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Why PHBs Fear Linux
Tin Foil Hat writes "Paul Murphy over at LinuxInsider examines the role IT text books play in business school curriculums and the misconceptions and misinformation that they present to students. If you've ever wondered why your PHB just doesn't get it when it comes to UNIX and Linux, this article is for you."
Our company builds software systems on linux, so our PHB's are very in tune and understand linux's advantages.
100% Insightful
I think a lot of people just don't know what *nix is. Of course, textbooks like these don't help. Hell I'm in my senior year of a CS BS course of study, and there are students in my classes who couldn't use a terminal to save their lives or work remotely without a GUI. They just don't understand the system commands.
Sad
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
Expect this to change now that IBM and Novell have to IT world all a-buzz. People are already being sent to Linux training (by their employers) in droves in my area.
I received an email at our lug webmaster account asking for help with some questions about Linux from an MIS student. Here are the questions that her instructor had given them to research and answer:
1.What is Linux and who created it?
2.Why was it released into the public domain rather than copyrighted?
3. Is it possible to copyright anything that relates to Linux? If so, in what way?
I gave *long* answers, showed examples of copyright statements from the Linux source, explained that everybody who contributes to it, such as Linus or IBM, keep copyright, etc. I really wanted to meet her clueless instructor, but, maybe next time.
Keep in mind that these guys were pushing cobol up until about 3 years ago, so they probably think it's extremely cutting edge to push windows nt.
Do you have ESP?
I work for a major defense contractor, where I've been integrating systems for numerous years. One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs...and yes, I do believe this is a huge waste of taxpayer money, but that's how it's done. You can't make a profit by saving the govt. money.
Just another day in Paradise
I was once told by an MBA that in order for my consulting services to be valued more, I should raise my rates. People automatically think that they get what they pay for, therefor a free distro can't be worth as much as an XP or Solaris license.
:)
I agree, and there's more to it than that:
Consider Godiva chocolates. I've read studies that state that blind taste tests cannot rate them higher than Russell-Stover chocolates, a much less expensive chocolate. The reason why Godiva exists is because people want to pay more for chocolate. It's part of a high-class lifestyle. They need to feel high-class, and they need to fit in with their high-class friends. This same phenomenon is true with many other products. Just replace "high-class" with "cool", and you'll see what had fueled the sale of Nike shoes for years.
I'm not interested in using products to make me feel like I'm better or, or in using products to impress my friends. I am, however, interested in selling products to people who feel that way. It seems to me that the seller is in the much more intelligent position than the buyer.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Some people are freaked out by the notion that Linux's source code is "open", and, as such, don't understand how it could possibly be a secure platform if all of its workings can be easily seen. Yeah, I know, it's wrong, but that's what a lot of people think. A lot of people think something freely available like Linux can't possibly be secure.
My experience with IS MBA textbooks and students is quite different; many of them have barely, if at all, even heard of Linux (and Unix), and almost none of them have any idea of the advantages it can bring to their business. I've shown some of my MBA-student friends some of the utterly cool stuff that can be done with OpenOffice, Python, PostgreSQL, and Samba, and many of them are stunned at the flexibility and capability, given the low cost and ease of development. They're also nominally kind of pissed at their instructors for not bringing this fantastic technology up, because they know that the kinds of advantages offered by free software are the kinds of advantages that can make-or-break a business.
I'll be working on an MBA in a few years myself, and I plan on paying pretty much nothing but lip service in the computer section to the instructors -- I've been working in the field long enough to see how things work, and I'm not stupid enough to think that one vendor is going to be able to solve all of my problems. I'm also not stupid enough to turn down a cost-effective solution just because it's not "commercial" -- nevermind that the non-commericial offerings of the free software world often have better support.
Maybe I should just start up a business that does nothing but set up and train users with free software for a small fee. *grin* It'd still be cheaper than any of the solutions from Redmond...
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
PHB have no clue about it because it isn't offered as standard by the major PC makers. If when you were buying a PC and you forgot to tell them to ship Windows XP they by default shipped SuSE or Mandrake then maybe they might know what it is.
Now at the Best Buy it's not that Linux is missing from the shelves. It's that applications that Run on Linux are missing on the shelves. Give me Quickbooks, OfficeXP, or Adobe with little "for Linux" stickers on them and we might get noticed.
Most PHBs don't even know what an OS is. I've had plenty of well educated people, when I ask them, "What OS do you run?" tell me Word. They know on some level that they run Windows but they are clueless about what it really is. They just hear the name and they parrot that. Word, Windows, whatever...
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Although we certainly see plenty of that kind of Linux zealotry on /., I really doubt that's what's going on in the corporate IS world. I'm one of the success stories -- I was able to convince my boss to go with a FOSS solution for our corporate database setup -- and I did it by preparing a calm, reasoned cost-benefit analysis with lots of references. But the primary reason it worked, IMO, is that we're a small company, and my boss, one of the founders of the company, is a scientist rather than a B-school grad.
... and I do believe that many of them are the way they are because they're the projects of the kind of "education" the article describes.
For every Linux (or BSD, or OS X) zealot, there are a hundred Windows zealots, the majority of them suits who have never had any real education in the evaluation of competing software, and who will reject out of hand any non-Windows solutions because that's how they were trained and because Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I took an 11 week course (we are on quarters) in Management of Information Systems. During the entire 11 week period my proffesor constantly damned the "cathederal approach to software engineering" we refer to as Linux (the book coined the term). His arguement was that it is not easy to use, it is not guarenteed to continue into the future, and there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes.
That being said, he refused to take a copy of knoppix, refused to play with it when I loaded it for him on the school's computer, and refused to believe that I wasn't playing a trick on him. Because he was the boss of the class and was handing out the grades, I was only able to convience one member of the class on the possibilities of class.
Oh yeah, the prof was a teacher at Northwestern and at DePaul. Yeesh.....
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
* It's not on store shelves at Best Buy.
* The Microsoft monopoly has brainwashed people.
* People will refuse to use anything other than what they know.
* They own stock in Microsoft.
* They're scared of SCO license fees.
Maybe, just maybe, people happen to prefer Windows in many instances. Maybe they really do view Linux as a cobbled-together OS made by volunteers.
Ever tried installing Java and Java programs? Ever tried to compile Java 1.3.1 (Native threads) on OpenBSD where you have to downloading several big files files from Sun after agreeing to Sun's obnoxious lisences? Java, the platform where everything is opaque? Where lack of relevant informations is the norm, and not the exception?
To vent some frustration, I've got a quote from the bok "Apache: The Definite Guide" (page 384):
It's percieved as some toy OS...
I think you're on to something here. Back in the eighties, when I was in college, the business majors were real MS-DOS bigots. The other personal computers of the day, Macs, were for toys for losers who just didn't get it.
This article shows that this MS-centric bigotry is alive and well in corporate America. From the business major's perspective, those other OSs are not real OSs because they aren't intended for real work, i.e., the stuff they do.
Very true. Curerently, my college is quite MS-centric. It's got this whole "Microsoft Certified Academy" plaque somewhere in the main hall which gave me a fear for something which became a reality when I got into "Advanced Programming" classes. They basically told us to go learn ASP.NET from w3schools.org and to get ( download ) a ASP.NET forum up and running, which I didn't like for several reasons:
And I won't even mention some of the books I must have for college: Very MS-centric. More or less to be expected, but a general understanding on other operating systems is never bad. Don't even get me started on the things they dont teach regarding Macs, which still hold a sizeable portion of the desktop market. ( when compared to Linux ) You'd think some general knowledge like knowing how to set up a network with Macs and Linux/Windows machines would be useful.
* Silly Dutch educational system.
** Not to mention licensing costs. W2k AS, 3999 USD and SQL Server, 1489 USD. Of course, we could fiddle around with Access database which would be a joke, but a less expensive on at 229 USD. I could of course use MSDE ( core of SQL Server ) which is free but comes with NO management tools. Woot. Not surprisingly, after the "teacher" told us to install W2k AS with SQL Server, legally, we told him to go hell.
Hate me!
Although we certainly see plenty of that kind of Linux zealotry on /., I really doubt that's what's going on in the corporate IS world.
As a consultant for several Fortune 1000 companies, I'm going to disagree with you here. Many of these companies have had negative interactions with FOSS proponents. More frequently than not, the pitch degenerated into "but you should dump Microsoft because it's better for the world when one company isn't so dominant." This usually happened when the TCO studies showed little or no gain to be had with a Windows-to-Linux migration. The business types want ROI, not religion.
For every Linux (or BSD, or OS X) zealot, there are a hundred Windows zealots
I'm going to disagree with you again here. I've met about ten times as many Linux zealots as I have Windows ones. The Windows guys just don't treat their software like it's a religion, they treat it like a business tool. If there's something better out there, they'll consider it, weigh it, and even implement it if it makes financial sense. The Linux camp, on the other hand, acts like it's everyone's religious duty to Bring Down Microsoft(tm). And based on the articles and open letters being written by those within the FOSS community, I'm not alone in my perception.
Me? I use the tool that's best suited for the job. Sometimes that's Windows, sometimes it's Linux, sometimes it's Solaris. I think anyone who gets "attached" to their OS is seriously in need of counseling.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ever tried installing Java and Java programs?
Yup lots of times.
Ever tried to compile Java 1.3.1 (Native threads) on OpenBSD
No
ere you have to downloading several big files files from Sun after agreeing to Sun's obnoxious lisences?
It's their code - don't like the license? Don't use it. Write your own and put it out under the BSD license. Besides, the fact that you have to download "several large files" to install an application is hardly unusual.
Java, the platform where everything is opaque?
Huh?
Where lack of relevant informations is the norm, and not the exception?
Java - the platform which pretty much set the standard for automated, standardised documentation of code, where all the source for the runtime, the standard libraries and pretty much everything else is available for free download. Java - the platform where even "compiled" code can usually be trivially decompiled into nice neat readable source. Java - the platform which gave us the self-describing bean interface, the JMX runtime management interfaces, etc.
In the authors' expericence, installing anything to do with Java is a very tiresome process, and this was no exception. The assumption seems to be that Java is so facinating that proper explanations are unnecessary -- devotees will immerse themselves in the holy stream and all will become clear after many days beneath the surface. This is probably because explanations are expensive and large commercial interests are involved. It contrast strongly with the Apache site or the Perl CPAN network...
The author is complaining that he doesn't understand how to set up a Java app. Fair enough. I wouldn't know how to go about setting up a Perl system - but that doesn't lead me to criticise Perl as tiresome. Maybe he should educate himself, or just get someone else to do the tricky stuff.
Heh - and it's quite entertaining that your quote is from a book about Apache, when as we all know, the Apache Foundation's biggest success story other than httpd is the Jakarta Java Project - which has produced an amazing amount of fantastic software, and lots of nice documentation for it all.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Have you tried the driver for the x73 off the linuxprinting.org site?
I work at a non-profit, and the donors all have stock in Microsoft, and the board is rather interested in all management decisions that are made. These people would rather see their donations thrown down the Microsoft drain than see their favorite charity using a competing product, even if it is more appropriate for the needs of the organisation.
Read, L
In reading the article I couldn't help but wonder if this kind of exclusion of choices in business is covered elsewhere in business classes.
I would bet it would be highly unlikely that a business course on selecting vendors for materials and services contains absolute adherence to a "single source" philosophy. In fact just the opposite is taught. Single source vendors for materials an services are heavily frowned upon in business. A major point of controlling business costs is tied up in pitting vendors for the same or similar materials against one another.
Yet in the absolutely worthless world of MIS, a single source of supply for operating systems on which to run your business is seemingly extolled as a VIRTUE!! All of the textbooks mentioned in this story are worthless drivel, with no critical critique of true use of software in business. No other aspect of a business would be allowed to be beholden to one supplier the way business IT is. And the peopld in charge of business IT don't just accept it, they demand it.
MIS degrees should be banned.
Well, except you just made me think of the article again and the big problem is that the article is most likely WRONG.
We're talking about some reasonably smart people here. Most of whom don't just buy off on an idea because they see it in print, and most of whom know how to research things a bit. Hell, I know a lot of business types and I seriously doubt they remember anything from school. Most of them went to get that scrap of paper that helped 'em land the job, then learned the real stuff there.
Treat the text of this article the same way you'd treat the text of one of the referenced text books: Don't believe it just because it's on Linux Insider.
Business people are trained to think in terms of dollars and risk. They need quarterly profits to satisfy investors, they need to manage risk. I have seen very few treatments of Linux or other OSS solutions that satisfactorily address BOTH cost and risk management concerns.
Linux is growing in a somewhat organic way, and the technology of it is way ahead of our ability to actually sell it. Until we address that lop-sidedness in the community, I don't see things changing fast, but they still will change, it's happening all the time.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
People are already being sent to Linux training (by their employers) in droves in my area.
.la file is. I definitely could not set up a Linux firewall or routing system without *heavily* drawing from a reference work, not like those Cisco gurus can do with their hardware, where they just happily rattle off commands. I don't have a clue how emerge works, or what its drawbacks are. I don't know how to configure Metacity. I've never seen YaST. I barely know any PHP. Perl's objects are a closed book to me. I develop software, and yet it's still a complete mystery to me how people can write autoconf files without painfully slogging through huge masses of GNU documentation and looking for likely candidates and doing days of cutting and pasting and trial and error. I've never used subversion. These are all standard Linux tools that you'll find on a common distribution.
This should be interesting.
I can't see any kind of training course that effectively teaches someone Linux. You *might* manage to teach someone the GUI configuration front end to Red Hat's current release in a week (including enough background concepts to allow them to understand it). Not much else, though. You definitely can't learn to admin Linux effectively in a week any more than you can learn to admin Windows in a week. I'd go so far as to say that six months of well-thought out curriculum and constant practice probably isn't enough to hammer all the important concepts into someone's head of the workings of just the full set of daemons in a distro, all the important POSIX commands, different security implications, the administrative stuff that a distro uses (keep in mind that this is just for *one* distro) the ins and outs of packge systems, troubleshooting procedures, appropriate forums to go for help and etiquette in those forums, rescue procedures, networking issues...
Maybe it's expecting too much. Most Windows admins that I've run into are barely more than instruction-manual-following monkeys, whereas there are some *scarily* knowledgeable UNIX gurus out there (could be because there are people with thirty years of UNIX experience out there, but none with more than eight of Win95+ experience). You might be able to take a short training course on how to do very basic operation of a system, but if anything breaks, you aren't going to have a *clue* what to do.
God, I've been using Linux heavily for years, and I still don't know standbys like awk (well, just enough to get by, but not much) or anything more than a single operator for sed. I *still* find new commands that I haven't seen before. Groff is a closed book to me. I know a bit of Apache's workings, but not loads. I don't know how to set the systemwide timezone in a distro-independent manner (I could look it up, though). I know almost nothing about sendmail's cf syntax -- without a GUI config frontend, I'd be helpless to get sendmail running, and probably mostly helpless to fix anything more than a basic problem. I don't know what a
May we never see th
... it's so apparent that the title "college graduate" doesn't mean as much as it should. The discrepancies I bet are the same in any number of disciplines. Over specialization -as the famous quote loosely goes- are for insects. And that degree in over specialization might indicate a severe lack of other skills, some of which are necessary in making a well rounded human, in any employment position. Example,these text books. OK, a requirement for that boss management degree, but really, none of these people ever go to a normal bookstore and walk by the magazine rack and see the linux magazines? None of them read any of the tech news sites on the net? I dunno, seems strange to me, but no more strange than all the people who can rattle off hollywood movies and the stars names, or their local sports "team" stars, but who cannot name their own US representative in the house. Part of our culture I guess...
Incidently, that was my impression watching the trump apprentice series as well. I don't watch very much television at all, but for some reason I was interested in that concept, so I've been watching it. All those young people with degrees (except one) and good paying jobs, but almost all of them seemed to lack quite a bit of real world common sense, and all of them had unreasonable expectations, IMO. I know it's stupid reality TV, etc, but still, that was the impression I got.
I completely agree, I work in a company where we run Windows 2000 server, Red Hat, OS X, XP and 2000 workstation. Each box serves its purpose with the OS best suited. Development on 2K and XP, design on OS X, hosting on Linux and Windows 2000 server.
To all the people who throw their hands up in the air, guess what... there's open source for Windows as well. I run an open source vbscript web server and an open source FTP server on Windows 2000.
At home I run SuSE, Mandrake and XP. Except the Linux boxes are toys to tinker with, install the newest OS and see how near to being a viable OS Linux is. Currently, I give it another year. I do a lot of multitrack recording, I could install an open source multitrack but when I send my Pro Tools or Cubase project to another studio I know they will be able to read it.
Have any of the Linux die hard fanboys actually USED XP? (not installed it and played around with the start menu - that's just appalling) Install it, turn off ALL the visualisations, ALL the audio, ALL the pointless services. My XP laptop boots into a useable GUI in about 8 seconds. SuSE takes 30 seconds.
I'd love to use Linux (especially with the up and coming Palladium) but it's just not designed for a high power requirement user (not technician) in mind.
You bet! Take a look at the full draft on my site (there's a link in the article). There are thousands of errors of all kinds in these books of which my personal fav rave is "mainframe and minicomputers have one cpu" (Turban et al).
Maybe you should actually learn some history, dude. And I don't mean from cold war-era textbooks. Try finding a source for the Stalin numbers, and you will probably end up finding that they were American estimates used mainly for anti-communist propaganda purposes, and that the actual numbers (as substantiated by extensive paper records) were many orders of magnitude lower. Unfortunately, most people are hopelessly brainwashed by American propaganda.
If you don't believe me, try a statistical experiment. Ask a few random people from Russia how many of their relatives/parents/grandparents died in WWII. Then ask them how many of them were killed by Stalin. You will very likely find that the numbers do not support the notion that the Stalin regime killed millions of people.
His arguement was that it is not easy to use, it is not guarenteed to continue into the future, and there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes.
.NET. This is all covering a span of under twenty years.
Wow.
not easy to use
I'd give it currently, from an end-user standpoint, about roughly equal to Windows. It is different, though, which means that for a user skilled in Windows, it is more difficult to use at first, until they become familiar with the differences.
it is not guarenteed to continue into the future
I will bet a million bucks that the Linux kernel will be around longer than the Windows NT kernel. There is one company working on the NT kernel -- there are many people working on Linux. Many companies have an investment and the ability and desire to continue using it, and nobody has the ability to "discontinue" Linux.
Or did he mean the APIs? UNIX system and library APIs have been more or less constant since the *'70*s. On Windows, a programmer has had to learn (get ready for it) DOS goodies, Win16, Win32, potentially the missing functionality in Windows CE and the added functionality in WinNT (which, frankly, is vastly more of a pain in the ass than the differences between even "different operating systems" like FreeBSD and Linux). Toss MFC into the mix. Now Microsoft's moving their developers to
Or maybe he was talking about the applications? Sysadmins might learn an application and then it's yanked out from under their feet...but sendmail (then called delivermail) shipped in the *'70*s. How about Apache? It started out as NCSA httpd, and was the second web server ever written.
there is no one to be held accountable for failures or for fixes
Absurd. Unless you are Dell or the US Government (and then only *maybe*), Microsoft does not *care* whether there's a bug in Windows. Name one instance where someone successfully sued Microsoft for a flaw in, say, Windows, and recieved damages for the problems caused by it. You can call Microsoft "accountable" all you want -- they are simply not.
In the Open Source world, I can sit down right now and email the main author, the development team, the maintainer, or the author of a particular feature (and usually *exact* line of code that I care about). I can generally enter bugs into the same bug-tracking system that the developers themselves use. If I'm in a hurry and need a contract for a fix within a certain time bound, I can hire a contractor to fix a bug or add a feature and send that fix to them, even if my company does not have any in-house developers capable of fixing the problem. I can discuss the problem at a technical level and point out the exact lines of code causing the problem publically, with every interested eye in the world trained on the bug. Linux has seen bug fix times for crucial bugs on the order of less than an hour ("there's a TCP bug that needs to be fixed *NOW*) "we need a fix out ASAP". Let's say you use Photoshop and report a bug to Adobe. Maybe, if you're lucky, they'll fix a bug. WilberWorks (a company formed by some GIMP developers) sells service contracts with guarantees that bugs you run into and require fixes for will be fixed within ten *days*. Try getting Adobe interested in doing something like that. Plus, if I don't like WilberWorks, I can hire anyone else to deal with my problem -- there are consultants and programmers-for-hire all over, and I can pay them whatever it takes or have them sign whatever contract I want to get them to fix my problem. Getting someone to be accountable to ensure that Open Source works is much easier than closed source products, where you have only one option -- the original vendor, which generally does not provide support on par with open source developers that provide support contracts (at least of the ones I've noticed). Most closed-source companies have churn, and do not keep developers on a single project. Microsoft, for exampl
May we never see th
Why the huge emphasis on textbooks? It's not like PHB's stop listening, learning, and adapting after they leave school.
Don't you think these PHB types talk to each other sometimes? Don't you think they read trade magazines? Word has and will continue to get around about Linux.
Big Companies that use Linux:
* Bank of America
* Autozone
* J.P. Morgan
* Golman-Sachs
The list is quite long.
from many of text books, you would think that the US is the greatest perpetrator of evil in the world. or at least, no better than most other nations. (okay slash trolls, flame on)
Really? I've found that US textbooks (assuming you teach in the US) are reasonably pro-US, though not to the point of USSR textbooks. Mine included things that reflected negatively on the US, like the origins of the Panama Canal, the origins of the Spanish-American and Mexican-American wars, the fact that the US didn't care too much about helping Jews (and had its own anti-Semetic problems at the beginning of World War II), the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation was less about liberty than a political tool, US finagling in Korea and Iran, points out the fact that the US was the a major bastion of slavery and so on. It gets much more rah-rah-rah, Red, White and Blue during the Cold War, though, and doesn't poke very hard at US-induced nastiness during that period.
May we never see th
Dunno what kind of answer you were expecting - this kind of question you can argue until the cows come home. It could be anything from socioeconomics, state's rights arguments, clash of cultures, butthead political leaders, foreign provocateurs - there was enough crap going on back then so that you can find a decent argument for just about any cause of the Civil War.
Most executives got to BE executives by caring more about leveraging technology than using technology. In other words, by taking X and using it to make money, rather than takign X and using it to do something.
A guy came into my cube today and asked about the box I'm building. When I mentioned that it ran Lniux, he asked me "Really? What *IS* Linux, anyway? What good does it do me?"
This was a brilliant question and it deserved a complete answer. So I looked at him. All of his needs were already met by Windows. We don't upgrade operting systems -- we just buy new machines ever three years or so on R&D grants -- so the cost issue was not there. He has never gotten any viruses and the firewall protects him from worms. In his day, he uses all of three apps: a custom program for customer management (Windows only), PC Anywhere (Windows only) and Microsoft Word. And he's busy as hell -- certainly doesn't have the spare time to pick up bash syntax or play around with Gee Whiz features. So I said to him, "It does you no good at all."
And then I proceeded to explain to him why I used in on the server. "If I ran the company website and that FTP site on Windows, I'd have to constantly worry about them. I'd have to constantly be installing patches and watching for exploits. By running Linux, I can decrease my watchfulness to the point where I only have to check up on it once a month."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
GNU/Linux (the OS) does everything Windows (the OS) does, and then some. Most GNU/Linux distributions include tons of applications that Windows users have to pay hundreds of dollars for, such as Word Processing. GNU/Linux has support for dozens of filesystems, not just its own. GNU/Linux has built-in security and productivity features that have either only recently appeared in Windows, or are architecturally impossible to include. And new versions of GNU/Linux Operating Systems, with better functionality, arrive every year.
Access to source code makes my time-to-market faster, because I can fix problems now rather than wait for vendors to respond. I have access to dozens of office applications, browsers, and e-mail programs, rather than being locked into just one or two. There are no restrictive licenses preventing me from changing how things work or spreading things around.
I can download, install, and use GNU/Linux for free. I only have to pay for support if I want it; if I do, GNU/Linux's higher uptime, greater stability and security over Windows means I will be spending less money keeping my system working and make more money doing my business.
This is not just the state of the art; GNU/Linux has an army of developers that dwarfs Microsoft's staff. GNU/Linux is improving more rapidly than Windows is, and in every aspect. GNU/Linux can afford to waste thousands of man-years on failed projects and branches because they have so many resources to spare, whereas any single company has to keep development costs in check to ensure profitability.
Nobody can compete with more features, more freedom, and lower cost over an extended period of time -- not even a company as large and successful Microsoft. In the long term, Microsoft will have to do what IBM has done -- adopt GNU/Linux and a service-based model. Otherwise, Microsoft won't survive.
Fifteen years from now, everything will be GNU/Linux.
Where do you go to school? Our school is C/C++/Java on UNIX/Linux/OSX based systems. The idea is not to teach you any particular technology, but to teach you the theory that goes behind building computing systems and software, so that when you graduate and the language that was cool your freshman year is not cool anymore, you still have the skills to apply to the next greatest thing.
PS: MS practically gives away software to universities. Office is like 45$, Windows 15$ and MSVC.Net is less than 100$.
The professors creating the courses are MS Biased, so it follows that the books chosen are MS centric.
I'm tutoring at the local CC, and was asked to teach a short course in Linux. Try to find a textbook that talks about a current version of Linux. Before you Fanboys start flapping your gums about kernel versions, the school will change books every year to keep up with the latest "innovations" from Redmond, and has changed mid year for the past two years.
The school's only "open" minded professor worked with me, and we ordered instructor's desk copies from all of the major text book publishers. The ones that came with CDs had RH7.2 This was Nov 03! Yet the same publisher had texbooks on Windows server2003.
After looking at the paucity of readily available textbooks, we opted to go for an open source solution: Paul Sheer's RUTE.
I taught out of the book, and the students had the choice of buying the book, or downloading the PDF. I burned copies of Knoppix so that they could actually have Linux at home to practice on.
This school does have two computer labs with Linux, one is locked away from the rest of the LAN, on its own subnet and firewall, and the other has removable hard-drives, and they disconnect the room from the LAN before they install the linux drives!
The school still equates Linux and "Hackers" since the sole purpose of Linux there is use in the computer forensics classes. Any wonder why the CIS majors never learn anything about Linux?
I'm still doing my MBA and actually Linux shows up in one of the corporate strategy case studies as a direct study item. Sadly the lecturer decided it would be unfair to set a question on that study ;)
On our course I've seen little "pro-windows" save the choice of OS the university made for desktops. Some of the lecturers including the economics lecturer find aspects of the GPL model fascinating.
Alan
We're talking about some reasonably smart people here. Most of whom don't just buy off on an idea because they see it in print, and most of whom know how to research things a bit.
They are smart, but in the midst of the complexity of business, finance, and management, where would they get the energy to understand the technology, too? Many technology decisions really do take the path of least resistance, simply because technology is just one more massive layer of complexity, risk, and volatility to deal with. It is simply the easiest thing to look around, see that Microsoft makes a good sales pitch and their technology is at least barely functional. Further, Microsoft is a brand that can make people feel good about themselves. It's sort of like driving an expensive good-looking car and feeling good simply by being seen in it.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
So UNIX is better because you have to go out of your way to do something?
Because you have to go out of your way to do something less desireable, the "non-common case". If it was really easy to, say, blow away all your files instead of a user having to go "out of their way", I'd call that a misfeature.
Seriously, I think the no-sharing default is to help prevent anamalous behavior. Sharing a file requries extra planning; you wouldn't share a block of memory between two threads, read/write, without a lock; exclusive access provides a primitive kind of locking. If you don't want the file to be locked, you only have to pass one extra flag when opening the file. But you are right that it is silly to deny read access when it's only open for read anyways.
Tell me you've never gotten a sharing violation when using Windows. Describe to me under what circumstances you would want to avoid reading from a file by two processes at once. Tell me you haven't rebooted when installing software. I've used both systems, and haven't ever hit problems with the UNIX approach, and the Windows approach has caused me countless grief. I've worked with a Windows fileserver and a cluster of machines that were running MS Visual Studio and Explorer. Inevitably, MS Visual Studio on some machine would have a file locked or Explorer a directory locked, and to delete a directory on one machine I'd have to go to every machine killing off all the processes that might be using the file/directory. Incredibly stupid. On *IX, you blow away a file, and the OS refcounts the thing. It doesn't break any applications currently using the file -- the file just doesn't have a directory entry any more, and when the last application using a file goes away, so does the file.
If you don't want the file to be locked, you only have to pass one extra flag when opening the file
That's not the point. The problem is that *developers don't*. They plop a zero in that field and don't worry about it. The net effect is that a user can't delete a file because something has it open without passing the shared flag. He didn't write the program, he doesn't have the source, and there are roughly zero instances where not locking the file is going to cause problems. You don't see folks in the UNIX world walking around with corrupted files, you know?
Yeah, sharing violation errors. However, sharing violation errors are obvious and direct. Insufficent locking can result in corruption and intermittent behavior that is hard to diagnose.
Yes, in theory. And in theory memory overcommits can cause massive unpredictable system failure, but you don't see your typical Linux system dropping on its feet. In theory languages that use a calling stack (C, C++, etc) can have completely unavoidable and unpredictable deaths due to exhausting memory by growing their stack when there aren't any pages left, but it's not a real-world problem either. People don't write apps that try dumping data to the same file at once (if they did, say by writing to a log file, Linux users would probably see mysteriously corrupt entries and Windows users would probably see mysteriously missing entries). Hell, every 1/(very large number) times key generation fails uncatchably for any prime-factor based cryptosystem, but we don't worry about it. They aren't real-world issues.
I created a new directory, changed to it in a command prompt, and tried to delete it. Explorer told me that it couldn't be deleted because it was in use. This is on XP (not that Explorer is anywhere near perfect). If I didn't know what has something open, there is always proces explorer, where I can search for handles and force them to close.
Not in my testing, which was over a file server. XP failed silently, whereas 2000 failed with an error. I could be wrong, but I doubt that Process Explorer will let me kill off said handles from a remote system (and certainly not if the access is from a different account...I might even have to go sit in front of the file server to run Process Explorer...I'll admit that it could have been handy other times that I've run into issues though, and didn't know about it).
May we never see th
Sit in front of the file server? What's wrong with terminal services?