Why would it matter if "credentials" were accurate, if the information provided by said person(s) was accurate and worthwhile?
After going through Essjay's edits, it was clear that he was using his "tenured position" to influence edit wars.
And so it seems, the real solution to Wikipedia's problem is to not give a shit about someones real or imagined credentials. If you are wrong, it does not matter if you are a Nobel Prize laurate or not, you are still wrong. But as usual, Wikipedia solves its problems completely backwards. I suspect that this policy will be quickly dismissed when someone like Noam Chomsky comes around and decides to expose the right-wing slant in Wikipedias articles.
Sure, "discuss" all you want. But you wont be discussing with me and you wont get any response until you actually file bug reports and try to come up with solutions to the problems you find. That is what I consider to be constructive work and not just general hand-waiving. Not long ago there was an article called 30 days with Ubuntu posted on Slashdot. It detailed problems the author found in Ubuntu Linux. That is useful information and inspired me to submit a few patches to fix the authors problem. Judging by the number of bug reports submitted each day to popular free software projects, it seems others are too capabable of constructively discuss and help Linux improve.
Yours and this articles authors complaining, however, is dead weight. There is nothing I can do about a complaint such as "geek developed UI's." The reason those UI's look "geek developed" is because not enough people have taken the time to constructively critisize them. As a developer, there is nothing I'd like to hear more than constructive feedback on my UI's. But as commens such as that it is "wild assed" does not help.
That aside, the article is off-base in my opinion. WiFi seems more likely to become a boost to cellular usage - expanding networks and lowering costs for providers. (IE: They combine their cellular service to work with WiFi VOIP - when a customer is in WiFi range, calls go over cheaper VOIP - when no WiFi is available it goes cellular.)
How do you price it? If I have a WiFi capable device loaded with VOIP software that I connect either via my own, or an open access point to someone else using a similar setup, there is no reasonable way for carriers to extort money from me. The do not control the network and they do not control my use of it. That is what scares the shit out of them. There is no way out for them except for forcing manufacturers to not add WiFi support to their devices. Which is the exact strategy the carriers by large are using. So far it has worked because manufacturers are wholly dependent on carriers to sell their phones.
he majored in marketing alright, it's really obvious since
for most people a 30 mm cube vs a 10 cm cube must be like a 1:1000 comparison
although roughly it's only 3 times as small
If they released Starcraft for the DS, everyone would buy it. Everyone would play it forever and ever. They would then enjoy that game so much that they would not have to buy new games. Nowadays, studios do not make hard and challenging games because they do not want to keep people occupied. Instead they make games that last for X numer of hours, where X is the smallest number possible while still making the customer believe it got its moneys worth.
You can keep on dreaming but there will never be any good RTS for the DS or a challenging chess game either for that matter.
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
Tibet has more Chinese than Tibetan inhabitants. Second, what are the odds that a bird flu virus that mutates so that it can infect from human to human would spread all around the world and include China? Those odds are pretty high.
One must wonder how you ever managed to even SURVIVE ten years ago before SUV:s became en vogue. One must also wonder why you do not purchase a farm tractor which seem to be exactly the kind of vehicle your heavy duty tasks require.
Not only that, but he could also view any email correspondence by that judge, which could have included sensitive court material.
Show me a judge who handles sensitive court correspondence by e-mail and I'll show you a judge I dearly want to smack in the face really, really hard.
Quite a few companies use internal mail servers to handle sensitive material. As long as the emails are not routed through public mail relays on the internet, there is nothing wrong with it.
Do you think American FBI agents are the only people in the world who knows how to catch file sharers? Or that there is so little technical know-how in Swedish organizations that we really need Americans to help us? It is not, Swedish cops are just as good at using computers as American cops are (if not better). Maybe they could use some help in improving their interrogation techniques, but they sure as hell do not bring Russian FSB agents over. The real reason why they invite the FBI has nothing to do with training.
What the big fuss is about, is that the Swedish police is tacitly agreeing that it will follow FBI:s and MPAA:s anti-piracy policies and do their dirty work for them. Which means do everything they can to shut down thepiratebay.
Yes dammit! Advertising has a huge impact on the content no matter which media is used. If ads are used to fund Wikipedia, Wikipedia becomes dependent on selling ads. Just like the publishing industry. When was the last time you read a trustworthy product review in a magazine? Never, ever? Magazines depends on their advertisers, their advertisers will not advertise if their products are given bad reviews. So magazines do not give shitty products bad reviews because they are afraid of losing their advertisers.
Have you seen leftist or Socialist papers with ads? There are almost ZERO ads in such papers. Not because they do not desperately want ads, they do, it is just that advertisers have realized that ads in such magazines do not sell. An ad for McDonalds next to an article about their abysmal labor practices is no good. That is why Wikipedia articles like this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofellatio will never ever have an ad next to it.
Just because Wikipedia is authored by a huge community does not mean it will not be tainted by ads. It will be just as tainted as every other ad-featuring media.
When it comes to bias, Wikipedia is just as gullible as very other published work in the world. If you have an author write a book, then it is very unlikely that that book will not be colored by the authors bias. If you have ten authors to a book, you get their ten biases. If you have a million authors, well, you get the mean of their million biases in the book.
That one million authors that Wikipedia has, is not a randomly distributed sampling of humankind. Most people do not have access to computers and those that do, do not speak English. Instead, Wikipedias authors come from mostly American middle-class youths with enough time on their hands to contribute to Wikipedia. There is nothing inherently bad with that, but it means that the bias is shifted towards an American point of view. Americans, naturally, have an American point of view. If you research the articles about the Iraq war, you will find that their bias have changed alot since 2003. Just like the American view of the war has changed alot since then. Or if you know some foreign languages, you can consult articles about the Iraq war in a non-English language. Not suprisingly, there will be some stunning differences on how what information is provided.
The standard response from Wikipediaists is that Wikipedia has a "neutral point of view" rule, meaning that articles should only contain facts and that all "views" should come from attributed sources. But such a rule totally misunderstands what bias is all about. Bias is all about EXCLUDING information that harms your bias and INCLUDING information that favors it.
So, Wikipedia is not what "Humanity Has to Say," it (the English version) is what Wikipedia contributors have to say. You are able to read a lot of great and factual things about maths, physics, medicine and other hard sciences. So please do not accept Wikipedia as an unbiased source for any topic that may be biased, it is not.
If a patient abuses a drug, or refuses to take the full course of drugs (in, say, a case of TB), is that the doctor's fault?
It could very well be. Or it could be that the drug is mis-designed. In Sweden, when a doctor prescribes a drug, he or she must clearly describe how the drug is used and ensure that the patient understands the instruction. When the patient then collects the drug at a pharmacy, the pharmacist must once again clearly communicate to the patient how to use the drug. And to boot, in the package for every drug there is an instruction sheet written in an easy to understand language. Really, when going to the doctor you are treated like a complete tool, until you have proven yourself otherwise. The reason is ofcourse that even tools need medication and needs to be shielded from disastrous mistakes.
Perhaps BofA's system is fundamentally flawed, but I don't see you offering anything else.
I do not work for BofA, but if I was, I would suggest that they supply every user with a personal electronic access key. Then even if the phiser gets hold of the users password he or she can not access the acount without the access key. In fact, I find it pretty strange that any banking site would rely solely on user entered security tokens.
It was not to hard to guess that that would be the very first response to this article. It is very typical for techies to expect users to use the system as the system was designed. That is not what happens in the real world. The usage of the system is equivalent to the system itself. If the usage of it is flawed, then the system, too, is flawed.
Many systems require you to change your password once a month or more often. Of course, the password must not be based on an English word and must contain both uppercase and lowercase letters and digits. Is it then a user failure when every other user forgets their password? No! It is the system that is faulty.
Therefore Bank of Americas system is faulty, most password based systems are infact faulty. It is not an acceptable excuse to put the burden on the user. It is a cop out. We are techies, we should make stuff work. It is our job.
Just too bad a few of us were saying things like this were going to happen since back in the 70's. It's just unfortunate that we had to have an acceleration period in the last 10-20 years to solidify the problem. And too bad the delicate cycle of the Earth has been damaged permanently as a result of man's greed and quest for senseless power and control.
Actually it is even worse than that. Some of us have beening saying things like this will happen for over 150 years. Marx predicted that the future would either bring a global Socialist revolution leading to the overthrow of Capitalism or that the world would be doomed due to Capitalistic exploitation of natural resources. Unfortunately, Capitalism is still here, and it seems more likely that the last Capitalist will be suffocated when there is to much carbon dioxide in the air to be able to breath than that something will be done about the ecological problems.
There is taxes on every value transaction. When you work, your employer pays you a set amount of money and a percentage of that goes to the government (the community, that is). No mutually-beneficial transaction is lost because you claim a yearly salary of 35k so that you can pay 15k in taxes instead of a salary of 20k if there would have been no taxes. Part of the transaction is just re-routed through the state so that those to poor to make mutually-beneficial transactions themselves still can live a decent life.
There is absolutely nothing inherently unfair with paying income tax. If there was no tax there would be no state and there would be anarchy. Would you rather prefer that?
Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere. Transport infrastucture is (or should be) a government problem.
Indeed! Almost everywhere where there is a functional mass transit system, it is heavily subsidized by the government. For example, the cost of laying rails, mainting trains and digging tunnels are much greater than the direct revenue a metro system ever could produce. The indirect revenues on the other hand; less traffic congestion, less pollution, easier access for people and a more attractive place to live is greater than the costs. A store pays tax to the government. The government builds cheap mass transit. The store gains back more than it payed in taxes because with the cheap mass transit it can attract more customers. Everyone wins.
Thank you Timbaland, this is a really great argument against buying music. I'll make good use of it to convice the few that I know that still buy music occasionally. First, commerical music is obviously crap since they have to "steal" their music. Second, if it is not immoral for producers to "steal," then why on earth should any consumer feel guilty for taking it back?
The list is pretty biased towards US-based companies. In most other Western countries you have five weeks of vacation and maximum of eight hours of labour each day. Plus good job security so that you can not be fired just because the boss dislikes you. And if you do get fired or quit, there is unemployment insurance money you can take out so that you do not have to starve while you look for a new job. With that in mind, I doubt that any US company could be "best," because when it comes to benefits, the US is centuries behind the rest of the Western world.
It works both ways. Those who say that the new Office interface suck because it is different, are also saying that Linux suck because it too, is different.
Oh really? Then I suppose you want Bono to stop talking about dropping the Thirld World Debt? Or Michael Moore about what is wrong with the US? Or Brad Pitt about global warming? Or Susan Sharandon about the war in Iraq? Or Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Ray Romano, Martin Short, Ben Stiller and Jack Black, Tom Hanks about Global Warming?
Yes, they aren't saying anything that activists and scientists have not already said for decades. But celebrities are, for right or wrong, something people listen to. And what they have to say is, generally, more well-thought out, smarter and far less corrupted by Capitalism than what politicians say.
I'm always skeptical about people that tell others to shut up. Often it just means they have nothing worthwhile to say themselves.
The EU employs 1700 translators full-time, translating 1.7 million pages each year into seventeen different languages. You tell me that an organization that big, that spends so many resources accommodating for people who don't want to read English (which most EU documents originally are written in), can't accommodate for Linux users??
It is my tax money that feeds the beast. They damn fucking sure have an obligation to make it work for me!
AD to LDAP not likely to be much trouble? Then your experience is different from mine..
The recommended way to switch over an AD to Linux, is to setup Samba to host file shares and LDAP to do the authentication. Setting up Samba itself is fairly easy. It is the different and weird ways in which Windows clients connects to the shares that will cause trouble. You will need to analyze the log files very closely because very minor errors in your setup will cause clients to be unable to connect for very strange reasons. You will have to learn about machine accounts and all the problems they can cause you.
Also, AD:s most often use ACL:s. There is no equivalent in the Linux world but you have to be content with the simple user and group settings available in the *nix world. So if your AD uses more advanced access control features you probably wont be able to replicate them in Linux. Sure, you could try using the Extended Attributes that some distros use. But that is yet an unproven technology and you shouldn't rely on it working.
Then you will run into character encoding problems, but that should be fixable. Just select the correct character set so that the filenames look correct in Windows and let your Linux clients (if you have any) see the corrupted filenames.
Setting up LDAP could be pretty painless. Just learn the very weird syntax ldapsearch and other LDAP directory querying tools use. It is the smb-ldap-tools package that will cause problems. It is a bunch of Perl scripts that are supposed to simplify setting up Samba/LDAP, but they are fairly buggy.
Doing all this isn't impossible and most of the problems are possible to solve (except for the ACL one). But it is not easy, and the resulting environment will NOT be identical to a pure Windows AD environment. I have done it for a small company and it took me roughly one month. In the end they stayed with their AD. Mostly for two reasons. First, Samba+LDAP does things different from AD. It is not worse, but it doesn't behave exactly like an AD. Second, where the HELL do you find a Samba/LDAP specialist to administer it and how much do you pay him or her?
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell me the bug number and I will look at it.
Why would it matter if "credentials" were accurate, if the information provided by said person(s) was accurate and worthwhile?
After going through Essjay's edits, it was clear that he was using his "tenured position" to influence edit wars.
And so it seems, the real solution to Wikipedia's problem is to not give a shit about someones real or imagined credentials. If you are wrong, it does not matter if you are a Nobel Prize laurate or not, you are still wrong. But as usual, Wikipedia solves its problems completely backwards. I suspect that this policy will be quickly dismissed when someone like Noam Chomsky comes around and decides to expose the right-wing slant in Wikipedias articles.
Sure, "discuss" all you want. But you wont be discussing with me and you wont get any response until you actually file bug reports and try to come up with solutions to the problems you find. That is what I consider to be constructive work and not just general hand-waiving. Not long ago there was an article called 30 days with Ubuntu posted on Slashdot. It detailed problems the author found in Ubuntu Linux. That is useful information and inspired me to submit a few patches to fix the authors problem. Judging by the number of bug reports submitted each day to popular free software projects, it seems others are too capabable of constructively discuss and help Linux improve.
Yours and this articles authors complaining, however, is dead weight. There is nothing I can do about a complaint such as "geek developed UI's." The reason those UI's look "geek developed" is because not enough people have taken the time to constructively critisize them. As a developer, there is nothing I'd like to hear more than constructive feedback on my UI's. But as commens such as that it is "wild assed" does not help.
That aside, the article is off-base in my opinion. WiFi seems more likely to become a boost to cellular usage - expanding networks and lowering costs for providers. (IE: They combine their cellular service to work with WiFi VOIP - when a customer is in WiFi range, calls go over cheaper VOIP - when no WiFi is available it goes cellular.)
How do you price it? If I have a WiFi capable device loaded with VOIP software that I connect either via my own, or an open access point to someone else using a similar setup, there is no reasonable way for carriers to extort money from me. The do not control the network and they do not control my use of it. That is what scares the shit out of them. There is no way out for them except for forcing manufacturers to not add WiFi support to their devices. Which is the exact strategy the carriers by large are using. So far it has worked because manufacturers are wholly dependent on carriers to sell their phones.
he majored in marketing alright, it's really obvious since for most people a 30 mm cube vs a 10 cm cube must be like a 1:1000 comparison although roughly it's only 3 times as small
... and you did not major in mathematics. :)
That will never ever happen. Why?
It would be to fun.
If they released Starcraft for the DS, everyone would buy it. Everyone would play it forever and ever. They would then enjoy that game so much that they would not have to buy new games. Nowadays, studios do not make hard and challenging games because they do not want to keep people occupied. Instead they make games that last for X numer of hours, where X is the smallest number possible while still making the customer believe it got its moneys worth.
You can keep on dreaming but there will never be any good RTS for the DS or a challenging chess game either for that matter.
Today if you want. In fact yesterday. The only reason for this to be done in China is that in any civilised country the public will torch the lab doing this and they will be right to do so. In fact this will be one of the very few cases where I will happily side up with the animal rights people.
5 01_020501_roborats.html/. Except the target animal was mice instead of pigeon. People were not torching that lab and they will not torch this one.
The exact same of research has been done in the State University of New York. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0
Tibet has more Chinese than Tibetan inhabitants. Second, what are the odds that a bird flu virus that mutates so that it can infect from human to human would spread all around the world and include China? Those odds are pretty high.
One must wonder how you ever managed to even SURVIVE ten years ago before SUV:s became en vogue. One must also wonder why you do not purchase a farm tractor which seem to be exactly the kind of vehicle your heavy duty tasks require.
Not only that, but he could also view any email correspondence by that judge, which could have included sensitive court material.
Show me a judge who handles sensitive court correspondence by e-mail and I'll show you a judge I dearly want to smack in the face really, really hard.
Quite a few companies use internal mail servers to handle sensitive material. As long as the emails are not routed through public mail relays on the internet, there is nothing wrong with it.
Do you think American FBI agents are the only people in the world who knows how to catch file sharers? Or that there is so little technical know-how in Swedish organizations that we really need Americans to help us? It is not, Swedish cops are just as good at using computers as American cops are (if not better). Maybe they could use some help in improving their interrogation techniques, but they sure as hell do not bring Russian FSB agents over. The real reason why they invite the FBI has nothing to do with training.
What the big fuss is about, is that the Swedish police is tacitly agreeing that it will follow FBI:s and MPAA:s anti-piracy policies and do their dirty work for them. Which means do everything they can to shut down thepiratebay.
Yes dammit! Advertising has a huge impact on the content no matter which media is used. If ads are used to fund Wikipedia, Wikipedia becomes dependent on selling ads. Just like the publishing industry. When was the last time you read a trustworthy product review in a magazine? Never, ever? Magazines depends on their advertisers, their advertisers will not advertise if their products are given bad reviews. So magazines do not give shitty products bad reviews because they are afraid of losing their advertisers.
Have you seen leftist or Socialist papers with ads? There are almost ZERO ads in such papers. Not because they do not desperately want ads, they do, it is just that advertisers have realized that ads in such magazines do not sell. An ad for McDonalds next to an article about their abysmal labor practices is no good. That is why Wikipedia articles like this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofellatio will never ever have an ad next to it.
Just because Wikipedia is authored by a huge community does not mean it will not be tainted by ads. It will be just as tainted as every other ad-featuring media.
When it comes to bias, Wikipedia is just as gullible as very other published work in the world. If you have an author write a book, then it is very unlikely that that book will not be colored by the authors bias. If you have ten authors to a book, you get their ten biases. If you have a million authors, well, you get the mean of their million biases in the book.
That one million authors that Wikipedia has, is not a randomly distributed sampling of humankind. Most people do not have access to computers and those that do, do not speak English. Instead, Wikipedias authors come from mostly American middle-class youths with enough time on their hands to contribute to Wikipedia. There is nothing inherently bad with that, but it means that the bias is shifted towards an American point of view. Americans, naturally, have an American point of view. If you research the articles about the Iraq war, you will find that their bias have changed alot since 2003. Just like the American view of the war has changed alot since then. Or if you know some foreign languages, you can consult articles about the Iraq war in a non-English language. Not suprisingly, there will be some stunning differences on how what information is provided.
The standard response from Wikipediaists is that Wikipedia has a "neutral point of view" rule, meaning that articles should only contain facts and that all "views" should come from attributed sources. But such a rule totally misunderstands what bias is all about. Bias is all about EXCLUDING information that harms your bias and INCLUDING information that favors it.
So, Wikipedia is not what "Humanity Has to Say," it (the English version) is what Wikipedia contributors have to say. You are able to read a lot of great and factual things about maths, physics, medicine and other hard sciences. So please do not accept Wikipedia as an unbiased source for any topic that may be biased, it is not.
It could very well be. Or it could be that the drug is mis-designed. In Sweden, when a doctor prescribes a drug, he or she must clearly describe how the drug is used and ensure that the patient understands the instruction. When the patient then collects the drug at a pharmacy, the pharmacist must once again clearly communicate to the patient how to use the drug. And to boot, in the package for every drug there is an instruction sheet written in an easy to understand language. Really, when going to the doctor you are treated like a complete tool, until you have proven yourself otherwise. The reason is ofcourse that even tools need medication and needs to be shielded from disastrous mistakes.
Perhaps BofA's system is fundamentally flawed, but I don't see you offering anything else.
I do not work for BofA, but if I was, I would suggest that they supply every user with a personal electronic access key. Then even if the phiser gets hold of the users password he or she can not access the acount without the access key. In fact, I find it pretty strange that any banking site would rely solely on user entered security tokens.
It was not to hard to guess that that would be the very first response to this article. It is very typical for techies to expect users to use the system as the system was designed. That is not what happens in the real world. The usage of the system is equivalent to the system itself. If the usage of it is flawed, then the system, too, is flawed.
Many systems require you to change your password once a month or more often. Of course, the password must not be based on an English word and must contain both uppercase and lowercase letters and digits. Is it then a user failure when every other user forgets their password? No! It is the system that is faulty.
Therefore Bank of Americas system is faulty, most password based systems are infact faulty. It is not an acceptable excuse to put the burden on the user. It is a cop out. We are techies, we should make stuff work. It is our job.
Just too bad a few of us were saying things like this were going to happen since back in the 70's. It's just unfortunate that we had to have an acceleration period in the last 10-20 years to solidify the problem. And too bad the delicate cycle of the Earth has been damaged permanently as a result of man's greed and quest for senseless power and control. Actually it is even worse than that. Some of us have beening saying things like this will happen for over 150 years. Marx predicted that the future would either bring a global Socialist revolution leading to the overthrow of Capitalism or that the world would be doomed due to Capitalistic exploitation of natural resources. Unfortunately, Capitalism is still here, and it seems more likely that the last Capitalist will be suffocated when there is to much carbon dioxide in the air to be able to breath than that something will be done about the ecological problems.
I take it you have not graduated from Slashdot Trolling 101 yet?
There is taxes on every value transaction. When you work, your employer pays you a set amount of money and a percentage of that goes to the government (the community, that is). No mutually-beneficial transaction is lost because you claim a yearly salary of 35k so that you can pay 15k in taxes instead of a salary of 20k if there would have been no taxes. Part of the transaction is just re-routed through the state so that those to poor to make mutually-beneficial transactions themselves still can live a decent life.
There is absolutely nothing inherently unfair with paying income tax. If there was no tax there would be no state and there would be anarchy. Would you rather prefer that?
Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere. Transport infrastucture is (or should be) a government problem.
Indeed! Almost everywhere where there is a functional mass transit system, it is heavily subsidized by the government. For example, the cost of laying rails, mainting trains and digging tunnels are much greater than the direct revenue a metro system ever could produce. The indirect revenues on the other hand; less traffic congestion, less pollution, easier access for people and a more attractive place to live is greater than the costs. A store pays tax to the government. The government builds cheap mass transit. The store gains back more than it payed in taxes because with the cheap mass transit it can attract more customers. Everyone wins.
Thank you Timbaland, this is a really great argument against buying music. I'll make good use of it to convice the few that I know that still buy music occasionally. First, commerical music is obviously crap since they have to "steal" their music. Second, if it is not immoral for producers to "steal," then why on earth should any consumer feel guilty for taking it back?
The list is pretty biased towards US-based companies. In most other Western countries you have five weeks of vacation and maximum of eight hours of labour each day. Plus good job security so that you can not be fired just because the boss dislikes you. And if you do get fired or quit, there is unemployment insurance money you can take out so that you do not have to starve while you look for a new job. With that in mind, I doubt that any US company could be "best," because when it comes to benefits, the US is centuries behind the rest of the Western world.
It works both ways. Those who say that the new Office interface suck because it is different, are also saying that Linux suck because it too, is different.
Oh really? Then I suppose you want Bono to stop talking about dropping the Thirld World Debt? Or Michael Moore about what is wrong with the US? Or Brad Pitt about global warming? Or Susan Sharandon about the war in Iraq? Or Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Ray Romano, Martin Short, Ben Stiller and Jack Black, Tom Hanks about Global Warming?
Yes, they aren't saying anything that activists and scientists have not already said for decades. But celebrities are, for right or wrong, something people listen to. And what they have to say is, generally, more well-thought out, smarter and far less corrupted by Capitalism than what politicians say.
I'm always skeptical about people that tell others to shut up. Often it just means they have nothing worthwhile to say themselves.
Bla bla bla.
The EU employs 1700 translators full-time, translating 1.7 million pages each year into seventeen different languages. You tell me that an organization that big, that spends so many resources accommodating for people who don't want to read English (which most EU documents originally are written in), can't accommodate for Linux users??
It is my tax money that feeds the beast. They damn fucking sure have an obligation to make it work for me!
AD to LDAP not likely to be much trouble? Then your experience is different from mine..
The recommended way to switch over an AD to Linux, is to setup Samba to host file shares and LDAP to do the authentication. Setting up Samba itself is fairly easy. It is the different and weird ways in which Windows clients connects to the shares that will cause trouble. You will need to analyze the log files very closely because very minor errors in your setup will cause clients to be unable to connect for very strange reasons. You will have to learn about machine accounts and all the problems they can cause you.
Also, AD:s most often use ACL:s. There is no equivalent in the Linux world but you have to be content with the simple user and group settings available in the *nix world. So if your AD uses more advanced access control features you probably wont be able to replicate them in Linux. Sure, you could try using the Extended Attributes that some distros use. But that is yet an unproven technology and you shouldn't rely on it working.
Then you will run into character encoding problems, but that should be fixable. Just select the correct character set so that the filenames look correct in Windows and let your Linux clients (if you have any) see the corrupted filenames.
Setting up LDAP could be pretty painless. Just learn the very weird syntax ldapsearch and other LDAP directory querying tools use. It is the smb-ldap-tools package that will cause problems. It is a bunch of Perl scripts that are supposed to simplify setting up Samba/LDAP, but they are fairly buggy.
Doing all this isn't impossible and most of the problems are possible to solve (except for the ACL one). But it is not easy, and the resulting environment will NOT be identical to a pure Windows AD environment. I have done it for a small company and it took me roughly one month. In the end they stayed with their AD. Mostly for two reasons. First, Samba+LDAP does things different from AD. It is not worse, but it doesn't behave exactly like an AD. Second, where the HELL do you find a Samba/LDAP specialist to administer it and how much do you pay him or her?