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Microsoft's 'Hands-On' Linux Lab
aneroid writes "eWeek has a story on Microsoft allowing a third party to present a 'hands-on lab' that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software at its annual worldwide partner show in Minnesota this weekend. It was run by Don Johnson (not the actor), who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with Windows are planned or an advantage. Whether it's for the desktop or server, wasn't clear. People did get to 'see the Apache Web server in action' and a KDE desktop.Is this more of a preemptive strike where the Linux experience is so bad (slow machines, old software) they wouldn't bother to check it out in the future, thus securing an existing partner/client? Or are they that confident people won't stray if they're invited to sample the competition? According to the Register, 'Microsoft is unlikely to stop developers moving to Linux and open source so its best hope lies in articulating a strategy of co-existence to limit the 'damage' to its business.'"
Wouldn't be interesting to see them show a fully configured Win98, 2000 and XP systems along with Linux to show what compelling reasons to move to the newest and best MS has to offer.
Linux is only a small part of their competition. Their own installed base is much bigger
Talk about redundant 101.
Microsoft are giving customers a chance to look at linux running in an environment of their choosing because they damn well know if they don't there's a good chance this sampling will take place in an environment not of their choice, by people with a passion for the alternative.
Talk about business 101.
The Mothership
I once read that the best way to get someone to swallow a lie is to mix a little truth into it. They showed the people Linux, then showed them the propaganda, disinformation, and blatant lies of their "Get The Facts" campaign.
and bullshit..
"Linux runs on just about anything, whereas Windows has a targeted platform focus," he said, adding that one of the main reasons people started looking at Linux was to avoid vendor lock-in.
No. Try again.. People quit M$ because they are sick and tired of dishing out bucketloads of money everytime they want to do anything, because they are sick of rebooting 400 times a day, because they are sick of BSODs.. And on and on and on...
An entire OS on a single CDROM that does NOTHING out of the box except get you on the internet and get infected before you can patch it..
I didn't want to spend hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a word processor, a paint program, virus protection, firewall, etc...
For the cost of a blank DVD and an hour or so to download an ISO, I can have everything I want and more.
And the absolute best part is is that I no longer have the big pain in my wallet and my ass called M$..
Oh yeah, and I have ZERO pirated stuff.. ZERO...
No warez, no serialz, no gamez, nothing...
Microsoft isn't willing to open up its source but by flying the flag of interoperability it's suggesting FOSS people can "seamlessly" move data across platforms.
Recently I've been doing alot of reading about The Xen virtual machine monitor and The Xen virtual machine monitor, interestinly MS is/was involved in both projects. There's never any doubt in my mind that the wet dream of every large corporation is to own everyone from the cradle to the grave. I've no doubt MS will never give up the idea of owning the web, and, further that interoperability is just another way to say "come into my web said the spider to the fly."
Behind it all, I suspect, is a gameplan that has MS software as a utility piped into thin clients in each and every household and business.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I'll bet the 3rd party was Novell.
Novell and microsoft seem to get by with each other well enough, and I could see them allowing them to make a demonstration.
That said, I'm sick of the lack of innovation on Microsoft's behalf in their OS department. That ALSO said, I don't think that there's much more that a desktop OS should offer that Win2000 doesn't already offer.
Longhorn will be a step in the right direction, but 2000/XP are minimal enough to leave a very low overhead and not be noticed too much. Personally, I like it when the OS isn't in your face. Until Microsoft can justify the whiz-bang features in longhorn that will suck up my resources, I'm quite content to devote my processor time to the applications i'm using.
Yes, I also use a mac and love that too, and I find it hard to have some sort of happy medium where you have the minimalism/low overhead that I like. Windows sucks at managing multiple windows -- this could be improved, and linux/macOS have a definite advantage.
But, on a whole, since switching back to windows from my mac after 2 years for work reasons, I'm finding that despite the loss of all of the cool producitivity-boosting features MacOS has (dashboard, iPhoto, Expose, etc.), Win2000 satisfies my needs just fine.
Microsoft is going to have a hell of a time pushing OS upgrades to corporations from now on. Windows as an operating system would seem to be almost complete (apart from a few glaring security things). All they can do now is tack stuff on top.
Linux on the other hand, needs to figure out what it wants itself to be. It's in an eternal conflict between being super-feature-rich(KDE/Gnome), and being uber-minimalistic (you're forced to go to the command line on a daily basis. this is something that almost never happens on other platforms, and rightfuly so). Comparing a linux desktop to Windows is just embarrasing for linux.
Comparing linux to MacOS is humiliating. With a tiny team of developers (compared to MS/Linux), apple built an OS in 5 years that is considered by most to be the most 'modern' operating system available to consumers. Sure you can debate this, but OSX/Darwin has stuff that windows and linux are hurrying awfuly fast to copy.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I understand your frustration. Most of us have had frustrating experiences with a wide range of operating systems. I remember spending three days trying (recently) to figure out a login issue I was having with a Win98-based point of sale terminal. Even Microsoft's tech support was unable to help. It turned out it was a deeply buried registry entry that I think the vendor had put in there to ensure that they could be the only ones to reinstall the OS, and I only found it after three readings of the relevent portions of the resource guide.
But most newbies are not going to be installing an OS. If an upgrade is done, they will call someone who is more knowledgeable than they are. Secondly most beginners are going to just use the default (GNOME in the case of Fedora). And if KDE doesn't work, then they probably won't even notice...
Nobody is denying that it is sometimes required that a user of any operating system go into portions of the system that a beginner would be uncomfortable with (in Windows, try the Registry Editor). But if they have to do that, they will call someone to help them.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think they're actually quite smart about it. The day they start making software for linux, is the day that a PHB can look at linux as a real option. Its just so much harder to pitch opensource solutions to a boss. If MS made MS-Office (and their other misc. crap) available on linux, the decision makers of the world would figure linux was viable (MS says so), and its free (as in beer)... and switch.
As it is, the switch is still a scary decision, and rightly so. Interoperability and familiarity are a big deal.
So furnishing your admins with an OS that gives them only ONE toolset is good?
Even as a Linux fan I can say 'forget it'. Your POV will be history a few years after Monad debuts. Then the only OS taking over *nix server marketshare will be Windows. And it will be a sad thing.
There is just no F-ing reason why the snobs at Apache and Xorg cannot write (or borrow) a simple API to change the subsystem's settings and handle the serialization to disk! Only then can they reasonably expect KDE and Gnome people to write and maintain GUI frontends for them. Individual distros are attempting to fill this gap -- with very mixed results.
Apache all but bars a small-office manager from setting up their own LAN webserver. Windows IIS does not.
microsoft is evil if it includes a web browser?
Microsoft is a monopoly on the Operating System market. This has been proven in court.
Microsoft have a relatively featureless, uninnovative browser compared to the competetion. Why is it so popular? It is because Microsoft are using their desktop OS monopoly to force people to use Internet Explorer (see Windows Update for example). Browsers like Firefox and Opera are put at a huge disadvantage.
If you were the boss of a browser company, I am sure you be complaining too.
Why is it ok for linux to include everything but the kitchen sink
Including multiple options is OK. I think there would be less complaints if Windows said 'Would you like to install Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera?'. It's not going to happen though, unless forced by the courts.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
The whole reason that $50/h Linux admins (and therefore Linux itself) makes sense is that it doesn't require as many hours to admin.
The other thing you're overlooking is the consequences of "you get what you pay for". A $12/hour Windows admin just isn't going to be able to provide the same quality of work as a $50/hour Linux admin (otherwise, why wouldn't they charge more than $12/hour ? If they're good, they should be able to at least charge something like $30/hour ?), which again will increase the number of hours that you'll have to pay the $12/hour Windows admin. The quality of the functionaly equivalent jobs won't be the same with such as disparity between the per hourly rates.
Comparing the platforms based purely on a per hour admin rate, irrespective of the actual time and effort involved, is a way too simplistic comparison to be useful.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
They don't buy things because "no-one got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft". They buy things at the best value, because the people making the buying decisions are spending their own money.
These people look for value. I know some small entrepreneurs who are using OpenOffice.org because the £200 license for Office is a fair slab of their business.
People often host small sites on LAMP. Over time, some of these small businesses are going to get larger.
I'm starting to see activity on jobs in PHP occurring now (this also co-incides with a noticable trend towards people building more and more browser-based apps).
Having mis-spent a season of my life with a circus, with a lot of exposure to the seamier side of carnival life, I believe the proper term is "shill", not "actor".
And considering the multi-year, multi-faceted MSFT attack on F/OSS, GPL, and GNU/Linux, I have no doubt that the MSFT "road show" in Minnesota must have had a carnival atmosphere. AFAIK, in every other aspect of "modern" civilization excepting politics and marketing, snake oil salesmen are run out of town or thrown in jail.
Why didn't this happen in Minnesota?
What's wrong with that? Do you think Microsoft just slapped a couple of XP-CDs in their demo systems, did a quick 5-minute install and left it at that??
I know this will get modded down into oblivion, this being Slashdot where joining in the "windows sucks" choir is _popular_ and _fashionable_. But Windows XP is no longer Windows 98, and it's getting tiresome to hear the same rehashed bullshit that was only true in the 90's.
"People quit M$ because they are sick and tired of dishing out bucketloads of money everytime they want to do anything, because they are sick of rebooting 400 times a day, because they are sick of BSODs.. And on and on and on..."
No, again, XP is no longer Windows '98. Have you even used a Windows XP system lately? No, I don't think so. I haven't seen one BSOD-ing even once, unless there's actually a hardware fault. (E.g., if you think you're so l33t for running CL3 memory at CL2 and your CPU running 20% higher than the speed it was sold for. You can crash any system, Linux included, that way.)
"An entire OS on a single CDROM that does NOTHING out of the box except get you on the internet and get infected before you can patch it.."
Again, I'll call that fanboy bullshit. The last XP SP2 I've installed never got virused.
Oh, wait, you presumably mean "but if you install an old unpatched Windows 2000 with an unpatched IE 5 you'll get virused." Which is the usual fanboy loaded comparison: let's compare an old unpatched Windows installation to a new fully patched Linux box. Well, gee.
Well, you try running an equally old and unpatched Linux distro, and then we'll talk. You know, since Windows 2000 or '98 are the ones used to hand-wave through the "windows sucks" bullshit, it's only fair to compare them to a distro from the same years. I seem to recall that the statistic for 2000, was that you'd get rooted within half an hour if you went online without a firewall.
"I didn't want to spend hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a word processor, a paint program, virus protection, firewall, etc..."
Bullshit again. The Gimp, OOo and a bunch of others are available on Windows just as well as on Linux. Those of us who do pay for something else, pay for the extra functionality that Gimp, OOo and the others don't have.
"Oh yeah, and I have ZERO pirated stuff.. ZERO...
No warez, no serialz, no gamez, nothing.."
Well, neither do I. So your point is? The usual fanboy bullshit along the lines of "everyone is using Windows just because they pirate everything"? Or what?
It may come as a surprise to you, but even by BSA's bullshit inflated statistics, most people are _not_ pirates. And BSA exists only to cry "wolf!", so they do that lots. Yet study their inflated statistics for the USA or western Europe sometimes, and you might be surprised. There just isn't that much piracy to support the fanboy idiocy that everyone running Windows is only doing it because they pirate everything.
It may come as a surprise to you, but some of us actually _paid_ for Windows, and for everything else on it, and found it worth every single cent. And why not? If the choice is between (A) a system which costs money, and (B) one which is utterly useless to me, trust me, I'll fork over the dough for A every single time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What I like about Linux over Windows is that Linux assumes that I know what I'm doing, doesn't talk down to me, and in general doesn't piss me off like Windows does. The stability and security of Linux are also definite added bonuses (spyware really irritates me).
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber" -- Plato
My comment is directly based on how often I have to upgrade my Linux box due to security updates verses how often I read about "critical" MS security patches on Slashdot. It is also based on what my friend says about the Linux servers his work run verses the windows servers and desktops they run. I'm fortunte that I got out of Windows desktop / server administration before the Internet became popular, and therefore these problems became common.
Windows advocates are more likely to make assumptions than Linux advocates. Windows advocates usually haven't used Linux at all, yet they're willing to repeat what other people say about it, without having any personal experience to indicate to them that what they are saying is the truth. It is hard to provide realistic or credible criticisms of something that you don't have any experience with.
Linux advocates are usually ex- or even current Windows users (sometimes not by choice, due to their work situation), so they're typically speaking with a level of experience.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
What I think they're overlooking is that the "Integration" problem of Linux is something that used to be, and still is, a problem for the Computer Operator (he who came before 'sysadmins'), and that seperating this 'problem' into different roles of administration, you actually put the User/Operator positions into a better perspective.
Integration isn't supposed to be a user problem. Its supposed to be a problem of the person who is setting up and responsible for the computing system being used in the business case.
Microsoft have made a great deal of hoop-lah over the years over the fact that "you don't need a sysadmin to run Windows"
But it seems to me that, conveniently, they're overlooking the fact that Linux, in fact, makes better Computer Operators; you don't really get a fully-Integrated computing system based on Linux without at least performing some of the 'old-school' functions of the Computer Operations hat. And, if you put that hat on and do the job properly, regardless of if its full-time or not, while using Linux you actually learn the bits you need in order to maintain the operator function during the course of use of the system by the business.
I believe in the separation between "Operator" (what some people call 'Administrator') and "User", and I believe that OS's that provide modular functionality for the "Operator" to apply in building a working, productive computing system end up in a better "User" experience. One thing I have always abhorred about the Microsoft way is that they seem to have tried to build one tool that does many jobs; e.g. I don't want to have to use a GUI if all the machine is going to do is serve files
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Are you kidding us ?
... You did not understand one thing about security, specially in Windows environment.
Shells will compete with Monad ? You MS zealots are amazing. So now, shells, like bash, which are extremely powerful, extensively used and improved, cross-platform will compete with something that is not even in stable state yet ? Compete with sth that is not even cross-platform ? Compete with sth that does the same mistakes as csh ?
If you want a universal config GUI for Linux and its servers, there is webmin. Distros don't actually need to overload anything in Apache server config files, Apache already interoperates pretty well with anything, there is a plugin API available for that. Now, could you please have an interesting topic ?
KDE would, given the chance. It could take a while for the KPart to be officially accepted, but thats par for the course.
I don't know, the config file of Apache is easier to understand than any GUI I have seen.
Actually, I still haven't seen sth easier and safer than a config file to configure a server.
For doing small office things I would. Snob. In fact, anyone with a PC on their desk should be able to 'publish' web pages to the rest of their LAN as long as a sysadmin hasn't specifically disabled such services.
Even though everyone with a PC is not a sysadmin
Quote: Linux has been written for those who have more IT expertise and knowledge, whereas Windows is designed from the ground up to be user-friendly: "There is a steep learning curve associated with using Linux," he said.
Rubbish.
I have Linux desktop users who are every bit as productive, as they were on MS Windows, after and hours tuition. I have others who are confident, after playing with a Live CD distro, without any input from myself.
Desktop Linux is no more difficult to learn than it is to learn XP when upgrading from 98 or ME.
Anyone can be a Windows admin. And that's the problem. It's insane to let ANYONE be an admin.
Try Ubuntu GNU/Linux, it's great!!!
Apache all but bars a small-office manager from setting up their own LAN webserver. Windows IIS does not.
And that's why they don't just use it for LAN webservers, but also for public webservers. Which leads to the huge number of compromised IIS systems out there.
Sorry, there's some things that better be hard. I don't want people driving near me who built their car in their garage, unless they know what the heck they're doing, and I don't want a badly cobbled-together IIS server in my net segment for quite the same reasons.
Easy != Good
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You know, you should go to work for NASA. After all, the solution to the shuttle crashes is to make a shuttle that can't crash. No, wait, you should go to work for aviation industries instead, and tell them that the solution to planes being hijacked is to make a plane that can't be hijacked. While you're at it, design a ship that can't sink and a building that can't collapse - japanese would pay a lot for that.
Most people couldn't care less about what mushrooms are poisonous and what edible either, they just want to eat everything that looks good. Most will learn the difference anyway after being stomach pumped a few times.
There is a very limited amount of possible inputs a processor can take. It is quite possible to predict all possible situations a processor can encounter. It is impossible to predict all possible situations an operating system can encounter. Therefore, it is possible to ensure that processor works correctly in all circumstances, but it is impossible to ensure that an operating system will correctly handle all possible circumstances.
Does your palm pilots need to deal with thousands of (often buggy on hardware level) peripheral devices that can be plugged in in almost any combination ? Or multiple processors that differ from each other a bit ? Or a hundred different memory maker with their different timings ? Or overheating components, since the user added a new graphics card that generates more heat than your average fireplace ? Or a trillion programs the user might want to install, some of them actively malicious ? Or a power supply made inadequate by the new graphics card, causing random resets in components ? Or being unable to read a system library because the hard disk generated a bad sector where it was stored ? Or a user program locking an important file against concurrent modifications and then entering infinite loop ? Or different keyboard layouts ? Or high-speed Internet connection being bombarded by a constant stream of malformed packets ? Or swapping ? Or trying to deal with all this and maintain an interactive feel to the user while not sacrificing much throughtput ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
In the above picture, I've naturally left out the commercial interest in improving Linux. Suffice to say that distros and tools are now embedded in a far more competitive environment, because of the relative ease of transition between distros and tools. This means that good enough is no longer good enough, especially if the free tools are perpetually playing "catch-up". Perpetual innovation is now the rule for a successful company that is using Linux as a base.
Wikileaks, no DNS
I run HP and Dell with one IBM stashed away to work from my couch when I feel lazy. Why? They all offer alternative OS as an option. HP-UX, Red Hat, and IBM's push for OSS has a good bit to do with it.
My wireless card for my laptops? Netgear. Why? They offer alternative OS drivers (Red Hat, but still, a step forward and it's not hard to mod them to Slackware)
How about instead of complaining that vendors won't support Linux/Unix, we make a pact to stop buying from companies who refuses to support it? There's enough companies out there who offer products and support for *nix distros, why don't we just band together and support those who support us? Maybe if some of the other companies see a 5-10% drop in sales, they'll look into why people are buying more from other companies with OSS support.
The solution isn't in pleading with companies to help us... it's with taking our money elsewhere. They don't care about *nix, they care about their bottom lines. If we can make their OSS support directly proportionate to their bottom line, we'll be making progress.
Evil Walrus >83=
For example, I know many small/mid-size businesses that run Windows servers and have one server for each service (mail, file server, etc.). Comparable businesses with Linux or BSD solutions often merge all these onto a single server.
My only point being that # of machines (servers, at least) is not always a good metric to use.