I think there are some good security and policy management reasons for Windows 7 - just none worth the expense and risk of an Enterprise migration.
Look, XP is SO OLD, you can't install it from a CD-ROM on new hardware! It can't even find your SATA drive, without crippling it in BIOS. Patching it to a minimum acceptable level takes hours. This is mitigated for slipstreamed corp images, but the situation is still bad, and only going to get worse.
The real fact is this: Microsoft completely blew leadership - the only thing they needed to ensure continued market dominance. Now, large-scale IT is faced with two almost unacceptable alternatives. Even MS friendly shops begin to spit and bluster.
It used to be "anybody but Microsoft"; a call that waited vainly for an answer. We now hear about consumerisation of IT. This may as well be rendered "EVERYBODY but Microsoft."
Of course, this is all in the context of the PC. Something that is now being further abstracted as "end-user computing".
I just picked up docky, a month ago. I still have the regular "task" panel at the bottom, on "auto hide". It's my insurance policy - I can fall back to using the desktop that behaves as I expect it to.
XP mode relocates and delays the problem. Now, instead of a difficult image to secure, manage and operate, each user has TWO difficult images to secure, manage and operate. Hey! Let's get all these critical, 0-Day Tuesday patches onto the client. Twice! Whoops!
"It seems that the XPmode is only activated at End-of-Month for this large population of users, and are patching reports have jumped from 4% to 23% failures - despite increasing our desktop security budget by a third. The reports from WSUS are crap, and the corporat compliance officer wants to know why I should keep my job."
Great going, using your SMB solution in a large corporation. That's why MS created MED-V. An enterprise-policy kludge/extension for the XP-Mode "admission-of-defeat" technology.
What happens to XP-Mode, when just having XP is a support policy failure in 15 months, or whatever?
IT is responsible for rollout/break-fix of OS. The departments have all wheedled their own applications into this "image" without proper governance or support chargeback. This occurred incrementally, but with momentum - like a snowball - over the last decade.
Now, the desktop is unmanageable - with every kludge from BigFix and Altiris to SCCM managing the convoluted issue by treating symptoms without realigning around the causes.
Rollout of a new OS is a mathematically infeasible proposition for most organisations of size. They have been burned at least once, and even with mature process, dread patch-Tuesday.
I remember the Window-manager-of-the-month club. Beginning with Enlightenment and finally sticking with Metacity, except when its Compiz that used to be Emerald.
I remember Big, default "CDE" panel, and the new, slim defaults. I remember difficulty in transition - but...
It was not so dramatic. Nautilus was always, pretty much a centrepiece - accessible as the Desktop - since the Andy Hertzfeld/Easel involvement 9-10 years ago.
This is crap navigation for phones/limited memory devices, shoveled up onto the full desktop. Unity looks to be... Much the same.
They make SURE that the upgrade path for their ERP front end brings the whole stack. Ten, if not HUNDREDS of millions. So. Not the kind of IT big spend that will be driven, in a down economy, by an IT sub-department's need for Windows licensing.
Trust me, Oracle knows that Windows desktop and MS Office revenue are Microsoft's lifeblood.
By holding off IE-next or FF compatible rendering for Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft, they hit Microsoft where it hurts - core revenues. They also reinforce the perception of Microsoft as a difficult upgrade, and a general poor technology choice.
Larry likes this. There are other vendors, playing this game, too. Some are MS partners, so work th angle with more ambiguity.
Try a phased roll-out to 20,000 desktops - with unknown compatibility in 4,000 departmental desktop applications.
You can see the regression issues that make a desktop roll-out of ANY new OS a suicidal risk for any IT organization of size. The answer they are grasping for? Consumerization of IT. Bring your own device, and we'll police connection/identity and document policy.
You see, people have already been bringing in their own Macs and Androids for a couple of years now - and "self servicing". This is how the IBM PC showed up next to the 5250 terminal, 25 years ago.
Gnome Shell - YES, I have tried this in Beta - is a real drag.
KDE4 was a cock-up. It's taken, what? 2 years to get back to everyday, usable? Gnome is great. The Gnome Shell will only take 1 year to do the same.
I don't know about Unity. But Gnome shell is a productivity / usability killer.
Example: Gnome Application Menu in the current Panel. Sure, it doesn't scale when you have 30 audio applications and as many "Internet" apps. But Gnome Shell? Only a handful available - in a non scrolling, apparently unconfigurable "top-ten" or so. None of which I chose to be displayed. Hey? Where'd WebHTTRack go?
Microsoft, despite "the success of Windows 7" cannot get it's friendliest, large enterprise customers to deploy Win 7 in full-scale roll-outs.
Not without grafting free deployments of MDOP (application virtualization solutions) and other "freebie" services of 50-100 K per customer. Not without deprecating XP - to the point it will not be supported in a few months.
They bought showcase deployments that displace XP. IE 6 is still needed for many ERP systems, and that is an incredible problem.
Microsoft is holding out the - again dubious - advantages of Windows 8? "And you want to be may latex salesman..."
The Zune store - which SLAVISHLY copies the entire iTunes / App store business and technology model - will be extendaed past Win Phone 7, right down to the desktop.
Pray that Intel gets here first. Then at least, you will have a federated ecosystem of public, corporate and commercial app stores, with flexible policy boundaries.
Otherwise, you are 4 years away from Palladium. Your PC is just like XBox 360!
My loyal readers may recall that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has some grotesque tentacles: the Information Awareness Office (IAO); TIA (Total Information Awareness, renamed Terrorism Information Program); and TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System).
It is commonly believed that in 2003 an irate American people forced the government to stop these Orwellian command-and-control police state operations--or did they?
Congress stopped the IAO from gathering as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized nexus for easy spying by the United States government, including internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and all other available data. The government's plan was to emulate Communist East Germany's STASI police state by getting mailmen, boy scouts, teachers, students and others to spy on everyone else. Children would be urged to spy on parents.
These layers of the mind control infrastructure were seemingly dead and buried. But was the stake actually driven through its evil heart? History leads us to believe that it was not.
Then shazam here comes the privacy killing juggernaut called Facebook.
Facebook, however, does what Chairman Mao, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler could not have dreamt of - it has a half billion people willingly doing a form of spy work on all their friends, family, neighbors, etc.--while enthusiastically revealing information on themselves. The huge database on these half a billion members (and non-members who are written about) is too much power for any private entity--but what if it is part of, or is accessed by, the military-industrial-national security-police state complex?
We all know that "he who pays the check, calls the shots," therefore; whoever controls the purse strings controls the whole project. When it had less than a million or so participants, Facebook demonstrated the potential to do even more than IAO, TIA and TIPS combined. Facebook really exploded after its second round of funding--$12.7 million from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager, James Breyer, was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital front established by the CIA in 1999. In-Q-Tel is the same outfit that funds Google and other technological powerhouses. One of its specialties is "data mining technologies."
Dr. Anita Jones, who joined the firm, also came from Gilman Louie and served on In-Q-Tel's board. She had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense. This link goes full circle because she was also an adviser to the secretary of defense, overseeing DARPA, which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.
But as bad as the beginning of Facebook is, the parallels between the CIA's backing of Google's dream of becoming "the mind of God," and the CIA's funding of Facebook's goal of knowing everything about everybody is anything but benign.
Furthermore, the CIA uses a Facebook group to recruit staff for its National Clandestine Service. Check it out if you dare.
Do not become a victim of this full frontal assault on your personal information. Think twice about putting your entire life on Facebook or by that matter on any social media site. None of it is ever private. Everything you put online stays online forever in a server farm somewhere for anyone to analyze you and the people you love. They do not care about your privacy at all and put great value on uncovering all they can about you. They have an agenda that will become more and more apparent to people as time goes by. Believe it or not there is a great change coming in our culture that many choose to be blind too. The mass loss of liberty and freedom we are experiencing is just a signal to the direction this is all going.
I miss not having to post replies to threads in this tiny, postage-stamp form field. "Quote Parent" is just not enough feature benefit to justify how ugly and unusable this has become!
Slashdot Mirror
For Dunhill over Pariament and Davidoff over Benson & Hedges!
Well. OLWM was there in the day - I just didn't know about /usr/openlook/bin back then.
Of course, FVWM in Magenta and Electric Blue. That's a classic look.
You don't eject PeopleSoft from your org, for a browser.
I think there are some good security and policy management reasons for Windows 7 - just none worth the expense and risk of an Enterprise migration.
Look, XP is SO OLD, you can't install it from a CD-ROM on new hardware! It can't even find your SATA drive, without crippling it in BIOS. Patching it to a minimum acceptable level takes hours. This is mitigated for slipstreamed corp images, but the situation is still bad, and only going to get worse.
The real fact is this: Microsoft completely blew leadership - the only thing they needed to ensure continued market dominance. Now, large-scale IT is faced with two almost unacceptable alternatives. Even MS friendly shops begin to spit and bluster.
It used to be "anybody but Microsoft"; a call that waited vainly for an answer. We now hear about consumerisation of IT. This may as well be rendered "EVERYBODY but Microsoft."
Of course, this is all in the context of the PC. Something that is now being further abstracted as "end-user computing".
I'm with you.
I just picked up docky, a month ago. I still have the regular "task" panel at the bottom, on "auto hide". It's my insurance policy - I can fall back to using the desktop that behaves as I expect it to.
XP mode relocates and delays the problem. Now, instead of a difficult image to secure, manage and operate, each user has TWO difficult images to secure, manage and operate. Hey! Let's get all these critical, 0-Day Tuesday patches onto the client. Twice! Whoops!
"It seems that the XPmode is only activated at End-of-Month for this large population of users, and are patching reports have jumped from 4% to 23% failures - despite increasing our desktop security budget by a third. The reports from WSUS are crap, and the corporat compliance officer wants to know why I should keep my job."
Great going, using your SMB solution in a large corporation. That's why MS created MED-V. An enterprise-policy kludge/extension for the XP-Mode "admission-of-defeat" technology.
What happens to XP-Mode, when just having XP is a support policy failure in 15 months, or whatever?
IT is responsible for rollout/break-fix of OS. The departments have all wheedled their own applications into this "image" without proper governance or support chargeback. This occurred incrementally, but with momentum - like a snowball - over the last decade.
Now, the desktop is unmanageable - with every kludge from BigFix and Altiris to SCCM managing the convoluted issue by treating symptoms without realigning around the causes.
Rollout of a new OS is a mathematically infeasible proposition for most organisations of size. They have been burned at least once, and even with mature process, dread patch-Tuesday.
I remember the Window-manager-of-the-month club. Beginning with Enlightenment and finally sticking with Metacity, except when its Compiz that used to be Emerald.
I remember Big, default "CDE" panel, and the new, slim defaults. I remember difficulty in transition - but...
It was not so dramatic. Nautilus was always, pretty much a centrepiece - accessible as the Desktop - since the Andy Hertzfeld/Easel involvement 9-10 years ago.
This is crap navigation for phones/limited memory devices, shoveled up onto the full desktop. Unity looks to be... Much the same.
You don't understand.
The ERP incumbents are guys like ORACLE.
They make SURE that the upgrade path for their ERP front end brings the whole stack. Ten, if not HUNDREDS of millions. So. Not the kind of IT big spend that will be driven, in a down economy, by an IT sub-department's need for Windows licensing.
Trust me, Oracle knows that Windows desktop and MS Office revenue are Microsoft's lifeblood.
By holding off IE-next or FF compatible rendering for Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft, they hit Microsoft where it hurts - core revenues. They also reinforce the perception of Microsoft as a difficult upgrade, and a general poor technology choice.
Larry likes this. There are other vendors, playing this game, too. Some are MS partners, so work th angle with more ambiguity.
Try a phased roll-out to 20,000 desktops - with unknown compatibility in 4,000 departmental desktop applications.
You can see the regression issues that make a desktop roll-out of ANY new OS a suicidal risk for any IT organization of size. The answer they are grasping for? Consumerization of IT. Bring your own device, and we'll police connection/identity and document policy.
You see, people have already been bringing in their own Macs and Androids for a couple of years now - and "self servicing". This is how the IBM PC showed up next to the 5250 terminal, 25 years ago.
Gnome Shell - YES, I have tried this in Beta - is a real drag.
KDE4 was a cock-up. It's taken, what? 2 years to get back to everyday, usable? Gnome is great. The Gnome Shell will only take 1 year to do the same.
I don't know about Unity. But Gnome shell is a productivity / usability killer.
Example: Gnome Application Menu in the current Panel. Sure, it doesn't scale when you have 30 audio applications and as many "Internet" apps. But Gnome Shell? Only a handful available - in a non scrolling, apparently unconfigurable "top-ten" or so. None of which I chose to be displayed. Hey? Where'd WebHTTRack go?
Microsoft, despite "the success of Windows 7" cannot get it's friendliest, large enterprise customers to deploy Win 7 in full-scale roll-outs.
Not without grafting free deployments of MDOP (application virtualization solutions) and other "freebie" services of 50-100 K per customer. Not without deprecating XP - to the point it will not be supported in a few months.
They bought showcase deployments that displace XP. IE 6 is still needed for many ERP systems, and that is an incredible problem.
Microsoft is holding out the - again dubious - advantages of Windows 8? "And you want to be may latex salesman..."
Windows will follow suit in just one version!
The Zune store - which SLAVISHLY copies the entire iTunes / App store business and technology model - will be extendaed past Win Phone 7, right down to the desktop.
Pray that Intel gets here first. Then at least, you will have a federated ecosystem of public, corporate and commercial app stores, with flexible policy boundaries.
Otherwise, you are 4 years away from Palladium. Your PC is just like XBox 360!
You mean your rainbow flag PNG and the photo taken on Sir Ian McKellan's lap didn't give it away? How about that status update: "You GO girl!"
Facebook conspiracy: Data mining for the CIA
My loyal readers may recall that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has some grotesque tentacles: the Information Awareness Office (IAO); TIA (Total Information Awareness, renamed Terrorism Information Program); and TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System).
It is commonly believed that in 2003 an irate American people forced the government to stop these Orwellian command-and-control police state operations--or did they?
Congress stopped the IAO from gathering as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized nexus for easy spying by the United States government, including internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and all other available data. The government's plan was to emulate Communist East Germany's STASI police state by getting mailmen, boy scouts, teachers, students and others to spy on everyone else. Children would be urged to spy on parents.
These layers of the mind control infrastructure were seemingly dead and buried. But was the stake actually driven through its evil heart? History leads us to believe that it was not.
Then shazam here comes the privacy killing juggernaut called Facebook.
Facebook, however, does what Chairman Mao, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler could not have dreamt of - it has a half billion people willingly doing a form of spy work on all their friends, family, neighbors, etc.--while enthusiastically revealing information on themselves. The huge database on these half a billion members (and non-members who are written about) is too much power for any private entity--but what if it is part of, or is accessed by, the military-industrial-national security-police state complex?
We all know that "he who pays the check, calls the shots," therefore; whoever controls the purse strings controls the whole project. When it had less than a million or so participants, Facebook demonstrated the potential to do even more than IAO, TIA and TIPS combined. Facebook really exploded after its second round of funding--$12.7 million from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager, James Breyer, was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital front established by the CIA in 1999. In-Q-Tel is the same outfit that funds Google and other technological powerhouses. One of its specialties is "data mining technologies."
Dr. Anita Jones, who joined the firm, also came from Gilman Louie and served on In-Q-Tel's board. She had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense. This link goes full circle because she was also an adviser to the secretary of defense, overseeing DARPA, which is responsible for high-tech, high-end development.
But as bad as the beginning of Facebook is, the parallels between the CIA's backing of Google's dream of becoming "the mind of God," and the CIA's funding of Facebook's goal of knowing everything about everybody is anything but benign.
Furthermore, the CIA uses a Facebook group to recruit staff for its National Clandestine Service. Check it out if you dare.
Do not become a victim of this full frontal assault on your personal information. Think twice about putting your entire life on Facebook or by that matter on any social media site. None of it is ever private. Everything you put online stays online forever in a server farm somewhere for anyone to analyze you and the people you love. They do not care about your privacy at all and put great value on uncovering all they can about you. They have an agenda that will become more and more apparent to people as time goes by. Believe it or not there is a great change coming in our culture that many choose to be blind too. The mass loss of liberty and freedom we are experiencing is just a signal to the direction this is all going.
You see, Bill wrote some girl's number on the back - and had it tucked away from Hillary.
That was the 90's - you know, before he could just add her to his Mobile.
Hey! Asynchronous! That's a design feature, right?
I already have 182 tabs opened...
Session recovery has replaced Bookmarks.
Why don't slashdot got vi bindings? Now you HAVE got me wishing!
/. is rejecting my Pref settings.
Probably something to do with AdBlock+, BetterPrivacy and Ghostery. :-)
I am not giving that up...
I miss not having to post replies to threads in this tiny, postage-stamp form field. "Quote Parent" is just not enough feature benefit to justify how ugly and unusable this has become!
Yes, but they no longer come from Harrod's, Mr. Fayed.
I love the Coward bit - but my reference is to what must be done with mad dogs.
"Men will never be free until the last policeman is strangled with the entrails of the last banker"
-- Diderot, or so.
Yes. In Canada they're Royal douches!