When it comes to Qwest, you may wish to take the information with a block of salt. They've been known to twist things rather heavily before in order to get their way (for a big instance - a quick Google search for "Qwest UTOPIA Utah" should cough up their antics in trying to kill off a muni-funded fiber broadband project just to keep their profits high).
IMHO, Qwest's motives are suspect, and this article with its sensationalist flavor reads almost like it came from Qwest's PR office.
...how on Earth are they going to insure that the "professional editors" don't insert their own not-so-blatant ideological and political slants into the mix?
I mean, seriously; if the Guardian / Independent Washington Post/Times and New York Times / Wall Street Journal editorial (and I daresay even political news) slants have taught us anything, it is that professional editors can be just as slanted as the amateurs, and even more subtly so.
I like the fact that schools are (finally!) looking at Linux as a viable OS for the classroom. Seriously, we've come a long way - I remember trying to get it introduced as curriculum in 2000 at the college I taught at, and it took a metric ton of tooth-pulling to get done.
I've seen (at least in Utah when I lived there) schools transitioning from NetWare servers to Linux-based ones, but the classroom pretty much was all Windows, all the time.
Now when will we see OpenOffice being taught in the High School and collegiate business courses, instead of you-know-who?
I didn't mean to hurt your feelings or anything - There's a good reason why I qualified it as "probably" as opposed to "definitely". If such follies as UAC in Vista is any indication (and that's just the tip of one very bloated iceberg), it's a pretty solid bet that MSFT simply tacked on more cycle-eating code to prevent break-ins.
In either case, don't complain to me - complain to Microsoft's marketing department, who went well out of their way to push that perception back when Windows Server 2003 launched (well, it came in second - right after the bazillion demonstrations showing how easy they made it to migrate for all the holdouts still using Windows NT 4.0).
Bet I can whip up vi, edit httpd.conf, and type "service apache graceful" at a bash prompt a whole lot faster than you can click-wait-click-wait-click-click-wait-click-wait-wait your way to a config then reboot the box to apply any critical IIS settings;)
Probably higher, considering the layers of security checks and "reducing the threat surface" whatnot which MSFT applied to IIS for Windows 2003 Server.
If it tastes bad, there are always other beers. Unfortunatly, I can't brew my own beer. Nobody I know is good enough at it either. Ans I won't want to taste a beer brewwed by a thousand hands, thank you very much.
You do realize that you're going to be awfully thirsty, considering that rather contradictory statement?;)
The longest continuous space trip by a crew (with no gravity... none) was 438 days... that's just over 1.2 years. Another single Cosmonaut managed one day beyond that.
Sure, the three guys who pulled it off were pretty much stuck in a convalescence home for nearly a year before they could walk again, and had to exercise their asses off every day they were up there, but point is that they did manage.
With 0.16 G , one would think you could stretch that out a bit to at least a year-and-a-half (perhaps more) before it got as bad as it did for the current record holders, no? This isn't even counting medical remedies and techniques that weren't available in earlier long-duration spaceflight tests.
You do know that a bash/csh/ksh script that reads a list of targets and iterates scp and ssh commands through a conditional loop (pointed to that list) is pretty easy to build, right? Couple that with pre-existing SSH keys on your target machines, and you're all set. Doesn't take more than a couple of hours to set up - less if you already have the script built from something earlier.
LDAP is just the icing on the cake (Hell, I use NIS for my auth...)
Actually, lag time (round trip, moon and back) would be about 1000 milliseconds or so, give or take - call it 1500ms to give it a comfy total.
Speed of light each way: ~250ms, or ~500ms total there and back (IIRC)
Rough lag from satellite to earth-bound Internet line (including all the A/D conversion crap): 125ms each way, or 250ms total.
Avg. lag from land-line link to typical WOW server: 50-300ms, depending.
It would be about like playing Quake 3 on a 9400-baud modem against a bunch of LPB's.
'course, this doesn't count dropped packets and all that fun stuff, but look at it this way - at least you'll enjoy the chorus of "WTF!?" as they see your character nearly teleport his way across the landscape...
Err, OSX has only come out with four (not yet five) iterations over seven years. That comes to (at present) ~1.75 years between versions, and I'm still happily using 10.3 on the home Mac w/o any real incompatibilities.
Meanwhile, there are, at the present, exactly two versions of OSX you can purchase right now:
The OSX 10.4 variant for normal desktops
The OSX 10.4 variant for servers (which you only need if you have XServe)
Compared to the craptastically huge array of versions they have for Windows Vista (all of which differ in feature sets and price)?
If it was a simple matter of semi-unseating a DIMM, then yeah, I agree with TFA - a simple check of cards, sticks, etc. would've revealed it to be busted, and a quickie re-seat would've been enough. If it were a simple POST-test failure, again, the beeps help t-shoot it if the guy is at least A+ certified (or knows enough to have one)
If however it was a matter of having a RAM stick with a subtle fault that kicked off only during extremely heavy RAM usage, then you may have had a point there.
Here's the trick, though... most of the 'expose' type stories like this usually involve something incredibly stupid, like loosening a cable or card (Hell, I used to drive students crazy when they were forced to troubleshoot a system I induced failure on with clear cellophane tape on the NIC card contacts).
Much like tweaking the distributor timing a bit on an other3wise perfectly running old car can out the fakes and the incompetents in the auto industry, there are some damned drop-simple ways of outing the scammers and dumbasses in the IT field.
I have yet to hear a serious argument for why the world will be injured by behaving as if there is an ozone or climate problem (if there is not), and so I just don't understand why anyone ever makes this argument.
Injured as in...?
Research money, time, and resources in general are going towards studying that ozone and/or climate problem, even if there isn't one. Given that governments and other grant sources work in a more-or-less zero-sum economic scale (with a sum that varies from year to year), those particular studies are eating a chunk of the 'research money pie' that could have been spent on curing disease, improving engineering endeavors, advancing humanity into space, improving agriculture yields w/o harming the soil, improving efficiency in raw materials use... things like that.
It's sort of like a town instituting an "Asteroidal Impact Disaster Management Department" because the town's populace has been scared shitless into believing that, with the large number of Near-Earth Objects out there, an asteroid will hit us "very soon now". Meanwhile, money is being bled from the town's Fire and Police departments to feed this new group. Intrusive policies and laws come out of the Township Council specifically to mitigate the impending (but mostly theoretical) asteroid impact. It winds up costing people and businesses in money and time, all geared towards something that may or may not happen in their lifetimes -- and may or may not actually do anything if the asteroid were to strike.
Note that I'm not saying that Climate change is bunk - far from it. I am saying however that perhaps gearing industry and people towards more ecologically friendly solutions don't require scare tactics to do it, and certainly don't require taking money that could be put to better use elsewhere.
But, in the case of the Ozone layer freak-outs of the late '80s/early '90s, there is evidence of injury - industry has spent many billions towards ditching otherwise safe R-22 rigged refrigeration units and retrofitting them for R-134a. Many have abandoned both and converted to refrigerating with Ammonia-based kit. Ammonia presents far larger and more immediate hazards in case of leakage or disaster than Freon ever did.
OTOH, Dow made a killing in selling R-134a, and IIRC they were rather enthusiastic about showing support for the original ban, since the patent on R-22 ran out ages ago.
Failing to find any mod points, I'd like to lend my voice in support of yours.
The good news on the learning bit is, there are a lot of classes out now that teach an introductory look-see at Linux, either at a low cost, or at no cost... just check in w/ your local community center or school district (which in some areas do night classes of interest to the community). If you can't find one, and you know what you're doing in it, then see if you can volunteer to teach it at your local school or community center sometime (Hell, I used to teach it professionally). Burn a stack of Ubuntu CD's and pass 'em around. Beg/borrow/steal some computers (or rig it so that folks bring their own stuff in if you can get a classroom that locks).
They are not targeting YOU. Keep on running your unsupported pirate copy of XP with unknown security backdoors. Your choice.
...and this differs from the legit versions how? XP has lots of unknown security backdoors in it, legit or not. The recent stealth update kerfuffle taught us that.
The support? Dude, a typical p2p Windows user just re-installs the thing when it breaks, like the legit users do.
Not that I support pirating the thing (after all, if they couldn't pirate it, they'd be learning to use Linux, BSD, or anything better than Windows), but honestly, you;re not really providing much incentive here.
Because they are playing a different game than online apps.
This is all about mating everything we like about desktop apps (rich ui, etc.) to collaboration tools found in online apps.
Basically, Sharepoint for the masses.
Sharepoint is a bastardized version of what the Web has enjoyed for years, if you knew where to look. I do agree about the motivations behind this little Office trick, though... I'm thinking OWA for Office, but this time you have to have the app anyway.
Then again, what exactly were they thinking? It's useless if you already have Office and a Web Browser - you go get the online doc, you work on the doc. All of these steps are pretty much the same no matter what route you take - the only real diff being where the binary translation from *.doc to UI is done.
Whether or not this works is open to debate, but to say this is me-too is just slashbots wearing their ignorance with pride.
I wouldn't exactly call it "me-too" - after all, Google Apps doesn't require you to blow $200-$400 on an app and install it locally, just to make their by-that-point-redundant service work.
Perhaps, but that would depend on a lot of factors, first of which being how exactly you purchased the licenses. If they came one-at-a-time with an OEM computer purchase, then sure. Otherwise, you're perfectly legal with passing it around as a corporate image, which is what pretty much goes on now - even with smaller companies.
Of course MSFT can refuse to activate 'em anyway - but if they're already running scared from their own kill-off deadlines, do you think they'd chance angering their business customers enough to get them seeking alternatives by refusing activations?
These people are still buying a MS Windows license. Maybe they'll even buy an upgrade to Vista later.
Not necessarily - If I'm a small-to-mid-sized business, I could simply buy all my new machines with no OS at all (it's a common option for business purchasers at most OEMs), and continue to use my existing licenses as long as I have enough of them to go around.
This means that, instead of buying new shiny Vista licenses, I get to keep my old XP ones (and then use whichever extra ones are freed up by obsolescing old machines), which in turn means less money for MSFT - not only in that I'm not buying new Vista licenses to replace the old ones (because I'm obviously not upgrading 'em), but that I'm probably not buying any new ones until/unless I absolutely have to.
You are correct in that (for now) Microsoft is still getting paid either way.
However, the problem lies in the fact that XP is one generation behind (okay, more than one in some aspects).
If people keep choosing XP, then everyone else (esp. Apple) gets to rocket ahead in features, and proclaim loudly in their marketing that they have the New Big Thing, while Microsoft has... umm, either XP, or the dog's breakfast of an OS they call "Vista". OSX (and to an extent) Linux continues to come out with new, neat stuff, people (slowly at first) begin shifting to them, and Microsoft loses OS share. By the time Microsoft finally does pull their heads out and come up with a new OS (or an SP that makes Vista run worth a damn), the competition has already taken a bite out of them.
How big of a bite depends on how long it takes Microsoft to get its act together.
If Microsoft loses enough marketshare, then software developers will chase the new "emerging" market in larger numbers, thereby removing one of the big reasons Joe Sixpack continues to use Windows in spite of the overall love/hate relationship with it (e.g. "I already invested $$$ into these apps, and they only run in Windows!").
Once that's gone (or even seriously going away), Microsoft will have to compete just that much harder against Free (Linux), or Just Plain Works (OSX). There will be a louder clamor for interoperability. Other factors pick up, and Microsoft would have to work exponentially harder than they do today just to keep from dwindling into irrelevancy over the long-term.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, requires roughly 3 hours of hacking and coding. Canonical has no interest whatsoever in making it play nice with Windows beyond implementing and supporting SMB.
Probably because Ubuntu and SuSE are aiming for two entirely different markets? (home desktop users v. enterprise business)?
Sort of like the reason why I wouldn't expect a typical Dell desktop to come with multiple hot-swap drive bays, two built-in NICs, or a RAID controller, nor would I expect a Dell server to come with a pair of GeForce 8800's in SLI configuration, y'know?
In other words, the Canada Revenue Agency is doing its job (this concept may be unfamiliar to Americans when relating to governmental agencies)
You surely understand that we're a bit anti-tax, yes? Hell, the US born of a tax revolt, and we (by and large) haven't really gotten that out of our system (pretty much everything from the Whiskey Rebellion to present-day anti-tax dodges and enterprises). So it's natural that we're a bit stranger than most when it comes to taxes.;)
As for bureaucrats not doing their job (but being shocked when they do)? I suspect that you'll find that to be rather common world-wide. Canada is one of those weird places whose gov't functionaries actually adhere to duty, which kinda scares the crap out of the rest of us (plus it perpetuates a whole lot of bad stereotypes... you really need to stop doing that).
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IMHO, Qwest's motives are suspect, and this article with its sensationalist flavor reads almost like it came from Qwest's PR office.
As is usual with opinions, YMMV.
I mean, seriously; if the Guardian / Independent Washington Post/Times and New York Times / Wall Street Journal editorial (and I daresay even political news) slants have taught us anything, it is that professional editors can be just as slanted as the amateurs, and even more subtly so.
I've seen (at least in Utah when I lived there) schools transitioning from NetWare servers to Linux-based ones, but the classroom pretty much was all Windows, all the time.
Now when will we see OpenOffice being taught in the High School and collegiate business courses, instead of you-know-who?
In either case, don't complain to me - complain to Microsoft's marketing department, who went well out of their way to push that perception back when Windows Server 2003 launched (well, it came in second - right after the bazillion demonstrations showing how easy they made it to migrate for all the holdouts still using Windows NT 4.0).
I do have one question - does it cover the whole wad, or just whatever MSFT felt like exposing to it?
Bet I can whip up vi, edit httpd.conf, and type "service apache graceful" at a bash prompt a whole lot faster than you can click-wait-click-wait-click-click-wait-click-wait-wait your way to a config then reboot the box to apply any critical IIS settings ;)
Probably higher, considering the layers of security checks and "reducing the threat surface" whatnot which MSFT applied to IIS for Windows 2003 Server.
You do realize that you're going to be awfully thirsty, considering that rather contradictory statement? ;)
Cue the hordes of political flame-fests in 3... 2... 1...
The longest continuous space trip by a crew (with no gravity... none) was 438 days... that's just over 1.2 years. Another single Cosmonaut managed one day beyond that.
Sure, the three guys who pulled it off were pretty much stuck in a convalescence home for nearly a year before they could walk again, and had to exercise their asses off every day they were up there, but point is that they did manage.
With 0.16 G , one would think you could stretch that out a bit to at least a year-and-a-half (perhaps more) before it got as bad as it did for the current record holders, no? This isn't even counting medical remedies and techniques that weren't available in earlier long-duration spaceflight tests.
LDAP is just the icing on the cake (Hell, I use NIS for my auth...)
Speed of light each way: ~250ms, or ~500ms total there and back (IIRC)
Rough lag from satellite to earth-bound Internet line (including all the A/D conversion crap): 125ms each way, or 250ms total.
Avg. lag from land-line link to typical WOW server: 50-300ms, depending.
It would be about like playing Quake 3 on a 9400-baud modem against a bunch of LPB's.
'course, this doesn't count dropped packets and all that fun stuff, but look at it this way - at least you'll enjoy the chorus of "WTF!?" as they see your character nearly teleport his way across the landscape...
Meanwhile, there are, at the present, exactly two versions of OSX you can purchase right now:
Compared to the craptastically huge array of versions they have for Windows Vista (all of which differ in feature sets and price)?
Bleah. Not even close.
If however it was a matter of having a RAM stick with a subtle fault that kicked off only during extremely heavy RAM usage, then you may have had a point there.
Here's the trick, though... most of the 'expose' type stories like this usually involve something incredibly stupid, like loosening a cable or card (Hell, I used to drive students crazy when they were forced to troubleshoot a system I induced failure on with clear cellophane tape on the NIC card contacts).
Much like tweaking the distributor timing a bit on an other3wise perfectly running old car can out the fakes and the incompetents in the auto industry, there are some damned drop-simple ways of outing the scammers and dumbasses in the IT field.
I have yet to hear a serious argument for why the world will be injured by behaving as if there is an ozone or climate problem (if there is not), and so I just don't understand why anyone ever makes this argument.
Injured as in ...?
Research money, time, and resources in general are going towards studying that ozone and/or climate problem, even if there isn't one. Given that governments and other grant sources work in a more-or-less zero-sum economic scale (with a sum that varies from year to year), those particular studies are eating a chunk of the 'research money pie' that could have been spent on curing disease, improving engineering endeavors, advancing humanity into space, improving agriculture yields w/o harming the soil, improving efficiency in raw materials use... things like that.
It's sort of like a town instituting an "Asteroidal Impact Disaster Management Department" because the town's populace has been scared shitless into believing that, with the large number of Near-Earth Objects out there, an asteroid will hit us "very soon now". Meanwhile, money is being bled from the town's Fire and Police departments to feed this new group. Intrusive policies and laws come out of the Township Council specifically to mitigate the impending (but mostly theoretical) asteroid impact. It winds up costing people and businesses in money and time, all geared towards something that may or may not happen in their lifetimes -- and may or may not actually do anything if the asteroid were to strike.
Note that I'm not saying that Climate change is bunk - far from it. I am saying however that perhaps gearing industry and people towards more ecologically friendly solutions don't require scare tactics to do it, and certainly don't require taking money that could be put to better use elsewhere.
But, in the case of the Ozone layer freak-outs of the late '80s/early '90s, there is evidence of injury - industry has spent many billions towards ditching otherwise safe R-22 rigged refrigeration units and retrofitting them for R-134a. Many have abandoned both and converted to refrigerating with Ammonia-based kit. Ammonia presents far larger and more immediate hazards in case of leakage or disaster than Freon ever did.
OTOH, Dow made a killing in selling R-134a, and IIRC they were rather enthusiastic about showing support for the original ban, since the patent on R-22 ran out ages ago.
The good news on the learning bit is, there are a lot of classes out now that teach an introductory look-see at Linux, either at a low cost, or at no cost... just check in w/ your local community center or school district (which in some areas do night classes of interest to the community). If you can't find one, and you know what you're doing in it, then see if you can volunteer to teach it at your local school or community center sometime (Hell, I used to teach it professionally). Burn a stack of Ubuntu CD's and pass 'em around. Beg/borrow/steal some computers (or rig it so that folks bring their own stuff in if you can get a classroom that locks).
They are not targeting YOU. Keep on running your unsupported pirate copy of XP with unknown security backdoors. Your choice.
The support? Dude, a typical p2p Windows user just re-installs the thing when it breaks, like the legit users do.
Not that I support pirating the thing (after all, if they couldn't pirate it, they'd be learning to use Linux, BSD, or anything better than Windows), but honestly, you;re not really providing much incentive here.
This is all about mating everything we like about desktop apps (rich ui, etc.) to collaboration tools found in online apps.
Basically, Sharepoint for the masses.
Sharepoint is a bastardized version of what the Web has enjoyed for years, if you knew where to look. I do agree about the motivations behind this little Office trick, though... I'm thinking OWA for Office, but this time you have to have the app anyway.
Then again, what exactly were they thinking? It's useless if you already have Office and a Web Browser - you go get the online doc, you work on the doc. All of these steps are pretty much the same no matter what route you take - the only real diff being where the binary translation from *.doc to UI is done.
Whether or not this works is open to debate, but to say this is me-too is just slashbots wearing their ignorance with pride.I wouldn't exactly call it "me-too" - after all, Google Apps doesn't require you to blow $200-$400 on an app and install it locally, just to make their by-that-point-redundant service work.
That's the part that makes no business sense.
Of course MSFT can refuse to activate 'em anyway - but if they're already running scared from their own kill-off deadlines, do you think they'd chance angering their business customers enough to get them seeking alternatives by refusing activations?
Not necessarily - If I'm a small-to-mid-sized business, I could simply buy all my new machines with no OS at all (it's a common option for business purchasers at most OEMs), and continue to use my existing licenses as long as I have enough of them to go around.
This means that, instead of buying new shiny Vista licenses, I get to keep my old XP ones (and then use whichever extra ones are freed up by obsolescing old machines), which in turn means less money for MSFT - not only in that I'm not buying new Vista licenses to replace the old ones (because I'm obviously not upgrading 'em), but that I'm probably not buying any new ones until/unless I absolutely have to.
However, the problem lies in the fact that XP is one generation behind (okay, more than one in some aspects).
If people keep choosing XP, then everyone else (esp. Apple) gets to rocket ahead in features, and proclaim loudly in their marketing that they have the New Big Thing, while Microsoft has... umm, either XP, or the dog's breakfast of an OS they call "Vista". OSX (and to an extent) Linux continues to come out with new, neat stuff, people (slowly at first) begin shifting to them, and Microsoft loses OS share. By the time Microsoft finally does pull their heads out and come up with a new OS (or an SP that makes Vista run worth a damn), the competition has already taken a bite out of them.
How big of a bite depends on how long it takes Microsoft to get its act together.
If Microsoft loses enough marketshare, then software developers will chase the new "emerging" market in larger numbers, thereby removing one of the big reasons Joe Sixpack continues to use Windows in spite of the overall love/hate relationship with it (e.g. "I already invested $$$ into these apps, and they only run in Windows!").
Once that's gone (or even seriously going away), Microsoft will have to compete just that much harder against Free (Linux), or Just Plain Works (OSX). There will be a louder clamor for interoperability. Other factors pick up, and Microsoft would have to work exponentially harder than they do today just to keep from dwindling into irrelevancy over the long-term.
Probably because Ubuntu and SuSE are aiming for two entirely different markets? (home desktop users v. enterprise business)?
Sort of like the reason why I wouldn't expect a typical Dell desktop to come with multiple hot-swap drive bays, two built-in NICs, or a RAID controller, nor would I expect a Dell server to come with a pair of GeForce 8800's in SLI configuration, y'know?
You surely understand that we're a bit anti-tax, yes? Hell, the US born of a tax revolt, and we (by and large) haven't really gotten that out of our system (pretty much everything from the Whiskey Rebellion to present-day anti-tax dodges and enterprises). So it's natural that we're a bit stranger than most when it comes to taxes. ;)
As for bureaucrats not doing their job (but being shocked when they do)? I suspect that you'll find that to be rather common world-wide. Canada is one of those weird places whose gov't functionaries actually adhere to duty, which kinda scares the crap out of the rest of us (plus it perpetuates a whole lot of bad stereotypes... you really need to stop doing that).