Slashdot Mirror
MS's Hilf Named Windows Server Marketer
netbuzz writes "The director of Microsoft's Open Source Lab, Bill Hilf, has added a new duty — general manager of Windows server marketing — to his already established role of shepherding the company's efforts to have open source software peacefully coexist with Microsoft technologies. What the company calls a 'natural evolution' of Hilf's job description may not be considered quite so natural among segments of the open source community that eye every Microsoft move with suspicion if not hostility." Bill Hilf answered Slashdot's questions two years back and sounded quite friendly to OSS; yet at other times he has come off like a hardcore Microsoftie.
MS's Hilf's Named Windows Server Marketer
Ok, I know what MILF stands for, but HILF? You've lost me.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ya man, totally!
How dare he not rage against the company he works for.
Also, why does the one of the first and most popular OS's not have a slashdot section?
Windows one of the "first OS's"? Are you joking?
Dear Slashdot community, .NET C++!
Wow, this is awesome! I'm glad Bill Hilf was promoted to this exciting new position at Microsoft! It is my hope that Bill Hilf will be able to help open source users synergize open source products with Microsoft's awesome, innovative Windows Server technologies. Well, I better go back to putting up posters of Steve Ballmer on my wall while I wait for my Windows gnome port to finish compiling in Visual Studio
Sincerely,
Miguel de Icaza
Microsoft marketing contractor and part time developer
--
I wish my sig were a picture of Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates!
Given the failure that Microsoft Server is, could it be migrating to an OSS alternative?
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Marketing Windows servers involves a lot of convincing people not to run Linux instead. Knowing about Linux probably helps.
this gives a whole new meaning to "HILF's i'd like to fsck"
the BIll Gatus of Borg icon?
Active Directory has to be one of the single most important things ever implemented by Microsoft. I can't think of a single coorporation that I have worked for which doesn't use it.
Just stating a point.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Although I don't know much about the Server edition MS software does not work well with OSS software. First off, playing of Ogg s are impossible without installing a third party codec (And its not patent-restricted like mp3) Second, Windows doesn't show Linux drives, yet Linux can see FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ETC. Linux can also play WMAs (provided you installed the codecs) Linux can open up .zip files while Windows can't open .tar files. Linux recognizes many different formats by default, unlike Windows (Windows can't even recognize an ISO by default...) MS has done too much trying to make Linux look like a small project, yet Windows (And OSX) recognize that there is competition and can detect the filetypes and such. As I said though, this might not be true about Server 2008, this is based off of XP and Vista Windows editions.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
> "Bill Hilf, has added a new duty -- general manager of Windows server marketing -- to his already established role of shepherding the company's efforts to have open source software peacefully coexist with Microsoft technologies"
So, let's analyse this. Hilf failed at getting open source software to "peacefully coexist" with Microsoft shite. His "reward" is to take on Windows server marketing - an area where open source beats Microsoft in terms of quality, TCO, initial price, and performance.
So Hilf is being punished, right?
Joking? I certainly hope so. Windows doesn't come even close to making that cut, even if we restrict the scope to "One of the first personal computer OSes." Even the first version of Windows (which I have actually scene with my own eyes, running on a PC-XT, and which may be the reason I need corrective lenses today ) was a relative latecomer among personal computer OSes. Well before Windows there was CPM, Amiga, Apple, DOS, and many others.
One of the most popular OSes? Sure, at least for the "market share" definition of popular (for the definition of popular as "well liked" it might be another story).
Windows Server do not at all co-exist with with Linux or any other type of server. Virtually all interoperability of Windows Servers and Linux Clients, or Linux Servers and Windows Clients is done through Reverse engineering of Windows SMB. So that makes Samba absolutely indespensible.
If you have have a Linux Server and a Heterogeneous or even one Windows client, you have no choice but to run Samba because Windows only talks to Windows.
Now before you go hauling off talking about Kerberos Realm mode:
That mode is completely useless. With Kerberos Realm mode, you have no Domain functionality, your machine is reverted to Workgroup status. No roaming profiles, no policies, no drive mapping scripts. So repeat after me, "Kerberos Realm Mode is fucking Horrible!" and nobody uses it.
Now. So lets say you go the Samba Domain Controller Route. In fact, lets go ideal and say you have someone who really knows what they are doing. Samba Domain Controller With Kerberos, NT4 SP6 Policy Editor Running under Wine, with LDAP Backend, either with OpenLDAP or Fedora DS.
Well.
Your Linux Clients work just fine. They login, get account data out of LDAP, Authenticate with Kerberos, maybe use AFS or Samba with Kerberos Authentication. (That works only for Linux boxen under Samba 3.0)
Your Windows Clients? See a bizzare Hellscape of situations where it looks like its surrounded on all sides by "Windows NT 4.9" Servers that all claim to be primary domain controllers. The Kerberos mode? They ignore that and fall back to NTLMv2. They can't even tell the Kerberos or LDAP Servers are even there. Still pretty decent interoperability.
lets take the reverse.
Well, Windows Servers will run AD, thats all they will do, thats all they have done.
Windows clients, GPO, all that shit. Linux Clients? Well. You can try the "Services For Unix" method with Kerberos and LDAP trick, but its doubtful that will work. Your best chance again, Samba with Winbind. Linux has too reverse engineer everything. Microsoft policy is very is not Embrace, Extend, Exterminate with Windows Servers. Its just Exterminate. To Microsoft, the only good Linux User is a Dead Linux User.
Microsoft's execs have no expertise in the subject of the departments they direct (except maybe legal or marketing). They are expert in being executives. I once met for a long time with the MS "Chief Security Officer", in my capacity advising the NYC City Council (legislature). He knew nothing about security, not even the recent history of MS (in)security under his predecessor. And I've watched how MS shuffles its execs.
All that the person in the job needs to know is their marching orders from where the only real MS strategy comes from: the mutual work of the (real) geniuses in legal and marketing. That's all MS is good at, and all it needs to be good at. They need to know how to talk to the other execs in their job, and the inevitable lawyers from other companies and the government, and marketers from everywhere.
So he's a "server marketer". It means nothing that he's also an "open source exec". All that means is that he's going to meetings about "open source" and "servers", which we already know since MS has a major strategic alliance with Novell over Linux, and Novell just won proof that Unix belongs to Novell, and *nix runs the only competition to MS servers. But I wouldn't expect this guy to know that until he takes the job.
--
make install -not war
As a longtime reader of /. and follower of this issue between MS products vs. Linux, I have to say that it is OBVIOUS that MS wants Linux to "go away". I firmly believe that we are witnessing Embrace, Extend and Extinguish in operation.
I really am not trying to troll. It just seems that way. Actions speak louder than words. I feel that the GNU/Linux folks need to be very wary of Novell, Suse, Mono, .Net/MS, etc. Keep it free, keep it open! /2cents
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
I sure hope you aren't a webmaster for any humour-related sites.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
To implement a Kerberos/ldap/sso system of even a fraction of Active Directory's complexity is prohibitively expensive on Linux, at least in my enterprise experience.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
Springtime for Windows and Microsoft;
... almost as good as the hotshots we've been hiring out of college.
Winter for Linux and Sun.
You're either with us, or you're with the free software hippies.
There's lots of things you can get for free - your neighbor's kid's pet iguana for instance.
Integrated innovation was good enough for Henry Ford, it should be good enough for you and me.
I know a lot of the guys heading up the free software projects. They're actually pretty good technically
This battle in the server room has been going on forever.
One thing in the war has become clear: Windows will never own the server room. Linux will never own the desktop.
Business will have heterogeneous systems forever. Hell, any business of any size, around for any length of time, has mainframes and oddball systems from the 60s and 70s they still support.
I bet these same types of Slashdot stories will be as fresh in ten years as they were ten years back.
its already evident what they are trying to do. they are trying to push ms stuff over seemingly open source channels. just HOW many signs and moves you people need to get it ?
Read radical news here
If you trust the bear, dont bitch when it bites your hand off.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Either way, that's gross. Back to 4chan with you!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
A collection of other Ballmer quips about open source is here.
Microsoft in no way shape or form accepts the existence of sharing source code or open source or Free Software. Anyone who believes to the contrary simply is new to the industry and is naive.
Uh huh, sure. What this is, is MS attempt at "make a noise in the east and strike in the west". The black suit business money mercenaries love that stuff, "business is war" and so on.
Sounds like a slogan from Kruschev era Soviet Union. Let's hope that "Peaceful coexistence" will end up for Microsoft the same way it ended up for USSR.
If you're just setting up sso for Linux or Mac clients, it's easy.
Setting up sso for a hetrogenous network including Windows clients can seem complex for a novice, largely because Microsoft broke Kerberos so that while Windows clients can speak both Kerberos and LDAP, they only know how to speak them at the same time when talking to an AD server.
Having said that, it's not THAT difficult once you've had a bit of experience (outside of Windows). What specifically were you having problems with?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Bill Hilf comes from around from a rack of servers, "Hi there, I'm Bill Hilf, General Manager of Server Marketing here at Microsoft, and Linux 'Good Guy'."
"We here at Microsoft are taking the cold Linux air out of data rooms by employing more than double the Servers running Windows, to make things warm - and quite pretty I might add - with all these blinking lights. Not just those pale green lights you see on Linux servers, but also the bright red and yellow flashing indicators and those reassuring alarms that let you know you are important and not lazy."
Walking over to the rack he turns back to the camera, "Why use Linux and run everything on a single box and worry about having it fail when you can have the same stuff run on eight computers, like this..."
Motioning to the rack full of blades, "One for the Files, one for the Microsoft license validation and tracking, this one here is for serving web pages, this is half the email service, the other one is to handle the other half, spam and viruses for the first, over here is the one for user authentication, Muti-media on this one... my, what big wires! And this one was provided by the federal government to ensure your security, I'm not quite sure what it does, but it is included free with every installation!"
"Now all that 'technology' looks a whole lot more 'professional' than that one box over there, just think of that big data center with that one box, think of your job with just one box, pretty terrifying isn't it... I bet now you are getting the picture...", Hilf smiles as a toll free number appears on the bottom, "Call us today and our sales rep will tell your boss the 'truth'", winks, "... about Linux and how Microsoft keeps YOU 'competitive'."
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Now lets don't make this into a HOWTO article; however, yes it can and indeed has been done, I have an army of redhat boxes joined to the AD as actual domain accounts, and they use KRB auth (and no they don't use Winbindd - that's NOT the same thing.) That being said, you have to extend the AD schema to get the Internix junk working properly (adding the uid fields and default gid) with a NIS/YP domain in reverse. So I'd say they're the ones lacking in bits and pieces. Kudos to them (MS) for giving the NFS client as a built in component (optional component) of Vista though, it's one thing that XP should have had. (Don't even get me started about how much I hate NVidia on Vista, that's another story. Most of you probably haven't heard the debate of it, because you don't ever think about vista; however I have to know the whole field so I am currently taking it for a spin, and while it has some moments of goodness, mostly it's just slow, flickery and pretty damned sucky, especially on a laptop.)
Speak for yourself.
"Windows can't open .tar files."
stop fudding buddy. Winrar even opens gzips.
So you have a package manager that forces what the coalition of mystical developers decrees should be the version your distro uses. If it was windows, people would complain that it was "monopolistic".
That Microsoft had to resort to Hilf shows how lacking in insight they are.
What? Given that Hilf has been running the open source stuff there for awhile, and has been the central point for open source @ MS, he's probably the best person there is to know - really know - where Windows is and isn't strong. That knowledge will both help the short term Windows messaging - advertising, etc. - but given his new position, that will have to have a greater impact on what makes it back to Windows developers as well. Ergo the known weaknesses will get addressed.
It's not just "spin" if it's the truth. Windows is the best platform for certain types of situations, whether that task is running specific commercial or open source software. That 'best' is a subjective measurement which has both emotion and short and long term ROI wrapped up in it, and is different for everyone out there.
This is not a 'lack of insight' on MS' part - this is probably one of the most insightful things they've done in a long time.
creation science book
He was saying that Windows *itself* didn't support tar files. You need to install a third-party tool. Pretty much all Linux distrobutions include the tar(1) program.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
But isn't the FOSS community damned if we do, damned if we don't in this circumstance?
I know there's hundreds of HOWTOs on the web, but if I'd suggested that, I'd have an equal number of replies screaming "Telling people to RTFM is why Linux will never be ready for granny's server farm".
Besides, imagine how much it's costing normal_guy's company in CALs and other licensing fees. In most other professions, people would be sacked for losing their companies so much money. We need to help the guy out here.
Now, I know it's Slashbot groupthink to just accept that AD is the only way of doing sso, but look at the costs of going down that path. With just a few hours of learning, you can save years of fees.
I mean, I love Windows 2003 server for little single-server offices where the group self-supports and people only know Windows, but you have to admit, it's horrendously expensive to scale up.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
When did that happen?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
What the fuck does this even mean?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Microsoftie"?
Honestly, sir. Your unending, rigidly-biased McCarthy-esque front-page banter is tiresome and uninteresting, and in no way promotes productive discourse.
Instead, it serves only give you the appearance of being callous and bigoted. And while you may, in fact, be callous and bigoted, the front page of Slashdot is no place in which to display such commentary.
Slashdot, at its tenth year, remains the pinnacle of dispersion for all news matters relating to open source technology, and continues to grow broader in scope of audience by the moment as more and more people become interested this very important concept.
Yet, it is as if you seek to squander that fame, and use it as a means to broadcast your own fallacious shallowness. This quite plainly reflects poorly upon Slashdot as a business unit, but also more significantly upon its own readership. It is nothing but detrimental to the idea of open-source software, and indeed is an affront toward its widespread acceptance.
Please, stop. Every time you say something so thoughtless and misguided, as is occurrent of regular frequency, we all lose a little more credibility.
You are doing us all a tremendous disservice.
Kid-proof tablet..
I do trekking in the woods from time to time, and it is recently accepted wisdom that if you meet a bear, you shouldn't play dead (as often advised), but you should calmly retrace your steps and then turn and briskly walk away (for a mile or two). Even better is if you keep making noises all along so that the bear can be wary and avoid meeting you in the first place.
;-)
Quite appropriate here too
It's not good when the first thing you see when you get in to work is "Milf named Windows Server Marketer".
I fail to see the insight. Windows Server isn't so bad as you might like to think - http://apache.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/06/138220
throw new NoSignatureException();
reminds me a little of some dialog from the movie 'The Peacemaker'
Clooney: so first you build the bombs to destroy the whole world & now you want to save it. What's it going to be?
Kidman: well I beleive this week we're saving it.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
I actually wouldn't expect that AD would be the de facto choice of anyone in the slashdot crowd :) Scaling up an environment based on AD is silly if your entire audience of users are on linux boxes. You could setup an ldap and a kerberos realm if you wanted to but I am not aware of (doesn't mean anything really, it could still be there) any system that marries the two systems nicely other than the AD.
Speak for yourself.
Although I don't know much about the Server edition MS software does not work well with OSS software. First off, playing of Ogg s are impossible without installing a third party codec (And its not patent-restricted like mp3) Second, Windows doesn't show Linux drives, yet Linux can see FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, ETC. Linux can also play WMAs (provided you installed the codecs)
wait, so if you need to install codecs for linux to play a file, thats perfectly fine, however, if windows needs a third party codec, well, they are just out to screw you?
Novell's eDirectory does that.
If you're working in the big end of town, it scales a lot better than AD as well.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Because that is exactly what this is. No sane employer would do that kind of mixing.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
yeah, I did know that, I just don't use it so I didn't think of it ;) Novell actually has a lot of things that are nicer about it, from the demo's I've seen, but I haven't used it since netware way back.
Speak for yourself.
I don't see why people seem to have so much trouble grasping this. Perhaps I need to explain in depth "what the fuck this means."
If you actually *read* the summary, let alone the article, and weren't just clicking on random links, you would know that Bill Hilf, the director of Microsoft's open source lab, is now the general manager of Windows server marketing. Do you see where the joke is now?
The bottom line: Do not take this post literally. I don't *seriously* believe that Windows Server co-exists with open source software better than any other version of Windows. I can't believe I even had to write this comment in the first place.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex