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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
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The parent story is highly misleading in regards to the actual article.
"...who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with Windows are planned or an advantage."
That's hardly accurate. The article says he was MS-biased. It also outlines tradeoffs between Windows and Linux. It's brief, but it fairly states the differences between Windows & Linux. Those are: integration vs. flexibility; user friendly vs. expert friendly; & propriety or single architecture vs. open architecture that runs on multiple platforms.
According to the article, Don Johnson makes no more assumptions than the parent as to what is "wrong" with Windows and "better" about Linux.
So far the Microsoft anti-linux campaign has been driven by FUD. Mostly anecdotal claims to shield the real battle between Windows and Linux.
Now they seem to really believe that Windows is superior. They believe it to the point of "proving" it to the users. I'd be interested to hear the reaction from the attendees. My guess is that a few PHBs got a reality check, linux is actually better off than Microsoft claims. A gutsy move for Microsoft IMHO.
I refer to my boss as the typical PHB candidate. 5 years ago my boss boldy told me "we will never be a linux shop". Last week I got our 3rd RHEL server up in production, and he's loving the cost savings. What made him change his mind? Opinions of other IT directors were a good part of it, but Microsoft helped a little too. He realized that linux was a viable product as soon as Microsoft started their anti-linux campaign. For Microsoft to launch a campaign against another OS must mean it has the potential of market share. A free OS with market share is worth checking out in his opinion.
and it was obvious from the get-go that Microsoft was trying to make Linux look bad. Not only were the running KDE (does anyone use that?), they didn't have Emacs installed (just vi w/o the X version), and they were running it on some pretty crappy hardware; a PIII w/ 128mb of RAM, a toaster, an old shoe, and a moldy piece of toast still in the toaster (which they were calling a Linux blade solution).
/., wrote "erpCON 2005" on their white button down shirts, and had an odor that was detectable from 30 feet away, again all before lunch).
Despite M$ stacking the deck against Linux the audience was captivated by the capabilities of the system and the posibilities of FOSS. I even saw two MBAs port Linux to their iPAQs, pull some code off the Internet, teach themselves C and perl, and write a complete ERP system for their business (which they are submitting to SourceForge soon) all before lunch (as an aside, in that same time they grew beards, joined
Amazing how Microsoft's attempts to undermine the community were undermined by the community.
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.
1) Johnson seems to feel that one must know the command line to use Linux....
My parents have used Linux since Red Hat 6.2 (what, 7 years now?) and have been quite happy with it.
They don't have to know how the command line works. If that is necessary, I will walk them through it (haven't had to in years) but I do the same for WIndows customers so that doesn't matter.
Of course if you want to run a web server, you might want to know the basics of the OS you are working on and be willing to learn the command line, but that is another matter...
2) Integration of user experience: Both KDE and GNOME offer this sort of integration to a large degree. Larger OSS projects like OpenOffice also offer such integration within themselves.
3) The flexibility of Linux does NOT just come from the ability to tweek and recompile the software. Instead it is the fact that you have a lot of pieces that do things well and can easily strung together (by someone know knows the system) into more complex systems. There is no reason I could not write a Perl/GTK program that could take a large number of programs and automate them behind the scenes. For other examples, see FileRoller, SimpleCDR-Tools, and a number of other packages that can make people's lives a lot easier when it comes to Linux. But this is more of a RAD environment than a user environment.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I wonder if this is the first wave of the new ideas Daniel's got for the Microsoft crowd. (see here for the backstory)
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...
JMHO.
I run various versions of linux, and windows, on the same PC all the time. Franking, in a 5 minute demo, I think windows would win. Especially if viewed by a total newbie, or somebody who only knew windows.
Windows has a sharp, snappy, display. Plenty of eye candy. Applications launch fast. Linux is okay, but I think windows would win *that* sort of comparison.
After a few months, of going back and forth between both systems; I think a lot of people would chose Linux. With Linux you don't get the software rot, or the adware/spyware/viruses. Also, once you learn a little bit about how to use linux, it's more powerful and flexible. And with Linux, you don't have msft on your back.
Again, all totally based on my guess.
Microsoft should get in bed with Linux and go to work. They keep trying to play with it. Microsoft could clean up if they had a Microsoft desktop environment or something similar. They did it with the Mac? With Office, why not write software for Linux?
They are acting like a bunch of babies, "We are Microsoft, we are better, so we won't worry about Linux.". What a bunch silliness. Same thing happened when they didn't take Java seriously. What JVM does Microsoft support, version 1.1? A 10 year-old could write an update to date virtual machine. Microsoft, get a clue.
---- Berlin Brown http://www.newspiritcompany.
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
When I teach free computing courses to the community, I often teach that a lot of the frustrations that many of us have with computers are a result of trying to make them user friendly. This is because the original idea of a user friendly computer was that the user should be completely abstracted from the operation of the software (think Mac OS 8). So we are left with an opaque "magic box" and when it breaks we feel helpless because the error messages aren't helpful.* Furthermore, not only did Microsoft completely screw up this concept and impliment it badly but nobody bothered to actually tell the developers that error messages like "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" don't help users feel empowered about their computers.
When I worked at MS (PSS), you would be surprised how many people calling tech support mentioned that their first reaction on reading this error message was that the police had been notified. Fortunately with ME and XP the inappropriate tone of the error was finally fixed.
Then comes the fact that many versions of Windows allow you to go ahead and destroy your system because there is no concept of permissions (Win 9x) and so users have become quite resonably afraid of destroying their system and losing their work.
Say what you will about Linux and userfriendliness. However, I have found that novices are quite easily able to feel comfortable quickly on Linux. Intermediate users take a little longer. And there have never been any of these alarmist error messages that bring to mind swat teams coming to one's door... I guess the most alarmist error message one can see in Linux is a "Kernel Panic" but for people who spend their lives in X, they never see the text of the error message.
Linux provides a more comfortable environment for learning how to use the computer for many users. I can't tell you how many of my customers are now using it for this reason. My cusotmers know that they can accidently delete their work, but they can't crash their system unless they are logged in as root. So they tend to be more adventurous about learning new things.
* Compare with a transparent system like Linux where often the error messages are very descriptive, but the user doesn't have to know what they mean. But when you call support, it is usually *extremely easy* to pinpoint the cause. For example error messages like "Error in line 156 of httpd.conf: tomcat.so Is this really a valid dynmaically shared object?"
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It was run by Don Johnson (not the actor), who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with
Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks.
I think we would be better served by a drop down menu with choices about deleting the last character, word, sentence, paragraph, etc. Perhaps this could be a new feature developed for Longhorn and backported to XP.
Oh, don't forget lots of "Are you sure?" boxes to click on.
Sorry for the rant, I've spent the last 8 hours supporting crappy MS programs for stupid people.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
While I know that tools like Webmin exists, and are very capable, an average person will expect something integrated into KDE.
I always thought it might be a good idea to create some form of text -> dialog parser, with basic structure data in the configuration file. Something kinda like doxygen except with support for some basic elements like checkboxes, radiobuttons, drop-downs, spinboxes and the like, as well as grouping elements like tabs, groupboxes etc.
#[Download]
#T: Foo means it will do foo, bar means it will do bar.
#C: With foo
foo = 0
#C: With bar
bar = 0
And then you'd get a dialog with a "Download" box, with text "Foo means it will do foo, bar means it will do bar." and two checkboxes "With foo" and "With bar". As they are checked/unchecked the text file is updated.
If you're editing directly in the text files, simply don't touch that. If you're editing in the dialog mode, you can't touch that. That could hopefully become a standard, using either a GUI or TUI (text UI, for SSH and the like). That way noone would really need to see the junk.
That way, you could also dress it up natively any way you want it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Introduction to Christianity" courses by Osama Bin Laden.
since 90% of what Windows has on Linux happens before the two are fully configured. What Microsoft brings to the table is an OS that can be admined by $12 dollar/hr employees instead of $50 dollar/hr ones. With hardware so cheap (and with value added upgrade cycles so short) this makes perfect sense.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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