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What Will Happen in IT in 2007?
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Paul Murphy has set out his IT predictions for 2007. Featured among the completely predictable, OpenSolaris overtaking Linux is apparently inevitable within one year. From the article: 'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop? Other 'inevitables' include Microsoft's success with Vista, the continuing phase-out of Itanium, and the Cell processor powering most of the world's super-computers."
every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Does that mean that he wants Linus to get hit by a bus? Cause that's what I'm reading!
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
And you can restore it!!!!!
BWWAAAA!
2. ???
3. Profit!
Ex MacOSX guys won't fuel Vista - Dell, HP, et al will. People won't even know that there's any alternative, that's why Microsoft will be making their billions. Bullshit that OpenSolaris will overtake Linux anytime soon, let alone within the next year. The open source zealots will never go for it, and a lot of people have too much invested in Linux. And how will the Cell processor totally dominate the next top computing list when it's not even worth a mention in the current top computing list?
He then goes on to reiterate much of what's been said every year but never come true, that is the parts that actually made sense. I'm surprised that he didn't say "2007 is the year for the Open Solaris desktop".
What a waste of time.
Seriously? Yes, seriously.
>>Vista will make billions for Microsoft - driven by the warm embrace of those who hated the MacOS X interface when Microsoft didn't sell it;
It isn't about the interface; it's the apps. And it'll make billions because of OEMs. Likely MS will report every sale to an OEM as a full-price sale.
>>Itanium will continue on life support while Compaq, operating as HP, negotiates a way out with Intel;
Itanium will go on as long as corporate HQs demand Intel procs for their servers.
>>By the end of the year, the super computer listings will be entirely dominated by products built using IBM's cell processor -and the business applications performance benchmarks will be equally dominated by Sun's second generation CMT/SMP technologies.
I don't know enough about Cell to make a comment here. However, X86 has lost the MIPS war many times. It always remains dominant. Until someone comes up with a CPU virtualization system (Transmeta, where are you?), X86 will remain king.
>>By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Again, Sun is a name corporate trusts. If they have a virtualization layer for Office and a really good management system, they'll be welcomed with open arms. But I doubt it'll happen soon.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
"What Paul Murphy, resident ZDNet Sun Fanboy, hopes will happen in IT 2007"
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Have you ever used OS X or Linux?
"'By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.' Is 2007 the year of the OpenSolaris desktop?"
I could replace the word OpenSolaris with Linux. Or Mac OS X. Or BeOS. Or Amiga.
Face it, Windows is the defacto standard and will be for many, many years. Until businesses change (from running Windows) every other operating system ever created will be second fiddle to the Microsoft monopoly. You know what? Who cares? Do you think Porsche executives stay up late at night thinking "Jesus Christ, Ford has really got us by the balls. How the fuck are we going to compete againt the new Escort?"
I don't care about Microsoft and what they're doing. If it wasn't for their stranglehold on the computing industry, they'd be 10 years behind the technological curve. Natch. They ARE 10 years behind the curve. They just (currently) have the money right NOW to stay relevant.
It'll change. Maybe not now, but soon.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
my predictions apple will buy google and the us army, and turn all into iPeople.
#11: The PS3 will remain in very short supply, and not come down in price anytime soon.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What I don't get is that Microsoft made Exchange clients for DOS, Win31, and Mac (There was even a rare Outlook 97 for Windows 3.1!) Why hasn't any of that been successfully reverse engineered and cloned?
Hmmm, I have been using Linux desktop since Sep 2004.
At this time my work machine, home machine, my kids' desktop and school notebooks are all Linux (pclinuxos 0.92)
I assume you don't use Linux as your desktop, have not even tried one in the last couple years, hence the total crap comment.
The reality is, Linux desktop is as functional and user friendly as the Windows desktop for most mainstream applications.
As an added bonus, you're virtually immune to virus, adware, data corruption, system hangs, etc.
You also have realtime access to many high quality applications.
And should you need to run the occasional Windows apps - wine works for many of them.
Everyone knows that there won't be any IT by the end of 2007, between Global Warming, Nuclear Winter, and the end of culture in America.
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community -and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure
Yeah, because Sun's "organizational structures" for open source projects have been such huge successes, right?
the core provisions in the community development license
Oh, Sun loves software licenses that lets big companies like them take advantage of open source developers to improve their proprietary products; they have stated as such publicly. Fortunately, the direction that open source licenses are going is the opposite.
and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.
My prediction: OpenSolaris is going to be a dud.
Somebody find this guy a cluestick and beat him with it.
How many trite phrases can you fit in one blog post? "structural convergence" "Web 2" "SOA" "Googlemania" "YouTube"
OK, Here's my set of predictions.
Don't like my list? You do better.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
DRM does not really matter to corporate. You shouldn't be watching movies or listening to music at work anyway. It's probably a selling point.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
An anonymous reader writes
ZDNet's Paul Murphy
Anybody else have the feeling that the submitter is actually Paul Murphy?
Seems like Zonk has broken into the New Years champagne a bit early, and the standard for front-page stories went from infinitesimal to nil.
... we can counter global warming with nuclear winter!
...... oh wait ....
Yay, the planet is saved
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Which apps specifically are you referring to that will not run in either OS X or Linux?
;)
The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.
In OS X you can run parallels but 99% of the Windows apps I use are available for OS X (for example, Office, Photoshop, Flash Studio, Quickbooks, Firefox, etc). Linux is a different story. That being said I have great luck running wine with photoshop and quickbooks. I've never tried flash but it's not needed. Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for MS Office. I don't use the extra 95% of tools available in those products anyway.
I like windows actually. I however love OS X. Linux is great as well. I cut my teeth using Linux in '95 while in college trying to get on doing Oracle DB development on HP-UX. I needed to be able to get around the shell and learn csh. Programming dot clocks to get your "new" video card to start X windows was an interesting learning experience. I'm forever amazed at the new distributions. Ubuntu (sp?), Fedora, etc. Ah the good old days of Slackware disk packages downloaded over ftp at the local Uni!
Tru64, Solaris (SunOS), hell even DR/MS-DOS in the days. Oh yeah Integer Basic on Apple ][ was great! Mac OS was pretty nice too, I was a bit sad to see OS 9 die. My first Mac with OS 9 & X dual boot made me see why so many people were into pre-OS X. 10.0 & 10.1 sucked IMO. However, 10.2 made my system exponentially faster, 10.3 sped it up even more, 10.4 was not such a drastic improvement, leading me to believe the OS is more mature now. I'd like to see that from an OS from Redmond. Windows gets massively larger per OS update. Granted Linux has as well. It however, includes almost 100% of what you need for an operational system. Windows just includes notepad
Ciao
XML still won't get the respect it deserves. One mass ritualistic suicide/orgy later in the googleplex, all google secrets are willed into the public domain thereby creating the biggest sexual open source squirt in history. In the year 2000.
Specifically Nevada build 54 and Nexenta alpha 5. They have some interesting technologies (specificaly ZFS, which is interesting, and Zones, which is a bit lower overhead than virtualization, but not as flexible (everything still goes through the Solaris kernel)). Nexenta I honestly thought was a cool concept, and executed quite well, Debian package management and GNU software that is clearly better than some of the Sun basic utilities (and much less Java inclined...), offering the benefits that Solaris does have to offer...
Anyway, from my working with it, I know the OpenSolaris is certainly full of themselves, and some denial, but I don't think they can live up to their own expectations. For example, any complaint or bug frequently got met with 'at least you aren't running linux!'. They trashed on lack of documentation in linux while I struggled to find some documentation on their stuff that seemed unwritten. They'd pick up a decade-old howto and say 'this is how linux requires you do it, versus our not-yet released way, see how crappy linux is'. When people talked about how woefully (understandably) incomplete their ACPI and suspend support was, they pointed at linux and said 'linux acpi support hardly works at all, so don't expect too much' despite the reality of 3 out of 3 generic motherboards I've tried worked splendidly with linux acpi. My laptop despite being one of their officially tested still doesn't have clock modulation and their acpi parser barfs on the DSDT that nothing else (not even intel's compiler) even warns on. People discussing panics/hangs are met with 'at least it doesn't crash as much as linux', despite evidence to the contrary. They are used to a closed, proprietary world of a select set of hardware and the open world if they make any headway in is going to give them quite the wake up call. They talk about how much better their driver support is, despite the glaring lack of drivers. Largely their efforts in expanding that involve porting drivers from the BSD projects.
Anyway, their current implementation does admittedly seem adequate for most server type activities if the hardware is supported. I could see a lot of hardware vendors happy about a system with a stable binary interface for drivers that doesn't require rebuilds for every uname -r, but hardware vendors face the market realities and put up with the pain if they want to play in the server space. I understand the hassle, but linux making a PITA for hardware vendors have given us a lot more driver source than we could have hoped for. For the market, probably the single best card they have is ZFS. They have done a good job of consolidating volume management, software raid, filesystem, stuff like snapshots, and paranoia of checksumming everywhere into a single implementation. In doing so they have done things more efficiently (such as RAID format on disk leveraging filesystem layer knowledge for better performance), and trustworthy (a controller failing to report data corruption is detected at a higher level). ZFS is impressive, and that was/is the one thing that makes me really want the rest of the platform to be usable for me day to day.
DTrace is much hyped, and very useful in the hands of good developers and good administrators, but I don't see administrators at large making use of it enough to deliver on the hopes Sun sets up for it.
Zoning is a nice logical extension from simple chrooting which is more comprehensive, and more efficient than the other extreme of virtualization, theoretically. However, with virtualization being ubiquitous and most of the market accepting the ever-reducing overhead for the flexibility, I don't know if Zones are going to excite anyone that much. The BrandZ extension of the metaphor gives it some flexibility, but again their Linux profile still doesn't run linux things just right, and a linux vm with the linux kernel already will do so today.
So you have a platform that probably won't need to be as successful as linux had to be in order for hardware ve
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I agree that corporations don't care about DRM, and about movies, but what kind of draconian place doesn't allow music? I bet their employee's efficiency sucks.
I honestly don't really care which flavour of unix is running my KDE desktop, so long as it's stable and runs my hardware and software. OpenSolaris would have to be somehow massively better than Linux for it to justify replacing my existing installs - which is necessary for it to be dominant within a year. I've heard it has advantages in some areas, but I'm not really interested in stuff like dtrace or ZFS. Does it come with a free candy bar or something?
He probably meant developer community, but if anything, I'd have thought that implementing the cool Solaris stuff in Linux would get those boys more excited than the thought of jumping ship.
As a solaris guy from way back I say.... not!
Solaris is great, but if you want a FREE unix BSD is your ticket. Hell I even run it on some older Sparc 5 boxes in the basement... Faster and easier than solaris because of it being 100% open.
As for everything else.... nope... IT in 2007 will look 100% like IT in 2006. XP on the desktop in every competent Corperation, not much changes anywhere else.
Change = expense.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
DRM _will_ start to matter to corporate the first time a software vendor shuts down a mission-critical business application due to some sort of misunderstanding over payment terms.
So Vista will make billions? Really? With all of their OEM arrangements, this is a foregone conclusion. How is this a "prediction?"
As for OpenSolaris and Linux? Uh... OK.
Most people don't care as much about open source as they do about getting work done in the short term.
I understand ZFS will ship with MacOSX Leopard. MacOSX market share will be bigger than OpenSolaris in 2007.
XFS is interesting, but if you want to criticize can be ignored, ReiserFS is a fair thing to complain about, but I tend to ignore that. Now a fair comparison would not be ext3 to ZFS, but ext3 to UFS. UFS and ext3 both prove ten year old concepts aren't necessarily bad things.
OpenSolaris has Zones/BrandZ, ZFS, and DTrace which are interesting, though I think Zones/BrandZ and DTrace are sufficiently compelling to convert, and ZFS is certainly appealing, but admittedly harder and less efficient methodologies can be done so that ZFS isn't an absolute must-have (i.e. block-level approaches to snapshotting and software raid, hardlinks/rsync for snapshotting, volume managers that understand how to grow filesystems). ZFS does have high-layer checksumming even above doing all those things better than anyone else on the market today, but a good storage vendor is so paranoid at the lower levels that the check becomes redundant.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Meanwhile, the best Linux has to offer are filesystems borrowed from others (XFS), grossly unreliable (ReiserFS), or based off ten year old filesystem concepts/technology (ext3.) Dude, throw your PC out the window, it's based on 10-year-old technology!
not to mention it's 3 times faster on some workloads, and at least 60% faster on others (mysql), all the while being more reliable and less full of security holes ("hello race condition, nice to meet you")
Linux is the Windows of UNIX... about time we all just jump off that crap kernel
The only hiccup I've run into running Linux or OS X (on non-mac hardware no less) is getting wifi working. A few internet searches later (other computer obviously) and voilà, they work.
Yah, because you can't download a driver for an ethernet adaptor without its drivers. Otherwise, we're resorted to floppies, CDs, USB fobs, or some combinations of each!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Linux has no good filesystems. You are stuck trying to pick which pig has the nicest lipstick on. And the two nicest made up pigs are both from corporations giving up their unixes and opening their filesystems up. If not for IBM and SGI, linux still would have no usable filesystems at all.
And linux has nothing that in any way comes anywhere even close to dtrace. I know its pretty standard for gnubies to not know anything besides linux, and speak of linux's greatness out of ignorance, but go read up on dtrace before spewing bullshit.
Everything about linux is a half dozen not quite good enough "solutions" that are miles behind solaris's offerings. From filesystems to virtualization, from threads to system administration tools, solaris blows linux away on every front.
You are right about one thing though. Linux will go its own way all right. As always, failing to learn anything from the vastly superior operating systems it pathetically fails to copy.
Internal clocks will freeze! Database servers will become unusable! Power grids will grind to a halt! Time as we know it will cease!!
...what? Oh, that's 2037. Never mind, carry on.
Yeah, I can show you at least 10 other benchmarks (including SPEC ones) where Linux is 10 times faster than Solaris. Go look at Sun's bug database for Solaris - there exist 100s of bugs where Linux is said to be faster and they are unfixed since circa 1999.
I'd like to see a demonstration of this technology that's ten years in the future. All the OS's he mentioned are nice, but they didn't represent a technological level ten years in the future.
Try using email instead of the strangeness that is MS Exchange. I'm possibly biased becuase my experiences with MS Exchange were unpleasant and ridiculously time consuming and it was entirely unsuited to 24 hour operation in a small site with only one mail server (you have to shut it down to back up the mail!). A bare metal restore drill showed just how flakey and fragile the whole thing used to be and possibly still is. The sendmail config files are horrible but they look good next to weird registry hacks to get MS Exchange to do what it is told.
I've seen installs of Windows that lacked the Ethernet drivers for the onboard Ethernet...as well as half the other stuff on the mobo...
I can't believe I clicked it.
AJAX rocks. It won't cure cancer, though.
Java probably will take off some in noughtseven.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Outlook not so good.
I've seen installs of Windows that lacked the Ethernet drivers for the onboard Ethernet...as well as half the other stuff on the mobo...
That's why the NIC/video/sound/whatever-card manufacturers include a disc with the drivers. It's hardly fair to expect MS to have drivers on a Windows install disc for a new gigabit NIC released after the OS.
Trolling is a art,
2. A Windows security hole will be discovered.
3. Internet use will increase.
4. Zune will not overtake the iPod.
5. The prices of hard drives and DRAM will continue to fall.
6. The circulation of print newspapers will continue to decline.
7. Interest groups will raise a stink over violence in video games.
8. A major technology company will introduce a new form of DRM...which will fail miserably.
9. The next version of Mac OS X will be visually and technically superior to Windows Vista.
10. Duke Nukem Forever will not be released.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but trust me. I'm a science fiction writer. I can see the future!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Two of Paul's more interesting predictions were placed on Who's Wrong.
Interesting site for viewing predictions from folks.
But the idea that OS is going to "overtake" linux any time soon is batshit insane.
Crackpot.
/. within last month. I just felt obliged to comment.
1) Billions off vista? Yeah, right. Public beta is expected to start at the end of January, turnaround to the market isn't THAT fast (remember NT4 SP3? Remember W2000 SP4? Remember Windows XP SP1?)
2) Itanium?
3) Except for the fact that SUPERcomputers are not specced, ordered and build overnight, more like 18-24 month timeframe for rollout and then some for full capacity if we are talking about serious ones. Also CELL is not the answer, ask Cray.
4) Assuming that ___OPEN!!! IT'S OPEN NOW___ Solaris actually manages to get any exposure at all this is absolutely unlikely to happen in an envorement that is supercharged with egos and religious evangelists/fanatics that spend their lives defending their indentation style or plan source control system migration for 18 months ahead.
Of course we could be had - last three paragraphs hives off a hint that this could be a very ultrasubtle attempt at humor. In a failed way of sense.
In short - most stupid article seen on
he's saying vista basically is the same as the max osx interface, and the people who will get vista are morons because they hated it until MS decided to copy it.
But the other predictions, ya worthless.
Huh. We run Exchange 2003 for about 40 or so users on a single server. I've had to restore the mail store from backup once due to a hardware failure - nothing was lost and it was a fairly painless procedure. Also, online backups are a pretty easy task as well. Actually, the whole system runs rather smoothly for us with minimal administration.
Obviously, we have a pretty basic setup, but it sounds like you do too. Too bad you had a bad experience with Exchange in the past because I've found it to be pretty easy to use.
Ugh. A couple of other predictions for 2007:
/. unabated.
1. Entertainment writers will spend the last week of 2007 wracking their brains for meaningless, top-ten-list, fluff pieces in order to receive their next paychecks.
2. The apparent MS astroturfing campaign will continue on
3. Apologists for the upcoming Vista horrorshow will continue to denounce MS critics as zealots.
4. A new branch of mathematics (VERIZONMATH) will dominate industry calculations, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
5. Richard Stallman will learn to levitate, leading to much hijinx, and ultimately, total economic collapse.
Ehhhh...my onboard Intel Pro 10/100 (e100 on Linux, for many years) doesn't work without Dell's drivers on XP SP2. I think it finally works on Vista, some four years and a major OS version after the PC was made. On a newer computer, the XP installer doesn't work if I run my SATA drives in AHCI mode (surprise, runs fine on recent Linux kernels). If you look at default compatibility with modern hardware, Linux is way ahead of Windows. Linux fails on a tiny subset of just-released hardware that require their own drivers, and hardware where the vendor has threatened legal action (ie: Broadcom wireless adapters, until recently).
LOAD "SIG",8,1
By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognized as larger and more active than the Linux community.
To quote Lewis Black: "where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional." The Linux community, I'm sorry to inform him, is much larger and more active than he apparently understands. That's because it encompasses tens of thousands of products and technologies well beyond the server and desktop markets, which aren't even the biggest market so far as Linux usage is concerned.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have a Macbook, use Ubuntu on and off :)
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
It isn't Outlook that needs to be beat, it is Exchange. The client is the easy part (relatively speaking).
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Sun is going to have an impact on anything? Huh? Sun is imploding. Anybody want to buy their Fremont campus? It's empty.
What else is he expecting, a comeback of SGI?
"Microsoft gets away with being mediocre because they target the hordes of similarly mediocre individuals who make up the human population."
And yet you don't have a problem with taking a paycheck from any of those "mediocre" people, Mr "I'm better than everyone else".
This ZDNet guy is an idiot in search of an audience. Move along, there's nothing to see here other than some pathetic dude trying to keep his ad-clicks up.
I didn't have to read more than OpenSolaris. Overtaking Linux? Yeah right. Even if it does happen it sure has heck won't be in 12 months time.
No one familiar with Exchange needs a registry hack. Nobody.
But, your comments make my point for me, thanks.
They're numbers we assign to years, a measure of time. For more info on this little-known phenomenom see Wikipedia's Year entry.
Software patents delenda est.
Well, I've already replied to one of your posts tonight--why not make a pair?
"OpenSolaris hasn't been big enough to experience fragmentation yet, so you can't judge how well OpenSolaris will hold up at scale of development community..."
This is entirely accurate. However, I'm inclined to believe that fragmentation will be less of a factor for OpenSolaris, due to the fact that it ultimately feeds back into a single definitive snapshot. Solaris will always be the watermark for OpenSolaris, so as new projects get brought in, they'll be (1) incorporated into Solaris and become part of the canon, (2) left out, and gradually fade away, or (3) be important enough to cause a fork. The key is that option (1) doesn't exist per se for Linux, so option (3) gets invoked far more often in that realm. There will be some fragmentation, yes, but OpenSolaris is constantly being refreshed from Solaris (and also feeding back into it), so the potential for fragmentation, in my opinion, is far less.
Of course, it's early. We'll find out in two years if I'm right.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Paul Murphy has no idea what is is talking about.
/MOD article +1 Flamebait
Ever tried reverse engineering the MAPI "protocol"? It's all serialized COM objects being shunted across the network. The client and the server are tied, making any attempts at reverese engineering an exercise in feature-chasing frustration.
There are still plenty of businesses that use alternative servers like Lotus Notes. (Though only God knows why.) That should tell the market that an alternative communications stack should be viable in the corporate market. All you need is an email server and client with features that are competitive with Outlook/Exchange, and an operating system that doesn't automatically sell the customer on using a "unified software provider" for all their OS, Email, and Office needs.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
A sony I worked on. Came with no cd, no drivers, and windows didn't work with the onboard ethernet, sound, or display beyond vga. Fun.
All of these next year IT prevision lists make me wonder, if we magically went back to one year ago and tried making a list of IT predictions for 2006, what would be in this list? Because I've been thinking about it and although I must have went through 80% at least of all Slashdot summaries in 2006 I can't think of anything but the Gootube merge and the Reiser story (but that one can't be put in a prediction list since it was obviously unpredictable)
Anyone?
You just got troll'd!
Microsoft software has improved recently so I can only comment on what I used - MS Exchange less than five years ago certainly was time consuming enough that I and several others had to come in and help on occasion in a situation with only three servers and about 250 clients - what should be a very light load on each server in each loaction. People do not use MS Outlook in my current workplace so there is no conceivable use for MS Exchange - we're only using email and no calender stuff.
I'm really trying to visualize a scenario that this would happen. Care to enlighten us?
Sure contrary examples exist (ie.: I had a 10 Mbit USB ethernet box which OpenBSD worked with just fine but Windows needed an external driver for) What I was referring to were new devices working with older OSs.
Trolling is a art,
As a comparison, would it matter if an Electiricity supplier shuts down mains power due to some misunderstanding over payment terms?
Years come with 365 days in them now? You crazy kids, back in my day we were lucky just to have a year, empty or not!
Nasty and showing ignorance of earlier releases to pretend it didn't happen! I should add that it was Exchange 5.0 and 5.5 - you did have to do such things, especially to get it to work with the required third party packages to make it functional like antivirus and other useful stuff like fax to email.
It is said to be better now but I'm still not convinced that it is enterprise software from what I have read and there is absolutely no reason to use it in my current environment so I'll remeain rusty on MS Exchange. I should have been more clear and should have remembered that some of the MS Exchange admins of today never had to touch NT4 and Exchange 5.5. Please go easy on the old folks that saw there was a better way before touching such stuff before dismissing real complaints out of hand. The problem of having to stop the services before doing a backup for the entire time it was dumping to tape was real and in my opinion made it toy software only a few years ago.
A registry hack was required just to put a disclaimer on outgoing emails - all of that sort of stuff is in the MS white papers.
BTW, internal mail is ok with anything stable, but for edge mail you'll need something fast for your Bayes and RBLs.
By a "small bit of performance" I'm sure you meant "some reasonable performance", and yes, the defining parameter for a successful IT solution is that it works. Unless your server has some headroom above its load, it will accrue undone work until it fails. It does not matter how well a solution does half the job.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Methinks you completely miss the idea of why Exchange is so popular. If all it did was email then it would never have become a dominant player. It is precisely because it offers a unified provider that it has become popular. The server integrates tightly with voice communications as well as forms of instant messaging. In addition to this there is the identity management integration, teleconferencing, remote assistance, the list really goes on and on.
The desktop OS created Microsoft but all the services provided under one roof are what solidified it in the corporate world. In large organizations they like to exercise strict control and if something goes wrong they want a single person to go to fix the problem.
Most everyone in the world realizes the shortsightedness of this philosophy but it is indeed the reality. The only way to compete with Microsoft is to first become compatible, then expand your feature-set beyond what Microsoft can provide. It is a steep challenge to say the least despite problems with the software that MS produces it is mostly functional otherwise it would never have been accepted. Convergence is the future, it is why SIP is the dominant protocol and why TCP/IP overtook IPX/SPX. The medium that can do the most will win despite IPX/SPX being superior TCP/IP still won so keep that in mind. Of course Novell can squander pretty much anything so that might not be the best example.
From what I've seen of Lotus Notes it's a huge pain in the ass and doesn't even come close to offering the same features as Exchange. Much like DB/2 against SQL 2005 or Oracle.
I think in short a small tools philosophy has proven to work well but it goes against how we think in the real world. We don't setup millions of tiny warehouses for everything we need to store, we setup large facilities where all the resources can be centralized, managed, and monitored. We're like ants that way. It's risky and causes problems; a single bomb and we're screwed.
With that said maybe this year we can devote to changing the way people think about their tools. My leatherman sure it handy with all the tools it has in it but sometimes you just need a proper screw driver to get the job done. Perhaps there is a place for both, granted I use my leatherman for 90% of the tasks I perform that require a tool.
AND Wine keeps improving. I had to do a couple of save hacks to take some PS1 saves from my PS1 memory card on my PS2 (via uLaunchElf) to my PC and then to my PSP, and to my pleasant suprise every Windows app I needed to do this worked perfectly in Wine. I'm aware that some of the more complex apps still don't work, but command line and simple gui programs work great.
that depends on how crappy your employer is
Hi there
action (ie: Broadcom
"e.g.,".
Perhaps it's good now - but is it really a shining example of something to emulate as hinted at above. I doubted it and wrote as such.
We'll know when Intel has got it when they realize the infinite possible permutations of special purpose cores on one chip means a great deal of marketing advantage.
Of course that solution includes a great deal more compiler complexity than even massively parallel GPGPUs. It is unfortunate that HPC is going to have this shakeout in programmers who know what they're doing, vs template geeks. Unfortunate for the template geeks, that is. Real programmers code with the tools at hand and solve the problems they have.
GPGPU owns the HPC high ground for 2007. Let's see if Intel can repurpose some of those 80 cores they showed off to do video encoding, random number generation and massively parallel floating point before we call the race in 2010. Oh, and of course to be relevant the compiler has to be GCC. No serious scientist would use a closed source compiler.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I meant to say "I don't think Zones/BrandZ and DTrace are sufficiently compelling to convert".
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You're missing the point of what DRM in Vista is for.
It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.
The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to play the new disks on any OS.
The DRM is there to let you play content, albeit with draconian restrictions, which you would not be able to play at all if the OS didn't support it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Did you sign an EULA with your electrical company?
BURN THE HERETIC!
You have got to be kidding. You're one of those blind "Linux-for-life" types. Try giving a Linux disk to my grandmother and see how "user friendly" she thinks it is. Multiply this times the number of average computer users in America.
And if any of those "mainstream applications" happen to be games, then you can forget Linux altogether.
Create an image of the system with the drivers preloaded. Or slipstream them into the install CD. This isn't hard.
I'm no MS fanboy but your argumentation is absurd.
"Try giving a Linux disk to my grandmother and see how "user friendly" she thinks it is."
Not to refer to your grandmother in particular, but this has already been done - and it worked fine for quite a few older people.
Thank you for playing.
Score: 0
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Apparently, Sun's corporate PR drones are in full swing moderating things down they don't like again.
As have I.
Nevertheless, these may be the most long-shot predictions I've seen yet. Servers/Users embracing Vista? Not likely. Open-Solaris being kick-ass? Hmm. Never tried it, but I gotta admit that the different *nix flavors are like that - ice cream with nuance.Don't matter to me 'cept that NetBSD is the hardest initial lockdown.
Everyone should have to be subjected to 'Babes in Toyland' at least once. How else do you learn?
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
ximian did that with its evolution-connector. It uses the OWA "interface", just like Microsoft Entourage on OS X.
Could happen, if Solaris was already massively better than Linux. I don't think that will happen.
/proc was ripped off wholesale from Plan 9. If ZFS is ultimately such a great idea, most of its advantages will be absorbed into Linux, so eventually you'll have OpenSolaris, which implements ZFS perfectly and may have slightly better-looking code, and Linux, which does almost everything you need from ZFS, but also has binary blobs from nVidia and ATI, can run in usermode, has suspend to disk, runs on an iPod, and does many other things that Solaris will still be catching up with.
The simple reason is: Worse is better.
Why do you think absolutely everyone on Linux was using Mozilla? It was the main Gecko program, and your other options kind of sucked. Mozilla got the job done, and everyone was developing for it -- you were guaranteed to have new and interesting stuff (Flash, Java, RSS, tabbed browsing, etc) on Mozilla, either before it was anywhere else, or within a month of it being implemented elsewhere.
Of course, some things never made it into Mozilla -- for instance, Amaya is both a web browser and a WYSIWYG editor, and you can jump into any webpage and edit, and save the new version somewhere -- there may even be a mechanism for re-uploading it. But there must not be that much demand for such features -- after all, most of us either use Notepad (or vim), or we use some nicely-done AJAX WYSIWYG.
You could point to Firefox, but remember: Firefox was originally named "Pheonix", because it rose from the ashes of Mozilla. Had Firefox been written from scratch, it would never have gotten where it is today -- old Mozilla bugs and all.
That is what will happen with Linux and OpenSolaris.
Linux is already much, much more popular than BSD or OpenSolaris -- or, for that matter, Plan 9. So, we take the best ideas from other OSes, so long as we can reasonably implement them, and we also toy with new things of our own. If I remember right,
The only way this picture changes is if Solaris is so ridiculously better than Linux that the few people hacking on it now are enough for it to surpass Linux -- keep in mind, there will be plenty more people hacking on Linux at the same time. This has happened in the past, on a smaller scale, but I just don't think Solaris is better enough -- remember, evangelizing won't work. You won't get me to hack on Solaris till it runs on my Powerbook, at least -- and you need people like me to make it run on that Powerbook. You need it to already be almost as good as Linux, if not significantly better -- and not just in a few areas I don't care about -- in order to get me to hack on it.
If you really want to replace Linux, come up with something that's both better enough that it takes half the time to write it in FooOS than in Linux, and can run a Linux kernel alongside it (do something tricky with UML, or something like what Apple did with Mach/Darwin), so that I can load up my nVidia driver and play Quake 4, and still hack around with something cool like, say, a new cluster filesystem. You have to do it right, though -- I should be able to load my Linux kernel, nVidia driver, and Quake4 binary (and maps) from my own FooOS cluster filesystem.
If you can do that, and provide compelling enough development tools to sway the Linux kernel devs, then we might actually lose the Linux kernel -- slowly -- and replace it with something better. Unless you can do that, Linux will remain the best we've got, now and forever.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm sorry, but the reality is that Linux pales in comparison to Windows with regards to user friendliness. How is using Wine simpler than just using windows? Why bother emulating it when it comes standard on most pre-built systems that the majority of computer illiterate will be purchasing? Its pointless for those kinds of people. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see ANY OS properly compete with Windows, but I don't see it happening. What will the computer illiterates do with their computer? I'm willing to bet its gaming, word processing (possibly some other apps that come in Office), surfing and chatting, and playing media. Yeah its wonderful that Linux is a very secure OS, but its too bad it doesnt play any games. Games for Windows, no matter how much I despise it, will bring make it even more simple for those who want to game on a PC but have trouble setting up in the current PC gaming world. Windows is on top and it is folly to think its up top without a reason.
My grandmother is ~80 years old and uses Debian stable. It fits her needs - or better - she fits the computer's needs.
She needs her PC for
In a way my granny is a lot more platform-independent than I am. She doesn't care if it's called C: or
About a year with Windows XP led to a bigger amount of "family support cases", now it's the second year with Debian and it just runs - but ok, she doesn't have to dist-upgrade on her own, just the updates. But she wouldn't install a new version of Windows on her own either.
But you'll never know if your granny likes it until she tries it for herself.
There is nothing innovative about theft. MS like so many other companies steal and then try to re-write history.
You know stuff about HPC. That's cool.
I've been reading some of your older posts. You seem like a smart guy. Even about non-tech stuff like http://www.mosesmi.org/ (who could use a new webmaster, btw).
I still disagree with you about GPGPU and HPC. For HPC interconnect is king and you can't get any better than being on the same die. Yes, compiler complexity bites, and it will get worse before it gets better. Naturally the ideal is an absurdly large address space of shared memory, but the reality is that no real processor can even CRC 2^40 bits of address space in real time. The rest of it can and should be abstracted at a level above the CPU.
We're programming down to the bare metal right now because that's how you get the answers in something close to real time with the available equipment. From an analyst point of view some of this stuff (granularity, interconnects, task sequencing) can and should be done by the OS or the compiler, and that's how it's going to work out in the long run.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, you didn't "sign" an EULA.
You signed a contract - something that has a hell of a lot more weight than an EULA.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Uh... Yeah. I don't know about where you live but I had to put down a deposit and sign a contract to get power anywhere I have lived.
I find your thoughts intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I like how the comparison in the Asterisk test was between CentOS 3 (kernel 2.4 based) and Solaris 10. A fairer comparison would've been CentOS 3 vs. Solaris 9 or CentOS 4 vs. Solaris 10.
Clearly you've never worked in a corporate IT environment.
If your job involves writing various flavors of text files, I'm sure you have no problem at all using Linux. However, if you're in a regulated industry (like healthcare) or an industry with standard programs (like AutoCAD or Photoshop) you are locked in to Windows because it a tremendous waste of money to move away from or redevelop applications your users need to do their work.
"I can get AutoCAD or Photoshop running with WINE just fine!"
Good for you. Why should I switch? I'm already paying ludicrous amounts of licensing fees to a software vendor, and now you want me to run it on an unsupported platform? Why not just run it on Windows? If your sole motivation is political, you've got a poor argument. Windows requires no retraining since everybody knows how to use it if they have AutoCAD or Photoshop experience. Most people don't know Linux at all.
"Parallels are available!"
So? I either spend the money on software licensing, or I spend it retraining my new employees and hoping the parallels can meet the same needs that the Windows equivalent does. Why not buy what my employees already know and what they want, and save the hassle of a 6 month training period for every employee I get?
Vendor lock-in has already happened. There must be clear benefits to moving away from Windows, and "it's not Windows" is still a penalty, not a benefit. It throws away any prospective employee's computer skills, throws away however many millions of dollars have been spent in hardware and software for the current design, and generally throws away vendor support and likely means much of your IT department needs to be retrained or replaced. Considering the number of Windows IT professionals compared to Linux IT professionals, a decent sized company will quickly saturate the entire Linux market in an area.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I make a concerted effort to never sign a contract with a utility company. I have mostly succeeded. I had to sign one for gas once, in an apartment with gas heat.
> which Windows can't refuse to run.
It will. It is precisely that audacious.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
THANK YOU! I've been telling this to people forever... MS didn't add any DRM "features" that I know of that will prevent us from doing current things, they added DRM so we could do the things we might WANT to do in the future that hollywood and the recording industry demand DRM for.
Geez guys, MS is actually sort of on our side for this one! So is Apple! They're providing us with the tools they are allowed to provide us with, and including the restrictions they are required by law (unfortunately) to provide. You can still rip a freaking CD, or download a DiVX copy of last week's Battlestar in Vista just as easily as you can in XP.
Jeremy
I should probably clarify -- it will, in the future, if your video stream is high-def, because it will assume anything high-def is "premium" content and shut it down if it doesn't contain the appropriate protection bits. Not kidding, because there won't BE an open codec, using one will constitute "hacking", which will trigger the anti-piracy shutdown measures. Using a closed codec? Your HD content better be blessed, can't play it without a key.
Luckily, they really turned up the heat too fast. I see congressional hearings in the future about it. God help us if they make RMS speak though -- if we're lucky we'll get Moglen or Lessig doing the talking.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
In any case, comparison with a utility company is not exactly right here, it would imply renting the software - this rarely happens. A better comparison would be with a paper book that contains a chip that monitors how often you read the book, where, and how, and won't tell you what else it monitors and sends back home. And this chip can incinerate the book if it receives a radio signal from the publisher, or if it itself thinks that you are trying to copy the book. In reality you may be just reading under the sunlight. The book costs $500 (or $5,000, or more) and is essential in your business. Would you buy it? Or maybe you'd prefer a book without the chip, the one that is yours for as long as you want (since that's what was promised when you paid the money for it.) Software is very much like a book - you get use rights only, but those use rights ought to be irrevocable, unless you breach the terms of the contract and the judge (if you so choose) agrees that you are the guilty party. You can't allow a dumb machine to be your judge, jury and the executioner; you can't allow your rights to be terminated on mere suspicion of wrongdoing - and that's what the DRM is about, to deny you your rights automatically, based on arbitrary set of rules that you aren't even allowed to know.
But I am not your grandmother. Nor am I an average computer user in America. I am an above average computer user and I find the Linux desktop experience to be comfortable.
Perhaps what you're saying is that you have average computer skills. That's fine. Linux is not for you.
Linux pales in comparison to Windows with regards to user friendliness. What exactly is user friendliness? Do by UF, you mean ease of use, simplistic layout, or few options? If you mean Windows is easy and simple to use, then I believe that your argument caters to people who are ignorant and simplistic.
When something is simplistic, it has little flexibility in what it can do or be used for. simple in design and simplistic are two different things. Simple in design means that the core mechanisms of something are simple, but the mechanisms combined, or oriented differently, can yield high flexibility.
Simplistic means that the overall configurability of something is limited or narrow. So If you are talking about a computer application being simplistic, then it implies that you can't do much with that application. If you can't do much with it, then preference of a simplistic application over a complex application, (or CLI pipeing of applications), then to me, it implies that the person is simplistic or, more likely, stupid.
I don't know about you, but I don't think that Linux should be dumbed down so that idiots can use it with little or no thought, and so that they don't cry about it when productivity requires intelligence. That's like saying Getting a medical degree is too difficult for the majority of stupid people, let's lower the requirements and "make it easy"(tm) so that they can all graduate with honors. Yeah, I'm sure that we would make great strides in the advancement in the field of medicine. Let's aim for the ground so that the idiots feel secure. Or how about you try and look to the horizon, and beyond to the stars, to see the real power behind cognition. Computers are very fast at mathematics. People could expand their minds, and embrace mathematics and its applications.
Every generation in Human history has almost always looked towards the past and previous generations, and noted how society had primitive and barbaric beliefs and practices. How ignorant the people of the past were.
Compare Mideaval medical knowledge to modern medical knowledge and you can see what I mean. Or how people thought the world worked, Earth is the cetner of the universe, planets revolve around the Sun, the Earth is flat, etc.
What makes you have any reason to think that this current generation is somehow different, and that we are not subject to the same fate?
Or should we recognize this, and try to expand our thinking, and explore new ideas. Making life simplistic and easy, is inherently slowing the advancement of the Human Race. Newton, Galileo, Einstein, and others were initially not famous during their lifetimes. They were as famous as everyday people at one point in their lives. Why wait around for the next one to show up, when each of us could try to expand our thinking and our knowledge now, and release the parachute slowing Mankind from reaching the stars -- figurative stars, I know we already physically explored space =P
---FourChannel---
There's no evidence of that, and I don't think it's technically possible for them to do it. Third party players don't use the Microsoft codecs - they read data out of a file, decode it and output it with DirectX or GDI. There's no way for the OS to know that a media file is even being played.
And in terms of company culture, if you read the Old New Thing you can see that they go to great, indeed sometimes crazy, lengths to support third party applications. They believe in a ecosystem of third party applications resting on their platform. It would be a complete 180 degree turn to start deliberately preventing them from running.
And it's implausible in terms of marketing too, Microsoft are pushing Media Centre versions of Windows. These would get slaughtered if they cripple multimedia in any way.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Outlook IS good. Could be better, but IS good. :D
/G
See also mongrel version in Microsoft Office 2004 - best one yet
I know a lot of tech people working in large corporations, small corporations, in banking, retail, service industries, and I haven't heard a single one express an opinion about OpenSolaris.
There's just no buzz at all. In fact, the one guy I know in a Solaris environment tells me that they're gradually switching to RHEL.
If there's 1 prediction that I have - it's that Sun are going to continue to shrink.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If we look at the recent progress towards user friendliness such as Ubuntu, we see that Linux has actually started to progress to a state where it will be usable to the average person who is not interested in computer science or the workings of their computer. The problem that Linux suffers from, and this problem will keep it from blossoming as a major competitor to Windows is that of the code that powers the GUI. Since the majority of casual users utilize the GUI rather then CLI the first thing that the users will see is a system that reacts slowly. This is caused by several things, primarily the lack of cooperation on the part of Intel, Nvidia, Ati, and other video chipset manufacturers in helping make Linux drivers. The second major reason is that most GUI applications use GTK to power themselves and GTK has become a huge, bulky, and dirty piece of software that responds way too slowly. If GTK was re created from scratch in order to provide faster response times, X was optimized for speed, and the distributors of major flavors of Linux either adjust their license to allow for closed source drivers (which chipset manufacturers might be willing to help with) or provide powerfull, fully functional drivers, then Linux could push its way to becoming a major competitor in the desktop market.
If you have a good systems admin, then Linux/Solaris is certainly mature for the cooperate desktop.
As far as Mac OS X application offerings, have a look at OmniGroup's offerings. I believe that OmniOutliner is currently bundled with many Mac models.
Lucid Information Systems, one of the companies where I work (shameless plug) has business laptops on offer with most of the OmniGroup products and VoodooPad among many other useful tools pre-installed.
OS X is ready for the business world!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
it could be a worm, like Code-Red but this time using a 0-day vulnerability on a web-server software (e.g IIS/Apache).
I think someone can take all of the internet down by such worm.
DRM does not really matter to corporate.
You've got to be kidding. Ever heard of Intellectual Property?
We're moving to Office 2007/SharePoint because of DRM.
(Not that I think it will work like the brochure says...)
The opposite of progress is congress
2004? I have a Linux-desktop since 1994! And at work, since 1996. Alas, I happen to work as Unix-Sysadmin since 1996...
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
OS X is ready for the business world!
Does it integrate with SharePoint?
Didn't think so...
(BTW, this is why MicroSoft dropped IE for OS X.)
The opposite of progress is congress
I'm sorry, but the reality is that Linux pales in comparison to Windows with regards to user friendliness.
:)
--Okay, I'm a little grumpy this morning (it's early), so sorry folks...
How is using Wine simpler than just using windows?
--Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to spend a few minute setting up wine than buying and installing windows onto another partition to run a couple old windows programs that somebody wants me to use.
Why bother emulating it when it comes standard on most pre-built systems that the majority of computer illiterate will be purchasing?
--Because my system isn't pre-built, and I'm not computer illiterate.
Its pointless for those kinds of people. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see ANY OS properly compete with Windows, but I don't see it happening. What will the computer illiterates do with their computer?
--The same as they're doing today. Not much. The "choice" of OS and GUI have no bearing on someone who doesn't care. They managed (when they were forced to) with DOS, they'll be in the same boat with any future OS.
I'm willing to bet its gaming, word processing (possibly some other apps that come in Office), surfing and chatting, and playing media.
--I'm willing to bet it's probably not even that. True computer phobics will go to familiar programs, have other people set up things and show them how to activate them. As long as someone is there to help and show them how to do the handful of things they need, they'll use any OS. I'd hazard a guess that Linux's myriad of configuration options might offer such people a better experience. Instead of trying to force people into MS's view of user interaction, Linux will work as configured, and won't scare them with "your subscription is about to expire!", "your anti-virus is out of date!", etc.
Yeah its wonderful that Linux is a very secure OS, but its too bad it doesnt play any games.
--You mean games, as in the popular ones that lots of people buy that are typically ported to Linux? Or do you mean the kind of games MS plays with their users?
Games for Windows, no matter how much I despise it, will bring make it even more simple for those who want to game on a PC but have trouble setting up in the current PC gaming world. Windows is on top and it is folly to think its up top without a reason.
--It's folly to base your opinion on one aspect of anything. You're obviously a gamer, and some of your choice games aren't made for Linux. Personally, I'm not into running on the gaming treadmill. I'd like to know a game is good before I spend my cash on it. A key to this decision is to see that gamers like it enough to request a Linux version.
--As you can see, this is all subjective. MS Windows works for you, Linux works for me. Blanket statements either way are useless. However, my choice is a lot cheaper to implement...leaving me with more money for games.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
You hear a lot of people saying this and I just don't think it's true. I've recently acquired a laptop for my mother (that's a good swap - stop it!) and she has never used a computer of any sort. Well, Windows is the obvious choice as it's so intuitive and user friendly says I. This is a myth that is cleverly enforced by the whole Windows GUI "Style Guide" meaning that most Windows apps have a similar "look and feel". If you've used Windows before it is indeed intuitive and user friendly. For the new user, however, it simply isn't!
Why is it then that Windows "power users" (for want of a better term) used to use the short-cut keys to accomplish most tasks rather than using the mouse - this was of course back in the day when every command available to the mouse had an associated key, or set of keys, to perform the same function from the keyboard.
With a command line, you just need to know what command to issue whereas with a Windows interface you need to know the command (ie which button to click, which box to tick) but you also need to know where to go to issue the command.
When trying to show my mum how to use the PC she is making notes. Does she have to draw each stupid window with some means of signifying which bit she has to click on? It obviously doesn't help that she's scared of the thing, like most people of her generation - a teacher at school when "computers" first arrived used to teach us kids how it all worked, and he spent most of the lesson telling us to stop pressing buttons and trying things. He offered a similar course to the other teachers and he found it hard to get them to even touch the computers at all!
I, personally, hate windows. It frustrates me enormously that I can't just issue a command to achieve what I want. Many of the more esoteric, and therefore useful, features of windows are hidden away down through a myriad of different pull down menus, select item, advanced button, select from multiple tabs, another advanced button, more damn tabs, more buttons - it's a nightmare! Aaaaaarrrggghhhh!
But I still got her a windows machine! Perhaps that says it all!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
And I think you might be overestimating the effect of all that integration because I yet have to encounter a company that uses all those features you mention. What I do see is a lot of companies that use it just for the email and calendar functions.
l utions-for-other-people.html
So why Exchange? Well let me put it the other way around: what else? What else is out there that does email and calendars and is easy enough to find, install, manage and use?
My current company still uses Lotus Notes, when I started working here one year ago it had been about 10 years since I last used it and my god it still sucked as bad as it did 10 years ago, they did not improve AT ALL! First thing lots of people do here is install Outlook with the Lotus connector to be able to use a user friendly client (hey, seems clients are important too). Luckily they have decided to move to Exchange which will be used for... email (being a Telco they do their own telephony and nobody here is interested in IM).
If I would have thought that there was a FLOSS alternative that would that would be good enough I would have pointed it out but you just can't if there are still comments like this from the community: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/12/new-years-reso
Well if you were to give my Grandmother a Windows disc she would just be as baffled by it. I assume the same would happen if you gave her a Mac. For people who have never used any operating system it would be just as difficult for them to understand any OS you could give them.
I can think of a few things:
- Microsoft Analysis Services: IMO, better than Hyperion, Cognos, etc as of 2005. And like it or not, SQL Server 2005 is a good RDBMS for Enterprise level use. This release of SQL Server also brings data mining to the masses. The only thing that really sucks about the entire SQL Server 2005 release is that you have to run it on a Windows OS!
- Microsoft Visual Studio: I know, everyone has their favorites, but it really is a very good IDE. MS has been making good IDEs probably longer than anybody (well, except emacs). Again, the biggest drawback is that it only runs on a Windows OS.
- MSDN: Best web reference (only works with IE though).
I've been using Linux as a desktop and server since 1997, and if you believe it's competative against windows as a desktop OS you'r kidding yourself.
Yes you can usually find an alternative to your favourite windows app. As long as your happy to wait for your favourite features to be implemented, to install all the libraries it needs, to do without a decent user manual, etc.
And yes you can teach your kids, wife, mother-in-law etc to use it, but why hinder them in the workplace? They will have to use windows machines at work and for most non-techies, mastering multiple operating systems is just not viable.
Linux will beat windows on the desktop when someone takes it and develops a viable commercial product out of it, giving consideration to what non-techies want from a OS.
And I can see PC-BSD getting their first myself....
You don't have much of a imagination if you can't visualize any scenarios.
Even today, at the company I work at, I've seen situations where negotiations over license fees have taken a little too long and leave a few departments of highly-paid engineers twiddling their thumbs (I'm assuming they end up taking care of paperwork or something) for a few days.
Think of any large-scale software deployment with a proprietary or encrypted database format (which will be pretty much required for DRM), and what would happen to your company if (for whatever reason), the software vendor decided to shut all that software down.
What would happen if your company's accounting system gets shut down?
What happens if you lose the license to your company-wide Business Office Suite and it refuses to allow anyone access to any company documents?
What about the huge database server that you've got all your client and sales information stored in?
Making access to your own company's data dependent on the whims of a 3rd party is a HUGE risk, and it's a risk that many businesspeople who don't understand the consequences of DRM aren't taking into account.
.. with vista - You mean like their "success with Zune" ?
Read radical news here
I have a thing against commenting all the pointless cruft flushing on us from ZDNet, yet I find that hilarious. From RTFA:
BUHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!
That's why I love modern IT journalism: it is self-contained and never really leave one's office desk - with notable exceptions of sponsored trips to important (from pov of sponsor) exhibitions and conferences.
Political merits. No new product/offering can win against established in market products/offerings. If that would be possible - imagine that market worked that way many users would have woken up to system with Windows replaced by BSD/Linux. But. Miracles do not happen. Traditionally, it had been observed on many occasions, new products first have to score new installations - before they can go after established players. Needless to remind that many predicted similar demise of Linux after release of OpenDarwin. No miracles did happen back then too.
Technical merits. First, "ZFS and Dtrace" are engineer's toys. Their real world worth is yet to be identified. (And identification alone costs 100GP. lol.) Second, only total idiot CTO/CIO would replace existing working system with something new. However good new stuff is, as long as existing solution works - nobody would even spend a minute looking into something new. Upgrade cycle will come - viable new options will be investigated. (People prayed for prolonged upgrade cycle - God heard their prayers and granted them the freedom with Linux.) Provided current state of affairs - very stable Linux offerings from RH/Novell/etc, best M$ Windows 2003 server product - I would expect that OpenSolaris would be ... unnoticed for the whole next year. Sun might beat some PR drums - but few would consider such a young system for anything important.
To put it generally: people (and market) are very inertial. It takes time to get into new system. And at moment that "new stuff" slot of most IT people's minds is occupied with "Linux, BSD, Vista" items. The list is too long already. I take that most would consider evaluation of Vista to be most important, since that what many customers inevitably would end-up using shortly.
Provided that what I said above bear some sense, no way OpenSolaris would (i) gain enough attention to (2) attract enough (system) developers. Probably some Java developers would find that interesting - but they are very poor when it comes to system programming. OpenSolaris would remain underdog - system for hobbyists. Many talented Solaris developers (Sun discarded not so many years ago lots) went to BSD, Darwin and Linux - I do not expect them to start trusting Sun again all so suddenly nor to jump into active development.
Conclusion: OpenSolaris next year needs to concentrate on improved hardware support, improved software installation, improved desktop, improved preinstalled application package, etc - leaving world domination target to some distant future.
(*) Also I find it absolutely hilarious that system which still shipps with original 20yo "vi" to win anything - least its users hearts. Ppl, first get some decent text editor - world domination comes later.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Wow, I hope people don't depend on you to look after their data. That would be one bitch of a consolation message. Don't confuse immunity to viruses with there simply not being many around. It's like telling someone who is in an Intensive Care Unit that they're immune to pathogens just because they are in a sterilised environment.
Amnesty International
Easily the *best* comment of 2006. Thanks, shawn443, happy new year...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
You're no MS fanboy
Quote from Microsoft Share Points Website :
"Built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business"I know very little about share points. From what I can gather by looking on Wikipedia, rather than the provided Microsoft link. SharePoints offers "wiki and weblog support, with third-party browser support".
If you are after version management, there are plenty of open-source tools available.
For the wiki and weblog solutions there are also plenty of other open source offerings. Check out opensourcecms for a live demo of alternatives. These systems do no have per-user license costs and many of the solutions are licensed under the GNU GPL and as such can be tailored to meet specific organizational requirements.
As previously mentioned, I know very little about sharepoints. So if I have missed the boat on what makes SharePoints indespesible let me know where I can gather detailed information from. I am guessing that you are running an older version which only works with Internet Explorer. Perhaps running Internet Explore within WINE or Parallels Desktop would be a way to provide access to any Mac OS Desktops you are running, or thinking of deploying
As another shameless plug. Lucid offers information management consultation. You would be welcome to contact Lucid to arrange a meeting so we can better understand your requirements.
The problem isn't just whether linux is a user friendly OS. the apps must also be user friendly and better than the best Windows apps in order to convince people to drop Windows. That is why I think it is more important to work on replacing their apps with Windows apps that are better and also run on linux. It's very unrealistic to get most people to switch OS but apps are easier. Games...ok that is a big problem but you should still be able to get your work done no matter what OS-that's a realistic but challenging goal.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
"-It's folly to base your opinion on one aspect of anything. You're obviously a gamer, and some of your choice games aren't made for Linux. Personally, I'm not into running on the gaming treadmill. I'd like to know a game is good before I spend my cash on it. A key to this decision is to see that gamers like it enough to request a Linux version." Reminds me of that Mac switch parody. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2282754844 569110939 Of course, Photoshop is not a game and not for linux either. I guess it's not good enough because there aren't enough linux users demanding a port.
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Sorry but SQL Server has a way's to go to catch up to DB/2 in terms of sheer horsepower that can be applied to a problem. (And they ALL suffer from the fact that ALL relationships are N:M [1:1, 1:N and N:1 are merely existential cases,] and NONE of the DB engines are capable of working with N:M relationships.)
IDE's are STILL trying to catch up with Smalltalk's IDE. (And its been 26 years!)
MSDN is great but the implementation sucks. (Like everything else from M$)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
But I still bet it will work!
Rethinking email
not to mention it's 3 times faster on some workloads,
the test was done using a specialized memory allocation library for OpenSolaris! I suspect the other test was done using the same memory allocation library....
Not a really fair comparision...
However, the idea of using an allocation lib optimized for multithreading is extremely clever.
It would be better if the application could dynamically choose whether to use the single threaded version or multithreaded version depending on the number of CPUs in the machine.
Cheers
Ben
I must be missing something, but are you suggesting that a company who decides to roll out Linux or OS X on their users desktops would then decide to use Microsoft Sharepoint as their collaboration server? You don't think they may have thought of that at the time?
I think the GP meant the software "Parallels", a Windows emulator for Macs.
From the suggestions that Vista will be immediately widely adopted, with all it's problems/DRM, and that OpenSolaris will rise out of obscurity and overtake Linux, I am guessing this article might be an attempt at satire or humor.
Meh.
I used to use Exchange 2000, then Exchange 2003. You know what? I dropped it for hMailServer (http://www.hmailserver.com).
/var backs up pretty much every important piece of data on my system.
:)
Exchange has a lot of interesting and possibly even useful features, but it is VERY unstable compared to *nix counterparts, or even open source Windows software. It requires frequent restarts of the services to keep it routing mail, the message store service likes to crash, and it is pretty slow and bloated.
I decided to switch after I had a HDD crash. I had backups that had been generated via the windows backup utility. However, when I tried to restore from it, it actually refused, as I had taken the opportunity to update to a newer service pack when I reinstalled the OS.
Now, I understand Active Directory changing between releases. What I do NOT understand is why it would not at least allow me to extract the files that were back up, and restore them. For something as critical as a system backup, MS sure blew it there.
When I moved to hMailServer, it was faster, MUCH less bloated, and even the Betas were more stable than Exchange had proved to be. Most importantly, I could backup the entire mail store just by zipping up a folder. This was completely version independent.
Now, I am using Courier/Exim under Gentoo Linux. A tarball of
One more example is the company I work for. We had been using courier/sendmail running under Redhat, but after a large corporation bought us out a couple of years ago, we have been moved onto MS Exchange servers. Some of the features are nice, but the servers go down, and have various problems several times a week. The previous linux server needed a reboot maybe once every 6 months if that. It virtually never had the same types of problems. (There was also a single Linux server, versus 2 separate Exchange servers that can't handle the load).
I can say from experience: Exchange makes a fairly poor mail server. The calendar is nice though
Why does slashdot, or anybody, consider Paul Murphy to be anything more than another idiot blogger? Are Murphy articles posted here as a sort of troll? Murphy is about as knowledgable and object as Enderle.
That whooshing sound is the joke flying over your head...
Wrong.
At least one good reason why one hasn't been built is that one of the best attributes of linux/unix by far is that it is composed of small programs leveraged together that can is most cases provide enterprise ready configurations. In the case of exchange, everyone non-linuxish keeps begging for a clone, but this goes against everything linux because you're asking us to combine email + calendaring + shared calendaring + todo + shared todo + filtering + contacts + shared contacts + webmail. Imagine the behemoth that would be - oh, you already can - look at exchange.
All of these things are currently accomplished by the linux community, it's simply that none of these have been acceptably glued together yet. You can come really, really close, but only when using standarized mail clients like evolution.
Right now, postfix + dovecot + av/antispam + ldap + imp + evolution data server + evolution clients can do all of this, as well as make a very secure setup, but it's awfully tough to get someone to switch to evolution client on windows, especially when they've been using outlook for so long.
You forget that we were talking about those with little computer experience. I completely agree with most of your points, but a lot of them don't relate to those I and the parent posters were refering to.
By games, yes, I am aware that popular games are ported to linux. I made a mistake in saying that it doesn't play any games, when I should have said it doesn't play many games. Yes you are right, I am a gamer, I'm also a computer science major, so I typically use my computer for a lot more than gaming. Also, let us not forget how horribly confusing it is to try and install video drivers for ATI in Linux.. I don't know about nVidia but ATI drivers, I don't even know what to do with the file.
While popular games are ported to Linux, you still miss out on good games. It's similar to a radio station playing popular songs, they might have some of the tunes you like but there could be a lot more they don't play that you like as well.
And on the topic of money.. as a Student, I only had to pay 7 dollars for XP Pro. If I could get some help getting video drivers to work in Ubuntu or Fedora Core (I ordered both, free of course) then I might give Linux another go, but to the average user I still think windows is the way to go.
When I refer to UF, I'm talking about installations of programs and drivers. I've had much difficulty setting up video drivers and motherboard drivers, and its just not a nice way of doing it. Windows keeps it simple. Its just an executable file like everything else is.
I don't think it should be dumbed down either, I don't remember saying that. What an OS could use today is something of a skill level approach, where it asks you how skilled you think you are, expert, average or beginner, and average or begginer would hold your hand through tutorials or do everything for you, respectively, and expert would be as it is now. There, easy solution and no dumbing down of the system.
Just use the mac OSX version of the software. A mac can get the pictures off without making you run with special privileges. It's people who put up with shoddy work like this that promotes the problem.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You had to search far and wide to find that company. And once you did, their main product seems to be blogging with so-called customers.
He meant actual companies that make money, have a building where people work, and perhaps you might have heard of them other than on a google search.
No offense.
Needless to remind that many predicted similar demise of Linux after release of OpenDarwin.
Say *what*?
I had a NeXT, I use Mac OS X daily, and even I didn't bother installing OpenDarwin. FreeBSD is far superior to Darwin in every respect but the ability to run OSX on top of it.
I don't recall anyone predicting that OpenDarwin would replace Linux. Where was this happening?
I can use our Sharepoint server from Safari and Firefox.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Solaris comes with at least 3 malloc libraries. But I did do a recent round of Solaris benchmarking that proved fairly impressive. On most machines, the numbers hover around Linux's numbers (with UFS), but once you start getting up in cores, it's amazing what you can do with the flexibility of resource containers, processor sets, etc to squeeze performance out of MySQL on Solaris. I didn't get a chance to get a good ZFS benchmark, unfortunately. The one I did get was on top of a software RAID, on top of a hardware RAID, on top of a SAN. What I really needed was just the raw SAN devices. I think there were too many layers involved, but ZFS dropped the performance by a small fraction, while reducing locking on the filesystem level.
One universal truth I did find though... MySQL sucks for vertical scalability. Really sucks. Basically, go with multiple instances if possible. Not something that most avid users of MySQL don't already know, but even when I went in knowing that, I was surprised at just HOW little it would scale.
"Indeed, and that's a deliberate and careful choice. It's a choice that has allowed UNIX to survive for 30 years, while one "vastly superior operating system" after another has come and gone."
/proc, but completely miss the fucking point and make it a useless mess.
No dumbass, those vastly superior operating systems are still around, and unix is the major one I am referring to. Linux is not unix, it is a sad, pathetic wannabe unix, that completely missed the point of unix. Its complex, convoluted and obtuse, the exact opposite of the very essence of unix. Linux copies the superficialities while ignoring the important aspects. Solaris, tru64 and all 4 BSDs are far better unixes than linux will ever be. But then of course, linux has done the same trick with plan 9 too, lets copy
"Yes, and that is why Linux will continue to be successful while Solaris will fail."
Really? I've been migrating people off of linux for 3 years, onto BSDs or Solaris as appropriate. In the past 6 months I have had people calling specifically to inquire about migrating from linux to solaris, which has never happened in the past. I'm not sure which part I like better, helping save these companies from the incompetant gnubies that fucked them over in the first place, or seeing the looks on those gnubies faces as they finally realize "oh look, the world is not windows vs linux, there's actually good OSs too". Solaris is not going to fail, there will always be competant admins out there who want good software. The world is not just twats who have never seen anything besides windows and linux, and thus falsely assume linux is good just because it sucks slightly less than windows.
"Sigh. I've been a UNIX hacker since V7. My experience tells me that morons like you are found in large numbers in every generation of computer users and OS designers, and I guess I just have to resign myself to the fact that there is nothing that can be done about it."
You must also be senile then, and have forgotten all about unix. Or did you mean "unix hacker" as in "I installed linux once" and "v7" as in "redhat 7"? Linux is as far from unix as windows is, and not co-incidently, they both suck cock.
That's why linux has a half a dozen broken, slow, data corrupting "solutions" for storage replication. Linux users want this, and they even risk their data to get it. Everything in linux is an unproven design, there's no testing done, they've stopped even bothering to pretend that there is a "stable" version, and the development is pulling in a hundred different directions by the hundred different corporate interests. Grow up and go try something besides sucking the linux cock. When you're defending linux constantly and can't actually manage to produce a single thing where linux excels, or is even better than adequate, you are clearly defending from a place of ignorance.
Your grandmothers extreme debian zealotry is yet another example of what is wrong with opensource software.
..Debian user since '98
My point is that a real scientist doesn't use instruments calibrated by the flying spaghetti monster.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'll concede your point is valid about Exchange and that there are a lot of people that don't currently use a lot of the integration although the company I work for and at least a few dozen companies I've consulted for do use it but the mere fact that the options exists only helps Exchange adoption. The power of Microsoft has always been, learn one tool, know them all. If I know how to configure DNS on Windows I am quite capable of setting up DHCP, manage Active Directory and monitor Exchange. I can do all this from my management console PC with little or no effort in setup.
The problem with FOSS is usually one of integration, like getting spamassassin working with your mail server without losing important email. Consider how much effort goes into a proper spamassassin setup and then consider the one minute setup time for IMF on Exchange which I can easily argue is just as good at filtering spam albeit, overtime spam assassin does improve. Considering the difference in effort I can easily see why a lot of organizations would go the MS route especially now that SP2 for 2003 came out expanding the database limit to 72gigs. 16gig was way too low and I think MS got the picture on that. Of course Exchange 2007 looks to be a marked improvement as well with site mirroring and replication in-house so no more expensive third party tools for better or for worse on that one.
My grandparents are using Ubuntu and are in their late 80s (can anyone top that for linux users?!). Why linux? Because they wanted to use the internet and setting them up with Windows would have resulted in lots of 60km support trips to clean out spyware, explain why they had to spend money on lots of security software etc etc etc. Their only concern is the slowness of their ancient computer (a free hand-me-down), which should be upgraded soon. But it should be a breeze doing a clean install of Dapper on a faster machine.
"I don't remember signing any contract with a utility company."
Proably because most people don't know beans about the law.*
*Happens a lot around here. Guess they don't make legal nerds.
Solaris sounds like an impressive piece of engineering.
I'm sure it's difficult/impossible to replicate the flexibility with linux currently but we'll have to see how the technology evolves.
I like the fact that it seems like it's getting easier to mix and match systems for best performance/TOC at least on the UNIX side.
Lets you use the best tool for the job. Just try to fit windows in there somewhere and you might be up s**t creek.
Cheers
Ben
Anyone nows if the cell processor have 32 bits units? I've been told that to go behind 32-bits (it can go to 128 bits) it performs lots of 32-bits operations, thus going passed 32-bits is a really bad performer...
No, /proc was not ripped wholesale from plan 9. If it had been, it would be useful like it is in plan 9. Loonix doesn't understand features from other OSs, tries to copy them, but ends up with something that just shares superficial similarities while completely missing the point. You can't just copy /proc if your OS lacks the fundamental abstractions that make /proc both needed and useful. (hint, its not a replacement for kernel configuration, nor for getting diagnostic info. Its for managing processes.)