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Alternative To Windows Desktops
Eric_Z writes "Ace's Hardware has got a article called "The Mad Hatter meets the MSCE" by Paul Murphy, about the TCO benefits of using UNIX(Lintel) instead of Wintel. According to the piece: 'The subject of this article looks at alternatives to the Windows desktop, which is a hot topic these days with IBM/SuSe scoring a highly public win in Munich with desktop Linux, and Sun aiming to build on StarOffice being the leading alternative to Microsoft Office with a software stack code-named Mad Hatter which Sun also plans to use extensively in-house. But companies depending on Microsoft Certified Engineers to adapt to Linux will carry over a number of problems, significantly increasing the chance of project failure. Paul considers the alternatives, the migration problems, and in seeking a more reliable alternative takes the opportunity to look at the business desktop from an entirely different angle, and propose a more radical solution.'"
I fail to see the necessity to produce hundreds of windows-clone distros - isn't it win that we want to draw people away from? Look at it through the eyes of the average user:
It looks and functions like windows. I already have windows. Therefore, I'm sticking with the superior(?) windows
What we need to do is be developing newer, fresher ideas which keep microsoft on their toes - if we do that then at least MS has to keep coming up with the goods. My point is that a line of copies doesn't work - the average user doesn't care about the inside workings - they want results. I'll take the handheld game market as an example - How many gameboy clones have we seen come and disappear, doomed to sit in the back pages of children's catalogs? What we need as I have said too many times in this post is something new. There is more than one way to do it and until OSs capitalises on that and jumps into that niche, there is little hope of removing MS's stranglehold on the market.
I am glad to see more code and support for GNOME, that said Sun still is a hardware company and Intel boxes are not their bread and butter. I see this product as a wedge for Solaris, not a true linux push. Even then, I don't see much here you can't get from RedHat's bluecurve additions on top of GNOME...actually I see very little on top of the stock GNOME itself (which says a lot about the high quality of the stock GNOME).
Gimme SAP Business warehouse under Linux and I give you 1000 users in my company alone.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Main thing that bothers me about this article is how obviously slanted it is, without really going into what's important. I mean, I see all of these statements about how things that are true in the Microsoft environment are not true in the Linux environment (or at least, aren't best practice). So, the missing information is this - if the design is flawed, and the solutions are wrong for the problem, then what are the solutions (at least give us a hint) to these problems in oh-so-perfect, everything-else-sucks Linux? Okay, so maybe I'm feeling a little annoyed, but if I'm supposed to be developing/supporting solutions in multiple platforms, perhaps some lucid discussion of the issues and their solutions would be useful? Certainly this article pretends to be hitting these things, but it fails to execute. I'd love to see some links that try to hit these issues in a more complete manner. Anyone?
At least you tried. WINE is not a panacea and any apps written in VB rather than WinAPI/MFC are notoriously tough to get working on WINE. After all, you've got an interpreter running on an interpreter in those situations so it's twice as tricky. You're best bet would be Win4Lin terminal server instead of WINE and simply serve the GUIs out to the clients. I had a similar situation where I had to get a 16-bit VB 3.0 app working and WINE consistently choked on it (not surprising since nobody is working on the 16-bit emulation anymore). Anyhow, Win4Lin (not terminal server though) was the cheapest / easiest solution since they already had WinME licenses and they've been humming along for almost a year that way.
For anybody else reading this, VB apps are an absolute terror to get working under WINE. If you're considering a Linux migration, be weary of these particular apps and have a backup plan.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
14 million active consumers use Mac instead of windows as their main alternative.
7 million use os 9.2.2 or older and about 6.8 million normally boot into osx.
True, there are forty times as many os9 apps as osx but the ratio is slowly changing, and hundreds of professional (>600 dollar) packages exist on mac osx now.
basically all the old SGI adn sun stuff emigrated to bsd-based mac osx.
osx is not as secure as os9, or as fast for small IO, or as quick booting, or as easy on powerbook batteries.... but it shines in parallel computation and most large desktop macs sold have more than one processor.
plus the worlds fastest computer for under 15,000 dollars only costs 2,999 and is from apple and is the dual g5 with pci-x slots and 8 gig of ram maximum.
Personally, I know quite a few. A good portion of the MCSEs that I know are quite skilled in *nix. I think it is funny how narrow minded some of the people are here on slashdot.
Taking a couple of tests because:
a) they were free.
b) they net you a couple more bucks an hour.
c) gasp! you want to know a little more about a product that you have to work with every day.
doesn't make you a dumbass.
One of the major benefits of *nix mentioned in the article was the centralization of processing, and how that can decrease hardware churn.
It's true, but by itself, it leaves a lot of wasted resources by having P3s and P4s acting like dumb terminals. If I'd just shelled out for new machines, I wouldn't like having to shell out for grunty servers to supplant the grunty desktops I'd just bought.
But the ability to have the whole network act as a Mosix cluster takes this and flips it on its head, allowing maximum leverage of all the hardware resources that the organization already has. Aside from the real-world benefits, pitching that would make a purchaser feel clever, not stupid. It ought to have had a mention.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Of course media codecs aren't installed in RH9. Not even MP3.
/var/www/cgi-bin I added an executable
/usr/local/bin/lame -S --mp3input -q 7 -b 64 "$PATH_TRANSLATED" -
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file added:
/cgi-bin/nph-mp3recode
If *you* are the "IT person" (geek) who is responsible for maintaining the systems, then you need to install the standard pieces that make it work. Otherwise, use Microsoft Windows.
WIN2K doesn't come with needed codecs either. It can't play DVDs "out of the box".
As to a "user friendly" desktop. That's your job. Really.
Can't play MP3 files from a Samba share? Works for me... as does playing re-coded MP3s via Apache at work from my home server.
Now, on to the tools that are "missing" from RH9, that you probably want to download and install:
ddclient.tar.gz - Update your dynamic IP with dyndns.org. Installs as a standard RH9 service
gotmail_0.7.10.tar.gz - Fetch all hotmail and transfer to your local mail service.
install_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz - Add flash to mozilla.
j2re-1_4_1_04-linux-i586-rpm.bin - Add Java to mozilla.
lame-3.93.1.tar.gz - MP3 encoding or recoding.
mpg123-pre0.59s.tar.gz - MP3 command line playback
xmms-mpg123-1.2.7-13.i386.rpm - Add MP3 format to xmms player.
wine-0.20030709-1.i386.rpm - Allow some windows executables (I use this to run MS MSVC6 for cross-builds).
XINE: (RealPlayer9-9.0.7.151-4.i386.rpm w32codec-0.52-1.i386.rpm xine-mozilla-plugin-0.2-030528.i586.rpm libdvdcss-1.2.6-2.network.i386.rpm xine-ui-0.9.21cvs-030528.i586.rpm libxine1-1_cvs-030528.i586.rpm)
XINE video and DVD player (you may want to skip the mozilla plugin).
And that should do it! Not all of these install cleanly, but they all do work.
Now for the bonus section. I have a cable modem, and want to listen to my tunes at work. I decided on a simple web-based "click on the song to listen" approach (at least initially). The problem is that my cable modem only does 128Kbps uplink, and most of my collection is stored at a higher bit rate. I don't want to completely download the music first. So, I decided to recode the MP3 on the server first (to 64Kbps -- and yes, I use cheap headphones at the office):
In
nph-mp3recode:
#!/usr/bin/sh
echo "HTTP/1.0 200 Document follows"
echo "Content-type: audio/mpeg"
echo ""
In my
Action audio/mpeg
to one of my virtual hosts.
Now, restart Apache (service httpd restart),
and any "mp3" files will be recoded to 64Kbps.
How to do this with Win2K? Damned if I know. Maybe you can give me a bit of guidance. Would it simply be 7 lines of text-based scripting, and a commonly available command line program? Hopefully, something even simpler (although, I must admit, I have a hard time envisioning that -- but I could be wrong!).
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
The problem with large scale adoption of Linux on the desktop is the applications that don't run or don't run easily on Linux.
Anyone who went through Y2k upgrades of desktops realizes that 20% of the appications (all of the odd balls) were 80% of the work. Upgrading Office, email, etc was the easy part.
There is a large cost involved in this migration. Even if you can replace 80% of the applications that everyone uses with a Linux alternative, you still aren't even close to being finished.
Running these applications under Wine or an emulator isn't going to work. The cost of supporting that alone would wipe out any saving from going to Linux.
I would like to see it happen as much as anyone else but I think that many people underestimate what it would really take to do it. There is still a very long way to go.
I can verify that the MCSE community is about 50% losers who I would not trust to tie their own shoe, and about 50% who know what they are doing on SOME if not MOST computing environments. Those are the ones who DONT just do Windows, but are versed in UNIX, Mac and other systems, and are prepared to deal with differences. I would suggest that any company that hires an MCSE who knows no other platform, is a very dumb company.
That's right. Because an el cheap-o quickie cert is no substitute for actually knowing something about computers It's certainly no substitute for a CS degree and 20 years development and admin experience on other platforms. Experience on a variety of platforms is actually the only guarantee you have that the person has any idea what's going on when taken out of their little point-and-click dumbed-down MCSE world.
I just had to laugh when this one MCSE was running around to my management telling them that my Linux box was "insecure" because it didn't have a virus checker. In actual fact, I'd put a virus checker on it that was 10 times faster than his, just to whipe his arse when his complaints got loud enough. I was also running a full-blown IDS, proxy and firewall on the Linux box.
When the "meeting" came, where I was supposed to be on the defensive about my "insecure" Linux box box, I told him how I'd tested the security on his "corporate level IT", described the measures I'd taken on the Linux box, and told him if he could show me a text file on my hard drive saying "MCSE WAS HERE" (like I'd left a note on his saying "TUX WAS HERE", and showed it to him in front of the very management he was bitching to about my "insecure" box), then I'd agree with him that his systems were more secure than mine. Never happened. The little toad. He went out and spent 30 grand on a turnkey firewall box after that, and had to get someone else in to set it up. And it was still crackable because it was so badly configured. Helped that I knew the guy that had designed it. BSD-based box. Nice little unit. Utterly useless in the wrong hands.
You know if these stupid, arrogant little MCSE toads weren't running around trying to play politics while not knowing even the fundamentals of their fields, it would be easier to help them get on with learning what Linux is about. They must get some sort of Ballmeresque Monkey-Dance Pep Talk about how it's in their best interest to play politics to try to ensure Micorsoft lock-down in their company or something. Monoculture.
I suspect little dramas like this are being played out all across the world, and the details of this particular story (mine, or the MadHatter's) are not particularly important.
What is important is the point that a quickie cert on which buttons to push is no substitute for actually understanding how things work, by the experience of having built things yourself , noticed the commonalities between systems (and the differences amongst them) when going from MVS to VM/CMS to Wylbur to TECO to TOPS to UCSD Pascal to VMS to BSD to SysII to HP/UX to SysV to Irix to SunOS to Solaris to NT to DOS to WinXX to RedHat to SuSE...in addition to a formal education.
The difference between an MCSE with 5 years of "experience" pushing buttons, and an MSCS with 20 years of experience in devlopment and systems planning and admin is like the difference between the machine-operator and the engineer. Why aren't the engineering societies demanding that the "E" in MCSE be changed to "O" -- for OPERATOR. (Support Engineer? What is that, somebody who designs sports bras and jock straps?) Because that's all they really are, is computer operators, NOT Engineers -- unless they have a whole lot of other training and experience, as you point out.
An MCSE is like someone who struggled through a high-school equivalency and then barely got an SAT score that qualified them for college by "studying the exam" vs someone
Mixing letters around but mostly conserving the "shape" of the word, as the "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy" quote does, highlights this perceptual capability. Our brains allows this paragraph to be read at normal (at least without significant impairment) rate without reading comprehension being broken by the fact that most of those words are no longer spelled correctly.
Human perception fills in a lot of blanks for us in vision, as well. Basically, our brains cut corners in the interests of speed. There are blind spots, such as where the optic nerve leaves the eye, that our vision fills in for us.
As for dyslexia, the paragraph above probably looks like what every written passage looks to a dyslexic. I suspect that dyslexia involves the brain mangling the shape of words by reordering letters at the outset of beginning to learn to read, so they never really learn to read by shape. I could be way off hear, I'm very out of date as far as dyslexia research.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'