Is it so hard to imagine that in 5 years most people will have tablets that they dock into a larger monitor and use with gestures and dictation instead of mouse and keyboard?
Maybe for light work and consuming media (which is already what tablets are used for) but for heavyweight work a keyboard and mouse is going to be the interface of choice for a lot longer than 5 years. Do you think, for example, a Visual Studio developer is going to use gestures and dictation to write code, 5 years from now?
In any case, that's fine, that's why there's a tablet edition of Windows 8 - WinRT, and a separate phone-optimized version too. Having separate user interfaces optimized for different tasks is great. So why force the desktop edition to use the tablet interface? If they must bundle the tablet interface in with the desktop edition, why not make it optional, and just make the tablet interface the default on devices with a touchscreen?
To use a vehicular analogy: to keep up with the trend towards motorbike use and away from cars, Microsoft Automotive's latest model of car now has no steering wheel, pedals or seats. Instead it has handlebars, a throttle joystick, and forces you to lie in a prone position, but only when turning a corner.
I think I understand what they're trying to do by forcing the Metro launcher on desktop users, but I don't think they have fully grasped exactly what their bread-and-butter users think of that. It will hurt their reputation even more than the Vista debacle. It could even kill Metro altogether, and with it, Microsoft's plans for phones and tablets.
Its entirely possible that the mixture of mouse, keyboard, voice, touch, stylus with all the different forms of breaking off screens and keyboards is such an amazing computing experience that it becomes the future. Obviously disaster is more likely, but the vision here is rather bold and exciting.
Sure the vision of Metro is good, but the implementation of it on Windows 8 desktop, with the constant jarring between the familiar desktop and the Metro launcher/start menu, is going to send desktop Windows users mad. For most people the desktop Windows 8 Metro start menu is going to be the first time they've seen the Metro style, and so far it doesn't look like it works well there, not with the keyboard and mouse that most will be using it with.
My suspicion is that it will engender such a dislike for Metro that it will actually put people off Metro altogether - the exact opposite of what Microsoft are hoping will happen, and not good for WP8.
His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS"
Agreed. Way to screw your business up good and proper. I'm sure Kaspersky is still effective antivirus, but I sure as hell won't be evaluating it now. Remarkable how few corporate antivirus programs combine not creepy, effective, and reasonably resource-friendly. Now I'm down to F-Prot, Sophos, ESET and Avira. Clam's not bad (I use it at home and on mailservers) but I need something with realtime scanning, backed by a company that's been doing it for a few years.
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with
I am, I specify my company's antivirus solution. Kaspersky got crossed off my list to replace the McAfee crap we're dumping. I think I'm probably going to choose F-Prot, it's a highly competent product and I think my government screwed over the lovely little country of Iceland unnecessarily last year: I'd like to make some kind of amends for that.
The performance is an order of magnitude or five better? Honestly, unless you're on something with REALLY high latency, even raw, unmassaged X is frequently better than VNC performance-wise. NX however is hands-down the best performing remote display protocol I've seen. Decently performing (very usable for basic office tasks) full modern desktops when the link has 400ms+ latency and 10kbps bandwidth. It knocks ICA and RDP into a cocked hat.
The real issue, from a real business point of view, is that you would have to be totally fsckin' stupid to store your confidential company communication and data on Google's servers
Thus speaks someone who apparently has never been responsible for the email systems for a small company without a full-time IT department or its own rack. Who cares if the government or the hosting provider reads my email? What are they going to do with it? It's only competitors and casual snoopers that need to be worried about, and the risk for them is the same for hosted email as it is for in-house email given that the in-house email solution is going to have to be exposed to the internet anyway. In what real tangible way is the information security worse with a hosted solution, assuming the hosting provider is competent? In house email is going to take a lot more looking after though, and potentially a lot more infrastructure (servers, decent internet connection, reliable power) than the average small business has or can afford. This is assuming there is anyone in-house who has the skills to look after an email server, which in a lot of small businesses there isn't.
If you're large and important enough that foreign governments are going to be snooping on you and giving your data to their local competitors (think Airbus/Boeing) then sure, you want to be running your own email system. Or if you're a technical business in a highly competitive market. That's maybe 10% of all businesses though. The other 90% don't need the hassle.
They just investigate and report which is what you want in an investigative body.
What the NTSB doesn't normally do is report unsubstantiated rumor to newspapers about investigations they have no direct jurisdiction over. While their job is certainly to get to the truth of why a plane crashed, in the absence of good evidence they can spin their version whichever way they choose. Unsurprisingly they have chosen to tell the story in a way that is detrimental to the design philosophy of the A330, just as European investigators would tend to blame Boeing if a 767 crashed and no reliable evidence was available as to why it crashed. Being dedicated to the pursuit of truth and being political are not at all mutually exclusive you know.
I think you mean you can make it work with normal quality but you won't get linear scaling of performance as the number of processors increases... For prerecorded material you could do a first pass finding keyframes then encode keyframe-to-keyframe sections on different processors, which will probably scale much better as the processor's L2 cache will be useful.
Sure, there is genuinely a problem on the Linux desktop and that problem is that there are two major toolkits, two major desktops, two looks and feels (despite the KDE/Qt community's attempts to unify them, note that the GTK/GNOME community have done absolutely NOTHING in this regard). However, this problem is ENTIRELY the making of the GNOME community, who came into existence purely as a reaction to KDE and who frankly have been the fly in the ointment ever since. I appreciate their commitment to choice and the (now irrelevant) commitment to the Free Software Ideals but anyone with half a brain has been able to see for about a decade now that the division this has created has made the Linux desktop as a whole suffer overall enormously. To then see someone choose GTK as their toolkit (for a C++ app no less!) and then complain that there is no standardisation is so rich as to make me feel unwell. It's your fault in the first place, and now you are perpetutating it. Grow up, stop whinging, and next time don't make a bum choice and then whinge about it as if it was somehow not your fault.
Which is one of the many reasons I use KDE. Startup speed (KDE 4.2 vs. GNOME 2.26) is about the same on my Ubuntu jaunty box (about 15 seconds from login), but once the DE is booted, KDE apps are literally several times faster to start than the equivalent GNOME apps. e.g. Amarok starts in 2 seconds, while Rhythmbox (which is throughly inferior anyway) takes about 7. Konqueror starts in another couple of seconds, Arora also takes about 2 seconds, Firefox takes about 8 or 9. Once upon a time it used to be that GTK/GNOME apps started up faster, I don't know how they've buggered that up.
On my eee 1000 (with its slow pair of SSDs) I found that while CFQ gave the best average throughput, the noop IO scheduler gave me the best disk latencies and the best interactive performance, which IMHO is much more important on a netbook than raw throughput. I think the issue is that the netbook SSDs have such slow write speeds (and no write cache on the SSD) that any long sequential write freezes all other IO for obviously noticeable periods of time. All of the 'intelligent' IO schedulers in Linux reorder IO requests so that writes happen in one long sequential block if possible to avoid seeking, which is the right strategy for traditional Winchester disks and probably even SSDs with a decent amount of write cache, but wrong for simple, slow SSDs. CFQ isn't too bad as it tries to be fair to different processes asking for simultaneous IO so there aren't too many very long writes, but the anticipatory and deadline schedulers are really painful on my eee.
I'd just like to echo what a few other posters have suggested: stick with AD for now and migrate to Samba4 when it matures.
While you can certainly hook a Windows network up to OpenLDAP, FDS, or $OTHER_DIRECTORY_SERVER, you will end up spending far more time and effort (and hence money) than you save when you try and reimplement all the additional management functionality that is built in, in particular Group Policy. If you decide to skip the Group Policy functionality, you will lose all your hair, acquire several ulcers and otherwise age very quickly as your students end up with the run of the network.
Further, as long as your AD controllers (and you should have at least two for reliability, if you only have two physical servers to play with then virtualise them with Xen or ESXi, run an AD controller on each and then any other VMs you care as well) are ONLY AD controllers then you should find that they are relatively stable. AD has numerous flaws but setup right, it mostly just works, and is the key ingredient to making Windows clients behave sensibly.
The Novell directory stuff works well and retains the management functionality (and gives you some more too) but it still isn't a drop-in replacement and is rather expensive.
Samba4 will be a great drop-in replacement for AD but it's still some way away from being properly production-ready.
I live and work in South Manchester and I've setup and looked after a number of similar heterogeneous networks (with various authentication mechanisms) over the past few years. For a school I'm also happy to do a bit of consulting pro bono. Email me if you're interested: marmarama@gmail.com
This is just off the top of my head and it's been a while since I had to deal with this, so please don't lynch me if this isn't spot on.
The bug is in the file open dialog, which doesn't respect Group Policy settings for the 'Common File Open Dialog' because the Office team decided to reimplement the dialog.
The upshot of which is that you can right-click on files in the dialog and you always get the full range of options, including being able to run executables. IIRC it was fixed in Office 2003 with a separate set of Group Policy settings for the Office version of the dialog.
Of course, if you're implementing Group Policy properly, you should also be using a software restriction policy that will prevent Windows from running any executables that you haven't approved...
1. I use whatever provides the best return on investment, reduces my support load, is acceptable to my users, but most importantly gets the job done. Frequently, that's something written by Microsoft, but increasingly, it's not. It used to be that people bought Microsoft because it was supportable - you could get people to look after it much cheaper than anything else. I see a lot of entry-level CS graduates with plenty of open source experience now though, and the up-front software price is hard to beat - notwithstanding my own experience and preferences. People are also much more comfortable these days with web apps and hosted services, hence I've been looking at replacing Exchange and Outlook with e.g. the corporate Google Mail and Calendaring services. Almost every one of my users has a personal Hotmail, Yahoo or Google mail account that they're very happy using - many of them prefer it to Outlook for email.
2. If people can get their work done more quickly and with less fuss, the company can do more with the same number of people. That's surely an advantage over competitors who haven't tried to improve their productivity.
3. It will cost somewhat less to move to OO.org rather than MS Office 2007, by my estimates: the amount of training required is about the same, and the up-front cost of OOo is obviously less. So far it seems I might be able to use fewer support resources once people are comfortable with it. However, I can't really move to OOo because of the file format issues, even though it's getting better with each release of OOo and the (hopefully) gradual acceptance of ODF as a format.
I should probably add, having got slightly carried away with my last reply, that RTF doesn't come anywhere close to providing good enough fidelity - for the documents I have tried - between different word processors, I suspect because it's specified by one entity (Microsoft) and everyone else has to play catch-up. HTML and CSS, on the other hand are specified by a group of people all interested in the same outcome - interoperability. RTF also has no bearing on spreadsheet interop...
OOXML will probably have exactly the same issues as RTF, because it's specified in the same way.
Because the file format limitations are what (at least as far as I can see) are what keep the competitors from being viable alternatives.
I'm an IT manager by trade. I don't care who provides my company with software or what platform it runs on, as long as the business I provide IT for benefits from it and it is cost-effective, ideally giving me an advantage over my company's own competitors. The changes in UI between MS Office XP (which they're mostly using now), 2003 and especially 2007 are big enough that I have to retrain my users to use them, and frankly the cost of training my users to use 2007 is enough that I've been seriously considering moving them to OpenOffice.org.
However, the lack of a properly standardized file format prevents me from doing that. I have experimented with OOo with some of my users, and the biggest complaint (once I have trained them up a bit in OOo) I have is that.doc documents they are sent frequently don't look or print right, or they don't look right on the receiving end. If they can cope with that, I have found OOo gives me fewer support calls, primarily because the text rendering engine in OO Writer is more predictable than that in MS Word. Every few days I have to send someone to look at a user's Word document because the formatting does not work as they expect, particularly if the document contains columns or per-paragraph margins. In OO writer, those same documents behave exactly as expected. I can't understand how MS Word has got it wrong for so long - the bugs I see in Office XP are exactly the same in 2007. OO.org does it right, MS Word doesn't, and the only reason I can't reduce those support calls is that my users expect to be able to import and export external documents perfectly each time. There are similar issues with OO Calc vs. Excel also, particularly with regards to external data sources that Excel seems to forget about with no rhyme or reason, but which OO Calc gets right all the time, every time.
I know from experience with KOffice that I get better import - pretty much spot-on for the fairly complex documents my users create - from that into OO.org as ODF than I do Word documents into OO.org, so there must be something good about having a properly standardized file format. My conclusion therefore is that if MS Office had to support ODF, then MS would be forced to fix the bugs in Word and Excel rather than rely on their proprietary file format to keep competitors out and ignore the problems.
This is a similar situation with IE8 finally fixing long-standing bugs in order to pass the Acid 2 test, which is only possible by HTML and CSS being properly standardized.
My rather obvious point (that I thought everyone would understand) being that if everyone used a standard format, then there'd be proper competition, and that would make MS Office better. Forest, trees, spot the difference?
...even if it's a shame it's taken this long to get there. Pre-releases of Safari and Konqueror passed this almost exactly 3 years ago, and Opera's Presto engine wasn't far behind. The fact that Gecko has taken nearly as long to catch up as IE/Trident is disturbing, but they had their own self-inflicted issues to fix (XPCOM? ewww).
All of this can only mean web developers sleep more soundly at night, and more real work gets done. The IE developers can give themselves a big pat on the back for achieving something useful that will make everyone's lives better, like they used to do with IE3 and 4 and initial CSS1 support. Shame the management decided to slack off on IE development so long. Microsoft: intelligent geeks, ruined by management.
Now, on to Acid 3. IE8 is still clearly trailing everyone else by some distance and is probably going to play catchup for a while yet until they implement native SVG (think about the possibilities for Explorer and Office, that Apple, KDE and friends are just beginning to explore).
As an aside, think how good MS Office might be if they had this level of competition due to having to implement a proper Open Document standard not specified by them. Everyone would get more work done, would be fitter, happier, healthier and better, and Microsoft would probably still have the lion's share of the market. OOXML needs to die now, for everyone's sake, including Microsoft's.
Does anyone here work for USPS/FedEx/UPS/Your favorite delivery company? Does anyone here have a chicken farm, keep pigeons or otherwise tend to numerous avians?
If we want to defeat Microsoft properly and deliver ourselves into a Brave New World then we must discourage those people who are considering working at Microsoft to change their mind and work at more enlightened establishments.
To this end I propose a daily drop-off of bird guano at Microsoft Headquarters, and ideally anywhere a Microsoftie may ply their trade or their closest supporters may be.
This is the funniest thing I've heard since I last read xkcd (when my neighbours were doing a genius stand-up routine).
To put $100M back into SCO to keep it afloat, Microsoft and its supporters must be wetting themselves with fear. No-one in their right mind wastes $100M idly, people only do it out of irrational exuberance or extreme white-knuckle terror. Given SCO's performance lately I'm not minded to think it's exuberance.
Even as a Free Software Maniac I hadn't realised how well the war was going, I thought we still had 10 years to run before we owned the playing field. Now it looks more like 5.
Congrats Microsoft and co. for confirming you're 5 years from irrelevance - apparently you know better than we do.
(= the population can only be kept alive with food imports)
Which also holds true for the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and many other major industrialized nations. Note that the UK and particularly Norway are heavily dependent on oil to prop up their economies. However no-one is seriously suggesting that once the oil money runs out Norway is going to starve: they have a highly-educated population, excellent infrastructure, and everything else required to turn their hand to anything that's profitable. Much of this development (particularly the infrastructure) has happened thanks to sensible spending of the oil revenues while they still have them.
This is all that Libya is trying to emulate: while the going is good, invest in infrastructure and education, so that the country can diversify its economy and ride the wave when oil finally stops bringing in the euros. Buying low-cost laptops seems like a remarkably good idea as it's an investment in both infrastructure and education at once. It's a shame that some other major oil producing countries aren't following this path, but at least Libya seems to have the right idea now.
You could try the LinuxQuestions.org Awards - I think it's the closest thing to a proper annual survey of the free desktop users' community there is. OK, it's self-selecting and the users who vote in the polls obviously care a bit more about their desktop than most, or else they wouldn't be at the site voting. Still, it's the best there is so far.
And the result for the 2005 poll (taken late 2005/early 2006)? KDE: 64.86%, Gnome: 25.67%.
It's been this way for several years, and indeed, KDE has been consistently increasing its lead each year. Note that the voters aren't rabidly pro-KDE: Gnome-related apps do quite well in the individual app categories, e.g. Gaim gets more than double the vote of the second-placed Kopete in the messaging app category.
Just to put forward my own anecdote, where I work 4 out of 4 Linux/BSD desktops (as yet it's only the sysadmins who have migrated, the developers are still resolutely sticking with XP and it'll be years before we're ready to migrate the non-technical users) use KDE, including one used by a guy who used to post pro-Gnome trolls on Slashdot... he switched shortly after KDE 3.4 was released.
why has the UK been consistently entering shit songs and shit performers for several years straight? is this on purpose?
Because winning Eurovision means that that country gets to host it next year, which is extremely expensive. Rumours abound that Ireland's winning spree during the 1990's almost bankrupted RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. Winning is fine if you're some newly-independent state or if you're trying to promote your country to the world for tourism or political purposes. It's expensive but it gets you lots of coverage and mindshare of the European public. If your country is already established on the world map however, winning means spending a lot of money for negligible gain. Hence why most countries enter rubbish songs - they want to avoid winning if at all possible...
Some of the graphic effects (heat ripples etc.) require a DX9 video card so this is unlikely to work at all under Linux.
What are you talking about? The NVIDIA Linux drivers support the same OpenGL extensions as the Windows drivers, and they support the same set of GPUs - right up to the GeForce 6800. Why would an OpenGL-based game look any different between the two?
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Is it so hard to imagine that in 5 years most people will have tablets that they dock into a larger monitor and use with gestures and dictation instead of mouse and keyboard?
Maybe for light work and consuming media (which is already what tablets are used for) but for heavyweight work a keyboard and mouse is going to be the interface of choice for a lot longer than 5 years. Do you think, for example, a Visual Studio developer is going to use gestures and dictation to write code, 5 years from now?
In any case, that's fine, that's why there's a tablet edition of Windows 8 - WinRT, and a separate phone-optimized version too. Having separate user interfaces optimized for different tasks is great. So why force the desktop edition to use the tablet interface? If they must bundle the tablet interface in with the desktop edition, why not make it optional, and just make the tablet interface the default on devices with a touchscreen?
To use a vehicular analogy: to keep up with the trend towards motorbike use and away from cars, Microsoft Automotive's latest model of car now has no steering wheel, pedals or seats. Instead it has handlebars, a throttle joystick, and forces you to lie in a prone position, but only when turning a corner.
I think I understand what they're trying to do by forcing the Metro launcher on desktop users, but I don't think they have fully grasped exactly what their bread-and-butter users think of that. It will hurt their reputation even more than the Vista debacle. It could even kill Metro altogether, and with it, Microsoft's plans for phones and tablets.
Its entirely possible that the mixture of mouse, keyboard, voice, touch, stylus with all the different forms of breaking off screens and keyboards is such an amazing computing experience that it becomes the future. Obviously disaster is more likely, but the vision here is rather bold and exciting.
Sure the vision of Metro is good, but the implementation of it on Windows 8 desktop, with the constant jarring between the familiar desktop and the Metro launcher/start menu, is going to send desktop Windows users mad. For most people the desktop Windows 8 Metro start menu is going to be the first time they've seen the Metro style, and so far it doesn't look like it works well there, not with the keyboard and mouse that most will be using it with.
My suspicion is that it will engender such a dislike for Metro that it will actually put people off Metro altogether - the exact opposite of what Microsoft are hoping will happen, and not good for WP8.
His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS"
Agreed. Way to screw your business up good and proper. I'm sure Kaspersky is still effective antivirus, but I sure as hell won't be evaluating it now. Remarkable how few corporate antivirus programs combine not creepy, effective, and reasonably resource-friendly. Now I'm down to F-Prot, Sophos, ESET and Avira. Clam's not bad (I use it at home and on mailservers) but I need something with realtime scanning, backed by a company that's been doing it for a few years.
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with
I am, I specify my company's antivirus solution. Kaspersky got crossed off my list to replace the McAfee crap we're dumping. I think I'm probably going to choose F-Prot, it's a highly competent product and I think my government screwed over the lovely little country of Iceland unnecessarily last year: I'd like to make some kind of amends for that.
I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. Ho ho ho.
But what does NX have over VNC?
The performance is an order of magnitude or five better? Honestly, unless you're on something with REALLY high latency, even raw, unmassaged X is frequently better than VNC performance-wise. NX however is hands-down the best performing remote display protocol I've seen. Decently performing (very usable for basic office tasks) full modern desktops when the link has 400ms+ latency and 10kbps bandwidth. It knocks ICA and RDP into a cocked hat.
The real issue, from a real business point of view, is that you would have to be totally fsckin' stupid to store your confidential company communication and data on Google's servers
Thus speaks someone who apparently has never been responsible for the email systems for a small company without a full-time IT department or its own rack. Who cares if the government or the hosting provider reads my email? What are they going to do with it? It's only competitors and casual snoopers that need to be worried about, and the risk for them is the same for hosted email as it is for in-house email given that the in-house email solution is going to have to be exposed to the internet anyway. In what real tangible way is the information security worse with a hosted solution, assuming the hosting provider is competent? In house email is going to take a lot more looking after though, and potentially a lot more infrastructure (servers, decent internet connection, reliable power) than the average small business has or can afford. This is assuming there is anyone in-house who has the skills to look after an email server, which in a lot of small businesses there isn't.
If you're large and important enough that foreign governments are going to be snooping on you and giving your data to their local competitors (think Airbus/Boeing) then sure, you want to be running your own email system. Or if you're a technical business in a highly competitive market. That's maybe 10% of all businesses though. The other 90% don't need the hassle.
They just investigate and report which is what you want in an investigative body.
What the NTSB doesn't normally do is report unsubstantiated rumor to newspapers about investigations they have no direct jurisdiction over. While their job is certainly to get to the truth of why a plane crashed, in the absence of good evidence they can spin their version whichever way they choose. Unsurprisingly they have chosen to tell the story in a way that is detrimental to the design philosophy of the A330, just as European investigators would tend to blame Boeing if a 767 crashed and no reliable evidence was available as to why it crashed. Being dedicated to the pursuit of truth and being political are not at all mutually exclusive you know.
I think you mean you can make it work with normal quality but you won't get linear scaling of performance as the number of processors increases... For prerecorded material you could do a first pass finding keyframes then encode keyframe-to-keyframe sections on different processors, which will probably scale much better as the processor's L2 cache will be useful.
Sure, there is genuinely a problem on the Linux desktop and that problem is that there are two major toolkits, two major desktops, two looks and feels (despite the KDE/Qt community's attempts to unify them, note that the GTK/GNOME community have done absolutely NOTHING in this regard). However, this problem is ENTIRELY the making of the GNOME community, who came into existence purely as a reaction to KDE and who frankly have been the fly in the ointment ever since. I appreciate their commitment to choice and the (now irrelevant) commitment to the Free Software Ideals but anyone with half a brain has been able to see for about a decade now that the division this has created has made the Linux desktop as a whole suffer overall enormously. To then see someone choose GTK as their toolkit (for a C++ app no less!) and then complain that there is no standardisation is so rich as to make me feel unwell. It's your fault in the first place, and now you are perpetutating it. Grow up, stop whinging, and next time don't make a bum choice and then whinge about it as if it was somehow not your fault.
Which is one of the many reasons I use KDE. Startup speed (KDE 4.2 vs. GNOME 2.26) is about the same on my Ubuntu jaunty box (about 15 seconds from login), but once the DE is booted, KDE apps are literally several times faster to start than the equivalent GNOME apps. e.g. Amarok starts in 2 seconds, while Rhythmbox (which is throughly inferior anyway) takes about 7. Konqueror starts in another couple of seconds, Arora also takes about 2 seconds, Firefox takes about 8 or 9. Once upon a time it used to be that GTK/GNOME apps started up faster, I don't know how they've buggered that up.
On my eee 1000 (with its slow pair of SSDs) I found that while CFQ gave the best average throughput, the noop IO scheduler gave me the best disk latencies and the best interactive performance, which IMHO is much more important on a netbook than raw throughput. I think the issue is that the netbook SSDs have such slow write speeds (and no write cache on the SSD) that any long sequential write freezes all other IO for obviously noticeable periods of time. All of the 'intelligent' IO schedulers in Linux reorder IO requests so that writes happen in one long sequential block if possible to avoid seeking, which is the right strategy for traditional Winchester disks and probably even SSDs with a decent amount of write cache, but wrong for simple, slow SSDs. CFQ isn't too bad as it tries to be fair to different processes asking for simultaneous IO so there aren't too many very long writes, but the anticipatory and deadline schedulers are really painful on my eee.
I'd just like to echo what a few other posters have suggested: stick with AD for now and migrate to Samba4 when it matures.
While you can certainly hook a Windows network up to OpenLDAP, FDS, or $OTHER_DIRECTORY_SERVER, you will end up spending far more time and effort (and hence money) than you save when you try and reimplement all the additional management functionality that is built in, in particular Group Policy. If you decide to skip the Group Policy functionality, you will lose all your hair, acquire several ulcers and otherwise age very quickly as your students end up with the run of the network.
Further, as long as your AD controllers (and you should have at least two for reliability, if you only have two physical servers to play with then virtualise them with Xen or ESXi, run an AD controller on each and then any other VMs you care as well) are ONLY AD controllers then you should find that they are relatively stable. AD has numerous flaws but setup right, it mostly just works, and is the key ingredient to making Windows clients behave sensibly.
The Novell directory stuff works well and retains the management functionality (and gives you some more too) but it still isn't a drop-in replacement and is rather expensive.
Samba4 will be a great drop-in replacement for AD but it's still some way away from being properly production-ready.
I live and work in South Manchester and I've setup and looked after a number of similar heterogeneous networks (with various authentication mechanisms) over the past few years. For a school I'm also happy to do a bit of consulting pro bono. Email me if you're interested: marmarama@gmail.com
This is just off the top of my head and it's been a while since I had to deal with this, so please don't lynch me if this isn't spot on.
The bug is in the file open dialog, which doesn't respect Group Policy settings for the 'Common File Open Dialog' because the Office team decided to reimplement the dialog.
The upshot of which is that you can right-click on files in the dialog and you always get the full range of options, including being able to run executables. IIRC it was fixed in Office 2003 with a separate set of Group Policy settings for the Office version of the dialog.
Of course, if you're implementing Group Policy properly, you should also be using a software restriction policy that will prevent Windows from running any executables that you haven't approved...
1. I use whatever provides the best return on investment, reduces my support load, is acceptable to my users, but most importantly gets the job done. Frequently, that's something written by Microsoft, but increasingly, it's not. It used to be that people bought Microsoft because it was supportable - you could get people to look after it much cheaper than anything else. I see a lot of entry-level CS graduates with plenty of open source experience now though, and the up-front software price is hard to beat - notwithstanding my own experience and preferences. People are also much more comfortable these days with web apps and hosted services, hence I've been looking at replacing Exchange and Outlook with e.g. the corporate Google Mail and Calendaring services. Almost every one of my users has a personal Hotmail, Yahoo or Google mail account that they're very happy using - many of them prefer it to Outlook for email.
2. If people can get their work done more quickly and with less fuss, the company can do more with the same number of people. That's surely an advantage over competitors who haven't tried to improve their productivity.
3. It will cost somewhat less to move to OO.org rather than MS Office 2007, by my estimates: the amount of training required is about the same, and the up-front cost of OOo is obviously less. So far it seems I might be able to use fewer support resources once people are comfortable with it. However, I can't really move to OOo because of the file format issues, even though it's getting better with each release of OOo and the (hopefully) gradual acceptance of ODF as a format.
I should probably add, having got slightly carried away with my last reply, that RTF doesn't come anywhere close to providing good enough fidelity - for the documents I have tried - between different word processors, I suspect because it's specified by one entity (Microsoft) and everyone else has to play catch-up. HTML and CSS, on the other hand are specified by a group of people all interested in the same outcome - interoperability. RTF also has no bearing on spreadsheet interop...
OOXML will probably have exactly the same issues as RTF, because it's specified in the same way.
Because the file format limitations are what (at least as far as I can see) are what keep the competitors from being viable alternatives.
.doc documents they are sent frequently don't look or print right, or they don't look right on the receiving end. If they can cope with that, I have found OOo gives me fewer support calls, primarily because the text rendering engine in OO Writer is more predictable than that in MS Word. Every few days I have to send someone to look at a user's Word document because the formatting does not work as they expect, particularly if the document contains columns or per-paragraph margins. In OO writer, those same documents behave exactly as expected. I can't understand how MS Word has got it wrong for so long - the bugs I see in Office XP are exactly the same in 2007. OO.org does it right, MS Word doesn't, and the only reason I can't reduce those support calls is that my users expect to be able to import and export external documents perfectly each time. There are similar issues with OO Calc vs. Excel also, particularly with regards to external data sources that Excel seems to forget about with no rhyme or reason, but which OO Calc gets right all the time, every time.
I'm an IT manager by trade. I don't care who provides my company with software or what platform it runs on, as long as the business I provide IT for benefits from it and it is cost-effective, ideally giving me an advantage over my company's own competitors. The changes in UI between MS Office XP (which they're mostly using now), 2003 and especially 2007 are big enough that I have to retrain my users to use them, and frankly the cost of training my users to use 2007 is enough that I've been seriously considering moving them to OpenOffice.org.
However, the lack of a properly standardized file format prevents me from doing that. I have experimented with OOo with some of my users, and the biggest complaint (once I have trained them up a bit in OOo) I have is that
I know from experience with KOffice that I get better import - pretty much spot-on for the fairly complex documents my users create - from that into OO.org as ODF than I do Word documents into OO.org, so there must be something good about having a properly standardized file format. My conclusion therefore is that if MS Office had to support ODF, then MS would be forced to fix the bugs in Word and Excel rather than rely on their proprietary file format to keep competitors out and ignore the problems.
This is a similar situation with IE8 finally fixing long-standing bugs in order to pass the Acid 2 test, which is only possible by HTML and CSS being properly standardized.
My rather obvious point (that I thought everyone would understand) being that if everyone used a standard format, then there'd be proper competition, and that would make MS Office better. Forest, trees, spot the difference?
...even if it's a shame it's taken this long to get there. Pre-releases of Safari and Konqueror passed this almost exactly 3 years ago, and Opera's Presto engine wasn't far behind. The fact that Gecko has taken nearly as long to catch up as IE/Trident is disturbing, but they had their own self-inflicted issues to fix (XPCOM? ewww).
All of this can only mean web developers sleep more soundly at night, and more real work gets done. The IE developers can give themselves a big pat on the back for achieving something useful that will make everyone's lives better, like they used to do with IE3 and 4 and initial CSS1 support. Shame the management decided to slack off on IE development so long. Microsoft: intelligent geeks, ruined by management.
Now, on to Acid 3. IE8 is still clearly trailing everyone else by some distance and is probably going to play catchup for a while yet until they implement native SVG (think about the possibilities for Explorer and Office, that Apple, KDE and friends are just beginning to explore).
As an aside, think how good MS Office might be if they had this level of competition due to having to implement a proper Open Document standard not specified by them. Everyone would get more work done, would be fitter, happier, healthier and better, and Microsoft would probably still have the lion's share of the market. OOXML needs to die now, for everyone's sake, including Microsoft's.
Does anyone here work for USPS/FedEx/UPS/Your favorite delivery company? Does anyone here have a chicken farm, keep pigeons or otherwise tend to numerous avians?
If we want to defeat Microsoft properly and deliver ourselves into a Brave New World then we must discourage those people who are considering working at Microsoft to change their mind and work at more enlightened establishments.
To this end I propose a daily drop-off of bird guano at Microsoft Headquarters, and ideally anywhere a Microsoftie may ply their trade or their closest supporters may be.
Get collecting people!
This is the funniest thing I've heard since I last read xkcd (when my neighbours were doing a genius stand-up routine).
To put $100M back into SCO to keep it afloat, Microsoft and its supporters must be wetting themselves with fear. No-one in their right mind wastes $100M idly, people only do it out of irrational exuberance or extreme white-knuckle terror. Given SCO's performance lately I'm not minded to think it's exuberance.
Even as a Free Software Maniac I hadn't realised how well the war was going, I thought we still had 10 years to run before we owned the playing field. Now it looks more like 5.
Congrats Microsoft and co. for confirming you're 5 years from irrelevance - apparently you know better than we do.
Personally, I'd rather live in a violent, "free" society, where I'm free to do as I choose, then a "safe" society where I have no rights.
How about a society that strikes a sensible balance between the two extremes?
Or indeed where decent education and a strong societal identity and conscience allows the society to be both "free" and "safe"?
(= the population can only be kept alive with food imports)
Which also holds true for the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and many other major industrialized nations. Note that the UK and particularly Norway are heavily dependent on oil to prop up their economies. However no-one is seriously suggesting that once the oil money runs out Norway is going to starve: they have a highly-educated population, excellent infrastructure, and everything else required to turn their hand to anything that's profitable. Much of this development (particularly the infrastructure) has happened thanks to sensible spending of the oil revenues while they still have them.
This is all that Libya is trying to emulate: while the going is good, invest in infrastructure and education, so that the country can diversify its economy and ride the wave when oil finally stops bringing in the euros. Buying low-cost laptops seems like a remarkably good idea as it's an investment in both infrastructure and education at once. It's a shame that some other major oil producing countries aren't following this path, but at least Libya seems to have the right idea now.
You could try the LinuxQuestions.org Awards - I think it's the closest thing to a proper annual survey of the free desktop users' community there is. OK, it's self-selecting and the users who vote in the polls obviously care a bit more about their desktop than most, or else they wouldn't be at the site voting. Still, it's the best there is so far.
And the result for the 2005 poll (taken late 2005/early 2006)? KDE: 64.86%, Gnome: 25.67%.
It's been this way for several years, and indeed, KDE has been consistently increasing its lead each year. Note that the voters aren't rabidly pro-KDE: Gnome-related apps do quite well in the individual app categories, e.g. Gaim gets more than double the vote of the second-placed Kopete in the messaging app category.
Just to put forward my own anecdote, where I work 4 out of 4 Linux/BSD desktops (as yet it's only the sysadmins who have migrated, the developers are still resolutely sticking with XP and it'll be years before we're ready to migrate the non-technical users) use KDE, including one used by a guy who used to post pro-Gnome trolls on Slashdot... he switched shortly after KDE 3.4 was released.
why has the UK been consistently entering shit songs and shit performers for several years straight? is this on purpose?
Because winning Eurovision means that that country gets to host it next year, which is extremely expensive. Rumours abound that Ireland's winning spree during the 1990's almost bankrupted RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. Winning is fine if you're some newly-independent state or if you're trying to promote your country to the world for tourism or political purposes. It's expensive but it gets you lots of coverage and mindshare of the European public. If your country is already established on the world map however, winning means spending a lot of money for negligible gain. Hence why most countries enter rubbish songs - they want to avoid winning if at all possible...
Some of the graphic effects (heat ripples etc.) require a DX9 video card so this is unlikely to work at all under Linux.
What are you talking about? The NVIDIA Linux drivers support the same OpenGL extensions as the Windows drivers, and they support the same set of GPUs - right up to the GeForce 6800. Why would an OpenGL-based game look any different between the two?