Installing OOo easily shouldn't be an issue for ANY OS - don't make excuses....
And please, let's not flame over which system installs things the best. Last I checked Linux users still have to worry about dependancies, patched kernels, and/or editing scripts to get shit to work. EVERY OS has issues.
Try Mepis, it's the least painful Linux install I've ever done. Upgrading it is a little more difficult because it uses Debian unstable and they just pushed KDE 3.2. Soon enough Mepis like installs will be stable and the rule rather than the exception. As it is, you can comment out the unstable deb source and run just fine. Mepis comes with a fine firewall, open office, Koffice, GIMP and sorts of other great treats.
As for centralized directories, the choice is yours. The MIT system looks like the best, but I'm not qualified to say. I simply know that there are many ways to do it without any help from those blood suckers in Redmond.
As for flames, your language towards OO for not being able to predict M$ BS was very harsh. You said:
That doesn't forgive the designers, though, who have access to per-user environment variables, per-user home directories and common areas to store information as defined in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
...[details, details]...
Minor programming changes to look for these environment variables would let OO be multi-user and secure on current and supported versions of Win32. How hard is that?
If what you say is true, it's not hard at all and you should expect these things to be rolled into OO shortly. The whole purpose of OO is to give people a way to get their data out of the Redmond Roach Motel. It is embracing M$ junk and will continue to follow each little step that is not protected by a stupid patent for something lame that everyone else has been doing for decades.
Expecting the OO team to predict what oddball methods M$ would chose is unreasonable. Calling the lack of clairvoyace "unforgivable" and acting as it it were lazy is a flame.
Check the forums - it works as long as your users understand how to do a small install on login.
Not acceptable here. I have 24 computers in our labs. No student 'owns' a computer - they sit where there is space. So what, they're supposed to do a quick install everytime they log in to a new computer?
This kind of thing was worked out long ago on Unix platforms and there are even crude similar solutions for winblows. A portable home directory with preferences that follow the user login is the best answer here. Microsoft has finally come up with that for 2003, but you have to be careful or all user settings get coppied to every machine - what you have now. I suggest you look into this before your workstations need new 120 gig hard drives to hold all of those skeleton files.
Don't blame OO for working with M$'s pathetic limitations and oddball junk. 2003, despite it's name was only released a few months ago. It will take some time for everyone else to play catch up with the strange way M$ does things. In the very short term M$ Office might have some short term advantage here, but they still suck when you compare the total system offerings to Unix solutions that were working as long as 10 years ago. DEC, Sun and others had the multi user thing nailed down with hardware that would be laughed at today. Free software has adopted those best of class solutions. M$ is doing what it can to patch users into what is essentially a single user mode kernel and file system. It's not OO's fault that Microsoft does things so poorly.
If you can't afford winblows server and you have not looked into complete free software replacements to that M$ junk, you are shortchanging yourself and your students. MIT manages to offer all the comercial propriatory junk you want over there Athena system. There are better ways of running a lab than swollowing M$ junk whole.
You present two cases where free software is the answer, a growing business and a place with stagnant needs. Both instances save money and frustration moving to free software.
In the case of a growing business, using OO on new machines saves the cost of M$ office even if they decide that the OS is worth the $90 it costs on each box. The cheapest solution is to grab something like Mepis, which has both KDE's excellent M$ network client and OO loaded and working well. Moving down to XP home or professional will cost you a few hundreds more in OS and hardware costs and leave you without an office suite and many other usefull programs. Moving all the way down to MS OS + Office will cost you about $500 extra per machine and then some for extra hardware and leave you without pdf printing ability but primed for virus attack.
The case of stagnant demand is more than met by free software. Older M$ OS explode, there's no helping it. Microsoft's complex registry system combined with dll hell are fatal design characteristics. When that happens you are forced to recover data with another machine, but then you have a choice. You can spend 15 minutes installing Mepis, or you can spend a few hours installing M$. Yeah, tell me about partimage or ghosted systems. Those work great if all you have is one or two identical computer systems in your office - fat chance. In the real world, it's much easier to put on something like Mepis than it is to host dozens of ghost images and keep track of all the propriatory licenses you will have to use. The absolute worse case is the most typical, some poor drone gets to spend a day tracing down half a dozen CDs, keys and reboots. They will be lucky if all the CDs and floppies they need still work. The easy solution is Mepis, which has all the tools you need to integrate seemlessly into a Winblows network.
The case where the winblows "server" explodes and needs to be rebuilt is one that you did not mention, but is probably the most compelling case for free softare out there. Samba and friends can provice all sorts of great services that cost big M$ $s.
there are a lot of people out there that need them and use them.
Especially in a genuine corporate office situation, it's really interesting to see the uses that people put the various MS Office apps to. Those extra features really do come in handy for them.
The macros are a big part of it - lots of office workers aren't programmers,
Yeah, I've worked in one of those corporate offices. Those macros and spreadsheets were the source of never ending heartache and pain. Some poor co-op continuously was used to fix the junk and the results were never wonderful. Macros and other "power user" features are the easiest thing for Microsoft to break when it's time to force the upgrade train down the tracks. The formatting was broken by so much as changing printers. The more of that shit you use, the more pain you suffer.
In short, M$'s tools proved unusable. The time wasted on these tools by those who actually wanted to use them was astounding and most people quit using them and returned to the most primative time wasting M$ way because it took less time than getting burt with macros that broke. Only fanboys continued to waste their time that way.
The free software world has much better alternatives, real tools. Any fortune 500 company would be much better off hiring a few free software gurus to implement these tools for them.
I don't even want to think about some of the nasty spreadsheets filled with macros that had evolved. The one guy I knew who really made use of those had to keep his old computer on change out two years ago. He also had the damn thing dialing out to gather information! It was a dissaster information and security wise. He had no set of test data, no means of checking the accuracy of data imported through all it's methods, he had to look over all of it. One day that nasty is going to screw up in a stubtle way and he's going to miss it and give the wrong information to regulators. UHG!
Apart from being inflammatory, this question sets up a false dichotomy, which presupposes that fileswappers help innovation. Yet this is far from proven, given that almost all of the files shared by fileswappers are the same pop culture materials produced by the conglomerates.
You got proof of that?
The whole purpose of file swapping is to get stuff you can't find easily. Saving $20 and a drive accross town for content you only want 1/10th of is a secondary consideration. Getting that recording of a concert that will never in a million years be worth some RIAA lackey's time and promotion dollar is the primary use.
Push is dying fast. Given time, people's taste veers away from top 40 and back to what people naturally want rather than what some dork in Hollywood thinks will make the most money. Song, dance and arts existed long before mass production and people will continue to sing, dance and make artwork long after mass production is ruled by the few who have been able to make a quick buck. No money, no push, much less garbage, the world will be a better place.
That's odd, I've been running windows 2000 since it came out and I haven't had to flatten and re-install once, nor has my system beem compromised once. Why is this? Because the problem is STILL between the keyboard and the chair.
Do you know why? To prevent a flood of lawsuits.....
If I remote into your box, and I hose it, then the company I am doing support for may be on the hook.
So what's WUS (Windows Update Services) all about? Also, the dummies at COX did backdoor people's systems so they could remote into it and "fix" problems. It was a colosal failure because Windoze services were unreliable. Registry hacking is bullshit. The registry is a God-Awful, unspecified piece of mixed binary and text horror that is as easy to break as changing one wrong bit, and then your computer is hosed and won't boot. SSH is a proven and working tool, and the free software packaging tools, apt, yast, and rpm simply rock. The remote user can change out anything without too much concern. Microsoft would like to have this work, they just can't get it up. Their remote access relies of the highest level services, are bandwith intesive, noisy and tend to flake out. Worse, it's hard to fix a M$ machine even if you are sitting right next to it with a working machine, software and the whole WWW for reference because too much is hidden and undocumented.
Having the customer push the button instead of the tech provides that veil of denialbility
Nonsense. While I have no doubt that Microsoft denies all responsibility, there's no way for a tech to do that.
What maters is what the customer thinks. When you go out there, you have do get results or you're out! That's why vendors need to be dumping
windoze left and right. It gets broken way too easily, it never worked very well in the first place and it's imposible to fix in a reasonable way.
Looks like a M$ fanboy losing his temper or being paid to look like they are. Tut, tut.
Please tell me you don't believe any of what you've just said otherwise i'm going to have to kill myself right-fucking-now.
Keep your head but, yes, I believe it.
Tell me, what exactly is to stop these same dialers from operating on a linux machine?
OK, I'll tell you. The three things that make it very difficult for free software to have Windoze type problems are:
Good Design
Variety
Code Quality
First, sound design. With free software all hardware is controled by the kernel running as root. This makes it much harder for malware to do things it should not. You might be able to trick my browser, but you won't get permision to run my modem very easily. Good design also makes it harder for other people to make my machine do anything at all. My mail clients don't call processes automatically because someone sent me a sound file. I have to save the file or tell my client to do that. My OS does not have files that I can't see or erase, so clean up is much easier to. Windoze is a single user OS with lots of band-aids and very poor hardware control and software that does things it should not.
Then again, you have no idea what software I'm running so you don't know how to craft the thing that breaks me. Sure, I'm unusual and post screenshots of my desktop, so you might be able to take me out personally, but outside the M$ monoculture you are not going to be able to craft a 21k Venerial Bisease that creams the internet. There are simply too many options available with too many versions within each option.
Worse for Billy boy, the number of holes in free software is low due to PEER REVIEW.
All three of these things greatly reduce your ability to own my machine with worms. A Linux, Solaris, OSX or BSD user has to try very hard to make their computer something that can be broken. Windoze gets broken automatically and regularly and the problem is not going to be solved with anything less than a fresh start: AV, Firewalls, blocked ports, draconian email and software restrictions have all proven inefective. The problem is not on the operator's side of the keyboard, it's the big fat trap that's been set by Billy inside the machine.
Don't think Billy's not trying. I'm sure he'd give me a nickle if I could craft a work to take out so much as 5% of the world's free computers. I can imagine he's got teams of people in India working on it. It's not going to work.
The proof is easy to see. Windoze machines get burnt all the time. BSD, Linux, Mac, OS/2, Solaris and other OS don't. Free software runs most of the web and sends most of the worlds email. The targets are all there and very high profile. When they run Microsoft, they get nailed. When they run anything else, life is much easier for them.
Now, that did not hurt did it? Install Mepis or some similar software at your place of work today. Make yourself root and lock the others out if you don't trust them. Your job will be soooooooooooooo much easier.
You are absolutly right. The "problem" with the internet is not that it works well! The problem is that most people are running insecure crap. The answer is not to criple people's ability to exchange information freely, the answer is to use the right tool for the job. People servicing computers see it all day long, Windows is broken not the internet.
Dial up users with Windoze get hosed just as fast as "broadband" users and have additional risks. They use the same email, IM, and browsing software and they get just as poluted. They will wait longer to get less information, but they will wait as long as it takes because they have to. The automated root kits will get them while tyey are trying to browse CNN and the email worms come with their email just like those for broadband. The only difference is that they have to go someplace to get a software fix because they don't have the time to research and download one. Dial up users also have uniqe problems, porn dialers and disconect malware. Porn dialers ring up charge lines in the middle of the night so the user recieves $500 phone bills at the end of the month. Hang up programs hang up the user frequently so that they have to wait for a reconnect. Go dialup! Porn dialers are more common than you think and commercial software may even be using the technique to gather information.
Windows sucks. It's designed to control and screw the user. Information exchange and user functions are secondary goals to money making in Redmond.
Don't blame the user, help them out. Commercial software vendors bombard them with BS and make life difficult for free software users. They are constantly inventing new file formats and abusing patent law to make sure free implementations don't exist. While there are free alternatives for everything worth while, the average user does not know this. Nor is the average user in a position to do the research it takes to purchase reasonalbe devices that will work. If you are clever, you will see this as a chance to make money for yourself!
You don't have to screw your neighbor to make money.
The whole point of Debian is to have software that everyone can use. The reason it is so powerful is because it is so free. As you noticed, the distribution system rocks. Debian mirrors are everywhere because Debian is intentionaly free and anyone can run one, even you. Right now, the newbie does need help with installs. That's nothing new and that's why right thinking people have been doing installfests forever. What is new are distros like Knoppix and Mepis that are both based on Debian and free.
Have you tried a Mepis install? It runs like Knoppix off a CD and has a GUI installer right on the desktop. The job is done in 15 minutes.
I would just tremble at the thought of telling someone to type "kdesu kate" and having them browse to/etc and opeing up a file and make a chage with me.
Why bother? If you do things right, the end user knows their root password and has ssh turned on. Because they called you for support, they will trust you with that root password and you can just ssh into the box and fix it.
Of course, you might find yourself out of a job when 4 of 5 PC support technicians are suddenly not needed. That just means you will have to beat the street yourself and help all of these laggin legacy software users up to free software one business at a time.
iPod: Home Market
Madrake: Small to Medium Business.
The difference between the two, ironically, has been created by a company that ignores the difference. It is easy to say that hardware makers would have settled on more reasonable standards long ago if it were not for Microsoft's disruptive influence. Free software still has a hard time with cutting edge hardware used for entertainment. Through the greatest stupidity, Microsoft continues to push what ammounts to gamming systems at businesses of all sizes. Large and small companies are questioning the wisdom of using computers that can play the latest games but that are regularly broken by viruses written by 16 year olds. The business market also objects to all the spyware and Microsoft's unreasonable EULAs that essentialy grant them permission to use that spyware and install whatever they want whenever they want on "their" computers.
Eventually, this artificial distiction will fade but today, it makes sense to see the two markets as seperate and distinct. As Microsoft loses it's power to threaten hardware makers, we will see more of them releasing free software drivers and specs. Sooner or later, you will be able to play the latest games and not worry about some VB crap deleting all of your files. Today, it makes sense for business to chose free software that does what workers need it to do while home users fidget with little bitty DRM cripled music players. Me? I've got my music on ogg and play it on my Zaurus. You can see where things are going from there.
I think the dispute with SCO would have been settled a long time ago if everybody knew this was the last one. The problem is there will probably be hundreds or even thousands of these disputes in the future and the targets will be the companies with the deepest pockets. Even if the large vendors disclaim all responsibility initially, I do not think the customers will accept this from their vendors for very long.
Microsoft does have 50 suits against them. That's part of the reason they engineered this SCO bullshit. Our dirtbag is promissing us that there will be more of the same.
I doubt it because Micorsoft is dying. Microsoft has suffered billion dollar judgments because their actions have been so outrageous. They are going to lose every one of their suits and this will cost them plenty. They are going to be exposed as the author of the SCO litigation and slaped with anti-competitive fines and people are going to be jailed. Most importantly to Microsoft's bottom line, their products are being replaced in the marketplace by superior free alternatives. Without M$ money, there would be no SCO problem.
That's about the size of the loser. It's funny that he did not metion the embarising little bit about how his letter was leaked because someone thought he was a sleezebag and wanted to blow the whisle on him.
I particularly like how he tried to turn evidence of society's hatred of Microsoft into a proof that only Microsoft can exist as a provider of operating systems. Yep, there have been $500,000,000 and one billion dollar judgments against Microsoft for IP violatins. The size of the judgment reflects the outrage people felt against the company. Only a brainless marketing drone like him could think that outrage makes Microsoft and other IP dirtbags useful. The outrage is there because Microsoft helped invent the stupid legal framework we all suffer under, but have no problem screwing others out of their work. This SCO noise that Microsoft is making is going to create plenty of the above outrage which is going to rebound as multiple billion dollar anti-trust violations against SCO, Microsoft and this dirt bag.
you don't have to worry about missing email because they should be relaying through central mail servers.
Sooner or later, mail admins, the target will be you. Today, it's the "clueless" home user. Tomorrow, it will be the clueless admin at a small company. In the end it will be everyone but AOL/M$N/McDisneyNet.
All praise for Comcast. Comcast's actions will make blocking their clients redundant. This makes it so you won't, in the future, need a license to send email. As a cable subscriber, I want the ability to send my own mail, encrypted, by direct connection, just like IM can, thank you.
Doing things the other way fragments the net and sets up 99% of the world's "mail admins" for being fired because their company lost it's license to email.
put the network connection onto a quarantined sub-net where all the necessary virus removal tools were available.
Like I'd trust tools from Cox. When those idiots took over from Excite@home, they sent everyone a crappy win32 CD that rooted your machine with remote access tools and other spyware, obstensively to help their customers fix their broken PCs. It did not work, of course, because it simply introduced a new hole to exploit. The customer is better off at the local computer store where there's someone who has experience using the tools and is not interested in your surfing and TV watching habits.
Anti-virus tools for Windoze only go so far anyway. When a machine is rooted, the only answer is wipe and reload. It's impossible for anti-virus people to keep up with the worm writers and all the places they hide crap in the registry. A real solution is to simply move people to free software.
Obviously, the automatic updating is a must. I also gave them the google toolbar with popup blocking (they've been unable to effectively learn Mozilla), and I use Spybot's Seek and Destroy software to protect against the more common malicious adware (immunize option). As a last-ditch failsafe, I can VNC into the PC with their permission and attempt to fix it that way.
Harrrr!
I gave my wife Debian. I can ssh into it and update it whenever I feel the need. It's easy, she loves it and I've never looked back. No more fucking around with Gator, attachments you can't get or any of those other Broken Windoze things that make for better billing than use. For those of you who don't want to spend too much time configuring things, install Mepis, God's gift of Debian for the masses.
It's getting better all the time.
yeah, that's a good one.
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Dude, everyone will have to pay me for their email!. Is it possible to be a Godhead without drugs? Nuts.
Please point to that story. The last time I read anything about Laura, French Major, of the Yankee Group, she was calling free software advocates "suicide car bombers". Quel s'pass, Laura?
Ahhhh! My host, EV1 has AiDS. I mean, "The customer is always right, even when he's a blithering idiot asking for a Windoze host," can only justify so much. I wonder if that fancy console or the scripting has a hands free reboot for all those 18 minute boxes they are burdening themselves with. I can only hope the dissease is contained quickly and does not do my poor host too much damange. It's apparent that the disease has already damaged their mental faculties. Why else would they have paid off the SCO extotion?
Every network aware product you install on 'doze may leave ports open. Any moderately experienced system admin knows this...
"network aware", that's great spin on crap that phones home and listens on random ports without telling you. Great of you also to mention how this helps worms propagate.
How about giving the man the benifit of the doubt and telling him what applications might be listening to 1723? He already knows that pptp or something is litening. What he needs to know is how to turn the shit off. My recomendation is, as always, to avoid M$ junk in the first place.
Look at the simpler case where the "plane" falls straight down and doesn't glide at all then ask yourself if it can recover the energy required to get it back to its original altitude. Obviously it can't.
Right, a simple test case is a good way to prove the concept. So let's do it!
Let's immagine a very simple baloon that only picks itself up and then falls down. We will cheat a little by having compressed H/He available on the ground. We will imagine our baloon has some structural weight, W, and that it's large enough to have bouyancy to lift that W. Our baloon must have a pump and a tank inside so that the boyancy can be reduced so the baloon can decend. The only energy we need, then, is enough energy to reduce the volume of H/He enough to descend. The energy available is mgh, or Wh the weight times the height. If, like most baloons, we can take it to the edge of space there should be plenty of energy available to compress our H/He. The only practical problem is capturing that energy. So, how much energy would we need to capture?
A 5Kg mass taken to 10,000m would give us about half a million joules. Givent the relative densities of air and H/He, we will need between 4 and 5 cubic meters of gas to lift 5Kg. It would take, roughly, 250,000 joules to compress that volume by half and give you 2.5 Kg of downward force. Oh dear, at 10,000m this is looking like a wash out. Fortunately, manned balloon flight can get to 30,000m, so this is theoretically possible. Just don't try to do it like this
Hats off to Fedora and Debian based distros like Knoppix or Mepis for making networking work out of the box. Can you say that about Microsoft? No, you can't. The average user can not install a basic M$ desktop. Networking, especially network printing are way too difficult for the average user too. Those are "Advanced" topics for "Admins" who will take $75/hr to fix it in some way the user will never fathom. When it breaks, and it will, they take more money and blame the user for not spending enough on virus protection.
Free software is not perfect, but you have to compare apples to apples here. Any user who can figure out M$ networking can do just as well with free software.
If he thinks Fedora and CUPS are bad, let him wade into someone else's Windoze network sometime. Think Aunti-T is going to be able to figure out what work group she belongs to? What the hell G: is? Netware? Ho ho ho! Jetway? Ahhh, ha ha ha ha! You're going to give her some floppies, a CDROM and expect that stuff to work when M$ changes the OS through updater? Does he really think M$ never leads you down blind alleys? NO FUCKING WAY! The average home user is unable to make Microsoft junk do any better, and those that can will do just as well with free software.
The folks at CUPS have made a fantastic printer interface and the people and KDE, Gnome, Debian and Fedora have all done a nice job making things easier to work with.
There's no reason to kick people around, things can and are getting better. Compare the ease of installing Mepis to setting up an XP box. This is how things are going. Free software is making great user interfaces.
The Luxury of Ignorance Eric is feeling is a complete ignorance of how bad things really are in the Microsoft world. It's easy to accept the market bable when you don't actually have that sofware sucking your life. The reality can be seen at any computerstore, people bring in broken Windoze boxes all day long. They are blown out with nasty worms, missconfigured underutilized standalone machines.
The whole "shared printer" thing seems like a hang over anyway. He's got ssh working, why on Earth would you not simply SHARE minx and snark through it? When me or my wife need to actually put something on dead trees, we log into the one machine with a configured printer, Star Office and other programs that might be useful for printing. I have not duplicated all of the work on all of my machines, because I did it once and don't need to do it again. The same kind of simple sharing also works for our single CD Burner, music machine and DNS. I don't want all of that software installed on all of my computers. This kind of networking is much easier and can be made simple by adding a nice little button to your desktop that logs you in and calls up a kdesktop from the other machine. Why not play up the underlying strength of an OS with real user accounts? Jet Direct and all of that looks to me like a leftover from single user computing.
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And please, let's not flame over which system installs things the best. Last I checked Linux users still have to worry about dependancies, patched kernels, and/or editing scripts to get shit to work. EVERY OS has issues.
Try Mepis, it's the least painful Linux install I've ever done. Upgrading it is a little more difficult because it uses Debian unstable and they just pushed KDE 3.2. Soon enough Mepis like installs will be stable and the rule rather than the exception. As it is, you can comment out the unstable deb source and run just fine. Mepis comes with a fine firewall, open office, Koffice, GIMP and sorts of other great treats.
As for centralized directories, the choice is yours. The MIT system looks like the best, but I'm not qualified to say. I simply know that there are many ways to do it without any help from those blood suckers in Redmond.
As for flames, your language towards OO for not being able to predict M$ BS was very harsh. You said:
That doesn't forgive the designers, though, who have access to per-user environment variables, per-user home directories and common areas to store information as defined in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
...[details, details] ...
Minor programming changes to look for these environment variables would let OO be multi-user and secure on current and supported versions of Win32. How hard is that?
If what you say is true, it's not hard at all and you should expect these things to be rolled into OO shortly. The whole purpose of OO is to give people a way to get their data out of the Redmond Roach Motel. It is embracing M$ junk and will continue to follow each little step that is not protected by a stupid patent for something lame that everyone else has been doing for decades.
Expecting the OO team to predict what oddball methods M$ would chose is unreasonable. Calling the lack of clairvoyace "unforgivable" and acting as it it were lazy is a flame.
This kind of thing was worked out long ago on Unix platforms and there are even crude similar solutions for winblows. A portable home directory with preferences that follow the user login is the best answer here. Microsoft has finally come up with that for 2003, but you have to be careful or all user settings get coppied to every machine - what you have now. I suggest you look into this before your workstations need new 120 gig hard drives to hold all of those skeleton files.
Don't blame OO for working with M$'s pathetic limitations and oddball junk. 2003, despite it's name was only released a few months ago. It will take some time for everyone else to play catch up with the strange way M$ does things. In the very short term M$ Office might have some short term advantage here, but they still suck when you compare the total system offerings to Unix solutions that were working as long as 10 years ago. DEC, Sun and others had the multi user thing nailed down with hardware that would be laughed at today. Free software has adopted those best of class solutions. M$ is doing what it can to patch users into what is essentially a single user mode kernel and file system. It's not OO's fault that Microsoft does things so poorly.
If you can't afford winblows server and you have not looked into complete free software replacements to that M$ junk, you are shortchanging yourself and your students. MIT manages to offer all the comercial propriatory junk you want over there Athena system. There are better ways of running a lab than swollowing M$ junk whole.
In the case of a growing business, using OO on new machines saves the cost of M$ office even if they decide that the OS is worth the $90 it costs on each box. The cheapest solution is to grab something like Mepis, which has both KDE's excellent M$ network client and OO loaded and working well. Moving down to XP home or professional will cost you a few hundreds more in OS and hardware costs and leave you without an office suite and many other usefull programs. Moving all the way down to MS OS + Office will cost you about $500 extra per machine and then some for extra hardware and leave you without pdf printing ability but primed for virus attack.
The case of stagnant demand is more than met by free software. Older M$ OS explode, there's no helping it. Microsoft's complex registry system combined with dll hell are fatal design characteristics. When that happens you are forced to recover data with another machine, but then you have a choice. You can spend 15 minutes installing Mepis, or you can spend a few hours installing M$. Yeah, tell me about partimage or ghosted systems. Those work great if all you have is one or two identical computer systems in your office - fat chance. In the real world, it's much easier to put on something like Mepis than it is to host dozens of ghost images and keep track of all the propriatory licenses you will have to use. The absolute worse case is the most typical, some poor drone gets to spend a day tracing down half a dozen CDs, keys and reboots. They will be lucky if all the CDs and floppies they need still work. The easy solution is Mepis, which has all the tools you need to integrate seemlessly into a Winblows network.
The case where the winblows "server" explodes and needs to be rebuilt is one that you did not mention, but is probably the most compelling case for free softare out there. Samba and friends can provice all sorts of great services that cost big M$ $s.
Yeah, I've worked in one of those corporate offices. Those macros and spreadsheets were the source of never ending heartache and pain. Some poor co-op continuously was used to fix the junk and the results were never wonderful. Macros and other "power user" features are the easiest thing for Microsoft to break when it's time to force the upgrade train down the tracks. The formatting was broken by so much as changing printers. The more of that shit you use, the more pain you suffer.
In short, M$'s tools proved unusable. The time wasted on these tools by those who actually wanted to use them was astounding and most people quit using them and returned to the most primative time wasting M$ way because it took less time than getting burt with macros that broke. Only fanboys continued to waste their time that way.
The free software world has much better alternatives, real tools. Any fortune 500 company would be much better off hiring a few free software gurus to implement these tools for them.
I don't even want to think about some of the nasty spreadsheets filled with macros that had evolved. The one guy I knew who really made use of those had to keep his old computer on change out two years ago. He also had the damn thing dialing out to gather information! It was a dissaster information and security wise. He had no set of test data, no means of checking the accuracy of data imported through all it's methods, he had to look over all of it. One day that nasty is going to screw up in a stubtle way and he's going to miss it and give the wrong information to regulators. UHG!
You got proof of that?
The whole purpose of file swapping is to get stuff you can't find easily. Saving $20 and a drive accross town for content you only want 1/10th of is a secondary consideration. Getting that recording of a concert that will never in a million years be worth some RIAA lackey's time and promotion dollar is the primary use.
Push is dying fast. Given time, people's taste veers away from top 40 and back to what people naturally want rather than what some dork in Hollywood thinks will make the most money. Song, dance and arts existed long before mass production and people will continue to sing, dance and make artwork long after mass production is ruled by the few who have been able to make a quick buck. No money, no push, much less garbage, the world will be a better place.
Bullshit
:D
So what's WUS (Windows Update Services) all about? Also, the dummies at COX did backdoor people's systems so they could remote into it and "fix" problems. It was a colosal failure because Windoze services were unreliable. Registry hacking is bullshit. The registry is a God-Awful, unspecified piece of mixed binary and text horror that is as easy to break as changing one wrong bit, and then your computer is hosed and won't boot. SSH is a proven and working tool, and the free software packaging tools, apt, yast, and rpm simply rock. The remote user can change out anything without too much concern. Microsoft would like to have this work, they just can't get it up. Their remote access relies of the highest level services, are bandwith intesive, noisy and tend to flake out. Worse, it's hard to fix a M$ machine even if you are sitting right next to it with a working machine, software and the whole WWW for reference because too much is hidden and undocumented.
Having the customer push the button instead of the tech provides that veil of denialbility
Nonsense. While I have no doubt that Microsoft denies all responsibility, there's no way for a tech to do that.
What maters is what the customer thinks. When you go out there, you have do get results or you're out! That's why vendors need to be dumping windoze left and right. It gets broken way too easily, it never worked very well in the first place and it's imposible to fix in a reasonable way.
Looks like a M$ fanboy losing his temper or being paid to look like they are. Tut, tut.
Please tell me you don't believe any of what you've just said otherwise i'm going to have to kill myself right-fucking-now.
Keep your head but, yes, I believe it.
Tell me, what exactly is to stop these same dialers from operating on a linux machine?
OK, I'll tell you. The three things that make it very difficult for free software to have Windoze type problems are:
First, sound design. With free software all hardware is controled by the kernel running as root. This makes it much harder for malware to do things it should not. You might be able to trick my browser, but you won't get permision to run my modem very easily. Good design also makes it harder for other people to make my machine do anything at all. My mail clients don't call processes automatically because someone sent me a sound file. I have to save the file or tell my client to do that. My OS does not have files that I can't see or erase, so clean up is much easier to. Windoze is a single user OS with lots of band-aids and very poor hardware control and software that does things it should not.
Then again, you have no idea what software I'm running so you don't know how to craft the thing that breaks me. Sure, I'm unusual and post screenshots of my desktop, so you might be able to take me out personally, but outside the M$ monoculture you are not going to be able to craft a 21k Venerial Bisease that creams the internet. There are simply too many options available with too many versions within each option.
Worse for Billy boy, the number of holes in free software is low due to PEER REVIEW.
All three of these things greatly reduce your ability to own my machine with worms. A Linux, Solaris, OSX or BSD user has to try very hard to make their computer something that can be broken. Windoze gets broken automatically and regularly and the problem is not going to be solved with anything less than a fresh start: AV, Firewalls, blocked ports, draconian email and software restrictions have all proven inefective. The problem is not on the operator's side of the keyboard, it's the big fat trap that's been set by Billy inside the machine.
Don't think Billy's not trying. I'm sure he'd give me a nickle if I could craft a work to take out so much as 5% of the world's free computers. I can imagine he's got teams of people in India working on it. It's not going to work.
The proof is easy to see. Windoze machines get burnt all the time. BSD, Linux, Mac, OS/2, Solaris and other OS don't. Free software runs most of the web and sends most of the worlds email. The targets are all there and very high profile. When they run Microsoft, they get nailed. When they run anything else, life is much easier for them.
Now, that did not hurt did it? Install Mepis or some similar software at your place of work today. Make yourself root and lock the others out if you don't trust them. Your job will be soooooooooooooo much easier.
Dial up users with Windoze get hosed just as fast as "broadband" users and have additional risks. They use the same email, IM, and browsing software and they get just as poluted. They will wait longer to get less information, but they will wait as long as it takes because they have to. The automated root kits will get them while tyey are trying to browse CNN and the email worms come with their email just like those for broadband. The only difference is that they have to go someplace to get a software fix because they don't have the time to research and download one. Dial up users also have uniqe problems, porn dialers and disconect malware. Porn dialers ring up charge lines in the middle of the night so the user recieves $500 phone bills at the end of the month. Hang up programs hang up the user frequently so that they have to wait for a reconnect. Go dialup! Porn dialers are more common than you think and commercial software may even be using the technique to gather information.
Windows sucks. It's designed to control and screw the user. Information exchange and user functions are secondary goals to money making in Redmond.
Don't blame the user, help them out. Commercial software vendors bombard them with BS and make life difficult for free software users. They are constantly inventing new file formats and abusing patent law to make sure free implementations don't exist. While there are free alternatives for everything worth while, the average user does not know this. Nor is the average user in a position to do the research it takes to purchase reasonalbe devices that will work. If you are clever, you will see this as a chance to make money for yourself!
You don't have to screw your neighbor to make money.
Have you tried a Mepis install? It runs like Knoppix off a CD and has a GUI installer right on the desktop. The job is done in 15 minutes.
Why bother? If you do things right, the end user knows their root password and has ssh turned on. Because they called you for support, they will trust you with that root password and you can just ssh into the box and fix it.
Of course, you might find yourself out of a job when 4 of 5 PC support technicians are suddenly not needed. That just means you will have to beat the street yourself and help all of these laggin legacy software users up to free software one business at a time.
Madrake: Small to Medium Business.
The difference between the two, ironically, has been created by a company that ignores the difference. It is easy to say that hardware makers would have settled on more reasonable standards long ago if it were not for Microsoft's disruptive influence. Free software still has a hard time with cutting edge hardware used for entertainment. Through the greatest stupidity, Microsoft continues to push what ammounts to gamming systems at businesses of all sizes. Large and small companies are questioning the wisdom of using computers that can play the latest games but that are regularly broken by viruses written by 16 year olds. The business market also objects to all the spyware and Microsoft's unreasonable EULAs that essentialy grant them permission to use that spyware and install whatever they want whenever they want on "their" computers.
Eventually, this artificial distiction will fade but today, it makes sense to see the two markets as seperate and distinct. As Microsoft loses it's power to threaten hardware makers, we will see more of them releasing free software drivers and specs. Sooner or later, you will be able to play the latest games and not worry about some VB crap deleting all of your files. Today, it makes sense for business to chose free software that does what workers need it to do while home users fidget with little bitty DRM cripled music players. Me? I've got my music on ogg and play it on my Zaurus. You can see where things are going from there.
I think the dispute with SCO would have been settled a long time ago if everybody knew this was the last one. The problem is there will probably be hundreds or even thousands of these disputes in the future and the targets will be the companies with the deepest pockets. Even if the large vendors disclaim all responsibility initially, I do not think the customers will accept this from their vendors for very long.
Microsoft does have 50 suits against them. That's part of the reason they engineered this SCO bullshit. Our dirtbag is promissing us that there will be more of the same.
I doubt it because Micorsoft is dying. Microsoft has suffered billion dollar judgments because their actions have been so outrageous. They are going to lose every one of their suits and this will cost them plenty. They are going to be exposed as the author of the SCO litigation and slaped with anti-competitive fines and people are going to be jailed. Most importantly to Microsoft's bottom line, their products are being replaced in the marketplace by superior free alternatives. Without M$ money, there would be no SCO problem.
I particularly like how he tried to turn evidence of society's hatred of Microsoft into a proof that only Microsoft can exist as a provider of operating systems. Yep, there have been $500,000,000 and one billion dollar judgments against Microsoft for IP violatins. The size of the judgment reflects the outrage people felt against the company. Only a brainless marketing drone like him could think that outrage makes Microsoft and other IP dirtbags useful. The outrage is there because Microsoft helped invent the stupid legal framework we all suffer under, but have no problem screwing others out of their work. This SCO noise that Microsoft is making is going to create plenty of the above outrage which is going to rebound as multiple billion dollar anti-trust violations against SCO, Microsoft and this dirt bag.
Sooner or later, mail admins, the target will be you. Today, it's the "clueless" home user. Tomorrow, it will be the clueless admin at a small company. In the end it will be everyone but AOL/M$N/McDisneyNet.
All praise for Comcast. Comcast's actions will make blocking their clients redundant. This makes it so you won't, in the future, need a license to send email. As a cable subscriber, I want the ability to send my own mail, encrypted, by direct connection, just like IM can, thank you.
Doing things the other way fragments the net and sets up 99% of the world's "mail admins" for being fired because their company lost it's license to email.
Like I'd trust tools from Cox. When those idiots took over from Excite@home, they sent everyone a crappy win32 CD that rooted your machine with remote access tools and other spyware, obstensively to help their customers fix their broken PCs. It did not work, of course, because it simply introduced a new hole to exploit. The customer is better off at the local computer store where there's someone who has experience using the tools and is not interested in your surfing and TV watching habits.
Anti-virus tools for Windoze only go so far anyway. When a machine is rooted, the only answer is wipe and reload. It's impossible for anti-virus people to keep up with the worm writers and all the places they hide crap in the registry. A real solution is to simply move people to free software.
Harrrr!
I gave my wife Debian. I can ssh into it and update it whenever I feel the need. It's easy, she loves it and I've never looked back. No more fucking around with Gator, attachments you can't get or any of those other Broken Windoze things that make for better billing than use. For those of you who don't want to spend too much time configuring things, install Mepis, God's gift of Debian for the masses.
It's getting better all the time.
Ahhhh! My host, EV1 has AiDS. I mean, "The customer is always right, even when he's a blithering idiot asking for a Windoze host," can only justify so much. I wonder if that fancy console or the scripting has a hands free reboot for all those 18 minute boxes they are burdening themselves with. I can only hope the dissease is contained quickly and does not do my poor host too much damange. It's apparent that the disease has already damaged their mental faculties. Why else would they have paid off the SCO extotion?
"network aware", that's great spin on crap that phones home and listens on random ports without telling you. Great of you also to mention how this helps worms propagate.
How about giving the man the benifit of the doubt and telling him what applications might be listening to 1723? He already knows that pptp or something is litening. What he needs to know is how to turn the shit off. My recomendation is, as always, to avoid M$ junk in the first place.
Right, a simple test case is a good way to prove the concept. So let's do it!
Let's immagine a very simple baloon that only picks itself up and then falls down. We will cheat a little by having compressed H/He available on the ground. We will imagine our baloon has some structural weight, W, and that it's large enough to have bouyancy to lift that W. Our baloon must have a pump and a tank inside so that the boyancy can be reduced so the baloon can decend. The only energy we need, then, is enough energy to reduce the volume of H/He enough to descend. The energy available is mgh, or Wh the weight times the height. If, like most baloons, we can take it to the edge of space there should be plenty of energy available to compress our H/He. The only practical problem is capturing that energy. So, how much energy would we need to capture?
A 5Kg mass taken to 10,000m would give us about half a million joules. Givent the relative densities of air and H/He, we will need between 4 and 5 cubic meters of gas to lift 5Kg. It would take, roughly, 250,000 joules to compress that volume by half and give you 2.5 Kg of downward force. Oh dear, at 10,000m this is looking like a wash out. Fortunately, manned balloon flight can get to 30,000m, so this is theoretically possible. Just don't try to do it like this
It is when the mail server is MS Exchange.
Free software is not perfect, but you have to compare apples to apples here. Any user who can figure out M$ networking can do just as well with free software.
If he thinks Fedora and CUPS are bad, let him wade into someone else's Windoze network sometime. Think Aunti-T is going to be able to figure out what work group she belongs to? What the hell G: is? Netware? Ho ho ho! Jetway? Ahhh, ha ha ha ha! You're going to give her some floppies, a CDROM and expect that stuff to work when M$ changes the OS through updater? Does he really think M$ never leads you down blind alleys? NO FUCKING WAY! The average home user is unable to make Microsoft junk do any better, and those that can will do just as well with free software.
The folks at CUPS have made a fantastic printer interface and the people and KDE, Gnome, Debian and Fedora have all done a nice job making things easier to work with.
There's no reason to kick people around, things can and are getting better. Compare the ease of installing Mepis to setting up an XP box. This is how things are going. Free software is making great user interfaces.
The Luxury of Ignorance Eric is feeling is a complete ignorance of how bad things really are in the Microsoft world. It's easy to accept the market bable when you don't actually have that sofware sucking your life. The reality can be seen at any computerstore, people bring in broken Windoze boxes all day long. They are blown out with nasty worms, missconfigured underutilized standalone machines.
The whole "shared printer" thing seems like a hang over anyway. He's got ssh working, why on Earth would you not simply SHARE minx and snark through it? When me or my wife need to actually put something on dead trees, we log into the one machine with a configured printer, Star Office and other programs that might be useful for printing. I have not duplicated all of the work on all of my machines, because I did it once and don't need to do it again. The same kind of simple sharing also works for our single CD Burner, music machine and DNS. I don't want all of that software installed on all of my computers. This kind of networking is much easier and can be made simple by adding a nice little button to your desktop that logs you in and calls up a kdesktop from the other machine. Why not play up the underlying strength of an OS with real user accounts? Jet Direct and all of that looks to me like a leftover from single user computing.