Click on the link to the side that says "For IT Professionals"
There are Security Bulletins highlighted in the upper right hand side of the page. The ones discussed here are listed, along with a link that says "More".
Right on the top of that list is a link that says "Want to receive future security bulletins automatically?" You might want to click on that and subscribe.
Now for home users, they have the WindowsUpdate feature which easily allows you to download patches. Plus it also includes links to find out more information about the patch... these links go to the security bulletins again.
If Microsoft is hiding security bulletins, they are doing a piss poor job.
It's interesting. I've already read every one of these articles linked to by slashdot in the last few days.
But the bizarre thing is how biased slashdot is with their presentation. If you actually quick thru on the links and read the stories, you'll understand why.
For instance, why wasn't this article from news.com linked as well, considering it is Scott Culp responding to a lot of the questions and accusations?
One is through motivation and persuasion. i.e. I run for Congress and then debate and argue and vote. Or I go around making speeches... Or the best example yet, civil disobedience.
The other is through revolution. i.e. I decide that my desire to change the world is very important and since everybody is a moron whom I can't persuade... I must crush the infidels and establish a new world order.
Rand, Friedman, King, Ghandi fit into the first category.
Lenin, Hitler, bin Laden, all fit into the second category.
RMS fits somewhere in between. He pretends to be in the first category, but oftentimes finds himself into the second and liking it very much.
Oracle, aka Larry Ellison comes out and recommends that the Government use Oracle software to create a national ID database system. This way Oracle software can be used to track everybody in the country, their comings and goings... where they live, whatever.
Did I mention this is Oracle that suggested this?
And how does the typical/. mindset take it. Why this is all Microsoft's fault! It's that evil Bill Gates, I tell ya.
Did Microsoft suggest this? No.
Does Microsoft's Passport system accomplish anything even remotely close to what this National ID database would be in terms of invasion of privacy? No. Passport is used to authenticate you to certain websites. Websites that you probably have a username/password to anyway, like oh say... slashdot. But Passport doesn't track your comings and goings, who you are, who your parents are, when were you born, what blood type are you... etc.
Did I mention that Larry Ellison wants to use his database software for all that stuff I just suggested Passport not do?
Again, did I mention that it is Oracle who was going to provide the technology?
You want to talk about intrusive, you want to talk about "evil", you want to talk about lack of privacy?
Need I remind you that Larry Ellison is the man who decided he wanted to spy on Microsoft and so paid some janitors a large sum of cash so he could get access to some trash cans?
It's just so bloody amazing. Blame Microsoft about some grand conspiracy that can't be substantiated... and let Larry Ellison off the hook who has proven he can't be trusted on matters of privacy.
"You don't have any privacy anyway. Get over it."
- Scott McNealy, another defender of privacy in the face of the evil Microsoft.
You best go out and look at ASP.NET and the other.Net framework items.
While PHP is a little bit better than ASP. ASP.NET is a *LOT* better than bother of them. If you want to talk about a rich ability to develop enterprise-ready applications, Linux doesn't stand a chance at this rate.
Oh good grief, you didn't buy Microsoft's Proxy server did you? Jesus, why do people keep doing that!
Well, I'm Microsoft certified as well. Did you go in and pass all the tests in one day like I did. Does that prove it's easy? Don't know, it sure was for me.
The unfortunate problem with the Microsoft certification is that people can pass the tests and really not learn anything from it. Take yourself for instance making statements like "Any moron can admin a Windows lan."
Sorry, still caught up on that and it's going to take a lot more than doing stuff on your home LAN I was doing back in '92 to prove you know what your talking about.
Interesting. How do you remotely access a Linux desktop that is having trouble connecting to the network? That's a situation that is far more likely to occur than the GUI of Win2k/XP to not function. Besides, most of the need for remote desktop access is to aid a user over the phone in showing them how to do something with an application. Can you do this easily in Linux?
You pretty much missed the point. I was referring to group policies. Which also addresses your last non-relevant point.
the cost of admining any server is directly dependent on what tasks the server has to accomplish.
Some server tasks are far more time consuming than others. For instance running a file/print server means you spend most of your time performing backups and adding users, printers... setting permissions. Oh and recovering files from tape when users delete them.
Any time you see an argument purporting that Unix is easier to admin than WinNT or Novell it's coming from someone who has never spent any time administering real servers.
"Instead, we spend almost $10k on licenses for Microsoft software "
If you are only spending $10k on licenses for software... you aren't working in a corporate world my friend. That's a small business.
Corporations usually end up writing checks with 6 zeros at the end for just their yearly Oracle maintenance agreements.
I especially liked the "Any moron can administer a Windows network" comment. I'll bet you couldn't even figure out my simple home LAN, much less a corporate network.
Going from Office 97 to Office XP I haven't noticed anything. XP basically has some new features that are quite nice to take advantage of, but the old stuff still works pretty much the same.
Now as far as moving to WinXP.
From an enduser perspective it really isn't that much different from Win95, much less all the versions built since then. The start button is there, you still click on icons to start programs, you can navigate through your files, etc.
From a support position, that's different. There's a substantial learning curve going from supporting the Win9x world to WinXP. But it's not quite as substantial as going from Win95 to WinNT was. At least the Hardware Device manager exists in 2k/XP.
There is also a great deal of planning that needs to go in to your 2k/XP deployment that wasn't necessary for 95. But as a side effect of this when you are done things just work... whereas with Win95 you would be fighting those same daily issues.
If you've ever had to figure out Netbios "browsing" on a Win95 network you'd appreciate this pain. Those problems didn't exist with NT4 and with a full migration to 2k you don't even care any more because you can disable the browsing service and rely solely on Active Directory.
Now moving from Win95 or WinNT to a Linux environment is a completely different issue. Here you have substantial end user training costs because things work very differently. Especially in the office suite products and working with files and printers and such.
But on the support side, it's an even more substantial cost of retraining. Everything is completely different, so it's almost like starting from scratch. Also you have a problem because in the end you don't really gain much. The manageability tools just don't exist for Linux like they do with Win2k/XP. Or the ones that are out there require even more substantial investment of human resources to implement.
It depends on the size of your network. You may not notice the hit with say only 500 desktops. But if you had 5,000 desktops to manage... Linux really looks like a poor choice at this stage of the game.
This still goes back to the Gartner report from this past spring that showed Linux market penetration at less than 10%. IDC is still claiming what? 32% and growing?
If you look at Netcraft's web survey back in September, 2001 they show Linux has around 30% of the market for internet web server machines. Ok, so that proves the IDC numbers correct, right?
Well not really, that's only counting web servers which are connected directly to the internet. This is the most established market for Linux as a server, so it's going to have a fairly substantial part of the market. But overall that's actually a relatively small percentages of global server sales, if you consider that there are other things servers run, such as databases, email, applications, file/print, etc.
I don't know the numbers for that, but as an example our company probably has on the order of 200 internal servers running a combination of WinNT/2k and commercial Unix(HP-UX, Solaris, etc), but only maybe 6 external internet web servers. I'd say that balance is actually pretty typical for the Fortune 1000.
But what percentage of the market for internal servers does Linux have? Well we can't rely on Netcraft as those servers can't be counted. You pretty much have to rely upon surveys of the IT staff to find out what they are actually buying or deploying.
That's apparently what Gartner and Goldman Sachs have done.
But where did IDC get it's numbers? Honestly I don't know, because every time I search I see conflicting details. At one point it appeared they were "estimating" based on the number of TurboLinux CDs shipped in Linksys NIC packages(as an example), and the number of Linux ISOs they thought were downloaded off ftp sites, along with the numbers of RedHat/Mandrake/Suse sales and some other factors.
But while that might create a rather large number, how is it actually related to server deployments? IDC doesn't really answer that.
When slashdot asked the questions to Mr. Kusnetzky he sort of side tracked the issues:
http://slashdot.org/interviews/01/06/21/154203.s ht ml
Basically it sounds as though the numbers IDC is reporting are what he calls "Supply Side". That seems to indicate more how many CD's have been pressed and sent out.
But the numbers coming from Gartner and Goldman Sachs are what he calls "Demand Side". That is... how many CD's are actually being used, or wanted.
It seems to me that the "Demand Side" is the far more important piece of the equation. It's relatively cheap and easy to press CDs and give them out, it's even easy to download something and try it out. It's much more difficult to turn that into a production server.
Consider this. What if AOL had no real way to track who was using their software. What if they decided that the way to track this was to count the number of CD's they had shipped out to people. I'll bet we'd find that AOL would report that they have 6 billion people using AOL software. Is that realistic? Of course not.
It's like MSN claiming they are now the most frequently visited website just because they changed the IE 5.5 browser to redirect to them whenever a page not found error shows up. It's not useful statistics.
I'll just add a caveat. It's easy to dismiss these numbers as coming from Corporate shills... MS paid results, whatever. I already see such responses to this topic. I don't see that type of attitude serving any positive purpose, and really just gives the "Linux Community" a bad name, like the Amiga, Mac and OS/2 users before it.
I'll go back to my days with the Amiga advocacy. There was a concerted effort to convince stores such as Software Etc. to sell Amiga software. We had a letter writing campaign to encourage them, we guaranteed them the demand was there.
So they started putting Amiga software on the shelves. Guess what? They didn't sell much Amiga software, because the demand really wasn't there. Now we had a lot of excuses for that... Software etc was too expensive, I could buy it cheaper at Computability by mail order, etc. Yep, so why'd we try to convinced them to sell the software retail if we weren't going to buy it?
People don't like being deceived. Companies don't like taking a risk that isn't well calculated. If they start noticing that a lot of these articles talking about the wonders of Linux, the fantastic demand, etc. are really just fabrications and wishful thinking...
It's going to hurt with a vengeance when they abandon the market en masse.
I want to give an anecdote of client leverage that sort of relates. This is a third hand story, but knowing the person who told it to me I suspect it's true.
A friend of mine was consulting many years ago with a large financial firm helping them to maintain their Netware 3.x servers.(as you can see it was several years ago) They had a tape backup system in house from one of the really large vendors that was not working.
They went for like a month where they could not get good reliable tape backups on the servers, and playing phone tag with the vendor trying to figure out the problem. Just wasn't working.
Anyway towards the end of the month, my friend griped to the CIO about the problems they were having and his frustration with dealing with the vendor. The CIO brought up the issue at the board meeting and how it was a risk to the company.
At this point the VP of trading piped up... "You know, we own several million shares of that company in our portfolio... let me see what I can do"
VP of trading calls up the President of the vendor company, tells him that if they don't fix the problem with the tape backup software he's going to issue a warning about the companies product quality and dump every single share of their stock on the market.
The next morning a team of developers were flown in and working on the problems. They had to recompile several modules, but they had the issues resolved within two days.
I guess the point is, there are many ways you can leverage a vendor. It doesn't have to be a lawsuit.
As larien said, usually you just threaten to not pay the contract, or not renew. Or add stipulations as part of the negotiation. I've been involved in many an instance where that has played a huge part in getting better support.
Once I had some issues with a GIS package we had purchased. I tried to work with support, and they ignored me. So when the $5k yearly maintenance agreement came up, I told my boss not to pay it because it didn't gain us anything. I also posted a note to a usenet group explaining my problem.
Next day I got a phone call from the development manager.
Financial incentives are the strongest leverage you can have with a software vendor. Like it's been pointed out... that doesn't work with Open Source in quite the same way.
Imagine if all of your voice conversations were taped, and then used in court. The problem with email is that it's often used for ad-hoc discussions, quite unlike say sending out official memos.
When those discussions can be captured and searched, you obtain a lot of stuff that taken out of context looks incriminating.
Our legal dept has mandated we delete old email as well. Actually IT loves it because it means they don't have to harp about email box quotas and such.:)
"After all, these State A.G.s did not get millions of dollars from MS in contributions "
No, but they did receive millions of dollars from MS competitors in contributions.
I think it's interesting how you try to accuse Microsoft of bribery, but ignore all of the money that was contributed that led up to this case. Microsoft only started contributing money to political parties after the fact. They've also given just as much money to the Dems as the GOP.
Go take a look at Larry Ellisons political contribution record. We're talking millions... I can't find a reference now, but I recall it being close to $60mil.
As a matter of fact, I am cynical.
I know that the only reason Mass and California are so unhappy with this settlement is that they have companies in their states that are MS-wannabees who have spent a lot of money on this court case...
The only state that you could possibly claim isn't in this for financial motivation is Iowa, but that's only because Iowa is a technological wasteland.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean still?
RedHat has release more bulletins about security vulnerabilities this year than Microsoft has.
At the rate RedHat is going the ratio will be 2 to 1 next year.
Absolutely!
The RedHat network is a wonderul example of getting a lot for your money.
Ever since I subscribed to it, I've been getting 5 times as many security vulnerabilities from RedHat than what I get from Microsoft.
I don't understand why Microsoft can't keep up. Maybe they should start shipping sendmail with Windows XP?
Go to www.microsoft.com
Click on the link to the side that says "For IT Professionals"
There are Security Bulletins highlighted in the upper right hand side of the page. The ones discussed here are listed, along with a link that says "More".
Right on the top of that list is a link that says "Want to receive future security bulletins automatically?" You might want to click on that and subscribe.
Now for home users, they have the WindowsUpdate feature which easily allows you to download patches. Plus it also includes links to find out more information about the patch... these links go to the security bulletins again.
If Microsoft is hiding security bulletins, they are doing a piss poor job.
In other news Microsoft pulled the patch for MS01-054 on WinME systems because of reports of endusers having problems.
Part of Microsoft's responsibility is to ensure the fix doesn't break something. That means that it takes a few days to go through testing, etc.
If you don't understand this, you don't believe in the software field.
It's interesting. I've already read every one of these articles linked to by slashdot in the last few days.
h tm l?tag=bt_bh
But the bizarre thing is how biased slashdot is with their presentation. If you actually quick thru on the links and read the stories, you'll understand why.
For instance, why wasn't this article from news.com linked as well, considering it is Scott Culp responding to a lot of the questions and accusations?
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1014-201-7819204-0.
There are at least two ways to change the world.
One is through motivation and persuasion. i.e. I run for Congress and then debate and argue and vote. Or I go around making speeches... Or the best example yet, civil disobedience.
The other is through revolution. i.e. I decide that my desire to change the world is very important and since everybody is a moron whom I can't persuade... I must crush the infidels and establish a new world order.
Rand, Friedman, King, Ghandi fit into the first category.
Lenin, Hitler, bin Laden, all fit into the second category.
RMS fits somewhere in between. He pretends to be in the first category, but oftentimes finds himself into the second and liking it very much.
Call it embrace and extend if you will, but he'd like nothing better than to get everybody used to using libc, and then relicense it under the GPL.
To RMS, all commercial software, all software not licensed under the GPL, is evil and must be destroyed.
The whole story is about Oracle.
But no, instead of responding to that you went off on your wild conspiracy theory about Microsoft?
Why? Because you don't know any better.
Oracle, aka Larry Ellison comes out and recommends that the Government use Oracle software to create a national ID database system. This way Oracle software can be used to track everybody in the country, their comings and goings... where they live, whatever.
Did I mention this is Oracle that suggested this?
And how does the typical
Did Microsoft suggest this? No.
Does Microsoft's Passport system accomplish anything even remotely close to what this National ID database would be in terms of invasion of privacy? No. Passport is used to authenticate you to certain websites. Websites that you probably have a username/password to anyway, like oh say... slashdot. But Passport doesn't track your comings and goings, who you are, who your parents are, when were you born, what blood type are you... etc.
Did I mention that Larry Ellison wants to use his database software for all that stuff I just suggested Passport not do?
Again, did I mention that it is Oracle who was going to provide the technology?
You want to talk about intrusive, you want to talk about "evil", you want to talk about lack of privacy?
Need I remind you that Larry Ellison is the man who decided he wanted to spy on Microsoft and so paid some janitors a large sum of cash so he could get access to some trash cans?
It's just so bloody amazing. Blame Microsoft about some grand conspiracy that can't be substantiated... and let Larry Ellison off the hook who has proven he can't be trusted on matters of privacy.
"You don't have any privacy anyway. Get over it."
- Scott McNealy, another defender of privacy in the face of the evil Microsoft.
Sheesh
Both the GUI and CLI support tools under Windows are more powerful than those under Linux/Unix.
If you like to type, you just go ahead.
You best go out and look at ASP.NET and the other .Net framework items.
While PHP is a little bit better than ASP. ASP.NET is a *LOT* better than bother of them. If you want to talk about a rich ability to develop enterprise-ready applications, Linux doesn't stand a chance at this rate.
So does Microsoft Access.
Doesn't mean I go around advocating it. Bleh.
Oh good grief, you didn't buy Microsoft's Proxy server did you? Jesus, why do people keep doing that!
Well, I'm Microsoft certified as well. Did you go in and pass all the tests in one day like I did. Does that prove it's easy? Don't know, it sure was for me.
The unfortunate problem with the Microsoft certification is that people can pass the tests and really not learn anything from it. Take yourself for instance making statements like "Any moron can admin a Windows lan."
Sorry, still caught up on that and it's going to take a lot more than doing stuff on your home LAN I was doing back in '92 to prove you know what your talking about.
Ok... Windows 2000 has been out for almost two years now.
Don't you think it's time to update your knowledge?
Interesting. How do you remotely access a Linux desktop that is having trouble connecting to the network? That's a situation that is far more likely to occur than the GUI of Win2k/XP to not function. Besides, most of the need for remote desktop access is to aid a user over the phone in showing them how to do something with an application. Can you do this easily in Linux?
You pretty much missed the point. I was referring to group policies. Which also addresses your last non-relevant point.
False.
the cost of admining any server is directly dependent on what tasks the server has to accomplish.
Some server tasks are far more time consuming than others. For instance running a file/print server means you spend most of your time performing backups and adding users, printers... setting permissions. Oh and recovering files from tape when users delete them.
Any time you see an argument purporting that Unix is easier to admin than WinNT or Novell it's coming from someone who has never spent any time administering real servers.
Such as this idiot I'm responding to.
"Instead, we spend almost $10k on licenses for Microsoft software "
If you are only spending $10k on licenses for software... you aren't working in a corporate world my friend. That's a small business.
Corporations usually end up writing checks with 6 zeros at the end for just their yearly Oracle maintenance agreements.
I especially liked the "Any moron can administer a Windows network" comment. I'll bet you couldn't even figure out my simple home LAN, much less a corporate network.
Sheesh, how'd this get modded up?
The changes aren't that substantial, really.
Going from Office 97 to Office XP I haven't noticed anything. XP basically has some new features that are quite nice to take advantage of, but the old stuff still works pretty much the same.
Now as far as moving to WinXP.
From an enduser perspective it really isn't that much different from Win95, much less all the versions built since then. The start button is there, you still click on icons to start programs, you can navigate through your files, etc.
From a support position, that's different. There's a substantial learning curve going from supporting the Win9x world to WinXP. But it's not quite as substantial as going from Win95 to WinNT was. At least the Hardware Device manager exists in 2k/XP.
There is also a great deal of planning that needs to go in to your 2k/XP deployment that wasn't necessary for 95. But as a side effect of this when you are done things just work... whereas with Win95 you would be fighting those same daily issues.
If you've ever had to figure out Netbios "browsing" on a Win95 network you'd appreciate this pain. Those problems didn't exist with NT4 and with a full migration to 2k you don't even care any more because you can disable the browsing service and rely solely on Active Directory.
Now moving from Win95 or WinNT to a Linux environment is a completely different issue. Here you have substantial end user training costs because things work very differently. Especially in the office suite products and working with files and printers and such.
But on the support side, it's an even more substantial cost of retraining. Everything is completely different, so it's almost like starting from scratch. Also you have a problem because in the end you don't really gain much. The manageability tools just don't exist for Linux like they do with Win2k/XP. Or the ones that are out there require even more substantial investment of human resources to implement.
It depends on the size of your network. You may not notice the hit with say only 500 desktops. But if you had 5,000 desktops to manage... Linux really looks like a poor choice at this stage of the game.
This still goes back to the Gartner report from this past spring that showed Linux market penetration at less than 10%. IDC is still claiming what? 32% and growing?
s ht ml
If you look at Netcraft's web survey back in September, 2001 they show Linux has around 30% of the market for internet web server machines. Ok, so that proves the IDC numbers correct, right?
Well not really, that's only counting web servers which are connected directly to the internet. This is the most established market for Linux as a server, so it's going to have a fairly substantial part of the market. But overall that's actually a relatively small percentages of global server sales, if you consider that there are other things servers run, such as databases, email, applications, file/print, etc.
I don't know the numbers for that, but as an example our company probably has on the order of 200 internal servers running a combination of WinNT/2k and commercial Unix(HP-UX, Solaris, etc), but only maybe 6 external internet web servers. I'd say that balance is actually pretty typical for the Fortune 1000.
But what percentage of the market for internal servers does Linux have? Well we can't rely on Netcraft as those servers can't be counted. You pretty much have to rely upon surveys of the IT staff to find out what they are actually buying or deploying.
That's apparently what Gartner and Goldman Sachs have done.
But where did IDC get it's numbers? Honestly I don't know, because every time I search I see conflicting details. At one point it appeared they were "estimating" based on the number of TurboLinux CDs shipped in Linksys NIC packages(as an example), and the number of Linux ISOs they thought were downloaded off ftp sites, along with the numbers of RedHat/Mandrake/Suse sales and some other factors.
But while that might create a rather large number, how is it actually related to server deployments? IDC doesn't really answer that.
When slashdot asked the questions to Mr. Kusnetzky he sort of side tracked the issues:
http://slashdot.org/interviews/01/06/21/154203.
Basically it sounds as though the numbers IDC is reporting are what he calls "Supply Side". That seems to indicate more how many CD's have been pressed and sent out.
But the numbers coming from Gartner and Goldman Sachs are what he calls "Demand Side". That is... how many CD's are actually being used, or wanted.
It seems to me that the "Demand Side" is the far more important piece of the equation. It's relatively cheap and easy to press CDs and give them out, it's even easy to download something and try it out. It's much more difficult to turn that into a production server.
Consider this. What if AOL had no real way to track who was using their software. What if they decided that the way to track this was to count the number of CD's they had shipped out to people. I'll bet we'd find that AOL would report that they have 6 billion people using AOL software. Is that realistic? Of course not.
It's like MSN claiming they are now the most frequently visited website just because they changed the IE 5.5 browser to redirect to them whenever a page not found error shows up. It's not useful statistics.
I'll just add a caveat. It's easy to dismiss these numbers as coming from Corporate shills... MS paid results, whatever. I already see such responses to this topic. I don't see that type of attitude serving any positive purpose, and really just gives the "Linux Community" a bad name, like the Amiga, Mac and OS/2 users before it.
I'll go back to my days with the Amiga advocacy. There was a concerted effort to convince stores such as Software Etc. to sell Amiga software. We had a letter writing campaign to encourage them, we guaranteed them the demand was there.
So they started putting Amiga software on the shelves. Guess what? They didn't sell much Amiga software, because the demand really wasn't there. Now we had a lot of excuses for that... Software etc was too expensive, I could buy it cheaper at Computability by mail order, etc. Yep, so why'd we try to convinced them to sell the software retail if we weren't going to buy it?
People don't like being deceived. Companies don't like taking a risk that isn't well calculated. If they start noticing that a lot of these articles talking about the wonders of Linux, the fantastic demand, etc. are really just fabrications and wishful thinking...
It's going to hurt with a vengeance when they abandon the market en masse.
I want to give an anecdote of client leverage that sort of relates. This is a third hand story, but knowing the person who told it to me I suspect it's true.
A friend of mine was consulting many years ago with a large financial firm helping them to maintain their Netware 3.x servers.(as you can see it was several years ago) They had a tape backup system in house from one of the really large vendors that was not working.
They went for like a month where they could not get good reliable tape backups on the servers, and playing phone tag with the vendor trying to figure out the problem. Just wasn't working.
Anyway towards the end of the month, my friend griped to the CIO about the problems they were having and his frustration with dealing with the vendor. The CIO brought up the issue at the board meeting and how it was a risk to the company.
At this point the VP of trading piped up... "You know, we own several million shares of that company in our portfolio... let me see what I can do"
VP of trading calls up the President of the vendor company, tells him that if they don't fix the problem with the tape backup software he's going to issue a warning about the companies product quality and dump every single share of their stock on the market.
The next morning a team of developers were flown in and working on the problems. They had to recompile several modules, but they had the issues resolved within two days.
I guess the point is, there are many ways you can leverage a vendor. It doesn't have to be a lawsuit.
As larien said, usually you just threaten to not pay the contract, or not renew. Or add stipulations as part of the negotiation. I've been involved in many an instance where that has played a huge part in getting better support.
Once I had some issues with a GIS package we had purchased. I tried to work with support, and they ignored me. So when the $5k yearly maintenance agreement came up, I told my boss not to pay it because it didn't gain us anything. I also posted a note to a usenet group explaining my problem.
Next day I got a phone call from the development manager.
Financial incentives are the strongest leverage you can have with a software vendor. Like it's been pointed out... that doesn't work with Open Source in quite the same way.
MOD THIS UP!
/. poster children.
That's an article I would love to see slashdot put on the main page and see some genuine responses to.
And Cringely is even one of the
Imagine if all of your voice conversations were taped, and then used in court. The problem with email is that it's often used for ad-hoc discussions, quite unlike say sending out official memos.
:)
When those discussions can be captured and searched, you obtain a lot of stuff that taken out of context looks incriminating.
Our legal dept has mandated we delete old email as well. Actually IT loves it because it means they don't have to harp about email box quotas and such.
"After all, these State A.G.s did not get millions of dollars from MS in contributions "
No, but they did receive millions of dollars from MS competitors in contributions.
I think it's interesting how you try to accuse Microsoft of bribery, but ignore all of the money that was contributed that led up to this case. Microsoft only started contributing money to political parties after the fact. They've also given just as much money to the Dems as the GOP.
Go take a look at Larry Ellisons political contribution record. We're talking millions... I can't find a reference now, but I recall it being close to $60mil.
As a matter of fact, I am cynical.
I know that the only reason Mass and California are so unhappy with this settlement is that they have companies in their states that are MS-wannabees who have spent a lot of money on this court case...
The only state that you could possibly claim isn't in this for financial motivation is Iowa, but that's only because Iowa is a technological wasteland.
Steve
From Iowa
Or the other possibility.
Consumers weren't interested in WordPerfect being bundled.
I can think of two other valuable lessons learned:
#1. Delete email after 90 days and don't save tape backups.
#2. If your competitors are lining the pockets of politicians, then you should throw even more cash their way.