sorts of wonderful things that IIS (at least as of 5; that's the last time I seriously used it) simply can't do (except maybe very slowly through ASP).

Re:MS consistency

[spruce]

No, the GUI just makes it easy enough that people who don't really know how to do it can, and some people abuse that. But people that do know how to do it can still design a proper database using Access, there's nothing about a GUI that stops that.

Re:MS consistency

[shaitand]

Hardly, there are no shortage of commercial support options available for those who wish to spend the money. But if you think you'll get better support by calling a support line and getting the opinion of one guy than the plethora of information a competant individual can get on-line (for microsoft or linux solutions) your a fool.

Re:MS consistency

[shaitand]

you have to hire 3x the number of in house support staff to keep windows up and running. This has been shown time and time again.

For every one windows machine I could administer (and I DO actively administer windows machines) I could easily administer at 3 linux machines. This is because of an extremely large number of factors. Power in scripting, ability to remote manage, the ability to apply patches for all software in the system remotely through one interface.

The fact that linux products simply work, no funky glitches to deal with, if it doesn't work your missing something in configuration, once you get it right it only goes down due to hardware failure or missing something in configuration when you make a change.

There is alot more to configure in linux, your talent actually needs to know alot more about mailservers to get a mailserver working properly, which gives "expert" a more appropriate meaning, but after a slightly higher labor cost in setup the machine just sits there and runs... for years.

Re:MS consistency

[shaitand]

Then there are those who would argue that an access database is not a proper database and that since all the clients communicate with eachother over the network and create very high overhead, and that overhead grows exponetially with each client added it's not a viable solution at all ;)

Re:MS consistency

[bigman2003]

Your post is much better than the one I responded to- at least you know that I don't need to go all over the place to configure IIS.

But, in all seriousness. What settings/configuration am I missing by using IIS instead of Apache? I'm not asking "why is Apache better to set up" but "What can Apache do that IIS is missing".

Yes, this is a serious, honest question. I have never used Apache, but I am fairly happy with IIS- except for the fact that moving my meta-data is nearly impossible. Supposedly they have fixed that with 2003.

Thanks-

Re:MS consistency

[raju1kabir]

But, in all seriousness. What settings/configuration am I missing by using IIS instead of Apache? I'm not asking "why is Apache better to set up" but "What can Apache do that IIS is missing".

For starters, have a look at the examples in the URL Rewriting Guide.

There are legions of other things. Have a look at the sample httpd.conf file that comes with the Apache distribution for lots of examples.

Yep buy Microsoft!

[bazik]

Yes, buy their products to support them. Where else can you get such decent mice?

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[kien]

Where else can you get such decent mice?

And keyboards! Until recently, I had always used Microsoft mice but that IBM optical mouse (with the blue wheel) finally won me over.
Come to think of it, Microsoft releases some damn fun games too. I can't wait until they realize that they should start porting them to *nix to prop up their profits.

--K.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[LamerX]

Uhm, you could try a Logitech mouse. They are $4.99 at most places and will outlast any MS mouse you can find on the market. Or get an optical for $8.99.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[KDan]

Hey, the logitech MX700 just kicks the ass of my old Intellieye explorer. It's really good looking, rechargeable, wireless, optical, high-frequency (good for games), works fine under both windows and linux (linux with a couple of buttons missing but I've got a mail logitech support sent me which explains how to get them working under linux - not something I'd expect from M$ - but haven't had time to go through it yet), etc. It's just perfect in every respect.

Daniel

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[bazik]

I dont like wireless mice that much. The cord saved mine from smashing on the floor hundred times ;)

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[tsa]

They killed Tex Murphy. I hope against all odds that they come back on that decision.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

then try the mx300 (or is it 500? to early now.)

the wired version

damn nice mice.

but alas, i still have all M$ optical mice here (about 8) except for one, on my main machine, a sony memory stick optical mouse....i love that thing.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[KDan]

I've learnt hand-eye coordination a while ago ;-)

Daniel

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I stay away from Logitech for the simple reason that their driver support sucks big time. They wouldn't release a Win2K driver for a 6 month old webcam - I can't do business with a company like that...

There's again, MS release driver updates even when I don't want them. usually every Wednesday.

Although that said, their hardware is nice, remember a big company like MS outsources stuff. You can't just slate it cos of the label someone put on it.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Loosewire]

I have to admit even though i hate M$ they make great mice, after 3 years my intellimouse explorer version 1 is starting to freeze :-( not ill have to find another - the version 3 one's thumb buttons are too small and its horribly shaped.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[fireman sam]

Ah yes, but the chord can also be used for swinging the mouse violently around just before you slam it into the ground when it stops working.

Or if you have a screwdriver handy, ram one through the top of the mouse. Mmmm satifying.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[bigman2003]

Are you epileptic? The armrests on your chair aren't really guardrails you know..they are there for comfort.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[the eric conspiracy]

And keyboards!

Gack! There is only the One True Keyboard.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

The lens has dust on it. Wrap some cloth or something around a penpoint and reach in there to brush it off, it'll work like new.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Karellen]

Actually, I do buy MS hardware. I prefer microsoft mice to most others; I currently have an MS IntelliEye optical mouse, and would hate to go back to one with a ball.

However, it is interesting to note that MS don't have a monopoly on hardware. The hardware they make is replaceable by other hardware of the same kind (Keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc...) with no issues whatsoever.

The fact that they are forced to play on a level field when it comes to hardware means that the stuff they come out with is good. It has to be, otherwise people would just buy the alternatives.

K.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft releases some damn fun games too. I can't wait until they realize that they should start porting them to *nix to prop up their profits."

Absolutely, look how profitable porting games to *nix was for Loki. Now there was a model to build a business on.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

after 3 years my intellimouse explorer version 1 is starting to freeze

The Intellimouse Explorer comes with a lifetime warranty. I had the same experience a while back and they sent me a new one in the mail for free. I believe the phone # was 800-360-7561.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[shaitand]

Loki was porting other peoples programs to linux and had to pay out the arse to any company it wanted to do this for. A company writing their games with portability in mind and adding another platform would be relatively cheap. A company porting their own game that was already written for an MS OS would be more expensive than planning this from the start but would still be cheaper than it was for loki.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Intellimouse Explorer version 1 freezes because of a design flaw in the cabling - it is poorly secured and the connection becomes flaky after some time. I wouldn't get another one.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Loosewire]

i took it apart about 6 months ago and completely cleaned it - thanks for your advice and the other reply's. Ill get on to fixing it tomorow when im awake.

Re:Yep buy Microsoft!

[Loosewire]

I tried what the other posters suggested and it didnt work, phoned MS - they seemed to think the Product id (im sure thats unique to my mouse its so long) was 1 digit too long - anyway their sending me another one free. err thanks M$ ???

67.123% of statictics are made up on the spot

[Michael's a Jerk!]

xxx% are planning to upgrade to linux anytime soon

This should be taken with a grain of salt. 'Planning' and doing are 2 entirely seperate things. The fact is, (ans I'm going to be modded down by the linux crowd) is that windows is cheap. Why?

You don't have to train your users over again. You don't need expensive unix/linux admins (MCSE's are a dime a dozen - and most are good, too. Don't let elitism clud your jusgement). More software works on windows (WINE is not always the answer).

Linux is nice, but it isn't ready for the desktop quite yet.

Re:67.123% of statictics are made up on the spot

[rat7307]

Mmmmmmm, Slanty

</i> Dude!

Re:67.123% of statictics are made up on the spot

[Anonymous Coward]

67.123% - oh man, that's a so made up number! Could you have not picked:

65.803%
42.914%

67.123% is almost as bad as 12.345%! You'd fail Statistics with that analysis.

Re:67.123% of statictics are made up on the spot

[Unregistered]

you need more MSCEs than linux gurus, though. One guru (with a few monkeys to replace blown hardware) can administer a system of any size if he's good. Admittadly to migrate you need more, but just hire them as consultants and you only need to keep one once everything's running.

Obligatory Bad Joke

[AtomicX]

Bill: Our market share is falling, what can we do? Ballmer: [Sweating]Improve our products?[Still Sweating] Bill: Don't be ridiculous, if Windows was secure then we wouldn't be able to charge for bug fixes, [not that our software is buggy of course] Ballmer: [Shirt now navy blue]We could take the old standby[Shirt now very dark navy blue] Bill: Aha - [to voice activated Windows box]Bring in the lawyers![Windows BSODs] [To voice activated Linux box] Bring in the lawyers! [Lawyers arrive] Bill: I want Linux to be made illegal Ballmer: [Shirt now dissolving in acidic sweat] Developers! Developers! Developers! Bill: Not now Steve! Lawyers: This will cost you Bill, bribery is very expensive these days. Bill: Nah! - I ran an audit check on the US govt. they haven't complied with the MS Windows Server 2003 EULA clause 0203432448 (You hereby agree that All your base are belong to MS) Lawyers: It shall be done oh fabulously wealthy one! [US Govt. declares Finland a terrorist state, wages violent war, Linus Torvolds writes a quick kernel update then goes into hiding] ... to be continued.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[AtomicX]

^^ forgot to format it - double posting is a /. tradition anyway.

Bill: Our market share is falling, what can we do?

Ballmer: [Sweating]Improve our products?[Still Sweating]

Bill: Don't be ridiculous, if Windows was secure then we wouldn't be able to charge for bug fixes, [not that our software is buggy of course]

Ballmer: [Shirt now navy blue]We could take the old standby[Shirt now very dark navy blue]

Bill: Aha - [to voice activated Windows box]Bring in the lawyers![Windows BSODs] [To voice activated Linux box] Bring in the lawyers!

[Lawyers arrive]

Bill: I want Linux to be made illegal

Ballmer: [Shirt now dissolving in acidic sweat] Developers! Developers! Developers!

Bill: Not now Steve!

Lawyers: This will cost you Bill, bribery is very expensive these days.

Bill: Nah! - I ran an audit check on the US govt. they haven't complied with the MS Windows Server 2003 EULA clause 0203432448 (You hereby agree that All your base are belong to MS)

Lawyers: It shall be done oh fabulously wealthy one!

[US Govt. declares Finland a terrorist state, wages violent war, Linus Torvolds writes a quick kernel update then goes into hiding] ... to be continued.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

I run Linux and I found that shit entirely unfunny. Then again, I don't say things like Micro$oft.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[davidsansome]

How does Microsoft make any profit at all, considering they have to pay for that guy's laundry bill...
(As bad as that joke was, it's better than the parent ;-))

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[bj8rn]

I found it funny for two reasons:
1) Because the same post got modded up twice
2) It resembles a part of James Joyce's "Ulysses"...

Apart from this... joke with a long beard.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for the +1 Funny punchline

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

2) It resembles a part of James Joyce's "Ulysses"...

Which part exactly?

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[bj8rn]

Which part exactly?

The hallucination part (in the red lights district), where people's appearances change all the time.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, your failure to properly preview or format a Slashdot post will not be taken as representative of the insight into your post. I understand that the life of a 14 year old is tough, and you were probably busy cleaning your room.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[kurosawdust]

if it sweats, we can kill it.

Re:Obligatory Bad Joke

[hackrobat]

Oops... you forgot to add:

Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[dipipanone]

This isn't my experience at all. I maintain two servers. One is a Windows 2000 server, the other runs the standard RedHat offering (not the enterprise version.)

The Redhat server just works. I never have any downtime, it's never crashed, I've never lost any data -- the thing just sits there, ticking away in the background, doing what it's supposed to do.

The Win2k server, in contrast, is a continuous pain in the arse. Administration isn't at all transparent -- you fill in a few tick boxes, and pray that it's going to do what the manual says it will do. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes things just stop working, with no apparent reason. (File replication was the last thing that just 'broke'.)

With regard to the learning curve, I found that it was slightly more difficult at the beginning for Linux, but once I'd grasped the basic concepts, they pretty well applied everywhere. This isn't true for Windows 2000.

The last big problem is interoperability. With the linux server, connectivity just works. With the Windows server, it's forever disappearing from view.

Both OSes do have certain strengths and weaknesses, but I don't see that Windows has any advantage in either stability or ease of maintenance.

Survey size?

[Anonymous Coward]

We polled 4 CIOs and 1 of them said they're replacing Microsoft with Linux.

I always love when they quote figures from a survey that was conducted, but don't give any details such as size or region (US only or world wide?).

Re:Survey size?

[Lord Kholdan]

"Poll was conducted at the door of the local LUG"

Re:Survey size?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more like "I went to dinner with 4 CIOs last night, and one of them said something about replacing his Windows servers with Linux. He then ordered a fourth Kamikaze."

Re:Survey size?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Nah. They asked 2 CIO's. Both were talking out both sides of their mouth.

All in One.

[SharpFang]

If you buy Microsoft products, you get all that stuff connected, i.e. buying Microsoft hardware you are sure it will be supported flawlessly by Microsoft software.

And now I wonder if I get modded down for this as Troll or up as Funny :P

Re:All in One.

[KingRamsis]

supported flawlessly by Microsoft software.

And now I wonder if I get modded down for this as Troll or up as Funny :P

how about getting modded imaginary:-2 .

Re:All in One.

[commodoresloat]

I thought that's what everybody said about Apple?

Re:All in One.

[Blob Pet]

imaginary:-2

You mean imaginary:i right?

Re:All in One.

[Anonymous Coward]

(Microsoft hardware? Like what? Mice? Keyboards? Are you serious?)

That's why people buy Apple or Sun.

Apple makes the WHOLE widget. Microwannabe pretends they do, tries to, but doesn't.

Go back to TechTV, you need to touch up on your cell-phone-attached-to-goatee-skills, Microsloth hick.

Re:All in One.

[Anonymous Coward]

imaginary:-2

You mean imaginary:i right?

No, imaginary: sqrt(-2)

Re:All in One.

[crgrace]

You mean imaginary:i right?

No, he means imaginary:j (He's an Electrical Engineer...)

Well..

[CausticWindow]

First of all, it would take quite a lot of money to buy them.

And secondly, if you did, you would have to get rid of monkeyboy somehow.

Re:Well..

[dipipanone]

And secondly, if you did, you would have to get rid of monkeyboy somehow.

Oooh. Can we make him dance until his heart explodes? Please? Pretty please?

Re:Well..

[KingRamsis]

I think we should lock him on a room with a keyboard and leave him there for infinity maybe he will come up with some worthy source code.

Why buy Microsoft ?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

One reason :

unmount /dev/hdd /cdrom

I love everything Linux, but seriously, what will my secretary do when her CD is stuck in the drive despite hitting the eject button furiously, and she doesn't know how to get it out ? And yes, I know you can learn Linux and it's not that hard and yada yada, but she's already taken months to leave her typewritter and get going under Windows. You think my secretary is an old thing from another generation that has become rare ? think again.

So, yeepee-doo for Linux, let Linux take over the world, but please leave my secretary under Windows so she can do her work.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[panurge]

Buy the poor woman a Mac. You know it makes sense. My wife runs an all-woman business, the office is full of Macs (Linux servers) and, you know what? Support is virtually nil. When she had PCs, we had constant training issues. I don't fully understand it myself, it just seems to happen.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Billly Gates]

I haven't seen this in awhile. Most modern distro's have automounting.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Narcissus]

It cracks me up when I read people complaining about mounting and unmounting disks. I haven't had to do any of this for a very long time: the last few Mandrake installs (at least!) came with automount or supermount or whatever it's called, and it just works.

And don't think that the disk won't get "stuck" in Windows: it just means that the only alternative is to reboot the machine to unstick it, not type a oneliner into a command line. Just make a link to a shell script, and everyone should be happy.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[chris mazuc]

I really don't understand people in general and how grossly incompetent they are with anything more complex than a toaster or a microwave. I can understand if they've never even seen a computer before, but jesus christ, if you've been using one for more than a week you should have more than a small grasp on how to open and save files. Or how about keeping track of where they save it to so I don't have to take the three clicks (in windows) to get them to the find dialog to have them tell me they don't know what it was called. If they are really that dumb whe it comes to technology they need to get another job.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[tortap-0]

"unmount /dev/hdd /cdrom"

Oh, so your "secretary" would have problems with Linux... Right.

Hee hee, looks more like _you_ couldn't figure it out. With the cdrom in fstab you would just need /cdrom not the dev-part and btw, the command is 'umount' :P

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Lord Kholdan]

Are you saying that people should adapt to technology instead of technology adapting to people?

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[chris mazuc]

No. I've given it a little more thought though. I think they are more impatient and unwilling to learn than unable. I've met people that can strip a car engine to the block in under half an hour, but claim to not understand the concept of right-click vs left-click. The level of dumbness that would have to be achieved would make the technology near useless.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are also clueless: the device is not required for unmounting, irrespective of what's in an fstab file.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[syberdave]

u use either

umount /dev/hdd

-OR-

umount /cdrom

you're wasting precious keystrokes!!

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Anonymous Coward]

you tell her to right click on the icon in nautilus, scripts, open scripts folder and double-click on the icon for the script you (or whoever) wrote to do whatever it is she needs to do.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[the eric conspiracy]

Are you saying that people should adapt to technology instead of technology adapting to people?

Despite all the protestations that technology should adapt to people, the fact of life is that technology inevitably changes the way people work. If it didn't and your email program worked like a fax machine (scan a paper copy and send the bitmap), there would be no incentive to invest in new technology.

It's called progress, and yes I know people hate change, but those who don't end up sleeping on park benches.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Anonymous Coward]

U start of so well with "u use either", but u blew it right @ the end there.

"you're wasting"? Plz! It sndz like u had an edu'n! U not typing it as "ur wasting", shame on u! Ur the 1 wasting preciou$ keystrokes... sheesh.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Anonymous Coward]

no no! /umount/cdr[TAB]

gotta love that command line completion

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Lord Kholdan]

You are missing the point. If it is possible we should design technology to fit humans and not the other way around. Change is not a value in itself.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[bigman2003]

I couldn't even begin to strip down a car engine.

I don't know what forms we need to use to send a request to purchasing.

I'm not a photographer.

I can't write a story that the public would want to read.

I don't expect the other people around me to know more about computers than I know about their jobs.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[khold]

Ah, ignore all other Linux Distros. Personally, I use Slackware and FreeBSD and I hate Mandrake.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[MobyTurbo]

One reason :
unmount /dev/hdd /cdrom

That should be umount No "n", in order to save keystrokes. :-) Of course, Red Hat and probably other Linuxes offer automounting, where CDs are automatically mounted and unmounting and ejecting them can be done via right-clicking on a desktop icon.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[mslinux]

Buy the poor woman a Mac. You know it makes sense.

Are you joking? I started using Macs two months ago. Before that time it was 100% Windows PCs. I found the transition from the PC to the Mac difficult, and still prefer the PC

The post above you complained about the steps required to eject a CD under Linux. Well, Mac's claim to be intuitive, but what the hell is intuitive about dragging the CD icon to the trash when you want to eject it? What does throw away have to do with eject? In Windows, I right click and select (gasp) EJECT. That's a hell of a lot more understandable than dragging it to the trash.

Windows is better than OSX by a long shot!

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just type eject. It unmounts, and ejects the CDrom (within RedHat anyway). And you could make her a nice little icon on the desktop that does this so she never has to type anything.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Waffle Iron]

That's not usually the problem. The problem is that Un*x refuses to unmount a drive with open files. It's compounded by the tendency of things like KDE to hold on to open handles for a while after a program is "closed". Or maybe the cdrom was the current directory when you started some unrelated program in a terminal hours ago.

You're going to have to teach the secretary how to use "lsof /dev/cdrom" to track down which processes won't let go of the CD.

This is one case where Windows does it right. It just unmounts the CD, and further attempts to access it by programs result in an I/O error. This behaviour is much more intuitive and convenient. Usually, if an I/O error occurs, a dialog pops up and you can figure out that you need to reinsert the CD in question if you really need that program to keep running.

Silenty disabling the physical eject button on the cdrom drive is one of those things that can make users want to smash their system with a sledgehammer. It is not a way to encourage people to migrate to Linux.

While it may make programming more consistent, it is a usability bug and should be fixed.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[rawshark]

Type "eject". I was even able to make a KDE desktop icon for it.

The above works in Red Hat 8.0.94 and 9.0, but I believe the eject utility is fairly common, still, YMMV

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[sjames]

Are you saying that people should adapt to technology instead of technology adapting to people?

Since it will be very hard to get computers to know what we want by beating our chests and grunting, we might just have to adapt. Sort of like we learned to use keyboards, light switches, and doorknobs.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[raju1kabir]

The post above you complained about the steps required to eject a CD under Linux. Well, Mac's claim to be intuitive, but what the hell is intuitive about dragging the CD icon to the trash when you want to eject it? What does throw away have to do with eject? In Windows, I right click and select (gasp) EJECT. That's a hell of a lot more understandable than dragging it to the trash.

Grab the USB mouse off your Windows machine, plug it into the Mac, right-click on the CD icon, and choose "eject". It's not hard, even for someone dumb enough to prefer the Windows UI.

Or hit command-E ('e' for Eject, get it?). Or click "eject" in the menu at the top of the window where you see the CD icon. Or choose "eject" from the File menu. Or control-click the icon and choose "eject" from the popup menu.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[sjames]

But I'll bet you can drive a car, take a snapshot, and write a brief note. You could probably even change a flat tire if pressed In addition, in spite of not being a linguist, you probably speak a language.

People don't expect their car to just 'know' what to do when they get in it in the morning, or even expect it to know what gear to be in, why do they start drooling uncontrollably when they sit at the computer?

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Kaali]

There you go, http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~quintela/supermoun t/ -- just add that patch to your kernel. Or use Mandrake kernel (or Mandrake itself if you want "easy to use" -distro). It's all free and happy pappy, so nobody is pissing against the wind.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[Alpha_Nerd]

All women business??

Wow, Affirmative Action might just get me a job now !!

Re:Why buy Microsoft ?

[mpe]

And don't think that the disk won't get "stuck" in Windows: it just means that the only alternative is to reboot the machine to unstick it

Or cope with the machine constantly switching into a text mode error message as some app tries to access a disk which isn't there any more.

Human Resources

[locarecords.com]

Regardless of the wishes of the open source community to write off Microsoft, it is one thing having every part of their product range being available and usable o/s... it is quite another to have the status and prestige of a multinational to implement them.

Corporate buyers and technologists are notoriously conservative and things like long term longevity of the company, market capitalisation, project history, locked in technologies and pure tradition (ie we have always bought from Microsoft) have a massive impact on buying decisions.

As someone once remarked to me, "No-one gets sacked for buying Microsoft software"...

So I think they'll be around mighty longer than anyone anticipates (providing they don't make a huge technological miscalculation). And judging by their past aggressiveness and competitiveness I would say they can't be written off yet.

When pricing a firm there is much much more to it than saying that someone else sells everything they do.

Re:Human Resources

[Anonymous Coward]

So I think they'll be around mighty longer than anyone anticipates (providing they don't make a huge technological miscalculation).

They are betting the company on Palladium and .NET. Could this be the huge technological miscalculation?

Re:Human Resources

[ealar dlanvuli]

Actually, we just got done firing 15 techs because they refused to expand their knowledge past windows. We now have a nice group of techs with some leaning towards windows and some leaning towards unix, but no one is lost in either system.

Don't say no one ever got fired for microsoft -- it was true two years ago -- it's not today.

Re:Human Resources

[Idarubicin]

.. it is quite another to have the status and prestige of a multinational to implement them...

As someone once remarked to me, "No-one gets sacked for buying Microsoft software"...

You know, that phrase used to be "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Big Blue sold (often) overpriced and underperforming big iron. How? Because their legendary sales force could use that very phrase.

Now, IBM isn't quite the juggernaut it once was--that torch has been passed to Microsoft, for the time being. They still do a damn good sales job, and they've been forced to improve their products and prices through a ton of competitive pressure. You want the status and prestige of a multinational? A company that can support their products 24/7? The stability of a name that goes back for decades?

Hint: Think IBM. Oh, and they're selling Linux stuff.

I can think of one reason...

[marsonist]

Clippit, the cute and loveable Office assistant. Let's see Linux' answer to that.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[commodoresloat]

this is it.

Never ever doubt linux again.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[iapetus]

Clippit, the cute and loveable Office assistant. Let's see Linux' answer to that.

That's an easy one: we have ESR. :)

Re:I can think of one reason...

[nitehorse]

First off, his name is Clippy. Clippy is the DEVIL.

Second off, of course we have an answer to that. We've combined our most evil text editor (vi) with an annoying assistant... BEHOLD! VIGOR!

Yeah, it's evil. Yes. Evil. /me cries in the corner.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Isomer]

http://vigor.sourceforge.net/

Vigor, the paperclip for vi. It provides helpful hints like "Remember, press [esc] to leave insert mode" and "are you sure you want to move left?"

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

As for that paper clip ....what a friendly fellow. See him again

http://www.deanliou.com/WinRG/WinRG.htm

Thats the Windows OS if ya wanna check it out :>

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vigor

Re:I can think of one reason...

[NineBall]

"Let's see Linux' answer to that."
My money's on Tux telling people to RTFM.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[marsonist]

I just opened up Word (I'm at work... blame my employer, not me) and he (or she for that matter) is clearly named clippit :-)

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

> First off, his name is Clippy.

No it isn't. His name is Clippit, check any computer running Office and see.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a shotgun and I don't need Linux for it at all!

Re:I can think of one reason...

[shaitand]

only on slashdot do you find debates on what the annoying paperclip guy's name is.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would, but I never installed the little piece of shit.

For those of you who installed him accidentally, and want him gone, delete the Actors dir under 'Microsoft Office'. Going through setup and unchecking his box is NOT enough to remove him once he's installed (nice one, MS).

Re:I can think of one reason...

[neo]

Done!

Tux, the mute pengium. He stays hidden unless you really, REALLY need him. Which nobody ever does.

Re:I can think of one reason...

[Piquan]

Actually, I had to change the "press [esc]" hint.

A user (who shall remain nameless) was learning Vi from a really bad tutorial, that didn't mention that bit. The user was confounded, until he used Vigor and got the hint. The user wrote me, and thanked me for writing Vigor! Since Vigor must be utterly useless, I had to change that hint. It now says:

You have not entered insert mode before. While you're in insert mode, remember that you need to return to command mode before entering Vigor commands!

As an aside: To make edits, I'll often open something like "/usr/local/src/vigor/vigor/vigor.tcl". There's something scary about saying his name three times like that...

A good reason not to buy it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, one reason not to buy Microsoft would be that I just don't have the money it would cost me (correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess it would take a couple of billion to do a hostile takeover)

Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Billly Gates]

Thank Microsoft for inventing the idea of Visual Basic and obstructions to the c++ standard that make it difficult if not impossible to port apps. This was done on purpose to force bussinesses to be dependant on Windows. Fact of the matter is during the 90's they viewed Microsoft as the good guys needed to set standards. Now its payback.

I remember the old saying "Don't code it include it!". The point is that your apps are really just wrappers for some ms specific code.

If it took 30 years to replace cobal/IBM 370 code then it will take 30 years to get the com/.net/Windows back out again. I predict Windows to be used for 30 or 40 years thanks to the proprietariness of the whole environment.

Also look at prepackaged software. Its all Windows based. Peoplesoft, great plains accounting, autocad, etc.

Sadly many companies today are ready to jump on the .net train even though they are critizing Microsoft's licensing practices. They will surely be locked in. Infact according to the Gartner group %50 of all companies are looking at .net migration! They just do not get it. Today its mostly Unix based but they are afraid that java might die under the almighty Microsoft view .net as a safe way to avoid risk managment.

On another note Microsoft does make the best Office suites around. Not to mention I found no ide that approaches VC++. Vi is cool as a great text editor for many different langauges but it does not have autoword completion, autoclass completetion, class browsing extra that VC++ has. Kdevelop sucks goatballs and only eclipse is close. Unfortunatly its for java development.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[l3mure]

Vi is cool as a great text editor for many different langauges but it does not have autoword completion

Have you ever tried ctrl-p in editing mode?

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Kumkwat]

Actually .NET is where I think Microsoft is going right for once. For the first time we have a truely open standard (ECMA standardized), well the CLR parts of it, which people can develop for. You won't find their Windowing code in their or ASP.NET but these are the area's that are going to generate revenue for MS. There are now ports for FreeBSD, MacOSX and the Mono guys are working a version for Linux. True platform cross compatibility, plus a typed runtime that was actually designed to provide support for somewhat seemless byte code compilation from multiple languages. Unlike the JVM which really was designed for Java only to run on different platforms.

I've been workin on .NET for a few yrs now, actually with the open source release Rotor designing a functional langauge and have found it rather a joy to use. Plus MS Research is now supporting quite a few research oriented open source initiatives that will hopefully provide rather novel enhancements in the coming years.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[chris mazuc]

If it took 30 years to replace cobal/IBM 370 code then it will take 30 years to get the com/.net/Windows back out again. I predict Windows to be used for 30 or 40 years thanks to the proprietariness of the whole environment.

That stuff was around for that long because it was installed on very large and very expensive mainframes and the like. I don't see much of the current hardware still being functional 15 years from now, nevermind 40. The hardware will change too fast to keep the old systems running, and it's not like they're going to port it over for you. You get to buy the New and Improved version!

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[bazik]

>> I remember the old saying "Don't code it include it!". Wasnt it: "Hey it compiles! Ship it!" ? :)

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[bazik]

Uhh... remember me hitting "preview" next time :P

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[sohp]

''Unfortunatly its (sic) for java development''.

Not true. Eclipse itself is a development tool platform, it just happens that Java is the first and most widely know language. There's a C/C++ toolkit now, though, see the CDT. There's also an effort to develop a COBOL IDE!

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[fongsaiyuk]

Also look at prepackaged software. Its all Windows based. Peoplesoft, great plains accounting, autocad, etc

Techincally, w.r.t. PeopleSoft, this statement isn't exactly true:

PeopleSoft Jumps on Linux Bandwagon

Announcements of this type are actually very big news for the business world, IMO. The biggest core application for a non-technology company, ie. Manufacturing, is it's ERP system's. Sure, Cisco can switch all desktop development off of Un*x to Linux because of the similar environment.

ERP systems moving to run wholly on Linux can be a very big insentive for bigger businesses to roll out Linux beyond simple Web servers...

The next hurdle will be trying to migrate the 100's and 1000's of little Excel spreadsheet applications over to OpenOffice/StarOffice. That is where some of the larger costs will be: training and user familiarity.

But I don't really care about that part yet. IMO, a businesses application development and ERP systems should all be running on Linux. All the front end applications that the non-IT people write can exists on MS-Office products.

Well, until OpenOffice familiarity and adoption occurs...

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[the eric conspiracy]

only eclipse is close

Eclipse is better and can be used to develop in langauges other than Java. I've used it for Java, C, PHP and Perl.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Anonymous Coward]

People soft.. hmmmm where have I heard that name before...

http://www.peoplesoft.com/corp/en/about/press/pr es s_release.jsp?doc=4E3DC2539585756B88256D1E005A0B63

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been chopping out the first paragraph break on and off for a while now... 'be nice if it would just work. :P

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[evilpenguin]

Sadly many companies today are ready to jump on the .net train even though they are critizing Microsoft's licensing practices. They will surely be locked in. Infact according to the Gartner group %50 of all companies are looking at .net migration! They just do not get it. Today its mostly Unix based but they are afraid that java might die under the almighty Microsoft view .net as a safe way to avoid risk managment.

First, let me let you know my prejudices. I am a Linux advocate. I like Linux. I've developed software for Unix systems professionally for 14 years now. I have also become a Free Software advocate. This took a fair amount of time. I thought the right way to make money with software was to keep it closed and secret. I now think this is the right way for a small number of investors to make the largest possible amount of money out of skilled people who are not so well compensated. In a Free Software economy, programmers become like lawyers, doctors, and architects: professionals compensated for the quality of their practice.

So much for background. Even as an advocate, I think we must recognize the validty of the argument quoted above. When you have choices between propretary platforms, you must manage the risk. You must try to choose the winner. And it is difficult to find a market Microsoft has chosen to move into where it has not become the winner (most often by leveraging their OS monopoly, but we've had that fight already).

The only products that have gained ground against Microsoft in a market Microsoft dominates are Free Software products. Why? The corollary to the above argument. Microsoft can't destroy a Free product. Sun should GPL or BSD license their Java VM and SDK as soon as possible (given my view, I'd prefer the GPL, but I would welcome any license that meets the Debian Free Software Guidelines). They should invite public development. I think everyone in the open deveopment community would welcome their sitting as benevolent dictator over the project, a la Thorvalds, and it would guarantee that whatever happened to Sun, Java would go on.

Sure, businesses are careful, and belief in the Free Software model is ony slowly winning acceptance (with Linux, Apache, and Samba leading that), but one of the reasons people accept those products is the confidence in knowing those projects will go on. No risk of vendor disappearence. Sun's best bet to keep Java in front and on top is to open it up. They already give it away, now they need to let go.

As for the general topic of Microsoft vs. Free, obviously I believe Free can do the job and will eventually (I think) completely replace all closed commodity market niches, leaving only specialty vertical markets as potential closed markets. But this will take quite a while. It will take a generation or two, simply because the generation of programmers raised on Free Software has to become the generation of technical people making the decisions. People do not make choices on a rational basis, they rationalize their prejudices. They come up with evidence for what they already believe (me too -- objectivity is extremely difficult to attain) and reject evidence to the contrary.

Money is the thing that drives what little rationality there is in this debate.

One of the reasons I think the Free Software will ultimately win is simply that Free Software is always free, whereas Microsoft gets its developer mindshare on the pusher model (first few hits are free). Universities and Technical Colleges are using and teaching with Free Software more and more. The current high price of Linux people is due to the last decade of Microsoft pushing. The people who know *nix are the older, more experienced folks -- the more expensive folks. But the next generation is going to have broader background and skills. The cheap folks will know *nix AND Windows.

Those who accuse the Free Software camp of

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[greenrd]

Actually .NET is where I think Microsoft is going right for once. For the first time we have a truely open standard (ECMA standardized), well the CLR parts of it, which people can develop for.

What use is a CLR standard without an API standard? You can't exactly WORA! It's like coding in C to platform-specific APIs! Or restricting your code to only run on x86.

Fine - so you're in effect targeting a single processor architecture which happens to be a virtual machine, not a real machine. Big whoop! That only solves the least interesting and challenging half of the platform standardisation problem. Java has already solved 99% of it.

Why don't people see this?

You won't find their Windowing code in their or ASP.NET but these are the area's that are going to generate revenue for MS.

Of course... but Sun made all their APIs cross-platform. Why the difference? Because MS needs to entrench its monopoly.

Anyone who doesn't want to support the MS OS/Office monopolies should not be using .NET. Java is equally capable, and more mature, save for some minor language points which are being addressed in JDK 1.5.

There are now ports for FreeBSD, MacOSX and the Mono guys are working a version for Linux.

Once again, a port of the CLR is not much use for without the API. Why not just use Java? Plus there are patent issues with the entire .NET shebang. Java is becoming more and more open all the time. The source code of J2SE 1.5 will be licensed for commercial use at no charge, according to Sun. And the language and all standard APIs are developed under the Java Community Process which includes open source groups like Apache (and one company heavily invested in open source, you might have heard of them - their name begins with I and ends in M).

True platform cross compatibility, plus a typed runtime that was actually designed to provide support for somewhat seemless byte code compilation from multiple languages. Unlike the JVM which really was designed for Java only to run on different platforms.

That's hype. CLR and JVMs are about equal in their ability to run different languages. Neither are perfect.

I've been workin on .NET for a few yrs now, actually with the open source release Rotor designing a functional langauge and have found it rather a joy to use.

Well, I'm sorry but I don't think that provides a good indication of real-world usefulness. "Pure functional languages" like Haskell are niche products that are inherently not suitable for many real-world, high-volume uses, because they don't support single-process interactivity(!) (Unless you implement a non-functional language on top of them and use that instead, which is one heck of a way to waste effort.) That's a pretty fundamental problem, man!

"Impure" functional languages, like Scheme, on the other hand, are fine - but the word "functional" has been stretched so much it's now unclear what it means.

Anyway, as I said, JVMs and the CLR are pretty much equal in terms of language support, so it's a moot point.

Plus MS Research is now supporting quite a few research oriented open source initiatives that will hopefully provide rather novel enhancements in the coming years.

Java is not standing still either. I suspect that Intentional Software (a R&D company - for now - started by a former MS research prodigy, and Gregor Kiczales, inventor of AspectJ) will produce stuff that feeds back into both Java and MS's stable. I don't however see anything which leads to the impression that MS will have a decisive upper hand in future.

Finally, check out www.gotdotnet.com and compare MS's short list of success stories (TWO! AllState and BearStearns) with the huge number of companies out there that have switched to Java or are building their business on Java technology. NET has been in public release (beta or otherwise) for quite a while now - shouldn't they have more success stories by now?

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Mr. Piddle]

True platform cross compatibility...

Please don't fall for the Microsoft marketing department this time around. The ECMA standardization is not sufficient, because vast .NET APIs are still proprietary to Microsoft. The ports to FreeBSD, Mac OS, and Linux are tokens, because they will forever be incomplete relative to the native Windows version.

People who will want to do anything meaningful with .NET are still locked into Microsoft and their Windows platform. Why would Microsoft allow anything else when Windows provides nearly half of their revenue? They are in a clear position of financial conflict of interest with respect to .NET on non-Windows platforms.

What other incentives would they have to allow
other companies to produce .NET compliant implementations? J2EE, for example, is implemented by IBM and BEA, whose market shares dwarf that of Sun's own implementation. Microsoft would never allow themselves to be nothing other than #1. Their corporate culture and growth-oriented stock model wouldn't allow it.

Does Microsoft have a test suite for full .NET compliance available to anyone who wants to license it? J2EE does, which leads to third-parties, such as BEA, IBM, Silverstream, Macromedia, etc., battling it out for market share. If one J2EE company kicks the bucket, there is a way out. It isn't monkey-trivial to move to a new J2EE app server (they are complex), but it is absolutely 100% possible.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Billly Gates]

Yes but do I have autoword completition, class browsing, auto class completetion, and docs?

CDT just has syntax highlighting for some keywords and thats it. You can't even compile with it. This is something I can do with the Unix version of gVIM by running :make projectname.cpp.

It is a java ide for the time being untill CDT improves.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Billly Gates]

I am shocked and amazed that people are falling for this.

I do not care how good .NET is. My point is vendor lockin creates artificial monopolies and locks out competition. How much of your asp.net code can be run on mono?

My guess is not any. My guess is Mono's .net code will not work with Microsoft's either. Microsoft is well known to break things. Just try to run Mosaic. They keep re-inventing winsock to break it on purpose.

Microsoft wants people to think of it as truly open but like another poster pointed out its not. Closed api's and libraries make this just as proprietary as VisualC++. Is the CLR even open source? Is it not patented? Microsoft has both copyrights and patents on .net just sun has on Java. I do have a mild interest in .gnu. Its a little different then .net but similiar in alot of ways.

JVM is more open in terms of ported libaries. Sun has an obsession on preventing fragemented versions. Yes its patented and copyrighted but at least all of its api's are open and all sun approved jdk's must not have any proprietary libraries.

Microsoft clearly states that it finds opensource its #1 enemy and competition is as bad as the days of os/2.

Microsoft's one area that they do not hold a monopoly in is in the internet services arena. Hmmm what market is .net targeted at? Oh, yes, Webservices!

I take Microsoft's marketing garbage with a grain of salt. They are unethical and not trustworthy. Microsoft is not in the bussiness of helping the little guy but in making money and killing competition. Ms loves to create standard for themselves. I do not know of any Microsoft related standard that is open or intended to be open.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[Kumkwat]

"What use is a CLR standard without an API standard? You can't exactly WORA! It's like coding in C to platform-specific APIs! Or restricting your code to only run on x86. "

True Microsoft have not released several core API's including ASP.NET, ADO and WinForm's. Though there are already several open source initiatives underway to provide replacements.

I've tried to use GTK# (licenced under LGPL) on Rotor and it works (at least it opens a window. GTK# is based on GTK+ and requires a little bit of work to make everything working. I followed the instructions at URL:

http://www.nullenvoid.com/gtksharp/wiki/index.ph p/ InstallingBeginnersGuideForWindows

And I had to download libintl-1.dll from

http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.ht ml
And iconv.dll from:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?gro up _id=25167

This and many other topics are currently under discussion and will provide solutions to missing functionality that can be used on ALL ports of the CLR. Remember the CLR is ECMA standardized, as long as Microsoft continue to expound this there is not going to be incompatibilities between platform ports as some other posters seem to think. So this code should work fine on an official .NET release.

"Anyone who doesn't want to support the MS OS/Office monopolies should not be using .NET. Java is equally capable, and more mature, save for some minor language points which are being addressed in JDK 1.5."

Hmm this is incorrect. "Minor" language pt's, I would hardly call direct runtime support for value types, pointer types and unmanaged code execution "minor" pt's. Sure you could say you could compile C++ onto the JVM, but u would end up writing almost whole layer of emulation to emulate the features of C++ that are missing in the JVM, like pointer support. Also generic's are finally making their way into the JVM, what 10 years after it was released? Rotor already has support through the new Gyro 1.0 release that add's generics to Rotor. The official .NET will be getting this soon.

I'm not going to reply further because it is obvious that u have little or no experience with the CLR. Before dissing it try it out. As for success stories can u really compare a platform that has had around 5 stable major release builds (I'm not exactly sure on the number) from 1.0, the JVM from around 1993 to the CLR which was only recently standardized i.e. circa 2000? I'm sure given another 7 years you'll have a lot more "success" stories to add to your list.

Re:Running proprietary inhouse apps

[hackrobat]

Just want to touch on two of your points. One, Vim does have autoword/autoline completetion. Second, Eclipse does have C/C++ development support.

Oh come off it.

[Lochin Rabbar]

What possible reason could there be for a technophobic secretary to need to mount a CD in the works machine. If she's not capable of coming to terms with the mount command then she shouldn't be installing software.

Re:Oh come off it.

[LMCBoy]

maybe she likes to listen to music while working.

Re:Oh come off it.

[schon]

maybe she likes to listen to music while working.

Then why mount? You don't mount a music CD.

Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[Thaidog]

I'm an analyst for IBM Global sevices and I work out of the RTP main campus site... A few weeks ago on break, I decided to take a walk around the hardware labs, and to my suprirse I found about 10 new Mac OS X workstations being configured... I talked with one of the techs who said they were using them because they are unix and therefore can run many of the apps they use right out of the box... I asked them if it had anything to do with the 970 development and he said he could not commment... It was ironic to say the least to see that the computers in the lab that actually had the *most* IBM hardware in it (logicboard, harddrive, cpus) had an apple logo on the front... Who needs micosoft? Obviously not us...

Re:Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar experience a few years ago when I made a visit to the defunct SriptX development group inside the RTP campus. They were using Macromedia Director running on Macs to prototype ScriptX development tools. Needless to say, my boss at the time, who was a Wintel fascist, was a bit gruff when he saw the Mac in an IBM office! Hell, even Steve Jobs had Windows and Sun boxes in the Cupertino campus until OS X was finished...actually, he probably still has some in certain dev groups.

Re:Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[afantee]

This is truly fantastic news.

Apple and IBM are probably the only companies left in the computer industry that are capable of innovations.

MS the copy cat and convicted monoplist just wants dominate the world with its inferior and bug-ridden bloatware, Dell the box maker is a shameless parasite profiting from other peoples R&D dollars, Carly's HP is more interested in jumping to bed with Intel and MS than inventing anything, and Sun is just too busy bad mouthing Billy boy to do anything useful.

Only IBM and Apple can save our dying industry, and we need Mac OS X on PPC 970 now.

As a long time UNIX and Windows programmer, I am much more productive on Mac OS X and can't bear the thought of having to go back to Windows or Solaris. Mac OS X is a dream platform for geeks and novice alike. There are tons of free and powerful programming tools which would cost thousands of dollars on Windows, and Cocoa (together with Interface Builder and Project Builder) is the only programming environment on earth that makes it possible to program great GUI with virtually no code.

Re:Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[Anonymous Coward]

So your company uses 30,000 Windows machines and after purchasing 10 Macs you declare "who needs micosoft? Obviously not us..." Moron.

Re:Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[Thaidog]

IBM > Microsoft... and no we don't *need* microsoft as much as microsoft needs us.

Re:Interesting developments at IBM maincampus...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is highly moderated bullshit.

"I talked with one of the techs who said they were using them because they are unix and therefore can run many of the apps they use right out of the box."

Wrong. The only thing a Mac with OS X can run "right out of the box" is software compiled for Mac OS or Mac OS X. You can't run anything else "right out of the box," unless you're running some kind of emulator like Virtual PC.

The moderators that pushed this post up should be ashamed of themselves.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[gilesjuk]

Which is why RedHat is Oracle's choice of a database OS.

Linux covers a wide variety of distributions, you can't tell me that Debian or Slackware aren't stable reliable Linux distros.

What's all this maintainence you are referring to? sounds like biased FUD to me.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't interesting. See here and here for two more instances of this wrong and redundant troll comment.

Linux is not a threat...

[Thanatiel]

People usually needs a (strong) motivation to move, even if it leads to a better state.
Linux is not a threat to Windows. The general behaviour of MS against it's custommers is.

Facts: (AFAIK)

_ Windows XP has been out for a while now.
_ With such an amount of time, there likely more hardware update needed (and applied) for a lot of computers.
_ A set of 3 changes triggers the mandatory registration process.

_ To have a locked computer on sunday morning because you just installed a RAM upgrade is really a pain. (*)
_ To have a very unpleasant MS guy on the phone Monday morning really improves your general bad feeling about MS and Windows. (**)

I know a few people who experienced that kind of story those last six months. Most were MS tolerant. Some are now planning to give a try to a Linux distribution (SuSE).

Since this kind of trouble is going to happen more and more, I think that MS is more a threat to itself than Linux.

(*) real story
(**) part 2 of the real story

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[TummyX]

_ To have a locked computer on sunday morning because you just installed a RAM upgrade is really a pain. (*)


Hmm. The activation centres here in NZ are automated (unless you've changed too much hardware). I had managed to activate at 3am in the morning.


_ To have a very unpleasant MS guy on the phone Monday morning really improves your general bad feeling about MS and Windows. (**)


Yes. I was unfortunate enough to have to need to talk to a human operator once. They're suspicious and treat you as *guilty* until you prove otherwise. I had a most unpleasent conversation with one of their operators. I tried explaining to them that I was reinstalling XP cause I had just upgraded my motherboard and cpu. They treated me like an idiot and asked me if I was sure that I wasn't installing it on a second machine. When I said "yes", there was a pause (obviously they were looking at the hardware ID changes) and they said "are you sure?".

It wasn't until I got very pissed off with them that they let me activate.

Not a very nice way to treat your customers.

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yeah, the activation centers here in the US are automated, also. But...

My company standardized on Office 2000 and upgraded all our machines from Office 97. The first few installs went flawlessly. We have an "always on" shared internet connection. The first few installs of Office 2000 hooked up, automagically registered and ran. Then, just about the time M$ released Office XP (odd timing that, eh? and less than 3 mos after we made major purchases to upgrade all of our systems to O2K), brand-new, just-out-of-the-box Office 2000 installs would NOT register automagically. I also could NOT use their Web-site based registration. No, the only way I could get registration numbers was to phone in and request one from a real person, a process that always takes at least 1/2 hour to an hour.

During upgrades to systems, I noticed that, even tho M$ says you should have the first 1 or 2 re-registrations automatically thru the Internet, I have always had to call starting with the 2nd activation!

This is an easy way for M$ to force product obsolescence. They make enough of a PITA that you upgrade just so you don't have to waste an hour on the phone every time you upgrade or replace major components in a system.

After about the 4th time, I located a pirated copy of their corporate version that did not require activation. We still have valid Office licenses and I have maintained enough documentation to survive an M$ audit.

We are legal, valid Office users but we were forced to locate a pirated copy of Office software in order to reduce the hassle associated with their (supposedly) anti-piracy measures.

As you said: not a very nice way to treat your customers.

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to 3am in the afternoon, or 3am in the evening.

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[Reziac]

I said a couple years ago (and got flamed for it) that M$ would eventually use activation as a tool to force upgrade migration -- either by making it too much of a PITA (as happened in your work's case) or by charging for REactivation (tho Intuit beat M$ to the punch on that one).

There is nothing to prevent M$ from refusing to reactivate "unsupported" software, or charging more for reactivation than it would cost to upgrade. Nothing, that is, but pissed-off customers. And when you've got that much market lock-in, who cares what the customers think, so long as they pay up!!

Mark my words, it's coming. It may be disguised as an upgrade to "Software Assurance" or "Subscription Services" but sooner or later, it'll happen.

Re:Linux is not a threat...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

That's strange - I have called them many times and they've always been easy to deal with. They ask how many computers it's installed on and then they give you your key. I've never waited on hold for more than a minute, either.

Not heard of automount then?

[gilesjuk]

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Automount.html

Re:Not heard of automount then?

[HuguesT]

Try the following:

1- Put cd in drive
2- open file on CD with any program
3- push the eject button on the cd drive.

What happens: nothing. The CD is stuck, you need to close whichever program opened the file on the CD first. Not obvious.

How do you find out about which programs have opened files on the CD? Read the lsof man page, good luck.

Automount doesn't help unmounting that much, you need to understand what is going on. Distros could make it easier with a GUI that would run lsof if unmout failed and tell you which program you need to close first, but none that I know do that at present.

Cheers.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ? Femminist?

[Anonymous Coward]

nah... probably running a lesbian porn site

Movement to server centric computing is MS threat.

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel servers and licensing 6.0 are MS's biggest threats.

Intel servers make sun's server & thin client model economically compelling

http://www.vnunet.com/Analysis/1139792

while MS's licensing 6.0 means that companies are actively looking for ways to limit their dependance on MS. Junking MS for Linux is rarely possible but a move to intel servers and thin clients is. Long term, platform neutral browser based software is the logical end for this trend.

Proprietary Corporate Client Apps

[evil_roy]

Reasons MS works in corporate environments:

1. Pre-trained user base = nil training cost for MS Office users

2. So many corporate apps that can be run on a variety of databases/servers, yet demand MS desktop OS's for their client app that is required. Many of these setups have no intention of moving to anything other than windows for the client side of things.

Re:Proprietary Corporate Client Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

So many corporate apps that can be run on a variety of databases/servers, yet demand MS desktop OS's for their client app that is required. Many of these setups have no intention of moving to anything other than windows for the client side of things.

citrix

Re:Proprietary Corporate Client Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Pre-trained user base = nil training cost for MS Office users

Actually, it can work out to be the reverse. Plenty of jobs have requirements to be able to use Word well. Now, since loads of people have it installed, they figure that, since they can type up a letter using Word, they can exaggerate a little and say they are some kind of an expert in it.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way. Most useful Word features aren't immediately obvious, like styles. I've even seen people with certificates in Word training (yes, they exist, and were actually sponsored by my government a while back), that haven't got a clue about this kind of stuff.

How this usually ends is the employer having to retrain this person, or go through the hiring process once more.

Re:Proprietary Corporate Client Apps

[Bartmoss]

I would argue that most users are not "pre-trained". If you knew the kind of tickets we get - from support techs no less - amazing.

I think there are three major reasons why corporations use MS.

1) It's mainstream. People fear the unknown.

2) It's there already. MS has been adopted in corporations for what, 10-15 years now? It won't disappear overnight.

3) Someone to blame. Companies pay MS big $$$ for support - if something goes seriously wrong, THEY have to fix it. There's no possibility to get such support for most open source products. Yes, I know - even if it may not be needed, managers will ask the question and a "no" is not acceptable. Most managers are scared, clueless people when it comes to IT and they surely won't want to risk their rep or salary for some intangible benefit of the corporation.

Oh yeah, that and Exchange - there simply isn't a very capable replacement for that yet.

Re:Proprietary Corporate Client Apps

[mckappa]

1.- nil training cost for MS? YOu are for sure meaning people that learns BASICS of MS Office and that won't go beyond that point. Otherwise, you WILL need to pay costs (very high costs). On the other hand, you seem to mean also to stay with old versions (that won't work for more than a couple of years, when you would see yourself on the needing of replacing your MS products... then retraining). Not to mention the great business it is for MS whenever a new version or "service pack" is released in terms of retrainning, recertifying and so on. Big business for Microsoft! Not for their users. I think that some of the real reasons why companies buy MS were perfectly replied by Bartmoss (16109). Companies are afraid of using other better technologies because Microsoft sells very well also its "support" product (even 'though it's as bad as the software itself).

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a troll. But some people may be fooled by these stupid statements. ext2fs can lose data, sure. It doesn't happen often. Soft updates are *not* the cure. With soft updates, things written to disk can occur over a minute after the application thinks they were written. Which means if you crash after saving your long document, it may be lost forever. Sure, soft updates maintain consistency, but it may be consistent with a few minutes ago, rather than right now. I'm not knocking BSD. I use it as well as Linux, and it's great, but it's not perfect.

The rest of the post is just more BS, of course. I merely wanted to clear up the soft updates issue, since lots of people actually think it's a perfect solution.

one good reason is...

[KingRamsis]

asshole boss who thinks that the world starts and ends with microsoft...?

Re:one good reason is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The asshole boss that has been running microsoft for a while and sees the pricetag to run linux. Then decides it's just better(read cheaper) to get screwed over some more.

Clippy and Bob

[KoolDude]

...unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else

How about Clippy and Bob ? Unique to Microsoft ? Yes, of course. Replacements ? No way!

Re:Clippy and Bob

[Anonymous Coward]

there's Vigor, also, Bob

Is it just me, or...

[tsa]

The head 'Any reason to buy Microsoft' made me curious. Are there companies even rich enough to buy Microsoft? And if so, I can think of many reasons why whey would want that...

Windows 2000 Server vs SAMBA -licensing per client

[grolschie]

Many organizationss have Win2K clients that log into a Domain provided by a Linux box running SAMBA. Once set up properly, it can be a Domain Controller and also replaces many of the other tasks that a 2K Server does, and without the huge license fee for the server (based on the number of clients connecting).

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[chris mazuc]

I'm pretty sure this dude is just trolling but this is too irritating to pass up.

An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
I don't have experience running any truly important systems, but the boxes I have administered have required almost zero maintenance. Unless I go and screw something up, I have found in my experience that it'll keep on chugging along. Besides the occassional ssh upgrade, I havn't had to touch anything on my NAT box since I installed it three years ago. It Just Works.

Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly.
References please. If you are going to make statements this damning you are obligated to provide data backing you up.

Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
Of all of the computers I have owned in the past seven years, all ran linux and one of them crashed once for a reason not attributed to hardware failure. This bug was reported to the kernel developers and was fixed within a few hours.

The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.
Given a little work by the admin, linux can be dumbed down as much as you need it to be (corporate environment assumed). Oh, you ever installed one of the BSDs? I assure you, linux is nothing. (Disclaimer: I have nothing against the BSDs, they are damn fine operating systems in their own right)

The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.
And would you like to tell us precicely what tools you are speaking of, as well as what your major beef is with them? Or how about one step better: go file some bug reports!

On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
Attacking the people you are setting your case against is a sure sign of a weak argument. Also see last paragraph.

I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
So what are you reccomending for us to use? I beg of thee, please share your infinite knowledge.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[danielrm26]

Dude, I think you need to step back and take another look at things.

You make me sad.

Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[danielrm26]

Because people who have businesses care very much whether or not they succeed or fail. Microsoft has succeeded, in most cases, to convince those that matter that if they go with the alternative, they are taking a risk with their business.

Microsoft, to most businesses, is the "safe bet". It's considered the superior choice only because it's mainstream.

The real threat will come to Microsoft not via some certain tech advance - it will come in the form of a slow penetration of anti-MS and pro-Linux gossip being spread throughout the business community. Once this happens the game will be over and MS will have to *totally* re-invent themselves - another product release won't save them.

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[clonebarkins]

Once this happens the game will be over and MS will have to *totally* re-invent themselves - another product release won't save them.

Right, just like the MPAA re-invented themselves when people wanted to play DVDs on their linux boxen; or like the RIAA re-invented themselves when people wanted to download music.

Unfortunately, monopolies don't see new technology and an smaller customer base as a chance to redefine their strategies. Rather, they use it as a chance to flex their muscle--both market and political--to force the public to do what they want. Microsoft's involvement in the TCPA shows that they already know the threat of their demise and are taking preemptive steps to demolish that threat (cf. Bush's preemptive steps to demolish the "threat" of Iraq).

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[x98chn]

The real threat will come to Microsoft not via some certain tech advance - it will come in the form of a slow penetration of anti-MS and pro-Linux gossip being spread throughout the business community.

It sounds as if you're depending on FUD to get Linux to climb over MS... While certainly useful at times, it's not a business solution I'd personally want to rely on.

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[Alomex]

Difference is, Microsoft has already reinvented itself three/four times. From being a developer of language compilers/interpreters to operating systems to office productivity applications to the latest x-box/internet attempts.

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[danielrm26]

> ... While certainly useful at times, it's not a business solution I'd personally want to rely on.

I am not suggesting you rely on anything. My point is that it is going to be word of mouth between people that buy software that will start to really Microsoft's marketshare.

Once "they" (the business owners/IT people) start feeling let down by Microsoft or done right by Linux, that will be echoed throughout the business community in the form of B2B gossip.

---------------

Person 1: "Yeah, I had a buddy who set up a couple Linux servers a year ago and they have been going sweet ever since...he hasn't paid a cent for tech support and the uptime is flawless..."

Person 2: "Hmm...." (starts re-thinking their approach to and opinion of Linux)

---------------

Once this happens on a large scale, Microsoft will be in some trouble. It won't be a gradual movement - we are in that phase already. It will be a swift and pervasive movement rooted in people finally starting to believe in Linux as an option for *them*. As it stands now, it's a solution for "those other types".

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[HuguesT]

I wouldn't call that re-invention, they still sell languages (C# being the latest), OSes (Windows in all its implementations), office suites and hardware.

They've been accreting businesses, not shedding any as they went. That's the problem. From a nice player now they cover all aspects of the dominant computing platform of today. Will they keep that position? if they do, what will they need to do?

Microsoft knows very well how to squash traditional competition. They have made a few unsuccessful moves against OSS, they are not giving up yet, that's what the whole DRM stuff is all about. The smart money is still on Microsoft.

Cheers.

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[_Sprocket_]

The real threat will come to Microsoft not via some certain tech advance - it will come in the form of a slow penetration of anti-MS and pro-Linux gossip being spread throughout the business community.

I would suggest that this is already happening. The tech press has been tossing out positive Linux articles for a few years now. Even more main-stream sources like Newsweek report on Linux and note its increased acceptance.

And it is being accepted. I was shocked when I fled the dot-bomb for the more stable life of my old, concervative Government haunts and found Linux everywhere. It was no longer some strange name people heard muttered somewhere. It was a viable option - sometimes a preferred option. It was in the lab hosting testbeds. It was in production. Linux was being deployed on the floor of the server farm right next to Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, and a handful of legacy systems.

Linux is out there. I'm not convinced it'll bury Microsoft; after all, Compaq and the slew of clones didn't bury IBM. But Linux is riding the comoditization of software just as Microsoft rode IBM's loss of control over the PC. And its already causing changes within Microsoft.

And that's a win for the consumer - whether you're deploying Linux or Windows.

Re:Why buy Microsoft? I'll tell you why...

[mckappa]

Marketing, marketing, marketing. Do you really trust all what you just told? Looks as if you are a Microsoft employee making and ad of the whole company. It's the same as when a bad politician promises lots of benefits if you vote for him.... and you happen to do! after having suffered the real bad things he is capable to do (and to hide).

Buy Microsoft.

[Lord Sauron]

If you had asked me this very same question some years ago, I could have outlined a series of reasons why you should buy Microsoft and sell Enron.

Microsoft = more licensing cost AND Linux = cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft products require licensing, for example Windows 2000 Server requires a "Client Access License" for each connection, where as Linux does not have such a scheme, making Linux servers handle an unlimited amount of connections or you can set the maximum number connections. Making Linux Servers better then Microsoft Servers.

You can configure a Linux Server once and leave, it contune to run for a very long time, where Microsoft Server requires more frequently changing configurations.

Microsoft systems have hidden cost unlike Linux.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[tao]

Erm. ReiserFS is far from a beta file-system anymore, and if you want a really reliable file-system, why not use JFS? Or maybe XFS? Oh, and claiming that Ext2FS has extreme dataloss on unclean shutdowns (reboots, power-outage etc.) smells of FUD to me. I've so far experienced nothing more than loss of some meta-data...

About Ext3FS, the back & forward-compatibility cannot be said to be something bad; it is based on a very reliable (YES, Ext2FS _is_ reliable) file-system, which has a proven track-record. The main purpose of Ext3FS is to allow simply remounting the file-system as Ext3FS and thus gain journaling; Ext3FS doesn't aim to bring the latest and greatest of file-system development (and indeed, doesn't). Judge it for what it is, not what other file-systems are. Comparing the use of Ext2FS as a base for Ext3FS with the DOS-heritage in Windows is like comparing night and day.

The uptime for my Linux system is _always_ determined by the frequence of kernel-upgrades. Ditto for the Linux-servers at work. Can you honestly claim that this heralds regular, mysterious crashes? Yes, I know of several persons with Linux-machines that crashes; and _without exception_ it is related to use of binary-only drivers (mainly NVidia-drivers, which are equally fatal to the system on Windows-machines, btw...)

WRONG!!!

[interactive_civilian]

47.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot!

duh! ;-P

ok...so I'm not funny.

glibc

[mkro]

It's not just a glib overgeneralisation to say that it helps admin, and from what I've seen of OSX server it has much the same advantages.

I'm sorry for going off topic here, but could anyone give an URL to a page summarizing the whole glibc issue? Neither Google or the glibc webpage/faq provides easily understandable information on it. IMHO, a quick guide to what to do to avoid it, how to fix it if it happens, etc. could help a lot of people.

Re:glibc

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... was it good crack dude?

The quality of trolls is going down

[mangu]

/. management is doing so much to fight trolls that the more entertaining ones have left. The sad thing is that the parent to your post has been posted several times before and each time it has been modded up at first.

However, bad as it is, this troll usually gets a few good rebuttals. Therefore, here's my tip for Linux companies PR: post FUD from m$ at /. and watch the answers.

Nope!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing beats this one: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouse/imo_info.a sp

Preferably together with a classic M:
http://www.3m3718.com/modelm.php

Re:Nope!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this one is easily the equal of that one. Excellent accuracy - I haven't mis-clicked using this mouse in over three months. The only difference I see is that the MS one has an extra button right where your thumb sits, which makes it too easy to click accidentally. Since they seem to like to set it up for 'back' on the browser, the logitech one needs one less configuration step (unless, for some reason, you are always going back in your browser - not a common thing for me. Certainly not common enough to need it's own special button in a stupid location).

Reasons

[briancnorton]

Integration Support Cheap Admins 3rd party software That's really enough reasons, but the arguement is useless. Nothing will offer a mid to large businesses what they want at a reasonable price except running BOTH. It dosent suprise me that 25% of businesses are switching, but it dosent say they are jumping off the deck of the SS Microsoft. It just turns out to be more cost effective to offload some of the work onto cheaper Linux machines.

well....

[ecalkin]

let me start with some agreements:
i agree with you on the filesystem, but i'm spoiled because of netware. the recoverability of original (3x, 4x, 5x) netware fs was good and nss is outstanding.
i also agree to some extent with the poor tools.

but here's the kicker: people talk about the expensive linux (or unix, or netware) engineers and compare that to the low-cost (cheap?) ms engineers and they haven't compared oranges to oranges. a lot of people are lining up to get burned because their ms technical people don't know what they are doing. and mcse's that do know what they are doing are rare and expensive. i've made more money that i want to think about cleaning up after one or two people who thought they knew active directory.

eric

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[subzerohen]

Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.

Alpha support for ext2fs was added in 1993. So the FreeBSD fs from 2003 blows Ext2fs out of the water? No shit Sherlock.

According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).

Hmm the kernel help text doesn't say that ReiserFS support is experimental. But of course as an AC on /. you are a much more credible source

The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'.

Yeah, the only drawback they removed was the non journaling nature of EXT2FS.

Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".

Yep, having full controll of the hardware platform and documentation will do that...

The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.

Lets compare it to Unix as you did above. I'd say the learning curve is almost non-existant. If a sheep farmer from Victoria Australia who used to use Windows (We actually have one in the Gentoo forums) can teach himself Linux so can a Unix sysadmin.

The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.

That has not been my experience. If you find something that irritates you file a bug report.

On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.

Yep, my Linux prinserver contains bad language. Better get rid of it.

I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.

What is clear is that you have a chip on your shoulder concerning Linux. Considering that there are lots of companies currently using Linux it clearly is an option for some.

In the end...

[Realistic_Dragon]

Windows really has to change to be able to compete.

Open Source software offers you the advantage of a propritary in house solution (customisability, flexibility) without having to go away and autally write all the code yourself - just change the bits you want changed.

Windows solutions (shared source being something of a joke) offer you very little more support or indemnification (read the EULA and see what's covered!) yet take away your flexibility.

In the long run, support costs with someone like CSC being similar for Windows or Linux (unfairly IMO, they must be raking it in even more than normal on Linux contracts, but there you go) a business needs to work out if the costs of customising an OSS app to make it perfect are more than the costs of licensing Windows. Factor in the cost of lock in to a Microsoft format and the loss of control in the figures, and you have a basis of comparison for your company.

-And of course if you contribute your changes back to the commnity (which you don't _have_ to do with the BSDL or under the GPL if you do not distribute outside the company) you will suddenly find yourself with Karma:Excellent in the geek community, which may or may not be good for your business.

Re:Why buy Microsoft ? Femminist?

[panurge]

Dear AC,
I'm assuming you are about 13 years old, which is why you can't spell and don't know the meaning of 'feminist'.
Well, I'll take you more seriously than you deserve. The answer is no. She runs an accounting company. Male accountants seem to have problems working for women. As for the meaning of feminist, I suggest you ask your English teacher.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Flabby Boohoo]

Sorry, but this is just plain bullshit. I run a farm of Win2k servers, and have never (NEVER) experienced the things you complain of.

Of course, I have the software properly installed on good hardware. And I don't try to run DNS, AD, Exhange, SQL and IIS all on the same box with 2000 people connected.

I have heard complaints about NT, 2k and how unstable they are. The only issue with MS and server products is security, not stability. There are costs associated with either product.

Re:Microsoft = more licensing cost AND Linux = coo

[TrancePhreak]

Linux systems have more hidden costs than Windows. Linux systems don't declare that they require a high paid geek to sit and tweak them and take care of them when some script kiddie takes over the box. There's a million and one MS certs ready and waiting to get paid for any job.

dissrespect is the core problem.

[twitter]

The turning point is here. Savour the moment and celebrate, but remember the mistakes others have made. This is a wonderful thing to see, equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The crowd is running at the wall now and it will be demolished before the makers of propriatory software know what hit them. You should be careful of your own attitude and be kind to those still suffering under non free software.

Everyone should use free software, free software should be used for everything and no one should write software that is not free. Only free software truely respects the user in one very important sense: Free software understands that if you hide the source from the user, the user will do it themselves. All other software is built on the assummption that the author is so clever that no one else can do what they do. The users have rewritten everything and the day of propriatory closed source software is over. It was not easy for the authors or the users of free software to get here, but now it seems obvious that it's the easiest way to go.

This does not mean that people will not make a living coding. Free software is just as valuable as the closed source stuff it's replacing. Society has and will continue to find ways to support people who know how to make and use it. In fact, free software lowers the barriers of entry so that more people than ever will be able to use their tallents. The losers in this transition will be those who have made lots of money screwing people around with upgrade trains, broken file formats, broken 3rd party software and other forms of intentional waste built on dissrespect.

There are many people unfortunate enough to have started with non free software. The comercial software world was created along with the personal computer industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reasonable reaction to that was the creation of free software movements, BSD and GNU being prominent. It has taken a long time to get from there to here and in the mean time, M$ provided a path of least resistance that many followed. It was a false path because of the core values of the comercial software world, but once emeshed in that trap it's difficult to get out. A friend gave me his 1987 copy of the Emacs manual. There is no doubt in my mind that had I installed emacs on the XT clone I bought in 1987 and learned it instead of Word Perfect 4.1, I would be better off today. As it is, I took a long trip down the M$ path through Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and through work 2000 and countless applications on top of those platforms. The effort put into learning the differences between those versions of software is much greater than the effort I've had to put into the free software I've learned since because free software does not impose useless changes on it's users. Those of you who are just comming into the world of computing are very lucky.

You can keep free software alive and give something better to the next generation of users if you remember to have respect for them. Those of you who lack respect for your neighbors will only repeat the mistakes others have made since the 1980s. All it takes is the wrong attitude for the walls to start going up again.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[smittyoneeach]

A moderate position might be that business should prefer a platform-agnostic approach to the greatest possible extent.
BillG and RMS are both bent on world domination, starting from different ends.
I thoroughly enjoy using free software. I haven't yet developed sufficient skill to contribute to a project (couldn't figure out how to link libraries in KDevelop, couldn't make sense of autoconf/automake until I found autoproject), and I've only contributed financially through the bookstore. Apparently, www.gnu.org is doing well enough.
I don't think that the walls against free software can ever go up again. The US can try to buttress the Monopoly Show ( or MS can expand its butt rest from the DOJ to the rest of the gubmint ) but the world at large is facing Redmond and yawning. How will, say, scientists doing genomics research collaborate if they can't use free tools, but spend their time dealing with the various exploits and incompatibilities?
No, paying an optional tax to a shadow government in Redmond will continue to lose appeal.
Of course, if everyone dumped MSFT, how far south would the NASDAQ go? In all honesty, concern over economic turbulence has got to be running through some senior heads...

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Zeinfeld]

The turning point is here. Savour the moment and celebrate, but remember the mistakes others have made. This is a wonderful thing to see, equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I have many friends from East Germany who would find the comparison highly offensive.

Enterprises use Microsoft for a simple reason, the alternatives suck. You might think that there is no difference between Microsoft Word and an open source alternative but end users don't.

Open source is hardly immune to buggy unreliable software and many users will even use the legacy unreliable and insecure code long after there is a better alternative. No software that Microsoft makes compares with sendmail for sheer awfulness. Yet sendmail is still hands down the main Unix mailer (unless you believe Prof Bernstein's QMail propaganda). There are much better alternatives, QMail and Exim, have been for years and years but they show no sign of dislodging the obsolete sendmail.

So given this position within the open source world why expect it to be different outside? The cost of Microsoft software is irrelevant if you are paying people to use it.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Daengbo]

Linux is ready for Thailand domination. The government here expects to take orders for 100,000 Linux computers before the 18th of the month, and will offer another million (yes, six 0s) by the end of the year.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enterprises use Microsoft for a simple reason, the alternatives suck. You might think that there is no difference between Microsoft Word and an open source alternative but end users don't.

Yeah, because LOTS of enterprises run Office on their servers, right?

Please RTFA. Or just read the damn summary - it's there too:

25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows servers with Linux

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[gandy909]

I believe the presupposition that "...Enterprises use Microsoft for a simple reason, the alternatives suck...." is completely incorrect. Rather, they use it because the enterprises up the street and down the street use it. They use it because all their employees and prospective employees (who aren't computer illiterate) can use it.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

BillG and RMS are both bent on world domination, starting from different ends.

That's the most stupid fucking thing I read today... RMS wants people to be independent, Billie wants them to depend on him - they're not in the same league, they're not even playing the same game?!

Damn trolls.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's GNU/Independant to you, Mister.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

So which is it? Is Sendmail obsolete, or is it the most widely used mailer?

As awful as Sendmail *was*, it was constantly being revised and tweaked. Now it is, without a doubt, the most powerful, capable and reliable MTA that can be had.

MS Exchange server does compare in sheer awfulness. Even when configured correctly, MS Exchange still crashed a lot, lost data, and was prone to exploitation. All this for a wad of cash up front, and a per-seat license for everyone that connects. Where do I sign up?!

I will grant you that configuring Sendmail is like trying to shave a rabid pitbull. One little mistake, a pinched corner of skin, and you'll be lucky to get away with your ass intact. But, it's been 3 years and counting with the Sendmail mx host that I set up at work. Not a problem in three years. No MS Exchange installation can claim that.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[sheldon]

"I have many friends from East Germany who would find the comparison highly offensive. "

I agree. The highly modded post I saw yesterday comparing the use of free software to the struggle for Civil Rights was even more offensive.

The real turning point here seems to be that the OSS zealots have become even more desperate. They're going off the deep end and lashing out with bizarre hateful arguments.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[smittyoneeach]

Both have a zero-zum view of the world. And about zero compassion for the right to an opposing viewpoint. To which non-empathy you appear attuned...
You seem to be one of the RMS extremists...

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have many friends from East Germany who would find the comparison highly offensive

Wow, you never seemed to have a problem when people on slashdot compare Bush to Hitler.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Guido von Guido]

I agree that this is a bad, overblown argument.

But the rest of your post uses, ah, interesting logic.

I've seen the same kinds of arguments from people arguing for Microsoft. For instance, I've seriously seen it argued that using Linux would require a company to release code to the public. I've also seen plenty of shrill, emotional arguments from people arguing against open source.

Does this mean that the anti-open source camp is getting more desperate?

Or does it just mean the debate is overheated?

Sheesh.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[garaged]

But is different if a killer has zero-zum view for the people's right to live, and a cop have a zero-zum view for the people right to live. The first will kill them, and the second will not thanks

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[smittyoneeach]

I simply don't follow your argument. Request elaboration.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet sendmail is still hands down the main Unix mailer (unless you believe Prof Bernstein's QMail [sic] propaganda).

What propaganda would that be, ass-tard? djb has never claimed that qmail (learn to capitalize it correctly) is the most-used unix mailer.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

The NASDAQ will go as far "South" as it needs to.

Are you suggesting that we all buy MSFT to keep the NASDAQ afloat?

That is absolute ludicrous.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[mpe]

Rather, they use it because the enterprises up the street and down the street use it. They use it because all their employees and prospective employees (who aren't computer illiterate) can use it.

Or possibly because they think their employees can use Microsoft and only Microsoft. With many of their employees thinking that.
Plenty of situations where the myth of Microsoft's stuff being easy to use falls flat. As well as plenty of situations where no-one is using any OS at all. They are using a bespoke application, where the entire user interface and environment is the application.

Re:dissrespect is the core problem.

[mpe]

I've seen the same kinds of arguments from people arguing for Microsoft. For instance, I've seriously seen it argued that using Linux would require a company to release code to the public.

Which a) isn't the case b) wouldn't really matter even if it were the case anyway. Since most companies don't sell software in the first place.

Who Fail To Learn From The Lessons Of History...

[NickFortune]

That used to be true of IBM twenty years ago. Big blue dominated the software market then and used the same sort of vendor tie-in tricks that microsoft are so fond of to maintain their edge.

Then they got blindsided by this mickey-mouse outfit calling itself Microsoft...

I don't suppose many people get fired for buying IMB today. They're a solid stable company delivering good solutions for a certain set of problems. But it's not automatic anymore. Things changed for IBM, as they are changing for Billy-Boy's outfit.

So it'd be foolish to rely too much on MS as a "safe" purchase. wonder who'll be the first to find themselves unexpectedly unemployed...

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[TrancePhreak]

NVidia drivers have been generally good on the windows side for quite a while. I remember the whole problem with OpenGL not too too long ago, but that's been resolved from what I've seen. DirectX crashes clean every time, so it's of no trouble. I remember back in the day running RedHat on my box and X would randomly crash, so I guess that makes 'em about even. The only thing that really sets either OS apart is what software you want to run. Someone else made a comment about incorrect documentation on some of the features, and I agree that there are some. However, I think the bigest flaw is the lack of a standard for interfaces in *nix.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Your trolling. Someone mod this turkey down like he deserves

I too can think of one reason...

[haeger]

I use Linux (Mandrake) on my laptop, but I have yet to find any decent replacement for "Offline files" or the "Briefcase" or whatever it's called.

When I connect my laptop to the network I want it to synchronize my files. If it can do this via ssh to any remote server, even better.

Anyone know of any such product for Linux?

.haeger

Re:I too can think of one reason...

[Roblimo]

Draksync and Unison are both included in Mandrake and will do this.

Unison is platform/OS agnostic, BTW.

- Robin

Re:I too can think of one reason...

[haeger]

Draksync and Unison are both included in Mandrake and will do this.

Thank You Roblimo for this information. I'm looking into it right now.
However I feel that this is one problem with Linux (GNU/Linux?). There are lots and LOTS of software for Linux, much good, much doing exactly what I need, but it's hard to find that software. Or, rather, it's hard to know what to search for to find what You need.

If there is one thing that Microsoft does right, it's marketing. I feel that Linux has to be more clear about what it wants to do. Focus on an "Office-Linux" in Mandrake and show how good it is and how many nice and nifty features it has, then focus on "Devel-Linux" and push the pros there. Right now I get the feeling that Linux tries to show that it can do anything, which confuses me a bit.

.haeger

Re:I too can think of one reason...

[mindstrm]

And if you pick a distribution with the right focus, it should have what yo need. If not, tell them, and it will in the next version. I've had several peopel running the latest mandrake incarnation, and they've had very little trouble finding what tehy want.. using only the gui tools and the default install set.

Something like the Briefcase in windows.... you may use it, but most people don't. It's not very common at all.

Linux doesn't try to show anything.. people try to show things about linux. It seems like they are trying to show it can do everything because, in the right hands, it can.

Psychology is a funny thing. The reason you like the Briefcase feature, and the reason people see linux as lacking, is because they were raised on Microsoft. I doubt you picked Windows because it had the briefcase feature.. you probably discovered that feature when you used windows one time. People don't want to take time to adapt.. and naturally tend to think "however things are now, that's how they are supposed to be."

Re:I too can think of one reason...

[snak0rific]

a cleverly written bash script will do it. :-/
ms has turned you into an uncreative person, sue them!

Re:I too can think of one reason...

[theoddbot]

I use rsync to keep my iBook syncronized with my Linux desktop.

Here's the Makefile I use:
----
rsync_opts=-e "ssh" -trvuzp
get:
rsync ${rsync_opts} 'brendan@192.168.0.11:/home/brendan/uni/*' /Users/brendanmccarthy/uni

put:
rsync ${rsync_opts} /Users/brendanmccarthy/uni/* brendan@192.168.0.11:/home/brendan/uni

sync: get put

----

Just run:
make sync

Works remotely too, and with fast transfers thanks to rsync.

-Spyro

surprised this hasnt been mentioned yet.

[caino59]

no wonder you have such a hard time using linux.

it's umount, not "unmount"

and when you are in a typing application in linux, the keys still type the same characters as they do in windows.

file->save and
file-> print are still there

like most have mention, automounting is now a pretty standard feature. not only that, but most distros also put a little shortcut right on the desktop for the typing impaired that you can right click on to mount/umount.

You also don't necesarrily have to push linux to every desktop machine, but it does make a wonderfull replacement OS for your servers, saving you at least a bit of money there. And if your sysadmins can't operate Linux, that's just plain sad.

Red Flag.

[twitter]

Companies go out of business for many reasons. Their choice of word processor isn't one of them.

It's an indicator. A company that wastes money on bad softare is probably wasting it elswhere too. The only places that will be running M$ junk soon are those so emeshed in red tape that they can't change a lightbulb without having a meeing, publishing a report and getting the proceedure authorized by upper management. It all adds up.

Re:Red Flag.

[Anonymous Coward]

the only places that will be running M$ junk soon are those so emeshed in red tape that they can't change a lightbulb without having a meeing, publishing a report and getting the proceedure authorized by upper management.

Jesus, you just describe my current employer down to the ground. Oh hang we are a management school

Re:Red Flag.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasting it on bad software? Now you're just being fucking ridiculous. If I recall correctly, for a long, long while, there wasn't -any- usable word processors for Linux. Before OpenOffice and KOffice started gaining footing there weren't a whole lot of choices at all, and the one that was being used the most was Office..which is still used, and improving at every release much like its free counterparts.

Any reason to buy Microsoft?

[aufecht]

Nope

Re:Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Win2k/XP
Hardware Price: 10

MacOSX
Hardware Price: 1

Linux
Hardware Price: 10

translation "this is a troll"

Great Plains

[chigaze]

Also look at prepackaged software. Its all Windows based. Peoplesoft, great plains accounting, autocad, etc.

It should be noted that Great Plains was cross-platform (running on Macs and Windows) until Microsoft bought them and killed the Mac version. The only Windows machines in our entire office are the Finance Dept's because of this.

Re:Great Plains

[ostiguy]

You cannot necessarily say that the acquisition and the end of the mac client are necessarily causational. MS has been complaining about their mac office sales. The number of people who want to run real financial software on a mac is much smaller than the market for office, or any of the multimedia packages that are the bread and butter for the mac user base. The mac rev could have been on the way out before the acquisition

ostiguy

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[NineBall]

"Do not meddle in the affairs of Unix for it is subtle and quick to core dump"-The Unix hater's handbook

Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

MS is just starting to compete in the enterprise app space, but Unix still beats it hands-down. There's no argument there. But at the desktop in a large, distributed enterprise, Microsoft is the only rational choice. Period.

For some reasons already mentioned and for some not, Linux et. al. don't make sense for an enterprise to deploy to the desktop. Here's my reasons why:

1. Manageability. With tools like SMS, software distribution, policy compliance management, and enterprise inventory are a breeze. Sure there's a new MS patch all the time, but with minimal administrative effort, I can test and deploy a patch in no time. Our SLA on turn-around to deployment of a critical patch is 24 business hours. Three days after release of a patch or other software update, our entire 20,000+ client network is 85% or more patched. With about 20 man hours of work across three staff. Linux absolutely can not touch that. Also, Active Directory is the bomb. We can integrate our email system with our help desk system with SMS with enterprise apps and others, while creating and maintaining user data once, in one place. Sure you can do that with OSS stuff (using LDAP etc.) but AD works almost out of the box. Turn it on, migrate, boom done.
2. Accountability. Senior management has somebody (outside the organization) to blame when there's a critical failure. It sounds like a cop-out, but hey, that's how it works. I dunno about anybody else, but I like getting a paycheck. And therefore, I like having the ability to point the finger at someone else when they screw up. So do senior managers, because it mitigates their liability and the liability of the organization as a whole. In any situation, we have the ability to say "Sorry, Microsoft screwed up." In a Linux environment, what could we say? "Sorry, a community of people that I'm likely an active member of screwed up, and ultimately the screw up is as much my fault as anyone else's in that community. So can I have a box with handles for my personal belongings? Thanks."
3. It's cheaper. Period. Sure OSS stuff is free, sure Microsoft's licensing is pricey. But anyone who takes an honest look at total TCO will see that MS/Intel's price point can't be beat. Administration is cheaper. Hardware is cheaper. Development is cheaper. Users are already trained and therefore cheaper. User and administrative efficiencies are pre-built because people are already Windows/MS familiar before they login to a corporate PC. And you can talk about OSS superiority in certain areas all day, but the fact is, to a business, cheaper is always better.

Obviously 1 and 3 are the most compelling. 2 might be something kind of specific to the financial industry (which I work IT in) or maybe my organization. Who knows. There are also a lot of more arcane 2-ish reasons (a bunch of audit and risk management stuff) that have already been touched on (Microsoft is stable, easy to build a clearly-defined business relationship with, etc.)

To be honest, I hope the OSS community is able at some point to create products that compete with MS in the ways I described above. And while Linux may be taking some market share from Microsoft in middle-tier enterprise apps, it's gonna be a long time before it can compete at the enterprise desktop. So there's plenty of reasons to still buy Microsoft, that is, of course, if you want to keep your job.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[mickwd]

Some of the points you make are good, but:

MS/Intel's price point can't be beat.

You mean paid-for MS software running on Intel hardware can't be beaten on price by free software running on the same hardware ?

"Hardware is cheaper."

What hardware are you talking about here ? Why does OSS need different, more-expensive hardware ?

"And you can talk about OSS superiority in certain areas all day, but the fact is, to a business, cheaper is always better."

Then free must be best of all. But the rest of your argument was about why free software WASN'T better than Microsoft.

Your post looks like a cut-and-paste from a Microsoft-vs-Commercial Unix argument - in which case it makes more sense. But some of the points just don't seem to apply against OSS software on off-the-shelf hardware.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[the eric conspiracy]

I think an important counter argument can be made against each of your points:

1. Manageability. If you think that Windows is unique and UNIX/Linux doesn't have comparable tools, it's because you have not worked with a comparable sized UNIX installation. Rdist and LDAP can do everything and more that SMS and Active Directory can. Furthermore they do it cross platform using open standards that are interoperable across a wide range of platforms.

2. Accountability. Baloney. Microsoft isn't accountable to ANYONE, including the Department of Justice. Sure, you can BLAME them, but that is not the same thing as accountability. What you are talking about is the old 'Nobody got fired for buying IBM' which is of course a dead letter these days. Accountability means that you can recover damages from somebody when it breaks, or you can switch to a different supplier. The former is impossible, and the latter is only possible if you are using open standards (i.e. Linux).

3. It's cheaper. Microsoft is cheaper? Have you factored in the costs associated with license compliance, the poor stability of Microsoft platforms compared to Linux, the forced site licensing that requires you to buy TWO licenses per employee for every software package? And hardware is cheaper? Since when? Linux uses the same hardware. The only real advantage Microsoft has with cost is due to vendor lock-in of their user base. And you know what? You PAY and PAY and PAY for that because Microsoft has you by the short hairs. License 6.0 is the shot across the bow. Microsoft got away with a major price increase in the middle of a recession, and they KNOW it. Wait 'till you see License 7.0.

People are not switching to Linux for fun. They are doing so because it gives them an advantage.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[ocelotbob]

All three of the issues you mentioned had been solved long ago in open source, in ways quite possibly superior to MS's solution. Open Source offers standardization and compatibility - you can deploy Suns next to PCs and know right away they'll talk to one another without spending a lot of money on consultants and third-party solutions to put the pieces together.

Manageablility is really a non-issue. Just because you don't know the tools doesn't mean they don't exist. Look into debian's apt-get. Set up a local repository, and have all 20,000 clients ping the server every day or so for updates. Bam, probably get patch deployment down to 10 man-hours of work. System imaging is easier under linux too. Take a look at System Imager; tools like it mean don't have to jump through the hoops you do with preparing windows images.

As far as accountability goes, that's why you get a support contract from someone like RedHat, who can provide enterprise level support for you. The contracts aren't expensive, but like you said, neither are MS's.

I'm going to have to call you on expenses, at least on the server side. Yes, client-side MS may be a bit less expensive at this point, but that's due to the fact that Linux doesn't have the broad base of users that MS does at this point. You can use the same hardware; Dell and the like already sell preconfigured Linux boxes, so I don't know where you're getting that hardware costs are more. Once you factor in retraining, user expenses would probably be less. Linux has far better tools for user administration and reconfiguring. Take a look at LDAP and name service switch, they provide all the tools of Active Directory, plus are based on open standards, which means that compatibility costs are lessened.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[ealar dlanvuli]

Manageability.

I would have to veto this one, I managed to make a machine unusuable yesterday (so much for my first experience with XP) and the reason given was "my hostname was incorrect". This required a local tech and a reghost on windows -- it would be a simple ssh session in unix.

I think the managability argument is valid only because all stupid techs know microsoft, but only smart techs know both.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

At my university we have Sun Ray thin clients hooked up to some pretty beefy Sun Servers. One person looks after the software on those servers, and it only takes him a couple of hours a week. He can roll out a new software package in 5 minutes on all servers so it's available on 300+ Sun Ray terminals.

The same cannot be said for the poor admins who administer the Windows boxes. The windows PC's _constantly_ have problems (hardware and software), and baffling bugs (usually solved by re-imaging the hard drive). Whereas the Sun Ray terminals never falter.

It wouldn't be hard to make some Linux boxes check a "master workstation" for package updates and download and install them. You could have a master workstation where you deploy patches and test to see if it breaks anything, if it's ok, then put the package in the package repositary. At 2am when the cron job goes off on the workstations, they will all auto update to the latest packages on the master workstation.

The amount of automation in Unix (this includes Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc) is incredible and can be unique to your organisation (rather than pre-canned Microsoft solutions). You should try actually looking at it one day so you can make a valid comparison on the managability of Unix.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[batkins]

Tuesday's coming. Did you bring your raincoat?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

My point is that overall TCO is lower. If you're a Unix guy, you make more than me, and you cost the business more, regardless of the cost of the software/hardware/infrastructure involved. That's what it ultimately comes down to.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Pfhreakaz0id]

I think the accountability vs. blame thing is a good point. Most times, when people say "accountability" they really mean "blame", and you can ALWAYS blame Microsoft, but the only way to make Microsoft accountable is for the community of users to howl (I'm talk
ing the mass, not the geeks), and that's pretty rare.

But in the business world, it's perfectly acceptable to blame microsoft for a problem and this is accepted at face value, even when it is a system administrator or programmer's fault. People LIKE having someone to blame and with Linux, they usually have no one but themselves. Just a quick anecdote, when Code Red came out, I was in charge of 1 server among about 15 we had (because I coded a piece of server software and we "ate our own dog food" with the beta releases by using it as our phone system.) My server, of course, had been patched because the patch had been out for MONTHS. Plus, I had used the IIS lockdown tool and followed the "best practices for IIS security" whitepaper from the Microsoft site which involved simple things like moving the wwwroot to a non-standard directory, etc. Anyway, the four other servers we had were all compromised. Our sysadmin promptly blamed Microsoft and I had to call him on it. It was incompetence, pure and simple. But the only reason he was called to task was because there was an uncompromised server the mere "programmer" was in charge of, otherwise management would have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[More Trouble]

Three days after release of a patch or other software update, our entire 20,000+ client network is 85% or more patched. With about 20 man hours of work across three staff. Linux absolutely can not touch that.

You, sir, should check out radmind when you're ready to switch to Linux. You're right about Linux not touching 20 man hours for a patch or software update. Not with a 10 foot pole! What stinky turn-around time! We turn our updates around in fewer than 4 hours, and only that long if we need to babysit a critical server or two while they update.

For our desktops, it's more like 45 minutes to capture and test the change, and you're done. 20 hour? Oh man!

:w

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

1. Rdist will work, but I guarantee you it'll take longer to do. And you're more expensive than any Microsoft admin, so it costs the business more. 2. Accountability goes beyond recovery from damages. It mitigates my organization's suport responsibilities to issues specific to our environment. Anything else we are not liable for. Regardless of whether Microsoft recovers our losses, the fact remains that we are not accountable, which also drives our cost lower to the business. We have our catalog of services, and troubleshooting core-OS problems isn't one of them. 3. Add it all up and it's still cheaper to support a Windows environment. Even with the cost of licensing, it's still cheaper for me to hire 2 Windows guys than it is one Linux guy. You're right. People are not switching to Linux for fun. Linus for enterprise apps makes sense. I'm talking about desktops specifically, and everything you mentioned doesn't go against my case.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Clarification: Our environment contains more than 200 apps that all have to be UAT'd before the business units will agree to letting us roll out a patch in production. That's where most of the work comes in. If you want to talk about actual work, the actual creation of a collection, package, and advertisement is done by one of my staff and usually within an hour. With the new software update services plugin for SMS, my guess is it'll take even less time.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[10Ghz]

While Unix/Linux-admins do have somewhat higher salaries than Win-admins, it has been shown that they are less likely to leave their employer and that they can manage greater number of servers than their Win-counterparts. So in the end, it more or less evens out.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Obviously package distribution is going to be easier in a thin-client environment.
And sure there's the "you could do this with Linux" arguments, but it's already done in SMS. Distribution of a package involves like 16 clicks. Done.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

That's true. But extend that mentality to a 400+ admin/analyst staff supporting 20,000 users, and the attrition will be the exact same.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

and distribution of a package is one command, which could be done via ssh by an admin who's working at home on a 56k dialup modem.

What was your point again?

And boy, I just looked at systemimager.org, that thing rocks!

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

That's great. Good luck trying to scale that to a 20,000+ user environment with a support structure cost less than or equal to Windows. If you can, good for you. Because not a single large environment has been able to do it yet.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Rdist will work, but I guarantee you it'll take longer to do.

Great! You have no idea about his current setup, yet you are willing to guarantee your solution is better than his. Anybody taking you seriously yet? Nope!

And you're more expensive than any Microsoft admin, so it costs the business more.

Well any is remarkably easy to disprove - all it takes is one person with a higher salary than him that admins Microsoft software, and you are flat out wrong.

Even if you couldn't find any Microsoft admin, your statement can easily be proven wrong by finding an example where the admin cost increase is more than compensated by related savings (e.g. lack of licensing costs, etc).

If you reduce your statement to the average Microsoft admin, you are still wrong. The average Microsoft admin doesn't have a clue - the definitive example being the sheer number of them that don't bother patching. This kind of incompetence costs money.

2. Accountability goes beyond recovery from damages. It mitigates my organization's suport responsibilities to issues specific to our environment. Anything else we are not liable for. Regardless of whether Microsoft recovers our losses, the fact remains that we are not accountable, which also drives our cost lower to the business. We have our catalog of services, and troubleshooting core-OS problems isn't one of them.

So let me get this straight: you are happier knowing that when you have a problem, it's not really your problem, because you can bank on Microsoft to fix the problem? And it doesn't matter if Microsoft doesn't compensate you for your losses because people can't sue you? What's wrong with this picture?

3. Add it all up and it's still cheaper to support a Windows environment. Even with the cost of licensing, it's still cheaper for me to hire 2 Windows guys than it is one Linux guy.

The first statement is not proven by the second part. Are "2 Windows guys" as valuable as "one Linux guy"? Plenty of evidence suggests that you need more admins to support less machines in the Windows world. Plenty of evidence suggests that, on average, the Linux guy is going to be more proficient than the Windows guys.

Linus for enterprise apps makes sense. I'm talking about desktops specifically

What, you don't think that enterprises use desktop machines? The majority of machines in most enterprises are clients, ignoring special cases like Google. That is where the highest savings are to be made.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[More Trouble]

UAT? So, are you counting that in the "20 man hours of work across three staff"? These are your staff, or these are "Users" doing "Acceptance Testing"? Perhaps we disagree on what UAT means.... I guess if your sysadmins can do UAT for 200 apps in 20 hours, that's really very impressive. I don't think it has much to do with SMS. What sort of "Acceptance Testing" are your sysadmins doing on your 200 apps?

:w

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

...err... you are _agreeing_ with him. If the attrition is the same, that means that the savings of using good admins goes _up_ in larger departments.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

1. Maybe he can do it as quickly, maybe he can't. I don't care. The point is, find me a large enterprise organization (15,000+ users) that uses Linux at the desktop and show me their support structure costs. Five bucks says it's more than that of an similar-sized Windows environment.

And "Well any is remarkably easy to disprove blah blah blah..." We're past the point of arguing based on semantics, don't you think?

2. "And it doesn't matter if Microsoft doesn't compensate you for your losses because people can't sue you?" Bingo. Microsoft screws up, we're not liable. That's for putting it a little more clearly.

3. I disagree. I don't buy the argument that a Linux environment is, as a whole, going to be cheaper to support. I just don't buy it. Factor in users, factor in admins, factor in licensing even, and Windows makes for a cheaper support structure at scale. I dunno. Maybe you know something that Gartner, Meta, et. al. and I don't.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

No, because they cost more. Bottom-line it: If magically tomorrow, my environment was Linux at the desktop, I'd be paying my support people more. That factor would for-sure change. And I still don't buy the argument that a standard Linux admin can do more on his own than a standard Windows admin. Take a Linux admin and throw him 40 tickets a day from people who can't figure out how to print or forgot their RAS dialin number and reconfig'd with AOL, and he's just as cost-(in?)efficient as a Windows admin.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[schon]

But anyone who takes an honest look at total TCO will see that MS/Intel's price point can't be beat.

Really? Here is a report of a study that claims exactly the opposite.

Your statement is demonstratably false.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[the eric conspiracy]

And you're more expensive than any Microsoft admin, so it costs the business more.

I may be more expensive than most Microsoft admins on an hourly basis. However my skills scale far better and result in more stable operations than you will get from some freshly minted ex-burger flipper now MSCE via the Chubb Institute. That translates directly to lower business costs.

Accountability goes beyond recovery from damages. It mitigates my organization's suport responsibilities to issues specific to our environment.

I fail to see how this has ANYTHING to do with vendor choice. You are simply defining the scope of your organization. Anything else is just not supported. You will support email, but the Computational Fluid Dynamics lab has to find some other way to support their Fujitsu supercomputer.

Microsoft has core-OS problems, just like Linux does. The fact that you choose RedHat over Microsoft does not mean you have to support troubleshooting these.

Even with the cost of licensing, it's still cheaper for me to hire 2 Windows guys than it is one Linux guy.

It's not just the cost of the licenses. It's the cost of being able to prove compliance, and the potential liability from an employee sneaking in some pirated package and risk of having the BSA tie up your operations in an crippling audit.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

1: If you didn't know, why try and persuade people with words like "I guarantee"?

I attacked your "windows admins are cheaper" point on three different levels. If you are trying to write-off all three arguments as semantic quibbles, then you are either deliberately trying to avoid the point, or are stupid. Which is it?

2: Did you miss the bit about "it doesn't matter if Microsoft doesn't compensate you for your losses"? You really believe that? And you really think that you can just pass the buck on services you provide?

I'm currently working as a web developer. Internet Explorer has loads of bugs. If I code to standards, and a bug in Internet Explorer screws up the rendering of the site, it doesn't matter if Microsoft doesn't compensate me for the loss of business? When clients come to me and moan that their sites don't work properly, I can say, but it's okay, you see, because, it's not my fault, it's Microsofts!"?

3: Okay, you've set off my troll detector once too often. How can licensing costs for Free software outweigh Microsoft licensing costs? You also mention Gartner etc, without realising that they've released studies supporting both sides.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Specifically, it's mostly our coordination of user's doing the testing, with probably about 30% of the apps being tested by my staff. But if you cut all that out of the picture, my guess is the actual time to produce and roll out a package may be similar. If so, SMS doesn't provide a specific advantage over your method. But, if there's no advantage either way, the overall TCO question still stands... You see where I'm going...

Slightly OT: For my sanity and blood-pressure's sake I just wish we could convince the business units to lose about 100 of their goddamn apps...

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

"The study, by the Robert Frances Group, in Westport, Conn., looked at production deployments of Web servers..."

Duh. How about 20,000 desktops?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

1. You're right. Bad choice of words. I guarantee you I'm really sorry.
As for the rest of the admin bit, your arguments are moot. Good admins cost more than bad admins, regardless of the infrastructure you support. And you haven't answered me this: "...find me a large enterprise organization (15,000+ users) that uses Linux at the desktop and show me their support structure costs. Five bucks says it's more than that of an similar-sized Windows environment." Prove me wrong. Maybe I'll PayPal you 5 bucks if you can.

2. No I didn't miss that. For one, that's not my problem. For two, if a service critical to one of my business units fails due to a Microsoft problem, the business unit is responsible for recovering the cost from Microsoft (which obviously would never happen). Why is that a good thing? I can manage my cost structure based on a certain catalog of services and pass the lower costs on to my client, the business, which saves them money at a marginal potiential loss of service. Also, if your organization is having so many problems that it's caused you to have to actually try to recover losses from MS, you're doing something wrong. And as for you and your IE problems, sorry, guy. Maybe you should change your methods to support all browsers. I dunno... I guess when I code stuff, I take into account the idiosyncrasies of the most widely-used browser. I guess that's just me, though.

3. Good call on the Gartner thing. You're right. But again, studies (contradicted or not)show lower TCO in Microsoft environments. And it's not the cost of the software or the licenses that I'm talking about, it's the support costs behind it.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[bellings]

If you think that Windows is unique and UNIX/Linux doesn't have comparable tools, it's because you have not worked with a comparable sized UNIX installation.

I am aware of a few large Sun installations. I am not aware of any large Linux installations. Can you give me an example of even one large Linux installation?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

However my skills scale far better and result in more stable operations than you will get from some freshly minted ex-burger flipper now MSCE via the Chubb Institute. That translates directly to lower business costs.

Well put, but I disagree with the notion that that holds true as you scale way up. 400 Linux admins running around dealing with user tickets isn't much more compelling than 400 Windows admins doing the same thing. Especially if they cost more. And I just don't buy the argument that running Linux at the desktop is going to reduce call or problem volume. Incident (in ITIL terms) volume maybe, but I don't see it cutting down on normal issues, which means I still have to have 400 people running around. And even if they are recent-burger flippers, with Linux as the primary skill on their resume, right now -- today -- I'd have to pay them more. Maybe that'll change.

You are simply defining the scope of your organization

I guess you're right. It is basically a scope-definition thing. But at the same time, it's a much easier sell to upper management to say, "I'm offloading that responsibility on Microsoft, a stable, financially healthy, readily available corporation." It'd be hard to do the same thing with Linux. Whether that's good or not, I dunno, but that's the way it is, right now.

It's the cost of being able to prove compliance

Yeah, there's that, but we don't really have a problem with licensing compliance... With SMS and a couple other home-grown apps, we have that pretty much under control. But I can see how that'd be an issue.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[UU7]

Have you ever managed a 20k installation.
Moreso .. a linux installation with 20k users ?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I still don't buy the argument that a standard Linux admin can do more on his own than a standard Windows admin. Take a Linux admin and throw him 40 tickets a day from people who can't figure out how to print or forgot their RAS dialin number and reconfig'd with AOL, and he's just as cost-(in?)efficient as a Windows admin.

Fucking hell, talk about missing the point. The point isn't that they are super-human, it's that there are less tickets in the first place.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I may be more expensive than most Microsoft admins on an hourly basis. However my skills scale far better and result in more stable operations than you will get from some freshly minted ex-burger flipper now MSCE via the Chubb Institute. That translates directly to lower business costs."

And this is better than all those still burger flippers who setup a Linux server on their home brew AMD system how? I've read many comments on Slashdot from people who claim to be network admins because they do some network stuff for their high school, and I'm not talking about teachers or parents, I'm talking about the burger flipping students themselves. Claiming to be a network admin and being a responsible, well trained network admin are two different things and both the Windows and UNIX world have their share of both.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

poor stability of Microsoft platforms compared to Linux

Dude quit using Windows95 and try NT or 2k. They crash a hell of a lot less than KDE or Gnome, that is for damn sure.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, perhaps he does. Perhaps he/she actually routinely uses Linux. That would give him/her a HUGE advantage over your knowledge of this issue, wouldn't it?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[More Trouble]

But, if there's no advantage either way, the overall TCO question still stands... You see where I'm going...

Except that your point was that MS was actually cheaper. Per our recent discussion, I think it's fair to question your claim. From my own experiences, I have certainly found that the services to staff ratio for our MS infrastructure is lower that for our Unix infrastructure. One could argue that our Unix admins are just more talented, but that's just another point against MS.

:w

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to read more.

Finding the many examples is a exercise to the reader.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[ealar dlanvuli]

or forgot their RAS dialin number and reconfig'd with AOL

That should be impossible if you set up the machines with any sort of security in mind.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[TKinias]

scripsit bellings:

I am not aware of any large Linux installations. Can you give me an example of even one large Linux installation?

Other than Google?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[raju1kabir]

That's great. Good luck trying to scale that to a 20,000+ user environment with a support structure cost less than or equal to Windows. If you can, good for you. Because not a single large environment has been able to do it yet.

You're saying that nobody's ever installed rdist? I think what's actually happening here is that you're not as familiar with the available Linux tools as you are with the available Microsoft brochures.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Tom]

Hardware is cheaper.

You're good, but that one gave you away.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[the eric conspiracy]

And I just don't buy the argument that running Linux at the desktop is going to reduce call or problem volume.

Given that most calls are going to be things like 'I forgot my password' or 'How do you sort email' I would agree that call volume is not going to change drastically. But I don't think most organizations are handling these with real admins any more. Costs to handle these should be independent of OS.

Incident (in ITIL terms) volume maybe, but I don't see it cutting down on normal issues, which means I still have to have 400 people running around.

How many are going to be doing real administration vs. level 1 activities ? 40?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

I managed to make a machine unusuable yesterday

because all stupid techs know microsoft

'nuff said...

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

3. Good call on the Gartner thing. You're right. But again, studies (contradicted or not)show lower TCO in Microsoft environments. And it's not the cost of the software or the licenses that I'm talking about, it's the support costs behind it.

You have got to be kidding me!!

You acknowledge that Gartner has done studies proving lower TCO for Linux AND Microsoft, but then you turn around and say, "studies (contradicted or not)show lower TCO in Microsoft environments."!!

You are a complete babbling idiot! How can you be so articulate and so well informed, and so BLATANTLY stupid?

You are a walking, talking condraction.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

With my blood boiling and my nostrils flaring and my fingers flying across the keyboard, I misspelled contradiction. One thousand pardons.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[belroth]

There's also the difference between an admin and a helpdesk person to take into account. I can believe an admin will cost more than a helpdesk tech, and he probably won't stay long if he's working helpdesk so there would be a higher cost.
Costs might come down with a better strategy of course.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a comment right at the top of his website that exposes his particular method.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[bellings]

Yes. Google is a perfect example of a place that Linux shines. Thousands of machines that are so cheap that they throw away the hardware rather than patch the OS.

Unfortunately, Google does more to point out how unmanagable one particular linux installation is, rather than the other way around.

I mean, lets be honest -- Google could probably run on a billion Sega Dreamcasts if there was some way to shove enough RAM into the things. It's NOT an example of a "place where Linux is good", but rather an example of "the Operating System doesn't matter one bit."

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

No, I'm saying that nobody is running Linux at the desktop in a large organization at a support cost less than Windows. Is my point still not getting through?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Desktop support staff? How big a user base? Just curious, because if that's true at a large scale, then I'm totally wrong. I have a feeling, however, you're talking about a smaller environment or server support.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Given enough time, I'm sure you could find a Gartner study that shows that Sony Playstations are cheaper to support than Windows. That's not my point.

You are a complete babbling idiot!

For being such an idiot, you're having a really hard time proving me wrong. You can criticize argumentative methodology of my points all you want, but you still haven't shown one example of how my overall point is wrong. If you're so supremely intelligent, answer my questions instead of criticizing the manner in which I ask them.

I'll ask AGAIN, since you've apparently not been capable of understanding so far:
And you haven't answered me this: "...find me a large enterprise organization (15,000+ users) that uses Linux at the desktop and show me their support structure costs. Five bucks says it's more than that of an similar-sized Windows environment." Prove me wrong. Maybe I'll PayPal you 5 bucks if you can.

Come on, smarty. Name one. Do it. Make me look stupid. Or, keep ignoring my point and keep making yourself look... oh... I dunno... "blatantly stupid". Whichever works.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for an answer. And good luck in a forensics class, kid, because you got a lotta learnin' to do.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

My point is that I don't think there'll be fewer tickets in the first place. I just don't buy it, and I haven't seen any evidence anywhere that supports that claim. Am I missing any?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Heh... touche...

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[demon]

I guess you're right. It is basically a scope-definition thing. But at the same time, it's a much easier sell to upper management to say, "I'm offloading that responsibility on Microsoft, a stable, financially healthy, readily available corporation."

Stable and financially healthy? Ok, I'll give you that (some people would debate that, due to assorted evidence of varying levels of book-cooking). Readily available? That I'd argue with. Have you dealt with Microsoft support? Did you see the comparison someone did of MS phone support versus the Psychic Friends Network? I actually had to call them at a previous job (company head's laptop was having nothing but problems, IBM said "call Microsoft"). The Psychic Friends Network would have been about as helpful.

And even if you _do_ find a legitimate issue? Unless you can make it financially worth their while (i.e., either go public, if it's serious enough, or be a very large customer), Microsoft will just tell you "hm. doesn't work. tough, don't do that." This is not what I'd call responsible.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

You make a good point. Their support does leave something to be desired, if you look at it from an admin level. But CIO it... They're bigger, they've got more money, and they ain't goin away.

And to be honest, the few times I've had to deal directly with Microsoft (working in my current position), I've been pretty impressed. We are a pretty large client, but the people I've spoken to have always been very informed, though perhaps not entirely cordial. There have also been issues where they've pretty much said "tough shit, that's the way it is" (you know, it's not a "flaw" it's a "feature") but that's been the exception. But in general, I agree, though I don't think those issues really matter in a business-case type scenario to senior or executive management.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[demon]

But CIO it... They're bigger, they've got more money, and they ain't goin away.

While that is the case for the next few years for sure, I think even a CIO would agree that being there and actually giving a damn are two very different beasts.

We are a pretty large client, but the people I've spoken to have always been very informed, though perhaps not entirely cordial.

Funny, the times I've dealt with them, they've been reasonably cordial (not overly, but reasonably so), but their support always offered the typical Microsoft troubleshooting techniques ("change this registry entry", "comment everything out in config.sys/autoexec.bat", "have you rebooted?", "have you tried reinstalling? how about a fresh reinstall?"), which IMHO are little more than waving the dead chicken over the computer, hoping it'll start working again.

All I can say is, if management thinks it's enough for the company to simply exist and take their money, they should have their heads examined. Microsoft's "support" leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually fixing problems - the times I have had to deal with them, it involved many hours spent on the phone, with no real fix reached, and I've heard many similar stories in the past. Only occasionally have I heard stories where MS's tech support came up with any kind of solution to the problem other than the obvious "doctor, it hurts when I do this!", "well then, don't do that!" sort of solution.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[rastos1]

Look over here for interesting reading or check out what Reuters thinks about it. Or look over here.
I have also a bunch of links to number of goverments considering Linux solutions - if you are interested.

No, I don't know how many users they have, nor do I know their support structure. But for some reason they've done the decission. Think about it.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[More Trouble]

Desktop support staff? How big a user base?

I'm talking about the University of Michigan, we have around 100,000 users. My group works closely with the University's various desktop support units, where you'll find a huge disparity: in terms of management, Unix-like systems are nearly an order of magnitude more efficient than Windows-based systems.

:w

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[bellings]

No, seriously. I am not aware of anyplace that has a large (say 10,000 or so) installation of centrally managed linux machines on the desktop. Where do you suggest that I start to read about such things?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[bellings]

Moreso .. a linux installation with 20k users ?

Does one exist? Is there an installion with 20K linux desktop users? I think it would be great to hear of such a thing.

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

Obviously not all 100,000 of those users are Linux, correct? Would you say that even a quarter are?

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[More Trouble]

Obviously not all 100,000 of those users are Linux, correct? Would you say that even a quarter are?

No, not at all! I'm saying that around half use Unix-like (Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX) operating systems on the desktop. And, considerably more than half of the infrastructure is Unix.

:w

Re:Still no MS enterprise desktop competition.

[reverendslappy]

I see... It'd be interesting to see how a support structure for that kind of environment in a business (specifically a shared-services organization) would be costed... My bet's still on the fact that it's currently more than that of a proportionate Windows env., but that it'll come down within the next 5-10 years... perhaps even below the then-MS-centric support structure cost. Especially if half the users in your environment are Unix-ish.

I guess time will tell.

piww

[Anonymous Coward]

Technology - NewsFactor
Is There Any Reason To Buy Microsoft Anymore?
Fri May 9, 1:48 PM ET
Add Technology - NewsFactor to My Yahoo!

Vincent Ryan, www.NewsFactor.com

The development and growth of the Linux (news - web sites) operating system has brought a new question to the lips of IT managers: Why should I buy Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news)? Five years ago, the answer would have been easy. With the dominant development tools, client operating system and client applications, Microsoft owned a certain portion of the enterprise (news - web sites).

Linux' New Best Friend: Microsoft Licensing 6.0
Microsoft Embraces Linux! (Sort Of)
What Next for .NET?

delayed 20 mins - disclaimer
Quote Data provided by Reuters

But now that the Linux OS is rapidly maturing and companies are looking to shrink IT budgets, the choice is not so easy. Almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices. Enterprises finally have a real choice, and that spells big problems for Microsoft.

In a recent survey of CIOs, Forrester Research found that about 25 percent of them were already in the process of replacing Windows servers with Linux. However, the switch may not be quite as seamless as one would hope. In fact, for enterprises that run their entire organizations on top of Microsoft products, a wholesale migration to Linux would be costly, Bill Claybrook, research director at Aberdeen Group, told NewsFactor. "Not only do you have the porting costs, but you have the systems administration costs. You have to retrain a lot of people," Claybrook said.

Battle Brewing

The real threat to Microsoft from Linux is not only that Linux will take away existing Windows business, but that it will overtake Microsoft in product areas where Microsoft is trying to grow its market share. Such a situation currently exists in the market for enterprise servers that run corporate data centers. Companies moving to Intel-based platforms from the dominant IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) and Sun platforms now have a choice between Windows and Linux, and vendors from both camps are vying for this migration business.

Who will win? The market favors Linux, according to Claybrook. "Linux is going to take over all those applications where Unix (news - web sites) is already strong," he said, pointing to the database server market as an example. "Linux scales as well as Windows does and has much better clustering capabilities," he noted.

But in the long-term, the battle centers on the hearts and minds of developers. Historically, the scarcity of applications on Linux has been a major advantage for Microsoft. That is no longer the case.

Instead, rather than general application availability, the biggest hurdle for Linux will be support by vendors touting a new generation of enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Still, the trend may favor Linux at Microsoft's expense. "There's a lot of Linux development going on, and it's going to make a dent in Windows' market share," Claybrook said.

Microsoft Counterstrike

Microsoft recently launched the Empower program for small ISVs (independent software vendors) to start defending against some of the developer defections. This program gives developers willing to stick with Windows a good amount of free Microsoft software as an incentive. At the same time, Microsoft also is sending out more evangelists to train application builders and help small ISVs get their products Windows-certified.

According to Ted Schadler, principal analyst at Forrester Research, the development-focused benefits of the Microsoft architecture are still a strong lure. Strong developer tools, pre-integrated servers and a consistent programming model on every tier are attributes tha

Come on....

[ajole]

Multimedia Multimedia Multimedia. show me ASIO and all the blinking apps for Linux/UNIX.

Example: Soundforge/Propellerhead Reason with synchronized hardware outputs; basic music production/sound engineering tools.

plain and simple.

your secretary?

[twitter]

She's still crying for Word Perfect, which let her see codes in her documents and correct them the few times the program made mistakes or did not understand what she wanted. Chances are she will like being able to fix things under Linux better than pushing the reset button under Windoze. Oh yeah, she can get version 8 of Word Perfect as a native Linux binary. It works well, though I'd prefer they make a newer version.

You should have more respect for the secretary and let her make up her own mind. Tell her she can have Word Perfect back and see if you can stop her from figuring it out. Ha!

By the way, the next time your CD get's stuck try right clicking the little picture of a CD on your desktop and chose "unmount" or "eject". If that does not work try using the command, "umount" or making an alias for "unmount".

At a reasonable company the secretary would not need a CD drive. She should be able to ftp her pictures from home to the company picture share or get her music from the company music share. Under those cirumstances, I can imagine someone forgetting how to unmount a CD. There should be someone around who would sooth your furry and panic. Next time, just ask the secretary.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the original poster, but I believe his comment is not based around Ext2FS, but the fact that the default was to mount it fully asynchronously (not only was data written async, but so was meta-data -- directory structure info). Makes for excellent speed, but on a crash/power-outage, etc... makes for a much larger chance of data loss.

The BSD's have always done async data writes, but fully synchronous meta-data writes. You may lose some data just written to a file, but you should never lose a file itself (barring, of course, hardware failure of the drive itself). The newest one is soft-updates, where even the meta-data is written asynch, but queued in such an order that the directory structure is always valid. Again, maybe some lost data but not a corrupted disk.

Journaling is a whole 'nother story. Thats why people in the sun world use Veritas VxFS... true safety, fast filesystem checking (doing a filesystem check on a TB EXT/UFS filesystem becomes an issue when the boss is screaming and your job is on the line if the system is down for 10 minutes).

Of course...for critical boxes, a UPS and a connection to your serial port so it shuts down gracefully is a must. If its *that* important, don't complain if its not on a UPS and the power goes out and you lose data. You deserve what you get.

Hobby Basics

[ajole]

How can something die if it doesn't rely on anything to stay alive? The authors/port maintainers of FreeBSD don't necessarily rush to meet the demands of any market. What does that tell you?
I'm developing some relatively sophisticated multimedia software _on my own_. The other day I was thinking that I should publish it somehow, but started thinking about others copying my innovative idea. That's when I realized I didn't care, because I did it for fun.
** Have it, play with it, mess with it. I might hack your systems if you say YOU wrote it, but that's your problem.
Get it?

Re:Hobby Basics

[Anonymous Coward]

ahole

Predatory Pricing = Bad Taste

[The Mutant]

Speaking as someone who in the past has managed budgets of up to five million US dollars for a global investment bank (I was a line manager, and that was my project budget) Microsofts well documented Predatory Pricing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Now I'm not an anti-Microsofter; I have a complex love / hate thing going for them.

I remember CPM / DOS quite well, and wondering why I couldn't use a GUI like I had at work (SparcStations) and the absolute joy when windows 3.0 then 3.1, etc came along.

And then there are their Office applications and generally well received development tools. I like lots of things about their products - accelerator keys rock, for example! So they've done some good.

But then they've got to go and destroy all the good will towards them by simply insisting that they will own all of it.

So if I have a choice between Microsoft and anyone else, I'll go with the latter. The industry as a whole has been damaged enough by Redmonds behaviour.

Things can be too dumbed down.

[Lochin Rabbar]

After years of struggling to understand why people seemed unable to grasp the basics of file systems I finally discovered that for many people the information they had was too dumbed down. The concept of a file often makes no sense because they have nothing to relate it to. Give them a dumbed down programmers view of memory, with diagrams, and things often fall into place. That is explain that memory is like a long row of little boxes each containing a 1 or 0, eight boxes represent a letter and that a text file consists of a contiguous series of these boxes. Finally tell them that a filename is just a means of telling a computer which block of memory you want to access, and watch the light switch on in their head.

Machines need to be user friendly but users need to be educated no amount of the former will ever take away the need for the latter. Give people a little understanding and they will start to learn for themselves, deny them this and the computer becomes a mysterious and intimidating machine that requires too much effort to learn.

Re:Things can be too dumbed down.

[chris mazuc]

Interesting. So basicially we're just dumbing it down in the wrong sort of ways; we are using the wrong kind of metaphors. The only issue I see with correcting this is that if you change the metaphor now, the usability issues will increase by several orders of magnitude for the near future. Remember, people hate change with a passion, even if it is for the better. Any sort of system that changes the metaphor in a useful, complete, and consistant way will be actively rejected and fought. Rock. Hard place.

Re:Things can be too dumbed down.

[Lochin Rabbar]

I don't think we need to change the metaphor, it's just that the technophobe doesn't understand the metaphor because no one has taken the time to explain that it is a metaphor, and they are considered to be to stupid to be given any concrete understanding of the machine. It's like going from Unix to old style Mac's. Personally I never felt comfortable with the things because I always felt everything was hidden, this gave me the feeling that the machine was in control and I wasn't. I think that is the feeling that technophobes get and it's why become hostile to learning. They're told how to do something but not why doing it that way works.

I've never had a problem with the file system metaphor but then I've never taken it too literally because I've always understood that it was just a metaphor. Most users are never told that it is a metaphor they are presented with a file system and told that this is how the machine works. They are being asked to believe in the metaphor yet they can't quite bring themselves to do so. It's not that we need to change metaphors, we just need to stop pushing so hard with the ones we have.

Re:Things can be too dumbed down.

[greenrd]

Uh yes, but one problem. Memory is not the same as hard drive space. It's not good to leave the conflation of memory and disks uncorrected. That's if anything more dumbed-down than leaving the concept of file unexplained.

Re:Things can be too dumbed down.

[Lochin Rabbar]

Yep, especially when you tell them that you have to unmount a floppy disk on a Linux system before removing it from the drive. You need to give some explanation of why this is the case, otherwise it's just mysterious mumbo jumbo that they have to get right in order not to break the machine. All I'm trying to say that people are better able to learn how to use a computer if they understand the reason things being like they are.

People coped with filesystems and disk changes on DOS machines, yet those starting out with the supposedly easier and friendlier folder system in Windows Explorer seem to get flummoxed. There seems to be a flaw in the philosophy of treating users like idiots.

Any reason to buy MS?

[Air-conditioned cowh]

I don't think I would want to buy MS even if I had the $10^23 billon required to do it.

Maybe they have some assets that would interest Redhat or Sun, perhaps.

Or have I misunderstood the question?

Re:Any reason to buy MS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...even if I had the $10^23 billon required....Or have I misunderstood the question?"

Yes.

History....

[hugesmile]

The reason people will buy or recommend Microsoft may stem from being burned in the past. Your age may determine how many times you were burned...

Real world examples:

"We need to recommend Mac's. Apple was THE FIRST SERIOUS PC, and Mac was the first GUI. It is far superior to anything running on the PC." (1987)

"Novell has 80% of the Network Operating System market. Go with the defacto standard; the industry leader." (1992)

"The Netscape team INVENTED browsing. Deploy Netscape Communicator to the desktop. Their browser and mail client will continue to dominate the desktop." (1996)

"The ONLY serious competitor in palmtop computing is the Palm Pilot. Why consider anything else?" (1998)

You can say it again and again for Apache (market leader, practically invented the market), Java (re-invented the concept of write-once-run-anywhere), home gaming systems, and forty other technologies.

The bottom line is that you better have a GREAT reason to bet against "Dollar Bill". He knows that there's more to the market than superior products (in fact, product superiority is probably low on Microsoft's strategic list, behind good marketing, product interoperability, and spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

I think Microsoft's here to stay as long as Bill's driving the ship. Why bet my business by betting AGAINST Gates?

Re:History....

[bubbha]

The point I thought the author made was that there are applications and services which have become commodity products. Because they are commodities, the the market will be driven by the lowest price. This is what happed in the PC market...so your Apple example seems to work against your position. Same with Netscape...MS reduced the price to zero. Once again, the cheapest product won a large share.

Despite Mr. Gates' constant references to how innovative his technology is, in a commodity market, the innovation comes from reducing product cost and converging on interoperable standards. MS business model assumes the exact opposite conditions and so ther author concludes that they are going to have to either change the conditions to their favor (i.e. ensure that MS product markets do not become commodity markets) or change their business model to adapt to the market situation. The author points out directly that, in a time of IS budget pressure, MS adding "frivolous" features - or "innovation" as Mr. Gates refers to it - is less attractive to IS management than lower TCO -especially when they see these loaded-up desktops with many MS Office features that nobody uses and Open Office does what they need for a much lower cost with open file formats based on industry standards.

Re:History....

[sheldon]

Actually spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt seems to be the hallmark of the Open Source world these days... :(

Re:History....

[antiMStroll]

In each example you quote someone makes a recommendation to stay with the market leader of the time and each of those recommendations proved to be wrong. Today Microsoft is the unquestioned market leader. Don't your examples really contradict your argument?

Re:History....

[hugesmile]

Well, my "argument" (point) is that people who have been burned will likely buy Microsoft products in the future. And a lot of people have been burned.

You point out that these people haven't learned the correct lesson from their mistake - that staying with the market leader sometimes proves to be wrong. Your point attacks the logic of those burned, and not the logic of mine.

So no, I don't feel that my examples contradict my argument.

Then again, what do I know? ... I'm one of those who consistently gets burned!

"PC"

[TeknoHog]

"We need to recommend Mac's. Apple was THE FIRST SERIOUS PC, and Mac was the first GUI. It is far superior to anything running on the PC."

So, is the Apple a PC, or is it not? Does PC mean 'personal computer', or does it mean 'x86 WinDOS box'? At least in the first option, the abbreviation actually works...

Re:"PC"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... and my thought when reading that comment was that Apple didn't "invent the GUI".

But I think his/her point was that these were things people said, not that he/she believed them.

she? what am I thinking! This is slashdot. Probably a guy, and one who doesn't know what a "she" is!

Still, good points.

Thing unique to Microsoft....

[SpikyTux]

You can't find Licensing 6.0 else where.

Not everyone agrees...Rob Pike for example

[andy666]

Many of you may have seen this, but Rob Pike has an interesting paper about systems research at www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pd Called Systems Software Research is Irrelevant Here is an excerpt: Where's the Innovation ? Microsoft, mostly. Exercise: Compare 1990 Microsoft software with 2000. If you claim that's not innovation, but copying, I reply that Java is to C++ as Windows is to the Macintosh: an industrial response to an interesting but technically flawed piece of systems software. If systems research was relevant, we'd see new operating systems and new languages making inroads into the industry, the way we did in the '70s and '80s. Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software.

Re:Not everyone agrees...Rob Pike for example

[Anonymous Coward]

Rob Pike, wasn't he the guy in the big black wheelchair thing who could only talk by blinking one of three lights on the front of it? Either him or James T was accused of date rape or genocide or something and they had to like read someones mind and play it on a viewscreen or something? Eventually they had to go back in time and work at a 1930's soup kitchen and the nazi's had to be stopped and there was no one over the age of 18 and there was like this big computer in a cave that told everybody not to eat the canned food because it was irradiated but then Chuck Bronson or Harvey Keitel or someone shows up and they smash the computer and eat all the irradiated canned peaches and then they all die but for some hobo guy??? That Rob Pike?? What the hell would he know about software?

Re:Not everyone agrees...Rob Pike for example

[andy666]

if you had to speak in binary then you'd know a lot about software too...

sorry - bad link - try this:Not everyone agrees...

[andy666]

www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/rob/utah2000.pdf

sure, sure.

[gl4ss]

yes i'm sure glad my microsoft forcefeedback pro joystick is flawlessly supported in xp/win2k.. (hint: IT IS NOT!, they want the customer to buy forcefeedback pro 2... in fact, the support is there but the software is ??deliberately?? not supporting it. you can use it but it's a bitch and to get the forces enabled you need to use 3rd party software that enables it, like an older game with ff options.)

when buying microsoft hardware, you usually end up with decent quality hardware, but the software support can be anything from rock to shit in the long run.

Re:sure, sure.

[dmaxwell]

dmaxwell@Amelia-Bedelia:~$ jstest /dev/js0
Joystick (Microsoft SideWinder GamePad) has 2 axes and 10 buttons. Driver version is 2.1.0.
Testing ... (interrupt to exit)
Axes: 0: 0 1: 0 Buttons: 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:off 6:off 7:off 8:off 9:off

Re:sure, sure.

[SharpFang]

Doh. My first troll and it gets so many serious responses... :)

I am sooo fed up with this discussion

[Sloshed_dot]

but just can't resist. Two reasons for having MS or Apple in your company: 1. It's compatible with what everyone else is using 2. It's EASY TO USE The fact that it costs money is not important. It is enough to spend two extra hours in front of the PC because I use Linux rather than MS, and the cost is paid. For poor students that do not have the money - that is an entirely different matter, please use the free software. But when our sysadm's propagate how good Linux is and how we should revert to the good side, I see red!! Are they afraid of losing their jobs when MS gets too easy to use?

Re:I am sooo fed up with this discussion

[demon]

Too easy to use? As others have said in the past, Windows makes easy tasks easy, but anything reasonably complicated? Better get ready to shell out the bucks. Windows breaks? Hm. How much does your company spend on MS each year? It better be a pretty big sum for MS to care. Don't like the fact that Windows has to talk to MS home base, or the fact that Windows and Office XP have to re-authorize on anything but the smallest hardware change? Tough.

Unix is easy to use too - the whole "easy to use" thing is a misnomer. There's a higher learning curve with Unix than Windows, yes, but once you've learned it, there's a whole lot more you can do with it too. Most Windows users can't deal with even a minor computer problem - they don't learn how to use the machine, but "if you click here, here and here, this will happen". That's not really learning, just simple application of patterns. They don't get an extensible skillset they can adapt to new tasks, but have to be retrained every time a new Office revision comes out, because "I can't click in the same places now!" or "everything looks different! help!". How is that better?

Re:I am sooo fed up with this discussion

[Sloshed_dot]

'Windows makes easy tasks easy, but anything reasonably complicated? Better get ready to shell out the bucks.'

Give me one single example of a PC application that is easier on Unix, and I will eat this mouse-mat.

'Most Windows users can't deal with even a minor computer problem - they don't learn how to use the machine, but "if you click here, here and here, this will happen". '

- What is the problem? I want my machine to do this and that, and when I click here and there it happens! Who cares if I understand the electric circuites inside the box? And why would I understand more using a more difficult OS?

'They don't get an extensible skillset they can adapt to new tasks, but have to be retrained every time a new Office revision comes out, because "I can't click in the same places now!" or "everything looks different! help!". '

I have *never* had any problems adapting to new versions, I have never heard of anyone who had.
Incidentally, my estimate is that we spend about 300.000 $ on MS products. Seems a lot, but how much do we save because our time in front of the computer is productive?

I like my job

[bigman2003]

If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?

I like getting paid to write software. If nobody bought software, I guess that programming would be a 'hobby' and not a 'profession'.

I think the free software people are idiots. Kinda the same if 1/2 the plumbers in the world went around doing the job for nothing- because 'everyone should have water'.

I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products, and make a lot of money, then the whole idea of a paid programmer will go away. That would be a bummer.

So why the hell do you want to give your work away for free? That's some crack that I ain't smokin'.

At this rate programmers will be like artists- all underpaid and 'struggling'.

Who the hell came up with the idea that my time, effort, and labor is not worth any money? Please don't offer my employer to replace me with something that is free. You may be on your moral high-horse, but what you are really doing is killing one more tech job.

Re:I like my job

[HalfFlat]

Almost all the software I get paid to write is written to allow my employer to do their work better, faster, or at all. Only a small portion is for distribution outside the company. Even if the distributed code were to be given away free of cost, the other code I write - which again, is by far the majority - would keep me employed and valuable to the company.

I would go so far as to say that most code written is written to perform some task for the people employing the programmer, rather than for resale.

That said, note that free (as in GPL) software does not mean that a company producing it gets no revenue. For starters, it need not be given to customers for free; while the customers can then create derivatives, redistribute source and so forth, they still need to buy the program in the first place. Given a choice of buying it with support from the vendor, or compiling it themselves from source gained from a 3rd party, many would (and do!) buy it from the vendor.

Further in products which contain a mixture of code and other material (for example, computer games, databases with data, etc.) the code component can be free-in-GPL and free-in-cost, while still generating revenue for the creators as part of a product which is very much not free.

You like being paid to write software. That's good, getting payed for practicing an art that (I presume) you enjoy and are skilled at. If free software became the norm, only one particular avenue of revenue for potential employers is removed, and it is one which probably does not account for more than a fraction of employed coders. There will still be many opportunities for you to practice your art. And with much free software available, you have a much greater opportunity to learn from and build upon the work of others, potentially allowing you to be a better and more efficient programmer.

Re:I like my job

[sjames]

Software still has to be written, maintained, and supported. At one time, there was little or no proprietary software. Most of it was either given away to sell mainframes, or written and maintained in-house to meet business needs. If priprietary software goes away, we'll simply return to that situation, just like waking from a nightmare.

I write Free software for a living. The biggest difference is that my license doesn't translate to 'all your base are belong to us' and I never have to reinvent my own wheel.

When Free software takes over, there will be MORE demand for programmers than ever. There are a great many proprietary apps out there that various businesses wish they could customise feature X or add feature Y. Proprietary software means that those customizations are simply out of the question, so that's one less position for a programmer. The money to pay the programmer's salary will come out of the licensing costs no longer paid out and from the administrative costs of license compliance that is no longer necessary.

The net result of Free software taking over is that a huge inefficiency in the economy will be removed. If any professions suffer because of Free software, it will be lawyers and redundant administrators.

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey you clueless piece of shit. 95% of the programmers are employeed for in house development and not for software for sale developers. Your FUD is useless get some new material or just go the fuck away like the dinosaur that you are

Re:I like my job

[numark]

This brings up a common misconception. "Free" software, as the old adage goes, is "free as in speech, not free as in beer". In other words, free software manufacturers can most definitely sell their works for a profit. Think of Red Hat. They sell a boxed version of free software for $69.95, and what is the user buying? Not only the collection of free software, but also the support contracts, warranty, and other features that you can only get in a boxed version.

Another example is MySQL. One company sells support contracts for that software and makes quite a bit doing just that. But MySQL is free both in speech and beer. Yet they still make money helping people fix problems that they have with it.

Free software can make companies money, it's as simple as that. It's not that the companies are developing programs they pass around without any cost whatsoever. Programmers still earn money because their work still profits the company. In other words, the exact same thing that goes on with proprietary software, just shifting the philosophy around. The money is still there.

Re:I like my job

[aallan]

I would go so far as to say that most code written is written to perform some task for the people employing the programmer, rather than for resale.

Enitrely agree, the number of truely generic tools is fairly limitied, the number of process specific tools is much larger.

I get paid to write software, these days I slap a GPL license onto everything I ship, but a great deal of this won't ever be seen by the public because its not generally useful and nobody would actually be interested. The stuff that is generally useful will eventually make its way into the wild, but its defaintely in the minority.

Al.

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't use P2P to download music, do you? I hope not, because then you'd be a hypocrite.

Re:I like my job

[shaitand]

Odd, everything I write is gpl'd and I make quite a bit of money on it... I explain to companies that the use of this license protects both them and me, it allows me to reuse and keep my code and it insures for them that they are never stuck down shit creek without a paddle because they have the source code they can always have someone else pick up on developement of their software if need be.

*gasp* that's right, I make sure they know if they find someone better they can dump me. Guess I'll just have to keep their business by being better than the competition eh?

Re:I like my job

[maxpublic]

If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?

As a geek, you could use your extensive knowledge of Klingon to get a job in Oregon.

Max

Re:I like my job

[MAXOMENOS]

If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?

They'll go to shops in big business and government agencies, where they need enterprise-grade, custom-built applications to handle their business needs. This is 90% of the code that we're writing anyway.

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the free software people are idiots.

Gee I'm sure glad a twink such as yourself has such a great outlook on life. Hey pal, maybe I could say quit sucking Bill's dick you guest-list faggot!

Now I can be normal again and have fun.

Just because you think your skills might be in danger because companies start giving stuff away does not make everyone else idiots. You sound like someone who is afraid of losing what skill you have that is considered "worth while"

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not time to panic yet. Companies will still be paying programmers to create the specific programs that they want. There will always be a place for non-free software because any decent company should be able to turn all that revenue into a better product. Unpaid programmers still have to make a living, and therefore can't put as much time into developing software as paid programmers can. Also, corporate software to date has done a much better job of catering to naive and stupid users (the general public).

Re:I like my job

[thegrendel]

If your coding skills aren't up to competing with
myself and all the other hobbyists and Open Source
software writers . . .

Well then, maybe you should just retrain as a plumber.

Why the hell did this guys *whine* get modded up to a 5?

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a writer, so I think all the people who put up Web sites or post to Slashdot for free are idiots.

Re:I like my job

[Trogre]

Consider different business models.

One for example: If you have written a decent open-source package that is useful to a business, they may be inclined to 'sponsor' you to add extra functionality. Sure, they can do this in-house (OSS, after all), but it may be more cost-effective to pay someone with prior knowledge of the project.

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?

I am a musician. P2P has already done this to us.

I like getting paid to write music. May not be paid for ever.
In the end, you don't really have a choice, you just have to live with it.

Re:I like my job

[sql*kitten]

I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products, and make a lot of money, then the whole idea of a paid programmer will go away. That would be a bummer.

Indeed, I can imagine the same "geek" a decade or so apart:

20 years old, college sophomore: Dude, everything should be, like, totally free dude. Like the sun, dude, nobody has to like, pay for that and stuff. Pass the bong, dude...

30 years old, wife and 2 kids, mortgage, etc: Shit, man, why can't I find a job? My kids gotta eat!

RMS has written a lot about the economics of open source, but he makes some basic assumptions: that everyone involved in writing software has a foundation grant or academic tenure and the programmer not the user is the best person to decide how software should work and what software should be written. Essentially he totally decouples the producer and consumer. Maybe the world really looks like that from an ivory tower at MIT, but the market in software exists so that programmers can earn a living writing the software that the users want written. The present system, selling software as a product, works very well. RMS and all open source advocates would like to go back to the days where computer operators were the "high priests" of technology. The real crime of the software industry in their eyes is that it brought computing to the "unwashed masses".

Re:I like my job

[sql*kitten]

There are a great many proprietary apps out there that various businesses wish they could customise feature X or add feature Y. Proprietary software means that those customizations are simply out of the question, so that's one less position for a programmer.

How do you figure that? All you're doing is moving the job, at best, from the vendor to the customer.

The net result of Free software taking over is that a huge inefficiency in the economy will be removed.

No, you're creating an inefficiency by removing economies of scale and specialization. Instead of one organization that knows the software inside out, you create hundreds who just know their little bit of it.

Imagine if all companies had their own couriers instead of using Fedex, or all companies generated their own electricity instead of buying it from the grid. Imagine Ford owned its own iron ore mines. Vertical integration of that kind has been thoroughly discredited. But that's what you're proposing recreating.

Re:I like my job

[An Onerous Coward]

"If everyone uses free software, and nothing but free software...where do all the programmers go?"

You've completely missed the whole point of "free software." It's not about "giving away your hard work without compensation." It's about not placing encumbrances on those who receive the software from you.

"I like getting paid to write software. If nobody bought software, I guess that programming would be a 'hobby' and not a 'profession'."

I'm still a bit confused by your position. As long as there are things software doesn't yet do, somebody is going to have financial incentive to pay you to write it. And if there is something that software can already do, why in God's name should anyone have to pay you to re-implement it?

Or, in the instance of buggy code, people are still going to be paying people money to fix them. The only difference is, in the brave new world of free software, the person with the problem can go to any of a thousand programmers to get the fix, rather than having to go to the owner of the source code.

"I think the free software people are idiots. Kinda the same if 1/2 the plumbers in the world went around doing the job for nothing- because 'everyone should have water'."

Well, I think the proprietary people are, erm...well, not really idiots. Let's just say we don't share the same values. To play with your analogy, it's the same as a plumber installing the pipes in your house, then forcing you to sign a contract stating that you cannot modify the plumbing system yourself or go to any competing plumber to fix a problem.

But the analogy you're using doesn't map very well. With plumbers and plumbing, if a person goes to one house and fixes all the leaks and adds stubs for the new bathroom the house owner is planning, that benefits only the owner of that specific house. Because code can be copied with almost zero marginal cost, making improvements to the code benefits everyone.

Unlike the plumbing scenario, this one raises the question, "How many times should a person be paid for the same work?"

"I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products, and make a lot of money, then the whole idea of a paid programmer will go away. That would be a bummer."

I believe that the vast majority of software (something on the order of 80%) is written entirely for in-house needs. People are being paid to write that software, and being paid well. There will always be situations where free software widget X doesn't do quite what is needed. Unpaid developers are going to work on whatever they happen to find interesting, and his interests are seldom going to coincide with those of the company wanting the new feature. If the company wants the feature, they have to fork over some cash to get to the front of the line.

So why the hell do you want to give your work away for free? That's some crack that I ain't smokin'.

There have been a lot of surveys on precisely this question (minus the crack pipe). The important reasons, in no particular order, are:

1) To show off, and get some fame among software enthusiasts.
2) To work on something interesting and useful to them, rather than "yet another e-business solution."
3) To make the world a hippy utopia.
4) To hone skills.
5) Intellectual challenge.

Now, as a self-professed desirer of paychecks, you might be most interested in #1. A sense of community often develops around projects. People are recognized for their work. People make a name for themselves by producing code. When said highly credible people find themselves between jobs, they have a community of friends in the software industry.

Oh, and being able to say "I built feature X into project Y" sounds

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of opportunities for programmers, just not so many jobs for programmers who want to lock people in to their tiny vision of what computers are useful for.

Programmers should be working at businesses which are not primarily creators of software, using commodity tools and/or sharing in the creation of new and better tools.

The result will be lower overall costs, and higher overall productivity, and it will make us all richer.

Re:I like my job

[benjamindees]

The real crime of the software industry in their eyes is that it brought computing to the "unwashed masses".

Free Software does much more to bring software to the "unwashed masses" than Microsoft ever did. Microsoft has only brought to the general public the idea that computers are supposed to crash, are essentially non-programmable, and must be thrown into the landfill every two years and replaced with an even-more-power-hungry model.

Re:I like my job

[Citizen of Earth]

So why the hell do you want to give your work away for free? That's some crack that I ain't smokin'.

If you don't want to give your work away for free, then don't. Duh! OTOH, if I want to write something and give it away for free, you have no right to stop me.

Re:I like my job

[Citizen of Earth]

The present system, selling software as a product, works very well. RMS and all open source advocates would like to go back to the days where computer operators were the "high priests" of technology.

It seems to me that I have heard many cries of "software sucks" from end users and trade magazines, so, it's not prefectly clear that proprietary software "works very well".

But, regardless, most people should understand the concept of a Free Market. People should be free to do what they want and the pursue the rewards that they desire. And this is what free-software folks are doing. If you don't like their products, then don't use them. If you don't agree with receiving non-cash rewards, then don't contribute.

The users of and contributors to open/free software do not require your blessing.

Re:I like my job

[t1m0r4n]

"I think the free software people are idiots. Kinda the same if 1/2 the plumbers in the world went around doing the job for nothing- because 'everyone should have water'."
To play with your analogy, it's the same as a plumber installing the pipes in your house, then forcing you to sign a contract stating that you cannot modify the plumbing system yourself or go to any competing plumber to fix a problem.

-----

In addition the plumber saying you can't use any other "tubular devices" other than those he/she has authorized for the transport of liquid materials. To use the approved "tubular devices" for any means other than the transport of liquids is also a violation of the contract. So on and so forth ad infinitum...

But I do agree that in the once free software days of yesteryear, there were problems, hence, allowing the shrink wrapped buisness model to succeed.

Re:I like my job

[croddy]

well, I'll still pay you to play a show. you can play a good show, right? cuz if I like your show I'll gladly buy your latest 12".

Re:I like my job

[Malcontent]

And you make the assumption that all code written gets sold.

Of the millions of lines of code I have written in my life less then 1% were in a software product that was for sale. What's your percentage?

Re:I like my job

[sjames]

How do you figure that? All you're doing is moving the job, at best, from the vendor to the customer.

Nonsense. MS (for example) is NOT about to produce 3000 different versions of Office for it's customers nor will it provide them with the source so they can do that themselves. Those customizations simply won't happen at all.

No, you're creating an inefficiency by removing economies of scale and specialization. Instead of one organization that knows the software inside out, you create hundreds who just know their little bit of it.

The efficiency comes from slashing several layers of administrative overhead from the transaction. That is, MS devotes non-productive (to the economy as a whole) resources to vendor lock-in 'features' and anti copying measures, then throws more resources at a massive legal department and lobbying in order to back up those measures.

In turn each business customer is forced to devote equally non-productive resources to coping with the anti-copy measures and auditing and accounting for licenses to assure that they are in compliance as well as legal staff to read over the EULAs that even MS doesn't fully understand.

Meanwhile, each customer's support staff are hampered in their efforts by not having access to the code.

Imagine if all companies had their own couriers instead of using Fedex, or all companies generated their own electricity instead of buying it from the grid. Imagine Ford owned its own iron ore mines. Vertical integration of that kind has been thoroughly discredited. But that's what you're proposing recreating.

None of those examples really apply since, unlike software, the products/services needed have a significant marginal cost. Since software collaboration has been shown to have very low communications overhead, it is quite likely that members of different companie's IT departments would work together on larger projects.

An alternate scenerio, companies may choose to outsource their Free software development needs. The difference from the current situation is that the overhead of license compliance (and assurance of compliance) will be removed and vendors of development services will compete freely.

The free competition is key. Currently, all MS needs to do is make sure that their offer isn't so much worse than the alternative that customers decide to accept retraining costs and temporary lost productivity to get away from them. If they had to compete with another developer that could provide the same product without retraining overhead, they would be driven to behave in a much more competitive manner.

Short summary, Free software has a good bit to offer users but will likely INCREASE demnd for programmers. Competition will be increased throughout the industry.

Re:I like my job

[sql*kitten]

Nonsense. MS (for example) is NOT about to produce 3000 different versions of Office for it's customers nor will it provide them with the source so they can do that themselves. Those customizations simply won't happen at all.

It's simply a matter of scale. Oracle or SAP for example, will fork their codebase for a major customer, then merge those patches back into the trunk in a later version (I have personal experience of this). In the vertical application space, pretty much all the new features in a new version come from customer requests/suggestions - when you get enough of those outstanding, you simply roll them up and release a new version (again, personal experience).

Secondly, altho' Microsoft (obviously) do not release source code, their applications are insanely scriptable from VBA or anything that can script COM (perl, if you prefer). Almost every object exposes an interface. You know why there are all these macro viruses? Because Outlook/Exchange isn't just a mail system, it's a complete platform for workflow and groupware application development, and like any platform (Linux included) it's not bulletproof. So there is a lot of scope for customization and adding plugins, and a lot of people do do it.

The efficiency comes from slashing several layers of administrative overhead from the transaction. That is, MS devotes non-productive (to the economy as a whole) resources to vendor lock-in 'features' and anti copying measures, then throws more resources at a massive legal department and lobbying in order to back up those measures.

That is quite possibly true (not enough data to call it either way). Is the overhead of this outweighed by the benefits of centralizing software development? (Probably) no-one knows.

is quite likely that members of different companie's IT departments would work together on larger projects

A company might help its customers and suppliers, that happens a lot today, but so long as software has the potential to be a competitive advantage, sharing will be very limited. At the moment, choice of generic office software is not a competitive advantage, but say you create a set of tools that are very specific to your industry (say, publishing or law or something). Now you do have a competitive advantage, but if you want to share (distribute) that to your suppliers and customers, GPL forces you to distribute it to your competitors too. But under the present system, everyone starts with out-of-the-box MS Office, customizes it with VBA macros, COM objects, etc, and they wholly own their own enhancements.

Short summary, Free software has a good bit to offer users but will likely INCREASE demnd for programmers. Competition will be increased throughout the industry.

Not a dig at you personally, but it amazes me that most Slashbots can simultaneously complain about wages being driven down by Indian/Russian outsourcing and H1Bs, yet promote the use of free software.

Let's say that a feature is "nice to have" but not essential. A single vendor, like MS or Oracle or SAP can afford to include it, because the cost is spread among many customers, and everyone gets their nice-to-have feature, and a programmer has a job. But if there was no central vendor, then no company can individually justify coding the feature themselves, so no-one gets it and the programmer is out of a job. It's lose-lose.

Re:I like my job

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that you can't have it both ways. On the one hand, Microsoft competed in the free-market, became wildly successful (through various scrupulous and unscrupulous means (welcome to the real world)), and everyone now bitches that they're a monopoly. Wah Wah Wah.

That's the problem. The free market chose MS. Now everyone from Oracle (not monetarily free) to GPL Zealots (not ideologically free) want to force MS to do various somersaults because they don't want to accept the market's decision.

Why has Linux succeeded so well in the server world? Because sysad geeks drive the market, like GPL, and don't mind recompiling the kernel to get up on the network.

Why has MS succeeded everywhere else? Because 40 something parents drive the market, want something that their kids can do their homework and play games on, can bring some work home to, and don't want to hear that their modem won't work with their OS.

It's not that MS didn't compete in the marketplace, it's that the maketplace didn't choose you.

Re:I like my job

[mpe]

I like getting paid to write software. If nobody bought software, I guess that programming would be a 'hobby' and not a 'profession'.

Most people paid to write software are doing so to perform a specific task, not to write some sort of generic program which can be sold in volume.

I think the free software people are idiots. Kinda the same if 1/2 the plumbers in the world went around doing the job for nothing- because 'everyone should have water'.

Actually free software enables coders to get paid the way plumbers get paid. For putting together or altering a system according to the customer's requirements.
You don't have anyone thinking that plumbers should design and put together "off the shelf" plumbing systems which can be installed by non plumbers.

I like getting paid to write code. I'm pretty sure that a lot of other people do. If the companies don't sell the products,

For many companies software is exactly like plumbing. It's an infrastructure to enable them to provide products and/or services better.
Just because a company is prepared to pay a plumber does not mean that their business is selling water pipes, why should the fact that they are prepared to pay someone install, configure and alter computer software mean that they must sell software?

Re:I like my job

[mpe]

I get paid to write software, these days I slap a GPL license onto everything I ship, but a great deal of this won't ever be seen by the public because its not generally useful and nobody would actually be interested. The stuff that is generally useful will eventually make its way into the wild, but its defaintely in the minority.

There is also a possible benefit to you. Since you are writing GPL code you are free to incorporate anyone else's GPL code in your project. No need to either "reinvent the wheel" or negotiate licencing with someone else.

Re:I like my job

[mpe]

There are a great many proprietary apps out there that various businesses wish they could customise feature X or add feature Y. Proprietary software means that those customizations are simply out of the question, so that's one less position for a programmer. The money to pay the programmer's salary will come out of the licensing costs no longer paid out and from the administrative costs of license compliance that is no longer necessary.

Don't forget the savings of not having to work around a sub optimal tool and from being able to do whatever tasks they want to perform more efficently.

Re:I like my job

[mpe]

How do you figure that? All you're doing is moving the job, at best, from the vendor to the customer.

A vendor is likely to want something which is generically "good enough" to be able to sell lots of copies. A customer is likely to want a tool which will do what they want done the best possible way.

Imagine if all companies had their own couriers instead of using Fedex, or all companies generated their own electricity instead of buying it from the grid.

Plenty of companies do have the means to generate their own electricity. If having a reliable electricity supply is importent they won't trust a third party. Also it's hardly unknown for companies to courier information themselves, including having people who have vital information in their heads physically go somewhere.

Re:I like my job

[mpe]

Or, in the instance of buggy code, people are still going to be paying people money to fix them. The only difference is, in the brave new world of free software, the person with the problem can go to any of a thousand programmers to get the fix, rather than having to go to the owner of the source code.

The owner of the source code might pay "it's a feature, not a bug" or "we can't be bothered to fix it".
In the open source senario it is likely to get fixed to the customer's satisfacton, because that is what they are paying for.

Re:I like my job

[sjames]

Not a dig at you personally, but it amazes me that most Slashbots can simultaneously complain about wages being driven down by Indian/Russian outsourcing and H1Bs, yet promote the use of free software.

Perhaps an explaination of that would be in order then. The problem comes in when economic barriers are crossed in one direction only. When outsourcing anything to the 3rd world, the company is attempting to reap the benefits of cheap labor AND wealthy customers at the same time. The net result is a drag on the overall economy. At the same time, the 3rd world becomes completely subserviant to the 1st world, primarily producing goods that it's people cannot afford.

Sure, for a sufficiantly LARGE customer, nearly anything is possible. For the vast majority of companies out there, forget it. In cases where no single company can cost justify doing the work themselves, they will likely collectively contract a 3rd party (one of several choices) to do the changes. Any company that has enough seats licensed to sway SAP, MS, or Oracle to create their pet feature could probably hire a decent sized full time staff of programmers for the cost of their site licenses.

In cases where the software would offer a significant competitive advantage, the app will be developed in-house anyway since buying from a software vendor will get nothing better than parity with the competition.

Re:I like my job

[Citizen of Earth]

The problem is that you can't have it both ways.

Of course you can: you can have a Free Market. A monopolized market is exactly the opposite of a free one. This is why government legislation is required to prevent monopolization. Unfortunately, the government failed to counteract the abusive Microsoft monopoly, even though it secured a conviction.

Speaking of "zealotry", you might want to examine your own fanboy attitude toward Microsoft.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[bigman2003]

First, let's assume this guy isn't full of crap. You have TWO servers- so this is the sample you are using for your statistics- one of each? What are your servers doing? Is there really an interoperability issue between them? Interoperability with WHAT? Are you trying to connect desktops to these machines? Are these DNS servers, what type of function are they providing. 95% of all desktops will be able to connect to the Windows machine better/stronger/faster than the the Redhat box.

Two more advantages to add.

[MtViewGuy]

There are two other reasons why Microsoft will still dominate the desktop space for now:

1. Consistency of interface. Sure, the folks who develop KDE and GNOME are trying to work out interoperability issues, but you can't beat Window's generally consistent interface for the end user. Note that outside of the configuration options, Windows' general interface has been pretty much consistent from Windows 95 all the way up to Windows XP at the desktop level; the Start button, the Taskbar, and the way icons work on the desktop has changed very little even though the look of the Windows 95 and Windows XP interfaces are in many ways quite different.

2. Unmatched hardware support. Practically all the the PC-compatible hardware currently sold out there have software drivers that enable the hardware to work under Windows 98 to Windows XP for desktop machines. And more importantly, the driver takes full advantage of the hardware; for example, does the Open Source Linux driver for the Sound Blaster Audigy sound card take full advantage of all of the card's hardware features? Sadly, no.

However, for server use, where interface consistency and easy of use are much less of an issue, Linux is making inroads because Linux (especially since the release of the 2.4.x OS kernel) is now powerful enough to handle the high-volume transactions needed for server operations.

Re:Two more advantages to add.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows' general interface has been pretty much consistent from Windows 95 all the way up to Windows XP at the desktop level

You're kidding, right? It used to be that the menu options would change from version to version (my pet peeve is Internet Explorer). But then they made it a hundred times worse by changing the menu options around while you used the fucking program!.

Unmatched hardware support. Practically all the the PC-compatible hardware...

You see the problem with that statement?

Re:Two more advantages to add.

[mpe]

And more importantly, the driver takes full advantage of the hardware; for example, does the Open Source Linux driver for the Sound Blaster Audigy sound card take full advantage of all of the card's hardware features?

Because the capabilities of the sound card are so importent to the secretary typing a letter...

Ack!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't just _replace_ $foo with $bar. You integerate and/or run-in-parallel while you sort out what runs best on which.

damn, all that formatting just to end in a preposition

Sure.

[TheLink]

Finally they are paying dividends :).

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[ealar dlanvuli]

And I don't try to run DNS, AD, Exhange, SQL and IIS all on the same box with 2000 people connected

Well drop sql, since if you actually need a database chances are you need a seperate machine just for it. Why exactly can't you run the rest of those items on a single machine with 2000 people connected? It baffles me that you would say that.

In linux I wouldn't flinch at running that on a nice U1 multiprocessor box with a few hundred gig Raid5.

You really offer only one reason.

[twitter]

The only thing I see above is a knowledge of how to get things done under Microsoft. It seems to have blinded you to better tools available at no cost as free software. Yeah, yeah, it takes time to learn how to use those tools, but nothing takes more time to stay on top of than Microsoft. In the free software world, you learn it once and don't have to worry about the rug getting pulled out from under you in the upgrade train.

An easy way to run a large Debian network would be to make your own mirror with meta packages. All your desktops and servers can point to the appropriate mirror to get the updates they need through chronned apt-get update and upgrade. There are other ways to do things, of course but none so woefully inefficent as to take 20 staff hours.

SMS, by the way sucks. Everytime the company upgrades, it breaks user shortcuts. Why? I'm not really sure, but it has something to do with deep seated flaws in the Microsoft platform that require version numbers or other unique names for SMS applications. The user experience is not smooth at all. I doubt the admistrative side is really much fun either. If inventory management was a breeze, thrid party software to do the same would not exist and Microsoft themselves would not have been hit by the SQL Slammer worm.

The tools are there in the free software world. Free your mind from that M$ junk and have a look. You will like what you see.

Re:You really offer only one reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the replies to this thread mentioned systemimager.org. I had never heard of it before, and I am very excited by it and it has quite a bit of corporate sponsorship as well.

Check it out, no need to maintain a package repositry, just a "golden workstation".

One thing gets me with these MS guys. Surely they know that Linux is used for big clusters. Surely these boxes need software updates, how do they think admins do this easily? This fact alone should tell them that the Free Software world has solutions out there.

Re:You really offer only one reason.

[reverendslappy]

Yeah, that product is pretty slick. But big-picture it, and your costs are still higher in a large enterprise with Linux at the desktop, package distribution notwithstanding.

Re:You really offer only one reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely due to people not being familiar with Linux and requiring retraining I guess. Which is not related to manageability, and this is the point we are arguing. You said Linux is not manageable, we're saying it is. Managing Linux rollouts is there, but maybe the desktop software isn't. Who's to say it won't be in the future? It would be silly not to re-evaluate Free Software solutions every year or so.

Re:You really offer only one reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

If inventory management was a breeze, thrid party software to do the same would not exist and Microsoft themselves would not have been hit by the SQL Slammer worm.

The tools are there in the free software world. Free your mind from that M$ junk and have a look. You will like what you see.

Take 10 minutes, go to www.securityfocus.com and subscribe to risks, bugtraq, and ntbugtraq. I see MANY MORE reports of problems with MySql or PostgreSQL as I do for Microsoft SQL. The only reason why it is a problem is that Microsoft has more deployments.

I am frightened at the low quality of linux packages. Microsoft has quite a few problems, but OSS packages have more problems than even Microsoft. I even see a surprising number of problems with HPUX, Solaris, and other unix variants.

Re:You really offer only one reason.

[reverendslappy]

Absolutely. But I guess the "manageability" thing was just one point to underscore my overall argument. For all those reasons, right now -- today -- it's cheaper to run Microsoft in a large environment. I hope to hell that changes, and maybe my view is an exercise in staunch pragmatism, but Microsoft TCO is lower. And to businesses in the current economic environment, the unfortunate reality is that's all that really matters.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[ergo98]

The fact that the parent post was moderated up to +5 says so much about Slashdot...

I work in enterprise development and analysis, and it's funny how different the "real world" is from the "fantasy world" that many Slashdotters manufacture for themselves here, patting each other on the back and assuring themselves of their righteousness.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

95% of all desktops will be able to connect to the Windows machine better/stronger/faster than the the Redhat box.

Bullshit, have you ever watched a DNS query? It's really fucking obvious when you hit a MS box cause they break protocol everywhere they can so long as in the end you get an IP. And you can generally drop 2 packets out by the time your done with a MS DNS session.

Education in 15 seconds

[FooBarWidget]

Secretary: "My CDROM drive won't eject the CDROM. What's going on?"

You: "From now on you must rightclick on the CD icon on the desktop and click the Eject menu."

Secretary: "Oh, OK." [click the menu]

Total time taken to educate her: 15 seconds.

There, was that so hard?

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Chicane-UK]

What the hell version of Linux have you used that requires constant attention to prevent it from breaking down??

The thing I continue to love about Linux boxes is that you can set them up and stick them in a corner, and forget about em. They just work.

I could go on and on, but the conclusion is clear.. you don't know what the hell you are talking about >:|

The Other Way Around?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...paying people to use it."?

Please tell me who is being paid to use Microsoft!

Re:The Other Way Around?

[innocent_white_lamb]

Please tell me who is being paid to use Microsoft!

Secretaries, "executive assistants" and data entry folks worldwide. And lots more too, but I think the above would make up the largest number of users, overall.

Re:The Other Way Around?

[mpe]

Secretaries, "executive assistants" and data entry folks worldwide. And lots more too, but I think the above would make up the largest number of users, overall.

Do they care who makes the software though? Since, in the end, the real criteria is "does the tool do the job".

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[gr66nman]

The Win2k server, in contrast, is a continuous pain in the arse.

The problem with arguing by specific example is that there are always examples of either scenario. I run two Win2000 servers and I haven't rebooted in months (and when I did, yes, it was to install patches). Heck, I went on vacation for a week and a half and there were no issues.

I work for a small company and the time to not only train myself but others in maintaining a linux machine just isn't practical.

Meet crossover.

[twitter]

So many corporate apps that can be run on a variety of databases/servers, yet demand MS desktop OS's for their client app that is required. Many of these setups have no intention of moving to anything other than windows for the client side of things.

Get Suse and try crossover today. It works with M$ office junk. I imagine it will work with most plugins to Office and all those nasty little VB database front ends that are floating around. Chances are, those interfaces can be ported to Kbasic or some other free software cheaper than to the next VB.

Pre-trained user base = nil training cost for MS Office users

If Microsoft would quit changing their interface you would have a legitimate point. Companies spent money teaching people how to use their computers, one way or another. Most left them to fend for themselves and that worked fine. The average Gnome or KDE desktop offers the user more, but does not take that much time to figure out. If you can mouse and push buttons you can run a Linux desktop. This inclueds Crossover and all your Windoze junk.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why don't you run all that?

[bluGill]

Why don't you run all those services on one machine. I could see serving 2000 users DNS, NIS (There are better replacements today, but I'm not up on them), sendmail/pop/imap, NFS, Apache, all on the same machine. If I can't it is because the users are using too much bandwidth for the hardware, these are (or should be) IO bound problems. 10 years ago I knew of a sun that served Apache and mail (pine mostly) for 15,000 users. Todays machines are much faster, so why can't they do it?

I'll grant that sql often requires a big CPU, and should be on a different machine. With a good OS though you should be able to run all those on one machine considering today's CPU speeds. Mind you I can understand the argument that you don't because that way a mistake on one machine doesn't take down the rest, I don't buy the argument that you need to do it. (though you should have a hot backup for those services that can take over the load anyway)

Re:Why don't you run all that?

[Haileri$]

For the AD/DNS/DHCP scenario there are security issues regarding DNS dynamic updates. You probably wouldn't want to run IIS on the same box since its (a:) pretty shiitte :) and (b) usually located seperately for load balancing purposes or based on location (dmz). Having said all that, at home I run Windows 2000 server with DNS, DHCP, IIS, Exchange 2000, ISA 2000 Server and Citrix MetaFrame XPe on a Proliant 3000 - seems to work fine :)

Re:Microsoft = more licensing cost AND Linux = coo

[Haileri$]

Hmmm the NT4.0 servers I built for a large Govt client has not changed for 5 years and run very nicely without rebooting thank you very much. FUD can be used on both sides of course...

Buy Microsoft, Go to Jail

[Peyote Pekka]

The bad reputation for poor security has been earned by treating secuirty as a PR problem. Any business storing sensitive data on Microsoft based systems is really asking for trouble, perhaps even a willful negligence lawsuit. It's not enough to slap old programs into a new carton and call them secure.

The crowd is starting to murmur, "the emperor [chairman] has no clothes".

Re:Why buy Microsoft ? Femminist?

[Anonymous Coward]

heeeyy wait a second...
it is another AC who wrote the feminist troll not me, I proudly wrote the lesbian porn site troll and I had good reasons:
1.all-women working there (raw meat).
2.MAC computers (graphic design).
3.Linux servers (apache is porn industry #1 choice).
so there you go...the evidence are piling up you had it coming man :-))) see you in the next troll

System Imager!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at System Imager [systemimager.org];

OMG, I had never heard of that piece of software before! If it works half as good as what the documentation says, than that thing absolutely rocks!
And it has quite a bit of corporate sponsorship as well.

Well..

[mindstrm]

Many of us don't see it as a free software war.

Sure, linux is "free software" and everyone likes to focus no that.... but I use it because it works.

"Where will programmers go?" "Why should I work for free?"

Answer: They will still program, and you don't have to work for free at all.

Nobody every said your time, labor, and effort is not worth money.

Companies will just have to actually produce real, useful software above and beyond the baseline set by FREE software that people actualy have a genuine need for, that's all. The ability to sell crap is all that's disappearing.

Look at.. VMWARE. Good, solid product. Innovative too. Price is right. Then look at FreeMware.. the oss project that aimed to duplicate it. Still nowhere close, they may have even changed their focus, i'm not sure, and will never catch up. And as lon gas VMWare keeps putting money back into development, and improving their products in both ways that are useful, innovative, and people want, they will continue to sell it and make money. The only thing they can't do is stop developing, just fix bugs, and keep selling it for years.

Free software sets a baseline, a barrier to entry to the software business world that says "You have to make something significantly better and more desirable than this."

Furthermore, many programmers work in-house in companies, developing software for internal use... where the ability to sell software is of les importance.. and heck, the world still hasn't realized the potential of real web services.

If your time and effort can be replaced with something that is free, then it should be. If your employer has you working on something he could just throw in for free, he should have you working on something he CAN'T get for free instead.

Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Quoth the AC:

Yeah, because LOTS of enterprises run Office on their servers, right? Please RTFA.

If you had R'd TFA then you'd spot that a lot of it does relate to things other than the OS side of the market, and many of the claims made are general and across the board. In fact, from the original article, and citing a guy from SuSE of all places:

"The concern is the user's experience," Migliaccio noted. "The business user doesn't know much about the operating system or interact with it. The question is, do [the applications] provide the functionality they need, and can [IT] support them?"

Some of the other more telling quotes from the article follow.

Five years ago, the answer would have been easy. With the dominant development tools, client operating system and client applications, Microsoft owned a certain portion of the enterprise

That is still true, if anything more so today than it was five years ago. MS still totally dominate the desktop. In particular, their Windows development tools and office suite still completely outclass the OS equivalents. To give credit where it's due, a couple more years at this rate and OpenOffice could be a real threat. I haven't seen any open source project currently in development that's even close to Visual Studio.

Almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else -- without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices.

Because of course, open source things are immune to bugs and security problems... not. If you really think "almost everything" that was once unique to Microsoft now has a serious open source competitor, you haven't been looking very carefully.

On the desktop side, Linux is also providing viable alternatives to Windows. For example, Linux vendor SuSE recently introduced Office Desktop, a Linux product that includes a copy of Sun StarOffice 6.0, which is a competitor to the Microsoft Office suite.

It may be a competitor, but it ain't a better product. It's got a way to go before it challenges either the raw power or the ease of use of the Microsoft suite. For geeks who are happy to play with new toys, it's great, and maybe in the future it will be great for Joe Average as well, but enough with the kidding ourselves, OK? It isn't there yet.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

"[StarOffice] may be a competitor [to M$Office], but it ain't a better product."

And here's an example of how true that is (and this isn't meant as a flame, tho I'm sure some will read it that way):

I hate, loathe, despite, can't stand, and do everything I can to avoid using WinWord; the whole way the program works is an exercise in disorganization and "you can't do thats". And I don't like the rest of M$Office much either; IMO, Powerpoint's design positively stinks.

I tried StarOffice 5.x for Win32... and, well, if it were the ONLY alternative to M$Office, I'd gladly embrace WinWord and Powerpoint. StarOffice was *that* annoying and inadequate. Its word processor reminds me of nothing so much as a bad miscegenation of Wordstar 5.x and DOSWord6. And it's SLOW!! (Nothing else ran that poorly on that machine, including OfficeXP.) I gather SO 6.0 is somewhat better, but I doubt that the basic design has changed all that much.

Thankfully, there's still the WordPerfect suite. (For a while.. :(

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

There are much better alternatives to Microsoft Visual Studio. QT Designer for the GUI is way beyond Visual Studio. If GTK is your forte' then anjuta is very nice for code development along with glade for the gui. Of course couple all these with VIM for your super text editing plus the fact that you can setup your projects to be cross platform (unlike any M$ product) and you have the makings for a SUPER software development environment.

I just love people like you. Just like my two year old, always in the moment and can never think of the future. OpenOffice.org is great now, now super, not fantastic, just great. And it will get BETTER. Just like Microsoft Word got better (although Microsoft Word still Sucks IMO).

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that it's written in Java. Remember when netscape tried Java and how slow it was. There's a lot of factors that make Java slow including the garbage collection and the fact that it's interpreted. It's the price they pay for platform independence I guess.

Re:Quotes from the article

[kotj.mf]

I tried StarOffice 5.x for Win32... and, well, if it were the ONLY alternative to M$Office, I'd gladly embrace WinWord and Powerpoint. StarOffice was *that* annoying and inadequate. Its word processor reminds me of nothing so much as a bad miscegenation of Wordstar 5.x and DOSWord6. And it's SLOW!! (Nothing else ran that poorly on that machine, including OfficeXP.) I gather SO 6.0 is somewhat better, but I doubt that the basic design has changed all that much.

???

So you haven't even tried OOo/SO6, but feel qualified to comment on it?

I'd agree that SO5 was a stinking pile of crappity crap, but the post-open source versions are nothing like it. The annoying integrated desktop is gone, and now the apps are all modular.

Granted, it still takes awhile to load the first time, but if you leave it in memory, it's not a problem.

The word processor and spreadsheet are good enough for 99% of anybody who uses Word or Excel, and since that other 1% are the people who can't write a fucking newsletter without using WordArt, who the hell cares, anyway?

I wouldn't know anything about the presentation app, because I find the entire concept of Powerpoint and its ilk to be evil and wrong, even if harvested directly from RMSes colon. Meetings suck.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Saint Stephen]

The main problem for me with Mozilla and OpenOffice is not their performance -- both are "fast enough" once they are running. The biggest difference between those and the Microsoft equivalents is (1) load time [especially on windows] and CPU-hogging. IE and Office load really fast, and remain zippy as the system incurs load. OpenOffice is worse than Moz for chewing up resources, but both are bad.

Linux in general "feels" like it's serializing tasks (except consoles), but maybe that's me not tweaking the kernel (I run Debian's 2.4.20+patches, plus CK low-latency patches, but maybe it's misconfigured?)

Re:Quotes from the article

[rowanxmas]

You would be zippy to if you were loaded at startup and never taken out of memory, and had on OS desinged around you.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Saint Stephen]

Or one that has at least modularized widget wrappers, print services, and font services so that every app doesn't have to "build the world." It's not as if IE and Office completely implement all that and just launch at startup as a hidden process.

And that doesn't explain the CPU hogging. (Although to be fair IE and Office are CPU hogs -- just trace the system calls in Word when you press a keystroke to see). But If I'm watching a DVD in Windows and want to surf IMDB without skipping frames, I'd always choose IE, Moz makes the DVD skip. And that's a fact.

There's nothing stopping OSS from designing the OS around it's apps either. Certainly they can read each other's code!

Re:Quotes from the article

[Trolling4Dollars]

I gather OpenOffice 6.0 is somewhat better, but I doubt that the basic design has changed all that much.

Actually the design is RADICALLY different. StarOffice was a piece of shit. OpenOffice.org 6.x is a wonderful improvement. There are some features that people who seem to write a lot of documents miss, but for someone who does the occasional party flyer, letter to grandma or even company newsletter, about 95% of the functionality they are looking for is already there.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The biggest difference between those and the Microsoft equivalents is (1) load time [especially on windows] and CPU-hogging.

On the contrary; I find OpenOffice to be quite zippy on my WinXP box, at least comparable to MS Office.

The places OpenOffice is still playing catch-up to MS Office are much more serious at the moment: stability, feature set and ease of use.

I mainly use the word processor, for a variety of different document types from simple letters to DTPing programmes for events to technical reports. I also use the spreadsheet, both for numerical work and as a toy database and mail merge data source.

I have found that both apps are generally less resilient than the MS Office equivalents, particularly in the much-advertised import and export of the de facto standard Microsoft file formats.

There are some features that apparently aren't properly or completed supported, at least not yet, though for most everyday uses either app is adequate for most people.

Perhaps the biggest issue is all the "little things". MS Office has had a lot of usability research done on it. You may not like the paperclip, adapting menus or wiggly spellchecker underlines, but you can switch them off. However, to pick on styles as a usability example, OpenOffice has a nice theoretical mechanism, but where are my keyboard shortcuts for styles and special characters in OpenOffice? Where's the key to reset the character format back to the paragraph style's default? How do I reset a paragraph style to not specify any font changes from the base style? There is functionality approximating most of these things, but it just isn't quite tidy somehow. You can cite similar problems with many other specific areas of the code.

It's got great potential, but one good answer to the question "Any reason to buy Microsoft?" is simply yes, because (for now at least) it's still quite a way ahead on usability.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I just love people like you. Just like my two year old, always in the moment and can never think of the future. OpenOffice.org is great now, now super, not fantastic, just great. And it will get BETTER.

I just love people like you. In a discussion about an article that questions whether there is any reason to buy Microsoft now rather than open source, you're looking at where open source might go later.

The question at hand is whether or not there's still any compelling reason to buy MS software today. The answer, for businesses looking for office software, is yes, for the reasons I and others have given in this thread. We all know open source has a lot of potential, but what happens tomorrow is a different question, and you don't know the answer to that any more than I do.

Re:Quotes from the article

[mbogosian]

In particular, their Windows development tools and office suite still completely outclass the OS equivalents.

I have to call bullshit on this one. Microsoft development tools (i.e., those sold by Microsoft) are, contrary to popular religion, not the cat's hind end. I'm a developer and I've found that Visual Studio .NET and Source Safe and nearly every other MS "product" I try is the most ridiculously bloated and cumbersome tool imaginable. I really can't understand how people use them to do real work.

The GNU/OpenSource/POSIX LIDE or Loosely Integrated Development Environment (e.g., autoconf, automake, make, gcc, etc.), however, is standardized for nearly every platform now (yes, including Mac OS X and Windows) and Just Makes Sense(tm). By this I mean these are good, simple and extremely flexible tools which are configurable to work the way you do (not work you the way its developers want to). If I see another god-damned fscking "IDE" which "tightly" (meaning inflexibly) integrates to a broken source control system like CVS or VSS and doesn't easily allow me to drop-in my own replacement like Subversion or Perforce, I'm going to vomit.

By the way, these are also the same tools which are used to teach computer science and programming courses in Universities across the world (at least for now). Graduate with a BS in computer Science and chances are, unless you came from a crack-pot or sell-out operation, you are already trained in their use and can develop software for nearly every popular platform on the planet.

As far as office products are concerned, I'm not a publisher, but I do write a fair amount of documentation and give a number of presentations annually, and I find that OpenOffice 1.0.1 (distributed with RedHat 8.0) is more than sufficient for my needs and is being improved at an amazing rate. In fact, our entire office (business and technical staff alike) uses it without complaint.

Re:Quotes from the article

[swv3752]

In some cases the low latency patches make things seem worse. As someone else mentioned, haveing the resources load at boot makes a world of difference.

On my dual boot machine I could run IE5.5 in wine. It was godawful slow and and took up more resources than Mozilla.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You would be zippy to if you were loaded at startup and never taken out of memory, and had on OS desinged around you.

Gee, what are those little icons in my system notifications area?

Oh yeah, it's the quickstarters for Mozilla and OpenOffice.

But seriously, we're talking complete packages here. Microsoft do provide an OS and Office combination that work well together. Whether you like their commercial practices or not, businesses can buy into that and gain its advantages today. If Linux/OpenOffice/whatever can't match it, that's their problem, not Microsoft's.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Microsoft development tools (i.e., those sold by Microsoft) are, contrary to popular religion, not the cat's hind end. I'm a developer and I've found that Visual Studio .NET and Source Safe and nearly every other MS "product" I try is the most ridiculously bloated and cumbersome tool imaginable. I really can't understand how people use them to do real work.

SourceSafe is a fairly horrible product, it's true, but I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about Visual Studio. I'm also a professional developer, and have been a "guinea pig" for a move to a new version of Visual Studio twice in recent years.

At first, I didn't like the latest versions. They have their flaws, they certainly could be less bloated, and Visual Studio.NET mysteriously removed a couple of very nice features that were present in VS6. But even ignoring all the .NET hype (which is irrelevant to me since my code runs on 15 different platforms), after keeping an open mind and giving it a chance, I find VS.NET to be a nice development environment. The recently released VS.NET 2003 seems to fix some of the more glaring issue with the original VS.NET, too.

VS.NET is very configurable. It can do all the same things with make files and such as the alternatives you mentioned, and has enough compiler options to make even GCC blush. The editor is pretty decent. The compiler outputs very high quality code compared to the field (and I work in mathematical software, so things like optimisations and generally efficient output code matter here).

I think the top spot for me is the debugger. A lot of my work involves tracking down bugs in complex numerical algorithms, and I make regular use of many of the VS debugger's more advanced features. An AC replied to me suggesting things like Qt Designer. Sure, some people have nicer GUI designers out there, but I'm talking about serious tools, not eye candy generators. What is the best debugger available in the Linux/GCC/LIDE world?

I'd love to know where you got your ideas about what's taught in university these days from, BTW. I'm not in academia myself any more, but several of my friends are in CS research at major UK universities, so I'm pretty well up on the academic scene here. I'm not aware of any group that specifically teaches anything much about the tools you mentioned; most of the universities, for better or worse, seem to use Java as their main teaching language now, and for the scale of project we're talking about there, the tools you mentioned are serious overkill.

Re:Quotes from the article

[rowanxmas]

Yeah, I really want the kernel I use for my scientific stuff to be "optimized" for office shit. OTOH, A different set of modules that IS office optimized might be nice.

Or one that has at least modularized widget wrappers,
If this is the case why does officeXP look like winXP on win2K?

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Brave_Guy,

No. The poster above correctly evaluates reality -
there is NO reason to buy M$ now. OSS OpenOffice is great NOW. I use OpenOffice almost every day. More on point - it is the *only* word processor/suite I use after migrating from StarOffice. There is NO reason to choose (buy) Word over OpenOffice. As more and more people clue into reality M$ will be dislodged from corp. desktops. Once the dam cracks it will bring an end to M$ DT/Win duality and their business. This isn't in question - only how soon.
btw - as a Mac support person in the mid-nineties I saw plenty of IT dept's throw out Apple in favor of M$ - end-users be damned. I will take unending pleasure in seeing CIOs throw out M$ because it's expensive crap and its support people don't really know their behind fron the backhoe digging their careers out...

Re:Quotes from the article

[tupps]

Both winword and IE on windows platform pre-load themselves, and hide the resource usage. Winword is a classic with Office Fast Start, which if I remember correctly lives as OSA.exe in task manager. You can turn it off if you know where to look.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

No, I haven't tried v6, but how different is the codebase? But my point was, 5.x was bad enough to discourage me from even giving a later version a fair chance, and in fact would have sent me running back to Word if that was the only other option; imagine what it would do to a corporate decision maker!! Gods, what were versions 1 thru 4 like?? (hopefully they never saw daylight.)

I've very rarely seen Powerpoint used to do anything but make completely useless wastes of time. The concept isn't bad in itself, but how people USE it is just ridiculous. I don't need an animated diagram projected on the wall to tell me how wonderful New Feature X is -- just show me the blasted feature in action and skip the freakin' slide show!! (I actually bitched out the last several M$ seminar presenters for this -- too much slideshow, not enough realtime demo!!)

One problem with Powerpoint's basic operation is that it makes you do an awful lot of needless work from scratch. Conversely, WP Presentations can take a carefully-formatted WP document and dump it to slides with ZERO additional work. If it wasn't planned to ever be a slideshow, do the dump but use Presentations' outline function to fix whatever didn't land where you meant it to. Much easier.

Not that this would make slideshow presentations any less useless for most purposes, but at least they wouldn't waste so much time for the poor sucker who's required to create them.

Re:Quotes from the article

[flacco]

I tried StarOffice 5.x for Win32... and, well, if it were the ONLY alternative to M$Office, I'd gladly embrace WinWord and Powerpoint. StarOffice was *that* annoying and inadequate. Its word processor reminds me of nothing so much as a bad miscegenation of Wordstar 5.x and DOSWord6. And it's SLOW!! (Nothing else ran that poorly on that machine, including OfficeXP.) I gather SO 6.0 is somewhat better, but I doubt that the basic design has changed all that much.

And that's where you would be incredibly, horribly wrong. 6.0 is *lightyears* ahead of 5.2. If I didn't know they came from the same lineage I would *never* guess they were related.

Just try the OpenOffice 1.1beta (keeping in mind of course that it's still beta).

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

Yeah, Moz is awful as a resource hog .. if used as a local file browser on Win32, it leaks something desperate, too. I use it mainly for sites that require js or flash (it seems to do quite well at rendering flash), but it would make me crazy to have to use it every day -- everything takes too long to cook. (Not quite as bad as IE, but close.) I primarily use old NS3.04 by *choice*, hence am used to FAST rendering even on my older machines. (I like Konq for the same reason -- ain't much to it featurewise, but it sure does its work fast.)

I tried SO5.2 (I think that's the subversion) on a P3-500/768mb RAM, fast new HD, and being it's the "try anything once" box, infected with WinME (but beaten into submission :) Loading wasn't exactly nimble, but worse, every operation felt like I was working on a 2MHz XT. I have some 3D apps, Photoshop, and suchlike on that same machine and even those hogs run way faster than SO5.x did. Considering how little there is to the formatting of a SO word processing document, hell if I know how they managed to make it that inefficient.

Re:Quotes from the article

[flacco]

It may be a competitor, but it ain't a better product. It's got a way to go before it challenges either the raw power or the ease of use of the Microsoft suite. For geeks who are happy to play with new toys, it's great, and maybe in the future it will be great for Joe Average as well, but enough with the kidding ourselves, OK? It isn't there yet.

No one's kidding themselves. You leave out a very important market segment between "geek" and "Joe Average" - "Bob Office Worker". OpenOffice provides everything that a significant percentage of office workers need to get their job done.

Now, some of them may whine because they're used to their Joe Average PC at home with Word on it. But management pays the bills and deals with the licensing and the macro viruses and the proprietary file formats, not Bob Office Worker.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

Well, that's good to hear... someone sent me OO6 on a CD a while back, so maybe I'll take a look, given these testamonials from other folk who agree with my assessment of SO5.x :)

When I need a GUI word processor, I'm normally using it either for font abuse or as a page layout program, so if it lacks precise layout features, it won't work for me. (Yet another reason why I use WP, not Word. Word is quite braindead in that area, whereas WP has nearly all the features of a real page layout program, without the steep learning curve.) -- I do my basic documents in WP5.1 for DOS. What's a GUI, daddy? :)

Re:Quotes from the article

[eLoco]

I haven't seen any open source project currently in development that's even close to Visual Studio.

You might want to have a look at Eclipse.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

"...would never guess they were related" has GOT to be progress. :)

I guess it's a good review for later versions that no one defended my scathing evaluation of SO5.2 :)

Re:Quotes from the article

[KindAloysiusX]

I've found that Visual Studio .NET and Source Safe and nearly every other MS "product" I try is the most ridiculously bloated and cumbersome tool imaginable. SourceSafe aside, can you give specific examples of what irks you about VS.NET?
I actually work on the Visual Studio team, and I am VERY interested in specific gripes and suggestions for improvement. Can you let me know what you most like and dislike?

Re:Quotes from the article

[Gabey]

Gee, what are those little icons in my system notifications area?

Oh yeah, it's the quickstarters for Mozilla and OpenOffice.

Yes, and you CHOSE to put them there. You don't get a choice with IE/Office...

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

...because good chunks of IE and Office's presentation layer are loaded at system startup. IE is just a wrapper around the MSHTML control, as well as integration with the Explorer shell. You can essentially do your own IE-like application with VB, Access, VBScript, whatever.

Do you think Mozilla uses any of the functionality that IE uses? No? OK.

While some might say this is a great thing about IE, others would correctly point out that this contributes to Windows bloat, makes the entire system more susceptible to IE-based security problems, etc.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

...but Microsoft has played this game for...oh, quite some time.

Why use OS-this, when OS-that can do what you need?
Well, OS-this will do it in the next version (just ask any former Novell admin).

If you have any sense of history, try to find out what was originally promised for a given Microsoft product, vs. what actually gets delivered. Look at "Woody's Office Watch" just for Office 2003.

Oh well.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Fred_A]

The biggest difference between those and the Microsoft equivalents is (1) load time [especially on windows]

I never understood this gripe. From what I've seen (I haven't really used any version since Word 2) the MS stuff starts faster than OOo, but since I'm going to spend hours using the package after I've started it, what do I care that it takes 10 seconds more to load ? I hardly consider that a criteria to base the choice of an office suite on...

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

there is NO reason to buy M$ now. OSS OpenOffice is great NOW. I use OpenOffice almost every day. More on point - it is the *only* word processor/suite I use after migrating from StarOffice. There is NO reason to choose (buy) Word over OpenOffice.

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I also use OpenOffice regularly, on my home PC. I have worked extensively with the word processor and spreadsheet apps, and have given the graphics app a serious try.

And I'm sorry, but I still completely disagree with you about its suitability for businesses. Among the good, and indisputable, reasons to remain with Microsoft Office for now are...

• OpenOffice is not reliable importing or exporting MS Office files. It can be crashed importing very simple MS Word documents, and exporting back to .doc format gets far too confused to be acceptable in a business environment. Guess who's been trying to transfer some documents just this week...
• Microsoft Office is still quite some way ahead on usability. (Did you see my other post in the thread where I cited several specific examples?) For geeks, this doesn't matter so much. In a business environment, where people just don't have the time or inclination to play around and get something right, it's not good enough.
• OpenOffice simply has too many bugs in core features. Mail merge data sources are screwed when you're trying to combine form letters in the word processor with data sets in a spreadsheet. The tools for setting up proper document templates and styles are hit-and-miss in several places. The graphics tool has severe bugs with output quality when printing. These things matter in a business environment.

If OpenOffice works for you and does what you need it to, great, I have no problem with your saying that. But please don't go claiming it's ready for everyday business desktop use when it's so easy to point out things like the above. Potential? Yes, it's going to be fantastic one day. Current use? No way, for most office environments. And the latter is what this thread is about.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Yes, and you CHOSE to put them there. You don't get a choice with IE/Office...

Yes, you do. It's trivial to switch off the Office quick loader. RTFM and quit with the FUD already.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OpenOffice provides everything that a significant percentage of office workers need to get their job done.

I honestly disagree with that, for the reasons I've detailed in another post to this thread. For individual use, it's fine. But it's too unstable dealing with MS Office documents, too buggy in areas commonly used by businesses and too far behind in the usability race. The cost of entry is just too high today for most businesses. Give it a couple of years and I think it will be a very real contender, but not yet.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Saint Stephen]

since I'm going to spend hours using the package

Your antecedent isn't valid for me. It's cheesey, but that's what MS is selling when they talk about the "agile business" -- for knowledge workers. What you say is valid for things like IDEs, but in a document-centric world URLS and docs are the permanent thing, apps should be invisible.

Re:Quotes from the article

[webzombie]

It's got a way to go before it challenges either the raw power or the ease of use of the Microsoft suite.

That may be true but I suggest that about 85% of MS Office users use less then 20% of the suites "powerful" features.

So introducing a feature lean product that focuses on the fundamental features that users actually use on a dialy basis is what I think project like Open Office are or should be striving for.

Re:Quotes from the article

[sgtrock]

The below is NOT meant to be a scientific comparison. These are just my experiences.

Actually, the core engine for OpenOffice (which is the same one used in StarOffice) seems to have been pretty seriously rewritten between 5.2 and 6.0. It is a MUCH nicer Office Productivity Suite now.

I couldn't stand StarOffice 5.2 at all, while OpenOffice has replaced MS Office for me as an OPS. I almost never fire up Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint any more. The only time that I do is for the very rare document that OO can't handle. For me, those tend to be very very old Powerpoints. Everything else I see Just Works.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Reziac]

5.2 could hardly have gotten worse [g]

What really annoyed me, beyond even the slowness, crashes, and disorganization, was the Wordstar style codes display. You can't check your layout if displayed codes are shifting line wraps over (which was what happened). No one has gotten the Reveal Codes concept right yet except WordPerfect.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear v6 is another beast entirely, since between document lock-in and nasty behaviour, I can't recommend M$O to anyone.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Prior Restraint]

SourceSafe aside, can you give specific examples of what irks you about VS.NET? I actually work on the Visual Studio team, and I am VERY interested in specific gripes and suggestions for improvement. Can you let me know what you most like and dislike?

I realize your question wasn't directed at me per se, but as this is a public forum, I'd like to relate a problem, if you don't mind.

Obligatory disclaimer: My only experience with .NET was Beta 2 or so, so this might no longer be a valid complaint.

My employer got a new CIO about a year or so ago, and he's decreed that .NET is the future. My team was asked to create a demo web service using VB.NET as a proof-of-concept.

Everything went fairly smoothly (except we couldn't access views in Oracle), until it was decided to change a Web service's return type.

At some point, we decided that this particular Web service needed to return a string instead of int, and we quickly discovered that the IDE wouldn't allow us to do this. Basically, it wouldn't allow us to delete the existing Web service. Oh, sure, we could remove it from the little list of available services, but when we went to replace it with the one we wanted, we were informed that a Web service with that signature already existed.

Ultimately, we were forced to shut down the IDE, and edit three different files in Notepad in order to change the return type. We restarted VB.NET, and everything went smoothly.

My gripe about all IDEs (not just VS.NET) is that they actively seek to keep the developer in the dark about what's really happening.

Re:Quotes from the article

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So introducing a feature lean product that focuses on the fundamental features that users actually use on a dialy basis is what I think project like Open Office are or should be striving for.

I totally agree that few people use or care about advanced macro facilities, setting up whole document production lines, etc. as supported by MS Office apps. However, mail merge, document templates, maybe some of the group working facilities etc. are important.

The thing is, though, the usability points are mostly in these major features anyway. OpenOffice's styles are great in principle, but broken in several serious ways in practice: you apparently can't use the "inheritance" idea because the UI just isn't there, and I still haven't worked out whether it's possible to assign shortcut keys to styles (rather than reaching for the mouse literally every word sometimes) and whether there's a shortcut to remove all character formatting and revert to the paragraph default. The mail merge has the same sort of problem: big bugs make it very awkward to update a mailing list you're keeping in a spreadsheet, for example. The version I got (1.0.1 as downloaded from their web site) doesn't even have a UK English spelling checker, nor was there any obvious way to get one when I was downloading it. These things are showstoppers for a business that wants to install a standard set-up and have their users ready to go, and the reason I say MS Office still way ahead on usability.

Re:Quotes from the article

[timmfisk]

Just take this argument into two simple arena's: server and desktop. I've worked on NT 4.0 (seems the most stable) for about 5 years now. I got tired of dealing with the licensing issues, so I moved into RHL 8.0... what a life saver. I have had some Unix background, but to get 8.0 running was not that complicated. I dont have to worry about what server has what licenses, update crashes... you know, the headaches that follow MS every where it goes. But, when you consider how easy 98 and 2k ran as a desktop system... they dominate. In the server field, MS imitate's in a market that is best left to tools like WebMin and PHP-Nuke. Why pay for tools that cost a fortune when you can use tried-and-true open source sofware that has such a broad range of immediate support (ie: /. forums).

You answered your own question!

[ArcCoyote]

>Multimedia Multimedia Multimedia. show me ASIO and all the blinking apps for Linux/UNIX.

UNIX?

Mac OS X.

Re:You answered your own question!

[ajole]

Yes, I agree. Although I've never used Macs, it's nice to admire the things that they produce.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Badanov]

I have to concur with the answer.

I have been running a Redhat server at my job for four years this coming up summer, a second one as a backup repository for two years. (I know, but before you jump on me, they worked five computers and a server with NO BACKUPS for close to 20 years before I came home and began computer work with them. Before I showed up they lost three full databases to administrator screw ups) I run two Redhat computers at home, one a personal internet machine. Have gone through several hardware and Redhat OS upgrades, equipment breakdowns at work, but I have never lost data using Linux/Redhat.

I find it difficult to believe that someone would say the Ext2 file system loses data with any credibility. Through screaming and cussing I got my family to agree to a Linux-based backup respository because I found that MS has an extremely poor file system. I found out at one point that MS lost about 90 percent of my backed up data. Not only that, but I found that my Windows computers were using data that should have been deleted, and NOT using data that Windows said was still there.

From that harrowing experience, I routinely check my Linux backups, my log files and other tools/shell scripts I have programmed and they are always correct, always flawless. Using MS for anything other than a desktop for me is just asking for trouble.

Exchange?

[Moridineas]

It seems to me that the one missing link in open source software replacements is some kind of replacement for MS exchange.

I would LOVE to be able to have some kind of solution that could do group calendaring, mail, and shared addressing. As it is now I'm using cyrus imapd, a webmail program, a different LDAP web gateway, and a different web calendaring program. We had used a trial of exchange about 4 years ago, and people still miss the features (even though we didn't stick with exchange due to cost)

Re:Exchange?

[fupeg]

You are absolutely right. My company did not want to incur the costs of Exchange, though most of our Windows users (75%, other 25% are Mac users) do use Outlook as their email client. Email is no problem, and group contact management isn't too hard either. But group calendaring is the holy grail. Our upper management uses Yahoo calendaring because they need it. Everybody else uses a hack (auto-publishing calendar items to an active directory.) If there was a good group calendaring program out there, particulary if it worked on OS X as well, we would use it in a heartbeat.

Re:Exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Ximian. They have an Outlook-like client that can actualyl connect to Exchange servers.

Re:Exchange?

[shaitand]

bynari insight server, it costs but is much cheaper than exchange.

Re:Exchange?

[fupeg]

There are a few Exchange clients out ther, but they do not address an enterprises needs. If you already have Exchange, you've already plopped down a load of cash. That's the major expense that at least my company, chose to decline. What is really needed is an alternative to Exchange. At least we need it for group calendaring.

Microsoft is a slow dinosaur

[afantee]

>> In Windows, I right click and select (gasp) EJECT. That's a hell of a lot more understandable than dragging it to the trash.

If you are smart enough to read or ask someone for help, you would know that right click (or trl click for a single button mouse) and EJECT also work on Mac OS X, in addition to pressing F12 or draging the CD to trash. So next time, do your home work before you complain about something new to you.

>> Windows is better than OSX by a long shot!

You must be either stupid or just kidding yourself. The problem with your poor MS victims is that you have wasted you life to fight with and learn the oddities of Windoze so that you have no ability to learn anything new. I bet you would argue that the most intuitive way to shut down Windows is to go through the Start Menu!

How many hours did spend on the Mac? You can't form an objective opinion about anything if you are biased. Millions of Mac users also use PC daily, but they prefer Mac based on real experiences, unlike you.

As a Windows and Unix programmer for over a decade, I can tell you that nothing comes close to Mac OS X - certainly not any version of Windows. From what I read, even Windows Lonhorn (to appear in 2005) can't touch OS X 10.2, and Apple will be at least 3 years ahead of MS when OS X 10.3 is realeased in a few months time.

With the most elegant GUI and a rock solid Mach / BSD UNIX foundation plus the best and free programming environment (Cocoa, Carbon, Java, Objective C / C++, etc), Apple is moving much faster than MS can with its insecure, unstable and over bloated Windows codebase, which is why OS X has been regularly updated with performance and new features while MS has been busy with weekly security patches and unable to upgrade Windows XP till 2005.

Re:Microsoft is a slow dinosaur

[jpkunst]

right click (or trl click for a single button mouse) and EJECT also work on Mac OS X, in addition to pressing F12 or draging the CD to trash. So next time, do your home work before you complain about something new to you.

Good points. Also worth mentioning is that when you start dragging a CD in Mac OS X the Trash changes to an "Eject" icon. This whole 'Eject by dragging to the Trash' complaint is no longer valid since OS X.

JP

Re:Microsoft is a slow dinosaur

[belroth]

Also worth mentioning is that when you start dragging a CD in Mac OS X the Trash changes to an "Eject" icon. This whole 'Eject by dragging to the Trash' complaint is no longer valid since OS X.

Of course it is blindingly obvious before you start to drag that the Trash will change to Eject.... </sarcasm>

Having said that it would be nice if pressing the cdrom eject button on a Linux box could be made to (configurable by user)
A: Do Nothing
B: Unmount & Eject
C: Pop up a confirmation box to Unmount & Eject or not
I would set the default to C, but then that should be configurable by the admin as part of the new user skeleton.

Re:Microsoft is a slow dinosaur

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be. I've never had a need for this myself (I prefer all the feedback the umount command gives me), but there have been programs (daemons) written to do it.

Re:Microsoft is a slow dinosaur

[Anonymous Coward]

A: Default
B: Automount or Supermount?
C: Pop-Up on the CLI? Even KDE has the right-click eject option.

Re:Microsoft is a slow dinosaur

[belroth]

It's no problem for me, I was discussing a possible solution for new converts who want to just use a computer and have no desire to learn any more than they have to. Even right-clicking to eject may be too complex for some users, sorry - not 'may be', it 'is' too much for some users.
Yes I have done my share of user support of the 'Your programme doesn't work I haven't got my printout' variety. It's suprising how many coding bugs are fixed by switching on a printer, filling it with paper or (in the old days) checking the protocol converter is working.

Two Way Street

[oaf357]

I am by no means defending Microsoft but a lot of the solutions that were once Unix centric you can find ports to Win32.

But I'm very glad to see that the tables are starting to turn in terms of "Well in Windows we had this..." It's good to see you can now have that in the *nix world too.

Makes pitching Linux a hell of a lot easier too.

MS and the economy

[Idou]

"if everyone dumped MSFT, how far south would the NASDAQ go?"

Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE, which gives you a feeling for what type of company it has become. However, back to the intention of your statement, since the performance of the economy is a function of the costs of capital inputs, the truth is our economy is being HURT by the MS monopoly. Consider it a "software shock" instead of a "oil shock," companies that are forced (by their own ignorance) to use MS software are less competitive because their inputs are more expensive and restricting. MS software inflates pc prices, just like expensive oil inflates all petroleum related products. This results in less consumption and less profitability and overall revenue to non-MS companies.

My company just had 10% layoffs and had we not gone with their new license plan, I am sure many of those people could have still had jobs. This is the reason that anti-trust laws exist. Not to be fair but because monopolies HURT the economy. Unfortunately, a monopoly with enough money not only adversely affects the economy but also the government.

Re:MS and the economy

[smittyoneeach]

Perhaps one should pay more attention to Wall Street. Tomorrow.
Clearly, over time, money given to BeelzeBill is money not spent elsewhere. However, in a land where near-term is the next quarterly statement, and long-term the next election, who can expect courage from the leadership?

Re:MS and the economy

[Thing 1]

Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE, which gives you a feeling for what type of company it has become.

Where did you get that information? I went to nyse.com and did a "Symbol Lookup" for Microsoft, which sent me to this page showing that Microsoft is a NASDAQ company.

So obviously it's not "now traded on the NYSE." Is it going to be?

Re:MS and the economy

[eyegone]

He's probably confused by the fact that Microsoft is now part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which used to be composed of only NYSE issues.

Re:MS and the economy

[Chester K]

Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE

No, it's not. It's part of the DJIA (which is merely an average of a bunch of unrelated stocks), but it's still traded on the NASDAQ market.

Re:MS and the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

But remember Wall Street tends to have a kind of 'What's good for General Motors is good for the economy' attitude to these things - free software is still seen as little people and as such does not elicit much interest

Re:MS and the economy

[mentin]

What is the importance of stock exchange assignment?

Re:MS and the economy

[panaceaa]

Microsoft never switched to NYSE, it's still on Nasdaq. Maybe you're confused because it's the only Dow component listed on Nasdaq.

You're right though, Microsoft has transformed from a growth company to a value company. If it was a growth company they wouldn't have done Software Assurance, and instead focused on gaining new customers and creating new products. As a value company, it may be smart to switch to NYSE. The NYSE is a haven for value companies, which enjoy the lowered volatility and greater depth of market.

Re:MS and the economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick tip: stocks with 4 or more letters in the ticker symbol trade on Nasdaq. If fewer than 4 letters in the ticker symbol, it trades on NYSE or possibly on Amex.

Your analogy is flawed.

[StarKruzr]

Plumbing is a service job. Service is the portion of the OSS software economy that IS charged for.

The OSS software economy model is analogous to giving away the pipes but still charging for labor. If pipes didn't have an intrinsic material cost, this might work. (Bear in mind that software is not a material thing you have to buy "raw materials" for.)

Creating software in the first place takes time, yes, and the labor of a developer, but that labor can be paid for with service charges.

Re:Your analogy is flawed.

[mpe]

Plumbing is a service job. Service is the portion of the OSS software economy that IS charged for.

Proprietary software often attempts to treat software as though it is a manufactured product.

The OSS software economy model is analogous to giving away the pipes but still charging for labor. If pipes didn't have an intrinsic material cost, this might work. (Bear in mind that software is not a material thing you have to buy "raw materials" for.)

If you look at any kind of plumbing invoice you will find that the materials are a tiny amount of the total anyway.

Creating software in the first place takes time, yes, and the labor of a developer, but that labor can be paid for with service charges.

How about each customer pays for the amount of work which needs doing. If that's developing a whole new type of software it's expensive. But presumably the customer considers the money to be worth it. If all that's required is a minor modification to an existing program then less to pay.

What percent are replacing Linux with Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the article says that 25% of CIOs are in the process of switching from Windows to Linux, I think it would be important to know the percentage of switchers from Linux to Windows, or how many have decided that they need a Windows presence in their server farm after all.

Re:What percent are replacing Linux with Windows?

[shaitand]

I'd be suprised to hear of many switching from linux to windows... but deciding they do need a windows presence after all is quite possible, these numbers of course would be worthless without finding out if they reason is because of somewhere they are still locked down by proprietary interaction between microsoft/windows based, applications or because of some real functionality needed.

It has cost my company quite a lot.

[Magnus Pym]

I am currently working for a company that has standardized on Windows 2000 for the desktop. I can tell you that this has significantly cost the company. For a simple reason:

Remote access is impossible.

We have a VPN, but it is unuseable from home. Using VNC remotely from home is too slow an option over anything slower than cable. You can use it to mount disks on your local machine, but you need the full development suite installed on your home PC to get any work done. But most home users do not have Win2000 at home, so the development tools do not install on most developer's home PCs.

The only way to access another machine, even within the company, is via VNC. But the VNC software that they have bought is too slow and crash-prone. Using VNC remotely from home is too slow an option for most users.

If your desktop is too loaded (doing a compile, say), it is impossible to telnet into your absent neighbor's PC and start another compile.

The worst part is, all the tools we use are available for unix. Almost all the developers are familiar with Unix/X. We could have ssh'd to our desktops and got lots of work done from home. Unix/X would have been a natural choice for us. They did not choose it. We are paying for it in terms of missed schedules and lost productivity.

Magnus.

Re:It has cost my company quite a lot.

[Quikah]

Maybe you should try using terminal services instead of VNC.

"+5 Funny"

[Overly Critical Guy]

You're right; that was "+5 Funny."

PROPRIETARY software impoverishes MORE programmers

[Idou]

unless you work for MS, most programming jobs are related to customization and maintenance. With proprietary software, though, there IS no customization (unless you want to be sued) and maintenance is either done by the vendor, at usually a reckless level, and by a MSCE over at the customer side. This results in a net LOSS of programming jobs (though cheap, mindless admin jobs have increased).

For instance, my company was nearly a YEAR into writing financial reports for the company. All the software we were using was proprietary. Suddenly, towards the end of the project, it was discovered that the software could not combine the portrait and landscape types of sheets into one package on the company website. It would have been more cost efficient to pay a programmer 50k JUST to fix this one issue, but since it was proprietary software (and the of course the vendor didn't care), we had to switch proprietary software and start over!

The truth is EVERY software related project should employ a programmer because you never know what the limitations of the already available software will be until you are too deep into the project. The reason that every project DOESN'T employ a programmer is the company doesn't have permission to customize the code, so, in the end, their only option is to change products. So you get companies full of Admins and no programmers.

Proprietary software kills more quality tech jobs and replaces them with mindless, admin jobs.

Wrong

[Idou]

Lots of people get fired because their company can no longer afford to pay their wages AND MS license fees.

10 and 20 years ago, you didn't need Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago, you could have been running OS/2 and Corel on the desktop. Or you could have been a Mac shop. The servers ran Novell or BSD. You could even have had an all-Sun solution.

Twenty years ago, you could have been running DR-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 on the desktop. Or you could have been an Apple 2 shop. The servers ran Unix System 7 or VMS. You could even have had an all-Sun solution.

Microsoft is stronger today than it was in either of those periods.

Re:10 and 20 years ago, you didn't need Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten years ago, you could have been running OS/2 and Corel on the desktop. Or you could have been a Mac shop. The servers ran Novell or BSD. You could even have had an all-Sun solution.
Twenty years ago, you could have been running DR-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 on the desktop. Or you could have been an Apple 2 shop. The servers ran Unix System 7 or VMS. You could even have had an all-Sun solution.

Microsoft is stronger today than it was in either of those periods.


This is very true. Where I work, they migrated most or all their tools to a Microsoft environment from in-house tools. We can deploy a new remote application server relatively quick with a cheap intel server and windows installed.

When there's so much on a developers and analysts' plate, it's often difficult to move to a new platform and justify it's better use in the company.

You'd have to convince management that OSS is better in it's availability, use, security, support and viability. And honestly, some OSS tools don't have convincing arguments that it'll be around the next few years.

Plus, it's much easier to train an admin to a Microsoft tool, than a linux tool. You can joke about it so much, but when an admin has to cover several machines, he'd prefer the easiest and fastests way to answer those problems.

Microsoft also comes with practically everything you need. If you want a webpage, ISS comes with server and major configs are available within a right-mouse click. If you don't like it, you can install apache. But if you got tons of ASP pages, you need a 3rd party software. You'd have to install apache, configure the text file and setup Chilisoft. Oh, now you have designers that only uses Frontpage. You have to find out how to configure Apache and set it up for Frontpage extensions; download the right tools and configure another script.

This wasn't meant to sound like a trolling but this happens. It's the stops and turns like this that scares most management away.

No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't. Really.

This article is faulty.

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

25 percent of how many CIO's are switching to Linux? 4 CIO's? 6 CIO's?

Give me a break.

Dolemite
____________

OS X + Linux will kill Windows

[afantee]

I am surprised that the article didn't even mention OS X.

Apple and the Open Source community should work together to take advantage of their UNIX similarity and fight the common enemy. MS doesn't play well with anyone - it just want dominate the world with its inferior and bug-ridden dirty Windows by flooding the consumers with incompatible technology (just look at Windows Media Player or the MS implementation of Java, JavaScript, XML, C++).

The combination of fast and dirt-cheap Linux servers with sleek and rock solid Mac OS X desktops can really damage the Redmond beast. Linux obviously has made impressive progress in the server space, but those millions of MS trained monkeys can always attack Linux on the usability front, which is why Mac OS X can be a valuable ally - even MS knows that Apple is years ahead with elegant GUI and industrial design.

A lot of alpha geeks have switched to Mac OS X, including Jim Gosling (the Java inventor) and most of his Java team, the entire Perl 6 core team, James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Ant and Apache Tomcat), Tim O'Reailly, Tim Bray (ActiveWin.com founder and co-inventor of XML), at least 4 /. editors, and many more.

Not only Mac software generally better (iLife, iSync, iChat, QuickTime, iTunes Music Store, Keynote, Safari, AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, and so on), Apple also has a bigger software portfolio than MS (incredible but true, considering Apple is primarily a hardware company and 60 times smaller than MS).

For instance, MS has no high-end tools to compete with Apple WebObjects (Java application server), Final Cut Pro (nonlinear video editing), Shake (movie composition), DVD Studio Pro (DVD authoring), Logic (digital audio), QuickTime Streaming Server. Linux could get a huge boost if many of these tools get ported over.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I care what Slashdot has to say about Microsoft with those big Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft Empower ISV Program ads slapped across the top of each page.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[dipipanone]

And I don't try to run DNS, AD, Exhange, SQL and IIS all on the same box with 2000 people connected.

OK, I'll admit that I'm running DNS and a couple of other minor services on a file and print server. (Nothing major. Filemaker server, VPN, IIS. etc. but under very low loads - 30 to 40 people at most.)

But the linux server easily handles the same loads and runs sendmail, pop3, apache, mysql, samba, etc. -- all without a peep.

Identical hardware -- low end Dell servers.

This month's "Linux will dominate Windows" Article

[btakita]

It seems like there has been a steady stream of these articles for a while. At first I believed them. Now it seems more like wishful thinking with every new "Linux will rule the world" article. I also tried OpenOffice and it is not as stable, mature and is way more bloated (Java) than MSOffice. Mozilla is now a great browser with many new features being added. It took a few to get to this point however. So OpenOffice has still has some maturing to do. There is something to be said about easy to use tools. Believe it or not, not everybody wants to think about tweaking, installing software dependencies, configuring, etc. People also like helpful and friendly help files (PHP is a great example). Time is more valuable and costly than software. OS can cost more if it takes much longer to learn and adopt. Don't get me wrong, OSS has its place. However, Microsoft does have some serious momentum in the marketplace especially with .NET. How do I know? Look at the job postings. Lots of .NET jobs even in this "dismal" economy.

why Linux or MS?

[besson3c]

I'd like to know why everytime an alternative to MS is discussed, Linux is always the subject of conversation? Macs are a far more feasible option for a desktop replacement for non-propellorhead types. Sure there are costs associated with migrating to the Mac, but there are costs associated with migrating to any platform. It can be argued that being Macintosh based is less costly than being Windows based. I can see the argument that Linux would be an excellent server replacement, but a lot of these articles and conversations in here seem to revolve around "Linux for everyone". A lot of the arguments against MS include security, viruses, etc. I don't understand why the subject of migrating to Macs isn't explored as often, as the Mac certainly addresses much of the justification of moving away from Windows. I'm not being critical of Linux here, but let's get real: Linux is just not the desktop OS that Mac OS X is!

I hope that you are a competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully, you are. Your costs will be much higher than ours.
Consistency is easy enough in a business by simply saying what you will run. We are moving to redhat from MS. We ould easily standardize on bsd or anything else. We had an assortment of MS systems that were costing up us big on admin and licensing. The IBM rep came at the right time and show numbers to us. (interesting that an HP rep was trying to keep us in MS land).
The support is from IBM. We found cheaper Linux support alternatives, but decided that IBM really is the goto company. If there is any better support company then IBM, I would love to see them (What I thought was funny, was that HP wanted the support contract after coming out strongly for ms. What a conflict of interest that would hae been. As someone who has worked at HP Ft. Collins, I was disgusted by what I saw ).

There is a reason to buy Microsoft products

[Anonymous Coward]

What the other posts I have read seem to have missed is that there is actually a very good reason to buy Microsoft products. That reason is hardware compatibility. Linux is still behind in this area. For example, you cannot plug in a printer (*cough* Canon *cough*) into a computer running Linux and have it work after a quick driver installation. You can do so in Windows. Until Linux catches up in this area, it will not displace Windows.

insightful? - what the fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck is the parent "insightful"? That is the most ludicrous moderation I have seen on /. to date, I do believe. The parent poster asserted that word processors are the only thing Microsoft sells!

Microsoft also sells server software, IIS and MS SQL, both of which have a track record of being costly to maintain, possibly contributing to major financial woes for companies.

I so wish I had mod points right now...

Any Reason To Buy Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's do a little comparison

Win2k/XP
Ease of use: 8
Stability: 8
Price: 3
Hardware Price: 10

MacOSX
Ease of use: 10
Stability: 8
Price: 1
Hardware Price: 1

Linux
Ease of use: 1
Stability: 10
Price: 10
Hardware Price: 10

So your either pay for ease of use(WIN), hardware(MAC) or training (LIN).

Re:Yep buy Microsoft! May go extinct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - and you'll need it! I have had 4 of them die on me in the last 3 years. One at work and three at home. The last was a replacement to one of the previosly dead ones. At this rate, MSmice might go extinct soon.

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[bellings]

You have two servers.

Please tell us what the RedHat server does.

Please tell us what the Windows server does. Also, please tell us what "connectivity" is, because I have absolutely no idea.

And, for the love of jesus christ above, can you give me even one example of the "basic concepts" that your Linux distribution pretty much applies everywhere?

blah..

[krappie]

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Well almost...

[shaitand]

remember most every ms mouse has to be specially configured or hacked to work properly with an alternative OS. My MS intellimouse explorer required setting a special protocol for my x server, hacking the additional buttons and scroll.

Now all 4 buttons and scroll button (as well as scrolling) work fine. but was a pain in the arse.

Re:Well almost...

[croddy]

I have a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical USB and PS/2 Compatible (according to the label underneath). when I booted from the redhat installers (or knoppix, for that matter), it was picked up and automatically configured by the default hardware sweep. the scroll wheel worked immediately, in the installer, as well as in the OS. remember 90% of people use a 2btn or 2btn+Scroll mouse...

Apple has almost all the pieces already...

[phillymjs]

...the question is, will they mix them together and try to whip up an Outlook/Exchange killer? I think so.

They've got iCal, web enabled calendaring. They've got Mail, a pretty decent mail client. And they've got Address Book, pretty decent contact management. These three apps already work together fairly well.

It probably wouldn't take much to bolt "on-steroids" versions of these three apps (and hell, maybe even iChat) together into a way cool facsimilie of Outlook. I don't know how hard it would be for them to make a version that would interoperate with Exchange servers in a Windows-centric company, but they could quite easily sew up the all-Mac shops.

For the server end of things, they'd probably have just as easy a time whipping something up-- people are already making faux-.Mac servers with what's built into OS X, so the capabilities are there.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all that if Apple were already working on this, given their recent shots across the Bill's bow with Keynote and Safari, and the fact the the Mac is still getting short shrift from Microsoft (STILL no OS X-native Exchange client, Goddammit). Apple, IMHO, is quietly working hard toward a day in the fairly near future when they can publicly tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves, or worse.

~Philly

In United States...

[etcpasswd]

Microsoft buys everyone, I thought.

Different Tool for Different jobs

[spruce]

I wouldn't advocate usign Access in a lot of situations, but I used to work for a company that used Access a lot and it can really be a quick way to develop a system that gets the job done well. With the speed of LAN's today network overhead was never a problem, and you can separate the front end from the data cutting down on traffic.

Having said that I much prefer MS-SQL and Oracle for most systems, but cost is a big factor and sometimes you can't justtify spending several thousand just for a DB.

Re:Different Tool for Different jobs

[JohnFluxx]

>Having said that I much prefer MS-SQL and Oracle for most systems, but cost is a big factor and sometimes you can't justtify spending several thousand just for a DB.

Well mysql can do anything ms access can (database wise).. At least as far as I can think of.

Oops . . .

[Idou]

You're right. I wonder if my post was modded up because of this or in spite of it . . . Either way, I apologize.

Re:Just run Windows! Do it now!

[mormop]

Simple,

If you can make your software so superior that it justifies the cost people will pay for it whatever platform it runs on. Just 'cos you write something to run on Linux doesn't mean it has to be free. Check out the dual personal/educational vs for profit licence at www.dansguardian.org.

Better product than any proprietry filter I've tried so I use it at home. If I put it in the office I'll happily pay and not pirate.

Re:asshat

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of all programmers do not write proprietary commercial software

guess the last 3 jobs i had were an aboration of your statistical continuum. The one before those 3 was a favor to my parents and was in house.

I don't know how the hell it got modded up to +5

Simple he actually states HOW companies will treat us. People who like stable jobs (you know ones where you can plan how you spend your money), like places that ship boxes. Companies will treat programmers as 'shit' if the stuff they work on costs/sells for very little.

If you are freelancing free software is a boone. You can swipe the work of hundreds before you. Tweak it a bit and sell it to your 1 customer.

Like it or hate it most companies, and the people that work on it, see software as product. Something to sell. Support is cost and overhead. That is why when things go wrong you end up talking to someone in india.

Was JUST at Circuit City and Best Buy. They have HUNDREDS of boxed software. All that neato software didnt just magicly code itself up from the good graces of free software. It was done by groups of programers, AND other support people. Oh and they were paid to do it.

Just because in your career you have only seen consulting type work does not mean the other does not exist, or is a small minority. YOU remind me of those dudes at best buy when you ask 'do you have item X'. They look up and down the isle they are in, and go 'hmm we dont seem to sell that so therefore it does not exist period.'

Me Ive mostly worked boxed type software. Course ive shyed away from one off projects because they are short time. I like to be able to plan out my existance at least more than 3 months from now.

XP has corporate versions

[rebelcool]

that do not require the registration process. It's meant for when you install on alot of machines, but works just like any other XP install. Minus the registration.

I call bullshit!

[cscx]

I have a hard time buying this. I just shut down two of my Windows 2000 boxes for summer break. They have been up for 85 1/2 days... that's 99.999% uptime. I haven't rebooted nor shut them down since I built them.

They do Windows Media stuff. They've transfered terabytes of data in this time. I've never had a single problem with the machine. In fact they've sat headless for all this time.

I had an entertaining conversation with a Linux-freak last night. I told him about my uptime and in a typical lofty voice I heard, "You must be running Linux, right?"

Well he almost had a heart attack when I told him that it was Windows 2000. Typical.

In your case, I see that you've provided no concrete data yet are modded up to +5. Typical Slashdot crap. Although I'll have to complement you on your troll, nice work.

Re:I call bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I'll have to complement you on your troll

One good troll deserves another?

games of course

[sexninja]

like it or not, windows IS the best platform for computer games at the moment

Re:Microsoft = more licensing cost AND Linux = coo

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I work at a large school. We have had NT boxes set up as authentication and file servers for years and years now. No problems to speak of. None. If you have a little bit of common sense and know how to admin them then for simple tasks NT works great. Which is not to say that free Linux or FreeBSD wouldn't be a better solution. I just think that you should concentrate on the strength of OSS rather than inventing false claims about microsoft software which just makes you look like a zealot who doesn't know what he/she is talking about.

A competant windows admin can make windows do just about anything that linux can do and vice versa. The big difference is in cost and that is where you should argue, not with crap arguments about windows BSODing all the time as anyone who uses windowsNT/2K/XP (and knows what they're doing) will see through your bullshit FUD and just dismiss both you and OSS outright.

Amazing that the question is being asked

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has diligently worked for the last decade to make this question irrelevant. Any choice was quickly destroyed.

Now, people are asking the question. The answer isn't a clear yes or no, because each situation is different.

But the question is being asked.

There is a growing body of users for alternatives.

Amazing.

Derek

Re:MOD UP!

[Billly Gates]

I am supprised people actually believe that .net is open. Its as closed as visualC++. Yes vc++ does minimally support ansic++ but how much win32/mfc code can be ported to the mac or unix platforms?

WHat I do not understand is why is Sun giving away java 1.5? There hardware bussiness is losing money. They are promoting sunONE for the reason of gaining lost revenue from software/services. Java is their second biggest assest behind their sparc servers.

They need to open java and license java technologies to software providers. If I were Scott McNealy I would pressure AOL and Mozilla to include jdk's and not just runtimes with their browsers. They need more java enabled web applets. Servlets are already covered.

But you don't have to train them to switch!

[bluGill]

I'm getting tired of the training argument. The fact is you don't have to train msot users to switch them. KDE (and I presume Gnome, but I don't use it) works close enough to windows that nobody will notice. Setup your default install with KDE configured to act like windows, replace all the applications with K equivelents and many will not notice.

My parents have macs, windows and linux installed at home. My mom knows nothing about computers yet manages to use whichever is free to play solitary. Sure they look a little different, but in the end all she cares is that she can find the icon.

Actually I'll grant you that linux isn't quite ready, but only because Project isn't cloned enough for management use yet. Kword is plenty good for all but a few users. I'll go so far to make the argument that if Kword isn't good enough for a user that the document should be send to a layout group with artists trained to put the document into the corporate form anyway.

Re:But you don't have to train them to switch!

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

You may not have a problem switching to KDE, but most users will. I know many people that tried to "rewind" DVDs when they first came out. Lots of people also run worm viruses because they
"come from their friends". The fact is that most users see computers on a different level than the typical Slashdot reader. Those are the people that would panic if suddenly their File menu wasn't there or if some function wasn't in the same spot.

Re:But you don't have to train them to switch!

[bluGill]

But my point wasn't about me, it was about others in my hosuehold who are not computer litterate. My Mom can switch back and forth no problem. So does my sister. These are real cases of people not interested in computers who use them once in a while and have no problems with KDE.

Mind you semi-advanced users might need it, that is a secratary who types all day and uses the features of Word often might need help finding them in the new program. The manager who types up a report and then sends it off to someone else to format won't need any help.

20% overhead is nontrivial

[coyote-san]

If you read some of the first-hand reports discussing why they switched from Microsoft to Linux, you'll see that many are reporting that internal audits were shoing that they were spending a full 20% of their time redoing work lost when the systems crashed, repairing files corrupted in those crashses, removing viruses and other malware, etc.

That's one full day/week for every employee.

That's a full person, in a small department of 1 boss and 4 workers.

That is a huge hit, and it can be enough to make the difference between a company that survives rough times and one that goes under.

Maybe Office has more bells & whistles than some of the other tools out there, but how often do you really need them? Especially if they come with such a steep cost?

Cardboard picket sign slogan in the making?

[Anonymous Coward]

My company just had 10% layoffs and had we not gone with their new license plan, I am sure many of those people could have still had jobs.

"Microsoft stole my job!"

Sure... it was the platform.

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course! Microsoft caused the bubble! Pets.com went under because of money they spent trying to improve their website. It certainly wasn't because of their advertising expenditures! Netscape also failed. If only they hadn't used microsft!! When will they every learn. When will they ever learn. I don't have a girlfriend anymore, but I suspect that was somehow microsoft's fault. If only I was a sexy linux guru! Then I would get all the chicks.

Re:Movement to server centric computing is MS thre

[Daengbo]

I am trying to finish a government program for thin clients in public schools. We are lucky that the whole internet / administrative backend has been handled by Linux for a while. The migration should be less painful that way.

Why Jump from one proprietary ship to another?

[g_bit]

The Mac is even more proprietary than Windows, since it requires proprietary hardware. People (and businesses especially) like choice. This is because the fact that there exists a choice means that there is competition, which means that prices are not fixed. OTOH, pricing for Apple hardware is fixed.

In the WinTel world, only the Windows software prices are fixed but the hardware as we've seen in recent years is dropped in price due to all the competition. Besides that, for big operations, PPC chips couldn't hold a candle to some of the multi-processor configurations of x86 cpu. I know you can do dual proc w/ PPC, but you can do up to 8-way with x86 and PPC was late to the game with it anyway.

One last thing until recently there was nothing easy like VB (and all it's 3rd party components and tools) to develop apps for the Mac. Now there is RealBasic, but you still don't have a 5 billion dollar/year component industry catering to RealBasic developers.

I can tell you first hand that business owners want stuff yesterday and there's nothing like VB on any other platform to satisfy those needs. (Python my a$$, where are all the components??) It's all about ease of use *and* availability of solutions. The article says more solutions for Linux are now available, but the water's still a little murky. For me and my biz, we'll stick with Windows (for now).

Ads?

[g_bit]

You mean you don't point images.slashdot.org to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file?

Samsung Contact (though not open)

[autechre]

Samsung Contact, formerly an HP product under a different name, is an Exchange replacement for at least Linux (and possibly other *nix platforms). I hear it's quite good. I haven't used it personally, but I can say that they're very good about keeping their freshmeat record up to date, and leaving tons of comments to let users know what's happening. :)

Not relevant to this article

[autechre]

This article is not about plugging your $100 printer into your $500 PC. It's about businesses, and it would be silly for them to use such equipment. Even with small businesses, it makes far more sense to have at least a network printer (like HP's 4000N or whatever newer model has replaced it), and probably a print/file server as well. There is more than enough hardware compatibility for such things.

buy microsoft?

[portscan]

What is this company Any Reason and where did they get the capital to buy Microsoft? Wow...looks like this new software giant came out of nowhere

One word for the GNU bashers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wah!

Consistancy.

[mrmeval]

We need a consistant integrated development environment with a method to install distributed packages as painlessly as possible.

We really need some more handholding companies, RedHat and SuSE are out front for now.

Re:Windows 2000 Server vs SAMBA -licensing per cli

[Man Eating Duck]

Many organizationss have Win2K clients that log into a Domain provided by a Linux box running SAMBA

As my final project of CS education, I have just set up a network for a small Medical Doctor's office. It involves a Linux server, and Win2k desktop machines (due to proprietary medical software). It's not connected to the Internet due to Government security regulations for sensitive information.

The Linux server works as a domain controller with roaming profiles just as the parent describes, and performs wonderfully. Having a little experience with Linux, but practically no experience setting up real-world production servers, it took us (two students) about 24 hours of work to install the OS, configure samba shares/printers/PDC stuff, internal email server (Qmail sure beats sendmail in terms of ease-of-configuration), DHCP, backup routines, etc etc.

What really amazed me in the end was that the MDs, being impressed by the fact that Linux was free of charge and still performed A LOT better than their old NT server OS in terms of reliability and speed, wanted Linux for their separate web-connected network. After having used Linux for Office, web and mail-applications for about a month, they've started to complain about not being able to run their medical software on Linux...

Re:Windows 2000 Server vs SAMBA -licensing per cli

[ashitaka]

Is the medical software Windows-based?

What about Wine?

Re:Windows 2000 Server vs SAMBA -licensing per cli

[Man Eating Duck]

A good point, which we discussed. Sadly, the problem is that some of the various pieces of software is 16-bit, and it's a pain to get it to run, even in Windows. One old Foxpro-application actually required the resolution to be exactly 800x600, 16 bpp (talk about those 18" LCDs going to waste...). Otherwise, it refused to launch. Screensaver starting? Crash and burn. Alt-tabbing out? Ditto. It even crashed due to Large fonts being selected. And of course, it was barely able to read its own database files. Talk about lock-in :(

Oh, to just have a suite of good, up to date medical software, running on top of mySQL, that ported to different platforms. I'm sure there is a fortune to be made.

Standard protocols and data formats

[Anonymous Coward]

Sales team that demand clients use MS products in the specifications rather than focusing on the protocols and formats needed to get the job done is the biggest reason that MS is still in some corporate enviroments is that the .

When they say...

[pacman on prozac]

...microsoft counterstrike.....

they sum up my only reason left to use their products :-)

Whine

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell did this guys *whine* get modded up to a 5?

Because it makes a good distraction from Microsoft's latest gaff, which may cost the company

Re:PROPRIETARY software impoverishes MORE programm

[mpe]

unless you work for MS, most programming jobs are related to customization and maintenance. With proprietary software, though, there IS no customization (unless you want to be sued)

Even leaving aside that aspect this would be a hard task since the first thing a programmer would have to do is reverse engineer the existing system.

For instance, my company was nearly a YEAR into writing financial reports for the company. All the software we were using was proprietary. Suddenly, towards the end of the project, it was discovered that the software could not combine the portrait and landscape types of sheets into one package on the company website. It would have been more cost efficient to pay a programmer 50k JUST to fix this one issue, but since it was proprietary software (and the of course the vendor didn't care), we had to switch proprietary software and start over!

Possibly the most important thing here is that it would have been worth your while to spend a substantial sum of money for a single change in a piece of software. Where that software was simply a tool, which was broken in a possibly minor way, but which resulted in expensive consequences.

The truth is EVERY software related project should employ a programmer because you never know what the limitations of the already available software will be until you are too deep into the project.

That limitation may well never have been relevent before even if it has been an issue in the past it may only have been a minor issue. Whereas at that time it could be an issue of losing lots of money, losing a lead on a competitor, etc.
There is a question of if you need to employ a programmer or to have the ability to call one in at short notice if needed. But, assuming you have the ability to alter the code, this is the kind of decision which can be made on a case by case basis.

HI can name a few reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Ease of use
Compatability, both hardware and software
More support available from the users and the Manufacturers

Well 2's a few isnt it?

oh yes and its also cheaper than the next best alternative MAC OSX because i would have to buy a mac to run it which costs more than a pc

Linux and BSD at the moment are just not viable desktop replacements, now if they ported MAC OSX to pc i would dual boot

Re:Exchange?Can you use Lotus Notes?

[fish_in_the_c]

I'm not well versed in this area. I'm software engineer(read not working for IS) by trade. However one of the companies I worked at used Lotus Notes to do all the things you are talking about. I'm pretty sure it works under Linux. It isn't of coarse Open source, but I remember it being much better then MS stuff I have to use at work now from a user perspective. ( Some of that may have been very competent admins though.)

Re:Really? Check this (plz don't mod down)

[Anonymous Coward]

With regard to the learning curve, I found that it was slightly more difficult at the beginning for Linux, but once I'd grasped the basic concepts, they pretty well applied everywhere. This isn't true for Windows 2000.


This is the key point.

Linux has a huge learning curve... not a lot of people are willing to risk it, especially with today's economy. Windows does not have a huge learning curve.

In a scale, as the learning curve of linux slowly decreases; taking course, practicing, understanding how things work, the stabilty and administrating uses increases.

In windows, as time goes on, the stabilty and administrating uses decreases and the learning curve increases.

A windows box becomes increasingly more complicated once it starts evolving. Programs will crash, connectivity drops, and stabilty becomes an issue. That's when you have to crack open some books, do some registry editing and whatnot... the real work under the hood in windows.

With linux, whipping up something simple is too time comsuming and often seen as, 'not worth the time'. But as that linux box evolves, you don't face the same issues as you would on a windows box.

Really, it becomes a matter of, 'what works right out of the box'. That's what most management remember. Hardest part is the first time, when you have no clue what's going on.

Reading and knowing where to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what's keeping linux from hitting new users. I'm not joking! How many times did you redirect someone to RTFM or go to the developer's website.

Either people don't read or they're not knowledgable how to fix a problem.

I know when I was a fresh newb, I didn't want to hear, RTFM, I just wanted it to work. Friends would help me out, and I'd forget again. But once I finally started to look for the answers on my own. I'd remember it.

Visual Studio .NET issues

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I actually work on the Visual Studio team, and I am VERY interested in specific gripes and suggestions for improvement. Can you let me know what you most like and dislike?

Obviously I don't know who you are, but I have no reason not to take you at your word, so here goes. For background, I have been the "guinea pig" for a move to VS.NET at two different offices within the past two years, in different fields but both in software development with around 30-40 developers, pretty much all using VS. I don't hold the purse strings, but I get asked for an opinion by those who do. Our main interest is in C++ and supporting tools. We don't much need the GUI stuff and wizardry (sometimes, but not often). We really couldn't care less about .NET.

OK, so first, to give credit where it's due, some good points.

• Standards compliance is much better in recent versions of VC++.
• I introduced my new office to AUTOEXP.DAT and it caught on real fast. It's way more valuable to us than almost every bullet point on the average marketing feature list for the VS debugger.
• Little-seeming things like those line numbers you can now display at the left of an editing window sometimes really help.

And now, in the hope that this will make a small difference somewhere, my pet gripes -- me and half the Windows development world, I'm guessing. :-)

• You took away the old browse toolbar in VS.NET. You replaced it with something so cumbersome and underpowered that I can't even remember what you call it. Please bring it back, or provide something even better.
• You have tabs now (good) but WndTabs doesn't work (very, very bad). I assume you're all very familiar with the latter tool; if not, it's homepage is here. It's better than yours by a long way. Don't just give Oz a freebie copy of VS.NET to develop with, contract him to write the support right into VS, or get one of your own teams to do it. Whatever you have to pay to get it done is going to be worth it.
• In the solution browser in VS.NET, the tree now seems to home in on the file you've currently got open. That's irritating at best. The fact that the project properties option (where things like command line parameters for a debug run are set) disappears from the main menu as well unless the project is highlighted in the browser is just downright infuriating.

None of these things is rocket science on a project like Visual Studio, and two of them (first and third) were there and worked fine in VS6 and have been broken for no apparent reason since. I promise you quite honestly that these issues are directly costing you thousands of pounds in lost sales in the UK at my offices alone, because when people hear about them while asking me whether to upgrade, they are losing interest and sticking with VS6.

I'd be quite happy to elaborate on these points and/or provide further ones if you want. I don't know how much one man's opinion means to you, but certainly your main marketing is telling me all the wrong things at the moment. :-( So, I'm guessing it's in both of our interests for you to know what I think. Here probably isn't the right place, though, so post some sort of contact e-mail address if you like and I'll get in touch.

MSFT is a Utility Company Stock

[4of12]

Microsoft has transformed from a growth company to a value company.

I'd argue that the position of MSFT is rather more like a utility company, just like electric, phone and water.

It enjoys a similar monopoly in its marketplace.

People using their products pretty much have to have Windows and Office at any price; there is almost as little resilience in the price/demand curve as there is for electricity from your local utility. If my electric company raised the rates from US$0.09/kWh to US$0.18/kWh, I'd still continue my service and pay up (although I'd look harder at every little appliance for potential energy savings.)

Finally, Bill has always set a stable growth plan which is turning into a stable dividend plan now that growth is finally capped due to market saturation.

Re:Windows 2000 Server vs SAMBA -licensing per cli

[grolschie]

Sounds like new medical software is just what the doctor ordered.

MS is still no enterprise desktop competition.

[brlewis]

MIT's Athena is used by nearly the entire community of 30,000 students, faculty and staff. The 9,000 students make almost daily use of it. It consists mostly of Solaris and Linux desktops. MIT spent much of the 1990s waiting for NT's capabilities to catch up to the hype. Finally, in the past couple of years, they've been able to make Windows desktops be part of the system. However, these are much more costly to maintain than the POSIX2-based boxes.

In short, your point is demonstrably wrong.

It's one integrated system. If you surpise me by actually giving an example of a company with 20,000 Windows desktops, I'll bet they're separated into a large number of islands of control ("domains"), and not one big system like Athena. MSFT just can't make systems scale like that.