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Xerox-Microsoft Partner
tea-leaves writes "Xerox and Microsoft are partnering to put Windows NT in their print boxes and such. Story says the technology replaces "UNIX-compatible" software already in place. Xerox wants to compete with HP for the desktop printing market with integrated printer solutions that use Microsoft software for the interconnect. Check it out. " I feel like we're going to have to re-sanctify Palo Alto after this.
Why NT? Whats the benfit? NT costs more (than Linux/*BSD) Linux/*BSD+Samba+Apache+Scripts..You have a box that can practically talk to everything...IP/IPX/Appletalk.. Just doesn't make any sense... Can someone please explain the business decision to me? NT will cost them more and overload under any real strain.... Please, someone explain this to me??????
Palin...
I worked at a copy shop in a major midwestern university that shall go unnamed. We ran three Xerox Docutechs and some smaller machines.
We ended up buying a Sun/Xerox network box of some sort. It was brought in with a lot of fanfare. I was a courier at the time, but the school gave all employees accounts on the school computers, so I was learning my way around as an Ultrix user from a Lear/Seigler ADM3a+ and a 1200 baud dialup at night.
Everyone stood around while the techs installed the thing and brought it up. I had never, at that point, seen X in action before so I had no idea there was a *nix under the hood. It wasn't until one of the techs brought up a term and I saw some of the commands they were typing that I realized what it was.
The boss 'in charge' of the machine announced that we were going to take great pains to keep the machine in good shape, and in order to keep it like new, we'd be shutting it down promptly at five every night.
Needless to say, it began to accumulate stuff that never got shuffled out by whatever housekeeping it was supposed to be doing at night, and soon the hard drive was full of undeleted tmp files and aborted print runs.
Eager to prove myself, pre-larval as I was, I went to the PHB and pointed out that the machine was running some sort of Unix and we ought to leave it on, as God intended, or figure out how the housekeeping was supposed to be done and reset some times. She told me it was just like Windows (3.0 was the current version at the time) and we didn't need to do that. I went over her head and got permission to at least twiddle with it to keep the logs rotated and the /tmp files cleaned out. She promptly took all the documentation and locked it in her office, changed all the passwords, and had me rotated to the night shift.
The machine continued to crash right and left, and no one could get at it to fix things. The PHB kept insisting it was just a faulty product. It was eventually branded a failed experiment and taken away.
I've since thought it was a rotten idea to sell a *nix box to a bunch of glorified Kinko's employees and expect them to do anything other than what they did at my shop. The support was god-awful, and the training I was eventually sent to never went past 'this is the garbage can... this is how to click and drag.'
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
We currently use 2 DocuTech 6135s for the digital printing side of our printing/fulfillment business. They are both driven by Ultra SPARC boxes running Solaris, so setting up automated tasks with my Linux Internet server and workstation has been frighteningly easy. And they've been (for the most part) terrific machines.
I am worried now that if and when we get a DocuColor or other high-speed printer from Xerox, we will be forced to use shoddy Winblows software--just like we were when we updated the document assembly facet of the operation. (Get this: we bought our own PC ($3K) for their XDOD document assembly software/system instead of buying their Compaq box ($10K). Now, if there's a problem on that machine, the techs will 90% of the time blame it on "incompatible hardware" and refuse to support it. Also, it runs NT and when I wanted to add a CD-burner for backing up jobs I had to install the latest service pack (3). Well, when I asked Xerox if this might be an issue, they said that their software wasn't tested enough on SR3 and that if we ran into problems later, they might have us revert to SR1! Aaargh!)
What really bothers me is that we may eventually have to sell our souls and adopt more and more Windoze applications because either that is what our customers expect or because we can't find the apps we need on *nix. (As another aside, we just recently visited a software company in Connecticut that makes a pretty good warehouse/fulfillment system that is currently available on SCO or NT, but their next major release will be NT only. Our plan is to get the SCO version now (partly because we have a SCO box with plenty of room already), but what about the future? We could migrate to NT in a few years, but dammit, I want more options!)
I know I'm probably preaching to the choir, but I don't want to live in Bill's version of the world, but it seems like our options are narrowing, in spite of the open source/free software movement. I guess we're in an interim period where business-ready open source apps are still being developed.
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
You know as much M$ slamming as goes on here, most end users never see the kinds of problems we as techs do. This is because they don't put their machines throught the rigorus workouts we do, they just write e-mail, read e-mail, play games, and d/l porn. I hate to point this out but M$ products are still easier to use then *nix products.
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Most big companies would rather pay techs than have to train users to use *nix. Get over it, all Linux OS distros are free and the public (read: the average user) can't get them to install right. Besdies the severe lack of hardware support, X claims to support my Diamond Speedstar A50, but it has 8 megs of RAM and X will only see 1 meg. Until *nix can catch up in the harware support division ppl will buy M$. Xerox made a damn good descion for now, partnering with M$ will boost profits, up the stock price, and get them into offices they couldn't get into before. If they want to make more money then they made the right desicion, think about it their copiers are already there, the salesman walks in and says you already have NT servers and Xerox copiers, how about we tie them both together. Managers are going to go ape-sh*t. As for being smart technology wise, we all know the answer to that one; NO ! But Xerox is interested in what most companies are interested in, the Allmighty Dollar. Anyone ever wonder why RedHat is the most used distro in the consumer market, because THEY SELL IT. People still believe the ols addage " You get what you pay for ". People want M$, if you want to force them to use something else then you are no worse than Bill.
Face it we love Linux but it is nowhere near ready for the concumer market, people don't want to customize their interface, they don't want to have to decide on a windows manager, and they don't want to have to mount/unmount a CD drive every time they want to chage a CD. Linux is great for certain things (tech geeks are one of those things), but for the average consumer M$ or Mac OS is better. I hope the Linux will soon be user friednly. My dad asked me a question the other day, maybe someone out there can answer because I sure as hell couldn't "Pretend for a moment I am new computer user, tell me why I should run Linux"
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Can We trust the future - Flesh99