Everybody burns out in this kind of support role. Do yourself a favor - do something else for a while, and examine why you burnt out - bad support from your mgmt, too long in the trenches, built up feelings of being a target, trying to support a lousy product? The list goes on, and many times it's just a bad combination of things. Get out for a while, 'cause being as exasperated with users as you seem to be will provoke the very reaction you're complaining about in your callers.
Yeah, good post thar...nice to see someone spending more time than it takes to jerk a knee when composing their comments...and IMHO Anonymous Coward is right on target with the practical reasons why any poor nation would consider open source. It doesn't hurt that M$'s general manager in China, a Chinese woman, quit the company and wrote a best-selling tell-all book that blasted Microsoft's business practices. (Some cross-cultural misunderstanding apparently played into it). So M$ may not get 'kicked out', but the emphasis on home-grown software by the gov't certainly tilts the playing field.
Your elite sneer doesn't impress me. The history of computing is also about the abstraction of complexity so that more people can utilize it. What's wrong with making Linux easier to install, with more drivers available, and configuration utilities? The persons who are using a computer for keeping the books, or as a teaching tool for their children, or as a POS system linking several small stores over dial-up lines, all equally deserve a rich store of utilities and interfaces that ENABLE people to *use* computing technology, and that's something people who make the distinction of who's worthy of participating in the Linux Movement and who's not just make me shake my head.
Linux and the open source movement isn't the only threat to MS; if you reread my post you might note I'm not talking just about Linux. Take Sun's Java - would you agree with me that MS tried to co-opt this effort when they changed their licensed code to run best on MS platforms, contrary to the intent of Java's creators? And co-opting takes many forms - look at the thread on this forum about the failure of a poster's girlfriend's Navigator browser to access some sites that take advantage of MS technology. That technology flies against the open nature of the Web - leaving it to MS, the Web will be an MS fiefdom, dependent on MS led technological initiatives. That's co-opting the Web - the open source movement has no great defenses against a determined and moneyed enemy.
Ignorance of history = repetition of history I love it when I see posts from people like this "right-wing" tech support guy and most (not all) of the equally simplistic responses. Always good for a chuckle, although I do admit that I dispair of people with a single idea in their heads, and from that one idea flows every other point of view. Why is it that people who spend most of their lives living breathing and sleeping technology think they know anything about economic theory or anti-trust theory because they had to take Econ 101? MS has succeeded because of tactics which shut out any technology they can't buy or co-opt to keep MS on top. Politics has nothing to do with it; economic behavior designed to control marketplaces has everythnig to do with it.
Microsoft's behavior precludes the option of not using MS products for most commercial and home offices. They have indeed prevented you from having any viable choices simply by their dominance in the marketplace - a dominance born not from superior technology, but from superior marketing, timing, and business acumen. If Apple hadn't had their collective heads up Steve Job's ego, they could have posed a credible alternative; Unix failed a long time ago as a desktop alternative because of the lack of a reasonably intuitive interface, and when one came along, even just a shell over the incrediably lame DOS, users stampeded to Windows. One of the things all you Linux heroes should do is get a little more respect for the average user - they're trying to do a job, and they can do that job easier and faster with a decent GUI - being a techie doesn't make you more attractive, sexier, or even smarter than the average user that most of you look down upon. Unix lost the battle that you're trying to make up for by reason of it's command line interface and obscure and idiosyncratic programs to do the simplest thing. A techno-follower like MS was able to win because YOU lost the war with your arrogance. Now get out there and listen to the people you claim to be fighting for, else none of this will matter a bit. Get on the side of the user.
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Everybody burns out in this kind of support role. Do yourself a favor - do something else for a while, and examine why you burnt out - bad support from your mgmt, too long in the trenches, built up feelings of being a target, trying to support a lousy product? The list goes on, and many times it's just a bad combination of things. Get out for a while, 'cause being as exasperated with users as you seem to be will provoke the very reaction you're complaining about in your callers.
Yeah, good post thar...nice to see someone spending more time than it takes to jerk a knee when composing their comments...and IMHO Anonymous Coward is right on target with the practical reasons why any poor nation would consider open source. It doesn't hurt that M$'s general manager in China, a Chinese woman, quit the company and wrote a best-selling tell-all book that blasted Microsoft's business practices. (Some cross-cultural misunderstanding apparently played into it). So M$ may not get 'kicked out', but the emphasis on home-grown software by the gov't certainly tilts the playing field.
Your elite sneer doesn't impress me. The history of computing is also about the abstraction of complexity so that more people can utilize it. What's wrong with making Linux easier to install, with more drivers available, and configuration utilities? The persons who are using a computer for keeping the books, or as a teaching tool for their children, or as a POS system linking several small stores over dial-up lines, all equally deserve a rich store of utilities and interfaces that ENABLE people to *use* computing technology, and that's something people who make the distinction of who's worthy of participating in the Linux Movement and who's not just make me shake my head.
Linux and the open source movement isn't the only threat to MS; if you reread my post you might note I'm not talking just about Linux. Take Sun's Java - would you agree with me that MS tried to co-opt this effort when they changed their licensed code to run best on MS platforms, contrary to the intent of Java's creators? And co-opting takes many forms - look at the thread on this forum about the failure of a poster's girlfriend's Navigator browser to access some sites that take advantage of MS technology. That technology flies against the open nature of the Web - leaving it to MS, the Web will be an MS fiefdom, dependent on MS led technological initiatives. That's co-opting the Web - the open source movement has no great defenses against a determined and moneyed enemy.
Ignorance of history = repetition of history I love it when I see posts from people like this "right-wing" tech support guy and most (not all) of the equally simplistic responses. Always good for a chuckle, although I do admit that I dispair of people with a single idea in their heads, and from that one idea flows every other point of view. Why is it that people who spend most of their lives living breathing and sleeping technology think they know anything about economic theory or anti-trust theory because they had to take Econ 101? MS has succeeded because of tactics which shut out any technology they can't buy or co-opt to keep MS on top. Politics has nothing to do with it; economic behavior designed to control marketplaces has everythnig to do with it.
Microsoft's behavior precludes the option of not using MS products for most commercial and home offices. They have indeed prevented you from having any viable choices simply by their dominance in the marketplace - a dominance born not from superior technology, but from superior marketing, timing, and business acumen. If Apple hadn't had their collective heads up Steve Job's ego, they could have posed a credible alternative; Unix failed a long time ago as a desktop alternative because of the lack of a reasonably intuitive interface, and when one came along, even just a shell over the incrediably lame DOS, users stampeded to Windows. One of the things all you Linux heroes should do is get a little more respect for the average user - they're trying to do a job, and they can do that job easier and faster with a decent GUI - being a techie doesn't make you more attractive, sexier, or even smarter than the average user that most of you look down upon. Unix lost the battle that you're trying to make up for by reason of it's command line interface and obscure and idiosyncratic programs to do the simplest thing. A techno-follower like MS was able to win because YOU lost the war with your arrogance. Now get out there and listen to the people you claim to be fighting for, else none of this will matter a bit. Get on the side of the user.