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mS office on Linux by nomaan · 2004-02-10 01:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

I can agree wuth that. i tried selling linux with open office idea to the adminstrative types, and they were like, no we need Ms office.

Re:mS office on Linux by Negatyfus · 2004-02-10 01:56 · Score: 3, Interesting

We definately need Office. It integrates well with all sorts of other software, like telex and fax solutions. Also, we have a server-client application that runs Linux on the server, but-- get this-- has been written towards Microsoft's Java VM on the client! Sun's VM runs it much slower on the clients.

Anyway... such tie-ins make it hard to migrate to Linux. I'm not even talking about disgruntled users having to learn something new (computer illiterates abound!).
Re:mS office on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:01 · Score: 1

who says MS isn't working on it? however, I don't trust MS not to read my files or scan my internal network. Probably would have to install office with some sort of root priviledge (* shudder *).
Re:mS office on Linux by diersing · 2004-02-10 02:05 · Score: 5, Insightful

And to really get your bang out of office, you'll need to run Exchange, which of course requires Active Directory...... you see a pattern here?
Having MS Office on Linux isn't the problem, users who believe they HAVE to have MS Office is. That bit of software your business needs, just needs to be rewritten to open standards and if enough clients start to leave SoftwareCompanyX, believe me, they'll write it. Or find the same integreation with Evolution.
Question - since MSJVM isn't available for distribution (from MS, I know what I can find with google) why hasn't that piece of software been rewritten to work better with Sun VM? You need to demand more from your vendors, or if you're going to drink the MS punch, don't make comments about migrating to Linux. I've migrating companies to linux and all were estatic with the final results. They were quite suprised how easy it was.
Re:mS office on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:11 · Score: 5, Interesting

so download the source and rename the application names.

I'm betting that 90% of msoffice users will not know the difference.

I did that here, replaced IE on all desktops with firebird + a IE skin.

nobody noticed anything changed.

most of the time it's resistance to change, even when there is very little change.
Re:mS office on Linux by visgoth · 2004-02-10 02:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

The "I _NEED_ Office" mentality is quite well hammered into average users. When I used to work at a certain office supply big box store (I was young, and needed the money!), at least four times a week someone would come in and ask for a full out copy of office. They would then freak out at the price and ask things like "why is this so expensive?!". Most of these people honestly didn't need all of office. A basic word processor, spreadsheet and email program were all they'd really need. I'd usually mention openoffice, and scrawl down a url for them to take home. Maybe that's why I didn't last long working in that dive :) MS seems to have done an exceedingly good job at promoting the idea that your pc is useless without having a copy of office running on it.

--
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Re:mS office on Linux by Negatyfus · 2004-02-10 02:59 · Score: 3, Interesting

Given the problems we've had over the last years getting this software package to run right for us, I don't think porting it all over right now would sit well with management. We've invested a lot of money and can't really back out now. Full migration to Linux desktops would be years away. In fact, we just bought brand new 2.6GHz machines with WinXP Pro. In fact, WinXP Pro isn't that bad at all, if the Microsoft company wasn't behind it. Anyway, the software company has been rewriting the software to have better Sun VM support, but it's still underway. It works, but much slower. Listen, you gotta understand how many problems we've had with this company! Sure, we should just sue 'em, but that doesn't get us the results we want: a working software package. They're getting off their butts-- slowly. We've gone higher up a while ago and it seems to work. Actually, we were a pilot program for a new target audience of their software package. They've invested as much as we did, so it's a trade-off. Suffice it to say that some bad decisions have been made before my time, but now we're kinda stuck with it.
Re:mS office on Linux by flacco · 2004-02-10 03:36 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Sun's VM runs it much slower on the clients.

those who would trade essential platform independence for a little temporary performance increase deserve neither platform independence nor performance increase.

--
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Re:mS office on Linux by ckaminski · 2004-02-10 03:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Throwing good money after bad isn't always the smartest option. If you're vendor is truly responsive to your needs, by all means, stick it out. If they're not however, don't be afraid to make the threat of dumping them. Because they're obviously not looking out for you, their customer.

I do understand what you're going through. I'm having similar problems as well with a particular vendor who seems to think MS SQL Server, IE 6 and Windows 2000 are all that exist in the world.
Re:mS office on Linux by fzammett · 2004-02-10 04:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm asking this as a legitimate question, not trying to troll...

Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?

Because I can tell you that's the primary thing that would keep my company (and the vast majority of the companies we deal with) from moving away from Office. I'd also be willing to bet we're not unusual in that regard.

Not so much because we already have tons of complex macros written that we wouldn't want to convert, but simply because it IS so powerful and relatively simple. We do some truly sick shit with VBA.

Note also that I'm NOT talking about simple macros to recalculate cell values and such. I'm talking about the ability to pop open a form on top of a spreadsheet with a bunch of buttons on it, each that execute hundreds or even thousands lines of complex code, some of which upload and download files via FTP, some of which make use of other Office apps via automation to do various things, and then export out the resultant data as a Viso document with an Excel spreadsheet embedded and links to a presentation that was generated and uploaded to a web site at the same time. Yes, we have some that do most of that, and some that do more. Let's not get into the debate about whether that was the right way to do things, because it's a much larger discussion, and the bottom line is that if the people in charge say do it using those tools, you either do so or look for another job, so it is what it is, and that's that.

If another office suite could match that capability, I doubt we'd have much incentive to stay with Office, but it truly would have to match or exceed that capability, and to the best of my knowledge, no other suite can do that.

Am I mistaken?

--
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Re:mS office on Linux by AlecC · 2004-02-10 04:50 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Sun's VM runs it much slower on the clients.

Have you checked that recently? We were startled at the speedup of the latest 1.4 release (1.4.03, if I remember rightly).

--
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Re:mS office on Linux by visgoth · 2004-02-10 04:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

"Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?"
I'm not sure, I mainly use the word processor and spreadsheet, and only in their most basic ways. A good place to start checking out what OpenOffice can do would be here Also, remember that it is a free download. You could grab a copy, and poke around to see if it does what you want, all without having to resort to warez.

--
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Re:mS office on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:55 · Score: 1, Insightful

Having MS Office on Linux isn't the problem, users who believe they HAVE to have MS Office is

How do I perform Linear Programming analysis in OpenOffice Calc?

Linear programming is supported in Excel as a standard feature. Businesses use the solver to solve many linear programming problems. Looking through the help of OpenOffice I can't figure out how to do it. Can anyone let me know how it's done?

It's for reasons like this that people insist on Microsoft Office.
Re:mS office on Linux by wasabii · 2004-02-10 05:06 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes. It's called open basic or some such. It is somewhat VBA compatible, but not totally, and lets you do REALLY COOL things with Java. You can write Java classes (which are really easy to write), and import/call them in VBA. Much easier than writing a DLL in VB6 or .Net and registering a COM object and some such.
Re:mS office on Linux by poot_rootbeer · 2004-02-10 05:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

so download the source and rename the application names.

I'm betting that 90% of msoffice users will not know the difference. ...at least, not until they email an (OO-native format) spreadsheet to someone that has MS Office and get the response "I can't open this!"
Re:mS office on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:23 · Score: 3, Interesting

They're indoctrinated at an early age. The Bill And Melinda Foundation donates computers to libraries that only can run Windows and MS products, the local school districts provide nothing but MS products, then they go to college where they buy WinXPP for $10, Office for $20.
They don't know about choice, and when they get to the PHB level they don't care too much about the cost, they want to be able to use what's familiar.
Re:mS office on Linux by IdleTime · 2004-02-10 05:27 · Score: 1

I haven't used MS Office since I moved to Linux full time in 1995. Granted, the first few years could be a pain not to have Office, but for the past 4-5 yearsIi haven't had any problems. I do work for a large software company with over 40000 employees world-wide and we have a lot of Office generated documents flying around.

For the needs I have, OO has been just fine. This should hold water for most people unless you have some very specialized apps running in MS Office. Typically VB stuff.

Anyway, the old 80/20 rule is valid here too. 80% of all users use only 20% of the features in the product, hence for 80% of MS Office users, they could easily move to OO and never look back. Anything else is just pure marketing babble.

--
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Re:mS office on Linux by daem0n1x · 2004-02-10 05:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

As a junior, I worked in the Oracle IT department, and MS Access was forbidden in any computer in there. I found it really weird, because at the time I thought Access was a pretty useful tool. It still is, at home, I mean.

Later I understood the reasons for forbidding Access. I worked for many customers who had their backoffices full of really shitty applications built on top of Access, Excel and VBA. I mean, they had their whole business built on that! More than a couple times I had to debug horrible stuff made by the local programmer wannabe, usually a financial or sales guy with no knowledge whatsoever of computer engineering, who learned a little bit of VBA and started coding away, turning his office in an intricate mess of redundant data, scattered files, and very shitty VB code.

Even worse is when some company has its customer database in Access, and each employee in the sales department has a local copy that they update regularly until nobody can track accurate information about anything anymore. Then every guy starts giving the others his password so they can read his files! Help!

And when we tell the manager their stuff is completely unsupportable and propose that they buy a suitable application or have a custom one built, the guy starts crying like a baby about the price of it. Sooner or later they will have to make that decision, but only after spending thousands in support, calling us every week to customise a little shit here or solve a little bug there. Not trying to put you down, though. If you work with VBA, and it works, my congratulations. You must be a pro.
Re:mS office on Linux by azaroth42 · 2004-02-10 05:46 · Score: 5, Informative

OpenOffice has multiple levels at which you can extend it. There's OpenOffice Basic, which is more powerful than just simple macros, but less powerful than your examples above.

Secondly, there's UNO bindings for C++, Java and (less well implemented) Python. From here you can do A Lot Of Stuff, including your examples, with ease. Additions like this don't require recompiling OO, they can be distributed (simple zip file) and linked with a single command (pkgchk)

Thirdly, as it's OSS, you could just hack the source code directly, though obviously option 2 is better.

-- Azaroth
Re:mS office on Linux by bebing · 2004-02-10 05:49 · Score: 1

Simpson! Uh oh, spaghettios! -Police Cops (formerly Badge Patrol)
Re:mS office on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:54 · Score: 4, Informative

>> Does OpenOffice, or any other office suite for that matter, have something as powerful and easy to use as VB For Applications?

OpenOffice 1.1 supports automation via Python scripting (http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.ht ml).

You might find that Python is a much easier to use and powerful language than VB for this sort of task.
Re:mS office on Linux by Xabraxas · 2004-02-10 07:02 · Score: 1

They've invested as much as we did, so it's a trade-off. Suffice it to say that some bad decisions have been made before my time, but now we're kinda stuck with it.
I'm not trying to be a dick but the money is already spent and the solution is not complete so trying to fix it is going to cause more trouble, cost more money, and create more headaches in the long run. It's probably not your decision but the smart thing to do, economically, would be to start over with a complete solution that just works.

--
Time makes more converts than reason
Re:mS office on Linux by EvilBudMan · 2004-02-10 07:28 · Score: 1

Outlook and Exchange are what there really needs to be alternatives to. Whatever the replacement for Exhange is, would have to work with Outlook as well since so many are acustomed to Outlook working on their clients.
Re:mS office on Linux by Kashif+Shaikh · 2004-02-10 09:04 · Score: 1

I don't use MS Office a whole lot(I develop software), but my brother does(being in a business position). He requires a lot of advance features in Excel(and it's tie in with Word) that can't be found in OpenOffice.

To each his own.
Re:mS office on Linux by fzammett · 2004-02-10 09:25 · Score: 1

I agree with your assessment, and I've been trying for a while to get the "just do it in Office" mentality out of here. Unfortunately, I work for a very large financial organization that is VERY set in it's ways, and change doesn't come easily when dealing with people's money.

To this company's credit though, they've been doing this FOR YEARS and being successful with it. We're more or less at the top of the food chain in our industry, so incentive to mearly improve for the sake of improvement isn't really there.

There are some interesting posts here, I certainly will spend some time looking into what OpenOffice can offer. I don't really expect to change the corporate world here, but for my own interest I'll check it out more.

--
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Re:mS office on Linux by online-shopper · 2004-02-10 11:41 · Score: 1

That's why you tell it to default to MS Office format.
Re:mS office on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 12:18 · Score: 0

Amen to that. I work for a retail company that has 2 or 3 guys that have invested their past 5 years in making sh!tty, klugey VBA applications and Excel Macros. Now, our CIO wants everyone on Star Office or Open Office but all this VBA crap is gonna hold us back. And its nasty stuff.
Re:mS office on Linux by MonsterChicharo · 2004-02-10 15:11 · Score: 1

Indeed. Performance should not be that much of an issue for most applications, given the fact that hardware is becoming increasingly cheaper and that most computers are replaced before you know. Software, on the other hand (and specially the custom made variety) tends to last longer. Therefore, a small increase on performance should never outweight independence.
Re:mS office on Linux by TrancePhreak · 2004-02-10 17:20 · Score: 1

With VBA, you generally have all your scripts in the spreadsheet itself and not off in some other file.

--

-]Phreak Out[-

Porting... by bendelo · 2004-02-10 01:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

As for open source on the desktop systems, Peters said although most of the applications are Webbased, a nonnative version of Lotus Notes for Linux and the lack of Microsoft Office are impediments to Linux on the desktop

I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?

Re:Porting... by Erwos · 2004-02-10 02:02 · Score: 5, Interesting

A while ago (year or two ago), IBM visited my university. One of the first things that came up was Lotus Notes on Linux, or lack thereof.

Basically, the IBM guy said the code of Notes was an absolute mess, and that porting it to Linux would be more trouble than it's worth. So, it might be ported, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.

-Erwos

--
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Re:Porting... by BoomerSooner · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 0

Notes is on linux and has been for years.

They should run Office in Wine or the codeweavers (sp?) tool. Problem solved. Or if they wanted office and stability of Unix they could try Mac OS X. Office is much nicer on my Mac.
Re:Porting... by Erwos · 2004-02-10 02:06 · Score: 2, Insightful

So Lotus Notes under WINE is a supported configuration? I kind of doubt it.

When businesses want something, they generally don't want a messy hack. They want something that's supported by the vendor. IBM is NOT going to be supporting Notes under WINE.

-Erwos

--
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Re:Porting... by monkeyfinger · 2004-02-10 02:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

One advantage of OpenOffice is that it runs on windows and linux. If I was an admin planning to switch to linux then I would install openoffice and get people used to it before the switch took place.
Re:Porting... by p4ul13 · 2004-02-10 02:07 · Score: 4, Informative

Nitpicking here; but Lotus Notes is eMail and application databases, and it runs rather well under Wine, but I'd love to see it run native.
You might be thinking of Lotus SmartSuite, which is a pretty good office package, and I think it'll run well under wine, but again it would be great running native.

--
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:07 · Score: 2, Insightful

Microsoft Office on Linux would destroy Windows. Office is by far the best productivity suite available and the most widely accepted. I know that now that our GL software has a web-based option there would be nothing holding us back from switching to Linux.

And before anybody disputes my claims about Office. I can tell you from the users perspective it is the best. I know hundreds of people who would rather using pen and paper then give up Excel. Word is probably the weakest link (there are a lot of good word processors out there). Powerpoint has equal and barring viruses Outlook is the best PIM.
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:08 · Score: 3, Informative

domino is already on linux

I know people inside ibm running notes on linux, using Wine. For a discussion on the pros/cons of a linux Notes client see this article.
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:11 · Score: 1, Informative

A "messy hack?"
Hardly. If there is one Windows application that works well under WINE, it'd have to be Notes.
Even the installer works.
Re:Porting... by Surazal · 2004-02-10 02:13 · Score: 1

But he runs the risk of running a configuration not covered by the support contract.

--
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:14 · Score: 0

Lotus Notes SERVER has been runs nativly on Linux, the client (thus support for the desktop) has IIRC not.
Re:Porting... by jusdisgi · 2004-02-10 02:19 · Score: 2, Informative

Read it again. He doesn't say Lotus Notes needs WINE...he alledges that it's native, and then says the company should run *office* under WINE.

Now, another reply says that only the Notes server runs on Linux, and that the client does not. And frankly, I don't know which is right.

Also...about the "supported configuration" deal...if you get Crossover Office with the intention of running MS Office on Linux, the Crossover people support the application.

--
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Re:Porting... by RailGunner · 2004-02-10 02:21 · Score: 1

The problem is that to use Mac OS X most companies would have to buy a LOT of new hardware that many just haven't budgeted for. You go to any Fortune 500 company and chances are that not only will you find leased machines from companies like Dell, but the secretaries and other non-geek types still have Pentium 2 based machines.
And then there's the executives... with state of the art boxes, marvelling at how fast Solitaire is and how pretty the screensaver looks.
But, I agree with you on one thing - they should get a few Macs - if for no other reason that a hetergeneous network of Winblows, Mac, and Linux is the best defense against the Worm or Trojan of the week. (Aside from not hiring attachment clicking morons.)
Re:Porting... by garcia · 2004-02-10 02:22 · Score: 3, Interesting

Back when I was in college at BGSU and the method of checking email was telnet to one of four different SunOS servers to use Pine, someone came in and "revamped" everything so that we could covert to Lotus Notes. They upgraded hardware, software, and pushed Notes on everyone. Sure, you *could* use any old POP equipped mail client but anywhere on campus you could only check your mail with Notes.

It was a major flop. The software was seriously crappy, it was slow, and it was quickly dropped in favor of POP clients and now webmail (which from what I understand still sucks).

The code may be messy but the application itself is a POS and isn't likely to be picked up by users.
Re:Porting... by Sique · 2004-02-10 02:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

In fact Excel is the only part of MS Office that is really good :) And Visio has an unrivalled number of stencils for it, so all line drawing monkeys (like me) are using it.

For all other parts of MS Office (Word, Access, PowerPoint) I prefer other solutions. And I especially hate MS's spellchecking. Because I am fighting with it until I have it switched off. It is good for nothing to me. But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway. And the nagging feature of correcting words starting with two uppercase letters always gets into the way while writing program or other technical documentation. Basicly everytime I try to adapt spellchecking to my needs I end up with having all features switched off.

When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP. So Outlook is a piece of bloat to me, and Exchange features are just there to be set wrong and creating havoc. :)

--
.sig: Sique *sigh*
Re:Porting... by dhall · 2004-02-10 02:23 · Score: 1

I believe one of the major reasons for moving towards R5 for Lotus Notes was the "web"-alization of the client. IBM and Lotus both toted the new R5 client as being just a beefed up web browser.

There was also a strong push towards Domino, a web frontend to the actual data, and if you're just using Notes as an email/calender/organizer, Domino could fill that need. One of the problems I've seen though is that Domino tends to require more horsepower on the backend server.

There was a R4 client that ran on AIX, so there was code out there. I believe most of the original code for the client as originally written on AIX, then they moved all development over to Wintel side of the house. A lot of IBM's projects were coming out on Windows, and it takes times for companies to shift their development strategies.
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:24 · Score: 0

"vastly comparitive"

what
Re:Porting... by ciggieposeur · 2004-02-10 02:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

I wonder how long it will be until Lotus Notes is ported to Linux? Although OpenOffice is improving all the time, would this company rather have MS Office on Linux (shudder) or a vastly comparitive open source product?

Never.

Lotus has announced repeatedly that they are never going to port Notes 5+ to the linux/unix desktop. And now that WINE is capable of running Notes 5 they have even less incentive.

In 1999 IBM Server Group was literally only two days away from receiving the source code to the Notes 4.6 client and they were going to port it to linux for internal use. The Lotus higher-level managers cancelled the deal. (Even though the 4.5 client for AIX had been ported to linux, then re-ported again to AIX with better stability and performance.) With the 5.0 release they dropped support for AIX and OS/2.

Inside IBM, Lotus still behaves like a separate company and basically never give out their code to other IBM groups. I don't know who precisely is sleeping with who, but clearly there's some bad mojo at work here.

To reiterate: we will NEVER see a native Notes client for linux. Support the Evolution folks instead. Their client is very similar, and if it ever supports the Domino server natively that will be our Notes client.
Re:Porting... by jimlintott · 2004-02-10 02:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think you have perfectly described what I consider to be MS Office's greatest weakness. To most Office users it is single app. It is a spreadsheet or a word processor or a presentation creator, it is seldom all things to the user. That Microsoft has managed to bundle all these apps together and sell them all to every user is the greatest marketing achievement ever. Yes, I do know that Office is capable of a high level of integration, the fact is that few users go there. Most Office users would be fine with just the single app they focus on.

Disclaimer - I have loathed word processors for twenty years now. MS Word is at the top of that list. So I am certainly biased. To be fair, I don't like Open Office either.
Re:Porting... by DavittJPotter · 2004-02-10 02:29 · Score: 1

The latest versions of Domino have iNotes access, which is a web-based client that replicates nearly everything the Windows client has, whilst being almost platform-independent! Check it out.

--
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
Re:Porting... by richie2000 · 2004-02-10 02:31 · Score: 4, Informative

Notes as only an e-mail client is indeed seriously crappy. Notes as a groupware package shines. When was this, BTW? If it was eight years ago or more, a die-hard Lotushead probably should have pushed cc:Mail on you instead of Notes.
Or maybe they had plans to use the database and document sharing functionality in Notes but never got around to it? That would be a good, valid reason to use Notes. There are many, many reasons to use Notes, but e-mail isn't one of them.

--
Money for nothing, pix for free
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:35 · Score: 3, Funny

To be fair, I don't like Open Office either.

Someone didn't take the blue pill did they? ;-)
Re:Porting... by twinpot · 2004-02-10 02:41 · Score: 1

I haven't tried the R6 versions of iNotes, but previous versions only worked on IE, and didn't work well (iirc - may have been that it didn't work at all) on the Mac. Hardly platform independant.

However, browser access using Domino servers to serve up web-based applications was quite good, providing the app was written with the browser client in mind. It is easy enough to have the code work well for native clients and browsers.
Re:Porting... by Savage-Rabbit · 2004-02-10 02:42 · Score: 3, Funny

Basically, the IBM guy said the code of Notes was an absolute mess

Having worked with notes that does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that an IBM guy would admit that. Usually when I ask the local IBM rep about buggy software he gets this distant zombie like look in his eyes and responds with the same mantra (in a hollow, mechanical voice):

It will be fixed in the next version....

--
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:57 · Score: 1, Informative

"One advantage of OpenOffice is that it runs on windows and linux. If I was an admin planning to switch to linux then I would install openoffice and get people used to it before the switch took place."

Great idea skip, but it doesn't happen that smoothly. Most people, non-tech, think MS Office is the only way to produce documents, reports, spreadsheets. Just think of the backwork written in past MSoffice.

To top that off, my last job had templates written in word and scripts so that the user would just have to fill in the blanks. Of course the person who wrote it, doesn't work for the company anymore and managers don't think about re-doing it in another format.

Honestly, Windows isn't the greatest Microsoft product to defeat. It's MSoffice!
Re:Porting... by Call+Me+Black+Cloud · 2004-02-10 02:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

I've used both OO and Office. I have Office at my day job and on my wife's home computer and OO on my home computer. OO is much slower. The interface isn't as nice, i.e. it's not as easy to get things done. The startup time is abysmal (P4 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM)...open a spreadsheet, go get a cup of coffee while it opens (ok, it's not that bad but it feels like it). My demands on an office suite are not great - I use a spreadsheet for time tracking mostly (sometimes I'll work with data) and I use the word processor for letters, invoices, fax cover sheets, the occasional mailing label.

The large company I work for during the day has a deal with Microsoft where I can get the full version of the latest Office for $20. I'm going to be ordering that and dumping OO, because even for my modest needs I find OO cumbersome and annoying.

While one advantage of OO is it runs on multiple platforms, the big downside is it is a hinderance to productivity. Labor is expensive - the cost of Office for the office is less than the time spent wrestling with an immature product.
Re:Porting... by RMH101 · 2004-02-10 03:05 · Score: 2, Funny

nah, think of all the cost implications of those nerf wars in the cubicles, and the health and safety issues caused by all those mac boys hanging their mountain bike on the office walls...
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:06 · Score: 0

nah, it was in 1998 or 1999.
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:16 · Score: 0

The most recent versions of OO.o open within 4 seconds on my Athlon 1400. That's without precaching.

I think that you're just impatient.
Re:Porting... by dyte · 2004-02-10 03:31 · Score: 1

Support the Evolution folks instead.

What is evolution? Could you provide a link?

Google is useless for very common words :)
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

>The interface isn't as nice, i.e. it's not as easy to get things done.
depends on what you use it for....depends on who you ask..etc...

>The startup time is abysmal
try loading it into memory right after boot....and leave it there mister 512mb RAM.

>I use a spreadsheet for time tracking mostly
there are other programs besides OO, you know?

>The large company I work for during the day has a deal with Microsoft where I can get the full version of the latest Office for $20.
Sounds great...not many other people have such a great deal, and many people are trying to get away from being locked-in to MS products. Oh yeah, and MS doesnt like to play with all the other boys and girls, rather they try to break them. Take, say, Corel WordPerfect. It took many hours trying to diagnose problems with it only to find out that Office INTENTIONALLY tried to crash it. So if OO doesnt seem great on a Win machine, perhaps you should compare it to that running on linux...just to calibrate how correct a feel you are getting in terms of speed, memory, and stability.

> the big downside is it is a hinderance to productivity.
depends on what you use it for....depends on who uses it...depends on who you ask..etc...
Re:Porting... by Pyrrus · 2004-02-10 03:37 · Score: 2, Insightful

Just think of the backwork written in past MSoffice.

Just think of the fact that OO can read .doc files.
Re:Porting... by JAgostoni · 2004-02-10 03:42 · Score: 1

I assume grand-parent is referring to Ximian's Evolution: http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/

--

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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
Re:Porting... by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 03:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

There must be some sort of conflict between some drivers or processes in your machine. OO does indeed open slow for today's speed capabilities, but it's still under 4 seconds.
It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools. When I show up for work if the boss says I am working in Maya this week, I work in maya. If it's Studio Max that next week, I work in Max. (Hell, I had to work in TrueSpace once, not so bad once you learn it.) Yeah, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but the important thing is that I am still able to get the job done, regardless of the renderer/3d engine. If I am able to handle working in different 3d platforms, why is it that 'normal' office users can't do the stupid TPS report in whatever is placed in front of them. It really pisses me off. I have to take college level physics and learn some fundamental AI as an artist, but some business guy can't even learn OO? It's truly a shame.
I am glad I am not the boss of someone who can't handle a different software package. I would be forced to fire them because they are clearly not able to 'grow' on the job. It's my opinion that the first priority is that the job gets done, how it gets done falls in second.
With all due respect, how hard could it be to do "word processor for letters, invoices, fax cover sheets, the occasional mailing label"? It's not rocket science, and doesn't require a huge amount of macros to do. If you can't work in multiple/different softwares, I am sure there is a new-comer college grad who would love your job for less that CAN do it, and will get a kick out of using something that is not the norm.
Signed, 24-bit Voxel
Re:Porting... by tedgyz · 2004-02-10 03:50 · Score: 3, Interesting

Lotus is the most hienous piece of crap ever to infect a computer. It's worse than Windows for pure evil factor.

I coded to their C API and found it to be a horrible mess. The API exposes all kinds of stupid artifacts of the internal database and file storage architecture. The API forces all clients, including their own client and server code to be a twisted mess.

The Java API is an order of magnitude better, but it is layered on top of the C API, so it is simply hiding the horror show underneath.

Lotus should be shot in the head. The best thing they could do is start over. They pretend to support standards, but the database and APIs force all kinds of conversions that end up mutilating the "standard" content. Case in point - I sent a simple HTML file to a colleage from Mozilla. The mess that came out of Lotus looked nothing like my original file.

--
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Re:Porting... by barzok · 2004-02-10 03:50 · Score: 2, Funny

Lotus Notes is eMail and application databases, and it runs rather well under Wine,
So you're saying it runs better under Linux/Wine than it does on Win2000?
Re:Porting... by dylan_- · 2004-02-10 03:50 · Score: 1

What is evolution? Could you provide a link?

Google is useless for very common words :)

http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/

You needed to google for something like "evolution linux lotus notes" (without quotes) and it would have come up.

--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Re:Porting... by dudeman2 · 2004-02-10 03:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

The IBM guy has most likely NEVER seen the Lotus Notes codebase. I have. There are definitely challenges in working with a codebase that's probably three or four times the size of Mozilla (and this was in 1997!), and besides that was evolved from original code written for Windows 2.1 and OS/2 1.3. Nevertheless the codebase was very well designed with an abstraction layer for porting the GUI and many features that were WAY ahead of their time (i.e. complete support for cross platform i18n years before UNICODE) The code was indeed ported to Macintosh, Solaris, HP/UX. (they did not port Notes 5+).

Porting to UNIX or LINUX today is technically feasible. Working with WineLib I am sure they could get a port up and running in a matter of weeks or months. The problem is one of support. Once a port is built, IBM has to QA it. Package it. Sell it. Support it for years. The costs are enormous. Measure that against the projected user base and it just wasn't cost effective. They'd rather spend the money on a web client.

Given that IBM is pushing for Linux desktops internally, the prospect of a Notes client port is more likely. On the other hand, IBM is now pushing new Java based groupware technologies that will naturally run on Linux. Who knows how it'll turn out.

Anyway Notes 5 runs splendidly under Wine and I think support for Notes 6 is on Codeweavers' todo list.
Re:Porting... by mabhatter654 · 2004-02-10 04:08 · Score: 1

Actually, Domino alreay runs on linux. You just have to use the web front-end. In an office environment that's not so bad to have all the data on the server anyway...desktop data is a nusiance to manage.
Honestly, it'd be better to see the current crop of OSS tools develop better. All the pieces are there for something MUCH better than Domino/Notes or Exchange/Outlook they just need "glued" together...best part is that it'd be standard's compliant with multiple vendors too!!!
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:22 · Score: 0

It's a poor craftsman who can't recognize when his tools just aren't up to par. OpenOffice is simply not at the level of maturity that Office is, whether you're looking at functionality or polish or both. It's not going to meet most people's needs as well as Office does for a while.

And don't say "with all due respect" unless you're going to fucking demonstrate some.
Re:Porting... by jazman_777 · 2004-02-10 04:24 · Score: 1

It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools. ... If I am able to handle working in different 3d platforms, why is it that 'normal' office users can't do the stupid TPS report in whatever is placed in front of them.
Because they're not crafstmen, they're drones.

--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Re:Porting... by Saeed+al-Sahaf · 2004-02-10 04:32 · Score: 1

"the secretaries and other non-geek types still have Pentium 2 based machines"
No... I don't think so.

--
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Re:Porting... by Mr.+Shiny+And+New · 2004-02-10 04:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's not that people can't handle a different software package. They can, if they have to. But any time spent learning that new tool, or re-writing macros, or working around limitations in that tool is time that could be spent doing real work. All of that has to be factored into the cost of switching. In my job, I am required to work in Java or C++, depending on what project I'm working on. I don't get to whine, I just do what I have to. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but I am forced to use one or the other depending on the task. But for my office correspondence? It's MS Word. It's there, I use it, I get stuff done. (Though I prefer Word Perfect, myself). Any time not spent messing around with my word processor is time I can spend coding. If my company were to switch to another word processor, they'd have to take into account all the time I, and my other coworkers, would spend messing around with the new program instead of coding. That's the cost of switching.
Re:Porting... by sloanster · 2004-02-10 04:38 · Score: 2

spoken like a man who hasn't used any recent version of openoffice...

I would have agreed with this having used openoffice 1.0 and Staroffice 6, but I find that with version 1.1 all the complaints I had with openoffice have been fixed.

Your comments about openoffice are about as relevant as somone today complaining about ms windows 3.1
Re:Porting... by Saeed+al-Sahaf · 2004-02-10 04:41 · Score: 1

"But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway"
Did you know that you can add words to the default dictionary and actually download specialized dictionaries?
"And the nagging feature of correcting words starting with two uppercase letters always gets into the way while writing program or other technical documentation"
Did you know that you can change that feature in the options?
"When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP"
Hey, I'll bet you love Pine, yes?
My point is, many of the "features" that you don't like are enabled because most people *do* like them, but that does not mean you can't take a few minutes to configure Word the way you like.

--
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Re:Porting... by Sepper · 2004-02-10 04:46 · Score: 1

Given that IBM is pushing for Linux desktops internally, the prospect of a Notes client port is more likely. On the other hand, IBM is now pushing new Java based groupware technologies that will naturally run on Linux. Who knows how it'll turn out.

They could have to employes test the software on linux and get free QA...

Just one departement... then another, and another...

I'm sure frustrated coworker are more inclinded to call the RIGHT person to fix the problem...

then again, I might be all wrong...

--
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
Re:Porting... by ScuzzMonkey · 2004-02-10 04:46 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools.

WTH? You think there is no such thing as poorly written, unresponsive software? I'd say it's a poor craftsman that can't pick his tools... but most of us don't really get the option to choose the right tool for the job in most of our positions.

The idea that all software simply has strengths and weaknesses is overly accepting... certainly, it may have strengths or weaknesses compared to another package, but it may just also be a steaming pile of crap, unless you consider the ability to consume disk space a 'strength'.

--
No relation to Happy Monkey
Re:Porting... by stormcoder · 2004-02-10 04:56 · Score: 1

Using Open Office 1.1 on a debian variant(mepis). Athlon-XP 2600, 512MB RAM. First launch took 10 seconds, subsequent launches took 3 seconds or less. This compares well with MS Office.

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Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
Re:Porting... by Call+Me+Black+Cloud · 2004-02-10 05:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

I am using 1.1. It would be silly of me to complain about an older version.
Re:Porting... by p4ul13 · 2004-02-10 05:09 · Score: 1

Not at all; just saying that it runs well under Wine.

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Paul Lenhart writes words!
Re:Porting... by robklaus · 2004-02-10 05:15 · Score: 1

If you can't work in multiple/different softwares, I am sure there is a new-comer college grad who would love your job for less that CAN do it, and will get a kick out of using something that is not the norm.

Yeah, that is frickin great until it is the president of your company, or someone else who is paid an obscene amount of money to make money . Not figure out how to format a fax in 3 different software packages. Thats your job!
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 06:03 · Score: 1, Interesting

I am sending this using iNotes with Firefox on Fedora, and can tell you that this is nothing like a native 6.x Notes client (like no appointment reminder popups for starters). It's clunky and slow, but at least worth having as an alternative to booting to windows.

I'm a GNU/linux regular, and will put up with something (rarely) less functional if it means avoiding "the dark side", but your average user would find iNotes a showstopper, and I don't blame them.

iNotes on IE, OTOH, is loaded with active-x crap and performs more like a native client, but then, that's what it is, a native windows client and not an open solution.
Re:Porting... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 06:07 · Score: 0

Whoops, bad form responding to my own post, but please ignore the "I am sending this using..." part, it should be "I am using iNotes..."
Re:Porting... by self+assembled+struc · 2004-02-10 06:27 · Score: 1, Interesting

why would you want a linux version of lotus notes?

just get your admin to turn on webmail. at my old company, one of the linux people wrote a "scraper" that logged into your web mail account and generated RFC compliant mail, and set up an imap server, and injected it there. then he set up ical and some sort of slick ical->notes gateway.

it was a think of beauty. too bad the old comnpany 'owns' the code. since it was written while he was on the clock.
Re:Porting... by Dave_bsr · 2004-02-10 06:35 · Score: 1

Then something's broken. My OO starts up in about 5 seconds on a dual 600 MHz linux system. Yeah, it's dual - but one processor can only run at 600 MHz. *shrug* - OpenOffice works for me...

--

Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Re:Porting... by C+Roth · 2004-02-10 07:11 · Score: 1

I'm using StarOffice7 on an 800mhz Athlon WindowsXP machine here at work. It runs just as fast as MSOffice ever did.
Re:Porting... by Xabraxas · 2004-02-10 07:25 · Score: 1

This is a little OT but it reminds me of when I went to college. We used to sign up for classes using Hummingbird HostExplorer to connect to the main server. The program was terminal based and was very fast and easy to use. Then my last year there they switched to PeopleSoft which is web-based and it was terrible. IF you could actually connect, it took forever to find what you wanted and to actually sign up for anything. Every transaction took minutes as opposed to seconds using the old system. Needless to say, many angry students lined up in person to sign up for classes instead of dealing with the hell of PeopleSoft.

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Time makes more converts than reason
Re:Porting... by drsmithy · 2004-02-10 09:30 · Score: 1

That Microsoft has managed to bundle all these apps together and sell them all to every user is the greatest marketing achievement ever.
Uh, the whole *point* of Office - and the reason it has become so dominant - is because of the integration it offers. To call it nothing more than a "marketing achievement" is to write off a *lot* of people who rely on the sort of integration it offers and the massive amounts of development effort that have gone into making it so.
Yes, I do know that Office is capable of a high level of integration, the fact is that few users go there.
Obviously more than you think.
Most Office users would be fine with just the single app they focus on.
You can (or certainly, you used to be able to) buy the office components separately. However, if you buy more than two separately it becomes cheaper to buy the whole package.
Re:Porting... by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 11:40 · Score: 1

I think you missed the point. The whole meaning is that a good craftsman can produce good results with a crappy tool. Thank you.
Re:Porting... by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 11:46 · Score: 1

I never said that there is no such thing as poorly written and unresponsive software. I did say that I had to use Truespace, in order to demonstrate that point actually. (Which really is a piece of crap compared to other packages.) But I got the job done.
As for a poor craftsman that can't pick his tools, I would say unlucky too. But in reality, seldom do my employers give me the freedom to use whatever I want in projects. (Ok, never is more like it.)
Re:Porting... by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 11:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

That is not my job. That is the job of a secretary.
You only have to train upper management where the templates are. A monkey could do it. I have never heard to a macro using CEO. I don't see how that is relevant. (And you can bet his secretary DOES have the templates.)
Re:Porting... by Mr.+Piddle · 2004-02-10 11:51 · Score: 1

I coded to their C API and found it to be a horrible mess.

Is there a C API that isn't a mess? Combine two of them and hell on earth is achieved. It just seems the C community never really did settle the debate over whether functions callees or callers handle malloc() and free(). My favorite APIs are the ones that use both conventions in inconsistent ways along with vendor-provided replacements to malloc() and free(). Sheer joy.

--
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
Re:Porting... by BoneFlower · 2004-02-10 16:35 · Score: 2, Interesting

Odd. Office 2000 is more cumbersome on my system than OO is(my system- Athlon XP2200, 1GB DDR266, WD 7200RPM/8MB cache hard drve- so ok, my system is a bit of overkill for office productivity apps), starts *very* slightly slower, but not much at all. barely noticeable.

As for ease of use, I find OO a lot easier. I don't even know how to do footnotes in MS Office, and I have looked, but I can do it with a right click in OO. That puts a nice little polish onto school papers, gets a few extra points(and wastes a couple lines to help bump up page count:))

Only reason I'm using MS Office mostly these days is its part of one of my courses.
Re:Porting... by denks · 2004-02-10 17:51 · Score: 1

I don't know who precisely is sleeping with who, but clearly there's some bad mojo at work here

Sounds more of a case of who isnt sleeping with who

--

I am Monkey, the Great Sage, equal of heaven!
Re:Porting... by BoneFlower · 2004-02-10 18:46 · Score: 1

Clarifying a couple points-

Its OpenOffice apps that start up slightly slower than MS Office's equivalent app. However, once running, OpenOffice runs faster and more smoothly, definitely better responsiveness. A bit more stable as well. OS is Windows XP Pro, some cache optimizations and registry tweaks done through TweakXP that may have an impact on things.
Re:Porting... by Sique · 2004-02-10 20:21 · Score: 1

"But maybe that's because the words I am making spelling errors in aren't in MS's dictionaries anyway"

Did you know that you can add words to the default dictionary and actually download specialized dictionaries?

I know... but you know, it's not much fun to add for instance all czech towns to the dictionary because I happen to write about my walking tours there (did you know by the way that it is impossible in Word to have german umlauts and czech accents in the same text? Only way to work around I discovered so far is writing the text in HTML with an ASCII editor and then import it into Word. Yes, it matters, if your mother is working for the Bruecke-Most-Foundation, a czech-german institution). And no, there is no specialized dictionary containing german, czech and polish towns together. But I happen to be grown up at the place where all three countries have common borders. Then there is no saxon dictionary I know of. But my home dialect is saxon. And I like to play with the different pronounciation between german and saxon.

So far for the private conversation. And at work: I do technical documentation at an university. I have to edit texts in german and english. Sometimes I have both languages in the same document. I have lots of identifiers, product specific and often wildly stung together words to use. If I would use activated spellchecking I wasted more time by adding words than the correctly corrected words (nice paradoxon btw: incorrectly corrected) would save me. Not to mention the fact that you may accidently add the word misspelled, and then fight with the dictionary to accept only the corrected version. I once had the idea that maybe if I would endure it for about one or two month, my dictionary would fill up with the words I use and finally it would actually help me. After six month I gave up and deactivated spellchecking. Every project comes with new words, and the old just get into the way.

"When it comes to Outlook and Exchange I barely use anything outside blank text via SMTP"

Hey, I'll bet you love Pine, yes?

I grew up with ELM, thanks for asking ;) Currently I am using mulberry and thunderbird. But I still love telnet smtphost 25 as my MTA.

My point is, many of the "features" that you don't like are enabled because most people *do* like them, but that does not mean you can't take a few minutes to configure Word the way you like.

Yes. By disactivating Word and using an HTML editor for formatted text. I have never worked at an institution which didn't accept HTML formatted documents even though there were strict guidelines to use MS Office. Obviously nobody noticed.
Those institutions include KPMG and Deutsche Bank.

--
.sig: Sique *sigh*

TCO analisys worldwide by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 01:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I live in Chile and i must say Chilean IT managers are very intrested in this kind of resources. At least 6 big Chilean firms are considering moving existing management, database and mail(the pain of spam beaking throug) to Linux as a safer, cheaper and more reliable alternative. But in general people are affraid since there always will be a Microsofr counterreport saying otherwise. As long as Linux doesnt gain reputation within the corporate world, it'll still be a small idealistic comunity. So TCO i think is the best way to change things theese days.

--
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."

Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 01:59 · Score: 1

So TCO i think is the best way to change things theese days. Independent, objective TCO analysis i mean.

--
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:09 · Score: 0

Give it a bit. IBM will provide support, and that should be enough.
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by archeopterix · 2004-02-10 03:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

I live in Chile and i must say Chilean IT managers are very intrested in this kind of resources. At least 6 big Chilean firms are considering moving existing management, database and mail(the pain of spam beaking throug) to Linux as a safer, cheaper and more reliable alternative. But in general people are affraid since there always will be a Microsofr counterreport saying otherwise. As long as Linux doesnt gain reputation within the corporate world, it'll still be a small idealistic comunity. So TCO i think is the best way to change things theese days.
I've skimmed the Microsoft TCO reports and they boil down to "Linux is more expensive, because it takes more qualified-man-hours to maintain". I think that in countries with lower labor cost this doesn't hold.
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 04:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

In Countries like mine, completely dominated by Microsoft you could maliciously justify labour hours by considering the training needed to get suck professionals to a decent Unix level, however, young professionals (like me ;) are very intrested in Open Source solutions, and the potencial they hold, so the transition should be rather smooth. My point is, determining such details about systems should be more the task of an independent source, like the costumer. Suse for instance publishes some case studies, but for me to believe them, must be the testimony of a real costumer.

--
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by JWW · 2004-02-10 05:22 · Score: 4, Informative

Ignore TCO. In the article they get it right. TCO is crap, in the end the only thing that really matters is cost of downtime. In most cases the cost of downtime is orders of magnitude greater than that of ownership.

For my location 24 hours of system downtime is one million dollars of lost production.
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 05:32 · Score: 1

shouldn TCO include downtime? since when you purchase a system, you should consider reliability and repair time in your analisys. Besides you cant pin downtime to a certain operative system, there are other variables involved, including hardware and process related events. It also depends on your line of business, if you mine gold, ten minutes are worth ...GOLD, but if you run a website with a shopping cart, unles is thinkgeek is not a fortune a minute you loose.

--
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by JWW · 2004-02-10 07:55 · Score: 1

Sure it should include downtime. But what I'm saying is that downtime far outcosts other factors. My example is for specifically a manufacturing location, so the value lost is the cost of the lost output.

But consider, when Microsoft is figuring out a TCO on windows, do you think they include the cost of downtime in the calculations?
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by F34nor · 2004-02-10 08:26 · Score: 4, Insightful

I am sure it takes more qualified man hours to run and support linux but I look at it this way, pay rent to M$ or put equity into a mortgage with Linux. They cost about the same, but when you're done you have the ability to knock out a few walls and paint the place any color you like.
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by the-build-chicken · 2004-02-10 08:54 · Score: 1

What's the IT climate like over there. I've been wanting to move to South America (from Australia) for about a year now. Have to finish my current project which is about another 18 month lock in, but was thinking of moving after that. I was originally thinking of brazil or venezuala...but am interested in any general information you can give me about your area.

Thanks

Adam
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Threni · 2004-02-10 10:05 · Score: 1

> In Countries like mine,

If I had one country, let alone more than one, I'd be too busy surfing and partying to worry about operating systems. I'd pay someone else to worry about them.
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 10:15 · Score: 1

email me so we can all end this off topic galore

--
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Re:TCO analisys worldwide by Moderation+abuser · 2004-02-10 10:21 · Score: 1

"Linux is more expensive, because it takes more qualified-man-hours to maintain"

Frankly this is bullshit. I'm a Unix sysadmin and a good one and under Unix or Linux, 1000 systems are as easy to administer as 10. If you get your architecture right the administrative effort increases logarithmically. If you're an idiot and put in a shite architecture then Linux will cost you as much as Windows. The difference is that Linux *allows* an efficient architecture. Hell, it *encourages* an efficient architecture if you listen to it. Horses/water/drinking and all that.

--
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.

Good article. by grub · 2004-02-10 01:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

I would hope that reading such as this is sought out by IT managers looking at a migration to any other platform. Real world results are what count. Trusting studies paid for by $COMPANY is just plain ignorant.

--
Trolling is a art,

Re:Good article. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:27 · Score: 0

>Trusting studies paid for by $COMPANY is just plain
> ignorant.

But this kind of ignorance rewards people with comfortable careers, job security, etc.

Other kinds of ignorance lead to bankruptcy or prison, and people tend to avoid those mistakes.

You could tell someone, for example, that investing in SCO late last year was an ignorant mistake, but, they made money hand over fist with that ignorant mistake.
Re:Good article. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 12:15 · Score: 0

Did you read the article? It was as vacuous as most Slashdot posts - no facts, no real comparisons just "I wouldn't trust Windows" and "Linux is cheaper".

The article would be better titled "Some IT manager for some energy company in Australia thinks Linux is cheaper and better than Windows, for running a whole bunch of *nix-centric apps. Big fucking deal."

But this is Slashdot - paid for by $COMPANY - so guess what the title read.

Wake up and smell the propaganda.

Don't get too excited by gowen · 2004-02-10 01:55 · Score: 5, Insightful

This is just one case study. One could certainly find one case study to "refute" this refutation.

To repeat a popular statistician's aphorism:

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data"

This has been a public service announcement.

--
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.

Re:Don't get too excited by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

Not really. It has nothing to do with statistics, it's logic.

A single counter example is enough to refute a general statement.

If somebody says that Open source software is more expensive than commercial software, having a case with says otherwise invalidates the statement. The case itself proves nothing either way, but it does disprove the general statement.

So to refute the case is useless because the case proves nothing.
Re:Don't get too excited by gowen · 2004-02-10 03:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

A single counter example is enough to refute a general statement.
But no-one made a sufficiently general statement. No one said "always has lower TCO". The Microsoft studies are specific, and are neveer dumb enough to make the kind of sweeping generalisations that single counter-examples can refute. In fact, they often just just give anecdotal examples themselves.

--
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Re:Don't get too excited by torpor · 2004-02-10 03:59 · Score: 2, Flamebait

Typical human reaction, bow to the abyss of the infinite whenever something comes along your way that you don't agree with, find 'right', or have an alternative use for ... ... of course there are an infinite number of arguments that its not this way. Just as there are an infinite number of arguments for using Linux...

The point is not whether or not there are alternative arguments, the point is that an Energy Company (in whom one ought to have at least a modicum of respect, given the parameters of their environment) saying it, not some market-droid, not some 'independent' research firm, not some half-assed marketdroid with a room full of monkeys.

You 'refuting' this 'refutation' with the 'statement' that this 'refutation' can be 'refuted' an 'infinite number of ways' says more about your ideals than it does about this article, actually ...

--
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Re:Don't get too excited by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:15 · Score: 0

Wow, you have the lowest user number of any poster I have seen here ever.
Re:Don't get too excited by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:44 · Score: 0

Wow, you have the lowest user number of any poster I have seen here ever.
It would certainly example how that incoherent twaddle got modded Insightful...
Re:Don't get too excited by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:38 · Score: 0

Funny how I first read "fund" instead of "find" in your post. Seems kinda appropriate tho.

honestly, I don't get it by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 01:55 · Score: 5, Interesting

I have not come across anything that MS Office can do that another office programme, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice can't do. AppleWorks is a bit crippled. The MacOS X version seems to be exactly like the one that I used to run on my PowerBook 1400c way back when.
Is the cause just coverting some of the document formating used in existing .DOC files? Feature wise MS Office has always kind of pissed me off, but document formating was a total sabot in the gears when trying to get my stuff to print off of windows machines at school

f.p. too

Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:00 · Score: 0

I have. Actually, that was a while ago, maybe openoffice fixed my bugs? I'll check and get back to you.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:03 · Score: 0

Easy--the same way like, at my company, they "Wanted Exchange" (nevermind that 1/2 the company uses flavors of Unix on their desktop, nor the fact that Exchange is a bloated piece of crap). I brought in Oracle Collaboration Suite, which _everyone_ can use just fine, and I *STILL* hear "Why can't we get Exchange?"

Why do they say that? Because they *KNOW* what "Exchange" is to them. They *don't* know what OCS is. Even though, to Outlook (which they insist on running) it looks just like Exchange, they "want Exchange". Even though OCS gives you a hell of a lot more functionality overall (web conferencing, Oracle Files, Processes in said OF system, etc), they *know* "what Exchange is"

"Exchange" lets me use Outlook.

"Exchange" lets me look at my subordinates' calendars in Outlook.

"Exchange" lets me have personal contact folders.

Nevermind that OCS does all the same things, plus a bunch more, and only cost us a fraction (yes, _a fraction_) of what Exchange would have cost.

Short answer: Managers want "buzzwords" not "software".
Re:honestly, I don't get it by DrSkwid · 2004-02-10 02:08 · Score: 5, Funny

can any of those run vb script macros?

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:10 · Score: 0

I have.

Try printing envelopes in Open-Office. Yeah it sorta works but plan to spend time fiddling with the settings to make it print correctly on whatever printer you have. Plus you can't print US-type postal bar codes. MS Office works better.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by NotClever · 2004-02-10 02:24 · Score: 1

Exchange wouldn't have cost them anything more or less due to the virus outbreaks. The most recent ones are targeted at Windows, not Exchange. Even the older ones out there were targeted at Outlook, not Exchange.

--
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 02:27 · Score: 2, Insightful

Just because you haven't come across the inferiority of [Star|Open]Office, doesn't mean it isn't there. Sure, it works fine for the average home user, just as MS Works would work fine.

But, just try doing enterprise strength solutions such as Sharepoint-style document management, smart documents, and so on -- it just can't be done as quickly and easily as with MS Products. Err, I mean, M$ Products.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by DrSkwid · 2004-02-10 02:29 · Score: 2, Informative

All of the Office applications are also ActiveX objects with enough methods to do *any* of the tasks one can do via kb/mouse with the GUI.

For instance I wrote some IIS script that instanciated the Word object, opened a template, filled in the contents, printed the document and then archived itself as a Word document on the server for later retrieval as required for some legal documents (these were court documents for non-payment of bills).

You can open a Word document and have it present dialog boxes and generate an Excel sheet complete with graphs etc. if you felt like it.

I don't do this stuff myself any more (I don't even know what it's called these days. It was 'Visual Basic for Applications' in my day.) but that's the kind of thing you can do.

Most MS places I've been don't use it, through ignorance usually, and have been impressed when I wrote a few scripts to repeat tasks that people seemed to like doing manually!

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:honestly, I don't get it by DukeyToo · 2004-02-10 02:32 · Score: 2, Insightful

I have no idea what other office products can do, but I know of clients that have used the Word Basic macro language to great effect. Can you do this with other office products? Is there another word processor product that exposes a complete object based API to the user, so that even a non programmer can write very impressive macros?

Also, I have tried other products over the years, but have always found the competition to be slow and buggy. The last impressive competition I saw was WordPerfect, back on Windows 3.1.

If I look again now, will I continue to be disappointed? I think I will be.

That said, I think that MS Word competitors will always lose out if they try and compete on the same platform. They need to have a little vision, and create their own market. For example, Word's big downfall is that the document is tied to the formatting. A good competitor would create something which added value to the data by separating the two. (Newer versions of Office support "XML" documents, but I doubt this is what I am talking about).

--
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:34 · Score: 0

can any of those run vb script viruses?
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Maestro4k · 2004-02-10 02:37 · Score: 4, Informative
- I have not come across anything that MS Office can do that another office programme, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice can't do.
That's not the problem, the problem is all the other people using MS Office. Even if your whole organization uses OpenOffice or StarOffice, you'll run into problems with people you do business with only using MS Office. Sometimes the documents won't look/work exactly right in anything but Office so you end up having to use it anyway, no matter how hard you try.
One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats, while WordPerfect's not changed their document format for years, MS's seems to change with ever release. I'm not sure, but I suspect the format will even change ever-so-slightly with some of the service packs. Nothing that'll affect MS Office versions, but enough to make the document a mess in anything else. Personally I dont't think this is just a coincedence, MS seems to be trying to make sure Office is the only thing companies can use without massive headaches. That's why I doubt we'll ever see it ported to Linux unless a court ordered them to, and then they'd probably find a way to hobble it enough that you still needed a Windows box to run it on for it to not cause grief.
If you're in a company that's not mandated another product, you can pretty much forget using anything buy Office happily. Last place I worked even though pretty much all the staff in my dept. preferred Word Perfect and had it on our machines, we still had to do the majority of stuff in Office because we had to deal with people outside the dept. It's insanely frustrating let me tell you. I ended up doing most of my work in Office just to save the hassle. The one thing I always used WordPerfect for was labels though, Office royally sucks for creating labels. It also sends unnecessarilly large files to the printer when it comes time to print the labels. I remember trying to print some VCR labels on an old Apple Laserwriter. Each one was a single graphic the size of the label. Couldn't get them to print, after looking at the queue size it turned out the document in the printer queue had a size of over 5MB! (The printer only had 2MB memory onboard.) What's scary is the actual .doc file was quite a bit smaller than 5MB. That's when I got a copy of WP for my work computer, when I checked its print queue size (for the same set of labels, all graphics) it was around 700k.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 02:39 · Score: 0, Troll

What kind of buzzword bullshit is "enterprise strength solutions?" back in the 90s i could have sold a god damned spork as an "e-commerce solution" and made $1,000,000,000 in an hour without backing it up. Sure it's not the 90s, but you can't have a "solution" without a problem.
Or maybe it is the fact that I do not respect capitalism, corporations, or profit motive and don't give a shit if these peopl get work done bcause they don't make anything useful, just generate more money out of thin air by dealing with other companies that do the same thing.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:49 · Score: 0

Infect other doc files.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by 99bottles · 2004-02-10 02:49 · Score: 5, Informative

I actually prefer OO for envelopes. I can't even count the number of times that I had to re-type an address when something went wrong and the MS label window had already gone away and taken the data with it. Setting up an envelope as a document makes much more sense to me.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Shados · 2004-02-10 02:58 · Score: 3, Informative

Simple enough...people here where I work use Excel for a lot of things, as they are used to it and it gets the job done (which in the end, is what matters). Some things they do in Excel, to interract with our other programs, require update of an SQL Server database, or because we are switching from a legacy system, even an update of Foxpro stuff, ODBC connections, sending files over the network, etc. We can just reuse our VB dlls and import them in those macros and such, so it takes seconds to make them, it gets the job done, and the employes can still work with excel. In the end, its more productive. I hate Microsoft's products as much as the next guy, but in many case, they're what does the job best.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by IANAAC · 2004-02-10 02:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

But, just try doing enterprise strength solutions such as Sharepoint-style document management, smart documents, and so on -- it just can't be done as quickly and easily as with MS Products. Err, I mean, M$ Products.

But the fact of the matter is that it can be done with non-MS products (easier, I might add). Whether you think Microsoft's solutions are easier and quicker are, well, subjective, just as much as any other option.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by mr_z_beeblebrox · 2004-02-10 03:02 · Score: 1

As a linux user and a Windows user and an admin of a large homogenous network I can tell you this. I simply do not like open office or star office. Don't like them at all, don't like their interfaces of file pickers etc... I also don't like Outlook, I prefer e-mail clients that are well, e-mail clients. So I use Office (currently 2003) and for mail I use whatever is handy for e-mail (on my Linux boxes) usually K-mail. So, I do not frown on people replacing Office I just say make sure that your users are comfortable with what you put out. (Yes I tried using it, and still do occasionally).
So remember, open source is about having a choice. Remember some people may choose something you don't like. I use Office because I choose to.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 03:10 · Score: 2, Funny

Being anti-capitalist, anti-corporation, and anti-profit motive precludes you from comprehending the definition of such "buzzword bullshit." I'll try to break it down into language even you can understand. Okay, so let's picture a system that isn't capitalist, corporate, and has no profit motive, and let's call this system, oh, I don't know, Communism. So this Communism thing is going to have lots and lots of people doing lots and lots of different things: farmers, doctors, waiters, etc (none of which, of course, will be motivated by profit, just the love of being a Garbage man). In Communism, a lot of time will be spent in something called "overhead," which well define as people not doing things that relate to their job function. A doctor managing his schedule, a delivery guy filling out forms, and so on. Now, since no one will be motivated by saving money, we'll just assume they'll be motivated to save time. Maybe that's a bad assumption, since it seems in Communism, everyone loves their job, but still, let's work with it. To save time, we would need to cut overhead and make processes more efficient. Some times, this will be very complicated and difficult. For a large organization, lets say, a Police Department (perhaps another bad assumption, as I'm sure communism will have no crime), they'll have lots and lots of information going from place to place that, often times, is disseminated and processed multiple times by multiple people throughout the organization. I hope I didn't loose you there. This is where the "enterprise strength solutions" will come in. To maximize productivity, we'll need to maximize information organization and processing throughout the organization. This is a complicated task, as it involves many facets of the organization, and requires tools that can manage this task. [Open|Star|K]Office just simply can't cut it, they just simply don't have the power. Hence, "enterprise strength tools," such as MS Office, Sharepoint, exchange, etc, are the tools for the job.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by IANAAC · 2004-02-10 03:13 · Score: 1

That's not the problem, the problem is all the other people using MS Office. Even if your whole organization uses OpenOffice or StarOffice, you'll run into problems with people you do business with only using MS Office. Sometimes the documents won't look/work exactly right in anything but Office so you end up having to use it anyway, no matter how hard you try.

If I were still using OpenOffice 1.0 I would agree with you. But since I've upgraded to 1.1 I have not had any problems with layout. Macros, yes, but layout no. And I receive a lot of Word docs (I do translations as well as sys admin work). What probably matters more is the fact that I'm pretty upfront with my clients as to the software I use. I tell them that I don't use Word, but I can read/write in that format. I suspect that they trim their files a bit prior to sending them to me. In any case, with OpenOffice 1.1 I'm able to send them the same formatting that I received - everything preserved.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by 13Echo · 2004-02-10 03:18 · Score: 1

You could at least be more specific and say "VB script macro virus."
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 03:20 · Score: 1

But the fact of the matter is that it can be done with non-MS products (easier, I might add). Whether you think Microsoft's solutions are easier and quicker are, well, subjective, just as much as any other option.
Well, if that's the case, then why isn't that a key selling point? It seems to me, the big selling points of OpenOffice are "It's Free," "It's Non-MS," and, "It's free." This is the first time I have ever heard that the alternative solutions are easier (translates to developed cheaper), and I still find it incredibly hard to believe. I can't immagine *any* situation that using C++/PhP to develop something like a Sharepoint portal would be faster than .NET (assuming, of course, expertise in both technologies). I'd be very interested to see case studies, or evern anecdotes to this.
Spending $100k on software solutions may seem like a lot, but if it saves $10M, then it's chump change. I get a lot of flack by this OpenSource community becasue I use evil-M$ products, when instead i should use OpenSource. Instead of being all Luke-Skywalker vs. the Empire, why not demonstrate ease of development and maintenace.
When it comes down to it, the cost of software and tools are minute compared to the cost of developing. We'll drop $20k on a RDMS, but $50k developing a database. So please, evidence. I'm somewhat open minded.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:23 · Score: 0

That is what PDF and RTF are for. Even in high school and college-level communications and writing classes, they tell you that you should use these formats instead of proprietary formats. I gues that people are just too stupid/lazy to listen.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 03:38 · Score: 1

VB Macros can do quite a lot ... assist in filling out forms (i.e., to make sure a Customer Number is properly formatted, to allow a search/update on a Customer Address), submitting documents to a server. They're fast and easy to write. A few lines of code, and you've got a Smart Document.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 04:11 · Score: 1

I once had a Marketing Manager who was totally convinced that Flash was going to save our company. Apparently he went to newgrounds.com and thought it was hilarious, so wanted us to switch to using flash to present company products as the front end. He insisted we install the flash program (not plugin) on his machine so he could get inside it right away. For three months he typed his emails up, then pasted them into flash and sent attachments as flash movies for his normal email.
You'd get an email with an attachment that had a 15 second long bouncing ball intro that you couldn't skip, only to be told that you had a meeting in 20 minutes. It was interesting times. Coincidentally, he and his brother got fired after they threw a chair at the CEO during a company meeting, who then in turn stapled one of them 10 or so times in the chest and face. Good times, good times.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by jridley · 2004-02-10 04:20 · Score: 1

Support multiple monitors for presentations.

This should be simple to do. I just built a system for my church to do presentations on a projector, and it looks like we'll have to buy a copy of Office just for this reason. I've got OpenOffice installed everywhere else, and it can do the presentations, but it doesn't support multiple monitors.

I've seen others complaining about this also.

The only reason I can think of to not support it is if they don't want it to be supported on Windows (where I'm told by other programmers it's very easy to do) and not Linux (where people on a couple of different boards have said it's not easy).
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:22 · Score: 0

All those words, so little meaning. Your attempt to sound smart backfired when you surpassed the attention span of even the most trained monkeys.
That being said, you are an ass and you need to get laid. Thank you.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by PhotoGuy · 2004-02-10 04:28 · Score: 1

Maybe for the light weight user, Star/OpenOffice are quite complete (and always improving), but I've occasionally stumbled across stowstoppers that have sent me back to office, typically in the more advanced features.

(For example, summarizing bank statements, using PivotTable to create a item/monthly-total table from bank statements; DataPilot will create the summary table, but I can't find a way for it to easily group and sums things together into months, like PivotTable allows.)

--
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Tin+Foil+Hat · 2004-02-10 04:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

Obviously not, but some of them can do similar stuff, if not as well. OOo Writer, for instance, can use (non-VB) macros to do many things. I use them to write scripts that convert word and excel docs to HTML on the fly. I get approximately the same conversion quality you find over at google.

--
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Re:honestly, I don't get it by peter_gzowski · 2004-02-10 05:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

I don't have a lot of experience using word processors, but I have switched people over to Linux, and the number one complaint is OpenOffice. Here are the complaints:

- It's slow, reaaaalllly slow (yes, OO 1.1 is slower than MS Office 2000).
- Where is Times New Roman? (Windows font, not installed by default)
- These fonts look weird, and strain my eyes. (OK, turn off anti-aliased fonts)
- It doesn't do lists easily. Do this in OpenOffice 1.1:
1. item one (enter)
It may number the next line 2. but if you hit the increase indent button, it does not go to 1.1, and it's not easy to figure out how to make it do this. It took me 20 minutes to figure out for my wife how to do this.
- It doesn't remember the last font you told it to use. Choose a font, do stuff, close OO, open OO, back to Nimbus Roman.

Some complaints were just vague. I had a girl who had done some secretarial temping, and told me that she felt OpenOffice was "written yesterday" and that it was not nearly sophisticated enough for her day-to-day use. This frustrated me, because I wanted to know what specifically was deficient, but I didn't press it, as converting people to Linux is a delicate operation, and I just try to give people what they want. So I just said, fine, we'll put MS Office on it for you.

--
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Re:honestly, I don't get it by seann · 2004-02-10 05:22 · Score: 1

word perfect?

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I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by MrScience · 2004-02-10 05:23 · Score: 1

Some changes, however, are actually for the better.

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You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Re:honestly, I don't get it by WindBourne · 2004-02-10 05:23 · Score: 1

If explaining security holes and the cost of it would make users and companies switch, they would have done so over the last 5 years. Sales ppl have been saying this for years but to no avail (of course, the $'s that appear in there eyes, the sweaty hand shake and the smirk on their face when money is mentioned, might be responsible as well).

The real problem is that even as adults we have the attitude that nothing can hurt us. We see the stats, we know that the other company got nailed with it. But it can not happen to us since we are paying out more for admins than others. The costs are hidden until you get hit, but at that time, it is too late to walk away.

--
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by 4of12 · 2004-02-10 05:25 · Score: 1

One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats,

This is one of the two biggest reasons for continuing dominance of MS Office (the other being that the installed base of users are effectively pre-trained most closely to Word's UI.).

It's also a vulnerability.

Someone with clout needs to nail down any one single specification of .doc and how it is supposed to be displayed and printed.

Someone like EMCA or the U.S. federal government.

No, don't mandate use of open source software.

Yes, do insist that any application, open source or proprietary, store data files in a completely-specified open format.

--
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Re:honestly, I don't get it by IronicCheese · 2004-02-10 05:52 · Score: 1

This guy got modded as funny, and he should have been given "Insightful" -- the ability to execute VBA script is a huge gain. Large corporations customize their distributions of Word throughout the enterprise with custom email, form, and word processing apps, and MSFT knows this and encourages this.

If you don't see Word as a platform, you're missing the point.

OO will never have a chance in these markets unless and until it can do the same.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Darby · 2004-02-10 06:00 · Score: 1

Coincidentally, he and his brother got fired after they threw a chair at the CEO during a company meeting, who then in turn stapled one of them 10 or so times in the chest and face. Good times, good times.

Please tell me that you have a more complete write-up of your trials and tribulations at this company up on the web.

I find your stories intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by sirshannon · 2004-02-10 06:03 · Score: 1

The 2 most used MS Office apps for me are Outlook and Access. Are either of those in OpenOffice or StarOffice? Not the last time I checked. Word is in 3rd position on my list, so let's make it simple and say word is 1/3 of my MS Office usage. That means StarOffice and OpenOffice are lacking 2/3 of my needed functionality.

Anecdotal and simplified, but definitely meets the "MS Office can do that another office programme, such as StarOffice or OpenOffice can't do" criteria and explains why I (and many others) have not and have not made the switch.

--
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 06:06 · Score: 0

Yeah, I mean, how else are we supposed to get infected with VBS macro viruses?
Re:honestly, I don't get it by davecb · 2004-02-10 06:08 · Score: 1

DrSkwid asks: can any of those run vb script macros?
I rather hope not! I'd prefer them to run sandboxed, safey'd-off, strongly-restricted mechanisms that don't attract virus writers.
--dave

--
davecb@spamcop.net
Re:honestly, I don't get it by nineoneone · 2004-02-10 07:03 · Score: 1

Just saying something over and over doesn't actually make it so. You parrotting MS propaganda is just so much noise. "enterprise strngth tools" is simply jargon and doesn't support your assertion that OO/star et al "simply don't have the power".

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sig under development
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Brandybuck · 2004-02-10 07:04 · Score: 1

No they can't, and that is a good thing. Documents should be documents, not executables. In the real world, very few people embed VB scripts in documents. You may have a need to write a script, but you won't have a need to embed that script in a document.

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Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 07:24 · Score: 1

Just saying something over and over doesn't actually make it so.
The same holds true for your side. As I've said before, the key selling points of OO/Star are "free," "not M$," and "free." If infact it can do the enterprise level(*) things, then why not sell it. I haven't heard anyone tout these features. Let's hear them. And Leave out the "well, any competent C++ programmer could modify the xyz module and do the same thing, since it is open source after all."
* If "Enterprise" is such a stupid buzzword jargon ... what term would be more appropriate for "large, organization-wide information system." Or is that just an area that isn't explored because it's "evil corporate"?
Re:honestly, I don't get it by DrSkwid · 2004-02-10 07:25 · Score: 1

I don't advocate it as the model to follow but seeing Word as just a word processing program misses it's power.

Office is more like a set of APIs that happen to have GUIs.

And now I shall ramble on a bit not really in response to your comment but just because I've got the muse.

We should really thank our lucky stars from a freedom point of view that the Microsoft Network came just too late to be outshone by the Internet. The combined power of Office Servers and Office Clients would be much more difficult to usurp had it taken hold.

Ironically I think that users have suffered from the fragmentation. A closely coupled client/server combination with such a huge installed base could really have brought an interesting outcome. I thknk the result of this failure to dominate then brought about the will to try and force the issue through the draconic OEM deals that brought about the subsequent DoJ prosecution. They had a great vision and didn't want to let it go.

We will have to wait much longer for the benefits such tight coupling can bring. The stateless web browser is a *really* crappy platform for networked applications, that's how we ended up with Javascript but it is a crufty model.

Oh well, the market will find something eventually. I envision that KDE will probably be the first to bring something neat but IE's entrenchment is now a *major* stumbling block for innovation and IE7 will just be playing catch up. It's going to be a long time so sit back and sip some gin & juice while we wait.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 07:53 · Score: 0

I use open office exclusively, with no problems reading MicroShit doc files. When I need to send a file to a client, I simply save it as a pdf, and mail it out, without worrying what word processor (or version thereof) they use.

Any alterations are done in house, so staff either uses OO or nothing. Ditto any home office work, which is no problem, as OO for Win works fine as well.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by mOdQuArK! · 2004-02-10 08:17 · Score: 1

the ability to execute VBA script is a huge pain

You had a small typo in your statement there.

People who haven't taken the time & effort to learn secure programming concepts (and yes, writing macros _is_ programming) should only be allowed to perform their trial-and-error attempts in carefully-supervised, self-contained environments. The Microsoft Office VBA environment does not qualify as such.

This doesn't even touch the restrictions that should be placed on people willing run every macro virus that comes along.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:25 · Score: 0

> some IIS script that instanciated the Word object

FYI -- this doesn't really work under any load. Word is single threaded.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:30 · Score: 0

Can I just refute two minor ponts in this article.

1. Most versions of word are incompatible with each other. Try it. Honestly, the reason most people don't know this is that they don't exchange documents. Any company that's updated one version of Word to another would know that a lot of time and effort is required to "migrate" the documents.

2. WordPerfect does change its formats. We're currently suffering because some documents were written in WP8, WP7, WP6 and WP for Unix. Just like Microsoft, these are causing us no end of headaches. The unix formats cause some versions of WP for Windows to crash!!

Thanks

AC
Re:honestly, I don't get it by HalliS · 2004-02-10 08:37 · Score: 1

Here are some things that are missing from OOo that bug me:
*no track changes
*not able to shrink all fonts in a single document at once (say, all by 30%)
bullets and numbering not as easy to use (changing the bullet-style for each bullet level)

I love OOo, but it's not perfect.

--

My other UID is 1337
Re:honestly, I don't get it by HalliS · 2004-02-10 08:45 · Score: 1
4th paragraph, 1st line:
- "[..] buy Office happily."
NEVER
--

My other UID is 1337
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Brandybuck · 2004-02-10 08:56 · Score: 1

The stateless web browser is a *really* crappy platform for networked applications

The web browser was never intended to be a platform!

--
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Re:honestly, I don't get it by weileong · 2004-02-10 09:08 · Score: 1

Hey man - this is a story that needs to be told. In detail.

You can't just tell us these things and NOT everything!!!
Re:honestly, I don't get it by DrSkwid · 2004-02-10 09:21 · Score: 1

I know Berners-Lee didn't envisage it to work out that way (he was annoyed when graphics were added!) but by IE3 in 1996 when Microsoft introduced ActiveX and Java they knew exactly where they wanted it to head.

Nine days after release and we started to see how this leverage would *really* pan out with the discovery of the fly in the ointment in the guise of "The Princeton Word Macro Virus Loophole". You could make IE download files in the background which would be auto-opened via their mime-type. It got it's name from being able to supply a Word document with an on-open macro. Being Windows 95 this meant an introduction to remote root exploits via web pages. "Information at Your Fingertips" indeed.

--
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 11:26 · Score: 0

fuck your vb script macros
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 11:55 · Score: 0

One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats,
This is one of the two biggest reasons for continuing dominance of MS Office (the other being that the installed base of users are effectively pre-trained most closely to Word's UI.).

Actually I find it an argument for Openoffice instead. Ever tried to open word documents with older versions of word?
Re:honestly, I don't get it by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 12:18 · Score: 1

Ok, ok, you convinced me. Here goes:
The company, who shall remain nameless, was based in the East Coast and dealt strictly with fortune 500 companies. My coworkers and I were working on 'content' CD's for these companies. We had two delivery methods historically, that was paper and standup. With the rush of the Internet came a nice little VC nestegg of cashola toward brining our company online.
The company did 85% business paper and standup, and 15% online. Dazzled by the online potential, the company severed the 85% part and went fully to online. We hired a flash in the pants new Director of Marketing, who was your typical soccer style guy, but very nice in his defense. He was not necessarily rooted in reality however, and decided that Flash was going to really get this company the attention it deserved.
So they took the new VC money and bought up like 100 employees from all aspects of the business. We had such culture shock that the management team was ineffective at best. I get pissed thinking about it sometimes because I was there before the hiring rush, and once they got the employees they didn't have the work for the new guys yet because of the process. So all these fresh young new faces played Quake 3 Arena from 9 to 5 for $1000 a week. This lasted for about 4 months. I had to work the whole time, and I really really love Quake. Sigh.
So it is decided by the Marketing Director that we are going to use flash for the front end of the "content" (I am being cryptic to protect the peoples I am speaking of.) Because of the sheer complexity of what we were doing, we had a lot of issues to solve. We were constantly trying to figure out how to store varialbes from flash into ram to the database, etc etc. (This was around version 4 of flash, so not as easy as today.) We suggested using Director to really make things stand out, but the MD said no, and had us install Flash Program Main on his computer so he could figure out things like passing variables and other such Marketing mystique.
The main problem here was that the MD and the Art Director (AD) just about hated eachother. The marketing guy had seen some really cool things and wanted to represent them in his product, but the art guy had done so much acid at a Floyd show 20 years ago that he wasn't going to abandon the rainbow idea he had now matter what. (God, it was awful. He literally justified every color of the almost-exact ripoff of Dark Side of the Moon cd cover. And I quote, "The yellow symbolizes the freedom in all of us. It pours freely from the main collective and makes us feel at ease." Jesus H Christ where do they find these people?
The CEO trusted his man the AD, rainbows and all, and told the MD to stick to his shtick, which was of course Marketing. The MD laid down the law during a quarterly company meeting. The Deadhead goes or he goes! Well the CEO told him to STFU and sit the fsck down or else, and the MD just picked up a chair and hucked it at the CEO with all his might. His brother also worked with us as a VP and he stood up to help increase the momentum of the chair on it's way to the CEO. CEO grabs the nearest object (a stapler, not red though) and gives the MD a few good staples to the chin and neck area. I sat nearby and filed doughnut after doughnut into my empty laptop case.
6 months later they laid off everyone they hired plus another 50%. I am not sure how they are now.
Re:honestly, I don't get it by 24-bit+Voxel · 2004-02-10 12:27 · Score: 1

I don't actually, perhaps it is time to start a blog. :) I put some more detail below if you are interested.
Vox
Re:honestly, I don't get it by Darby · 2004-02-11 01:12 · Score: 1

I'm sorry you had to go through all that, but that is freaking hilarious.

Wise move on the donuts. You seem the sort who can tell which way the wind is blowing ;-)
Re:honestly, I don't get it by omynous · 2004-02-11 17:45 · Score: 1

One of the problems is MS's ever-changing document formats, while WordPerfect's not changed their document format for years, MS's seems to change with ever release.
I got bit by this a while back. We had an old word file from backup that we needed and Office XP corrupted it beyond use. We finally found an old paper copy from the archives, and re-entered it into Office XP, so a recent copy could be kept.
Presuming that Microsoft will not break their own compatability is a fallacy.
Shannon Mann

--
A comment overheard in a corn field `If you have better ideas, lets hear them. I am all ears.'

comment... by freerecords · 2004-02-10 01:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

"Also, it is easy to find Oracle admins for support."

And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?

--
tim

Re:comment... by I+Be+Hatin' · 2004-02-10 01:59 · Score: 4, Funny

And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?
Competent ones?

--
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
Re:comment... by banzai51 · 2004-02-10 02:02 · Score: 0

RTFA. They are Unix gurus who are above piddly Windows admins. If they can't get it running right, no one can. Common story in old unix shops. They can't get off thier high horse long enough to hire someone with experience on the MS platform.
Re:comment... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 0

And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?

That's easy.

Now try finding good Windows admins. I don't mean MCSE-theory-smart idiots, those resumes go straight to the shredder. I mean many years of experience, can speak about networking in a generic IP sense, etc. The 28 year old neighbourhood kid living in his parents' basement and building boxes doesn't count.
Re:comment... by UnknowingFool · 2004-02-10 02:10 · Score: 1

And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?
In this context he was talking stricly about databases and why he cose a proprietary DB like Oracle over the OS ones like MySQL and ProgreSQL.
One point that is missed is that in his case, the company was already using Unix in many areas. Since they had to unify their IT structure after mergers, it only made sense for them to migrate to Linux. With Linux they could migrate certain servers from Windows that may have not feasible (Intel boxes) or cost-effective with Unix. I wouldn't say that anything he did was ground-breaking, but rather it was just practical.

--
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Re:comment... by jusdisgi · 2004-02-10 02:30 · Score: 2, Insightful

And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?

No, it's plenty easy to find Windows admins....it's just really tough (read: not possible) to get ahold of a Windows database stack with the performance, reliability, and scalability of Oracle on AIX.

But of course, the important thing here is that Windows wasn't even one of the stated possibilities; it couldn't even really be considered for this. The choices were Linux (on a big Altix box...probably 20+ procs) or AIX (on a 24-proc), either way with Oracle. They mention that the OSS databases aren't there, but it seems to go without saying that Windows doesn't fit in this market segment. What, are you going to use MS SQL Server? Give me a break.

--
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Re:comment... by Nplugd · 2004-02-10 02:55 · Score: 1

This should be moderated funny, not insightful. Come on, working with ms products does not make someone bad in his field.
No, really.
Don't stare at me like that, I'm scared.

--
Je n'ai pas d'avenir Je n'ai qu'un destin Celui de n'être qu'un souvenir C'est pour demain
Re:comment... by arkanes · 2004-02-10 03:11 · Score: 1

MS will happily sell you SQL Server for that sort of market. You're supposed to cluster instead of using big iron. I imagine that this would work fine for the vast majority of even high end oracle installations (and I seriously doubt most oracle isntallations are actually that high end - certainly none of the ones I've come across). I can't speak to the price/performance ratio of clustering vrs big iron, but I would tend to assume that clustering would be cheaper but with a somewhat lower cap on absolute performance.
Re:comment... by autophile · 2004-02-10 03:17 · Score: 1

"Also, it is easy to find Oracle admins for support."
And it isn't easy to find Windoze admins?

I think he was talking about using Oracle versus using MySQL or some other open-source database. Thus, it's easier to find Oracle admins than it is to find MySQL/whateverDB admins.
--Rob

--
Towards the Singularity.
Re:comment... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:20 · Score: 0

Wrong answer, junior. I'm a *nix admin, and here's the scoop: if you've worked with LDAP and know a bit about Windows clients (a bit in *nix vernacular means you've read beyond "left click this and that", which is the norm for 'doze admins), it takes about a week of reading up on DNS, Active Directory, policies, and GPO's in order to field a decent server configuration. Throw in another week for test bedding and there you go!

Already passed a security audit and the domains, clients, and users are doing fine.
Re:comment... by jusdisgi · 2004-02-10 05:06 · Score: 1

Of course MS would sell you SQL Server for that market. The point is, no one in that market would buy it, because your crazy pipedream notwithstanding, it isn't now, and will likely never be, in the same league as Oracle in any of the three qualifications I gave above (performance, reliability, and scalability).

My employer has completely migrated away from MS SQL Server to PostgreSQL on Linux, for performance, security, and reliability reasons. And this guy doesn't consider Postgres ready for him. So....my guess (and I'm not really going out on any limbs here) is that neither he, nor anyone else with his level of requirements, would or should even consider Windows or MS SQL for the job.

--
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.

Linux alert by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 01:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

They probably want to acquire more machines for Windows. Hence they are advertising their liking for open source stuff so that Steve Ballmer will visit them soon and offer to shave off 90% of the price + free training.

Governments can always have second thougts.... by Groote+Ka · 2004-02-10 01:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

Over the past time, I've noticed more and more news coming from Australia that Australia will comply with US economical requirements, as the US is a very important trade partner for Australia. What if George W. ask Mr. Howard nicely to implement US software in all government applications?

Fortunately, on the other hand more and more government institutions give Linux a fair chance as well in competing with Microsoft and especially on the cost side, Linux (and other open source) wins! (Community of Munich, Amsterdam is considering it and I bet there are more examples)

About time, I could really welcome a tax cut. I hate to lose my tax money on Microsoft.

Re:Governments can always have second thougts.... by leerpm · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 1

It is one thing to 'play nice' and bring your country's laws into sync with anothers. It is an entirely different matter for one country to ask another to send off its money to foreign suppliers instead of using local suppliers. No government leader is that stupid. Mr. Howard would be committing political suicide to favour the opinions of one foreign leaders, over the loss of jobs in his homeland.
Re:Governments can always have second thougts.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:23 · Score: 0

What if George W. ask Mr. Howard nicely to implement US software in all government applications?

Redhat is based in the USA isn't it?
Re:Governments can always have second thougts.... by Jaywalk · 2004-02-10 02:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

What if George W. ask Mr. Howard nicely to implement US software in all government applications?
You mean suck up to Microsoft while angering IBM? Ain't gonna happen. While politicians try to curry favor with special interests, they have to do it without angering other special interests. The last thing George and Company need in an election year is another story that paints him as pandering to a particular company. And a move like that would guarantee that Microsoft's enemies would see that the story got a lot of press time.

--
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Re:Governments can always have second thougts.... by twinpot · 2004-02-10 02:35 · Score: 1

Actually, I think Oz is mighty close to telling GWB where he can stick his "free trade" deal, as it's beginning to look rather one sided, in favour (favor?!) of guess who?

Seems free trade wouldn't apply to agriculture and several other industries in which Australia is more competitive.
Re:Governments can always have second thougts.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:49 · Score: 0

What if George W. ask Mr. Howard nicely to implement US software in all government applications?

It is rumoured Bill Gates himself told the previous prime minister to use Microsoft or else!
Re:Governments can always have second thougts.... by Groote+Ka · 2004-02-10 03:04 · Score: 1

The last thing George and Company need in an election year is another story that paints him as pandering to a particular company.

Well, there's still the export benefit from the US government for US companies, including Microsoft. The EU is not happy with that and it's quite probable that there are going to be penalty fees for import of that kind of products.
But for a lot of products, you already know who the victims will be. Not the companies...

another staticians aphorism by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 01:57 · Score: 1

there are lies, damned lies, and statistics -- Mark Twain

Re:another staticians aphorism by BetterThanCaesar · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 1

Especially since Twain didn't even coin it; he just quoted it in his autobiography. The grandparent might wanna google for Benjamin Disraeli.

--
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Re:another staticians aphorism by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 02:26 · Score: 1

i /might/ want to do a lot of things, but seeing as how i disrespect mathmatics it's not bloody likely.
Re:another staticians aphorism by Vann_v2 · 2004-02-10 05:18 · Score: 1

Don't let your mathmatician friends know. Damn mathmaticians.

Interesting article! by Dogers · 2004-02-10 01:58 · Score: 1, Interesting

Always good to hear about some large company/organisations plan to move over to linux - its just a shame its missing more of the technical details..

i'm forever curious to know how everything integrates - think Active Directory on windows, is there such a thing for linux? if not, how do users login to various machines? how is the fileserver secured?

--
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.

Re:Interesting article! by leerpm · 2004-02-10 02:06 · Score: 1

Yes, Samba. Keep in mind it does not have all of the advanced features and capabilities of Active Directory, but for basic setups it is usually enough.
Re:Interesting article! by Dogers · 2004-02-10 02:25 · Score: 0

wierd, that didnt reply right, but anyway

i've used samba as a client, to access windows shares before, but never really read into it as a server..

is samba actually suited to serving linux desktops, as opposed to NFS or something? i always assumed it was a crossover to basically enable windows file sharing..?

--
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Re:Interesting article! by Yue · 2004-02-10 02:43 · Score: 2, Informative

NIS, LDAP, Kerberos, even samba. Pick the one that suits your environment.
Re:Interesting article! by mu-sly · 2004-02-10 02:47 · Score: 4, Informative

Not only does Samba 3 support Active Directory (see "Major New Features" on that page), but it's also 2.5 times faster than Win2k3 Server in the same role, and scales up considerably better as well.

Kinda funny how Samba kicks the shit out of the thing it was designed to emulate, once again showing that Open Source is A Good Thing(tm).

--
Organic free-range music... yum!
Re:Interesting article! by LilMikey · 2004-02-10 03:15 · Score: 1

SAMBA Is Not An Emulator...

err, that's not right.

--
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
Re:Interesting article! by mu-sly · 2004-02-10 05:29 · Score: 1

SAMBA Is Not An Emulator...

Mu-Sly is not a dictionary! Still, my bad on the choice of words. You knew what I meant though, dag nammit!

--
Organic free-range music... yum!

Linux much cheaper! by MooKore+2004 · 2004-02-10 01:58 · Score: 0

I use it as my main OS. The only reason why Windows is on my system is because I have an old copy (Windows 2000) that I use just for mucking about with. With your typical Linux Distro, you get a Operating System, Desktop Environment, Office Suite, Multimedia Player, Internet Suite, Games, Development tools, Image editors, Document publishers, Movie production tools and More for a very low cost. Most of them are absolutley free as in beer. So what are you waiting for. If you havent tried Linux yet, then grab your self a copy

--
found here

Re:Linux much cheaper! by Lumpy · 2004-02-10 02:20 · Score: 4, Insightful

Movie production tools

Really? I cant find ANYTHING for linux... even something I could buy that can do movie production..

kino and the other early alpha video editing software and tools cant even touch a 10 year old version of Premiere (Premiere version 4.x) I have tried Cinderella (sucks, cant use DV2 files and crashes alot!) I bought Main Actor... it also can't edit DV2 files or anything standard for movie production that is for anything but low quality web release and it also crashes like a madman..

Finally there is absolutely nothing available for linux that can do anything that After Effects can do. and there is nothing available for DVD creation that is even useable.. DVDlab is desperately needed to be ported to linux...

I desperately want to be able to do my video editing on linux, it can not be done right now. I tried, wasted 6 months trying my hardest. Main Actor has been all but abandoned on the linux side, Cinderella is not interested in performance/stability but is on a "ooooh Shiney! New features!" kick for the past 2 years and is still only early alpha quality.

I would be 100% microsoft free if I could do my video editing and full DVD creation under linux..

but it can not be done right now.

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Linux much cheaper! by JeffTL · 2004-02-10 02:51 · Score: 4, Informative

Do you want Linux video editing or just non-Windows video editing? Right now, Mac OS X is probably the best operating system for video editing, simply because of the software that works on it: iMovie (good for most purposes), Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, and Avid.
Re:Linux much cheaper! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:01 · Score: 0

Finally there is absolutely nothing available for linux that can do anything that After Effects can do.

There is Apple Shake for Linux. However, it is high-end software, not cable-tv toy.
Re:Linux much cheaper! by Arielholic · 2004-02-10 03:45 · Score: 1

"Movie production tools

Really? I cant find ANYTHING for linux... even something I could buy that can do movie production..
"

Shake is also available for linux, from the apple site: (http://www.apple.com/shake)

"Shake 3 is also available for Linux for a suggested retail price of $9,900 (US) with an annual maintenance of $1485 (US). Render-only versions of Shake 3 are free on Mac OS X and are available for Linux for a suggested retail price of $3,900 (US) with an annual maintenance of $585 (US). Contact an Apple Authorized Professional Film Reseller to purchase."
Re:Linux much cheaper! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:50 · Score: 0

that's ok, Microsoft Office professional 2003 for linux is available for $30,000.00 for running on a linux platform, plus a 19,000.00 required yearly maintaince fee.

it's extortion... apple is just good at extortion same as microsoft...

as the renderer is free on a mac yet costs more than a mac for linux... that's extortion if I have ever seen it.

besides Shake3 is not a very impressive program... I'd go with Avid over it any day....

Lumpy was asking about REAL offerings...
Re:Linux much cheaper! by HermanZA · 2004-02-10 05:56 · Score: 1

Well gee Pixar and Disney make their movies on Linux...

Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by heironymouscoward · 2004-02-10 01:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

Product L is free, widely available from a variety of sources who compete purely on technical quality, and designed principally by its own users to be portable, reliable, and as efficient as possible.

Product W (its primary competitor) is sold at quite a high price, by a single vendor who relies on marketing, market position, and features to sell the product. The product's users have little to say about the evolution of the product and nothing at all to say about its internal design.

The vendor of product W releases studies which it pays for proving that W is cheaper to own than L. Later, a large field trial proves that product L is, actually cheaper than product W. ... duh.

Who is kidding who here? There is a very good reason that small businesses with any technical savvy at all jump onto the Linux/OSS bandwagon as soon as they possibly can. It saves money.

Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first.

--
Ceci n'est pas une signature

Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by MisanthropicProggram · 2004-02-10 02:13 · Score: 2, Insightful

"convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first"
This has been a concern of mine. Whenever I have to send a doc via email, it's ALWAYS assumed to be in some MS Office format. I would switch to OpenOffice, but I'm afraid that when MS comes out with a new version, it will break any compatibility that OpenOffice has and any doc I send will look like shit - if I'm lucky - or not be able to be viewed at all.
MS Office is the defacto office suite is the US and if you don't comply, you're SOL.

--
There is no spoon or sig.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Apreche · 2004-02-10 02:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

Another note to evangelists. If people only use word and have no need for spreadsheets databases and such. Convert them to abiword on windows first. My usual conversion strategy is thunderbird firefUx, abiword and gaim. Once they've got that down if they like it I say, you know... all the software on linux is like that. In fact, the whole os is like that.

--
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by DarkSarin · 2004-02-10 02:16 · Score: 2, Insightful

You know, I used to think that you were correct (at least that line of thinking), but there is a little snag to the logic--MS is unlikely to break backwards compatibility with its own office suite. That said, many people may need to upgrade to see documents produced by the newer, but the newer will always be able to read the older.

Otherwise they lose some of the "vendor lockin" that makes them so powerful...

just a thought

--
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by MisanthropicProggram · 2004-02-10 02:26 · Score: 1

I know what you're saying and you're right. The thing that's concerning me - go into MS Word. Do a "Save As". You'll see a bunch of choices. Amoung them: Word 2.0 for Windows, Word 5.1 for Mac, Word 6.0/95 etc. .... It looks like they have to add backwords compatibility for thenselves.
Why do they have to add all those choices for older versions of Word? Will OpenOffice have to do this too?

--
There is no spoon or sig.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by tr0llb4rt0 · 2004-02-10 02:27 · Score: 1

It not so much as break backwards compatibility but the slight changes of *features* that don't affect older versions of MSOffice but have undesirable effects in OO or KOffice.

A nice standard document format exists in rtf. Surely standardised presentation formats or spreadsheet formats are available. (Not an office user so I can't be sure)

--
Worst .sig ever!
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by RailGunner · 2004-02-10 02:30 · Score: 1

I haven't looked lately, but MS used to release free viewers for their Office format documents (ala Adode Acrobat Reader).. if they're still doing this, you should just get these until you build up your confidence using OpenOffice.
As far as sending documents that need to look a certain way, have you considered other formats then .doc? (PDF, HTML, TeX, RTF (hahahahah ok I'm only kidding on that one)
But seriously - OpenOffice 1.1 will let you export your docs as .pdf files.. and Acrobat Reader is everywhere..
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by naryco · 2004-02-10 02:31 · Score: 1

I believe that the users of product W have much to say about the evolution of the product. More so, in many cases, than the users of product L.

As the product W is a commercial product, the sole reason for its existence is to bring money to the vendor. Money that comes only if the users decide to buy the product. Thus there is very strong incentive to listen to what the users of the product W want.

The Product L on the other hand is not a commercial product and the reason for its existence is not to please the users but the developers of the product. In some happy occasions the needs of the developers and the users are same, but that is not always the case.

Combine with the stronger incentive to please the users the larger amount of available resourcers, it is not surpising that the Product W is in many cases superior to Product L - from the users point of view.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:33 · Score: 0

OOo has one click PDF creation. Much better than any other format for consistentcy across unknown platforms. Even sharing between various MS machines can have issues if uncommon fonts were used. Maybe the people you share with are different but the documents I have been downloading from various companies tend to be in PDF. More and more my advice to those asking about sharing documents with others is, use PDF. OOo does this for free where M$ ... well you get the idea.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Mister+Moose · 2004-02-10 02:34 · Score: 1

does open office have anything like an equation editer in ms office? just curious also, one of excels big drawbacks is that it'd be nice if it had a numerical integration feature such as cubic splines.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by kinnell · 2004-02-10 02:43 · Score: 3, Insightful

Initial cost is insignificant compared to administration, support, training, etc. Many companies have a significant investment in windows infrastructure with custom software, experienced administrators, etc for whom switching to OSS would take years to pay off, if it did at all. In short, while the windows TCO claims are laughable, it's not obvious at all that linux saves money.

--
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Ubi_NL · 2004-02-10 03:03 · Score: 1

Is that really so?

* A 'supported' version of linux (RH enterprise) is more expensive than windows as you have to pay a licence each year

* A free (beer) linux is hardly ever supported for more than 2 years (RH9?), whereas MS win 98 is still supported, not to mention W2K.

Although all you 31337 hax0r5 recompile updates as a hobby, I need an easy and reliable update service, like RHN, that exists for more than 3 years, as I do not feel like upgrading my servers that many times.

I'll probably get modded down for this, but to me it seems that the one-off payment for a win2k server license is cheaper than a RHEL subscription, and the need of a tech to constantly search and recompile bugfixes is the most expensive option of all

--

If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:20 · Score: 0

but I'm afraid that when MS comes out with a new version, it will break any compatibility that OpenOffice has and any doc I send will look like shit - if I'm lucky - or not be able to be viewed at all.

And this is exactly the tool that Microsoft uses to force users to upgrade. Odds are that your current version of Office will not work with the new version of Office either; we recently (about 1.5 years ago) went through a switch to Office 2000 from Office 97 for exactly that reason.

So let's see; you can shell out $500 for a new Office suite every time Microsoft tells you to OR you can use something that costs nothing, wait until they catch up to Microsoft's change in formats and get the new version for nothing OR you can force OO to save it as a PDF file and skip all this damned nonsense!

Sounds to me like the only way you are SOL is if you do comply!
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by DarkSarin · 2004-02-10 03:21 · Score: 1

Absolutely. Personally, I like the idea of an open XML based document format. Does that mean that I want all documents done in XHTML? Not really, but hey, it would work, but then again so would TEX or LATEX.

--
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by mpe · 2004-02-10 03:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

This has been a concern of mine. Whenever I have to send a doc via email, it's ALWAYS assumed to be in some MS Office format.

In a great many cases the sensible format is PDF, which even Windows can handle.
Unless you explicitally want the document alterable at the other end and you know exactly what you are doing any word processing format is a bad choice.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by lpp · 2004-02-10 03:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

As an OS X user, my solution to this has always been to first determine whether the end user will need read only access to the document or rather will want to be able to edit. For example, a resume sent to a prospective employer (not a contracting agency) won't need to be edited.

If it can be read only, I just use the built in Print to PDF functionality and send the person a PDF. That's a near universally readable format and certainly in most business situations.

If it must be editable, then I will generally shoot for RTF, simply because it is, yet again, nearly universally readable.

If they refuse to accept those formats and I have to do business with them, then I will author the document in the editor of my choice and export to the appropriate format. Naturally this can cause problems when the export functionality isn't precise enough, but I can't honestly recall when the last time was that I had to do this anyway.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by dsci · 2004-02-10 03:26 · Score: 1

You have obviously never tried to send a bug report or such to MS.

--
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:34 · Score: 0

Consider this: my Xandros/2.0 system cost $39.95. It has single-click updates for all packages including OS patches. It comes with a database manager, web server, email server, office suite, development tools, and many other applications I would pay for under W. It is stable, and runs my applications rapidly with little fuss. A system that simply reeks of solid design and quality.

In contrast my W2K server system cost something like $1000 initially. Then I had to pay for SQLServer and MSVC and MS Office. I had to upgrade SQLServer after a year because the old version would not support the new version of the development tools. My COM+ applications run, but slowly and I have to reboot the server daily or else both the webserver and the database server have resource problems that eventually kill the application.

TCO? It is not a complex comparison to me.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by mpe · 2004-02-10 03:41 · Score: 1

As the product W is a commercial product, the sole reason for its existence is to bring money to the vendor. Money that comes only if the users decide to buy the product. Thus there is very strong incentive to listen to what the users of the product W want.

This can only be the case in a free market. Product W is not sold as a free market product. The supplier is a monopoly which uses all sorts of dodgy deals to strengthen that position.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:44 · Score: 0

This is so true!

I remember clearly when I sent a request to Bill, asking if please, please would they fix the outline numbering in MS Office so that it actually worked.

Well, you'd never believe it, but just the next version of Office came with a complete synthesizer that made automatic abstracts of my documents! I had so much fun with this feature - way better than the jargonizer - that I forgot all about my outline numbering woes.

OpenOffice is downright boring in comparison. You click 'Tools', 'Outline Numbering', and it just works. No fun at all.

The pure comedy vote has to go to product W. You'll laugh until you cry!
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by naryco · 2004-02-10 04:34 · Score: 1

I think the current market situation is much closer to free market than monopoly. As far as I know it is still legal to develop, market and sell software products almost everywhere in the world. And for almost every software product need, there are alternatives - like linux and open office. The freedom to buy the software product that you want is pretty common as well.

While I agree that the "vendor of product W" is not known for playing fairly, I believe that rules of capitalism still apply for software products. As most people currently choose Product W over product L, there must be reasons for it. If people use product W simply because it is easy to exchange office documents with it, that is a valid reason too. The reasons probably vary from one person to another though.
The rulings of US courts on whether this situation is monopoly or not are in my opinion irrelevant. The rulings are based too much on politics and I am sure that all of us can think of many rulings by US courts that we find simply unbelievable.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Prior+Restraint · 2004-02-10 04:52 · Score: 1

As far as sending documents that need to look a certain way, have you considered other formats then .doc? (PDF, HTML, TeX, RTF (hahahahah ok I'm only kidding on that one)

HTML is a horrible choice for documents that need to look a certain way. "The Web is not WYSIWYG."
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Prior+Restraint · 2004-02-10 04:56 · Score: 1

[T]o me it seems that the one-off payment for a win2k server license is cheaper than a RHEL subscription...

How much does Microsoft's support cost? I'm pretty sure it's more than a "one-off payment."

Apples and oranges.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by antiMStroll · 2004-02-10 05:15 · Score: 1

True, but this only applies to existing businesses. New businesses don't have the legacy overhead and can choose to start with Linux or Windows equally. Many will find the lack of expensive forced upgrades and closed document formats appealing. The established businesses which remain on Windows must compete with those which chose Linux. They might well be better off capitalizing the conversion, as they did instituting Windows, and banking on reduced long-term operating to offset the cost.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by WNight · 2004-02-10 05:34 · Score: 1

You need the supported version of Redhat, but you don't need a supported version of Windows? You do know that Microsoft won't give you any support at all, right? Unless you call the support line and pay per incident. (And they have been unfavorably compared to the psychic friend's network.)

Just configure the machines correctly and you should rarely (never?) need to update them. It's a client machine, why does it need sshd or anything else? Setup a basic iptables rule to drop everything incoming.

Sure, there's a bit of admin cost, but not much more than the install process for Win2k and in Linux it's easily scriptable. No problems "ghosting" many machines from one, no problems copying config info (in nice seperate files) from one to another, etc.

There are a ton of updates for Linux systems but rarely for the kernel or any external service a user would need. Even when they are, the usual severity is priv escalation, meaning you need an account already. In other words, just like a Windows machines by default. When needed it's just as easy to push updates to a bunch of machines (or set them to pull from a specific server) with a few lines of perl and a crontab entry.

Finally, Linux admins scale better. Add ten times the machines and the admin job isn't much more complex. (Except for hardware problems.)

I really wish all the users I deal with used Linux. I'd get so much more Slashdot time.
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:46 · Score: 0

There is a very good reason that small businesses with any technical savvy at all jump onto the Linux/OSS bandwagon as soon as they possibly can. It saves money.

You do realize that that is insulting, right? "Small business" can be anything down to a sole proprietorship, which may already have all of the licenses it needs. Now you're saying they aren't technically savvy just because they have no motivation.

Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first.

As a Windows user, let me say that OpenOffice is annoying as hell. Much like The Gimp last I used it, it fails to match the UI, and is just "not quite right" in so many places. Maybe because of this, maybe unrelated, but Microsoft's Office feels a lot more "well polished" than OpenOffice.

Mind you, I don't need Office XP either, 97 is still good enough for me. (Hey, I have all the licenses I need. ;)
Re:Sometimes the truth is astonishingly obvious by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:35 · Score: 0

Obvious Points.

1. Joe average doesn't want to have to think

2. Joe average doesn't want to be left out

3. Joe average does whatever everyone else does

I don't beleive the "format" compatibility myth. What I do beleive is brand recognition

- Coca Cola
- Nike / Reebok

Is coca-cola really worth 4x the cost of cheaper colas? What about those Reeboks? To answer that question, please read the history of "new coke"... The truth may surprise you ;)

MS v/s any other product follows the same pattern.

What TCO Refutation? by 4of12 · 2004-02-10 01:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

The article is mostly a narrative of a large IT shop that is bringing open source into doing different parts of its business, with databases and desktops still living in the proprietary world.

The guy in charge is no zealot, just evaluating his options and doing what makes sense.

The bottom line is:

"Talk to your peers about open source as there is not really a downside," he said. "You can use it without risk and it won't cost you anything other than a bit of time. You'd be mad if you didn't try it."

--
"Provided by the management for your protection."

Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by pirhana · 2004-02-10 01:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

It was reported that the latest virus incurred a loss of about 30b dollar globally. At this backdrop, I am just wondering do these consultacny firms like Gartner and all include the cost of fighting virus and the loss incurred by them while calculating the TCO ?

--
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/

Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by p2sam · 2004-02-10 03:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

The propagation technique used by the latest so-called "virii" is primarily social engineering. Linux is not inheriently any safer than Windows in this regard.

So long as users see nothing wrong with executing arbitrary code attached with email from strangers, we'll never be safe.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Jagasian · 2004-02-10 03:32 · Score: 1

However, as it stands today, for whatever reason (social or technical), Windows is far more susceptible to virus, worm, and trojan attacks... making this a cost against Windows.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by pirhana · 2004-02-10 03:38 · Score: 1

You are correct in this with regard to the latest virus but not always. One of the recent virus( was it sobig ? I forgot actually) DID NOT need the attachment to be opened . You had to open the mail ONLY. So I dont think your argument would be correct in that case. Also, when I said virus in my post , I should have said virii and worms. I dont think vulnerability to worms are equal in both platform.

--
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:53 · Score: 0

And recent sendmail attacks didn't require that the mail item get opened at all, simply get relayed.

Viruses can and will happen. The lists of buffer overflow vulnerabilities in applications and services is quite long in Linux, coupled with kernel vulnerabilities that happened fairly recently (please, business patching regularly?)
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Permission+Denied · 2004-02-10 03:56 · Score: 4, Informative

The propagation technique used by the latest so-called "virii" is primarily social engineering. Linux is not inheriently any safer than Windows in this regard.
First, the plural of virus always has been "viruses".
Secondly, if I get an ELF executable in an email, I have to save it to disk, open a terminal, chmod +x it and then type in its name. Double-clicking on a saved executable in a file manager will probably do something like open it with a text editor until you've made it executable.
It might be a little easier if you send an RPM file in email, but then the user opens the file and is asked "Are you sure you want to install package 'such-and-such'?" by the friendly rpm gui manager. Even then, unless the user provides an administrative password (assuming the machine is running some kind of backend gui authenticator like ksudo for KDE or the Security Services API in Mac OS X), there is no way any kind of software can install itself systemwide so it starts on boot, but only to start on login (granted, this makes little difference on a single-user machine).
With these things in mind, you can very easily lock down a system so even this rpm-on-login exploit is impossible if you mount home directories (and /tmp) no-exec. This flag has been standard in Unix variants for a long time and is often used for stuff like NFS-mounted mail spools. It even works in Mac OS X and I've successfully used it for this purpose on specialized kiosk-type applications. This prevents certain users from writing their own programs and scripts, but hopefully one would feel comfortable granting an exception for these more advanced users and giving them some space for programming.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by srealm · 2004-02-10 04:16 · Score: 1

Actually, there is a HUGE difference.

In most cases, mail is opened (and even attachments executed) as a user. The windows security model is poor, and an application can actually get Administrator rights without too much trouble.

On *nix, the limitation of damage for an executed virus is usually anything that user has write permissions to. On windows, you can pretty much count the whole system as given over entirely to the virus.

This is even besides the situation whereby for the most part, running windows as a non-administrator (ignoring the poor security model) is too restrictive for somoene to do it on their own machine, so most users set their own account up as an administrator. As opposed to *nix where you can install/run apps just fine as a standard user (in your home directory), and if you want to install something system wide, you 'su' - you don't need to log completely out, and then log-in again just to install an app (which is too much effort for most users).

Plus, as previously mentioned, windows has a habit of automatically doing stuff (executing scripts to show 'web-enabled' content, auto-running whats on a CD, etc). You have to explicitly disable this behavior on windows machines -- and most people just don't know how.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by iantri · 2004-02-10 04:24 · Score: 1

Not to mention that a regular user at MegaCorp would not have root access to their machine... The Linux security model isn't horribly broken like in Windows.
The damage would definately be limited.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:34 · Score: 0

The problem isn't Windows/Linux, and it *isn't* users. It's Outlook. Establish a corporate policy to use anything but Outlook (bye bye Exchange..) and that alone will reduce virus infections by an order of magnitude. Eudora (for Windows), anything. No other email clients make executing attachments quite so easy, and even if they have bugs, the viruses and worms are targetting Outlook, not the other 100+ email clients out there.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by p2sam · 2004-02-10 04:40 · Score: 1

However, as it would stand tomorrow, for whatever reason, the same Windows users switch to Linux, Linux would be far more susceptible to virus ...

My point is, this is primarily a user problem, not the OS.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Prior+Restraint · 2004-02-10 05:02 · Score: 1

There are ways around noexec. For example, if I type /bin/sh foo, then foo will run, regardless of the options passed to mount.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by moranar · 2004-02-10 05:34 · Score: 1

Linux is not inheriently any safer than Windows in this regard.

That's not true. If a moron using Linux executes a worm in his network, the worm only has the privileges of the user, not those of the root user. The admin shouldn't allow users to install mail or web servers.

Of course, a linux virus could theoreticallly erase that moron's files. It still wouldn't be able to do anything to other users.

In both cases, there's a very big difference between Linux and Windows.

--
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:51 · Score: 0

So long as users see nothing wrong with executing arbitrary code attached with email from strangers, we'll never be safe.

If code has to be installed before it can be executed, this is less of a problem. (I don't know of any OS that works this way.)

Make running software a process: You must install it first, and during the install process you assert that you trust it and grant it specific access. (ie, a screensaver does not need network capabilities)

If running software that has yet to be installed has enough of a road bump in it, abitrary code will be less often executed.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Jagasian · 2004-02-10 06:27 · Score: 1

But then the same argument could be used to claim that most other TCO measurements should not be included, such as lack of expert admins familiar with Linux, lack of user experience with Linux, etc... These things would change once people convert to Linux.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by p2sam · 2004-02-10 06:35 · Score: 1

Good point. I concede that I know every little about so-called TCO reports.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Keeper · 2004-02-10 06:58 · Score: 1

Limited in the sense that the user can lose all of their data, but the system still boots. The user is still fucked, because they lost all their data. Somehow, that doesn't really seem any better to me.

Additionally, all of the worms that depend on the user launching them on windows could do an equal amount of 'damage' in the unix world. No special permissions are required for them to do their thing.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by IamTheRealMike · 2004-02-10 08:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

Secondly, if I get an ELF executable in an email, I have to save it to disk, open a terminal, chmod +x it and then type in its name.
Nah. It's easy. Just stick it into a .tar file, call it "runme", mark it +x (tar preserves permissions). All modern desktops include a visual archive viewer like File Roller or ark, which allow you to open/run files direct from it. I don't know if you can run an ELF binary direct from file-roller, but I expect it's not too hard. Certainly most users, once tricked into wanting to run the file, could do it, especially as Linux desktops get more straightforward.
This prevents certain users from writing their own programs and scripts, but hopefully one would feel comfortable granting an exception for these more advanced users and giving them some space for programming.
noexec provides no security at all, any script or ELF binary can be run by using the appropriate interpreter. For most ELF binaries the interpreter is /lib/ld-linux.so.2, and it takes as an argument the binary to run.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Coryoth · 2004-02-10 08:06 · Score: 1

Additionally, all of the worms that depend on the user launching them on windows could do an equal amount of 'damage' in the unix world. No special permissions are required for them to do their thing.

That's where SELinux, good security policy, and well written mail clients would come in. Suchb a setup could potentially block most such worms. You would have to manage to convince the user to run the worm in a role that has access to address books and outgoing ports. I suspect even the most foolish of users would struggle with that one:

You run the executable you got in the mail and a dialog pops up saying "Sorry, this process tried to illegally access file /home/user/mail/addressbook.xml, and outgoing ports [blah blah blah] please execute this program in a role which has access to these". Sure, you'll still find a few people who will willfully run it anyway, but a lot of the casual attachment clickers would have the odd alarm bell go off at that point.

Jedidiah.

--
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Darth · 2004-02-10 08:16 · Score: 1

Limited in the sense that the user can lose all of their data, but the system still boots. The user is still fucked, because they lost all their data. Somehow, that doesn't really seem any better to me.

really? it seems a lot better to me....especially if you have more than one user of the machine (like, say, a family). Sure, your stuff got nuked. Your wife and your kids still have all their stuff though.

Besides, if you're really worried about it, you can create two accounts; a work account and a mail account. Then crap in your inbox cannot nuke your work.
Alternatively, you can set up a cron job to do nightly backups so a virus hosing your home directory only trashes work done since midnight the night before.

Meanwhile, your 30 gigs of riaa hated mp3s are safe and your porn collection is safe (and you can make it so your wife can't find it...maybe we should be promoting this as a reason to switch to linux).

Additionally, all of the worms that depend on the user launching them on windows could do an equal amount of 'damage' in the unix world. No special permissions are required for them to do their thing.

well, the afore mentioned noexec would stop them in their tracks. On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients. Other user accounts are easily protected from having their address books read by these kinds of worms (i'm not sure if they grab multiple user address books in windows, so this may be a non-issue).

sure, they only require executable permissions to do their thing once they are run, but how are they going to get run?

--
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Keeper · 2004-02-10 09:08 · Score: 1

Besides, if you're really worried about it, you can create two accounts; a work account and a mail account. Then crap in your inbox cannot nuke your work.

Sure, while we're at it, let's create separate accounts for the word processor, gimp, the application you use to transfer pictures from your digital camera ...

Alternatively, you can set up a cron job to do nightly backups so a virus hosing your home directory only trashes work done since midnight the night before.

The problem still remains -- damage is done.

well, the afore mentioned noexec would stop them in their tracks.

So a 'well written' worm will contain the text:

"Hey, check out this cool new game...you'll have to run 'chmod 755' on the file after saving it before you can run it." The problem still exists. In fact, with all of the stupid things people email each other your user will already be conditioned that such an operation is a normal thing to do. The fact that your mail client has a poor UI doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients.

There no KNOWN active scripting exploit. And there's that "most" word ...

Other user accounts are easily protected from having their address books read by these kinds of worms

It doesn't matter about the other users. The ability to get one user's address book means that the worm will probably end up being sent to your other users.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Darth · 2004-02-10 10:30 · Score: 1

Sure, while we're at it, let's create separate accounts for the word processor, gimp, the application you use to transfer pictures from your digital camera ...

while i agree that creating a separate account just for mail is extreme, your examples dont really compare (except probably the word processor one). Those other applications are not a concern for virus propagation.

The problem still remains -- damage is done.

but that wasnt the point. the point wasnt that viruses cause damage at all. the point was it is much easier to minimize the damage a virus can cause in linux than in windows.

So a 'well written' worm will contain the text:

"Hey, check out this cool new game...you'll have to run 'chmod 755' on the file after saving it before you can run it." The problem still exists. In fact, with all of the stupid things people email each other your user will already be conditioned that such an operation is a normal thing to do.

i'm pretty sure that if you mount the filesystem noexec, chmod will not give you executable permissions on files on that filesystem. I agree that people will do stupid things and no amount of engineering can stop that. But i dont think this piece of social engineering would work on a noexec filesystem.
Tangentially related (and solely my opinion), i think the windows ui encourages people to do stupid things.

>On top of that, there's no active scripting to exploit in most linux mail clients.

There no KNOWN active scripting exploit. And there's that "most" word ...

I didnt say there were no active scripting exploits in linux mail clients. i said there is no active scripting to exploit. I included the "most" because i'm not personally familiar with all mail clients that exist for linux and expect there's probably one out there that does have an active scripting language in it.

It doesn't matter about the other users. The ability to get one user's address book means that the worm will probably end up being sent to your other users.

in the case of a family (since i used that example earlier), i would agree. If it gets one family member's address book, it'd probably propagate to the rest of them. The damage done to them can still be minimized.

In the case of a more public server (like a university email account server or something) i wouldnt agree. (which i recognise isnt really the situation we are talking about)

the point wasnt that you can prevent damage from happening at all. the point was that you can minimize the damage in a way that is significant to the user. The user doesnt have to be fucked because he doesnt have to lose all his data; and that makes it better.

--
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by ignavus · 2004-02-10 10:41 · Score: 1

It might be a little easier if you send an RPM file in email, but then the user opens the file and is asked "Are you sure you want to install package 'such-and-such'?" by the friendly rpm gui manager.

My browser keeps trying to open rpm's with realplayer.

--
I am anarch of all I survey.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by paj1234 · 2004-02-10 13:22 · Score: 1

> I get an ELF executable in an email, I have to save it to disk, open a terminal, chmod +x it and then type in its name.

Man, you are making way more effort than you need. Simply right-click on the email attachment, choose "Open With", type "sh" (without the quotes) and hit Enter. Works great with ELF executables and shell scripts. Works with Perl scripts too as long as the hash-bang points to the right place.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Keeper · 2004-02-10 15:23 · Score: 1

while i agree that creating a separate account just for mail is extreme, your examples dont really compare (except probably the word processor one). Those other applications are not a concern for virus propagation.

If you assume that your mail software has exploitable problems, and your document editor has exploitable problems, it is reasonable to assume that all software has exploitable problems. I was just illustrating that sandboxing an application under a unique user account was a silly, and merely masks the underlying problem.

i'm pretty sure that if you mount the filesystem noexec, chmod will not give you executable permissions on files on that filesystem. I agree that people will do stupid things and no amount of engineering can stop that. But i dont think this piece of social engineering would work on a noexec filesystem.
Tangentially related (and solely my opinion), i think the windows ui encourages people to do stupid things.

Just because the tools are there to prevent the problem doesn't mean they will be used. No home user will use a system where they can't run a program of their choice (which you seem to acknowledge).

The problem is that the secure way isn't convenient. Users like convenient. Where possible, they will disable security features when they believe they're smarter than the computer. Security has to be done seamlessly (ie: not get in the user's way), which is one of the goals of the 'trusted computing initiative' (aside from all of the paranoia you read about it around here).

The UI doesn't cause people to do stupid things ... that may have been true 5 years ago before anyone came up with email-worms. But definately not today. People just ignore the warnings and click ok.

I didnt say there were no active scripting exploits in linux mail clients. i said there is no active scripting to exploit. I included the "most" because i'm not personally familiar with all mail clients that exist for linux and expect there's probably one out there that does have an active scripting language in it.

Gotcha. I misread your original statement. However, you don't need to have active scripting in your mail client to have a flaw present which allows arbitrary code to run. A flaw could exist in HTML rendering code, MIME decoding, the code which displays the subject line, etc...

the point wasnt that you can prevent damage from happening at all. the point was that you can minimize the damage in a way that is significant to the user. The user doesnt have to be fucked because he doesnt have to lose all his data; and that makes it better.

The same solutions that you describe can be implemented on a Windows system with the tools currently available. Nobody does it, because it's a pain in the ass for the user.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Darth · 2004-02-10 16:45 · Score: 1

I was just illustrating that sandboxing an application under a unique user account was a silly, and merely masks the underlying problem.

i wouldnt say it's silly. There are some cases where you cannot solve the underlying problem and sandboxing becomes an acceptable damage mitigation solution. As i understand it (and i could be wrong about this), this was a solution microsoft used to deal with a root exploit involving SqlServer.

Just because the tools are there to prevent the problem doesn't mean they will be used. No home user will use a system where they can't run a program of their choice (which you seem to acknowledge).

i agree that the tool existing doesnt mean it will be used. my point was that it is available if the user is so inclined. realistically, it doesnt matter how much security your operating system has built into it if the user decides it's too inconvenient and turns it all off.

However, you don't need to have active scripting in your mail client to have a flaw present which allows arbitrary code to run. A flaw could exist in HTML rendering code, MIME decoding, the code which displays the subject line, etc...

sure, we saw this last year (i think) with a buffer overflow in the subject line of some mail reader (i forgot which one, maybe mozilla?). For that kind of thing, you're really at the mercy of the patch process for the application (unless you have the source and ability to patch it yourself, but that doesnt apply to generic users).

The same solutions that you describe can be implemented on a Windows system with the tools currently available. Nobody does it, because it's a pain in the ass for the user.

i dont think the cron job nightly backup idea is a pain in the ass. you could even build an install system for it that would set it up for the user to backup and restore their directory to the last backup. that doesnt mean the user would actually use it, though.

The post you originally responded to was working from the context of employees at a company with an IT department, though. That makes things like the backup and noexec ideas more feasible since someone other than the typical user would be managing the system (and also means protecting other user accounts becomes more important)

realistically, home machines of users who are non-technical would be screwed in a way that, to them, might not be quantifiably better than how screwed they'd be on a windows box.
in the original context of the conversation, though (corporate users with an IT dept), i still think the damage mitigation of linux over windows is a big deal.

--
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Permission+Denied · 2004-02-10 20:34 · Score: 1

For most ELF binaries the interpreter is /lib/ld-linux.so.2, and it takes as an argument the binary to run.
Now wouldn't it be nice if malicious code could only be run by those who know how to bypass fascist security restrictions? :)
I'd say noexec buys you something if you can only run a new program after going through a specific process. Namely, you know you're running a new program. I can deal with my users' maliciousness, but my users' foolishness keeps me up at night.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by lmfr · 2004-02-11 04:48 · Score: 1

Only if foo is a shell script
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by lmfr · 2004-02-11 04:51 · Score: 1

For most ELF binaries the interpreter is /lib/ld-linux.so.2, and it takes as an argument the binary to run
./bash: error while loading shared libraries: ./bash: failed to map segment from shared object: Operation not permitted
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by iantri · 2004-02-11 11:04 · Score: 1

However, the other 999 people at MegaCorp are completely unaffected. That one person is really insignifigant compared to the number of machines that COULD be affected.
Additionally, all of the worms that depend on the user launching them on windows could do an equal amount of 'damage' in the unix world. No special permissions are required for them to do their thing.
Mount the /home partition 'noexec'. That's something Windows definitely CAN'T do..
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Prior+Restraint · 2004-02-11 11:17 · Score: 1

There are ways to run binaries, too. My point stands: mounting a partition noexec doesn't prevent execution of files on that partition.
Re:Does TCO include the cost of virus attack ?? by Keeper · 2004-02-11 20:19 · Score: 1

Mount the /home partition 'noexec'. That's something Windows definitely CAN'T do..

Actually, you have finer grained control in Windows (if you use NTFS) by using the Read & Execute permission...

Experience tells... by RGautier · 2004-02-10 02:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Total Cost of Ownership is a marketing buzzword that is supposed to mean 'measurement of how much it costs to maintain'. There are so many variables involved in that definition:

Experience of personnel
Age of the system and its knowledge base
Number of inherent maintenance problems
Cost of expertise
Severity of maintenance issues
Perceived impact of issues

and so on, and so on...

Too often, the people making decisions based on marketing numbers like TCO fail to realize just how many issues are involved in these measurements. The buzzword TCO becomes another name for just one of the measurable items (e.g. Number of inherent problems).

What's needed are top-level executives that weren't churned out by a college and hired because of thier good-old boy connections. CIOs, CTOs and other executives in power need to be from one school, the school of hard knocks, so that they can make INFORMED decisions instead of blindly relying on the marketing fodder that are handed.

Re:Experience tells... by mcwop · 2004-02-10 02:30 · Score: 1

Of course, one cannot seriously talk about TCO unless one also talks about the fact that nobody got fired for buying Winblows.

--
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Re:Experience tells... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

I can tell you about a bunch of 'wonderful' products that people have bought over the years, and not gotten fired over. Windows certainly has no monopoly on bad software that gets used because someone soaked their Enterprise budget into it without looking ahead.
To be perfectly honest, I was all for converting from Banyan and Novell networks to the single vendor solution that Microsoft offered us, because the alternatives at the time sucked, and budgetary contraints meant we couldn't hire all the *ix gurus we really would need. I don't regret that move for a moment. At the same time, I'm not afraid to mix environments and I use Linux where it's appropriate and will save me money in the short or long run.
Last point: Remember that just because we don't fire people in the real world for making bad decisions doesn't mean that we don't deride them behind their backs or completely lose respect for them. Bad decisions cause lots of pain in the business arena, but it also provides plenty of jobs for people like you and me.
Re:Experience tells... by salesgeek · 2004-02-10 03:32 · Score: 3, Informative

Total Cost of Ownership is a marketing buzzword that is supposed to mean 'measurement of how much it costs to maintain'. There are so many variables involved in that definition:

Having sold software and hardware for literally decades using TCO, I can tell you conclusively that it's worse than you think. TCO is MUCH MORE SWEEPING and includes:

* Cost of Acquisition (hard)
* Cost of Installation (soft)
* Cost of maintenance (soft)
* Cost of downtime (soft)
* Interest costs from loans (hard)
* Cost of consumables (soft)
* Utility costs (electric) (soft)
* Cost of anticipated moves, adds changes (soft)
* Cost of anticipated upgrades (soft)
* Cost of disposal (soft)

Most of which are highly subjective soft costs. TCO is basically useless unless it's your accountant telling you what your departmental expenses related to ____ are. If you here it from a sales person or marketing type, it is most likely bs. ROI is even worse and TCO comparisons are the worst of all. If you want reality have your CFO or controller do a ROAE (Return on Assets Employed) study.

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-- $G
Re:Experience tells... by mpe · 2004-02-10 03:43 · Score: 1

Total Cost of Ownership is a marketing buzzword that is supposed to mean 'measurement of how much it costs to maintain'.

Very often the "Total" bit is bogus. Since isn't even a "good faith" attempt to measure total costs involved.

Different tools for different people? by Walkiry · 2004-02-10 02:00 · Score: 1

In this case, I think the claimed legacy of various *IX programs made the decision a lot easier. (I use *IX instead of *NIX since they seem to have had an IRIX or two in there). Some people might have more trouble if a significant part of their software is firmly buried in Microsoft's products.

The most interesting bit, IMO, was the one about the ease to use proprietary and free applications together. That's what standards are for, and shows that Microsoft has NO reason to keep with their annoying obscurity of standards other than to hider competing products. It can be argued if it's ethical, smart, stupid or whatever, but from the end user point of view it's a restriction and an impediment.

I'm also not surprised they're going with Oracle for their DB. Free DB software needs some time and more work, although it's very usable in many cases right now. "Open source databases are where Linux was a number of years ago in terms of maturity", now the exact number of years is up for grabs ;) I'd say 2, any takers?

--
---- Take the Space Quiz!

Re:Different tools for different people? by Coward+the+Anonymous · 2004-02-10 02:27 · Score: 2, Funny

"I use *IX instead of *NIX since they seem to have had an IRIX or two in there" So what do you do when they have Solaris? *I*??

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-- Jason
Re:Different tools for different people? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:36 · Score: 0

When using Peoplesoft you have to run a supported database. That is why they are using Oracle.
Re:Different tools for different people? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:42 · Score: 0

> *I*??

I agree, Linux falls into the *I* category too.

:)
Re:Different tools for different people? by MtViewGuy · 2004-02-10 03:54 · Score: 1

I think for now that Linux will primarily stay a server operating system, since on a server OS ease of use is less of an issue but licensing costs can be an issue.

Linux is not yet a desktop OS that is usable by less-experienced computer users, especially if you have to download and edit movie files from a MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorder or image files from a digital still camera. Linux is getting better but it's still a bit behind with what you can do easily with a machine running Windows 2000 Professional/Windows XP or a Macintosh running MacOS X.
Re:Different tools for different people? by Walkiry · 2004-02-10 04:55 · Score: 1

*I(X|S) obviously. *I* would match Windows too.

If there is also Linux then it should be *(I|U)(X|S)

Finding an appropiate one for the inclusion of *BSD is left as an exercise to the reader.

--
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Re:Different tools for different people? by Sri+Lumpa · 2004-02-12 11:37 · Score: 1

Ignoring the case issue it would also match wIndowS.

--
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,

MS Office -does- run on Linux by rchf · 2004-02-10 02:02 · Score: 5, Informative

If you really want to run MS Office on Linux apparently CodeWeavers has polished up a version of WINE to run MS Office with great stability (http://www.codeweavers.com). There is a review here (http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT6509081484 .html).

Useful quote from the review '...it's now so easy (and reliable) to use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for reading doc, ppt, and xls files, that I'm beginning to fear that those programs -- which I was getting so good at doing without - - might no longer be relegated to the status of "options of last resort".'

Breaking the MS Office to Windows OS tie-in will seriously undermine the MS monopoly.

MS Office is on Linux already by erturs · 2004-02-10 02:02 · Score: 5, Informative

Crossover Office (http://www.codeweavers.com) runs MS Office 2000 very well under Linux, and claims to run Office XP as well. I can't personally verify the latter claim, but can testify that Office 2000 works well.

(I have no affiliation with CodeWeavers, I'm just a happy customer.)

Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Mysticalfruit · 2004-02-10 02:19 · Score: 4, Informative

I'm a happy customer with one exception... MS Project.

Though it's not my personal choice, my boss forces our unit to use project to orchestrate projects. It's the one reason I'm not running linux on this machine. Running a VMware session just so I can run project is just a waste of resources.

If CodeWeavers ever get Project to work properly under linux, they'll be one less windows box in the world...

--
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:30 · Score: 1, Informative

100 Licences for $4800 US.....??? Educationally we get office MUCH cheaper and that would be a hard pill for the Super/Board of Educ to swallow...

2cents...
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:39 · Score: 0

It comes with xandros deluxe...I use xp on there and it works fine
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Caeda · 2004-02-10 02:42 · Score: 0

"100 Licences for $4800 US.....???" Uhuh, sure. Now take off 100% of the Operating system costs, take out all expenses for future software upgrades, and take out all expenses for tech calls to fix the computer when windows inevitable crashes... Does 4800 still sound that bad?

--
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by 13Echo · 2004-02-10 03:06 · Score: 2, Informative

Have you tried Planner or Mr. Project?

http://mrproject.codefactory.se/
http://planner .imendio.org/

They do lack a lot of features of MS Project at the moment, but both are great tools, and should do most of what you need.
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:09 · Score: 0

But if MSProject is being required by someone higher-up, you have to use it. Trying to get your manager to switch to something else that "lacks a lot of features" isn't really an option.
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Kenja · 2004-02-10 03:22 · Score: 1

The problem is that most companies who claim to NEED MS Office really need the stuff that comes with it such as OWC and ODBC. Most are running some custom built database or web app system. Many ISO certification platforms use OWC because most peoples docs are in Word/Excel format. So you cant get rid of office until you stop people from using office, which they wont do as long as everyone is using office.

--

"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by JAgostoni · 2004-02-10 03:34 · Score: 0

Have you tried using Wine to run MS Project on your Linux desktop?

--

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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:53 · Score: 0

i use vmware so i can use xmlspy - but i find vmware to be generally useful to have for other MS only bits and pieces. that way i can handle most stuff that gets cheucked at me,

kev bailey
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by jdray · 2004-02-10 05:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

I thought I read something that said the latest MS Office license REQUIRED that you run it only on Windows, therefore making anyone running it through Crossover Office a license violator. That's not so big an issue for a home user, unless MS stoops to the depths of the RIAA, but for a corporate installation, with a public presence and possibly thousands of licenses, it's a huge issue.

Of course, I could be wrong about the license clause. We're still running Office97 for the time being.

--
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Just+Some+Guy · 2004-02-10 06:24 · Score: 2, Insightful

That very much depends on the definition of "run it only on Windows". Are Wine's Windows-alike libraries sufficient to say it "runs on Windows"? What if the user takes DLLs from a legitimately licenced Windows installation and uses those instead of the Wine-native versions - is that "running on Windows"? How much of the running code has to originate from Microsoft before that restriction was met?
Personally, I'd be perfectly happy to buy a copy of Windows if Wine could use the files in it to make applications work properly (I have to run Quickbooks Pro 2002 and it doesn't currently run on Wine).

--
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Xabraxas · 2004-02-10 07:04 · Score: 1

I don't think WINE is going to work if Codeweavers doesn't.

--
Time makes more converts than reason
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by JAgostoni · 2004-02-10 07:28 · Score: 1

Why would that be? I thought Crossover Office was specific to products and will not work outside of it's "list" . However, Wine has no such restrictions and will always do it's best to work with any app you through at it.

--

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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by arch_helmet · 2004-02-10 10:30 · Score: 1

I can't comment on planner ... but I can on Mr. Project. Last year I worked on a simulated software project as part of my studies. I chose MS Project, a friend tried Mr. Project. All we had to do was produce Gantt Charts and a schedule: pretty basic. A bit of resource allocation. I spent a *long* time learning the mysteries of MS Project but got there in the end, it was like using a bulldozer to move a sandcastle, but I got there. My friend found that Mr. Project was so bugridden it was unusable; he upgraded to a later version and found it was even worse. In the end he wrote his own program to produce Gantt charts. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for OSS (we developed/deployed on LAMP), but when you need programs to work reliably, sometimes there just aren't options. As I say, Planner may be great, as may a future version of Mr. Project. :) ~ Tim
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by NonSequor · 2004-02-10 11:18 · Score: 1

Crossover Office is just a version of Wine configured to run MS Office. If it won't run MS Project, that means that the people at Codeweavers, who wrote most of Wine, don't know how to get Wine to run MS Project.

--
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by JAgostoni · 2004-02-11 00:45 · Score: 1

I don't buy in to that for a couple reasons: (a) MS Project is not part of MS Office (b) Why didn't crossover "office" (emphasis on the office) then support all other Microsoft products known to man? Visio? VS.Net? Microsoft Bob (that would be funny) In fact here is some anecdotal evidence that proves nothing (but it looks like some people were succesful some not...). They also mention the WABI app in getting MS Project to work under Linux... View it here

--

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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
Re:MS Office is on Linux already by Sri+Lumpa · 2004-02-12 11:18 · Score: 1

I don't know about the US but in Europe it would look a lot like product tying, which is illegal, and done by a quite likely soon to be convicted monopolist to boot (in Europe that is, in the US they already are convicted) which probably wouldn't help them enforce this clause.

--
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,

Re:well, duh by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 0

I know it is a troll but others may get the same impression, I'll comment anyway...

but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system.

Sounds like your previous experience with Linux/Unix was very little (other then hearing comments from friends). You will not be able to configure a stable enterprise system with any software without some experience and knowledge of what you are doing. This applies to ANY OS you plan to use.

MS Office CAN run on Linux (1000000, Informative) by MooKore+2004 · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 2, Informative

Im FED up of people claiming Microsoft Office cant run on Linux. It CAN! There is a program called Crossover Office that can run not only Microsoft Office, but other top commercial apps such as Internet Exploder, Photoshop, Lotus notes and more!
But with the latest versions of the GIMP (now with cmyk), OpenOffice.org, Firefox (see my sig) and the Kompany there is really is no excuse not to run Linux!

--
found here

TCO... by ValourX · 2004-02-10 02:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

After reading several TCO reports and even writing one myself, I've come to the conclusion that TCO is not something that one can make a sweeping generalization about.

Cost is one thing and convenience and time are another thing. Windows costs more than GNU/Linux is most cases, but no doubt someone somewhere can twist the numbers to make it look otherwise. Windows is less secure than GNU/Linux, but again -- someone, somewhere will come up with bullshit numbers or statistics or outright lies (Steve Ballmer!) to "prove" differently.

Companies (and home users) should choose to leave Windows because of its licensing, first and foremost. The MS EULA basically says, "we own you" and people should take issue with that. If we all followed every license to the letter of the law, very few people would be using proprietary software -- especially Windows.

Everyone has their own take on TCO and TBO (Total Benefit of Ownership) and anyone can make either "side" look like it "wins." Licensing costs and rights are undeniable though; that's one area that is not up for debate. What is the hidden cost of being tied down by fascist licensing? It costs you your freedom and subjects you to software audits. Violation of the EULA is US$200,000 and up to five years in jail...

-Jem

Re:TCO... by dtperik · 2004-02-10 02:54 · Score: 5, Funny

I think I know why Microsoft keeps coming up with these "TCO" studies showing Microsoft costs less to own.... YOU DON'T OWN IT!! As you said They own you

I'd like to see a "TCBO" study - Total Cost of Being Owned. I imagine the cost goes up with each virus... because you're owned by the virus writers then to

- Dan
Re:TCO... by mpe · 2004-02-10 03:49 · Score: 1

Companies (and home users) should choose to leave Windows because of its licensing, first and foremost. The MS EULA basically says, "we own you" and people should take issue with that.

The "we own you" can also include "we own your data". Which you'd thing a few executive type people would object to :)

If we all followed every license to the letter of the law, very few people would be using proprietary software -- especially Windows.

Ditto if organisations applied their regular financial policies/rules to software.

licensing costs and rights are undeniable though; that's one area that is not up for debate. What is the hidden cost of being tied down by fascist licensing? It costs you your freedom and subjects you to software audits. Violation of the EULA is US$200,000 and up to five years in jail...

If your company is dependent on such software even an accusation of non-compliance could result in bankruptcy...

They are migrating from UNIX by blorg · 2004-02-10 02:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

In fairness, they are migrating from UNIX. In such a situation, I'm not surprised that Linux is a better fit for them.

The truth is, what is better for you will depend on your situation, existing applications, existing in-house skills, etc. I don't believe Microsoft's funded propaganda, but there can be situations in which Windows is an appropriate choice. Look at what you are running and then make a decision. In this case it is obviously Linux.

Re:They are migrating from UNIX by Otter · 2004-02-10 02:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

With 50 +1 comments up already, I'm glad to see somebody else has bothered to read the article. Admittedly, it's a little incoherent and references to Windows periodically float through it, but on the whole it's about the replacement of a stew of commercial Unixes (Tru64, AIX, Solaris) with Linux.
One of the "Halloween documents" dealt with this -- the MS marketing people were struggling to keep up with the flood of "____ Switching From Windows To Linux!" driven primarily by the inability of Slashdot editors and other Linux media figures to read.

--
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Re:They are migrating from UNIX by geomon · 2004-02-10 04:51 · Score: 1

They are migrating from UNIX.... ...but landing in a non-Mac, non-Wintel universe.

I consider that an accomplishment.

--
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Re:They are migrating from UNIX by zootman · 2004-02-10 13:20 · Score: 1

no - they are moving the front end systems to Linux - the backend is still AIX on p690's....
Re:They are migrating from UNIX by ElectronF · 2004-02-10 23:28 · Score: 1

The choices are starting to become Linux or Windows as the app server layer. In the past the choice waqs only windows, now that the choice includes Linux we can make the decision to move that way. As soon as betting the business on single image large scale DB server running linux becomes the safest bet we would move that layer as well. The point is that lowest risk at reasonable cost is the main driver.

There is always the option of running Linux on the p690 instead of AIX, but that is hardly low-risk at this stage.

Given all that, yes it is a migration from Windows, it's just that the best way to do this from a business perspective is to do it as the opportunities arise, not just wake up one morning and decide to move all the existing systems to Linux.

This is business, not a hobby so evaluating risks to the business is one of the largest contributing factors to these types of decisions.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2004-02-10 02:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:well, duh by scottyboy · 2004-02-10 02:09 · Score: 1

Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc,

Like, WTF? This has to be a troll right? Off the top off my head, I can think of 3 Journaled files systems, and I know there are more. SMP support? It's been there in Linux for years.

As for your comments on the venerable Apache project - the is pure flamebait. Please educate yourself, Sir! And please apologise for your astounding rudeness to the Apache Foundation.

I can only assume that you hoped that Apache would run "out of the box" and didn't bother to investigate it's configuration options for serving larger numbers of requests. Also - you should have been using Apache2 - it has a better threading model.

En garde! by glpierce · 2004-02-10 02:10 · Score: 4, Interesting

I believe you quite handily defeat yourself there.

"Product W [...] is sold [...] by a single vendor who relies on [...] features to sell the product." (emphasis added)

Features are more important than stability to many people. Rebooting is annoying, but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable. In environments were stability is most important (always-on systems, such as internet, power, and telecom), Linux will do well. In other environments, it won't.

"Small note to evangelists: convert people to OpenOffice.org on Windows first."

You assume that OpenOffice is just as good as OfficeXP. For people who don't use any advanced features, this may be true, but not for many others. OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor, for example. For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite. Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch? People paying licensing fees for multiple machines are far more likely to need the features not found in OO.org than individuals, in my estimation.

--
G

Re:En garde! by AssClown2520 · 2004-02-10 02:46 · Score: 1

Features are more important than stability to many people.
I think that the only group of people that think that features are more important than stability is the quasi-geeks.
Every normal business user that I know, doesn't give a sh*t about features. They just want to do their job and get on with their lifes. If they can do their job on product 98, they don't want to learn product XP.
Re:En garde! by ysachlandil · 2004-02-10 02:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

>OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea
>while its chart-making is so poor, for example.

Uhm, OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academia because everybody uses LaTeX and GnuPlot

Which happens to be an open source product, and existed way before Linux.

--Blerik
Re:En garde! by uradu · 2004-02-10 02:54 · Score: 1

> For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite.

And that is MAINLY because it's so EASY to get hold of a FREE copy of MS Office. Ironically the best thing that could happen to Linux and OOo would be for MS to start implementing some SERIOUS copy protection. Once all these legions of MS-enamoured Office fans can't get their fix for free anymore, they WILL start switching. After all, we're talking about people that scour pricegrabber.com for days on end to save $50 on that new notebook. Are these the kinds of people that you see plonking down $130 for an MS Office upgrade? As has been said again and again, MS is closing more than one eye to piracy for the sake of mindshare. Once MS software isn't "free" anymore, suddenly the lack of those other five border styles on a chart object doesn't seem all that important anymore. Plus, in academics, you might actually start to appreciate the free bibliography support in OOs--Endnote it may not be, but it's free and good enough for many users.
Re:En garde! by cybergrue · 2004-02-10 03:06 · Score: 1

You assume that OpenOffice is just as good as OfficeXP
In some ways Open Office is better then Word. Try putting a callout on top of a graphic in Word (I tried this in Word 2K). Word put the callout under the graphic. The only way I could get it to work was to create a canvase object, add the graphic, then put the callout on top of that. In OO, I just added the graphic, then put the callout on, and it worked correctly the first time I tried. OK, OO does not have the variety of callout that word does, but it does have the basic functionallity, and new callout could probably be added quite easily. Annother integration feature that OO has that I cannot find in Word is the auto wrap-arround feature that allows the inclusion of a graphic, and allows the test area to flow around it like what you see in magazines. In Word, you can put a rectangular graphic in the document, and have the text squashed to one side, if it puts any text there at all, most of the time it just restarts the text below the graphic.
Remember, this is an Open Source project, if someone (in academia say) doesn't like the functionallity in OO, they can modify the program to do what they want.
Re:En garde! by dsci · 2004-02-10 03:22 · Score: 1

Features are more important than stability to many people. Rebooting is annoying, but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable.

I know more people who say they have never used most of the features in MS Office..nor even know what they are...than comment about how feature rich MS Office is.

MS Office (and other heavily integrated packages) tries to be all things to all people. Most uses have a very small subset of required featured that they use regularly, imho.

--
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Re:En garde! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:25 · Score: 0

No, they really can't, not unless they have some programming knowledge. Your english professors aren't going to have that most of the time, the classics profs won't either, and probably not many of the hard science guys either. Open Source is closed and locked tight to anyone without the technical proficiency to make use of the source.
Re:En garde! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:25 · Score: 0

OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor, for example.

I assume you're implying here that MS Office has foothold in academia. Wrong!
Latex/GnuPlot rules. Most of the ppt slides that exist are of fairly simple nature that pretty much any office suite will be able to do that.
Re:En garde! by InfiniteWisdom · 2004-02-10 03:30 · Score: 1

OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor, for example.

MS Office can never get a foothold in academia while ITS chart-making is so poor.

Seriously... try to do something *MARGINALLY* non-standard and it barfs. I don't really think there is a real alternative to GNUPlot here.
Re:En garde! by 13Echo · 2004-02-10 03:37 · Score: 1

For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite.

This is definately WRONG. There is a reason. My family was using an ancient version of Mirosoft Works for Windows. The program was terrible. Instead, I hooked them up with OpenOffice and they love it.

Get the point? There is a reason. It's cost. Honest people don't want to pirate software instead of being forced into buying upgrades of expensive software for occasional home use. Sure, there is nothing wrong with a perfectly good copy of a modern version of MS Office, but *not everyone has a modern copy of MS Office.* And many folks have illegit copies at that.

I will grant you that MS Office has a feature that is typically used in businesses... A feature that OO.o is missing. It's the group capabilities. In addition, however, they require an Exchange server license which is *per seat* as well. Other than that, there are very few, if not any, features that OO.o lacks in comparison with MS Office. And it bests Office in several areas as well.
Re:En garde! by Clovert+Agent · 2004-02-10 03:48 · Score: 1

Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch?
Depends on what you mean by "perfectly good". I have a perfectly good copy of Office, in that it does exactly what I expect it to do. And until now, I've used it almost exclusively at work, despite being a Linux and OpenOffice user at home.
But recently I switched to OO for word processing, because of a single feature - just one - that OO has which Word does not. It can export PDFs. I suddenly needed to produce PDFs, and I don't like having to wait for my overworked creative department to run Word documents through Acrobat.
It's not all roses. OO's wordcount is crap, and you have to go and find a separate macro to get a useful wordcount (ie: one like Word's). Fortunately, I already had a macro handy (might be the same one as http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/bugs/oo_macros.h tml), but I've known other writers give up on OO after about 30 seconds because it had no wordcount built in.
But it only took one feature to compel me to switch. For someone else it may be a different feature which does it, but I can't avoid the sense that Microsoft is falling behind. IE is a vastly inferior browser - like many others I use Firebird (now -fox) not because I dislike MS but because it's simply a better product. If Office starts lagging OO in any meaningful way, a lot more pressure will build from users like me. What do you think I recommend to my colleagues who envy my ability to spit out PDFs on demand?
Re:En garde! by thoth · 2004-02-10 04:02 · Score: 1

Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch?

I did this, for a few reasons.

For the first time in my life I now own multiple computers - 3 of them, plus a notebook which is sort of on permanent loan from my company. I have reason to use spreadsheets on all of them, and don't want to shell out for four copies of MS Office. That would be what, $1200? No way is that worth it, it isn't even worth it for one copy and the inconvenience of only using MS Office on one machine.

Seccond, this is more anecdotal, but recently I visited an out-of-state friend who owned Office 97. I used her computer and copy of Office 97... and it wasn't until I was finished with what I needed to do that I realized that I couldn't find anything different between Office 2000 and Office 97, at least among features I used. But, I'm not an "advanced user".

I also don't fit into the "needs compatibility with others" situation. I'm not sure what jobs require this, nowhere I've ever worked have I ever had the occasion to send documents (the bits) to people outside my place of employment. Maybe that is something for legal and/or marketing careers (not a diss, I just don't write documents that get circulated in binary form).
Re:En garde! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:05 · Score: 0
- OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor, for example.
That's right, but Office doesn't have a foothold either. We all use LaTeX.
Re:En garde! by pjt33 · 2004-02-10 04:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

There are branches of academia other than CompSci, Maths and Physics.
Re:En garde! by mabhatter654 · 2004-02-10 04:20 · Score: 1

The only problem with OO.org is being in a mixed environmen with MSOffice. There are very few features that OO.org doesn't have matches for...and some features are more accessable in my opinion than the MSOffice versions. The problem is in the conversion..or worse having some people on oo.org or some on MSO. That's the mix for trouble. The solution is to make OO.org the business standard...and keep the MSO around for interfacing to other businesses.
When somebody builds a filter so MSOffice can properly read/write OO.org files they'll be blood in the water...because the mixed environment would then work nicely!!
Re:En garde! by iwadasn · 2004-02-10 04:34 · Score: 1

In my experience, the chart making of open office is indeed fairly poor. If they could substantially improve that, then that alone would put them on much better footing. The second area that needs work is much more specialized. We would love to use open office at work if it had RTD (Real Time Data) functionality. Basically a little command you can type into a cell that will cause a function call to called into a library of code to fetch data into the spreadsheet. A lot of people use this for a lot of things, and it would dramatically help if there was a good way to get data into the spreadsheets. I have used the current interface to OpenOffice, and frankly it sucks. It's extremely slow, and feels very kludgy from java. Basically, that's what it would take for us. RTD, better charting (handling lots of data without croaking), and a better java interface. If those three were delivered we'd drop excel in a second.
Re:En garde! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:09 · Score: 0

>> For individuals, there simply is no need for a different office suite.
>> Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch?

1) fear of viruses
2) fear of next upgrade cost
3) fear of compatibilty issues with next version
4) cost/ease of support
5) concerns about pirated software 'phoning home' (do you think all those home users who own 'office pro' have actually paid for it?)
6) had enough of the paperclip yet? ;o) (sorry)

granted, some people/organisations need some of the features provided only by microsoft's office s/w... but many people don't.
Re:En garde! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:12 · Score: 0

oh, and try sharing your calendar with microsoft office -- you'll need to spend more money on some server software to do this.

in open-office, this is simple and requires no costly extra software
Re:En garde! by WNight · 2004-02-10 05:18 · Score: 1

They just need to give the CS department a project for the students... It's fairly hard to come up with a real-world task that will build skills, and yet choose something students can complete in a semester. Modifying an existing project would be a great way to handle this.
Re:En garde! by DrCode · 2004-02-10 06:58 · Score: 1

When I taught a math course last year, I found Lyx and gnuplot excellent for creating tests and assignments. Lyx's equation editing works beautifully, and I also liked its ability to specify vertical space in inches.

My only gripe was the outdated Xforms GUI, but I believe that's being replaced by GTK.
Re:En garde! by glpierce · 2004-02-10 07:32 · Score: 1

I'm in nearly the same boat as you with word processing. I use OO almost exclusively (pdf being the deciding factor), but I have to copy/paste into Word for document summary (word count, etc) info. OO has the basics done, but most intermediate and advanced features are lacking. Try changing text color to something other than a preset.

--
G
Re:En garde! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 16:35 · Score: 0

Yes, but none that matter.
Re:En garde! by Clovert+Agent · 2004-02-11 02:44 · Score: 1

This is the macro I was talking about:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/showattac hment.cg i?attach_id=1907&file=wordcount.txt

Best quote by Noryungi · 2004-02-10 02:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

Best quote from the article (at least for me):

I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that.

There you have it, in a nutshell... :-)

--
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)

Re:Best quote by Pros_n_Cons · 2004-02-10 08:27 · Score: 1

By saying he's never rebooted he just told us his machines do not have kernel updates and are vulnerable to about 10 security holes.
We need to figure a way around this. It sounds impossible and maybe it is which is too bad for enterprise customers.

--

-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller

Alright so I am an idiot but where is the case stu by SmallFurryCreature · 2004-02-10 02:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Alright so I am an idiot but where is the case study? All I see is a very short interview with a man in charge of the IT department where they already have a large amount of unix knowledge choosing to go with the new kid in the unix camp rather then going with windows.

This is in fact what MS is saying. That if your company does not have significant unix skills but instead is windows based then switching to linux will be more expensive. Sure they mess around with it but that claim is pretty valid. It is always more expensive in the short term, and tco is short term roi would be long term, to switch.

So yes he does say the lack of MS Office is keeping the linux desktop down. True or not this is hardly likely to ever change. Hell MS is even backing down on MS office of the apple.

Nice headline, pity it doesn't seem related to the story.

To those impatient to see when Linux will overthrow MS windows look back at history and ask how long it took MS to go from nobody to somebody. There was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked. With PICTURES!!!!!

--

MMO Quests are like orgasms:

You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

Re:well, duh by pyropaul · 2004-02-10 02:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

Shouldn't feed the trolls but ... when you make a statement like "... the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, ..." it's rather obvious you're just a Microsoft shill. No journaled filesystem indeed. From "man fs":

ext3 is a journaling version of the ext2 filesystem.

etc.

No big surprises here by NixLuver · 2004-02-10 02:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

Having been in the IT space for some time, administering both NT/2k/XP based networks and *Nix networks, this comes as no great shock to me. FUD from Redmond notwithstanding, *nix is a win for server applications, hands down.

'Objective Studies' aside, there is little comparison in performance, ease of maintenance, etc. The answer I've begun giving the Windows Admins here at work (who are fighting for server installs - a losing battle in this age of dropping budgets and 'increased efficiencies') is this: Go and administer an enterprise level *nix network for five years, then come back to me and we'll compare notes. (Yes, I did my time as an MS Admin, MCSE+I and all that crap, back when NT was going to save the world)

IMHO, the only reason M$ still has any of the server space at all is 'time to market' considerations, and the overall lower level of expertise. Back when I was a Windows admin, I used to say: "The biggest problem with Windows is that Microsoft designed it so that any idiot could set it up - and most of them do."

Any given network is only as stable/secure as its administrator, it's true, but remember that the ideal case stability of the platform represents a hard limit, no matter how competent the admin. Anybody wanna bet their job on 5 9s from NT?

--
Thinking outside my Head

one word: endnote by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:21 · Score: 0

Endnote
Endnote
Endnote

Endnote.

For handling large (>10) references, Endnote is where it's at.

the probable answer by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 02:24 · Score: 0, Flamebait

because people are lazy shits or they would have gotten a real job building things instead of siting on their ass typing shit all day long. the vb macros are already written. they don't want to make them again.
that said, i don;t know anyone who uses them. i certainly don't. i don't use macros for anything, except in C and in cofig files. and I don't programme anymore, just run my website and look for work. therefor i do not use macros at all. textedit does what i need for day-to-day stuff. appleworks is fine when i need to make a large sort of document, not that i am writing papers anymore.

Re:the probable answer by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 03:33 · Score: 1

because people are lazy shits or they would have gotten a real job building things [...] I [...] just run my website and look for work.
I can't resist commenting on the on the irony here. Us "lazy sh*t, macro-programmers, who should get a real job" all seem to have well paying jobs, while you "hardcore, real ASM/C programmers" seem to be jobless. Heh.
Re:the probable answer by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:08 · Score: 0

Um.. no, not really. As a matter of fact I was an embedded developer. The market changed, I learned a few new products, and replaced two guys just like you!

Your honour! by n.o.d.y.n.e · 2004-02-10 02:24 · Score: 1

Objection! Leading the witness.

--
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. - Henry Ford

Get OpenOffice.org instead by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:25 · Score: 1, Insightful

Who needs Microsoft Office anymore? OpenOffice is a OpenSource, Free Office suite that is compatible with Micosoft files and it Runs on Linux as well as Windows. Not only that it is completley free.

If you wanted to swtich to Linux but you were afraid you couldnt open your documents you shouldnt Get OpenOffice today!

Download OpenOffice 1.1
Download page

Re:Get OpenOffice.org instead by sithlord2 · 2004-02-10 10:36 · Score: 1

Because a lot of software-packages use the MS-Office Active-X/OLE controls to generate documents (orders, invoices, etc...)

--
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.

Re:well, duh by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:25 · Score: 0

One would figure that with the line, "I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming", it would have been obvious this was a (dumb) joke...

TCO of recent Microsoft Updates by servicepack158 · 2004-02-10 02:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

How much is it costing when M$ releases a patch for IE (last week) and it erases all of your IE passwords? Imagine the call centers and helpdesks getting slammed for password resets because people don't know what their account info is.

Re:TCO of recent Microsoft Updates by poot_rootbeer · 2004-02-10 05:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

How much is it costing when M$ releases a patch for IE (last week) and it erases all of your IE passwords?

It is a user's responsibility to remember their passwords, not the browser's. If this presents a problem for your organization, I would suggest that your computer users need more training on good security practice.
Re:TCO of recent Microsoft Updates by servicepack158 · 2004-02-11 01:04 · Score: 1

You have no idea about this vulnerability. I'm talking about bank passwords to https websites, slashdot passwords, not corporate passwords. You can't train your clients if you are a bank.
You shouldn't answer things you know nothing about.

How about read my E-MAIL?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:25 · Score: 2, Funny

It constantly confounds me WHY none of the open office alternatives leave out this VITAL piece of software. Instead, preferring to point users to some other project not integrated into the office applications.

Mark me up as troll if you must but I believe Outlook to be one of the best, if not exactly secure, pieces of software microsoft has ever made. The latest version fixes a lot of complaints and security problems of the past and adds some really nice features.

-The Anonymous Bastard

Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:52 · Score: 0

You can't be serious? That POS outlook ranges below both Internet Explorer and Windows 95.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:55 · Score: 0

I believe Outlook to be one of the best, if not exactly secure, pieces of software microsoft has ever made.

You are absolutely right! Oh, I know all those Linux fanatics out there are going to point at the miserable security history of Outlook, but what's a few (thousand) viruses? I gotta have my outlook no matter how often it brings down the entire corporate network!
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by jusdisgi · 2004-02-10 03:01 · Score: 1

It constantly confounds me WHY none of the open office alternatives leave out this VITAL piece of software.
Uh...possibly because there are lots of perfectly good and free email clients?

Seriously...no matter what platform you are on, there is at least one built-in mail client. The mail app that came with OSX sucks, and should be replaced with Mozilla; and of course Outlook Express isn't great, but it's not any worse than Outlook. But the point is, they are already there, and if you want a good one, it's readily available for free too. So there isn't any need for every office suite to have email.

And where did you hear that Outlook's latest version fixed security problems? It still runs crap from the preview pane, right?

--
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by GarryOwen · 2004-02-10 03:27 · Score: 1

The latest Outlook preview pane comes with scripts turned off and does not download external content by default. That should solve the previous security problems. Honestly, I have used Outlook for the last 6 years or so, and never had a single virus or such. It is amazing what staying on top of patches and keeping an up to date antivirus running does.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by squiggleslash · 2004-02-10 03:41 · Score: 1

I have to agree with the grandparent. Outlook Express sucks lemons, but Outlook itself is a well-integrated intuitive email/groupware system and I've yet to come across anything quite so well put together.
I think the major problem with the open source/free software alternatives is that the standards are lagging. Rich text has to be implemented with HTML and programmers are still trying to get the hang of that, and HTML is a little too much for what's needed in any case; email notifications has to be implemented by regular polling of an IMAP server (and beyond checking for new email, notifications are rarely fully implemented); emails have to be downloaded in full before they can be parsed and summarized or not at all. There's no standard for creating filters, and the standards for groupware are really defacto, poorly documented, and lack maturity.
Outlook's major problem has been that it integrates a little too well with Windows making it relatively easy to put together trojans and viruses. Beyond that it's a very nice system and I haven't come across a free and open alternative that matches it. I don't think one will exist until, at the least, IMAP is extended to support real time notifications, filter support, and an effort is made to make HTML email a little easier to work with.

--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by kdart · 2004-02-10 04:24 · Score: 1

IMAP has been extended to support asyncronous notifications. At least the Courier implementation supports it. However, I am not aware of a client that supports it yet.

--

--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by MKalus · 2004-02-10 04:41 · Score: 1

Seriously...no matter what platform you are on, there is at least one built-in mail client. The mail app that came with OSX sucks, and should be replaced with Mozilla;

That I can't agree with. I take mail.app any day over Thunderbird... I have both on the system but think Mail works better. Especially since 10.3

--
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:58 · Score: 0

try ximian evolution -- it's almost a straight rip off of outlook.

it's not quite as mature, and not quite as polished (yet), but it seems to have all the key functionality, including imap, ldap, palm sync, etc.
Re:How about read my E-MAIL?? by jusdisgi · 2004-02-10 05:15 · Score: 1

I have little experience with 10.3, so it is possible that the mail program has been improved.

However, if you have not had any problems with this app, you are just lucky. I happen to do some technical support as part of my job at a very small ISP, and this client fails more per user than any other one I know of. And when it does, it is often just inexplicable. And googling the error typically reveals several other people with the same problem, and no one who has any fix. Deleting/recreating the account often solves the problem.....but this mail client has the dubious distinction of being the only mail client I have ever used or even heard of that irrevocably deletes all the mail along with the account settings. Yeah...found that out the hard way.

Again, perhaps newer versions are better...but it is of note that my problems with this client don't have anything to do with lack of features, or interface grumbles, or anything else. I don't like it because it is flat out the least reliable agent for the checking of email that I have ever had the misfortune to have to work with.

p.s. Note I am talking about the mail chunk of Mozilla, not Thunderbird. I have only used Thunderbird on a Mac once, and it was Thunderbird .2 with OS 10.0.2....but it was completely unstable. Now, that box wasn't very stable to begin with, and Thunderbird is several revisions down the line....but that's not my recommendation either. Real Mozilla is.

--
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.

Features? No, function! by heironymouscoward · 2004-02-10 02:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

Features definitely do not equal value despite the propaganda that tries to convince people otherwise.

The essence of good design is simplicity and value comes from the elimination of unnecessary features, not their addition.

You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.

As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users. You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.

Finally, people will switch to OOorg for several reasons. Firstly when the weight of yearly licenses starts to hurt. Secondly, to avoid yet one more cycle of upgrades that break large numbers of existing configurations for little obvious gain. Thirdly, when they are running old versions and do not want to pay once more for new ones. Lastly, and I believe significantly, many people use MS Office with no license at all. OOorg provides them a way to become "legitimate".

Now, the discussion is not about "why switch", it's about cost.

In a global market, any business that pays more than it needs to for a service (including software) is at a competitive disadvantage, and will eventually be beaten by leaner competitors.

Microsoft's offerings costs more, and for the majority of its users, this extra cost simply does not translate into extra value. You cannot debate this observation away. If you work for Microsoft, you would do better to consider how such an unbalanced business model can actually survive. Eventually your customers will be unable to pay for your products, however much they like them. What will you do then?

--
Ceci n'est pas une signature

Open Source can be commercial by latroM · 2004-02-10 02:30 · Score: 4, Informative

>...open source and commercial software work in peace together.

Commercial doesn't always mean non-free. MySQL and RedHat are both companies which produce commercial software which is open source/free software.

Printing Envelopes by Walrus99 · 2004-02-10 02:33 · Score: 3, Interesting

Just sent out 2000 brochures using FileMaker and MacLabel on OS X.2. Had bar codes and everything. The fun part was getting the address database from a flat file into the FileMaker relational database. Was able to use Perl to do this from the command line in OS X. I doubt that it would be as easy to do this in Windows. Can you even get to a command line in the latest version of Windows? Is Perl included? Can you easily write your own scripts?

Re:Printing Envelopes by drinkypoo · 2004-02-10 03:42 · Score: 1

You can still get a command line. Perl is not included but it is readily available from activestate, or by using cygwin. (There may be a perl for SFU as well.) And what do you mean by flat file? Is there any formatting in this file?

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Printing Envelopes by agallagh42 · 2004-02-10 03:49 · Score: 1

"Can you even get to a command line in the latest version of Windows?"

Yes, of course you can. In fact you can do more from the command line than you can from the GUI these days.

"Is Perl included?"

No, but it comes with the resource kit.

"Can you easily write your own scripts?"

Yes. We use scripts for many day to day activities here. They're very powerful. VBScript is most common, but you can use several other languages if you like.

--
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Re:Printing Envelopes by omicronish · 2004-02-10 04:29 · Score: 1

You can get the free ActivePerl distribution for Windows. They also have a Python distribution, which works perfectly and is incredibly useful.
Re:Printing Envelopes by Tin+Foil+Hat · 2004-02-10 04:54 · Score: 1

Can you even get to a command line in the latest version of Windows? Yes, it's under Start->Programs->Accessories, but it's not very good. Is Perl included? No, but you can download a no-cost version from ActiveState.com Can you easily write your own scripts? Why yes, yes I can.

--
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Re:Printing Envelopes by Clover_Kicker · 2004-02-10 08:36 · Score: 1

Windows uses different technology for "glue scripts". Any MS Office feature can be called by VBscript/WSH scripts.

The syntax is horrendous, but you can do very nifty things.
Re:Printing Envelopes by BoneFlower · 2004-02-10 14:53 · Score: 1

Yes, perl is included in SFU, but its a slightly older version(5.6.something IIRC). Which actualyl works out for me, my webhost is a linux box with Perl 5.6.x on it, so having the same version available locally, when I do local tests of the scripts, I know if they will work live or not- subtle versioning issues aren't likely to come up, especially given that SFU has good posix support so I can even test out that stuff.

ActiveState ActivePerl should be included on windows by default... if not with XP Home, with XP Professional and 2003 Server, and thrown on to 2k service packs. Perl is a little hard to learn, but once you get it its damn easy to use. imagine all the perl hackers that could create... wait, no, maybe thats not a good idea. Perl is hard enough to read without using AOL'ese for your identifiers:)

Re:well, duh by Gordonjcp · 2004-02-10 02:36 · Score: 1

integrate the shareware version of Linux

That should be a major clue...

Remember: real-world results usually aren't by bucknuggets · 2004-02-10 02:37 · Score: 2, Insightful

How often do you see case studies in which management says that something they tried really stank? The only time you'll see that is when they intend to litigate - which is rare. Most of the time these "real world results" are produced by ambitious executives that want more publicity within their own company: they never want to take responsibility for a failure. Fortunately for the open source movement, it's gaining popularity - so you'll tend to see more of these in support of it. It'll be almost impossible to find one that opposes it (even though it is sometimes a failure).

Re:Features? No, function! by leerpm · 2004-02-10 02:37 · Score: 1

As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users

I disagree. While no one uses all the advanced features, most users often have use for at least a few of them. Give OpenOffice a few more years and it may mature to the point where it is suitable for all. But not yet. Oh, and where is the replacement for Outlook (that will still run on Windows)?

The most important post you will ever read. by Chess_the_cat · 2004-02-10 02:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

I've got an excuse: There's no reason *not* to use Windows. It's called inertia. I've already got an OS. It works. There are millions of apps. Why should I spend my time, and energy to switch? Even 'free' isn't going to make me switch. Think about that. I've already paid for an OS so why should I care that Linux is free?

Why should I knock myself out with Crossover Office trying to get Photoshop to run on Linux when I can just doubleclick on a shortcut and get it to run now? I can go to Best Buy, pick up a game and just know it will work.

As for all the supposed problems with Windows, they're non-starters for me. I run a firewall and a pop-up blocker. I install the updates. XP hasn't crashed since I got it 2 years ago. I've never had a problem.

In short, what's in Linux for someone like me other than headaches?

I'm not saying I never would switch but this has to be addressed by the Linux community. You need to come up with something that is obviously better and not for reasons that only geeks are interested in. Something so good that I am compelled to switch. I'd even pay money for it. The free thing that Linux nuts love to harp on is not important to the average user.

I'm only trying to help.

--
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1

Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:48 · Score: 0

XP doesn't crash for me so much as it executes it's auto-reboot function about 3 times a day. Okay, it could be the crappy nForce board I'm using but the machine doesn't auto-restart when booted into Linux. Then again maybe it's because there aren't any drivers for the auto-reboot chip in Linux yet. XP is not a bad operating system but it certainly does crash, your box is an absolutely exception to the rule. W2K is the only MS OS that I would agree can run for weeks on end without crashing. All that shit aside, if you don't want to switch don't. Nobody's forcing you to. You're mistaking Linux with MS which pretty much forces you to buy an MS OS if you buy an OEM system.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:58 · Score: 1, Interesting

Yes, you are just one lame user who is semi-competent in keeping up to date, knows what a firewall is, understands the term pop-up blocker, etc.

I run a computer lab of 20 Linux machines, and several Linux servers. I work in a building where everyone else uses Windows. Guess who goes home at a reasonable hour everyday? Guess which machines are a constant pain? I've been using Linux for a couple of years now, and I'll probably never use MS junk again. If you are happy with Windows, fine. Note that most are not...hence the ever-increasing tide of change to Linux, BSD, etc. MS reminds me of the fall of the Roman Empire...:-) Guess you're a Roman...fiddling, perhaps? =)
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by 26199 · 2004-02-10 03:03 · Score: 4, Insightful

Hmm, you're missing the meaning of 'free'... that's free as in freedom. Linux won't try and hide what it's doing or why, and you're always welcome to change it...

Linux won't try and screw you over for the next dollar, ever.

It's good for peace of mind :-)
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

I've already paid for an OS so why should I care that Linux is free?
Perhaps because with MS, at some point, you're going to have to pay _again_ to use the same set of features ?
A lot of company are already in a renting software scheme with MS products : they receive everything MS produce, and pay each year for what they effectively used during the last year.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by olip · 2004-02-10 03:14 · Score: 1

Typical 6-digit-SID...
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:21 · Score: 0

What utter crap. Stop blaming the OS for your crap hardware.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:33 · Score: 0

Call me ignorant but what's 6-digit-SID mean?
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:33 · Score: 1, Insightful

Don't switch. Linux community doesn't want you. If the reasons on the wall aren't compelling enough for you, you can stay with your bloody proprietory OS. Linux community is not a company, that goes about asking every dork out there what they want. We aren't obliged to come up with something .... so good that I am compelled to switch
If you want something, you code it up, or make enough noise and compelling arguments about it that the developers will be interested in doing it.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by LWATCDR · 2004-02-10 03:38 · Score: 4, Informative

"There's no reason *not* to use Windows."
For you there might not be but for Company IT people there are many.
1. You said, "I can go to Best Buy, pick up a game and just know it will work." This is a down side for many companies. You put a copy of Ultra Mega Super Pimp on your work computer and you company could be sued for sexual harasment, and or piracy.
2. You said, "As for all the supposed problems with Windows, they're non-starters for me." But they are not non issues for the rest of the world. Outlook is a security nightmare. It has allows millions if not billions of dollars in damages from exploits. Lets talk about trojans? How many have there been for Windows? You run firewall. That is nice but in a setup with even as few as a few dozen people all that has to happen to make your firewall usless is for on person to hook up there notebook at a hotel and then come back to the main office and plug into your network. You now have the worm on the inside of you network.
Windows is not secure. Just because you have not been hit does not mean they are non-starters. I know a few people that drank like a fish and smoked all the time that made it to 90. That does not prove that smoking is a non-issue.

In a corprate setting all you care about is will a computer run programs X,Y, Z and not cause me issues. The only reason I care about a game working on one of the systems in my office is that there should be no games running in my office.

My office is moving away from Microsoft products for a couple of reasons.
1. Away from Outlook to Thunderbird. Some of us already use Thunderbird all we are waiting for is VCard support. Calander would be nice as well. PS a Windows version of Evolution would be nice to help in migration.
2. Away from Office to OpenOffice. OpenOffice has worked well for us in tests and is a LOT cheaper then MSOffice.
3. Away from NT and Novell towards Linux for our severs. This is pretty much done. We have one Windows box running. The only reason we keep that is for our accounting system. All of the print, database, mail, DNS, and file servers are Linux

To answer your final question. "In short, what's in Linux for someone like me other than headaches?" Knowlege. If you just want to play games and surf for porn Windows is fine for you. This artical is not about people like you. It is about companies. It would be the same as if artical was about tractor trailer trucks and you said, "My Ford pick up is easier to park, and it works just fine when I need too haul some plants home from Home Depo, Semi trucks are usless!."

--
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:40 · Score: 1, Insightful

The "free thing" is definitely of interest to the average user. I've lost count of the number of times people have said to me they don't feel they can justify the cost of a license for MS Office or Photoshop. They're delighted when I show them the Open Source alternatives they don't have to pay for. The only people I know that don't complain about the price of software are those that constantly download warez.

These days the cost of an OEM license for XP and Office approaches the cost of entry level hardware. If you buy retail or upgrade products it's more expensive than the hardware. This is nuts. The software has become the hardware. I'm just glad there's an alternative in Open Source.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Jagasian · 2004-02-10 03:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

One thing that is far better on Linux is installing, removing, and updating software. With apt-get, a nice GUI frontend, and a good package repository... it is hands down better than on Windows. While apt-get will keep my entire system up to date, Windows, at best, will be able to keep a few core aspects of the OS up to date. Almost everything that you installed after you got your computer with Windows preinstalled will have to be manually maintained.

For Windows users with little software installed, this isn't a problem, but for those with many apps installed, it quickly becomes difficult to stay up to date on updates and security fixes.

With Linux, the amount of installed software installed does not effect the ease of maintaining the system. Of course, I assume you have a comprehensive package repository, but this is easily obtained on Debian, for example... or even Fedora.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by AJC1973 · 2004-02-10 04:45 · Score: 1

The parent poster is referring to the 6-digit Slashdot ID, and possibly implying that later Slashdot members (6-digits) are more likely to hold the grandparents point of view.
And, almost certainly, to the book "6 dinner Sid"
I guess. (Grandparent had a "cat" themed name).
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by iwadasn · 2004-02-10 04:45 · Score: 1

That's nice, but for those of us who actually use our computers for something other than surfing for porn, XP is woefully insufficient. My XP box crashes about twice a week because I'm using it for actual work, and as soon as I cause a little memory churn it starts swapping out all the programs (even when it never even gets close to filling up its memory) and becomes dog slow. My computer at home is almost identical (1.6 G5 w 1.25 GB RAM Vs. 2.4 P4 w/ 1 GB RAM) and it never has these problems, despite running far more programs, and often much more intensive ones. Face it, for real work, windows doesn't cut it.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by sgtrock · 2004-02-10 04:53 · Score: 2, Informative

You do realize that you don't actually own that copy of Windows XP, don't you? You do realize that if you bought that copy from a retailer 2 years ago, you have about a year to go before it just quits working because you only bought a 3 year license to USE it?

You purchased a rental agreement. Not a copy of the software.

BTW, go read your EULA some time. Then read what's posted on Microsoft's web site now. Nice how things have changed for the worse in the past couple of years, eh? Not that it was a customer friendly EULA to begin with.

Other posters have it right. You missed the point. It's free as in speech, not free as in beer.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Barraketh · 2004-02-10 05:13 · Score: 1

I hate to say this, but he's right. I've tried to switch to linux several times, but in the end i just ended up going back to XP. Most of the tools I need from linux I can get from cygwin, and as the parent said, XP works well enough for most users.

A point that most linux advocates seem to miss is that most windows software is pirated. As such, the fact that linux software is free is irrelevant. I can run Gimp, which is free, or I can run Photoshop, which is also free. Until the Linux applications (not the OS, applications!) beat their commerical counterparts on their own merits, linux will not be adopted on the desktop.

Keep in mind that the general economic rule for a new product to be adapted is that it has to be 10x better than the old widespread alternative. Linux is just not there yet
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by sirshannon · 2004-02-10 06:14 · Score: 1

Linux won't try and screw you over. Niether will your floppy drive.

But RedHat, Dell and other vendors just might.

--
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by sirshannon · 2004-02-10 06:17 · Score: 1

I would love to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook but programs are barely in the same ballpark. If comeone can use Thunderbird to replace Outlook then they don't need Outlook to begin with.

Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express is possible for most people but it had a few too many bugs the last time I tried it.

I haven't downloaded and tested the new version but I'm planning on correcting this within the hour.

--
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by LWATCDR · 2004-02-10 08:33 · Score: 1

Many people use outlook for just email. Yes Outlook express would be work as well. I have had few problems with Thunderbird than outlook but then I do not have Outlook XP and I am not getting it.
I have to say you are right. If you are really using a lot of outlooks features then thunderbird is not a replacment. You might have noticed the plea for Evolution for Windows :)

--
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by 26199 · 2004-02-10 08:36 · Score: 1

I think the important point is 'other vendors'. With free software there will always be other options, which means companies have to play nice, whether they want to or not.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:43 · Score: 0

"A point that most linux advocates seem to miss is that most windows software is pirated. As such, the fact that linux software is free is irrelevant."

Sure, home users pirate a lot of stuff. But not business users (or at least not as much), and as others have already pointed out, the article is about business users. No business larger than 25 employees can justify the risks associated with pirated software. Ask any place that does a lot of production CAD work - they are probably scared stiff of AutoDesk and its lawyers. Getting caught pirating AutoCAD can cost a company tonnes of revenues.

Businesses smaller than 25 employees? Without the purchasing power to get MS products at reasonable prices, they will soon be flocking to Linux/OSS in droves anyway, as soon as their "license to repair" expires.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 11:17 · Score: 0

OUCH!!!!

You had a good argument going and then this:

"I know a few people that drank like a fish and smoked all the time that made it to 90. That does not prove that smoking is a non-issue."

Whoops!!

You just triggered my Stupid-Analogy-Argument filter and now I know that you are just some three button shirt wearin' dork who drives a Saturn.

Whoops!!

"It would be the same as if artical was about tractor trailer trucks and you said, "My Ford pick up is easier to park, and it works just fine when I need too haul some plants home from Home Depo, Semi trucks are usless!."

There it is again.

I am not the droid you are looking for.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 13:26 · Score: 0

If nothing else, the events of september 11 should have shown us that people are willing to give up "free as in freedom" as long as it doesn't effect the way they are doing things right now too much.
Re:The most important post you will ever read. by LWATCDR · 2004-02-11 02:42 · Score: 1

Analogies are a valid form of argument. I would say throughing it out the other points because you do not like analogies is flawed. I in fact do not own a Saturn and never will I feel they are over priced. My vehical of choice is my 78 CB750 that I am working on restoreing in all of my free time.
But if you want me to not use them replace the offending lines with. "What some little dweeb that worries about his copy of Ultra Mega Supper Pimp Gold not running on Linux has little to add to a discusion of it use in a proffesional setting." I will also add that if he was not a dork and wanted to play games he would have taken the effort to look at WineX.

--
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.

Mod this up ... its hilarious by Evil+Pete · 2004-02-10 02:41 · Score: 4, Funny

we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool

When you start off thinking that Linux is shareware then you've just demonstrated that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Anything else that follows in your post can only be viewed as slapstick!

having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming

Oh man you're a scream. This has gotta be a troll. A very funny one at that.

kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem

Ok gotcha, this is for those who still don't realise its a joke post. Tell em something obviously false.

Yes a hilarious post, though unfortunately some people might think you actually mean what you said. If you did .... well um ... hate to say it but you're an idiot, just hope your clients don't find out.

--
Bitter and proud of it.

AppleWorks by Walrus99 · 2004-02-10 02:41 · Score: 1

AppleWorks is a bit crippled. The MacOS X version seems to be exactly like the one that I used to run on my PowerBook 1400c way back when.

I think that Apple stopped improving AppleWorks a while back so that it doesn't compete with MSOffice. Wanting to have Word, etc. available for the latest version of Apple OS has kept Jobs under Gate's thumb for decades. It was part of the leverage he used to get Apple GUI for early version of Windows.

AppleWorks is great for writing simple basic documents and it doesn't have a pop-up box that tells me how to spell my own name or assumes that I want an indented list everytime I type a number. I would like to see a version of OpenOffice for OSX. Does anyone know if one is in the works?

Re:AppleWorks by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:48 · Score: 1, Informative

would like to see a version of OpenOffice for OSX. Does anyone know if one is in the works?
There is a porting project, but presently it doesn't use the carbon/cocoa libraries. So you need to use it with the X-windows interface. I'm sure they could do with some help (bug reports, testing etc.).
Re:AppleWorks by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 02:49 · Score: 1

It's there if you run the X11 server. /. posted that Koffice was ported nativly, but I can't find a download site.
Re:AppleWorks by NatasRevol · 2004-02-10 03:00 · Score: 1

Try here.

Karma whore-day

--
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Re:AppleWorks by Walrus99 · 2004-02-10 03:11 · Score: 1

Thanks for the links, but I am looking for something that works with the OS X desktop, not X-11. I'm sure that there are enough OSXers out there to make porting OpenOffice worthwhile.
Re:AppleWorks by alcmaeon · 2004-02-10 04:05 · Score: 1

Here is the KOffice on OSX link.

http://ranger.befunk.com/blog/archives/000291.ht ml

Yawn.... by Hangtime · 2004-02-10 02:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

Peters, Country Energy's information systems manager, wanted to leverage the large amount of inhouse Unix skills within the IT department by choosing Linux as the operating system platform for front end applications.

Of course it's going to be cheaper to run Linux in their environment; they have a large in-house staff that already knows Unix. This is not rocket science and I myself would tell them to go the Linux route. However, if your a Windows-only shop like our little cranny of the world then moving to Linux doesn't make a lot of sense because their is no internal knowledge base. Moral of the story: Use what's best for you because if you don't have the resources then the alternative most times will be more expensive.

Re:Yawn.... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:05 · Score: 0

If your a small windows only shop, but have noone on staff who knows what they are doing when it comes to interoperability, security and maintenance, then you are an accident looking for the most inopportune time to happen.

If you have someone with any level of admin skills, then learning *nix is not a difficult chore, and the person would know when their skills are of a sufficient level to start any other required switchover.
Re:Yawn.... by Hangtime · 2004-02-10 16:00 · Score: 1

Oh because, Windows shops don't know what their doing right and all hail our protectors the mighty Unix shops.

We have dealt with DB2 databases running on AS/400 systems, we keep our s*it patched and watch the security newsgroups, we ensure that things that don't need to run under the system account don't so no we are not an accident waiting to thank you very much. Code Red, MyDoom, SQL Slammer never heard of them because we were patched.

We don't live our life in a beautiful world where we can all learn technologies that don't relate to what we do today, we have a business to support. Accept the fact that there are places in the world where MS might be a better alternative and that while we are in the minority it seems some of us on the other side of the fence do know what we are doing.

Re:Features? No, function! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:45 · Score: 0

I'd say give it a few months. It has rapidly matured in the last few weeks as developers sort out the bugs and implemented more features. Download the latest version and see it for yourself. I am using it now, and it is way faster and less buggier than previous versions!

It works on OS X by JeffTL · 2004-02-10 02:45 · Score: 1

Which is to say that if it can be ported there, a port to Linux would not be difficult for the likes of IBM.

Re:Features? No, function! by glpierce · 2004-02-10 02:45 · Score: 1

I definitely agree. I'm probably in the minority, having several major problems with OO.org instead of one or two, but there is enough missing or less functional that almost everyone will find something.

As for Outlook, I'm using Thunderbird, which is great, for email, and the Calendar extension for Firefox, which is pathetic. If Mozilla could make a nice calendar/scheduler, I think Outlook would be outdone.

--
G

Touche! :-) by Advocadus+Diaboli · 2004-02-10 02:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

"Features are more important than stability to many people. Rebooting is annoying"

No, its not the fact that you have to do a small coffee break for rebooting your machine (a coffee break is always welcome) the real annoying thing is that you lose 4 hours of work because your PC crashed right 10 seconds before you wanted to save your work. Or, thanks to the latest security issues you're unable to use your PC because remote administration is enforcing a virus signature update that needs a reboot. That's especially big fun if you use a PC installed in a meeting room and only booted when you have a meeting... If a meeting of 12 people is postponed because a security patch has to be installed, than this adds 1 hour of worktime to the TCO! And if you need a person that applies those patches as a service that also adds to the TCO.

"but not being able to do certain things is unacceptable"

That is exactly why I switched from Windows to Linux. There are things I can't do with Windows as well, sometimes the problem is technical, sometimes its just that I'm not able or willing to pay a fortune for a software I just want to try out.

"For people who don't use any advanced features, this may be true, but not for many others."

Pardon me. Receiving a lot of MS-Office documents from people that always say that there is no better things than MS-Office I find out that not even 1% of them is really using one of the advanced feature. They could even go with notepad or Write, but it has to be office...

"...while its chart-making is so poor, ..."

So what? The good thing of Linux is that if I'm not satisfied with the features of one component I'm able to use another component as well. So if the chart functions of OO are too poor, why not exporting the data and generating something with GnuPlot?

"Why would someone who has a perfectly good copy of MS Office want to switch?"

One reason could be that some things won't work (like very big documents), the other could be that MS-Office files can give away information that you don't want to give away or just simple seurity issues. I wouldn't mind if Outlook and its "childs" would be deleted from every installation, that could make the net much more safe and hopefully less worms would spread around.

"People paying licensing fees for multiple machines are far more likely to need the features not found in OO.org than individuals."

I guess exactly the opposite. Big organisations that get the "discount licenses" because they order so much are usually forced to use a "common set of features", so that means that you put company communication to the lowest possible level. An individual that is working just for himself and his pleasure is maybe more able to use features than a company. Here you have to use what everybody understands... so using high level features would result in a higher TCO (we're back at the topic, wow) because you'll always find some idiots in the firm that don't know how to use that. So firms policy to avoid support costs for those idiots can only be to lower the standards.

Re:Features? No, function! by mpe · 2004-02-10 02:48 · Score: 1

Features definitely do not equal value despite the propaganda that tries to convince people otherwise.

Also something in the "bells and whistles" catagory does not become a "feature" just because the marketing makes that claim.

Re: Let's Reconsider Everything Here. by zacnboat · 2004-02-10 02:50 · Score: 2, Informative

Clearly you aren't working in a collegiate level academic environment. I support hundreds of users with a variety of PhD's and I'll be honest: I'll could switch them all tomorrow and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I don't doubt that some of the more computer savvy users might make comment about the switch; but the fact remains that on the whole the average computer user, in both an academic environment and a corporate one, are approximately equal.

You have to look at the baseline for age and experience when considering the average user. On the whole your looking at middle aged people who are still only moderately exposed to ANY computing system.

You said: "OpenOffice can never get a foothold in academea while its chart-making is so poor." I would argue counter to that--most academics don't rely on the Microsoft suite to do "chart-making" or statistical analysis based on data models; in my experience SPSS has been the benchmark for that kind of work. In all honesty most users, in an academic environment, just don't USE all the features offered in the MS-Office Suite; and when your operating budget is limited because you're functioning under state contract, or on a federally subsidized grant you are significantly more concerned with where the money is going every week, rather than on making a small portion of your users feel like they have "The best product on the market."

You must also realize that when you carefully explain Linux and OpenOffice to someone working in an environment that is designed to promote education and learning---they can't help but acknowledge its relative importance.

As far as the features argument is concerned, all I have to say in response is: Tell the user that because of the opensource nature of Linux it is constantly evolving at a much faster pace than any Microsoft product. That means, in theory, that Linux is much more "cutting edge" than Windows. Thus the same argument could be made for any opensource product versus one designed by MICRO$OFT.

--
"We're gonna need a bigger boat." - Jaws

Cinelerra? by autechre · 2004-02-10 02:50 · Score: 1

Ever tried Cinelerra? Used to be called Broadcast 2000. I don't really know what your needs are since I mostly do audio work, but I'm surprised that you didn't mention it since I always thought it was "the" video editing app on Linux.

Also, if your goal is "100% Microsoft Free", then why not do your work on the Apple platform?

--
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.

Re:Cinelerra? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:00 · Score: 0

doesnt matter if Avid Express DV was available for Linux.. without real tools like after effects, commotion or boris red, it's not a viable platform.

plus what are you going to create it on? making a DVD is damn near impossible in linux as nobody has made a dvd menu/content creation software package yet. so all you can make is lame - just play a movie with one audio track and no subtitles DVD that has no chapter points... Yay...

cinerella is spoken about in the above post, and I agree.. it sucks, is very unstable, does not edit uncompressed DV files (changing video formats is very stupid in editing.) and is pretty much a flashy toy that is un-usealbe for anything but a silly little web-movie.
Re:Cinelerra? by autechre · 2004-02-10 06:29 · Score: 1

I'm sorry, I assumed that when the parent poster said "Cinderella", that is what he meant, not "Cinelerra". See, there's actually a freshmeat project called Cinderella, though on closer examination it's interactive geometry software. I should have looked more carefully before assuming that someone else could spell.

You didn't mention anything about Apple, so I guess my point about the ability to be "100% Microsoft free" still stands?

--
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.

Re:Alright so I am an idiot but where is the case by Kircle · 2004-02-10 02:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

To those impatient to see when Linux will overthrow MS windows look back at history and ask how long it took MS to go from nobody to somebody. There was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked. With PICTURES!!!!!

MS-DOS was release at around 1981, and 15 years later they had a monopoly with Windows 95. Linux is already about 10 years old. Should we expect great things from Linux in 5 years? I believe that is a reasonable expectation.

--

-- Kircle

Microsoft as carreer consideration by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 02:54 · Score: 2, Insightful

Microsoft as carreer consideration is an important factor.
Managers try to reduce teir personal risk to go with "mainstream vendor". Nobody gets fired becouse of Windows. You can get fired very quick if something goes wrong with the product of a lesser known vendor, becouse "how come you didn't choose Microsoft?
Senior managers who will fire the IT manager love Microsoft - as a corporation. They would love to be a Microsoft. If they have to reboot several times a day, well... they don't know anything else, so they assume that that's how computers work.

Just playing the other side for a moment... by gosand · 2004-02-10 02:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

Companies (and home users) should choose to leave Windows because of its licensing, first and foremost. The MS EULA basically says, "we own you" and people should take issue with that. If we all followed every license to the letter of the law, very few people would be using proprietary software -- especially Windows. ... ...What is the hidden cost of being tied down by fascist licensing? It costs you your freedom and subjects you to software audits. Violation of the EULA is US$200,000 and up to five years in jail...

OK, I feel this way too sometimes. But I have to look at it realistically too. Businesses - yeah, they have to consider TCO and licensing terms. Home users? No consideration whatsoever. I understand that *technically* Microsoft could audit everyone for license compliance, but it is not feasable that they would do so. Licensing of Windows sucks, if you care about it at all. Ask any home user of Windows what their major beef with it is, and I'll bet nobody says anything about Freedom. Hell, most people don't even like computers, let alone have a philosophy regarding them. That is why Microsoft has such a huge marketshare - they cater to the lowest common denominator. Not that the LCD is bad, just that the majority of people aren't tech-heads. People don't get it, nor do they WANT to get it. They don't care. Virus hits, they can't do email for a few days, they get over it. As Homer would shrug and say "Hmm, whadaya gonna do?"

If there is any kind of "Linux Revolution" it won't start in the U.S. All of a sudden, U.S. companies will look around and realize that the rest of the world has embraced this "new" technology and we'll have to play catch-up. Fine by me, maybe then I can get a job doing something I like - but I feel sorry for all the MCSEs. ..... Nah. :-)

--

My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

Re:Just playing the other side for a moment... by ValourX · 2004-02-10 04:30 · Score: 1

I think if home users were more aware of licensing terms and restrictions, they would reject Windows and similar software. People don't treat licensing seriously, and I think that's going to change in the future -- I think with DRM and activation schemes becoming mroe prevalent, people will turn toward Free Software. I think GNU/Linux will end up right where it began -- as a social movement designed to make better software more available to everyone to use as they see fit.

I think if there is a Linux Revolution it is already happening in Europe and Asia, and eventually Africa will be there too. It'll take more DRM and product activation to really move the mainstream US toward GNU/Linux though.
-Jem
Re:Just playing the other side for a moment... by TrancePhreak · 2004-02-10 18:15 · Score: 1

I think it is the opposite of what you imagine. I think DRM will drive people to Windows. Not really because it has DRM, but because something they bought requires it. I'm sure a lot of companies are going to be moving towards DRM enabled devices and software in the future as distribution moves more and more towards the internet.

This can greatly hinder adoptance of OpenSource by companies as well. Why would someone's boss want their code to be distributed? That's like saying our software is free. Which can be bad if you intend to sell your program.

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-]Phreak Out[-

What they're waiting for by andih8u · 2004-02-10 02:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

Reading through several newsgroups postings now and then, some newbie will post a question asking about which linux distro would be easiest to use and where would be the best place to go learn about it. And the answer typically is "stick with windows, you're too stupid to ever run linux" and "just do a google search for it dumbass," and assorted other flames. With someone's first introduction to the linux userbase being that, its a small wonder they won't use it. As Bruce Perens said, every linux user is an ambassador for linux. Some people are very nice and helpful about it, but you still have a large percentage of the users who are elitist and can't be bothered to help a newbie out (or they're just the most vocal.)

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Re:What they're waiting for by Tarwn · 2004-02-10 03:47 · Score: 1

I see a lot of that also, in fact just reading through the responses above to some of the other posts I see a lot of that. Although I'll add that some of it was in response to illegitimate claims, calling somone stupid for being ignorant doesn't do a lot to help them get past that ignorance.

This reminds me of the old highschool "I'm cool cuz I listen to bands you haven't heard of" thing.

A lot of people use Linux primarily because it's "cool". I wouldn't hazard a guess at percentages, and it is probably quite low, but these people are also required to be extremely vocal "I use Linux, I'm cool!!!" and to put down the people they are trying to be cooler than: "Your to stupid to use Linux, I'm cool!!!"

Unfortunatly this happens in pretty much every major area of human existence, I mentioned music above, you could probably find a few million other examples.

For most of us we use products because they benefit us (err, duh). I think in most cases we are willing to provide explanations to people who are using what we believe to be inferior products and that this is a Good Thing(tm). Unfortunatly, the "look how cool I am" people are loud, obnoxious, and probably alienating almost as many people as we are informing. Maybe we should spread a rumor that Windows is cooler so they will stop shooting the rest of us in the foot...

Oh yeah, and I use Linux and Windows, I'm cool :P

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Whee signature.

One more case study by flyingace · 2004-02-10 03:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

The first job that I worked for, in India, back in 1997-98, was a big M$ shop. We worked on C/C++/Win32SDK/VC++/MFC/COM. I used to be treated as the villain around the office, because I was the only Linux evangelist. I had to sneak in one 486 and run a seperate domain for the few linux lovers there.

Last week I had a chance to run into my previous project manager, and he was telling me that they went completely Linux. The organisation grew from a group of 40 programmers to 250 dudes. The only reason for this is, with the recent M$ licensing policy it was impossible to buy so many licenses. Now the whole organization is running RH 9.x and they use it to monitor home security systems and medical automation.

So please dont give us bull about TCO M$!!!

Re:One more case study by InfiniteWisdom · 2004-02-10 04:06 · Score: 1

Once factor you neglect to consider is the relative cost of people. For a 40-hour week's worth of pay at minimum wage in the US you can buy a Windows XP license retail (i.e. no bulk discounts or site licensing). The same amount of money will buy you an entry-level computer engineer for a month in India. So in India if its going to take two weeks of work to adapt.... sure, Linux is the clear winner. The same does not apply to the US.

That said, other factors may yet push things in Linux's favour even in the US... forced upgrades, viruses, downtime. The bottomline is, TCO for Linux may the clearly lower in your/b> case, but the issue is not as simple as you make it out to be.

PS: I'm a Linux zealot too, and of Indian origin

OT: IT Jobs in Chile by hypnotik · 2004-02-10 03:07 · Score: 1

I'm considering a move to Chile for personal reasons. What is the IT industry like there? Is it hard to find jobs or are there many companies looking for qualified workers?

Sorry I had to post this on the thread, but no other way to get in touch with you.

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(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)

Re: OT: IT Jobs in Chile by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 03:30 · Score: 1

Well, the market has been very, very rough this days, since the economy in Chile has been depressed. However, its still the software developing paradise of SouthAmerica, since is the only area of technology that developing is cheap. Santiago(big city like all the others) has heaps of offers(dont expect huge salaries unles you are very young and very experienced...i know, its crazy) and some down south for the wood and paper industry. 2004 is the year of reactivation, so i wouldn be a pesimist about it.oohay si liame ym

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"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Re: OT: IT Jobs in Chile by nelsonal · 2004-02-10 05:33 · Score: 1

Chile has appealed to me for several years, how hard is it to get a work visa or similar papers? I'd love to move down there in say a handful of years, and would probably not quite be financially independant.

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Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Re: OT: IT Jobs in Chile by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 07:03 · Score: 0

What is important is an university degree that they understand here, e.g. civil engineer, and you need to be more or less fluent in spanish. English will get you nowere. Dont expect to earn more than 800000 pesos as a programmer (1US$ ~= 550 pesos). As a project manager you might get up to aprox. 1500000 pesos. To earn more than that you'll have to be working rather high up in the organization.

However, earn less is a lot easier. I was programming C on Linux for a while and they paid me 500000. Then as a ASP and pl/sql programmer on another firm they paid me 600000. Now I am a project manager and I earn 1000000 which is ok, but no more. I never finished university though. Don't expect to find a job outside Santiago (crowded, bad air but fun).

Depending on your standards, but for me as an immigrant from western europe, ok living cost 200000-300000. Food set me back around 150000 and transport 40000. If you get a contract tax is 18% and without 10%. If you have a contract tax include a basic health insurance, but youll probably want to pay some extra, in my case 35000. Yet again with a contract you'll get three weeks vacation. A movie ticket is 3000, a beer 1000-1500 and a cup of coffee 500.

On the upside is that in general people tend to very nice (my new friends here are great) and the girls are NP.

Re:Features? No, function! by dubious9 · 2004-02-10 03:14 · Score: 4, Funny

You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.

I don't know. Ask Larry Wall.

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Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?

Nope... by twoslice · 2004-02-10 03:15 · Score: 1

On the numerous vendor and analyst TCO arguments flying around about Linux versus Unix and Windows, Peters said: "The battle is between Unix versus Windows rather than Linux versus Unix."

It is common knowledge that Linux is better than Windoze for uptime. The best quote is that people are starting to shift away from the theory that Linux is only gaining market share at the expense Unix.

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From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...

Re:Features? No, function! by rjstanford · 2004-02-10 03:25 · Score: 1

As for OpenOffice.org, it is easily, easily sufficient for 80-90% of all computer users. You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.

Er, so a cheap product can beat a free product because its, er, cheap? Yeah, sure, whatever...

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You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!

not a troll... by gimpboy · 2004-02-10 03:29 · Score: 2, Informative

i dont know why this guy was marked troll. i've had the same expirence with oo. i've only used the versions which come with redhat, so that might be the problem. in my expirence it's really slow.

i just started oowriter on a dual athlon MP 2200+ running redhat 9. it took 10 seconds for the splashscreen to open up and 9 more seconds for the application to start. that's almost 20 seconds just for a word processor to start.

i'm not going to comment much on the interface design except to say that it's not very responsive.

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-- john

Re:not a troll... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:35 · Score: 0

Yes it is the problem. Red Hat is obsolete by the way, better upgrade to Fedora, which comes with a newer, faster OpenOffice.
Re:not a troll... by Just+Some+Guy · 2004-02-10 04:24 · Score: 2, Informative

I just tried OpenOffice Writer 1.1.0 (Debian/unstable) on a P4/2.4 and it took 4 seconds from launch to accepting input. Recent versions load much faster than 1.0 and before.

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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Re:not a troll... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:00 · Score: 0

OO 1.1, running on Mandrake versions 9.1 and 9.2.
Machine is an Intel mobo, D845EBG2, P4 2.0 Ghz, 256Mb DDR RAM, KDE 3.1.3 on 9.1 and 9.2. On the Mandrake 9.1 install, first open of Writer takes ~20 seconds, subsequent opens down to ~10 seconds. On 9.2 first open takes ~12 seconds, subsequent opens ~7 seconds. Both 9.1 and 9.2 installs have default kernels.
Re:not a troll... by Just+Some+Guy · 2004-02-10 08:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

I hate to sound like this, but that must be a Mandrake thing (or maybe a low RAM thing - 256 isn't exactly a lot these days). These are the results of me launching OO Writer and hitting ^Q as soon as the window opens:
kirk@janus:~/projects$ time oowriter Starting configuration import into user data .. real 0m3.903s user 0m2.586s sys 0m0.135s kirk@janus:~/projects$ time oowriter Starting configuration import into user data .. real 0m3.898s user 0m2.573s sys 0m0.145s kirk@janus:~/projects$ time oowriter Starting configuration import into user data .. real 0m3.492s user 0m2.577s sys 0m0.136s

I'm using KDE 3.2 (which shouldn't matter) on an Dell Dimension 4600 with 1280MB of RAM (thanks to a mistake by the ordering department). I don't doubt your numbers, and they seem in line with others I've heard, but they're certainly far different than my local results.

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Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?

-1, Hypocrite by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:33 · Score: 2, Informative

"I don't reply to Anonymous Cowards" :-P

Re:-1, Hypocrite by The+Cydonian · 2004-02-10 20:01 · Score: 1

Quite clearly, he should learn from Microsoft and never make sweeping generalisations about his /. behaviour.

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More than mere navel gazing.

Re:Features? No, function! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:36 · Score: 0

Yes, when 'cheap' is effectively free. The schools get bulk discounts that are low enough to make it unworthwhile to switch. The students don't care either way. Technically this is called "dumping" and is illegal, but who cares?

No convincing evidence, until... by alispguru · 2004-02-10 03:36 · Score: 1

Business people won't believe viruses really cost money until they lose business because of them. Microsoft's stuff is so pervasive that when the virus/worm-du-jour comes around, everybody gets hit pretty much evenly. As long as everyone suffers mostly evenly, there's little reason to switch, especially if the perceived cost of switching is higher than the hard-to-quantify cost of virus cleanup.

Switching away from Microsoft could become a real competitive advantage in the right circumstances, though. Consider a business sector that has a lot of knowledge workers who live and die on their workstations (brokerage houses, big law firms, high-tech R&D). If a few firms in such a sector got off of Microsoft, they would be in a position to take business from the rest when viruses knocked them off the net.

This effect would be more pronounced with more destructive viruses, of course. If, say, Dell, HP, and Gateway were crippled for a day, the effect on market share would be nil. If they were offline, unable to take orders for a week, or a month, though, I guarantee you Apple's market share would go up.

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To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.

Re:Alright so I am an idiot but where is the case by LWATCDR · 2004-02-10 03:41 · Score: 1

"here was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked."
I had an Amiga 1000, and 2000HD. I even programed on the Amiga and got paid to do it. When was it more mainstream than MS-DOS??????????

--
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.

Office interoptibility by trezor · 2004-02-10 03:44 · Score: 3, Interesting

Office is by far the best productivity suite available and the most widely accepted.

No and yes. It's might be the best package when it comes to cooperation between the programs, when it comes to intuitivity, though it can be argued thats because everyone allready knows how MsOffice works. In fact Im pretty sure that any office-package not behaving exactly like MsOffice would be claimed to be less intuitive. Because everyone knows how MsOffice works.

But let's call these things technicalities. My beef is with another part of the package. A part which usually is unseen for most users, but nevertheless presents a problem.

Let's say we take a look at MsWord, for example. My first encounter must have been with version 2. The documents were labeled with the extension .doc. Take a look at the newest version, still suffixed with .doc.

Does anyone know what the actual diffferences in the file format is? Have you ever tried exchanging documents with people working with older version of MsOffice? If not, let me tell you right away that hell will arise.

The newest version of Office will recognise the documents, and open them without any indication that it is treating a depricated format.

In some cases (no deep research conducted here, on my part) if you edit the document, and save it, and return it to the sender, it will remain in the old format. However, sometimes (if you use some new features, or god knows why) it will save the document in the new Office format. All without any warning.

Now guess what will hapeen if you cooperate on some work between Office versions. The incompatabilities between the different versions of the fileformats risks rendering your work totally useless.

And Microsoft really haven't seemed that eager to document the formats at all or their differences.

So to my point. One version of Office works fine. Yes. To different versions hardly work at all.

And their is no telling what the differences is, or have you can avoid the trouble of encountering them.

And yes, I know you can choose "Save as... (Word 95,3,2,....-file) every time you need to communicate with other versions, but how can you know what version the recipient will have, and what design/flow-coontrol-features will be disabled when you save in an older format?

Office, kinda like Windows, like things very homegeneous.

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Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.

Re:Office interoptibility by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:41 · Score: 1, Informative

This is such an old issue (at least 6 years). If you have that many people still on the pre-Office 97 file format then just use the duel version save. It doubles the file size but at least you don't have to worry about versions. I can't remember the last time I exchanged info with anybody still using Office 95 though. The only other problem is between 97 and 2000 VBA (which goes from VB5 to VB6) but that is rarely a problem for regular users.
Re:Office interoptibility by drsmithy · 2004-02-10 09:23 · Score: 1

In some cases (no deep research conducted here, on my part) if you edit the document, and save it, and return it to the sender, it will remain in the old format. However, sometimes (if you use some new features, or god knows why) it will save the document in the new Office format. All without any warning.
It's been some time since I've opened any really old (pre Office 97) Word documents under a new version, but I distinctly remember the last time I did it and hit "Save", I got a little dialog box warning me that I had used new features incompatible with the older file format and that saving the document with these features enabled would make it unopenable in the older program.
It also offered an option to save in the old format, losing any of the newer features unsupported in the old format - and to show what aspects of the document would be affected.
Now guess what will hapeen if you cooperate on some work between Office versions. The incompatabilities between the different versions of the fileformats risks rendering your work totally useless.
I seem to recall the file format hasn't changed majorly (ie is almost completely backwards and forwards compatible) since Office 97. Certainly since the version after that (Office 2k ?).

Re:Alright so I am an idiot but where is the case by drinkypoo · 2004-02-10 03:49 · Score: 1

Owning an Amiga was still alternative and weird, but the computer was better than a PC and cost a whole lot less, so you still got to thumb your nose at the PC owners. Of course that story didn't end well for Amigans, now did it. Of course they would argue that it's not over yet, but the fat lady has opened up her pipes several times now, and they just keep trying to bring it back. Bully for them though, if AmigaDOS ever became a serious contender again I'd be very tempted to jump back into the world of the bouncing checkered balls.

Hmm, that just sounded wrong.

Anyway you're right, a zealot will latch onto anything that supports their argument. There is some value in this story, but I wouldn't have chosen to spin it in quite this way. Then again, my story submission probably wouldn't be accepted, either.

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"

hear hear by zpok · 2004-02-10 03:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm glad someone acknowledges two facts in one statement: Office is an important application and Office keeps people on their platform.

If this is not acknowledged, it can't be properly addressed. Next time you say "it's just marketing" or whatever other BS on Office's success, realize you're not doing yourself and your favorite alternative Office program a favour.

Allow me to rant a bit on what's needed to get people (companies) to replace Windows and Office...

The big challenge is that apart from having to be every bit as good as Office, the working environment should also be better.

I think with KOffice and OpenOffice, Linux has two excellent candidates, KOffice for the more simplestupid crowd (me and most people although most won't admit it) and OpenOffice for the "power user". For obvious reasons though, they should be 100% interoperateble. Even if features are not fully supported, they should not result in document hell.

Right now, in a lot of environments you can't do away with MSOffice. Find out why (without resorting to arrogant BS) and fix it. Sometimes it's easy: a few people are seriously into Powerpoint, and the company distributes them to others. Well, that's enough reason not to switch.

But also, apart from having the clip art, dictionaries, etc etc etc all that stuff, there might be a lot of things that arguably are outside the scope of the software, but need to be looked into in order to fulfill the full productivity cycle people are running now with MSOffice.

Their Office runs on their OS and they don't really differentiate. So if you can map the whole experience and make that good, only then you can claim to be able to replace the desktop.

The same goes for the Gimp btw. If you already *have* Photoshop, there is not ONE single reason to go to Gimp.

Disclaimer: This mail not to make things seem easy or to in any way berate Linux developers (bless you) but in response to the many derogative remarks here on MSOffice.
Comparison: SCO is not being beaten up and undressed by "Fuck You" comments but by a bunch of highly skilled lawyers - and appropriately the Groklaw crowd.

--
I think, therefore I am...I think.

IT staff per computer by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 03:55 · Score: 1, Insightful

Anyone else think they had a lot of IT people per computer?

2400 screens, 140 IT staff, or roughly 17-18 computers per IT admin. Am I missing something? Isn't this rather high? At the University I worked at the goal would be 1 IT person per 100 computers, but most of the time you would have 1/200 or 1/300 machines.

Re:IT staff per computer by gordguide · 2004-02-10 07:40 · Score: 1

I definitely did the math and noticed it as much as you did.

Having said that, I'm not particularly familiar with what they do (I know from the article they're an "Energy Company") and what would be standard in such an organization. It seems obvious that since uptime seems critical to them that they would have a lot of support staff; every box counts and every box should be up.

I do know that there's a big difference between a University environment and a critical infrastructure environment. What would be useful would be to know the industry norms, but I think it's fair to say they know what they need and what their competitors are doing.

Interesting, but not an argument either way.
Re:IT staff per computer by ElectronF · 2004-02-10 11:13 · Score: 1

Two Words.. Radio Technicians

If only by jefu · 2004-02-10 03:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

I much prefer LaTeX and Gnuplot myself. Faster, produces good looking output, handles bibliographies simply and easily and lots of conferences/journals have style definitions so all the papers can look about the same.

Best of all its EASY to author. (Well, once you've done one anyway.)

However, I'm finding more and more places that only want stuff in MS Word format. And in my university everything, and I mean everything, is in MS Word format. No other format is allowed. Not PDF, not PS, not even RTF in many cases. And sure as hell no text, sgml/xml/html or TeX. A while back I got a list of people, email, phone numbers etc that the department circulated. Not in csv format which would be the most sensible. Not in XML which would have been flexible and useful. Not in Excel format which could have been useful. In Word format. Completely useless.

And the CS department teaches computer literacy. Which translates to "Demonstrate that you can use MS Office".

Re:If only by PantsWearer · 2004-02-11 02:47 · Score: 2, Informative

Here's a little secret that might help you. Just change the extension from rtf to doc and Word will open it and convert it transparently.
It works the same way with Excel and tab separated text files.

--
Be glad life is unfair, otherwise we'd deserve all this.

Re:well, duh by wackysootroom · 2004-02-10 03:58 · Score: 3, Informative

Same old cut and paste troll from comp.os.linux.advocacy. See Here

Script support for the mainees by trezor · 2004-02-10 04:00 · Score: 4, Funny

Is Perl included? Can you easily write your own scripts?

Yeah, ofcourse man! I mean, who would release an Office package for the mainstream without perl and scripting support? That's the one feature that everyone needs.

After they learn about locating their own files on the harddisk, that is.

--
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.

Re:Script support for the mainees by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 11:58 · Score: 0

You search for files on your hd without perl?

you're thinking about it backwords by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 04:03 · Score: 1

of course no one is going to love being a garbage man. However, it doesn't really take anything to do that job. Any old schmuck can do it, even total retards. However, there are people who would be a doctor for the love of it. No kids want to be a doctor when they grow up to be rich. They want to be a doctor in order that they might help people. They don't start thinking about the money until later. And doctors that are just out for money are called HMO members and are traitors agaisnt humanity.

Comment removed by account_deleted · 2004-02-10 04:05 · Score: 1

Comment removed based on user account deletion

further irony by bsDaemon · 2004-02-10 04:11 · Score: 1

"hardcore, real ASM/C programmer" is not a real job either. I meant like, carpenter or electrician or an artisan of some sort. I'm going to be a house framer starting this week once Mark calls me back without me having to go intercept him at the pub. That's a real job, ie actually working. an actual position in the proletariat. Plus, I am only 20. I quit school for political reasons and am just loafing around my parents' house adgitating revolution and running An Reabhloid.ORG for the Irish Republican Socialist Movement.

MS Office wont be repalces in my company/home! by Monkey+Overlord · 2004-02-10 04:14 · Score: 2, Insightful

If all you use MS Office for is to type up a simple document/spreadsheet and then print/e-mail it ... then you can easily use any word processor/spreadsheet applications with a minimum of features. Hell, a glorified Notepad.exe with a spellchecker is more then enough for a lot of people.
Did you know that a lot of people bought MS Word (in the old days) because WordPad didn't have a spellchecker! Sad, but true.
Anyways, MS Office is an important obstacle to switching to Linix for a lot of companies. I don't see the company, I work for, switching anytime soon.
We use a groupware/e-mail/fax client at work (Message Manager 2000) that integrates closely with MS Office. While MM2000 is the most unintuitive, fugly PoS software package I have ever used ... but it works and no alternative on Linux and only much more expesive alternatives on Windows are available.
We also use a few applications that are written around MS Access. They may suck, but they work and since most of them are targeted towards a nieche it will be hard to replace/find alteratives for any of them.
I don't see myself switching either. On a regular basis I have to edit large contracts that go through several negotiation stages and a lot of the changes just can not be seen by reading the damn thing (50+ pages of 7pt print) ... this is where MS Word's tracking of changes (doc CVS basically) is superb.

further irony indeed by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 04:18 · Score: 1

Well then, best of luck to you! I've had good friends who've left the world of IT because, as they say, "it's nothing but moving around a bunch of ones and zeros." And I respect that.

I appologize for mistaking you as one of those "hardcore" programmers who believe anything but ASM/C is a "pansy" language, and that using anything but a rock to shave is the "lazy" man's way out. And everyone else is a poor excuse of a professional.

Re:further irony indeed by mOdQuArK! · 2004-02-10 08:20 · Score: 1

using anything but a rock to shave is the "lazy" man's way out

Damn rock got too smooth after a couple of months scraping away at _my_ beard - besides, using a branding iron was faster & lasted longer.

Even better... by trezor · 2004-02-10 04:20 · Score: 1

And you allways got those victims of Microsoft-propaganda that believe the newest version is allways so much better.

Now I don't know what's better, the user doesn't know what it actually is that makes the newest version better, but he does know the newest version is better.

Now guess who has to install the latest version and break office-compatability, or indulge in a admin-user flamewar when these people enter the IT-dept....

--
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.

you're thinking about it ... off topic! by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 04:22 · Score: 1

I'll agree to that. But, isn't the whole HMO concept fall a bit closer to socialism than free market doctors? Take Canada, for example, that's one gaint HMO.

I'm not anti-HMO. I have a HMO and am happy with it. But, I'm healthy and haven' thad to use it either ...

Refutation? by jayp00001 · 2004-02-10 04:30 · Score: 2, Insightful

In order for this to be a refutation of the TCO of opensource vs Windows, wouldn't there have to be some sort of cost savings mentioned in the article? The only numbers I find ain the article says

""I'm happy to pay for Linux support by moving to Red Hat Advanced Server which is about $1500," he said. "Choosing Linux is not about acquisition costs and I'd be prepared to pay $10,000 per server for it. I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that."

Which says that costs weren't his concern. (windows is stability concerns are just flamebait and another topic)

Why isn't anyone discussing the article? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:48 · Score: 4, Informative

I read through most of the comments and to be honest it sounds like most people came here to unload a spleen on Office. Did anyone actually read the article?

I did, and I find it amazing /. says the company refutes Windows TCO claims with a throwaway line or two. To whit:

"The PeopleSoft back end is moving to the AIX system and we would move the Windows front end to Linux if the application gave us the option," Peters said. "We have no interest in staying on Windows for those types of applications as there are just down sides. In our organisation Windows is not a threat as we get to see both sides and Windows is not cheaper at all."

My reading of the article is that large Australian energy company focused on UNIX / Linux / Sun / AIX technologies that happens to have some Windows boxes has come to the conclusion that if they were in a position to centralize even further (by ditching Windows) it wouldn't cost them any more money.

B F D

This is news?

A bit thin I thought by Alan · 2004-02-10 04:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

I was expecting something with more hard numbers. The MS TCO site is full of pretty graphs and charts showing how MS software is cheaper in the long run than "free" software. This article had none of that.

What I'd like to see is a linux biased company come out with a similar "get the real truth .com" site which has case studies that show linux is cheaper in the long run than Windows based solutions.

Dude! Then your PC is messed up! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 04:56 · Score: 1, Informative

Please. I'm running a W2K K6-450 w/256 RAM and OpenOffice apps start faster than the times you quote. And I'm simultaneously running Outlook2k, Acroread 6, TrackIT, FireFox, PalmDesktop, SETI@Home and ConText. My home PC dual boots Mandrake 9.1 and W2Ksp4 and my OO loads are faster still. Meanwhile Word, Excel and Access take about twice as along. I pity you.

Re:Dude! Then your PC is messed up! by hesiod · 2004-02-10 07:40 · Score: 1

> Meanwhile Word, Excel and Access take about twice as along

I'm on a Dell Laptop, 1133Mhz, 256MB of RAM and running MS Office 2003. Word opens in just under 4 seconds. Then every other App opens faster, as parts of Office are still in memory.

Publisher: 2.5s
Powerpoint: 2s
Excel: Barely over 2 seconds
Opening Word Again is less than 1 second. About as instantaneous as you can get.

I hate to say it, but MS really is getting better at writing software (or at least fast software). A week ago I had Office 2000 on here (With Win2k) and it was about 2x-3x as slow, and I didn't think it was slow at the time.

Hmm... just to keep myself sane: "M$ $ucks Dick!" "tehy are my bItCheS." I feel better now.
Re:Dude! Then your PC is messed up! by t1m0r4n · 2004-02-10 10:26 · Score: 1

I'm on a Dell Laptop, 1133Mhz, 256MB of RAM and running MS Office 2003. Word opens in just under 4 seconds.

We can play this game forever :P

I am writing this on a 233 Mhz laptop purchased circa 1997. Takes apporximately 9 seconds (one mississippi, two mississippi...) to fully open a new OpenOffice "Text Document" from "Quickstarter". I feel that is perfectly acceptable, as the computer is also running Mozilla, and the two are quite a load for this old machine. MS Office 2003 isn't even an option, as this piece of equipment doesn't meet the minimum system requirements.

But if you want to send me money to buy a new Dell laptop and a copy of MS Office so I can shave five seconds off my start up time, feel free to PayPal me :)

Regards
Re:Dude! Then your PC is messed up! by hesiod · 2004-02-11 01:43 · Score: 1

> Takes apporximately 9 seconds to fully open a new OpenOffice "Text Document"

Great. I hope that one day OO is faster than MSO and beats the pants off of it in market share. I'm just pointing out that not everyone automatically hates all MS software because they hate the company, and I give them some credit when due. I'd rather give the credit to OO, but I can't. I CAN give them credit, however, for making a kickass -free- office suite that runs amazingly well.

> if you want to send me money to buy a new Dell laptop and a copy of MS Office so I can shave five seconds off my start up time

Well, this isn't new and isn't mine -- I couldn't afford one for myself, and the copy of Office 2k3 was sent to us for free from MS (*boggle* I have no idea WHY... we're a pretty small business).

Maybe if I win a few million dollars in the next few weeks, I'll look you up :)

Windows platform strengths are missing by dtjohnson · 2004-02-10 04:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

The story makes it very clear that there are no real Windows platform strengths while Linux has many that were particularly important to the energy company including better performance and better reliability. Even on the desktop, the only real advantage given for Windows was that it ran MS Office. If Windows is going to survive in the long term, Microsoft will have to develop some compelling technical advantages for Windows. The MS Office support is not going to carry it forever.

Re:mS office on Linux - macros = yes by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 05:09 · Score: 1, Informative

yes it does have a macro language. i haven't used it, but this book seems to know about them ... "OOoSwitch: 501 Things You Want to Know About Switching OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office" ... at bn.com

Re:Features? No, function! by X_Bones · 2004-02-10 05:12 · Score: 1

The essence of good design is simplicity and value comes from the elimination of unnecessary features, not their addition.

Your'e right, but so what? I don't think anyone is arguing that Microsoft's products are designed well, but all features are added to a product because someone, somewhere, said they needed it. Nobody goes out of their way to add unrequested features to a product, causing more work and more testing headaches.

You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly.

That's also correct, but is missing the point again. A more valid analogy would be the Microsoft door having a mail slot, while the OpenOffice door does not. Sure, maybe your 80-90% of users have mailboxes outside, so any brand of door would work for them. But the folks who live in an apartment absolutely need that particular feature and as long as it's not present in any other brand of door, they're not gonna switch.

So features do indeed equal value, if you have a legitimate use for them; you probably don't, based on your post there, but not everyone can be painted by the same broad brush.

--

the coolest club on /.

Re:Alright so I am an idiot but where is the case by poot_rootbeer · 2004-02-10 05:19 · Score: 1

There was a time when owning a DOS machine was alternative and weird when everybody had an amiga on wich everything just worked. With PICTURES!!!!!

This must have been a regional phenomenon... where I lived, the only Amiga owners were a handful of C64/128 owners, who upgraded out of brand loyalty to Commodore as much as anything else.

Much more common, at least among the small percentage of the population that frequently used home computers back in those days, were 386s and even Macs.

Re:Features? No, function! by kdart · 2004-02-10 05:33 · Score: 1

Yes, indeed. I recently had to produce some documents for the court and tried to use StarOffice. I found that StarOffice simply cannot produce a document that conforms to the court requirements. Mostly, it has to do with line numbering. I had to resort to WordPerfect for Windows.

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--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.

OT - Postive props to Domino by wift · 2004-02-10 06:13 · Score: 1

Being a Notes developer it makes me happy just to see Domino mentioned in a positive way even if it's not important to the article. Regarding the article, I see this as another pro in the column to learn j2ee as opposed to .Net for my next technical notch on my belt.

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....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever

Like Linus said... by Dave_bsr · 2004-02-10 06:39 · Score: 1

Linus torvalds said he and Bill Gates are both among the best at what they do.

Linus manages a massive online coding project.

Bill runs a business.

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Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?

Mailbox? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 06:40 · Score: 0

No, most of the features in MS products would be like the front door having biometric recognition. Excellent for 0.01% of users. Useless and complex for 99.9% of users.

There is. It's called NUL by aWalrus · 2004-02-10 06:44 · Score: 1

I'm amused at all the uninformed responses. I work at IBM, and we do have a Lotus Notes Version for Linux (we call it NUL -- Notes Under Linux). It uses the Wine libraries but is compressed into a single installable file. It runs very well. Most bugs have gone away. It's still not up to date with Lotus 6, but the future looks promising.

Standard disclaimer: The above represent my views and not those of my employer in any way whatsoever yadda yadda yadda.

--
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.

Not scientific by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 06:47 · Score: 0

You can't refute MS claims with one data point. That's not scientific.

TCO -- Total Cost of an Outage by azpcox · 2004-02-10 06:58 · Score: 4, Informative

From the article "I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that" pretty much sums it up.

Why don't we look at what an outage would cost, the expenses necessary to create a redundant infrastructure to minimize those potential outages, and then compare costs.

I wouldn't have my job either if I didn't plan for network failures and the recovery mechanisms in place. Although cost is a factor, uptime and reliability are much more important.

--
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"

*NIX is ready now! by Brandybuck · 2004-02-10 07:00 · Score: 1, Insightful

Linux and BSD are ready now for the corporate enterprise. Not in ten years, not in ten months, but today!

We have open source group ware, open source office productivity tools, open source infrastructure, and open source just about everything else you want. And professional level support for everything above.

Is there any compelling reason to use ISS instead of Apache? Any compelling reason to use Exchange instead of *mail? Does OpenLDAP somehow not meet your needs? The GUI doesn't count, because you're an enterprise, and you have intelligent professional IT administrators. If they bitch about the lack of GUI, replace them with competent personnel.

Is there any compelling reason to stick with Microsoft Office? How many of your users really need the functionality to embed executable applications in their documents? How many times have you ever run across a real-world document that OO.org won't open? There's no reason to put Word on every desktop just because two people in marketing have a "genuine" need for it.

I've played around a bit with KDE's new Kontact. Why someone would want to use Outlook instead of Kontact is beyond me. Ditto for Evolution. These are applications that work with widely used standards. Eliminate the proprietary Microsoft Exchange standards and you eliminate the need for Outlook. The KDE and GNOME desktops are certainly ready to replace Windows in the enterprise. Maybe they're not quite ready for your grandma, but they're more than ready for the corporate desktop.

And software installation? Anyone wh's had to manage the software on half a dozen or more desktops will realize that package managers are clearly superior to the Windows way.

So start migrating!

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Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!

Re:*NIX is ready now! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 09:41 · Score: 0

ok, joking aside, sometimes there are microsoft specific technologies that require IIS. sometimes people stick with IIS because of legacy applications. sometimes people just use what they're trained to use. and i hate to toot microsoft's horn, but outside of outlook/exchange being the security equivilent tissue paper, it is quite featureful. and usually if the company is diligent on patching up their workstations, they're ok. groupware is where microsoft does well in the corporate arena i think. it integrates anything and everything into each other. anyway, just some food for thought. i do feel the winds are changing, but it isn't as clear cut as you make it. maybe in as early as a year things with progress, but certainly not right now. so, can we use Linux and BSD "not in ten years, not in ten months, but today" in the corporate environment? i see your point, but i would have to disagree.

Re: Let's Reconsider Everything Here. by glpierce · 2004-02-10 07:14 · Score: 1

First, I am in a collegiate academic environment. The chart example was random. It would have been more accurate to cite the small spreadsheet size as opposed to charts (we do use SPSS for that). I'm working on something with over 160,000 rows of data. In Excel, that splits into 3 workbooks. In OO.org it's twice that. May not seem like much, but when you need to sort that data by different columns, it's a real headache.

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G

Italics by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 07:32 · Score: 0

...entire italic post snipped...

If you don't care about your own words enough to preview them before posting, then it's not realistic to expect others to care about your words enough to read them.

Learn how to close your damn <i> i t a l i c </i> tags.

Re:Italics by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 09:38 · Score: 0

Ah, a Nazi, who most likely sits at home and masturbates to Slashdot. Sad, very sad.

Get a Mac by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 07:32 · Score: 0

Simple enough.

Re:Get a Mac by Lumpy · 2004-02-10 07:45 · Score: 1

ok, I got a mac, installed yellow dog linux...

now what....

--
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Re:Get a Mac by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 09:42 · Score: 0

Well, if you installed Linux on your Mac, then you missed the point of what everyone was trying to say. If you want high-quality video editing for a Mac, you should stick with Apple's OSes, notably OS X for which several high-quality software packages are available.

Training by El · 2004-02-10 07:49 · Score: 1

The caveat here is that they already had system administrators that understood Unix. Presumably, if all your sysadmins only knew Windows, that would adversely affect your TCO in switching to Linux. Of course, you'd be stupid to not be developing at least some in-house Linux expertise at this point.

--

"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney

You must have been in college a long time ago... by sean.peters · 2004-02-10 08:02 · Score: 1

I use Notes 6 mail all the time - all the UI goodness of Outlook, but with 99% fewer viruses! And if you don't like the way Notes mail looks or acts, you can change it.

Sean

The second paragraph is true... by sean.peters · 2004-02-10 08:07 · Score: 1

Some links:

Terminology: Domino is the server, Notes is the client. Hope this helps.

Sean

UTCOAD analisys worldwide by Jotaigna · 2004-02-10 08:15 · Score: 1

i bet they just cram the numbers so the huge manuals Microsof give you can be used as a stool, to sit in front of the racks, waiting for the system to come back online... seriously, i dont know. This definetely points to a unified criteria for TCOAD (Total Cost of Ownership and Downtime ;)).

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"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."

Why Wine Won't Ever Work by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:26 · Score: 0

It all has to do with compatibility. A lot of poorly written Windows programs use reverse-engineered internal Windows API's. These are implementation-dependent, and vary across versions.

In Linux terms it's as if these programs notice that glibc uses the IO_stdin lock to guard input, and deciding to acquire it, then use internal glibc functions for input. Of course, the next version of glibc will break this incompetent programmer's code.

With Windows, if it's commercial software, the vendor threatens to sue Microsoft for abusing its monopoly position. If it's an internal program in some large corporation, the corporation threatens no upgrades if their broken software doesn't work. Either way, Microsoft has to include a workaround that violates the published API for those programs.

Of course, it happens for Linux as well. If it's internal software the corporation won't upgrade, although they may pay extra to move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 that still offers support. If it's commercial software, it just stops working and the company decides if they want to continue supporting Linux.

Wine faces the problem that they can't implement compatibility fixes until Microsoft publishes the list of compatibility fixes. Since this is a list of Things You Can Do That Break Things, that is something they would really prefer not to do.

Re:not a troll? by sloanster · 2004-02-10 08:26 · Score: 1

Not a troll? perhaps, but quite a few folks find OO fits their needs just fine.

To address your comments, RH 9 has a number of annoying bugs and can be quite slow in certain situations if you haven't done the standard tweaks, which a linux newbie would not know about.

And, as everyone has mentioned, you are complaining also about the speed of the old OO 1.0, which everybody complains is too slow to start up, so welcome to the club.

In any case, I'd say that upgrading that RH9 to fedora with the accompanying newer version OO will go quite a way towards improving your opinion of it.

Lotus Notes by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 08:32 · Score: 0

In all seriousness, it is the worst crap software ever. Most IBM employees hate using it. If forced to test a beta version of it, most of them would probably quit. I don't know how they sell it to anyone else when they eat it themselves and know that it sucks. Lotus Notes really is That Bad.

Maybe you should flat out define Enterprise level. by IANAAC · 2004-02-10 08:47 · Score: 1

Once you've defined it, open up both Office and OpenOffice. Go through all the drop down menus of each program. With the exception of Web meetings (which can EASILY be handled externally), you'll be hard-presssed to find anything that OpenOffice can't do. You'll also find some things that OpenOffice does better: better datasource configuration, multiple dictionaries, better security, better XML filters come to mind. There are other things, but don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself. It's easy and free (OpenOffice, of course).

In everything I've seen posted by you, I've yet to see what exactly you mean by "Enterprise", other than what we all suspect: "Microsoft".

Murphy's Law by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 09:00 · Score: 0

===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====

Shouldn't that be:

===== Murphy's Law is recursvie =====

Think about it for a bit... :-)

Re:Maybe you should flat out define Enterprise lev by Ernest+P+Worrell · 2004-02-10 09:20 · Score: 1

An enterprise consists of all functional departments, people, and systems within an organization, and often times, includes partners, vendors, and customers. Hence, "enterprise level" would be a system that interacts and encompasses the enterprise. It generally goes without saying, but, when we say "enterprise," we're generally talking about large, Top-5000 companies.

When you're talking about information systems this complex ("enterprise level solutions"), features (i.e., the things that can be accessed through drop down menus) are of little consequence to system architects, management, etc. The "features" that are important are more along the lines of "how well can we integrate this into our ERP?"

Again, things like Biztalk, Exchange, Domino, etc, are just not things I see in openSource. If I'm missing them, please, let me know. Believe me, I'd love to save the $$$.

and the answer is... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 09:31 · Score: 0

and the answer is... yes, yes, yes, yes, everyone, and many times :)

Re:Features? No, function! by comedian23 · 2004-02-10 09:39 · Score: 1

> Nobody goes out of their way to add unrequested features to a product, causing more work and more testing headaches.

I disagree. MS and the hardware manufacturers have spent the last 20 years getting used to the idea that we need a new computer every 2-3 years. MS adds new features(making their products more resource intensive), and then hardware manufacturers(Intel, et al.) make faster processor, bigger HDDs and RAM, etc.(to accomodate the new software). If we were faced with a legitimate technology barrier on hardware everyone would be yelling at MS to trim their stuff down ASAP.

Trust me, they add those features for a very good reason: So they can sell more products and so their partners can sell more hardware. I would LOVE to see what kind of kickbacks MS gets from Intel and the other hardware manufacturers.

BTW, as I sit here with only 5 apps open I am using 212MB of physical RAM. And the worst offender of the apps taking RAM is IE weighing in at a svelte 22MB.

-Comedian

We created a Posgresql server by Moderation+abuser · 2004-02-10 09:47 · Score: 1

Called it freebase. In order to clean up all the Access shit that was lying around. Basically we took the small access datbases which are everywhere and loaded them into freebase and hand out the odbc drivers.

Once we had most of the databases on freebase, the access problem went away, anyone who wanted a database just had to ask. Instead we now had a registered set of centralised but not integrated applications and databases, most complete shit but a couple of nice ones.

Then we went through the applications and databases, grouped them and generated sets of requirements would replace these small [sh|b]itty applications. Let me tell you this is *not* easy, fun, fast or cheap, the levels of complexity were phenominal, this crap was running the business, it was a miracle anything got done. However we ended up with 3 main applications which would do the job of the rest and got management buy in to have them customised and rolled out. With an Oracle back end as it happens.

Freebase is still there but it's job is more testing and prototyping now.

--
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.

Windows TCO is only lower if you don't value ... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 09:47 · Score: 0

Windows TCO is only lower if you don't value your time. Kind of a spin on a often heard comment about Linux. I just spent the better part of the afternoon tracking down and eliminating a virus on an XP box. This after I ran two seperate virus scanners and spent at least an hour or two on Symantec's website and prowling through the registry. So which do you think is cheaper? A system that's not vulnerable to such viruses or Windows? Gee thanks Microsoft, where do I want to go today? How about somewhere else.

your hard disk is buggered by Moderation+abuser · 2004-02-10 10:12 · Score: 1

or something like your name resolution is shagged.

1st initialisation on my machine: 15 seconds an this is a laptop with a shite 4200rpm IDE drive. 2nd initialisation 3 seconds.

Course if you were doing Linux and properly there would be an OpenOffice server running all the instances so it never has to scan disk and 80% of the application RAM would be shared.

--
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.

TCO IS Important ! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:23 · Score: 0

Well, I work at a 9-5, Mon-Fri site, and if we can use TCO to get Linux in, then there's one more reference site you can point to and say 'well, they are having no problems - why don't we try it ?'

Re:MS Office CAN run on Linux (1000000, Informativ by sithlord2 · 2004-02-10 10:38 · Score: 1

Two words : No support

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...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.

Re:Features? No, function! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 10:59 · Score: 0

I want to talk about this quote:

"You would consider a door with fifteen handles and ten ways of opening to be "worth more" than a door that has one handle which works exactly as you expect? Hardly."

Question: What the fuck does an analogy of doors mean to the debate at hand ?

Answer: not one damn thing.

Solution: Get a clue. Stop being a Slashbot.

Your nifty Jedi Mind Tricks do not work on us.

I am not the droid you are looking for.

They said "2500 screens" by misspelled · 2004-02-10 11:05 · Score: 1

That could mean they have 25,000 people. Counting helldesk staff, 140 people in IT isn't really all that much. And it's much closer to your average.

Re:Features? No, function! by wsloand · 2004-02-10 11:57 · Score: 1

You can argue with this but the real reason MS Office is popular in academea may have more to do with cheap licenses than anything else.

Having just recently graduated from undergrad at Georgia Tech, I can definitely say that the reason that MS Office is popular there is Excel. For engineering uses, the formula features of Excel beat any other system I've used for quick, easy calculations. The plots are almost up with Kalidegraph, and it's easy. Licenses are cheap, but people are using the best tool for the job (for the moment).

TCO is only part of the story by BoneFlower · 2004-02-10 14:44 · Score: 2, Interesting

Example:

My dads truck has a FAR higher TCO than my moms car. Cost twice as much, the systems are so much more complicated it breaks more often simply due to having more parts. It burns so much more fuel that even though deisel is cheaper these days its miles per dollar are lower.

On the other hand, if my dad tried using my moms car for what he uses his truck for, he wouldn't even get out of the driveway.

TCO is only part of the story, what you need the system for is another... so generalized TCO is not very useful. Its only useful when comparing narrowly defined usage scenarios- like with cars, it would be relevant to compare TCO of the Hyundai Elantra and the Honda Civic for the purposes of transporting passengers. But some of the TCO comparisons I've seen are more like comparing the Hyundai Elantra and a Dodge 350 truck for the purposes of doing everything automobiles are capable of doing. Completely irrelevant.

Yep OpenOffice does after a being recoded by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 17:24 · Score: 0

Note proto code translate from VB scripts to Star Basic mainly command for command swaping. Note protection from viruses is better on the openoffice side. So far every basic code that does not translate just need a new cross link added. Code is based on BCX the basic to c complier few minor changes to make it a bas 2 bas converter. Many never be realize from me due to problems.(Where I work has in house rules on the giving away of programs)

Please READ GIMPBOY TROUBLE REDHAT by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-10 17:37 · Score: 0

The trouble is redhat 9 it load a 1.0 something version installing a 1.1 on is a lot faster Also dual Athlon will not helping at all startup is single thread(really needs to be fixed). Get Core 1 you will see the difference(newer open office). Note load time for word 97 under wine is a 10 times longer if it does not crash compared to the default open office with redhat 9 so it is not all that bad.

Yes I used redhat 9 I went as far as building OpenOffice from source to get around the problem.

Interface design is different it word but I would not have it any other way.

Re:Features? No, function! by TrancePhreak · 2004-02-10 17:54 · Score: 1

and it is way faster and less buggier than previous versions!

Isn't that what MS said?

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-]Phreak Out[-

Re:Windows TCO is only lower if you don't value .. by TrancePhreak · 2004-02-10 18:32 · Score: 1

*nix is vulnerable to viruses, there's just less of them. What program would you have used to scan for a virus on a *nix box should you require doing so? What website could you trust to look through to figure it out? When you say you had to prowl through the registry, please don't tell me the virus started up in the area that runs programs at startup..... That would be sad of you to not know that area as an Admin.

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-]Phreak Out[-

No you don't by leonbrooks · 2004-02-10 22:13 · Score: 1

MS-Office only looks well-integrated, under the sheets it's a bit of a botch. You don't need MS-Office, what you do need is a compeent office suite of some kind.

OpenOffice does that - and throws in free PDF writing; real, parseable XML files; the ability to load damaged MSW dox safely; and a number of other handy, production-loss-averting features.

And KOffice is fast catching up (plus it's a reasonable MS-Publisher erplacement now too).

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

Re:No you don't by Negatyfus · 2004-02-10 22:19 · Score: 1

Sorry, I think you misread. I have other application that integrate well with MS-Office (and not OpenOffice). Throwing this out would not be received well.

I have customers... by leonbrooks · 2004-02-11 00:22 · Score: 1

...who must run MS-Word full screen as Administrator (and no screen-saver because even a blank one slows it down) in order to print out faxes.

I recently explained the "headless" command-line switch of OpenOffice to their supplier, very slowly and using lots of short words. They will be switching within a quarter.

I also explained about using a faux print spooler (Samba -> pipe containing OOo run headless) but I think it went over their heads. You can apparently even do that with SaMBa on MS-Windows now.

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

measuring Downtime no good by Hangman+Jim+99 · 2004-02-11 07:20 · Score: 1

in my industry (SCADA) we have zero tolerance for downtime. we use redundancy and perform remote service, upgrade and fixes. Of all the customers I have supported, unix beats windows every time in terms of support and explainable failures.

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--- I hate my sig

Re:measuring Downtime no good by JWW · 2004-02-11 12:00 · Score: 1

You are absolutely correct. Which is why it is sad that there are so few vendors out there selling Unix/Linux SCADA solutions. Because while SCADA on windows can work, eventually you'll end up smacked upside the head by a limitation of the operating system in one way or another.

TCO just a part of picture. Look at ROI, etc. by Frobnicator · 2004-02-13 04:18 · Score: 1

If you look at most quality TCO reports, they will have a little disclaimer stating that TCO is only one aspect of what should be reviewed.

Other SIGNIFICANT factors are "Return On Investment" approximate useful lifetime, estimated volume/throughput vs. required volume/throughput, and initial cost. Other than initial costs, these are usually omited when Microsoft and others start spewing TCO facts. These numbers are what accountants and auditors use to keep books in order. These companies are just reflecting what happens when you consider the other values.

For example:

Assume two products. One has a higher TCO, but lets assume it also has a longer (or possibly shorter) expected lifetime. More significant in that case, is the average or per-unit costs, which is (TCO/lifetime) . If the TCO is 25% higher, but the lifetime is 50% higher, then the higher TCO product will cost 0.83 for every 1.00 of the lower cost object.

A good real-world example for this first relationship: Do you buy the 2-liter bottle for 1.99, or the 3-liter bottle for 2.59? The 3-liter bottle has a higher TCO, but also a longer expected lifetime.

ROI is also very significant. Investing in stocks has a high TCO, when compared to, say, a bank CD. This year (a US election year) historical trends show an 8% increase in the stock market. I can get a CD with a guarenteed return of 2.25%, with a lower TCO. TCO should be considered, and usually subtracted from ROI. For a business, ROI includes use of the product, so it is harder to subtract than cash interest.

In the banking example, You may pay a little more for the stock in this case, but at the end of the year, you'll be better off.

Volume/throughput is also very important. Most of the TCO reports indicate that in order to balance the TCO, the estimated that a single unix-based server needs about 1.5 to 2.0 Windows servers to handle the same load. Specifically, several IDC reports use 1.8 windows boxes to do 1 unix box. This effectively means that if you have enough work load to warrant purchacing multiple computers, you need to multiply the Windows TCO by 1.8.

For comparison -- the local Coke/Pepsi Bottling Plant won't buy the same products as your local individual canning company. The Bottling Plant will buy a high TCO canning system, designed for large environments. The smaller company will invest in a low TCO system, probably low-volume, hand-operated equipment.

So...

Considering TCO in a vacuum is foolhardy. Fortunately, these companies understand that.

frob

--
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement

Re:Windows TCO is only lower if you don't value .. by Thomas+Shaddack · 2004-02-13 17:31 · Score: 1

What program would you have used to scan for a virus on a *nix box should you require doing so?

Ummmm... eg. checking the MD5 checksums of the system files, eg. by Tripwire, or comparing them against the installation medium or a known-good machine? There are also some native *nix scanners.

What website could you trust to look through to figure it out?

Just about any of any reputable member of the antivirus community.

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