You need to do some basic research before spouting off nonsense like the above.
DesktopBSD is nothing more than a custom installer for FreeBSD that also installs X and KDE out-of-the-box. Underneath the already installed GUI, though, is bog-standard FreeBSD. Trying to say DesktopBSD and FreeBSD are different is like trying to say Fedora Core 4 without X is a different OS than Fedora Core 4 with X.
There are 4 BSD operating systems: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD.
There are a handful of other operating systems that are based on BSD, like Darwin, but they are not really BSD systems (more like BSD userland running on different kernels).
And then there are the customised installs for BSD for embedded systems like PicoBSD, NanoBSD, MicroBSD, m0n0wall, pfSense, MyrBSD, and the like. These are special purpose OSes, though, and are all based off one of the main BSD systems (their more like custom installs and stripped down systems than separate OSes).
Nothing even close to the craziness over in Linux-land with the more than 200 separate distros, no two of which are binary compatible, and few of which are source compatible.
KDE, GNOME, X, and GCC are all just applications that run on various operating systems.
What the post you are responding to is talking about are the CLI userland tools that comprise the base OS (find me a Linux distro that even understands the concept of base OS). For instance, ps, ls, more, grep, awk, and all those other programs that sit under/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin, and/usr/sbin.
Every Linux distro uses programs from 50+ different projects, each using a different version, each using slightly different programs. Some have standard argument syntax (-option), some have non-standard argument syntax (option), some mix the two, some use long options (--some-long-option-name), some don't. And those options change from version to version, program to program. If the kernel API changes, you have to wait for each individual project to update their tools to work with the new API before the distro packagers will update the distro.
The BSDs all have a fairly regular commandline syntax (-option), with only a smattering of long-options (thank god). The BSD tools are also generally more POSIX compliant, have more useful options (not always the largest number, but definitely the most useful ones), and are updated in lock-step with the kernel.
The other big difference is that the BSDs are full-fledged operating systems, and there is a true understanding of the concept of "base OS". ie: every install of the OS has the exact same base set of tools/programs installed. And there's a clear separation between programs installed as part of the OS, from programs installed by the user.
Instead of shifting the clocks, why not just change business hours? Where is it engraved in titanium that "standard" business hours *must* be 9am to 5pm?
Instead of mucking around with the clock, why not find some incentive to have working hours changed to 7am to 3pm? Or 8am to 4 pm? It's the same end result, and nobody has to fiddle with their clocks.
In fact, why not drop DST completely? It serves no logical, useful purpose anymore.
Which is what a virus is. It spreads itself from one binary/script to another.
Too many people nowadays confuse "worm" with "virus". A virus infects (appends, prepends, or copies itself to the middle of) binaries on the same system, mainly through an infected binary being executed.
A worm just copies itself to other systems using network connections of some kind. These spread by multiplying and creating new copies of itself.
If it's an Internet cafe, then the customers will be paying to use the wired terminals. Why should they get wireless for free? Charge them the same as for the wired terminals. Keep things simple, and make everything work the same.
The levy gets split between all the Canadian labels and artists.
Up here, Fair Use is still understood and protected. You can make backup copies of your music, rip your music to your MP3 player, etc, without worrying about the cops busting down the door and confiscating everything.
All the transmission throughput speed records are held by NetBSD. Hence, it should be fairly obvious which TCP/IP stack is the best.:) Okay, maybe not the best, but definitely the fastest.
It's too bad that Microsoft owns so much of OS/2. It would be great to see it released as Open Source. The Open Source OS/2 Petition is a good start.
MS owns large parts of OS/2 1.x and 2.x. They split with IBM during the development of 3.x. What was to be OS/2 3.0 was released as Windows NT 3.1.
After the split, IBM re-wrote most of the MS code and released OS/2 Warp 3.0. With the release of Warp 4.0, there is very little, if any, MS code left in OS/2. There may be code licensed from others, though,
We should all be exclusively using laserjets anyway, why is anyone happy the inkjet technology has a new lease on life?
Perhaps because a colour inkjet is in the sub-$50 CDN range and a colour laser is still in the over-$500 CDN range? Even when you factor in the cost of toner vs. cost of ink, and the useful lifespan of a toner cartridge vs. the useful lifespan of an ink cartridge, it's still a *lot* cheaper to use inkjets.
For non-colour printing, yes, we should all have a laser printer at home.
FreeBSD does this already, and much better than Linux ever has.
You can run Linux, SCO, and another Unix I can't recall the name of, binaries. The FreeBSD kernel checks the type of the binary, then loads the appropriate system call table, and then executes the binary. This allows you to run non-native binary at near native speeds, and can even run some binaries faster than if they were run on the proper OS. All you need is the correct libs from the other OS stored under the/compat directory. Works quite nicely. This is not emulation (there's not translation from one syscall to another), it's compatibility.
The other 'feature' I want to see is a ruggedized phone. Something a construction worker can use at work, and not have to worry about getting trashed in the first week.
I would love to find a ruggedised GSM phone. My old Panasonic TX220 was a beautiful TDMA phone. Fully ruggedised and coated in rubber, yet still nice and small. Survived a two-storey tumble down cement stairs, falling off my second storey balconey, an "accidental" throw into a cement wall, and various other falls, drops, and bounces.
Trying to find a GSM phone with the same minimalist feature set and ruggedisation is virtually impossible. Everytime I pass a Rogers store in town I keep asking if there's anything like that, and the answer is always no.:( Too bad you can't just upgrade a TDMA phone to GSM.:(
They are asking for the documentation to be able to write their own driver. All they want is the API documentation that tells them what values to poke into which registers to get a signal emitted from the device. That's it.
Let the companies release their own drivers for whichever OSes they want to officially support. Then let them release the documentation needed to write drivers, so that others can write the needed drivers to support the other OSes out there.
Voila! Instead source of new revenue, as new users using other OSes will be able to use the hardware. If someone calls the support number, they get billed $X / call to be told, "We don't support that OS. Call the driver writer."
Any number can be converted to a fraction simply by putting that number over some power of ten.
Convert 0.934 to a fraction? Easy, it's 934/1000.
Convert 934.567 to a fraction? Easy, it's 934567/1000.
So long as you know your decimal places (tenths, hundredths, thousandths, etc), then you can convert any decimal number to a fraction. After that, it's just a matter of simplifying.
If you need a calculator to convert from decimal to fraction, you should not have been allowed to graduate from an elementary school.
Ah yes, sounds like the "good ol' days" of the Pentium2. Back when the CPU and L2 were "in the same package" but not on the same die. What a wonderful solution that was, it worked so... wait, it barely limped along. The L2 was run at 1/2 the speed of the processor, and the Celeron 300a beat the pants off it.
Intel likes to take shortcuts, hoping nobody notices, or that nobody cares. Unfortunately, nobody does, and the ones who can actually benefit from the proper technology are the ones who suffer.
It would be nice if Intel would take a more than 12 month look at the future.
DOS and Windows 1/2/3 had no concept of a central documents (home) directory.
Windows 95 introduced the My Documents folder. But, it was either under c:\, or c:\windows\profiles, or c:\windows\profiles\"username" depending on whether you had User Profiles enabled, and whether or not you had indivual user profiles enabled.
I don't recall the name of the directory for Windows NT, but it was located under c:\winnt\profiles.
Windows 2000 moved it to c:\documents and settings\"username"\my documents.
Windows XP kept it there.
Then there's the "shortcuts" to my documents under my computer, that would either read "My Documents" or "username"'s documents or shared documents, but you were never really sure where those folders were actually stored. And the names kept changing.
Microsoft implements "Focus follows Mouse"
They implemented this with the Windows 95 Power Toys, and has been available as part of the TweakUI tool ever since. Personally, I find this to be a very annoying feature and disable it on every X desktop I use.
They get rid of those stupid drive letters
They implemented this with Windows NT 4 or maybe Windows 2000. You can mount any harddrive partition on top of any empty directory anywhere in the tree. You use the NT Volume Manager, part of the Computer Management tool. Using this, you are left with just A: and C:. I use this at home. Not sure if it works with network shares, though.
Microsoft ships a real shell like bash with it, not that cmd.exe rubbish
Supposedly this will be "fixed" in the next release. But who knows when that will be.:) JP Softwares excellent 4DOS and 4NT shells make good replacements in the meantime.
It comes with konsole and openssh out of the box
These would be wonderful additions. Maybe they could even add Kontact to Office as a replacement for Outlook.:)
Stupid comment system stripped my less than sign out even though it's posted as plain text. The above comment should start:
You can't compare "lowest priced CPU" to "lowest price CPU". That's like saying 15 lbs of apples at $5 is a better deal than 30 lbs of oranges at $8. $5 is less than $8 so it must be a better deal. [rolls eyes]
You can't compare "lowest priced CPU" to "lowest price CPU". That's like saying 15 lbs of apples at $5 is a better deal than 30 lbs of oranges at $8. $5 $8 so it must be a better deal. [rolls eyes]
Look at the specs of the lowest priced A64-X2 and compare those specs to the lowest priced PD. You'll noticed that the performance of the A64-X2 is a lot higher than that of the PD.
Work your way up Intel's price chart until you find a PD or even PEE CPU that has similar performance to that of the lowest priced A64-X2. Compare the prices of those two, and you'll find the AMD CPU is a better deal.
I can tell you have never worked in a K-12 environment. The objective of education is suppose to get people ready for life. Guess what, the vast majority of kids are going to work in an environment where Windows is used. Linux has it's place and it is not on the desktop, yet.
I am the computer tech. for a K-12 school district. I and I alone must support 14 different buildings with a total of over 5,000 computers. Desktop management is extremely important for me. I currently use Zenworks to manage the desktops. There is nothing in the Linux world that compares with the options available for Windows management. Believe me, I have tested SuSE with Zenworks and it is not as refined as the Windows implementation.
I do work in a K-12 environmnent. And we have moved all our elementary school labs to Linux X Terminal servers. You want to talk about desktop management: we have no desktops to manage.:) Each of the 37 schools has a server, and that's all we worry about.
In three years, with less than $200,000/year capital budget, we were able to put in 37 labs of 30 computers, 100mbs switched networks, and dual-proc servers.
The desktops run the lightweight ICEwm, OpenOffice.org, TenThumbs typing tutor, a whole bunch of KDE science apps and games, Scribus, Firefox, and so on. We also put in two drafting labs in the secondaries that run QCad and Cycus 3D CAD programs.
Students should be taught skills, not programs. And the more, different programs they can learn, the better off they will be./p.
Acutally, if you save $100,000 on software, you can re-allocate that to hardware, or wiring, or infrastructure, or even to hiring a new employee. Trust me, that's exactly what we did. Our budgets have dropped from the multi-million-a-year mark to the $200,000/year mark, and we are still able to grow our department, purchase new hardware, and do more neat stuff (like video conferencing, distance learning, fax-over-ip, and such). How? Because we no longer have the $35,000 Novell licensing fees (our servers are FreeBSD and Linux), we no longer have the $50,000 Office licensing fees (moved most sites to OpenOffice.org), and so on.
Get a cheap box you can use as a firewall / proxy server. Change the DHCP setup to point the default gateway to that box. Put a virus scanner on that box (Squid + DansGuardian + ClamAV works nicely) to scan all incoming / outgoing files via FTP/HTTP. Add in a Postfix install using Amavisd-new + SpamAssassin + ClamAV, and you can intercept all incoming / outgoing SMTP as well.
Voila! You have taken control of the network, and moved the virus scanning off the individual desktops.
This is a similar setup to what we use in the local secondary schools.
Uniformity in all programs is what caused MSFT Office to succeed beyond its dreams.
Oh, that's rich. Fire up a copy Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. Use Windows' nifty "tile windows" feature. Then compare the menu bar, menu layout, and toolbars in those 4 windows. Yeah, real consistent. If you think chaos is consistent.
Now fire up 4 different versions of Word. Notice how very little stayed the same in the interface across versions.
a) They thought they knew how to design products better than their customers. Companies which think they know more than their customers become extinct very fast. Irrespective of what people might say, Microsoft actually listened to people while building new versions of Office. They cared and actually respected customers instead of deriding them with a "i know all" attitude.
MS has not listened to their customers. Otherwise they would not be changing menu layouts and file formats with every single point release of Office. Adding features is one thing. Changing the placement of icons in the toolbar or items in the menus simply to make it seem new is quite another.
Until you can open a Word 2003 document in Word 97, you'll never be able to convince me that MS is listening to their customers. If Corel can figure out how to keep the exact same file format across 6 versions of WordPerfect (create a doc in WordPerfect 12, you can open it in WordPerfect 7 without losing formatting), then why can't MS? They've got how many more programmers and customers than Corel???
Keep it Simple, Keep Listening to customers and Keep it wickedly fast.
I have run Office on systems ranging from 64MB to 1.2 GB RAM and i have always felt MSFT made best of system provided and actually was faster than O/S on same systems.
You obviously have not used any version of Office other than 95. Because trying to get Office 2002 or 2003 to work on anything less than a P3 1 GHz is not fun. While WordPerfect Office 12 runs quite nicely on my P2-333. Hell, the minimum system requirements for Office 2003 are simply mind boggling. If would really be nice if MS understood the phrase "keep it simple".
Slashdot Mirror
You need to do some basic research before spouting off nonsense like the above.
DesktopBSD is nothing more than a custom installer for FreeBSD that also installs X and KDE out-of-the-box. Underneath the already installed GUI, though, is bog-standard FreeBSD. Trying to say DesktopBSD and FreeBSD are different is like trying to say Fedora Core 4 without X is a different OS than Fedora Core 4 with X.
There are 4 BSD operating systems: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD.
There are a handful of other operating systems that are based on BSD, like Darwin, but they are not really BSD systems (more like BSD userland running on different kernels).
And then there are the customised installs for BSD for embedded systems like PicoBSD, NanoBSD, MicroBSD, m0n0wall, pfSense, MyrBSD, and the like. These are special purpose OSes, though, and are all based off one of the main BSD systems (their more like custom installs and stripped down systems than separate OSes).
Nothing even close to the craziness over in Linux-land with the more than 200 separate distros, no two of which are binary compatible, and few of which are source compatible.
KDE, GNOME, X, and GCC are all just applications that run on various operating systems.
/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin.
What the post you are responding to is talking about are the CLI userland tools that comprise the base OS (find me a Linux distro that even understands the concept of base OS). For instance, ps, ls, more, grep, awk, and all those other programs that sit under
Every Linux distro uses programs from 50+ different projects, each using a different version, each using slightly different programs. Some have standard argument syntax (-option), some have non-standard argument syntax (option), some mix the two, some use long options (--some-long-option-name), some don't. And those options change from version to version, program to program. If the kernel API changes, you have to wait for each individual project to update their tools to work with the new API before the distro packagers will update the distro.
The BSDs all have a fairly regular commandline syntax (-option), with only a smattering of long-options (thank god). The BSD tools are also generally more POSIX compliant, have more useful options (not always the largest number, but definitely the most useful ones), and are updated in lock-step with the kernel.
The other big difference is that the BSDs are full-fledged operating systems, and there is a true understanding of the concept of "base OS". ie: every install of the OS has the exact same base set of tools/programs installed. And there's a clear separation between programs installed as part of the OS, from programs installed by the user.
Instead of shifting the clocks, why not just change business hours? Where is it engraved in titanium that "standard" business hours *must* be 9am to 5pm?
Instead of mucking around with the clock, why not find some incentive to have working hours changed to 7am to 3pm? Or 8am to 4 pm? It's the same end result, and nobody has to fiddle with their clocks.
In fact, why not drop DST completely? It serves no logical, useful purpose anymore.
And for those that like links and backing up statements and all that other jazz: Wikipedia Article
Pay particular attention to the first couple lines, and then the Definition section. :)
Which is what a virus is. It spreads itself from one binary/script to another.
Too many people nowadays confuse "worm" with "virus". A virus infects (appends, prepends, or copies itself to the middle of) binaries on the same system, mainly through an infected binary being executed.
A worm just copies itself to other systems using network connections of some kind. These spread by multiplying and creating new copies of itself.
If it's an Internet cafe, then the customers will be paying to use the wired terminals. Why should they get wireless for free? Charge them the same as for the wired terminals. Keep things simple, and make everything work the same.
The levy gets split between all the Canadian labels and artists.
Up here, Fair Use is still understood and protected. You can make backup copies of your music, rip your music to your MP3 player, etc, without worrying about the cops busting down the door and confiscating everything.
All the transmission throughput speed records are held by NetBSD. Hence, it should be fairly obvious which TCP/IP stack is the best. :) Okay, maybe not the best, but definitely the fastest.
It's too bad that Microsoft owns so much of OS/2. It would be great to see it released as Open Source. The Open Source OS/2 Petition is a good start.
MS owns large parts of OS/2 1.x and 2.x. They split with IBM during the development of 3.x. What was to be OS/2 3.0 was released as Windows NT 3.1.
After the split, IBM re-wrote most of the MS code and released OS/2 Warp 3.0. With the release of Warp 4.0, there is very little, if any, MS code left in OS/2. There may be code licensed from others, though,
We should all be exclusively using laserjets anyway, why is anyone happy the inkjet technology has a new lease on life?
Perhaps because a colour inkjet is in the sub-$50 CDN range and a colour laser is still in the over-$500 CDN range? Even when you factor in the cost of toner vs. cost of ink, and the useful lifespan of a toner cartridge vs. the useful lifespan of an ink cartridge, it's still a *lot* cheaper to use inkjets.
For non-colour printing, yes, we should all have a laser printer at home.
FreeBSD does this already, and much better than Linux ever has.
/compat directory. Works quite nicely. This is not emulation (there's not translation from one syscall to another), it's compatibility.
You can run Linux, SCO, and another Unix I can't recall the name of, binaries. The FreeBSD kernel checks the type of the binary, then loads the appropriate system call table, and then executes the binary. This allows you to run non-native binary at near native speeds, and can even run some binaries faster than if they were run on the proper OS. All you need is the correct libs from the other OS stored under the
The other 'feature' I want to see is a ruggedized phone. Something a construction worker can use at work, and not have to worry about getting trashed in the first week.
I would love to find a ruggedised GSM phone. My old Panasonic TX220 was a beautiful TDMA phone. Fully ruggedised and coated in rubber, yet still nice and small. Survived a two-storey tumble down cement stairs, falling off my second storey balconey, an "accidental" throw into a cement wall, and various other falls, drops, and bounces.Trying to find a GSM phone with the same minimalist feature set and ruggedisation is virtually impossible. Everytime I pass a Rogers store in town I keep asking if there's anything like that, and the answer is always no. :( Too bad you can't just upgrade a TDMA phone to GSM. :(
Hmmm, last time I checked my Batman comics, the Batmobile was not some chunky army reject with a pointless afterburner thrown in for no good reason.
Other than that, the movie looks a lot closer to Batman 1 than the goofy crud that was Batman 2-4.
They are not asking for the source to the driver.
They are asking for the documentation to be able to write their own driver. All they want is the API documentation that tells them what values to poke into which registers to get a signal emitted from the device. That's it.
Let the companies release their own drivers for whichever OSes they want to officially support. Then let them release the documentation needed to write drivers, so that others can write the needed drivers to support the other OSes out there.
Voila! Instead source of new revenue, as new users using other OSes will be able to use the hardware. If someone calls the support number, they get billed $X / call to be told, "We don't support that OS. Call the driver writer."
Well, you have to admit... emacs is a much better operating system...
:)
All it needs now is a text editor.
Any number can be converted to a fraction simply by putting that number over some power of ten.
Convert 0.934 to a fraction? Easy, it's 934/1000.
Convert 934.567 to a fraction? Easy, it's 934567/1000.
So long as you know your decimal places (tenths, hundredths, thousandths, etc), then you can convert any decimal number to a fraction. After that, it's just a matter of simplifying.
If you need a calculator to convert from decimal to fraction, you should not have been allowed to graduate from an elementary school.
Ah yes, sounds like the "good ol' days" of the Pentium2. Back when the CPU and L2 were "in the same package" but not on the same die. What a wonderful solution that was, it worked so ... wait, it barely limped along. The L2 was run at 1/2 the speed of the processor, and the Celeron 300a beat the pants off it.
Intel likes to take shortcuts, hoping nobody notices, or that nobody cares. Unfortunately, nobody does, and the ones who can actually benefit from the proper technology are the ones who suffer.
It would be nice if Intel would take a more than 12 month look at the future.
DOS and Windows 1/2/3 had no concept of a central documents (home) directory.
Windows 95 introduced the My Documents folder. But, it was either under c:\, or c:\windows\profiles, or c:\windows\profiles\"username" depending on whether you had User Profiles enabled, and whether or not you had indivual user profiles enabled.
I don't recall the name of the directory for Windows NT, but it was located under c:\winnt\profiles.
Windows 2000 moved it to c:\documents and settings\"username"\my documents.
Windows XP kept it there.
Then there's the "shortcuts" to my documents under my computer, that would either read "My Documents" or "username"'s documents or shared documents, but you were never really sure where those folders were actually stored. And the names kept changing.
That's a bit more than 3 times.
Microsoft implements "Focus follows Mouse"
They implemented this with the Windows 95 Power Toys, and has been available as part of the TweakUI tool ever since. Personally, I find this to be a very annoying feature and disable it on every X desktop I use.
They get rid of those stupid drive letters
They implemented this with Windows NT 4 or maybe Windows 2000. You can mount any harddrive partition on top of any empty directory anywhere in the tree. You use the NT Volume Manager, part of the Computer Management tool. Using this, you are left with just A: and C:. I use this at home. Not sure if it works with network shares, though.
Microsoft ships a real shell like bash with it, not that cmd.exe rubbish :) JP Softwares excellent 4DOS and 4NT shells make good replacements in the meantime.
Supposedly this will be "fixed" in the next release. But who knows when that will be.
It comes with konsole and openssh out of the box :)
These would be wonderful additions. Maybe they could even add Kontact to Office as a replacement for Outlook.
Stupid comment system stripped my less than sign out even though it's posted as plain text. The above comment should start:
You can't compare "lowest priced CPU" to "lowest price CPU". That's like saying 15 lbs of apples at $5 is a better deal than 30 lbs of oranges at $8. $5 is less than $8 so it must be a better deal. [rolls eyes]
You can't compare "lowest priced CPU" to "lowest price CPU". That's like saying 15 lbs of apples at $5 is a better deal than 30 lbs of oranges at $8. $5 $8 so it must be a better deal. [rolls eyes]
Look at the specs of the lowest priced A64-X2 and compare those specs to the lowest priced PD. You'll noticed that the performance of the A64-X2 is a lot higher than that of the PD.
Work your way up Intel's price chart until you find a PD or even PEE CPU that has similar performance to that of the lowest priced A64-X2. Compare the prices of those two, and you'll find the AMD CPU is a better deal.
I can tell you have never worked in a K-12 environment. The objective of education is suppose to get people ready for life. Guess what, the vast majority of kids are going to work in an environment where Windows is used. Linux has it's place and it is not on the desktop, yet.
I am the computer tech. for a K-12 school district. I and I alone must support 14 different buildings with a total of over 5,000 computers. Desktop management is extremely important for me. I currently use Zenworks to manage the desktops. There is nothing in the Linux world that compares with the options available for Windows management. Believe me, I have tested SuSE with Zenworks and it is not as refined as the Windows implementation.
I do work in a K-12 environmnent. And we have moved all our elementary school labs to Linux X Terminal servers. You want to talk about desktop management: we have no desktops to manage. :) Each of the 37 schools has a server, and that's all we worry about.
In three years, with less than $200,000/year capital budget, we were able to put in 37 labs of 30 computers, 100mbs switched networks, and dual-proc servers.
The desktops run the lightweight ICEwm, OpenOffice.org, TenThumbs typing tutor, a whole bunch of KDE science apps and games, Scribus, Firefox, and so on. We also put in two drafting labs in the secondaries that run QCad and Cycus 3D CAD programs.
Students should be taught skills, not programs. And the more, different programs they can learn, the better off they will be./p.
Acutally, if you save $100,000 on software, you can re-allocate that to hardware, or wiring, or infrastructure, or even to hiring a new employee. Trust me, that's exactly what we did. Our budgets have dropped from the multi-million-a-year mark to the $200,000/year mark, and we are still able to grow our department, purchase new hardware, and do more neat stuff (like video conferencing, distance learning, fax-over-ip, and such). How? Because we no longer have the $35,000 Novell licensing fees (our servers are FreeBSD and Linux), we no longer have the $50,000 Office licensing fees (moved most sites to OpenOffice.org), and so on.
Get a cheap box you can use as a firewall / proxy server. Change the DHCP setup to point the default gateway to that box. Put a virus scanner on that box (Squid + DansGuardian + ClamAV works nicely) to scan all incoming / outgoing files via FTP/HTTP. Add in a Postfix install using Amavisd-new + SpamAssassin + ClamAV, and you can intercept all incoming / outgoing SMTP as well.
Voila! You have taken control of the network, and moved the virus scanning off the individual desktops.
This is a similar setup to what we use in the local secondary schools.
Oh, that's rich. Fire up a copy Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. Use Windows' nifty "tile windows" feature. Then compare the menu bar, menu layout, and toolbars in those 4 windows. Yeah, real consistent. If you think chaos is consistent.
Now fire up 4 different versions of Word. Notice how very little stayed the same in the interface across versions.
MS has not listened to their customers. Otherwise they would not be changing menu layouts and file formats with every single point release of Office. Adding features is one thing. Changing the placement of icons in the toolbar or items in the menus simply to make it seem new is quite another.
Until you can open a Word 2003 document in Word 97, you'll never be able to convince me that MS is listening to their customers. If Corel can figure out how to keep the exact same file format across 6 versions of WordPerfect (create a doc in WordPerfect 12, you can open it in WordPerfect 7 without losing formatting), then why can't MS? They've got how many more programmers and customers than Corel???
You obviously have not used any version of Office other than 95. Because trying to get Office 2002 or 2003 to work on anything less than a P3 1 GHz is not fun. While WordPerfect Office 12 runs quite nicely on my P2-333. Hell, the minimum system requirements for Office 2003 are simply mind boggling. If would really be nice if MS understood the phrase "keep it simple".