One time I had the displeasure to deal with Support from our local quasi-monopoly CableISP (Telstra, Australia) for one of my clients with a Business LAN user account (cheap connection upto 8 users), they had just had their cable modem replaced after the old one died, after working fine for 8months mind you. Now the new modem would only assign 4 IP's (via DHCP) to the first four pc's on (I figured it only accepted 4 MAC address's). The first phone call went like this:
Me:"... we just had a modem replaced, but it does not work correctly, only allowing 4 users"
Support:"Sorry, we dont support network connections, call your Network Engineer."
Me:"I _am_ the network engineer! Im telling you there is a fault in _your_ modem, you are charging my client for eight users, but it will only accept four!"
Most of the problem appears to be overloading the idea of "support". To include supporting some software the ISP supplies, support with the services the ISP supplies and reporting of faults. Maybe ISP's should get out of the software business all together and try and operate more like telephone companies.
I think the general assumption seems to be that if you're running Linux - you're smart enough to sort out the problem yourself - or if its at their end - clever enough to work that out!
Except that the problem is that if you arn't running a very specific set of software it can be impossible to convince them that there might be a problem at there end.
..is that the very products they peddle are NOT integral parts of our lives. Their output is something I (we ALL) can do without. I have more CDs and VHS tapes than I know what to do with, and quite frankly, I am ashamed I bought as many as I did.
Even where people do care about the content how often do they care about which RIAA or MPAA was responsible for publishing it. Where people are fans they tend to be fans of authors, singers, musicians, actors, directors, etc. e.g. If for example Fox/Columbia-Tristar/Tribune/Time-Warner-AOL/Some company no-one has ever heard of, were to have their name on "Star Trek" instead Paramount how many Star Trek fans would even notice or care?
Basically, the advance of technology has made copyrights unenforceable. Like the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete.
What they are trying to protect isn't so much copyright (it would probably be possible for the US Congress to come up with a new "copyright" law which would serve the purpose outlined in the US Constitution.) It is more the paradigm of big corporate publishers. Effectivly what technology is doing is lowering the cost of recording and publishing works. To the extent that either completly new publishing companies, who don't use "legarcy media", could come into existance (who wouldn't need to create "megastars" to ensure they make money even if they have "megaflops") or the people who actually create works no longer need a third party to publish their work.
* Grass-roots efforts like petitions for state ballot referenda
* Peaceful protests and demonstrations
* "Civil disobediance," such as staging a general strike
* Riots and other isolated incidents of violence against officials and institutions
* Full-scale armed warfare against the government with the explicit purpose of overthrowing or dismembering said government
The problem with the latter is actually having it work. If a revolution fails you tend to have an even more opressive government in power. If it succedes who do you then get to govern. (If you make a popular rebel head of state you could end up with someone like Robert Mugabe...) In the case of the US you'd need to overthrow not just a handful of people but most of the federal government, the large state governments and the entirity of the Democratic and Republican parties.
I feel that right now the U.S. government is strong enough now so that it would require widespread civil disobedience to significantly change its policies. Simply getting a few hundred or even a few thousand people together peacefully voicing their anger about something just isn't going to cut it any more. The way the media works now, such a demonstration will be ignored by the masses or even worse, attacked in such a way to get those who haven't made up their minds about the issue to turn against you.
It would be fairly easy to either infiltrate such a protest with some trouble makers or even have police attack protesters then claim the protesters started it.
Just because you say he didn't win the recounts doesn't make it so. Under every interpretation of the vote results, Algore lost and Dubya won.
Not every possible interpretation. Bush would have lost without the electoral college votes from Florida. Considering the utter farce of the election process there Florida abstaining would have been perfectly reasonable behaviour.
Furthermore, America is not a democracy, and I for one am grateful that it isn't. Democracy is, as another/.er's sig says, two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Our nation is a representative republic. There is a difference. Learn it, live it, love it.
Remember though that large corporate interests and political extremists get "first dibs" on this representation...
With most closed source products you have to tinker as well to get it running the way you want, but alas, you can't. Instead you get any number of consultants in who will then tell you, that you have to reengineer your business processes (if you can't pay for the software customization) to fit the software.
Assuming that you can pay to have the software customised. It could be an issue of persuade the supplier that such a customisation is even necessary. Also you have no way of knowing if you are getting good value or not for your money. If you pay someone to modify some open source code they probably won't need convincing.
With opensource a company, even with a limited budget, can influence the developers of OSS projects and maybe donate hardware, money or whatever else is required. Yes, it might take a little longer and cost is hard to predict, but so it is with business process reengineering.
Is the cost of proprietary software easy to predict anyway. It's not unknown for people to pay then be told "you need better hardware", "you bought the old version which isn't supported any more", "you really need xyz addon to make it work well", etc.
In almost all corporate environments the IT staff handles the configuration of the workstations, not the end user so configuration should not be an impediment to deploying Linux.
If anything it should be an advantage. Some organisations must spend huge amounts of money to prevent end user configuration of Windows workstations (or to tidy up afterwards)...
I have recently installed Linux on the public workstations of a local library and not one patron has commented about it not being Windows. They open and use AbiWord without instruction - creating, formatting, inserting clip art. They print, they save to floppy disk, surf the Net - all without a single piece of documentation or instruction from the staff.
This appears to indicate that from the POV of people simply using the computers any differences in the UI are trivial.
If these untrained, and generally unskilled, computer users can cope with Linux on the desktop, how hard could it be in a corporate environment where you could actually train the users.
Maybe the problem is down to management perceptions and a vocal minority of users who like to tinker with computers...
So you'll also assume that grandma will do Windows-configuration by hacking the registry?
The kind of "configuration" most users tend to make is altering the desktop colours. Most of the Windows control panel is pretty much irrelevent to people who are simply using a machine.
If you buy SAP, then you do get the source for (most of) it, and you customize it to fit your business - this is bread-and-butter work for the "Big 5" consultants. You can't release it, but nor would you want to, since it encodes intimate details of exactly how your business works. If you need code written from scratch, large corporations hire IBS, EDS, CSC et al to do that, the source is right there, but it will never be let out "into the wild".
Your point please? You can do this with GPL software easily. Your are only obliged to distribute the source (under the GPL or a compatable licence) if you distribute the binaries. Since in this case the modified software is used entirely within the organisation it isn't being "distributed".
ok, using the KDE/GNOME dialer is not a problem, but configuring an ISDN-card or DSL-modem is simply NOT an easy task for an average user.
It's a setting up task. Rather than a using task. Somehow people confuse "easy to use" with "easy to set up and service". Even though outside of computers it's perfectly acceptable that the latter can require a specialist.
Computers should be easy for non-technophiles. People don't want to know about drivers and interrupts or even document types. They just want to surf the web, print their documents, play their games, and not be bothered with the details. The OS that did this first and best was been Windoze.
In what universe. Windows does an utterly awful job of being "non techie" when it comes to "drivers, interrupts and document types". If it did a good job it wouldn't allow regular users to even see what they were, let alone alter them. The best platforms for games are game consoles, standard hardware, no software installation of any kind, with the only user interface the game itself.... Surfing the web requires setting things up to the exact internet connection method used.
One of the things you're missing is that just because you use Linux on the desktop, that does not mean its ready for people in general.
But the frequently mutating Windows desktop is?
And the general public are the people who really count, not you.
When were the general public given much of a choice. Including the ability for individual people to choose from a decent range of options? Most people IME simply use what is put in front of them, regardless of what it might be.
How many vendors have the source code to Win2k or your other proprietary S/W of choice? How much choice do you have among vendors that are capable of fixing an obscure-but-critical-to-me flaw in a closed source app or OS?
Especially if whoever wrote the software claims "it's a feature, not a bug"...
If you sell me a product that doesn't work for us, I expect *you* to fix it. It doesn't matter if the source is open or closed, because *you* have it either way. And if I throw enough $$$ at your company, you WILL put us at the top of your priority list, or we'll go to a different vendor.
That threat is a lot more credible if you have the source. Otherwise your alternative vendor might have to start again from scratch. With closed source they are in a position of power, not you.
Having the development company that has responsibility and experience with that product fix that product is not only more cost effective, but is also generally the only feasible way to solve the problem.
Assuming you're "vendor" is actually the entity who wrote the program. They could just as easily be selling something they didn't write and know less about it than you.
Solving these kinds of problems in house is just not feasible. You can't afford to keep a bunch of programmers around just to solve those occassional problems with varying pieces of software and even then the programmers would be inefficient because they'd have to scale the learning curve first (this is made harder by the piss poor documentation of most open source software).
How do you manage if you need an electrician, builder, plumber, lawyer, etc? Using open source puts your software on the same footing as everything else...
Or maybe you missed the stories about the ship with the NT-controlled powerplant, and when NT went away, so did control of the engines? Ship had to be towed back to harbor. Big embarrassment
Would have been a bigger embarrassment had this happened in the middle of an actual war. It's a lot easier to bomb a ship which can't manouver.
And who is accountable when their in-house application has a bug which costs them millions? Duh, Merrill. Do you think they only operate financial systems that have been produced by other companies or consulting shops???
Indeed a common reason given for organisations sticking with Windows is in-house applications. Can they point the finger at Microsoft when those fail???
The accountability issue has nothing to do with finding someone to blame. They're only concerned with IP issues, and this is where moving to Linux can bite them in the ass. You don't have to pay lawyers to figure out whether using a commercial software product could expose them to an IP lawsuit.
Isn't going from certainty of risk (see BSA) to the vague possibility of risk a good move?
We use a scripting language (Kixstart), kicked off at logon by a batch file on the logon server(s).
IIRC Kixstart originates from within Microsoft. Though they actually provide by default the crude LMSCRIPT... Must be one of those political things since some of Microsoft's documentation implies that their policy/roaming profile stuff is a subsitute for decent login scripting. Which is utter nonsense.
First, you assume that email is the place to make appointments.
This appears indicative of a certain mentality that the way Microsoft have done things is the best way. In some cases they appear to have implimented things in what looks more more the worst way...
Try a portal instead - it's generally more secure, and usually has it's information stored in a database (unlike Exchange2k, which won't have a SQL backend until one or two versions from now).
I'm not convinced there is much point having this information in a complex database. Plain text files with cron scheduled jobs to manage notification (be it email, direct messaging to a workstation, SMS to a phone, etc) and cleaning/archiving old entries would be a far simpler way to do things.
If you have a legcy app the only runs on MS-DOS, or Windows, then you get Microsoft Terminal Server and Citrix. Or you get a Sun desktops, and plop in one of their Intel-PC-On-A-Pci-Cards and run Windows at native speeds. There are other options.
The other alternatives would be running the app in it's own virtual machine which automatically resets the install everytime it is run (using dosemu, wine, vmware, win4lin, plex86, etc) effective against both viruses and Windows "bit rot".
You cannot share out folders, have your secretary keep your schedule, do detailed contact managment, check strangers availability, attach spreadsheets to meeting entries, build custom inter-departmental forms, use digital signatures, automatically keep journal entries of it all, and centrally manage and archive everyone's mailbox, etc. etc. in any application other than Exchange and Lotus Notes(sort of). And Notes doesn't hold a wet candle to Exchange.
Exchange has one big negative it's a monolithic application which stores everything in a special format. Can you have redundant servers with exchange? How about storing email in someone's user area with the rest of their stuff? What about restoring some emails from backup?
Yahoo mail lets you embed yahoo calender links easily...in fact you can embed the Yahoo calender links in any type of communication.
No you wouldn't want to use that for serious business work. A web based calander which speaks PAM would make far more sense. No adverts and no user signup needed...
The real problem is that Linux people are so busy trying to fight Microsoft that they forget what they do well in the first place.
It's partly that some people appear to think that the best way to compete with Windows is to clone Windows apps warts and all. e.g. allowing, even expecting, non techie end users to know what IP addresses and TCP ports are. In order to get their web browser to work.
Marketing people and higher level executives like Windows because that's what they were trained on in school.
There must be some places with some very young senior managers. Most such people would have left school long before even Windows V1 came along. More that they want Windows because Microsoft has promoted it as the only thing, using methods both legal and illegal.
Of course, Forbes is confusing a license to use the software (the sort of license that Oracle, for example, makes you pay for) with a support contract (which companies like Oracle make you pay for in addition to the usage license).
Sounds like the per copy licence paradigm is so deeply embedded in some people's brains that they don't realise that it is not universal...
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One time I had the displeasure to deal with Support from our local quasi-monopoly CableISP (Telstra, Australia) for one of my clients with a Business LAN user account (cheap connection upto 8 users), they had just had their cable modem replaced after the old one died, after working fine for 8months mind you. Now the new modem would only assign 4 IP's (via DHCP) to the first four pc's on (I figured it only accepted 4 MAC address's). The first phone call went like this: Me:"... we just had a modem replaced, but it does not work correctly, only allowing 4 users" Support:"Sorry, we dont support network connections, call your Network Engineer." Me:"I _am_ the network engineer! Im telling you there is a fault in _your_ modem, you are charging my client for eight users, but it will only accept four!"
Most of the problem appears to be overloading the idea of "support". To include supporting some software the ISP supplies, support with the services the ISP supplies and reporting of faults.
Maybe ISP's should get out of the software business all together and try and operate more like telephone companies.
I think the general assumption seems to be that if you're running Linux - you're smart enough to sort out the problem yourself - or if its at their end - clever enough to work that out!
Except that the problem is that if you arn't running a very specific set of software it can be impossible to convince them that there might be a problem at there end.
..is that the very products they peddle are NOT integral parts of our lives. Their output is something I (we ALL) can do without. I have more CDs and VHS tapes than I know what to do with, and quite frankly, I am ashamed I bought as many as I did.
Even where people do care about the content how often do they care about which RIAA or MPAA was responsible for publishing it. Where people are fans they tend to be fans of authors, singers, musicians, actors, directors, etc. e.g. If for example Fox/Columbia-Tristar/Tribune/Time-Warner-AOL/Some company no-one has ever heard of, were to have their name on "Star Trek" instead Paramount how many Star Trek fans would even notice or care?
Basically, the advance of technology has made copyrights unenforceable. Like the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete.
What they are trying to protect isn't so much copyright (it would probably be possible for the US Congress to come up with a new "copyright" law which would serve the purpose outlined in the US Constitution.) It is more the paradigm of big corporate publishers. Effectivly what technology is doing is lowering the cost of recording and publishing works. To the extent that either completly new publishing companies, who don't use "legarcy media", could come into existance (who wouldn't need to create "megastars" to ensure they make money even if they have "megaflops") or the people who actually create works no longer need a third party to publish their work.
* Grass-roots efforts like petitions for state ballot referenda
* Peaceful protests and demonstrations
* "Civil disobediance," such as staging a general strike
* Riots and other isolated incidents of violence against officials and institutions
* Full-scale armed warfare against the government with the explicit purpose of overthrowing or dismembering said government
The problem with the latter is actually having it work. If a revolution fails you tend to have an even more opressive government in power. If it succedes who do you then get to govern. (If you make a popular rebel head of state you could end up with someone like Robert Mugabe...)
In the case of the US you'd need to overthrow not just a handful of people but most of the federal government, the large state governments and the entirity of the Democratic and Republican parties.
I feel that right now the U.S. government is strong enough now so that it would require widespread civil disobedience to significantly change its policies. Simply getting a few hundred or even a few thousand people together peacefully voicing their anger about something just isn't going to cut it any more. The way the media works now, such a demonstration will be ignored by the masses or even worse, attacked in such a way to get those who haven't made up their minds about the issue to turn against you.
It would be fairly easy to either infiltrate such a protest with some trouble makers or even have police attack protesters then claim the protesters started it.
Just because you say he didn't win the recounts doesn't make it so. Under every interpretation of the vote results, Algore lost and Dubya won.
/.er's sig says, two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. Our nation is a representative republic. There is a difference. Learn it, live it, love it.
Not every possible interpretation. Bush would have lost without the electoral college votes from Florida. Considering the utter farce of the election process there Florida abstaining would have been perfectly reasonable behaviour.
Furthermore, America is not a democracy, and I for one am grateful that it isn't. Democracy is, as another
Remember though that large corporate interests and political extremists get "first dibs" on this representation...
With most closed source products you have to tinker as well to get it running the way you want, but alas, you can't. Instead you get any number of consultants in who will then tell you, that you have to reengineer your business processes (if you can't pay for the software customization) to fit the software.
Assuming that you can pay to have the software customised. It could be an issue of persuade the supplier that such a customisation is even necessary. Also you have no way of knowing if you are getting good value or not for your money. If you pay someone to modify some open source code they probably won't need convincing.
With opensource a company, even with a limited budget, can influence the developers of OSS projects and maybe donate hardware, money or whatever else is required. Yes, it might take a little longer and cost is hard to predict, but so it is with business process reengineering.
Is the cost of proprietary software easy to predict anyway. It's not unknown for people to pay then be told "you need better hardware", "you bought the old version which isn't supported any more", "you really need xyz addon to make it work well", etc.
In almost all corporate environments the IT staff handles the configuration of the workstations, not the end user so configuration should not be an impediment to deploying Linux.
If anything it should be an advantage. Some organisations must spend huge amounts of money to prevent end user configuration of Windows workstations (or to tidy up afterwards)...
I have recently installed Linux on the public workstations of a local library and not one patron has commented about it not being Windows. They open and use AbiWord without instruction - creating, formatting, inserting clip art. They print, they save to floppy disk, surf the Net - all without a single piece of documentation or instruction from the staff.
This appears to indicate that from the POV of people simply using the computers any differences in the UI are trivial.
If these untrained, and generally unskilled, computer users can cope with Linux on the desktop, how hard could it be in a corporate environment where you could actually train the users.
Maybe the problem is down to management perceptions and a vocal minority of users who like to tinker with computers...
So you'll also assume that grandma will do Windows-configuration by hacking the registry?
The kind of "configuration" most users tend to make is altering the desktop colours. Most of the Windows control panel is pretty much irrelevent to people who are simply using a machine.
If you buy SAP, then you do get the source for (most of) it, and you customize it to fit your business - this is bread-and-butter work for the "Big 5" consultants. You can't release it, but nor would you want to, since it encodes intimate details of exactly how your business works. If you need code written from scratch, large corporations hire IBS, EDS, CSC et al to do that, the source is right there, but it will never be let out "into the wild".
Your point please? You can do this with GPL software easily. Your are only obliged to distribute the source (under the GPL or a compatable licence) if you distribute the binaries.
Since in this case the modified software is used entirely within the organisation it isn't being "distributed".
ok, using the KDE/GNOME dialer is not a problem, but configuring an ISDN-card or DSL-modem is simply NOT an easy task for an average user.
It's a setting up task. Rather than a using task.
Somehow people confuse "easy to use" with "easy to set up and service". Even though outside of computers it's perfectly acceptable that the latter can require a specialist.
Computers should be easy for non-technophiles. People don't want to know about drivers and interrupts or even document types. They just want to surf the web, print their documents, play their games, and not be bothered with the details. The OS that did this first and best was been Windoze.
In what universe. Windows does an utterly awful job of being "non techie" when it comes to "drivers, interrupts and document types". If it did a good job it wouldn't allow regular users to even see what they were, let alone alter them.
The best platforms for games are game consoles, standard hardware, no software installation of any kind, with the only user interface the game itself....
Surfing the web requires setting things up to the exact internet connection method used.
One of the things you're missing is that just because you use Linux on the desktop, that does not mean its ready for people in general.
But the frequently mutating Windows desktop is?
And the general public are the people who really count, not you.
When were the general public given much of a choice. Including the ability for individual people to choose from a decent range of options?
Most people IME simply use what is put in front of them, regardless of what it might be.
How many vendors have the source code to Win2k or your other proprietary S/W of choice? How much choice do you have among vendors that are capable of fixing an obscure-but-critical-to-me flaw in a closed source app or OS?
Especially if whoever wrote the software claims "it's a feature, not a bug"...
If you sell me a product that doesn't work for us, I expect *you* to fix it. It doesn't matter if the source is open or closed, because *you* have it either way. And if I throw enough $$$ at your company, you WILL put us at the top of your priority list, or we'll go to a different vendor.
That threat is a lot more credible if you have the source. Otherwise your alternative vendor might have to start again from scratch.
With closed source they are in a position of power, not you.
Having the development company that has responsibility and experience with that product fix that product is not only more cost effective, but is also generally the only feasible way to solve the problem.
Assuming you're "vendor" is actually the entity who wrote the program. They could just as easily be selling something they didn't write and know less about it than you.
Solving these kinds of problems in house is just not feasible. You can't afford to keep a bunch of programmers around just to solve those occassional problems with varying pieces of software and even then the programmers would be inefficient because they'd have to scale the learning curve first (this is made harder by the piss poor documentation of most open source software).
How do you manage if you need an electrician, builder, plumber, lawyer, etc? Using open source puts your software on the same footing as everything else...
Or maybe you missed the stories about the ship with the NT-controlled powerplant, and when NT went away, so did control of the engines? Ship had to be towed back to harbor. Big embarrassment
Would have been a bigger embarrassment had this happened in the middle of an actual war. It's a lot easier to bomb a ship which can't manouver.
And who is accountable when their in-house application has a bug which costs them millions? Duh, Merrill. Do you think they only operate financial systems that have been produced by other companies or consulting shops???
Indeed a common reason given for organisations sticking with Windows is in-house applications. Can they point the finger at Microsoft when those fail???
The accountability issue has nothing to do with finding someone to blame. They're only concerned with IP issues, and this is where moving to Linux can bite them in the ass. You don't have to pay lawyers to figure out whether using a commercial software product could expose them to an IP lawsuit.
Isn't going from certainty of risk (see BSA) to the vague possibility of risk a good move?
We use a scripting language (Kixstart), kicked off at logon by a batch file on the logon server(s).
IIRC Kixstart originates from within Microsoft. Though they actually provide by default the crude LMSCRIPT...
Must be one of those political things since some of Microsoft's documentation implies that their policy/roaming profile stuff is a subsitute for decent login scripting. Which is utter nonsense.
First, you assume that email is the place to make appointments.
This appears indicative of a certain mentality that the way Microsoft have done things is the best way. In some cases they appear to have implimented things in what looks more more the worst way...
Try a portal instead - it's generally more secure, and usually has it's information stored in a database (unlike Exchange2k, which won't have a SQL backend until one or two versions from now).
I'm not convinced there is much point having this information in a complex database. Plain text files with cron scheduled jobs to manage notification (be it email, direct messaging to a workstation, SMS to a phone, etc) and cleaning/archiving old entries would be a far simpler way to do things.
If you have a legcy app the only runs on MS-DOS, or Windows, then you get Microsoft Terminal Server and Citrix. Or you get a Sun desktops, and plop in one of their Intel-PC-On-A-Pci-Cards and run Windows at native speeds. There are other options.
The other alternatives would be running the app in it's own virtual machine which automatically resets the install everytime it is run (using dosemu, wine, vmware, win4lin, plex86, etc) effective against both viruses and Windows "bit rot".
You cannot share out folders, have your secretary keep your schedule, do detailed contact managment, check strangers availability, attach spreadsheets to meeting entries, build custom inter-departmental forms, use digital signatures, automatically keep journal entries of it all, and centrally manage and archive everyone's mailbox, etc. etc. in any application other than Exchange and Lotus Notes(sort of). And Notes doesn't hold a wet candle to Exchange.
Exchange has one big negative it's a monolithic application which stores everything in a special format. Can you have redundant servers with exchange? How about storing email in someone's user area with the rest of their stuff? What about restoring some emails from backup?
Yahoo mail lets you embed yahoo calender links easily...in fact you can embed the Yahoo calender links in any type of communication.
No you wouldn't want to use that for serious business work. A web based calander which speaks PAM would make far more sense. No adverts and no user signup needed...
The real problem is that Linux people are so busy trying to fight Microsoft that they forget what they do well in the first place.
It's partly that some people appear to think that the best way to compete with Windows is to clone Windows apps warts and all. e.g. allowing, even expecting, non techie end users to know what IP addresses and TCP ports are. In order to get their web browser to work.
Marketing people and higher level executives like Windows because that's what they were trained on in school.
There must be some places with some very young senior managers. Most such people would have left school long before even Windows V1 came along. More that they want Windows because Microsoft has promoted it as the only thing, using methods both legal and illegal.
Of course, Forbes is confusing a license to use the software (the sort of license that Oracle, for example, makes you pay for) with a support contract (which companies like Oracle make you pay for in addition to the usage license).
Sounds like the per copy licence paradigm is so deeply embedded in some people's brains that they don't realise that it is not universal...