Maybe, IBM and Microsoft deserve each other. Neither is exactly a saint here.
Recall that OS/2 was originally developed as an attempt by IBM to take the system proprietary again. They were facing severe profit pressures from all those clone makers that MS was selling DOS to. So they contracted MS to write OS/2 for IBM and IBM alone, hoping to leverage their still-dominant brand name to allow higher profits. It's hard to imagine now, but in the context of 1990, DOS and Windows were relatively "open" systems, at least in the sense that they could run on generic hardware.
Today, of course, MS is threatened by a system that has taken openness to the next level.
All of the Asus P2B series boards that I've used do power on when the cord is first plugged in; in other words, when power is first applied to the PS, the board turns on. So that takes care of power failures, etc. I haven't checked for relevant BIOS settings, but if there are any, they apparently default to this behavior.
It seems to me that browsers are really a pretty trivial application. That's not meant to downplay the fact that there are some complex things going on inside. But look at the interface. Forward, Back, choose a bookmark. From the users' perspective, they're all pretty much the same. Unlike word processors or spreadsheets or accounting or graphic packages, there really aren't many ways to make one browser dfferent from the next, especially from the end-users' perspective.
It turns out the browser wars were insanely overhyped. It looked important three years ago, but in retrospect, it seems pretty silly to think that somebody could gain influence over the Internet by implemeting and promoting special HTML tags.
As far as I can tell, there aren't too many situations where NT or NetWare or Linux/Samba is going to offer much more hardware bang for the buck than the others. Differences of 10-20% don't mean much until you get into fairly large servers.
But one thing I've noticed is that when we buy an NT server, we always end up specifying a bigger one than we really need, if for no other reason than to make so the installation and reboots go a little faster. I'm not talking about crashes, just routine reboots that we're inevitably forced to do for minor configuration changes. When your servers are lightly loaded, as ours are, there can be actual cost savings using Linux.
But the hardware costs for such servers are usually less than the cost of the people who manage them. That can cut both ways. On the one hand, there are plenty of people who can keep a simple NT network up and running, and it's harder to find people with Linux experience. But one of the best-kept secrets about Linux is how incredibly easy it is for a competent person to manage. My NT experience vastly outweighs my Linux experience, but when an NT server gets cranky, I still get cold chills. On a Linux box, I calmly look at the log files, and usually find the answer pretty quickly. Samba's SWAT web admin tool is killer, far easier to use than anything in NT.
So, it all comes down to people. If you have people who are sharp, who understand what's really going on while they're clicking "Next... Next... Finish," then they should be able to do a lot more neat things in a lot less time with Linux.
Much also depends on how the company accounts for costs. Smaller businesses often ignore support and admin costs ("We have 3 people in our IS department, and they're on salary, so nothing's really going to change our costs.").
One other consideration, is that it's often useful to think not in terms of migrating but of integrating. It's relatively easy to pop a Samba server into an existing NT network. Keep doing that, and eventually all you'll have on NT is a PDC. So think of file services and authentication services separately. Linux can be used as the workhorse file-spitter-outer, while you maintain some other system, whether it be NIS or NT or, in the future, NDS, as the authentication system and user database. (hmmm... couldn't Samba use PAM to authenticate against a Novell server?)
About a month ago, there was a story here from somebody who had done a job search on "Linux" at Apple. I though it was clever, so I did the same search at MS and found one job advertised. It's in the marketing department. I saw no need to fan the anti-MS flames by posting it here, but the job is still listed as of today, so you can check it out for yourself.
"It's a mistake to ask that question," said Stallman, fixing upon me a baleful look. "Because that makes it sound like there is one winner and one loser and it's an all-or-nothing thing. You're leading yourself into confusion mentally if you formulate it that way. As I see it, I'm sure to have a certain amount of success."
For me, that sums up the futility of the debate. RSM knows that "Linux" is the term that will be used most widely. He just wants to get as many people as possible to use "GNU/Linux". As long as people are aware of his efforts, they'll be reminded of GNU, regardless of whether they say "Linux" or "GNU/Linux."
It used to be that you could cross-reference domains by taking the contact handles and doing a search on those. That showed you all the domains that a person was associated with, assuming they used the same NIC handle. Looks like this feature no longer works, or I've forgotten how to do it.
If you go to http://www.askreggie.com you can do a similar cross-reference through a browser. It works like a regular whois, but the results let you click on the company name and it will bring up a list of domains owned by that company.
It's also helpful to look up the domains that appear in the contact e-mail addresses, especially the admin and billing contacts.
If you're moving to the Boston area, then MediaOne is probably the best bet. By all means, don't land in a town that has Cablevision. Their TV technology is so far behind that when you tune to ESPN, Chris Berman still has hair, and Internet isn't even on their radar.
The cable modem is a blast, it's available in almost all MediaOne towns, and they're pretty cool about what you do with it. That's what impresses me the most, they really do give you pretty much just a pipe instead of trying to "add value" by forcibly guiding you to their own content. They don't "support" Linux, but they've set up a private newsgroup for Linux customers, which, given how most companies deal with unsupported platforms, is pretty refreshing.
All of which has had me concerned since the original Comcast merger was announced. I'm not familair with Comcast, or RoadRunner, or any of the other players involved, but I suspect any one of them might change it into some sort of proprietary service designed to sell you services or content.
Today's story on the arrest notes that he was "snared with the help of America Online technicians."
Basically, it sounds like he was tracked from the newsgroup postings. The role of the Word GUID was that it helped correlate documents after they found him.
I was planning on putting out an April Fool's story saying that a free operating system developed by volunteers on the Internet was threatening Microsoft Windows.
Sorry for my loose use of the term "spec" and any resulting confusion. As I'm all too painfully aware, Word documents are not an open spec. But some info about them is published.
Anyway, the existence of the GUID is not a new discovery, while the existence of the embedded MAC address is.
Since it was the MAC address portion that was used to correlate the documents, I guess it is accurate to say that it came about as a result of Phar Lap's recent research.
It's still a sloppy article by ZDNet. I mean, how the *&%$ did they know where to look? What led them to that particular web site?
>> it shows how they traced the GUID Again, not to be picky, but it could not have been the GUID that led ZDNet to the original. Yes, it was used to compare MAC addresses, but there was certainly something else that helped them find the source.
Note, too, that the article said only that the MAC addresses matched. It did not say that the GUID's matched. I'd think it would be easier to forge the MAC address portion than the entire GUID.
Maybe it's just one hacker setting up another hacker, then blowing the whistle. Just speculatin'
Even though Phar Lap established that the MAC address is part of the GUID, you can't just take a MAC address and go find it on the Internet, at least not that I know of.
ZDNet must have had some other tip such as an IP address or an informant that led them to the source. If forced to wager, my money would be on "informant."
Also note that even though MS has changed the registration process, this still leaves the same GUID in your Word documents. It's just not sent to MS anymore.
First, the existence of the GUID in Word documents was not "recently discovered." It's part of the spec, and it's been known about for a long time.
What was discovered is that the GUID is transmitted to MS during the registration process.
Of course, the likelihood that the macro writer registered his copy of Windows using his real name and address is probably.... zero. So it's doubtful that MS has any record that GUID.
Which begs the question... What is the basis for ZDNet's claim that the GUID was used to "track" the document back to its creator?
More likely, they used the NNTP headers to get some hints about where to look, and when THAT trail led somewhere, they compared GUID's and thus established an apparent connection.
The real issue is not the recently discovered transmission of the GUID to MS during registration, it's the existence of the GUID itself that can reveal more about information than you realize. It's not "big brother," it's just bad design. And sloppy reporting.
If Andrew Schulman is now a Microsoft employee, it's news to me. It wasn't entirely clear from reading the article,
In the past, though, he has taken on Microsoft pretty thoroughly. He did a lot of reverse engineering on the Win95 betas, and much to MS's displeasure, he released "Undocumented Windows 95" which was one of the first books to blow through the hype that Win95 was a "new 32-bit" system. Later, he cracked the MS CD key code, and an article describing it was available on O'Reilly's site. I think it's gone, now. Anyway, even if he is an MS employee now, he has in the past been pretty independant, and he's a very sharp guy.
It's also a little unfair taking pot shots at the article; it's an article written for people who have been hearing about this Linux thing, and it inevitably has to be a little shallow. Many more similar articles will soon follow in the non-trade press, so get used to it.
That said, he still can't seem to understand how it can work while being free. I mean, geez, how far does Linux have to progress before people believe that it exists? To quote Groucho; "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
I have to admit, when I first started reading about RMS, I thought he was sort of a left-wing flake. BUT... On further reflection, I see how a passionate attitude such as his is a crucial ingredient to making something like GNU work.
At the same time, the way he has implemented the GPL is largely derived from practical considerations (at least that's how he describes it on fsf.org). No intellectually honest libertarian can find any fault with that document, or with the time and effort that he has devoted to the cause. In fact, much of the beauty of the GPL is that it relies on intellectual property rights to be enforceable.
He's really a living contradiction, and perhaps that's why I admire the guy so much. His leftish message rings true with a lot of people, it recognizes the inherently stressful relationship between a proprietary software publisher and their customers. But his solution for the perceived problem avoids the simplistic leftish approach of "pass a law to make it better."
The fact is, GNU needed somebody passionate and idealogical to get off the ground, and RMS filled that role perfectly. And to a certain extent, I feel for him, now that Linus is the new poster boy, the guy everybody (including me) would love to share a beer with. Linux without GNU would be fairly irrelevant, but RMS's eccenticities have pushed him and his GNU colleagues to the background, and, let's face it folks, that's gotta hurt. Shoot, fifteen years of creating software and giving it away, and this is the thanks he gets?
And you know, I'm as much a born-again capitalist as anybody, but I have to say, when I first went to install Linux on a second computer, it dawned on me... I don't have to enter a unique CD code to make it work, I don't have to buy a second license, I don't have to register in order to read the Knowledge Base, I don't have to accept a hundred license agreements everytime I update something. After years of reflexively worrying about that stuff, it's a *very* liberating feeling. I don't begrudge MS and such for doing things that way, but when it's not there, you suddenly realize just how nice it is not to have to deal with it. It has nothing to do with "freedom" in the way the word is used in the Constitution, but it *is* about freedom in a sense that the average person can relate to.
I didn't mean to say that Linux costs less on an ongoing basis or anything like that.
In small businesses (ours is about 80 people), good cost analysis just isn't done routinely. Often, decisions are made at purchase time. And managers hate to approve a purchase of Office, plain and simple. Not a strictly rational decision, just their gut feeling. They hate spending several hundred bucks for a piece of paper. They always hem and haw until I spell out for them that there is no other legal way to provide Office to the user, and I don't intend to get caught holding the bag.
It's not just the company I'm presently with, either. Nearly every small business I've seen works in a similar way; family-run businesses are most susceptible to this kind of decision-making, but it happens in small public companies, too. Yes, the understand that there are support costs, but they always behave as if the marginal price of support is zero. Thus the acquistion costs become the determinant.
In the 60's we were shocking the older generation with our bad music, bad haircuts, drugs, and irresponsible sex. And I remeber wondering, how will the next generation shock US?
Turns out they're doing it with bad music, bad haircuts, drugs, and irresponsible sex.
I've found that very few users on my network really know how to use the Windows interface, so I don't expect that switching them to KDE or Gnome would present any serious problems. Training? That's for big companies. Most folks on our network can barely copy files successfully.
After an hour or two of playing around, I suspect most people would be comfortable with KDE or Gnome. That's not the problem.
The PROBLEM is the mountain of MSOffice documents that we have. Star Office just doesn't cut it for opening existing documents, and this is where users get really antsy.
On a related note; we tried skipping Office 97, and we've been running Office95. But then some managers started getting Office97 attachments via e-mail, and demanded their own upgrades. Of course, they started saving their own docs in '97 format (they're way too lazy to set the options), so it spreading. It's sort of like a Microsoft implementation of a GPL.
Fortunately, as PC prices drop, the window of opportunity for Linux in small business widens. Currently, about 40% of our cost for a new PC is a piece of paper that we purchase from Microsoft. Even though it's a tiny fraction of the user's salary, management HATES approving the purchase. They do, but only after I remind them that felony charges look terrible on one's resume. "Of course, if you ORDER me to install an unlicensed copy, I'll obey." Heh. Never fails. But we go through this dance several times a year.
Anyway, their ears are open to alternatives. Just don't mess with their Office documents.
The way that/. is "moderated" is very clever. Heck, anybody who wants to read everything will be able to. There's no censorship there, not even in the sense that the term is loosely applied these days. It leaves the choice to the user.
Maybe "moderation" isn't the term to use, though, since it will inevitably inflame the people who see censorship in every editorial decision. Maybe call it "flame rating" system or something like that.
Anyway, I think it's a very good system. I've been stuck with the job of "moderating" traditional message boards, and it sucks. You end up getting sucked into flame wars with raving nuts who didn't have anything to say in the first place. The/. system lets the raving nuts rave, and gives the rest of us the tools to read them or avoid them. Perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, IBM and Microsoft deserve each other. Neither is exactly a saint here.
Recall that OS/2 was originally developed as an attempt by IBM to take the system proprietary again. They were facing severe profit pressures from all those clone makers that MS was selling DOS to. So they contracted MS to write OS/2 for IBM and IBM alone, hoping to leverage their still-dominant brand name to allow higher profits. It's hard to imagine now, but in the context of 1990, DOS and Windows were relatively "open" systems, at least in the sense that they could run on generic hardware.
Today, of course, MS is threatened by a system that has taken openness to the next level.
All of the Asus P2B series boards that I've used do power on when the cord is first plugged in; in other words, when power is first applied to the PS, the board turns on. So that takes care of power failures, etc. I haven't checked for relevant BIOS settings, but if there are any, they apparently default to this behavior.
It seems to me that browsers are really a pretty trivial application. That's not meant to downplay the fact that there are some complex things going on inside. But look at the interface. Forward, Back, choose a bookmark. From the users' perspective, they're all pretty much the same. Unlike word processors or spreadsheets or accounting or graphic packages, there really aren't many ways to make one browser dfferent from the next, especially from the end-users' perspective.
It turns out the browser wars were insanely overhyped. It looked important three years ago, but in retrospect, it seems pretty silly to think that somebody could gain influence over the Internet by implemeting and promoting special HTML tags.
Those interested should read this Linux World article. A very good introduction to the issues involved.
As far as I can tell, there aren't too many situations where NT or NetWare or Linux/Samba is going to offer much more hardware bang for the buck than the others. Differences of 10-20% don't mean much until you get into fairly large servers.
But one thing I've noticed is that when we buy an NT server, we always end up specifying a bigger one than we really need, if for no other reason than to make so the installation and reboots go a little faster. I'm not talking about crashes, just routine reboots that we're inevitably forced to do for minor configuration changes. When your servers are lightly loaded, as ours are, there can be actual cost savings using Linux.
But the hardware costs for such servers are usually less than the cost of the people who manage them. That can cut both ways. On the one hand, there are plenty of people who can keep a simple NT network up and running, and it's harder to find people with Linux experience. But one of the best-kept secrets about Linux is how incredibly easy it is for a competent person to manage. My NT experience vastly outweighs my Linux experience, but when an NT server gets cranky, I still get cold chills. On a Linux box, I calmly look at the log files, and usually find the answer pretty quickly. Samba's SWAT web admin tool is killer, far easier to use than anything in NT.
So, it all comes down to people. If you have people who are sharp, who understand what's really going on while they're clicking "Next... Next... Finish," then they should be able to do a lot more neat things in a lot less time with Linux.
Much also depends on how the company accounts for costs. Smaller businesses often ignore support and admin costs ("We have 3 people in our IS department, and they're on salary, so nothing's really going to change our costs.").
One other consideration, is that it's often useful to think not in terms of migrating but of integrating. It's relatively easy to pop a Samba server into an existing NT network. Keep doing that, and eventually all you'll have on NT is a PDC. So think of file services and authentication services separately. Linux can be used as the workhorse file-spitter-outer, while you maintain some other system, whether it be NIS or NT or, in the future, NDS, as the authentication system and user database. (hmmm... couldn't Samba use PAM to authenticate against a Novell server?)
About a month ago, there was a story here from somebody who had done a job search on "Linux" at Apple. I though it was clever, so I did the same search at MS and found one job advertised. It's in the marketing department. I saw no need to fan the anti-MS flames by posting it here, but the job is still listed as of today, so you can check it out for yourself.
from: http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31fe ature.html
"It's a mistake to ask that question," said Stallman, fixing upon me a baleful look. "Because that makes it sound like there is one winner and one loser and it's an all-or-nothing thing. You're leading yourself into confusion mentally if you formulate it that way. As I see it, I'm sure to have a certain amount of success."
For me, that sums up the futility of the debate. RSM knows that "Linux" is the term that will be used most widely. He just wants to get as many people as possible to use "GNU/Linux". As long as people are aware of his efforts, they'll be reminded of GNU, regardless of whether they say "Linux" or "GNU/Linux."
It used to be that you could cross-reference domains by taking the contact handles and doing a search on those. That showed you all the domains that a person was associated with, assuming they used the same NIC handle. Looks like this feature no longer works, or I've forgotten how to do it.
If you go to http://www.askreggie.com you can do a similar cross-reference through a browser. It works like a regular whois, but the results let you click on the company name and it will bring up a list of domains owned by that company.
It's also helpful to look up the domains that appear in the contact e-mail addresses, especially the admin and billing contacts.
If you're moving to the Boston area, then MediaOne is probably the best bet. By all means, don't land in a town that has Cablevision. Their TV technology is so far behind that when you tune to ESPN, Chris Berman still has hair, and Internet isn't even on their radar.
The cable modem is a blast, it's available in almost all MediaOne towns, and they're pretty cool about what you do with it. That's what impresses me the most, they really do give you pretty much just a pipe instead of trying to "add value" by forcibly guiding you to their own content. They don't "support" Linux, but they've set up a private newsgroup for Linux customers, which, given how most companies deal with unsupported platforms, is pretty refreshing.
All of which has had me concerned since the original Comcast merger was announced. I'm not familair with Comcast, or RoadRunner, or any of the other players involved, but I suspect any one of them might change it into some sort of proprietary service designed to sell you services or content.
see:
http://www.m ercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/01 2315.htm
The story details how Richard Smith put out inquiries on the 'net, and was led to the VicodinES web site by a tipster.
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/breaking/ merc/docs/023550.htm
Today's story on the arrest notes that he was "snared with the help of America Online technicians."
Basically, it sounds like he was tracked from the newsgroup postings. The role of the Word GUID was that it helped correlate documents after they found him.I was planning on putting out an April Fool's story saying that a free operating system developed by volunteers on the Internet was threatening Microsoft Windows.
But I figured nobody would believe it.
Sorry for my loose use of the term "spec" and any resulting confusion. As I'm all too painfully aware, Word documents are not an open spec. But some info about them is published.
Anyway, the existence of the GUID is not a new discovery, while the existence of the embedded MAC address is.
Since it was the MAC address portion that was used to correlate the documents, I guess it is accurate to say that it came about as a result of Phar Lap's recent research.
It's still a sloppy article by ZDNet. I mean, how the *&%$ did they know where to look? What led them to that particular web site?
>> it shows how they traced the GUID
Again, not to be picky, but it could not have been the GUID that led ZDNet to the original. Yes, it was used to compare MAC addresses, but there was certainly something else that helped them find the source.
Note, too, that the article said only that the MAC addresses matched. It did not say that the GUID's matched. I'd think it would be easier to forge the MAC address portion than the entire GUID.
Maybe it's just one hacker setting up another hacker, then blowing the whistle. Just speculatin'
Even though Phar Lap established that the MAC address is part of the GUID, you can't just take a MAC address and go find it on the Internet, at least not that I know of.
ZDNet must have had some other tip such as an IP address or an informant that led them to the source. If forced to wager, my money would be on "informant."
Also note that even though MS has changed the registration process, this still leaves the same GUID in your Word documents. It's just not sent to MS anymore.
First, the existence of the GUID in Word documents was not "recently discovered." It's part of the spec, and it's been known about for a long time.
What was discovered is that the GUID is transmitted to MS during the registration process.
Of course, the likelihood that the macro writer registered his copy of Windows using his real name and address is probably.... zero. So it's doubtful that MS has any record that GUID.
Which begs the question... What is the basis for ZDNet's claim that the GUID was used to "track" the document back to its creator?
More likely, they used the NNTP headers to get some hints about where to look, and when THAT trail led somewhere, they compared GUID's and thus established an apparent connection.
The real issue is not the recently discovered transmission of the GUID to MS during registration, it's the existence of the GUID itself that can reveal more about information than you realize. It's not "big brother," it's just bad design. And sloppy reporting.
Are the GNU tools a "part of the operating system", or are they "bundled applications"?
Seriously, "GNU/Linux" will just never catch on. People are always going to call it "Linux". It's a linguistic thing.
But it would be nice if distributors started giving "GNU tools" better visibility on the boxes and on their web sites.
Oh. Never mind.
If Andrew Schulman is now a Microsoft employee, it's news to me. It wasn't entirely clear from reading the article,
In the past, though, he has taken on Microsoft pretty thoroughly. He did a lot of reverse engineering on the Win95 betas, and much to MS's displeasure, he released "Undocumented Windows 95" which was one of the first books to blow through the hype that Win95 was a "new 32-bit" system. Later, he cracked the MS CD key code, and an article describing it was available on O'Reilly's site. I think it's gone, now. Anyway, even if he is an MS employee now, he has in the past been pretty independant, and he's a very sharp guy.
It's also a little unfair taking pot shots at the article; it's an article written for people who have been hearing about this Linux thing, and it inevitably has to be a little shallow. Many more similar articles will soon follow in the non-trade press, so get used to it.
That said, he still can't seem to understand how it can work while being free. I mean, geez, how far does Linux have to progress before people believe that it exists? To quote Groucho; "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
I have to admit, when I first started reading about RMS, I thought he was sort of a left-wing flake. BUT... On further reflection, I see how a passionate attitude such as his is a crucial ingredient to making something like GNU work.
At the same time, the way he has implemented the GPL is largely derived from practical considerations (at least that's how he describes it on fsf.org). No intellectually honest libertarian can find any fault with that document, or with the time and effort that he has devoted to the cause. In fact, much of the beauty of the GPL is that it relies on intellectual property rights to be enforceable.
He's really a living contradiction, and perhaps that's why I admire the guy so much. His leftish message rings true with a lot of people, it recognizes the inherently stressful relationship between a proprietary software publisher and their customers. But his solution for the perceived problem avoids the simplistic leftish approach of "pass a law to make it better."
The fact is, GNU needed somebody passionate and idealogical to get off the ground, and RMS filled that role perfectly. And to a certain extent, I feel for him, now that Linus is the new poster boy, the guy everybody (including me) would love to share a beer with. Linux without GNU would be fairly irrelevant, but RMS's eccenticities have pushed him and his GNU colleagues to the background, and, let's face it folks, that's gotta hurt. Shoot, fifteen years of creating software and giving it away, and this is the thanks he gets?
And you know, I'm as much a born-again capitalist as anybody, but I have to say, when I first went to install Linux on a second computer, it dawned on me... I don't have to enter a unique CD code to make it work, I don't have to buy a second license, I don't have to register in order to read the Knowledge Base, I don't have to accept a hundred license agreements everytime I update something. After years of reflexively worrying about that stuff, it's a *very* liberating feeling. I don't begrudge MS and such for doing things that way, but when it's not there, you suddenly realize just how nice it is not to have to deal with it. It has nothing to do with "freedom" in the way the word is used in the Constitution, but it *is* about freedom in a sense that the average person can relate to.
Not sure if your reply was meant for me but....
I didn't mean to say that Linux costs less on an ongoing basis or anything like that.
In small businesses (ours is about 80 people), good cost analysis just isn't done routinely. Often, decisions are made at purchase time. And managers hate to approve a purchase of Office, plain and simple. Not a strictly rational decision, just their gut feeling. They hate spending several hundred bucks for a piece of paper. They always hem and haw until I spell out for them that there is no other legal way to provide Office to the user, and I don't intend to get caught holding the bag.
It's not just the company I'm presently with, either. Nearly every small business I've seen works in a similar way; family-run businesses are most susceptible to this kind of decision-making, but it happens in small public companies, too. Yes, the understand that there are support costs, but they always behave as if the marginal price of support is zero. Thus the acquistion costs become the determinant.
In the 60's we were shocking the older generation with our bad music, bad haircuts, drugs, and irresponsible sex. And I remeber wondering, how will the next generation shock US?
Turns out they're doing it with bad music, bad haircuts, drugs, and irresponsible sex.
And I want bob.com, since that's my first name.
Oops. Too late.
Registrant:
Microsoft Corporation (BOB3-DOM)
One Microsoft Way
Bldg 25
Redmond, WA 98052
Domain Name: BOB.COM
Congratulations on your successful migration.
I've found that very few users on my network really know how to use the Windows interface, so I don't expect that switching them to KDE or Gnome would present any serious problems. Training? That's for big companies. Most folks on our network can barely copy files successfully.
After an hour or two of playing around, I suspect most people would be comfortable with KDE or Gnome. That's not the problem.
The PROBLEM is the mountain of MSOffice documents that we have. Star Office just doesn't cut it for opening existing documents, and this is where users get really antsy.
On a related note; we tried skipping Office 97, and we've been running Office95. But then some managers started getting Office97 attachments via e-mail, and demanded their own upgrades. Of course, they started saving their own docs in '97 format (they're way too lazy to set the options), so it spreading. It's sort of like a Microsoft implementation of a GPL.
Fortunately, as PC prices drop, the window of opportunity for Linux in small business widens. Currently, about 40% of our cost for a new PC is a piece of paper that we purchase from Microsoft. Even though it's a tiny fraction of the user's salary, management HATES approving the purchase. They do, but only after I remind them that felony charges look terrible on one's resume. "Of course, if you ORDER me to install an unlicensed copy, I'll obey." Heh. Never fails. But we go through this dance several times a year.
Anyway, their ears are open to alternatives. Just don't mess with their Office documents.
The way that /. is "moderated" is very clever. Heck, anybody who wants to read everything will be able to. There's no censorship there, not even in the sense that the term is loosely applied these days. It leaves the choice to the user.
/. system lets the raving nuts rave, and gives the rest of us the tools to read them or avoid them. Perfect.
Maybe "moderation" isn't the term to use, though, since it will inevitably inflame the people who see censorship in every editorial decision. Maybe call it "flame rating" system or something like that.
Anyway, I think it's a very good system. I've been stuck with the job of "moderating" traditional message boards, and it sucks. You end up getting sucked into flame wars with raving nuts who didn't have anything to say in the first place. The