This is what I did. I setup a Windows box that acts as a document converter. Incomming emails are scanned for.doc's by procmail which sends off the word doc to the windows machine. A VB script takes that file, opens it in word, and causes word to save it as RTF. The rtf is sent back to procmail which adds it back as a second attachement. So now each email has both the original.doc file, and an rtf version (you want to keep the doc file for various reasons (sometimes you lose info.)
I also setup drop-box directories for employees to put old word docs and a vb script generates an RTF version.
You can do the same with other "common" proprietary file formats. We also have a few windows boxes setup that can be accessed via VNC to run various legacy / proprietary apps (I thought about writting a proxy that finds the next "free" machine automatically."
While this doesn't totally eliminate windows, it cuts it way down. The document converter alone eliminates 95% of the reason to use Windows.
For people with a larger need for Windows, VMWare can be useful.
I don't think it's realistic to target grandparents at this point. Business suffering under the constant threat of the BSA, hundreds of thousands of dollars a years in license costs, viruses / worms that shut down their networks IS a good target market. Government is another. Do YOU really want a large chunk of YOUR tax dollars going to line Bill G's pockets?
If we took only 1% of the money that governments / business spend on MS licenses and used that to fund open source software, we could offer a viable replacement to MS in 1 year.
That's load balancing. I can do the same thing with any load balancing tool with any web server farm. You can use the proxy feature of apache for this, squid, F5, Cisco local director, Foundry ServerIron, etc., etc., etc.
You can also use things like Oracle parallel server on the back end for HA (High Availability / failover).
Clustering, load-balancing, and HA are very different things, but are concepts that can be used together depending on the situation.
In a web farm, if a node dies, does the controller restart the request on a new server or does it just stop sending requests to the dead one? In a true HA cluster or HA load-balanced server farm, it would. Typical load balancers don't do this.
The needs of a web farm are quite different than a computational cluster as well. In a computational cluster, it's common for the task to need to share data between nodes. In a web farm, each server usually stands alone (sessions bring up various issues.)
You don't need a cluster for this. Just a few scripts. Frankly, it's easy to just let each machine rip through several CD's worth at a time in batches.
I was ripping my entire collection of CD's... Picked up a cheap 56X reader which can dump a CD onto the hard disk in about a minute. The results were dumped into a series of directories, one for each "ripper" machine. These machine accessed the shared directory via NFS and save the resulting ogg file into the main repository tree.
I just setup a script on each node to start ripping whatever it found in it's "node" directory automatically. Simple.
Setting up a cluster for doing simple shit like this is a waste of time IMHO.
A cluster is fine for HARDWARE based issues with fault tolerance, but the nex worm / bug / blue screen will kill the entire cluster.
In an exchange cluster, you even get to replicate a corrupted database!!! Cool!
A cluster of fragile unstable software that is full of security flaws and bugs and costs big bucks (Advanced Server, which is the version that clusters is Very expensive) isn't something to bother with.
XP is the one with all these privacy problems. 2000 is the last one that is even somewhat reasonable.
I use Linux for almost everything, and 2000 only when I need to use my scanner, download pics from my camera, visio, convert evil word docs to an open format (since none of the importers work worth a damn) etc.
Agree that the 9X/ME lines are crap. Not stable at all.
Yes, this does mean blocking some legit mail. That's the breaks. If only 1% of email is legit, then you need to make a decision. For me, I have NEVER received legit mail from china. Pretty cut and dried there...
The Taliban did nothing to deal with bin Laden. Eventually every single country broke off diplomatic relations with them. The rest is history. Same goes for ISP's and even countries that don't deal with the spam problem.
While translation is a nice idea, I don't think it's worth my time to learn 20 different asian languages just so I can complain about spam. I'm sure not going to pay someone to translate for me to complain about spam. So what OTHER constructive steps can you come up with that are REALISTIC?
The bottom line is that if asia doesn't want to get firewalled, they need to get agressive about closing open relays. Note that I don't descriminate against asia, I descriminate against EVERYONE that sends me spam. This include many european and south american netblocks / TLD's too.
Basically I don't get ANY legit email from these countries. Not blocking them would be silly.
MS has ALWAYS had a monopoly on the OS for x86 machines. Everyone else that tried to compete was crushed save Linux which can't be crushed due to the lack of a company behind it. I don't believe the court set a particular date that MS became a monopoly, and since they have always been one on the x86 platform, I suppose that any company could file a suit if they do so within the legal time limits.
Now that Netscape is all but dead as a browser, don't expect to see much "innovation" from MS.
The fact that there is no effective competition IS a bad thing. By the way, notice how the price of Windows keeps going up with each new release / upgrade? Do you REALLY think that the browser is free? Hmm. I'll believe that it's free when there is a version for Linux.
Netscape was out and thriving before Win95 was a product. You also seem to have forgotton Bill's statments that he wanted to crush netscape.
One thing MS does is find a product that is doing well, and say "We should do that too. Let's see if we can buy them, and if the price isn't right, we will do our own (crappy) version and crush the competition."
Word and Excell SUCKED compared to wordperfect and 123 / quattro when they came out. Due to the bundling / tying they were able to kill all the other office suites in time.
MS's arrogance and business tactics are VERY well known with MANY examples of hostile / illegal business tactics.
What are you talking about? The states want to LOOK at the code to independantly verify MS's claims that IE is an integral part of the OS as opposed to being bolted on (as anyone with a clue knows to be the case.)
NOBODY (involved with the suit) is talking about making Windows open-source.
Um, not sure where you got your info, but how it really works is that you pay for a PERMIT. The PEOPLE get NOTHING. As a matter of fact, if they rip up sidewalks while putting in new gas lines for example, I may even be assesed a fee to repair the sidewalk that someone else ripped up! Why? because the utility has an EASEMENT. The easement gives them a dedicated path that they can use to run their services.
Bingo. Frankly I didn't find N4 hard to learn at all. I bluffed my way through an interview to be a Network Admin for a Novell shop (I had a VERY small amount of N3 on AIX experience), got the job, and in my 2 week buffer before I started, I read a book on N4. First day on the job I was productive and solving problems. Within 3 weeks I felt Very comfortable, and was deploying replicated servers, managing and enhancing our deployment of NDS, etc. The ability to run processes in different rings was interesting.
Note that N4 was not the most stable thing, but wasn't bad. Much better than Windows NT was at the time and would turn out to be.
PC Hardware is a cut throat business. There is NOT much margin, which is why so many hardware companies bit it even with a hot market for new hardware. A couple of bucks per PC is a big thing. They can't afford getting on MS's bad side. Compaq very nearly lost the ability to bundle Windows a while back in a contract dispute which would have killed them.
Any lawsuit needs to be from an OS vendor that can prove they were hurt by MS's actions. Be can do that.
Your example is meaningless. Sony is NOT a monopoly. Microsoft is. This makes ALL the difference. The abuse of that monopoly IS illegal under US law. Deal with it.
Abuse of monopoly power to crush potential competition is what we are talking about here, not Be's advertising ability. OS/2 was killed the same way Be was killed, and Linux is being hurt as well (Linux adoption would be MUCH faster if it was available to all as a dual boot option.)
Claiming that MS did nothing wrong is bullshit. This is a cut and dried case.
Configuring Win2000 as a file / print server that authenticates against a domain controller (or IS a domain controller) is TRIVIAL. Configuring a Linux box to do the same thing is a PAIN. This is the MOST common use for corporate servers.
You don't need regedit to do configure this unless you are REALLY into self-inflicted pain, and decide not to use the other tools. Regedit would be the same as vi in my example. It's a way to manually edit data. I am NOT describing regedit. You are thinking that my tool would be an XML browser that would basically manualy edit the first file I described. The second file is the key. It's the one that gives you all the smarts in the config tool such as whether to do radio buttons, check boxes, tabs, text entry, value validation, online help, etc. This is alot of the stuff that's hard-coded into so many different tools.
It's also the one that would define where in the scope of configuration of everything a particular task belongs. Obviously the schema, taxonomy, etc. need to be thought out, but this is a VERY doable project.
Um, most MUA's on unix send mail by calling the sendmail binary. If it's not configured right, you are screwed.
However, if you look at the config that comes with Redhat (as an example) it only needs a couple minor edits and it's ready to go.
Frankly, sendmail's config SUCKS. I've been configuring sendmail for for about 8 years, and while I have no problems working with it, it just gets more and more complex with each version as features are added. New users are overwhelmed, and the current books on sendmail only cover older versions. It's time for most distributions to dump it and replace it with postfix or exim. Exim is probably best.
Fixing config IS a fairly high priority. It's what keeps Linux out of the hands of the common person / enterprise. Even being a very seasoned UNIX guy, every time a new application comes out I have to learn a new configuration system with its own goofy rules and limitations. Other UNIX flavors have interesting configurators such as AIX's SMIT, which can handle many of the common config tasks. Nothing on Linux comes close to SMIT.
A good unix admin that can setup and secure a system start to scratch in a couple hours (and do it right) is a Very good find. If a GUI helped a novice person do the same thing we would see Windows servers being dumped by the truckload all across corporate America (and the world.) (we still need better apps for the desktop...)
This is a defeatist attitude. Did you even read the article? If MS or Apple can do it, we can do it, and we can do it better.
Now a GUI won't make people understand what they are doing or do the work for them (ever configure MS Exchange? That's a bitch....) but what it DOES do is make the configuration easier to navigate.
By using an XML based file format (as I proposed in a previous comment) you get the best of both worlds. The Apache config file is a close example of what I was thinking (it's not XML, but it is XML "like".)
An application would actually have 2 configuration files: one that actually contains the configuration data (like httpd.conf for apache) and the other to describe the options, help for the options, defaults, etc. to the configurator GUI. Both would be XML, would be extensible as hell, and provide a single tool for configuring any application, current or future.
As I mention in a previous post, a set of importers / exporters would provide a way to migrate until the various applications were updated to use the new format (sendmail may NEVER change...)
So you get what you want. Hell it would probably be better as you would no longer need to memorize all the differet quirks / rules for different applications's configuration language.
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This is what I did. I setup a Windows box that acts as a document converter. Incomming emails are scanned for .doc's by procmail which sends off the word doc to the windows machine. A VB script takes that file, opens it in word, and causes word to save it as RTF. The rtf is sent back to procmail which adds it back as a second attachement. So now each email has both the original .doc file, and an rtf version (you want to keep the doc file for various reasons (sometimes you lose info.)
I also setup drop-box directories for employees to put old word docs and a vb script generates an RTF version.
You can do the same with other "common" proprietary file formats. We also have a few windows boxes setup that can be accessed via VNC to run various legacy / proprietary apps (I thought about writting a proxy that finds the next "free" machine automatically."
While this doesn't totally eliminate windows, it cuts it way down. The document converter alone eliminates 95% of the reason to use Windows.
For people with a larger need for Windows, VMWare can be useful.
I don't think it's realistic to target grandparents at this point. Business suffering under the constant threat of the BSA, hundreds of thousands of dollars a years in license costs, viruses / worms that shut down their networks IS a good target market. Government is another. Do YOU really want a large chunk of YOUR tax dollars going to line Bill G's pockets?
If we took only 1% of the money that governments / business spend on MS licenses and used that to fund open source software, we could offer a viable replacement to MS in 1 year.
RE: Win2000 ford demo
That's load balancing. I can do the same thing with any load balancing tool with any web server farm. You can use the proxy feature of apache for this, squid, F5, Cisco local director, Foundry ServerIron, etc., etc., etc.
You can also use things like Oracle parallel server on the back end for HA (High Availability / failover).
Clustering, load-balancing, and HA are very different things, but are concepts that can be used together depending on the situation.
In a web farm, if a node dies, does the controller restart the request on a new server or does it just stop sending requests to the dead one? In a true HA cluster or HA load-balanced server farm, it would. Typical load balancers don't do this.
The needs of a web farm are quite different than a computational cluster as well. In a computational cluster, it's common for the task to need to share data between nodes. In a web farm, each server usually stands alone (sessions bring up various issues.)
You don't need a cluster for this. Just a few scripts. Frankly, it's easy to just let each machine rip through several CD's worth at a time in batches.
I was ripping my entire collection of CD's... Picked up a cheap 56X reader which can dump a CD onto the hard disk in about a minute. The results were dumped into a series of directories, one for each "ripper" machine. These machine accessed the shared directory via NFS and save the resulting ogg file into the main repository tree.
I just setup a script on each node to start ripping whatever it found in it's "node" directory automatically. Simple.
Setting up a cluster for doing simple shit like this is a waste of time IMHO.
A cluster is fine for HARDWARE based issues with fault tolerance, but the nex worm / bug / blue screen will kill the entire cluster.
In an exchange cluster, you even get to replicate a corrupted database!!! Cool!
A cluster of fragile unstable software that is full of security flaws and bugs and costs big bucks (Advanced Server, which is the version that clusters is Very expensive) isn't something to bother with.
XP is the one with all these privacy problems. 2000 is the last one that is even somewhat reasonable.
I use Linux for almost everything, and 2000 only when I need to use my scanner, download pics from my camera, visio, convert evil word docs to an open format (since none of the importers work worth a damn) etc.
Agree that the 9X/ME lines are crap. Not stable at all.
Chapter navigation outside the DVD? This has GOT to be a violation of the DMCA... :-)
Yes, this does mean blocking some legit mail. That's the breaks. If only 1% of email is legit, then you need to make a decision. For me, I have NEVER received legit mail from china. Pretty cut and dried there...
The Taliban did nothing to deal with bin Laden. Eventually every single country broke off diplomatic relations with them. The rest is history. Same goes for ISP's and even countries that don't deal with the spam problem.
Yeah, but once you DO find the American spammer, you can put him in the same cell as a serial gay-rapist.
While translation is a nice idea, I don't think it's worth my time to learn 20 different asian languages just so I can complain about spam. I'm sure not going to pay someone to translate for me to complain about spam. So what OTHER constructive steps can you come up with that are REALISTIC?
The bottom line is that if asia doesn't want to get firewalled, they need to get agressive about closing open relays. Note that I don't descriminate against asia, I descriminate against EVERYONE that sends me spam. This include many european and south american netblocks / TLD's too.
Basically I don't get ANY legit email from these countries. Not blocking them would be silly.
MS has ALWAYS had a monopoly on the OS for x86 machines. Everyone else that tried to compete was crushed save Linux which can't be crushed due to the lack of a company behind it. I don't believe the court set a particular date that MS became a monopoly, and since they have always been one on the x86 platform, I suppose that any company could file a suit if they do so within the legal time limits.
Now that Netscape is all but dead as a browser, don't expect to see much "innovation" from MS.
The fact that there is no effective competition IS a bad thing. By the way, notice how the price of Windows keeps going up with each new release / upgrade? Do you REALLY think that the browser is free? Hmm. I'll believe that it's free when there is a version for Linux.
Netscape was out and thriving before Win95 was a product. You also seem to have forgotton Bill's statments that he wanted to crush netscape.
One thing MS does is find a product that is doing well, and say "We should do that too. Let's see if we can buy them, and if the price isn't right, we will do our own (crappy) version and crush the competition."
Word and Excell SUCKED compared to wordperfect and 123 / quattro when they came out. Due to the bundling / tying they were able to kill all the other office suites in time.
MS's arrogance and business tactics are VERY well known with MANY examples of hostile / illegal business tactics.
What are you talking about? The states want to LOOK at the code to independantly verify MS's claims that IE is an integral part of the OS as opposed to being bolted on (as anyone with a clue knows to be the case.)
NOBODY (involved with the suit) is talking about making Windows open-source.
Damn I wish I had mod points right now! ROFLMAO
Um, not sure where you got your info, but how it really works is that you pay for a PERMIT. The PEOPLE get NOTHING. As a matter of fact, if they rip up sidewalks while putting in new gas lines for example, I may even be assesed a fee to repair the sidewalk that someone else ripped up! Why? because the utility has an EASEMENT. The easement gives them a dedicated path that they can use to run their services.
What does this have to do with Be and MS?
Bingo. Frankly I didn't find N4 hard to learn at all. I bluffed my way through an interview to be a Network Admin for a Novell shop (I had a VERY small amount of N3 on AIX experience), got the job, and in my 2 week buffer before I started, I read a book on N4. First day on the job I was productive and solving problems. Within 3 weeks I felt Very comfortable, and was deploying replicated servers, managing and enhancing our deployment of NDS, etc. The ability to run processes in different rings was interesting.
Note that N4 was not the most stable thing, but wasn't bad. Much better than Windows NT was at the time and would turn out to be.
Not comming with Windows disks is a hardware vendor cost-saving thing. Every penny counts. Vote with your wallet if you don't like it.
PC Hardware is a cut throat business. There is NOT much margin, which is why so many hardware companies bit it even with a hot market for new hardware.
A couple of bucks per PC is a big thing. They can't afford getting on MS's bad side. Compaq very nearly lost the ability to bundle Windows a while back in a contract dispute which would have killed them.
Any lawsuit needs to be from an OS vendor that can prove they were hurt by MS's actions. Be can do that.
Your example is meaningless. Sony is NOT a monopoly. Microsoft is. This makes ALL the difference. The abuse of that monopoly IS illegal under US law. Deal with it.
Abuse of monopoly power to crush potential competition is what we are talking about here, not Be's advertising ability. OS/2 was killed the same way Be was killed, and Linux is being hurt as well (Linux adoption would be MUCH faster if it was available to all as a dual boot option.)
Claiming that MS did nothing wrong is bullshit. This is a cut and dried case.
Configuring Win2000 as a file / print server that authenticates against a domain controller (or IS a domain controller) is TRIVIAL. Configuring a Linux box to do the same thing is a PAIN. This is the MOST common use for corporate servers.
You don't need regedit to do configure this unless you are REALLY into self-inflicted pain, and decide not to use the other tools. Regedit would be the same as vi in my example. It's a way to manually edit data. I am NOT describing regedit. You are thinking that my tool would be an XML browser that would basically manualy edit the first file I described. The second file is the key. It's the one that gives you all the smarts in the config tool such as whether to do radio buttons, check boxes, tabs, text entry, value validation, online help, etc. This is alot of the stuff that's hard-coded into so many different tools.
It's also the one that would define where in the scope of configuration of everything a particular task belongs. Obviously the schema, taxonomy, etc. need to be thought out, but this is a VERY doable project.
Um, most MUA's on unix send mail by calling the sendmail binary. If it's not configured right, you are screwed.
However, if you look at the config that comes with Redhat (as an example) it only needs a couple minor edits and it's ready to go.
Frankly, sendmail's config SUCKS. I've been configuring sendmail for for about 8 years, and while I have no problems working with it, it just gets more and more complex with each version as features are added. New users are overwhelmed, and the current books on sendmail only cover older versions. It's time for most distributions to dump it and replace it with postfix or exim. Exim is probably best.
Fixing config IS a fairly high priority. It's what keeps Linux out of the hands of the common person / enterprise. Even being a very seasoned UNIX guy, every time a new application comes out I have to learn a new configuration system with its own goofy rules and limitations. Other UNIX flavors have interesting configurators such as AIX's SMIT, which can handle many of the common config tasks. Nothing on Linux comes close to SMIT.
A good unix admin that can setup and secure a system start to scratch in a couple hours (and do it right) is a Very good find. If a GUI helped a novice person do the same thing we would see Windows servers being dumped by the truckload all across corporate America (and the world.) (we still need better apps for the desktop...)
Ahh crap. stupid slash deleted my example, but the point remains (as others have shown) that there are alternate syntaxes that work and are simple.
For the other XML naysayers, styleguides solve most issues, and since the files would normally be generated by code, it's a non-issue.
How about:
Notice the "/>" syntax defining the the item as an empty element.
Really, you don't need to make things more complicated than they need be. This uninformed defeatist attitude will solve nothing.
This is a defeatist attitude. Did you even read the article? If MS or Apple can do it, we can do it, and we can do it better.
Now a GUI won't make people understand what they are doing or do the work for them (ever configure MS Exchange? That's a bitch....) but what it DOES do is make the configuration easier to navigate.
By using an XML based file format (as I proposed in a previous comment) you get the best of both worlds. The Apache config file is a close example of what I was thinking (it's not XML, but it is XML "like".)
An application would actually have 2 configuration files: one that actually contains the configuration data (like httpd.conf for apache) and the other to describe the options, help for the options, defaults, etc. to the configurator GUI. Both would be XML, would be extensible as hell, and provide a single tool for configuring any application, current or future.
As I mention in a previous post, a set of importers / exporters would provide a way to migrate until the various applications were updated to use the new format (sendmail may NEVER change...)
So you get what you want. Hell it would probably be better as you would no longer need to memorize all the differet quirks / rules for different applications's configuration language.