Seriously, though, China remains a huge source of spam. Some may be zombies, I'm sure, but commercial spammers in China, operating on IPs with no forward or reverse DNS are very common. They've cracked down on bullet-proof hosting like they've cracked down on pirate DVDs: not really at all, just a little window dressing.
Re:Geeks hard to manage? Since when?
on
IT Manager's Handbook
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· Score: 2, Informative
How do you avoid the pitfalls of employment law that state you can't not hire(*) someone based on certain personal traits
IANAL, but AFAIK there is no law that I've ever heard of that makes personality a protected category, at least not in the United States.
Protected categories that I'm aware of include race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, physical disability, and things of that nature. Technical skills aren't a protected category either; that is, there's no law that says you have to hire the most technically qualified person[1], without regard to other factors. If you sue because you think a less qualified candidate was hired over you (and generally, you'd have know way to know; no company will tell you anything about any of the other applicants), you probably wouldn't have a chance. If someone were going to try that approach, they better also be in some protected category and claim "They didn't hire me because I'm _______" instead. And then, they'd better hope the company isn't filled with people in the same category. Being in the San Francisco area, which is extremely diverse in every way imaginable, I expect we could deflect any kind of claim like that easily.
In at least one instance, I passed over someone with a graduate degree for someone who didn't even have a degree. He was a self-taught programmer with little formal education in the subject, but was very sharp and had written a well-regarded BASIC library for gaming. He was a terrific addition to the team on both the technical and personal levels, and no one (not even HR) questioned why I wasn't hiring the guy with the master's in CS. I told my boss "This is my pick" he did a short second interview himself, then signed off on it. If there was anything wrong with that, I'm sure HR or Legal would have said something.
[1] There may be different rules on this for managers at government agencies; I once applied for a job at a county government (looking back, I'm very glad I wasn't hired) and took what was basically a civil service exam for mainframe computer operators. In that kind of environment, I imagine a manager's hands might be a lot more tied WRT who they can hire. Even then, if the most technically qualified person is not in a protected category and the person you really like is, then you're probably gold.
No, by "managing" I definitely do not mean and I don't regard that as being in the definition of a competent manager. Yes, we all have to be in control to the point of achieving our goals on time and on budget, but control in the sense of keeping people under your thumb and feeding them BS, well, that's not management. That's using control-freak/micromanager strategies to conceal a lack of managerial competence.
Middle management does have a legit role, although there are certainly middle managers who have no really good purpose in an organization (I've worked under at least one like that). With that said, in defense of middle management, I have to say that being a good middle manager is hard, much harder than being a good first-line manager (my own level of experience). Some of the main duties of a middle manager are to be an information conduit between upper management and first-level management, and to make sure the first-level managers and their teams are meeting their objectives.
When you have good upper management and good lower management, being a good middle manager is a lot easier. If one or both of those is not so good, it gets a lot harder. If you're a middle manager and you have one or more teams that are behind, understanding the problem and taking the correct action to fix it is when the good middle managers show themselves as such, and the others, well, don't.
If the good ones will succeed, the bad ones will always act as more of a communications obstacle than a conduit, and if the problem is with either them or senior management, they will pretty skillfully manage to pin the blame on the first-level managers and their staffs. Not that I've seen this happen, or anything.
While many companies may have what looks like too many middle managers, they exist for the same reason an army has levels of officers between 2nd lieutenants and generals: there are only so many direct reports any one person can handle, and only so many details any one person can pay attention to. If a CTO of a large company had to personally manage every team manager and oversee their projects, s/he would have no time to do the things that CTOs are tasked with. Even in a small company, that can be true. At one place I worked we had fewer than 100 people when I joined and fewer than 200 when I left, but even there I had a level of management (the director of development) between me and the CTO. That worked well. Later, another level of management was added in there between the DD and the CTO, with a VP title. In terms of competence he was somewhere in between a good one and a bad one. At the end of the day, I don't think he really contributed all that much. A VP in that spot might have been necessary but I would have preferred a better one.
Not to take anything away from the book - I'm sure it's excellent - but I do have to question its basic premise that geeks are hard to manage.
They can be, like anyone else - but like anyone, that depends a lot on who you hire. I managed a staff of eight full-time developers and two interns, and to throw some extra complexity into the mix, they were all all at a location quite remote (~2000 miles) from my location and I only got to go out there about once every six months.
They were never hard to manage. Even the one who required the most management (and whom I might not have hired were it not for a particular rare skill that he had and we needed) was never a problem.
Why was this so? Because of how I hire. Technical chops matter, but personality fit with me, my other staff members, and with the corporate culture matter just as much. Probably more. If you don't fit in, no matter how good your technical chops are, you're never going to be right for the position and will probably need a lot more active management than people who do fit in.
As a result, my staff didn't need much active management. I positioned myself as a BS filter between them and corporate politics, so they could focus on the work, and I made sure they knew they were appreciated, got recognition, and could see the results of their work. And raises. I made sure they got good raises. Money may not be everything, but it matters.
My opinion is that if I hire someone who really needs to be "managed" I have made a mistake. Maybe I can get the person from there to a point of not needing to be managed much, but most probably I have made a mistake of personality fit, and those are hard or impossible to fix. My personality, the personalities of my existing staff members, the company's culture, and the personality of any new hire are all unlikely to change, so I'd better get it right at hiring. If I don't, I'll just need to re-fill that position after a while because no one will be really happy and it will eventually lead to a parting of ways.
In my experience, if you hire the right people and keep them as insulated as possible from BS, all you need to do is give them clear goals and get out of the way and they will meet and exceed them all.
This so completely false that I can only imagine the person who modded it "troll" was spot-on.
Nothing in the GPL (V. 2, at least, who knows how V. 3 will wind up?) requires you to release the source for modifications you create only for in-house use and do not distribute. A couple clear examples:
1) Linksys did have to release their source because they made a product for distribution and in fact distributed it. The fact that it was an embedded system does not change the fact of distribution, thus they were required to honor the license; I'm sure you have no problem with honoring licenses, right?
2) My former employer makes extensive use of Linux and other GPLed software, and in fact built they business around it. They have also modified that software, and directly use it to support customers and provide the services they offer. However, since none of that software is ever distributed (it runs only on the company's servers, under their control in their own co-los), there is no requirement to release any source code for the modifications.
Since you're a troll, I'm sure there is no "lawyer" who told you those things, but on the off-chance there is, you need to get a different lawyer and that one needs to be disbarred for incompetence.
In the case mentioned - a company hired you to do some consulting work and wanted it done in Linux - the only party you'd have to release the source code to is the company that hired you, since what you're doing is a work for hire and they own the code, not you, unless you have a contract with them that says otherwise. Since it is a work for hire and the code has therefor not been distributed, no source release is required. Even if there was, however, the GPL terms are satisfied by giving the source code to those to whom you distributed a binary. If you provided binaries only to the company that hired you, then you are under no obligation to provide source to anyone but them. If they do not distribute it further, then they don't have to give source to anyone, either. Since investment firms are not in the habit of distributing their software, that's unlikely to happen.
Token ring? Since when does Linux not support it? Not that I've seen a token ring net in years...
Note that I address these points only to keep anyone new to free software from being taken in. I'm certain you made up the entire story and none of these events ever took place.
I agree with most of your points, but I have to call you out on point 2: Make you point out that learning Linux isn't as easy as windows [sic].
In my (considerable) experience, that's simply not true. You take someone who finds computers and mechanical things in general difficult and is confused by even the most basic computer tasks (my mother, for instance), and put her in front of a Windows machine and a Linux machine (I'll use Kubuntu in these examples, because it's my distro of choice). She doesn't find either of them easy, but doesn't find one to be harder than the other.
My wife primarily uses Windows because it's what she learned on and it's the only platform where Yahoo Messenger supports voice (that's the biggie for her) but on those occasions where she has to use Linux (our kids both have Linux machines, for example), she doesn't find it harder the Windows. They're both point/click.
My kids (not yet kindergarteners) both have Edubuntu on their computers and they don't think it's hard, even though they'd been using Windows on my wife's computer before that.
Now, if you'd made a comment on the learning curve/transitional difficulties for people who are used to Windows, I wouldn't complain. There's going to be a transitional period. I'm primarily a Linux user and recently got my first Mac. I still prefer Linux overall, but the Mac is wonderful in many ways. One of the big ones is one you touch on in point 4: coherent user experience. Things hang together on a Mac much better than on any other platform I've used. However, since I'm now talking about coherence, I don't think Windows has much (if any) advantage there compared to any one distro or desktop environment (the great diversity of those things is another matter, but since most people use only one distro everywhere, I don't think that's as important as some might think it). KDE, especially as implemented on Kubuntu, obviously borrows from the Mac approach, something which I hope only accelerates with KDE.
Overall, is Linux still a little harder than Windows? Yes, in some areas. In other areas, it's way ahead of Windows, and ahead of Mac in some areas too (installing software through things like Adept, Synaptic, or Linspire's Click-n-Run Warehouse is way ahead of either Win or Mac, for instance). Most administration tasks are now quite easy and pretty coherently handled in a GUI (speaking of Kubuntu and Edubuntu, at least). Installing Linux (depends on your distro, of course; but this is true of (K)ubuntu, at least) is a piece of cake. Easier than Windows, hands down. Installing XP and getting it up to date is really painful compared to installing Kubuntu.
Is Linux, then ready for the desktop? Depends which desktop. For the power user, it's been ready for years. Linux has been my primary (and exclusive, at home), desktop OS for nearly 10 years. For business desktops? Yes, in most cases. For Multimedia?, No, it's still behind there, but regular progress is being made. For a light-use home user who just needs web, email, and occasional light word processing? Yes, it's been ready for that for quite a while.
Oh, about Outlook: yes, Outlook is a decent PIM, except for the mail part. It's a heinous email client in most respects, worst I've ever used. Thunderbird is much better at mail, and at least IMO, Evolution is a better Outlook than Outlook.
This sounds a lot like Google to me. The main point of Google's hiring gimmicks is to convince everyone that Google people are smarter than everybody else.
Maybe. I haven't worked there, so I couldn't say. I did have a first-round interview, seemed like a nice enough place. Every place that wants to succeed needs to have its staff believe in its products, it's just the extreme to which Microsoft takes things that gives them a blind spot.
However, the claim of people buying into the idea of MS or Google superiority without any evidence that it's true seems unsupportable to me. There is, in fact, a lot of evidence out there. Microsoft is a tremendously successful company by any measure. It's true they got a break by buying DOS and being selected by IBM to provide the OS for the IBM PC, but when they caught that break they executed on it very well and they already had a decent track record before that (which doubtless is a major factor why IBM chose MS). When Excel was launched, it wiped the floor with every other Mac spreadsheet. When Excel later became a Windows app, it did the same to other Windows spreadsheets. Microsoft Word beat out every other word processor. Like at least some people here, I used those sorts of then-new Microsoft apps back in those days, and the reason for their success was clear: they were good. Very good. Microsoft really raised the bar for a lot of application software.
MS then was probably better (and certainly more nimble) than it is now, and had the advantage of being the competitor who had to take on entrenched players. Now, they are the entrenched player and are in the sights the way they had WordPerfect and Lotus and Wordstar in the sights back in the day. However, I think they do have some sense of the danger and are trying to re-tool to meet it. Exchange 2007 is a big improvement, Office 2007 is faster than 2003, and once you get used to the ribbon (took me about a month), it's actually pretty good. I wish OO.org had a ribbon interface, too. SharePoint is a very good product. Will this effort be too little, too late, especially in light of Microsoft's lack of desire to either break itself up or risk undermining the Windows franchise by selling things such as Office, Exchange, or SQL Server in Linux versions? Perhaps. If I were the head of Microsoft I would break it up into three independent companies under a holding company, as some have proposed: an operating systems company, a hardware and gaming company, and a desktop and server products company. I might even go to four, and divide out the server products into a separate company. Windows games would be in with desktop apps.
In such a system, the desktop and server apps companies would not only be free to produce Mac and Linux versions of products, they would probably have to in order to compete. The OS division would suffer in the short term, cut loose from support and lock-in provided by the current structure. If it rose to the challenge, the Windows that came out the other side would be better than the Windows we have now, by far. If it didn't, MS might wind up being a non-player in the OS market, but with unbeatably good desktop and server apps. The hardware and gaming division might or might not make it. Xbox would have to learn to compete without subsidy.
It's hard to say which of those scenarios would be better for Linux and open source in general. If MS stays the way it is now, it's probably going to get a pretty good black eye from Google, Apple, and the collective Linux camp. If it breaks itself up, parts of it (esp. operating systems) may get a black eye anyway, but the competition will improve them tremendously and they will survive.
While I did not specifically address those factors, I don't find them to be compelling, either. Yes, Steveb got his position as a result of being one of the founders, as did Billg. However, it is very common for tech startups to wind up having their CEO/founder(s) replaced by others after they go public. It happened to Apple (which was good for Steve Jobs if not for Apple; he really matured into a good CEO during his time away from Apple). It happened to a once fairly major Linux distributor which is now very nearly defunct. I was closed enough to that situation to know the principals personally, and a year or so after they went public, they were both deposed by the VCs that were major shareholders. The fact that both Steveb and Billg have retained their positions at the head of Microsoft after all these years as a public company speaks to their ability. It may also speak to their collectively holding enough stock to prevent any attempt to oust them (although I don't know if they do or not).
Whether he is still adequate to running Microsoft or not is a valid question, but certainly, he has been adequate for a very long time in the past. IMO, if there is an adequacy issue there, it comes from the source that I have already mentioned: that Microsoft is so steeped in its own culture and success that it can't see the forest for the trees. It recognizes that it has tough and able competitors in Apple, Linux, and now Google, but I think few people - if any - at Microsoft realized just how far ahead of them those competitors are in a number of areas. Microsoft has already peaked; now, the tipping point for real marketshare losses may not be all that far ahead and Vista may prove to be the grease on that slide. The mindshare tipping point has, I believe, already been reached.
Either Ballmer's an idiot or in denial. I'm feeling it's a little from column A and a little from column B
I used to work at Microsoft, and while I have not met Steve Ballmer, I presume he's not an idiot. If he were, he wouldn't have gotten where he is. He may be, however, blinded by a mix of success, loyalty, and drinking his own kool-aid. When I was at Microsoft (and this figures into why I no longer work there and am glad to be out) is that Microsoft regularly tells the world and itself that it produces the best software in the world. The propaganda beat in Redmond is unending, and I think that much of the company - and all of its senior management - truly believe this.
People might ask, "How can this be? All you have to do is try some competing products to know that there is a lot of software out there that's better than Microsoft's!" This can be because Microsoft has its fingers in so many software pies that a typical computer on Microsoft corpnet might not have a single piece of non-MS software on it. Microsoft employees live in a universe where there is little or no direct contact with competitive products, unless their jobs involve checking out the competition. Against that background, I'm sure Steveb and a lot of others really believe that Microsoft products are the best, period. And some of them are actually pretty good. SQL Server 2005 is a fast, stable product. If it ran on *nix it would be a huge threat to Oracle, IMO. Exchange 2007 is a ground-up re-write and a huge leap forward in security, capability, and performance. SharePoint is a jewel of a product, perhaps the best thing Microsoft makes, but one that somehow doesn't seem to get much of the spotlight. At the opposite end of the spectrum is their internal bug tracking system, which is the biggest pile of crap I've ever used, in any category. Somewhere in the middle is Windows. Of the three OSes I regularly use (Windows XP, Kubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X), Windows comes in last in terms of overall functionality and ease of use (IMO; doubtless some of you will have different opinions on this, but I say this from the perspective of someone who moved from Windows to *nix because he found it to be better; I used to be a Microsoft fanboy in the 1990s). Windows just feels clunky compared to either KDE on Linux or OS X.
That's Microsoft's achilles heel. They generally do believe that they are the best, across the board. They are ferociously competitive, probably more so than any company in the world, but the culture is blinded by its own success. In terms of features and ease of use, Microsoft is playing catchup to both Mac OS X and Linux in many areas (not all, of course). Things like LAMP continue to pressure them on the server side, while Mac and increasingly Linux, are focusing pressure on the desktop. And then Google comes out of left field with thing like Google office apps. Microsoft is still a powerful monopoly and a very tough competitor, but I think they mostly don't realize the extent to which their opponents are in a position to turn the tide of battle. If there is a point on which Steveb or anyone else at Microsoft could be called foolish (idiot just isn't right, sorry), it's that one: they still believe that Microsoft is the best, period. However, the 900 pound gorilla is now down to about 700 pounds and doesn't know it.
Your experience sounds similar to mine. At my new employer, employees are given the choice of a Dell or a MacBook Pro (nearly all computers issued now are notebooks; we're mostly not doing desktops anymore). I could have any OS I want on a Dell, but anything other than Windows I would have to install myself. I wanted to get right down to work, so I chose a Mac (which most people in our engineering department do).
As a Mac n00b, I spent enough time learning the Mac and getting it set up the way I like it that I might just as well have installed Kubuntu on a Dell (might have taken less time, actually), however, I'm very happy with the Mac and wouldn't go to the trouble to migrate off of it now that I have it.
But- if my choice were between the Mac and a Dell with factory-installed Linux, I probably would have taken the Dell. Don't get me wrong, I love the Mac and will probably get one for my wife (kids are already on Linux ), but overall, Linux is still my preferred OS.
At least based on my experience here, and how most of our engineers choose Mac, I think it's pretty clear that Dell is losing sales by not offering factory-installed Linux. Nice to see they're taking a serious look at it.
Maybe we don't *need* a government-sponsored TV upgrade, however, as other(s) have pointed out, the government wants to sell of the VHF spectrum. To that end, they have mandated that after the cut-off date people will no longer be able to use their otherwise perfectly usable TVs to watch TV. These TVs are not being artificially obsoleted for some clear greater good such as safety issues or environmental preservation (indeed, all the SDTVs getting junked for HDTVs will doubtless have a negative impact on the environment), but solely for the convenience of both the broadcast television industry and the government itself.
IMO, this makes the government ethically liable to pay for adapters. Yes, I know that it's myself and other US taxpayers who are actually paying for it, and I think that sucks, but the point at which to stop that suckage is long past: when HDTV was mandated. Now we just have to clean up the mess.
I firmly believe that the free market should have been allowed to decide when SDTV went away. Big government strikes again.
I pretty well agree with this. I'm a Republican, a right-wing one with a libertarian bent. I have been using Free software for nearly 10 years now. My OS breakdown:
Me: primarily Linux, with one XP machine, one MacBook Pro, and one FreeBSD box. The Mac is my company computer, so it's the one I spend the most time with. It's my first Mac, and I think it's great. Overall I still prefer Linux, but I'm very happy with the Mac and can see myself purchasing one for my own use at some point. I run Kubuntu in a Parallels VM on it.
Wife: XP on a Thinkpad
Kids: Edubuntu
Why do I use Free software? Well, for one thing, it's free. Buying proprietary equivalents of all the free software I use would almost certainy exceed the price of the hardware. For another, I believe in the OSS development model as a way to produce quality software. It's great to build a business on it. My current employer is the fourth company I've worked for that did so. I like the community. Many of them are liberals and I'm a conservative, but we have common ground in FOSS. I believe FOSS can really drive economic growth by commoditizing software. Bad for Microsoft, sure. Somewhat bad for Apple, Sun, IBM, HP, et all, but not as much b/c they all sell hardware, too. Commoditized software is bad for MS in the same way that commoditized hardware is bad for hardware vendors, but commoditizing both is good for business that use hardware and software, which is nearly all of them.
A $500 cheap busines PC may easily have $500 or more of software on it. Use FOSS and that PC may now have $0 worth of software on it. You've just seriously cut your IT costs. Start looking at the server side and considering the cost of Windows 2003 Server, Exchange, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Lotus, Groupwise, etc., and comparing that to the cost of FOSS alternatives, and again, huge savings. Even if you decide you need a proprietary database or messaging software, you can still save a lot of money by running it on a FOSS operating system.
I use Free software because it makes sense to me on so many levels. Economically, ethically, socially, it just works for me.
I think it more likely that MS is trying to kill the *nix world through their deal with Novell - how much longer before software that was Open Source/GPLd becomes MS' property and whole sections of *nix need to be re-written?
Anything that is currently available under GPL (2 or 3, doesn't matter) and not already patented or at least filed on, can never really be owned by MS, Novell, or anyone else. The fact that prior art exists and is GPLed would make any future attempt to patent it easily defeasible because that prior art is widely available and would be noticed, esp. now that USPTO and the courts are finally starting to wake up to this stuff.
WRT copyright, Novell could change the license of anything for which they hold copyright and release it under a proprietary license going forward, but all that get them is a fork based on the last GPLed version and not many users of their proprietary version in comparison. This is one of the things the GPL is designed for, and a comparison of SSH and OpenSSH is a good example of this in practice. SSH was taken proprietary, a fork was made of the last GPLed version, and now OpenSSH totally dominates the market.
I'm not advocating a relaxation of vigilance - MS is a fierce competitor and will do anything to win - but these are approaches that would not work well for them, if at all.
At my company, the majority of the technical staff and a good-sized (and increasing, I believe) percentage of the non-technical staff are using Macs. Most people also use XP under Parallels for Outlook (and an online meeting service that only works in IE 6), although I use Entourage instead.
However, Entourage isn't for everyone, and that's one of the big obstacles IMO to broader corporate desktop use: there is no *good* native Exchange client for Mac and from the viewpoint of an IT department, if you have to run XP in Parallels anyway, it's cheaper to just keep running XP natively.
Entourage is not good by any reasonable definition, and it uses WebDAV, not MAPI; whether Outlook itself is good or not is another argument altogether. I've tried building Evolution on OS X from time to time, but no luck so far. Evo IMO is a much better client than Entourage, if it only worked on Mac. Still, what I'd really like to see is for Apple to produce its own native Exchange client, or at least some conduits to connect Mail.app and iCal to Exchange.
The only fundamental flaw in prop. 13 is that it allows for a reassessment when a property is sold. Even *that* should be prohibited. My monthly taxes on a house I bought in '05 are 1/3 of the mortgage amount, which is ridiculous.
Time for a Prop. 13.5, to roll back the taxes again and prohibit reassessment at transfer (I could maybe go for a 10% boost at transfer, but no more).
As others in this thread have noted, California is enjoying windfall profits from reassessment resulting from the real estate boom of 2004 - 2005, has one of the highest sales taxes in the nation, and the government *still* manages to make a financial mess of things through wasteful spending. They have no right to the amount of money they get in taxes, much less to get more by reassessment, in light of their terrible track record.
And how did this travesty of government come about? Because most Californians continue to foolishly vote Democrat. Vote Libertarian and Republican (Libertarian preferred) and watch problems with government shrink. But if you vote Republican, make sure it's a true conservative like Tom McClintock. Lots of Republicans are just as bad as Democrats, and largely indistinguishable in their policies (The Governator, for instance).
Sure, I want to use Linux to run Free software too, and with very few exceptions, that's all I do run on it. Buuuuut, one of those exceptions is an nvidia binary driver. If you've ever used openGL without it, you know why I'm using the binary driver.
There's nothing about the Canonical/Linspire deal that in any way restricts you from using exclusively Free software. It just makes non-free alternatives available for people whose needs just aren't met by Free ones. I stick to Free as much as possible, and will take "Free and good enough" over "proprietary and better" as long as "good enough" really is. The nvidia driver is one of those places where "good enough" wasn't.
This deal will help raise the overall profile of Linux, raise the popularity and mindshare of Linux, and get more vendor recognition of both Linux in general and even of why open is good. In the long term, it will help close more of the gap between Linux the way it is and Linux the way you (and I) want it.
If Macs have a slight edge in ease of use over Windows, than an M-16 has a slight edge over a muzzle-loading musket as an infantry weapon. Looking on from the Windows or Linux side of the fence, you may not realize just how much better OS X is than Windows, but the gulf really is about that large.
Price? XP Pro isn't exactly cheap. Software availability? For most users, there are no areas where either the same or workalike software isn't available. Better still, in cases where there is both a Win and Mac version of a software product, the Mac version is usually better. There's more Windows software out there, but a lot of it's crappy and nowhere near worth the price. Mac software covers all the important areas and is usually much better in quality.
Also, consider this: if price and software availability are really all that matter to most people, they should all be using Debian or one of its clones: they're free and there's something like 7000 packages in the Debian repositories, any of which can be installed free of charge with a few clicks of the mouse.
Why, then, do most people use Windows? Because it's what their computer came with and they don't know anything else/know any better. If they did know anything else, they'd switch. The fact of the matter is that in terms of the quality of the UI, Windows has fallen far behind both Mac and Linux. Vista does a lot to offset that, but it brings so much other crap with it that it's not worth switching, IMO. If you're going to learn a whole different UI anyway, might as well forget Vista and Aeroglass and get something better and cheaper, like OS X or Kubuntu.
Tell the truth like "Linux IS harder to use than Windows, But..."
Uhh, don't look now, but that's not the truth. At least, it's not an objective truth. Linux is subjectively harder than Windows if you've been using (only) Windows for a while and have built up a skillset with it, or at least are good at the things you need it for. That's also true about Macs.
I recently became a Mac user when I took a new job and my company asked me if I'd like a Mac or a PC. I decided to try a Mac. I know Windows well and I know Linux better, but Macs are new to me. The first week had a pretty steep learning curve. Macs may have *nix under the hood, but on the outside they are very different, although Kubuntu has clearly taken some pages from Apple's play book, so I had to learn a lot of new ways of doing things.
Three weeks on, I'm not about to dump my Linux machines - Kubuntu remains my OS of choice, and I have Kubuntu installed in a Parallels VM as well, although I rarely use it (along with XP; we use a conferencing product called Raindance that only works in IE; so far I've never needed it but XP is there just in case). At the same time, however, my attitude towards this Mac has become "They'll pry it from my cold, dead fingers." I understand now why longtime Mac users would have nothing else.
It's pretty unusual for anyone to switch off of Linux or Mac to anything else, but I really can see Windows users switching to Mac or (some distros of) Linux. Macs are clearly easier to use and more stable than Windows. I find the same to be true of Linux, although both KDE and GNOME are not yet as polished as OS X. However, in most respects they are easier to use than Windows. Plus, they're cheaper, more secure, more stable, faster on some hardware, and like OS X, they rarely get in my way or piss me off the way that Windows does.
So, if we want to tell prospective Linux users the truth, we'll say something like "Linux is more secure and more stable than Windows, it needs fewer hardware upgrades to keep performing well (which, combined with the fact that you can get it for little or no cost, makes it much cheaper to own and use), has little or no vendor lock-in, and in most respects it's easier to use. However, there are still some rough edges in a few areas. Tell me more about what you need from your computer, and I can help you assess whether Linux might be something you should try right now, or whether you should wait a year or two for those rough edges to be smoothed out."
That's the truth about Linux today: it's better than Windows in most respects, including ease of use, but it's not (yet) for everyone.
As the CP says, two weeks is the norm in the US, and even that is only a matter of tradition and courtesy, not a matter of law. If you decide one day to quit your job, you can just say "I quit" and walk out and that's that.
Microsoft did sue Google, but they settled out of court, and Lee works for Google today.
Even if the guy being sued did sign a non-compete without realizing, they still can only sue to block him from working for a competitor. They can't sue him just for quitting. And depending on what Texas courts think of non-competes, they might still be on thin ice. Here in California, courts have generally held non-competes to unenforceable. I have a non-compete, like most other tech workers, and the major reason courts have generally held them unenforceable is that (especially in a narrow specialty like mine), a two-year non-compete clause would be tantamount to forcing me to leave my chosen career completely and work for a lot less money in some other industry.
Add to that the fact that the standard employment agreement states that you have an at-will relationship with your employer. They can terminate your employment at any time, for any reason, or for none. Likewise, you can quit at any time, for any reason, or for none. If an employee is going to be at-will (yes, you can still sue for wrongful termination in some circumstances, I know), companies can't expect to have it both ways. If they can do whatever they want with respect to their employees' employment, employees likewise should be able to do so.
I agree with that idea, both because I'm an employee, and because I have fairly libertarian principles regarding the free market for goods and services. My job skills, like my house, stocks, car, or any other assets, should be worth whatever the market will bear, to offer to any bidder, without restriction. If a company can keeps its employees happy (and that takes a lot more than salary; salary may not even be the top thing; I'd rather make a medium salary at a great place to work than a top-of-market salary at a bad place to work), they'll stay there and work. If it can't, they'll go elsewhere. Maybe to a competitor. That's fair. Employees should have the same relationship with a company that customers do: make them unhappy and you'll lose them.
Perhaps not a short-term threat, but it might be more of a long-term one. I'm a former Microsoft employee (by acquisition, not my fault ), and even I see nothing new in Vista. At home I have a mix of a couple XP machines, some Linux machines, and a FreeBSD box. The XP machines will remain XP machines; I have no intention of every migrating to Vista. There's nothing compelling there for me.
At my current employer, you get a choice of a PC with XP or a Mac when you go to work there. Or you can install FreeBSD or Linux on your PC if you care to, and some people choose that option. I decided to try a Mac, since I haven't touched one since a brief experience with OS 7.6.1 10 years ago. Company wide, my eyeball survey says about 1/3 of the staff have Macs. Among newer hires, the majority are going Mac; everyone in my new hire orientation group chose a Mac; everyone. If it keeps going at this rate, in a year we'll be a majority Mac shop.
We have an Exchange server and a Windows network. The Mac fits in well. My Linux and XP machines play nicely together at home. Since getting this Mac and adjusting to it (it's very different than either Linux or Windows), I know why so many Mac users are so fanatic. It (almost) never pisses me off, it very rarely gets in my way, it just works. In quite a few respects, it's better than a Linux machine, although I still overall prefer a Linux machine runnning KDE. That said, there's a lot KDE could learn from the Mac UI, and Kubuntu has obviously taken a look at the system preferences panel.
The fact of the matter is that today, the Mac is easier to use, more stable, and more productive than Windows. So is KDE (it's true; put a competent Windows user on a KDE box for a month or so and they'll be fine). Maybe GNOME is,too, but I haven't used it in so many years that I couldn't say.
It's true that none of this is a short-term threat to Microsoft. However, Macs and (moreso) Linux are making small but steady inroads. Windows has already had it's highest level of market penetration, and while it's clearly still the market leader and will be for some time to come, there's an important fact to keep in mind: nobody switches *to* Windows from Mac or Linux. The migration, while it may still be just a trickle, is always off of Windows.
I'm a recent first-time Mac owner (except for a brief stint on 7.6.1 on some Motorola-based Mac in the late nineties; that sucked), and do you know what? Windows machines (not PCs; Linx machines are mostly PCs, too) do suck relative to the competition in most respects.
Honestly, unless you're really into PC games, there aren't many areas where a Mac isn't >= to a Windows machine. Granted, one of those areas is that there is no Exchange client on Mac that is as good as Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 on Windows. Microsoft Entourage is adequate, though, and Mail.app can handle the mail part of dealing with an Exchange server just fine (I'd love to see Apple add calendar integration, though; the best thing Apple could do here is put out their own complete Exchange client). Mac Office 2004 is decent, and at my company - which my eyeball estimate says is 1/4 - 1/3 Mac, some Linux and FreeBSD, and majority Windows - the Macs work just fine on the Windows network.
Mac is a no-brainer for ease of use, but what may come as a surprise to many is that among the three platforms, I also consider Linux to beat XP for ease of use in most areas (roaming between wireless networks is not one of them, which is one reason I chose a Mac; I move around the building a lot and don't want to have to mess with wireless problems). The main reason most Windows users today would say Windows is easier to use is because it's what they're used to. If they switched to a Mac, they would also find it "harder" than Windows at first, but once they got used to it over a month or so of use, they'd realize there's no way they'd go back.
I don't see myself going over to Mac as my primary system instead of Linux, I just like Linux to much. But migrating my parents from Linux to Mac? Yeah, I can see myself encouraging them to get a Mac. My dad likes to tinker too much to ever give up Linux, but I think they'd really enjoy a Mac as their "real work" computer.
I had never seen the ad because I was living abroad at the time, not using Macs (just Linux, but I have a Mac at work now, a MacBook Pro 15; I like it almost as much as a Linux box, and better in a few specific areas), and AFAIK it wasn't broadcast on Japanese television.
Now that I have seen, I don't see what the big deal was. It's hardly something that would compel me to want a Mac, unlike the current Mac and PC ads, which are hilarious. And she's absolutely right that it's creepy how so many people were so into her and are still so into the 14-year old her.
I think I heard that Francis Drake sailed right past SF bay because from offshore it looks just like another pices of rocky unforgiving shoreline.
May well be true. Even Portola's expedition discovered the bay by climbing over the peninsula in the vicinity of what is now San Bruno. At first, they couldn't even see it because of the lay of the land. They were up on the peninsula for two or three days before they came to a place that had an overview of the bay.
I bet there was much cussing to be heard when they realized that if they'd just sailed a few more miles to the north they'd have found it without climbing those big hills
You can compare that to Asia, too. Tokyo, Osaka, and Saigon both have massive urban sprawl. They remind me very much of the greater LA area (well, Tokyo and Osaka; Saigon is big, but not that big). I lived in Asia for nine years, and in 3.5 years I gained 30 pounds (worked off about 10 of it now, but I'm still on the chunky side).
Because of urban sprawl? Nope. Had urban sprawl in Japan and Viet Nam too, but I wasn't fat. Why, then? B/c you have to drive everywhere in frigging California. I just moved from SoCal up to the Bay area, and while there are trains and seemingly better bus routes here, the BART and other trains aren't like the ones in Japan: you have to frigging *drive* to the train station, so you lose the exercise that walking to the station provides for people in Japan. I used to walk several kilometers a day in Japan just as part of commuting. Not here. Urban sprawl doesn't cause gut sprawl, the lack of exercise coming from our poorly designed public transportation system does. Most Tokyoites living within a 10 or 15 minute walk of a train station and work even closer to one. The only place in the US where that might be true is New York City.
Besides the driving, having kids now leaves me with far less time to work out, which doesn't help.
Is urban sprawl bad? Heck no. I love it. I want a house in the 'burbs with a yard and a view of the sky. Evidently, so do most other people. Urban sprawl is simply a product of a free market. The "smart growth" types can go live in the middle of the city if they want, and have no yard for their kids to play, but I won't be joining them. And if they think they're going to legislate us out of the 'burbs, they'll just be voted out of a job, too.
Also, when I was a kid (60s and 70s), there was a lot of urban sprawl then too, but fat kids were rare. There were only a few in any school, and they were very often made fun of for being fat. Now, fat kids are so common in school they're probably not even a minority in some places. All the kids who lived next door to me in SoCal were fat. The oldest one is on a *diet* - but it doens't seem to be helping. Her mom and her aunt are both fat, too, and they used to be really thin and hot. What's the difference, if there was sprawl then and now?
Umm, could it be how much people eat, and what they eat? Restaurant portions are way bigger than they used to be, and all kinds of drinks and other food are filled with high-fructose corn syrup, when those same foods used regular sugars when I was a kid. HFC is bad news from a dietary standpoint.
Finally, another thing that makes (most) Americans get fat easier is we're more genetically predisposed towards it. Consider the case of my wife, who is east Asian. We had two kids back to back, born a year apart. Less than a year after our second one was born, my wife was back at the same weight she was when we met (100 pounds). And she did *nothing* to achieve that. No dieting. No exercise. Nothing. Eating the same food as her every day, I made the weight gain mentioned above. And there's nothing at all unusual about her. You see that all the time in Asia. You rarely see it here. White, among others, (maybe as a result of eating a lot during warm periods to get through long, lean winters for thousands of years) seem more predisposed to get fat than Asians. Heck, one of the best 20 year old bodies I've ever seen turned out to be on a fifty-somthing woman in Tokyo (you could have knocked me over with a feather when I finally got to an angle where I could see her face ).
Thanks for all this useful info! I do now have my Applications folder back (I actually have two, for some reason; the second one only contains Office 2004, Parallels, and the Cisco VPN client.
WRT your second post, I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the usefulness of having a start menu:)
I do know about Spaces in the upcoming Leopard and will request an upgrade from our IT department as soon as it's available. VirtueDesktops is usable but unstable (it dies at least once per day).
Our IT dept. actually does know what they're doing on Macs, but the IT department only has one Mac guy and he's rather over-burdened. We have ~450 employees and my eyeball survey guesstimate is that about 1/3 of us have Macs, and among more recent hires such as myself, that number may be even higher. There were four people in my new employee orientation group this week. When you're hired, they ask if you want a Mac or a PC (if you take a PC, you're free to install the OS of your choice on it if you don't like Windows; if the PC hardware was a Thinkpad I would have gone that way, but it's Dell and I don't much care for their notebooks. Thinkpads and Macs are the only notebooks I would buy with my own money), and three of the people in my group had chosen Macs. When the other guy saw we were all taking Macs, he changed his mind and asked for a Mac as well:) Even at my old company, where Windows PCs were all they handed out, five out of my staff of eight brought in their personal Macs and used them to do most of their work, saving the Windows machines for the internal stuff that could only be done on Windows.
Overall, I'm very pleased with my first modern Mac. I have a few nits to pick with the UI, all of which are long-standing design choices by Apple, and since those things will never change, I will just have to live with them. Overall, it's a very good OS and super stable. At my old job I had a Toshiba tablet notebook with XP on it, and I couldn't go more than three days without having to reboot the thing. In a bad week, reboots were a daily occurrence. I was very happy to turn it in on my last day:) It's the end of my first week with this Macbook and it has been neither turned off nor rebooted since I got it.
One thing is for sure: if I knew somebody with an old PC who was considering buying a new one to get Vista, I would definitely recommend they go and spend some time with a Mac first, even renting one for a week if possible. You meet a lot of people who use Windows but don't like it. You meet some people who tried Linux but went back to Windows. But you never, ever meet anybody who owns a Mac and hates it and wishes they had some other system. That says a lot. I think a lot of Windows users who spent a week with a Mac (or even a Linux system, for some of them) would switch.
Slashdot Mirror
China cracked down on bullet-proof hosting? As a person who has been in the anti-spam business for over four years now, all I can say to that is:
A AAAAAA!!!
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA
Seriously, though, China remains a huge source of spam. Some may be zombies, I'm sure, but commercial spammers in China, operating on IPs with no forward or reverse DNS are very common. They've cracked down on bullet-proof hosting like they've cracked down on pirate DVDs: not really at all, just a little window dressing.
How do you avoid the pitfalls of employment law that state you can't not hire(*) someone based on certain personal traits
IANAL, but AFAIK there is no law that I've ever heard of that makes personality a protected category, at least not in the United States.
Protected categories that I'm aware of include race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, physical disability, and things of that nature. Technical skills aren't a protected category either; that is, there's no law that says you have to hire the most technically qualified person[1], without regard to other factors. If you sue because you think a less qualified candidate was hired over you (and generally, you'd have know way to know; no company will tell you anything about any of the other applicants), you probably wouldn't have a chance. If someone were going to try that approach, they better also be in some protected category and claim "They didn't hire me because I'm _______" instead. And then, they'd better hope the company isn't filled with people in the same category. Being in the San Francisco area, which is extremely diverse in every way imaginable, I expect we could deflect any kind of claim like that easily.
In at least one instance, I passed over someone with a graduate degree for someone who didn't even have a degree. He was a self-taught programmer with little formal education in the subject, but was very sharp and had written a well-regarded BASIC library for gaming. He was a terrific addition to the team on both the technical and personal levels, and no one (not even HR) questioned why I wasn't hiring the guy with the master's in CS. I told my boss "This is my pick" he did a short second interview himself, then signed off on it. If there was anything wrong with that, I'm sure HR or Legal would have said something.
[1] There may be different rules on this for managers at government agencies; I once applied for a job at a county government (looking back, I'm very glad I wasn't hired) and took what was basically a civil service exam for mainframe computer operators. In that kind of environment, I imagine a manager's hands might be a lot more tied WRT who they can hire. Even then, if the most technically qualified person is not in a protected category and the person you really like is, then you're probably gold.
No, by "managing" I definitely do not mean and I don't regard that as being in the definition of a competent manager. Yes, we all have to be in control to the point of achieving our goals on time and on budget, but control in the sense of keeping people under your thumb and feeding them BS, well, that's not management. That's using control-freak/micromanager strategies to conceal a lack of managerial competence.
Middle management does have a legit role, although there are certainly middle managers who have no really good purpose in an organization (I've worked under at least one like that). With that said, in defense of middle management, I have to say that being a good middle manager is hard, much harder than being a good first-line manager (my own level of experience). Some of the main duties of a middle manager are to be an information conduit between upper management and first-level management, and to make sure the first-level managers and their teams are meeting their objectives.
When you have good upper management and good lower management, being a good middle manager is a lot easier. If one or both of those is not so good, it gets a lot harder. If you're a middle manager and you have one or more teams that are behind, understanding the problem and taking the correct action to fix it is when the good middle managers show themselves as such, and the others, well, don't.
If the good ones will succeed, the bad ones will always act as more of a communications obstacle than a conduit, and if the problem is with either them or senior management, they will pretty skillfully manage to pin the blame on the first-level managers and their staffs. Not that I've seen this happen, or anything.
While many companies may have what looks like too many middle managers, they exist for the same reason an army has levels of officers between 2nd lieutenants and generals: there are only so many direct reports any one person can handle, and only so many details any one person can pay attention to. If a CTO of a large company had to personally manage every team manager and oversee their projects, s/he would have no time to do the things that CTOs are tasked with. Even in a small company, that can be true. At one place I worked we had fewer than 100 people when I joined and fewer than 200 when I left, but even there I had a level of management (the director of development) between me and the CTO. That worked well. Later, another level of management was added in there between the DD and the CTO, with a VP title. In terms of competence he was somewhere in between a good one and a bad one. At the end of the day, I don't think he really contributed all that much. A VP in that spot might have been necessary but I would have preferred a better one.
Not to take anything away from the book - I'm sure it's excellent - but I do have to question its basic premise that geeks are hard to manage.
They can be, like anyone else - but like anyone, that depends a lot on who you hire. I managed a staff of eight full-time developers and two interns, and to throw some extra complexity into the mix, they were all all at a location quite remote (~2000 miles) from my location and I only got to go out there about once every six months.
They were never hard to manage. Even the one who required the most management (and whom I might not have hired were it not for a particular rare skill that he had and we needed) was never a problem.
Why was this so? Because of how I hire. Technical chops matter, but personality fit with me, my other staff members, and with the corporate culture matter just as much. Probably more. If you don't fit in, no matter how good your technical chops are, you're never going to be right for the position and will probably need a lot more active management than people who do fit in.
As a result, my staff didn't need much active management. I positioned myself as a BS filter between them and corporate politics, so they could focus on the work, and I made sure they knew they were appreciated, got recognition, and could see the results of their work. And raises. I made sure they got good raises. Money may not be everything, but it matters.
My opinion is that if I hire someone who really needs to be "managed" I have made a mistake. Maybe I can get the person from there to a point of not needing to be managed much, but most probably I have made a mistake of personality fit, and those are hard or impossible to fix. My personality, the personalities of my existing staff members, the company's culture, and the personality of any new hire are all unlikely to change, so I'd better get it right at hiring. If I don't, I'll just need to re-fill that position after a while because no one will be really happy and it will eventually lead to a parting of ways.
In my experience, if you hire the right people and keep them as insulated as possible from BS, all you need to do is give them clear goals and get out of the way and they will meet and exceed them all.
This so completely false that I can only imagine the person who modded it "troll" was spot-on.
Nothing in the GPL (V. 2, at least, who knows how V. 3 will wind up?) requires you to release the source for modifications you create only for in-house use and do not distribute. A couple clear examples:
1) Linksys did have to release their source because they made a product for distribution and in fact distributed it. The fact that it was an embedded system does not change the fact of distribution, thus they were required to honor the license; I'm sure you have no problem with honoring licenses, right?
2) My former employer makes extensive use of Linux and other GPLed software, and in fact built they business around it. They have also modified that software, and directly use it to support customers and provide the services they offer. However, since none of that software is ever distributed (it runs only on the company's servers, under their control in their own co-los), there is no requirement to release any source code for the modifications.
Since you're a troll, I'm sure there is no "lawyer" who told you those things, but on the off-chance there is, you need to get a different lawyer and that one needs to be disbarred for incompetence.
In the case mentioned - a company hired you to do some consulting work and wanted it done in Linux - the only party you'd have to release the source code to is the company that hired you, since what you're doing is a work for hire and they own the code, not you, unless you have a contract with them that says otherwise. Since it is a work for hire and the code has therefor not been distributed, no source release is required. Even if there was, however, the GPL terms are satisfied by giving the source code to those to whom you distributed a binary. If you provided binaries only to the company that hired you, then you are under no obligation to provide source to anyone but them. If they do not distribute it further, then they don't have to give source to anyone, either. Since investment firms are not in the habit of distributing their software, that's unlikely to happen.
Token ring? Since when does Linux not support it? Not that I've seen a token ring net in years...
Note that I address these points only to keep anyone new to free software from being taken in. I'm certain you made up the entire story and none of these events ever took place.
I agree with most of your points, but I have to call you out on point 2: Make you point out that learning Linux isn't as easy as windows [sic].
In my (considerable) experience, that's simply not true. You take someone who finds computers and mechanical things in general difficult and is confused by even the most basic computer tasks (my mother, for instance), and put her in front of a Windows machine and a Linux machine (I'll use Kubuntu in these examples, because it's my distro of choice). She doesn't find either of them easy, but doesn't find one to be harder than the other.
My wife primarily uses Windows because it's what she learned on and it's the only platform where Yahoo Messenger supports voice (that's the biggie for her) but on those occasions where she has to use Linux (our kids both have Linux machines, for example), she doesn't find it harder the Windows. They're both point/click.
My kids (not yet kindergarteners) both have Edubuntu on their computers and they don't think it's hard, even though they'd been using Windows on my wife's computer before that.
Now, if you'd made a comment on the learning curve/transitional difficulties for people who are used to Windows, I wouldn't complain. There's going to be a transitional period. I'm primarily a Linux user and recently got my first Mac. I still prefer Linux overall, but the Mac is wonderful in many ways. One of the big ones is one you touch on in point 4: coherent user experience. Things hang together on a Mac much better than on any other platform I've used. However, since I'm now talking about coherence, I don't think Windows has much (if any) advantage there compared to any one distro or desktop environment (the great diversity of those things is another matter, but since most people use only one distro everywhere, I don't think that's as important as some might think it). KDE, especially as implemented on Kubuntu, obviously borrows from the Mac approach, something which I hope only accelerates with KDE.
Overall, is Linux still a little harder than Windows? Yes, in some areas. In other areas, it's way ahead of Windows, and ahead of Mac in some areas too (installing software through things like Adept, Synaptic, or Linspire's Click-n-Run Warehouse is way ahead of either Win or Mac, for instance). Most administration tasks are now quite easy and pretty coherently handled in a GUI (speaking of Kubuntu and Edubuntu, at least). Installing Linux (depends on your distro, of course; but this is true of (K)ubuntu, at least) is a piece of cake. Easier than Windows, hands down. Installing XP and getting it up to date is really painful compared to installing Kubuntu.
Is Linux, then ready for the desktop? Depends which desktop. For the power user, it's been ready for years. Linux has been my primary (and exclusive, at home), desktop OS for nearly 10 years. For business desktops? Yes, in most cases. For Multimedia?, No, it's still behind there, but regular progress is being made. For a light-use home user who just needs web, email, and occasional light word processing? Yes, it's been ready for that for quite a while.
Oh, about Outlook: yes, Outlook is a decent PIM, except for the mail part. It's a heinous email client in most respects, worst I've ever used. Thunderbird is much better at mail, and at least IMO, Evolution is a better Outlook than Outlook.
This sounds a lot like Google to me. The main point of Google's hiring gimmicks is to convince everyone that Google people are smarter than everybody else.
Maybe. I haven't worked there, so I couldn't say. I did have a first-round interview, seemed like a nice enough place. Every place that wants to succeed needs to have its staff believe in its products, it's just the extreme to which Microsoft takes things that gives them a blind spot.
However, the claim of people buying into the idea of MS or Google superiority without any evidence that it's true seems unsupportable to me. There is, in fact, a lot of evidence out there. Microsoft is a tremendously successful company by any measure. It's true they got a break by buying DOS and being selected by IBM to provide the OS for the IBM PC, but when they caught that break they executed on it very well and they already had a decent track record before that (which doubtless is a major factor why IBM chose MS). When Excel was launched, it wiped the floor with every other Mac spreadsheet. When Excel later became a Windows app, it did the same to other Windows spreadsheets. Microsoft Word beat out every other word processor. Like at least some people here, I used those sorts of then-new Microsoft apps back in those days, and the reason for their success was clear: they were good. Very good. Microsoft really raised the bar for a lot of application software.
MS then was probably better (and certainly more nimble) than it is now, and had the advantage of being the competitor who had to take on entrenched players. Now, they are the entrenched player and are in the sights the way they had WordPerfect and Lotus and Wordstar in the sights back in the day. However, I think they do have some sense of the danger and are trying to re-tool to meet it. Exchange 2007 is a big improvement, Office 2007 is faster than 2003, and once you get used to the ribbon (took me about a month), it's actually pretty good. I wish OO.org had a ribbon interface, too. SharePoint is a very good product. Will this effort be too little, too late, especially in light of Microsoft's lack of desire to either break itself up or risk undermining the Windows franchise by selling things such as Office, Exchange, or SQL Server in Linux versions? Perhaps. If I were the head of Microsoft I would break it up into three independent companies under a holding company, as some have proposed: an operating systems company, a hardware and gaming company, and a desktop and server products company. I might even go to four, and divide out the server products into a separate company. Windows games would be in with desktop apps.
In such a system, the desktop and server apps companies would not only be free to produce Mac and Linux versions of products, they would probably have to in order to compete. The OS division would suffer in the short term, cut loose from support and lock-in provided by the current structure. If it rose to the challenge, the Windows that came out the other side would be better than the Windows we have now, by far. If it didn't, MS might wind up being a non-player in the OS market, but with unbeatably good desktop and server apps. The hardware and gaming division might or might not make it. Xbox would have to learn to compete without subsidy.
It's hard to say which of those scenarios would be better for Linux and open source in general. If MS stays the way it is now, it's probably going to get a pretty good black eye from Google, Apple, and the collective Linux camp. If it breaks itself up, parts of it (esp. operating systems) may get a black eye anyway, but the competition will improve them tremendously and they will survive.
While I did not specifically address those factors, I don't find them to be compelling, either. Yes, Steveb got his position as a result of being one of the founders, as did Billg. However, it is very common for tech startups to wind up having their CEO/founder(s) replaced by others after they go public. It happened to Apple (which was good for Steve Jobs if not for Apple; he really matured into a good CEO during his time away from Apple). It happened to a once fairly major Linux distributor which is now very nearly defunct. I was closed enough to that situation to know the principals personally, and a year or so after they went public, they were both deposed by the VCs that were major shareholders. The fact that both Steveb and Billg have retained their positions at the head of Microsoft after all these years as a public company speaks to their ability. It may also speak to their collectively holding enough stock to prevent any attempt to oust them (although I don't know if they do or not).
Whether he is still adequate to running Microsoft or not is a valid question, but certainly, he has been adequate for a very long time in the past. IMO, if there is an adequacy issue there, it comes from the source that I have already mentioned: that Microsoft is so steeped in its own culture and success that it can't see the forest for the trees. It recognizes that it has tough and able competitors in Apple, Linux, and now Google, but I think few people - if any - at Microsoft realized just how far ahead of them those competitors are in a number of areas. Microsoft has already peaked; now, the tipping point for real marketshare losses may not be all that far ahead and Vista may prove to be the grease on that slide. The mindshare tipping point has, I believe, already been reached.
Either Ballmer's an idiot or in denial. I'm feeling it's a little from column A and a little from column B
I used to work at Microsoft, and while I have not met Steve Ballmer, I presume he's not an idiot. If he were, he wouldn't have gotten where he is. He may be, however, blinded by a mix of success, loyalty, and drinking his own kool-aid. When I was at Microsoft (and this figures into why I no longer work there and am glad to be out) is that Microsoft regularly tells the world and itself that it produces the best software in the world. The propaganda beat in Redmond is unending, and I think that much of the company - and all of its senior management - truly believe this.
People might ask, "How can this be? All you have to do is try some competing products to know that there is a lot of software out there that's better than Microsoft's!" This can be because Microsoft has its fingers in so many software pies that a typical computer on Microsoft corpnet might not have a single piece of non-MS software on it. Microsoft employees live in a universe where there is little or no direct contact with competitive products, unless their jobs involve checking out the competition. Against that background, I'm sure Steveb and a lot of others really believe that Microsoft products are the best, period. And some of them are actually pretty good. SQL Server 2005 is a fast, stable product. If it ran on *nix it would be a huge threat to Oracle, IMO. Exchange 2007 is a ground-up re-write and a huge leap forward in security, capability, and performance. SharePoint is a jewel of a product, perhaps the best thing Microsoft makes, but one that somehow doesn't seem to get much of the spotlight. At the opposite end of the spectrum is their internal bug tracking system, which is the biggest pile of crap I've ever used, in any category. Somewhere in the middle is Windows. Of the three OSes I regularly use (Windows XP, Kubuntu Linux, and Mac OS X), Windows comes in last in terms of overall functionality and ease of use (IMO; doubtless some of you will have different opinions on this, but I say this from the perspective of someone who moved from Windows to *nix because he found it to be better; I used to be a Microsoft fanboy in the 1990s). Windows just feels clunky compared to either KDE on Linux or OS X.
That's Microsoft's achilles heel. They generally do believe that they are the best, across the board. They are ferociously competitive, probably more so than any company in the world, but the culture is blinded by its own success. In terms of features and ease of use, Microsoft is playing catchup to both Mac OS X and Linux in many areas (not all, of course). Things like LAMP continue to pressure them on the server side, while Mac and increasingly Linux, are focusing pressure on the desktop. And then Google comes out of left field with thing like Google office apps. Microsoft is still a powerful monopoly and a very tough competitor, but I think they mostly don't realize the extent to which their opponents are in a position to turn the tide of battle. If there is a point on which Steveb or anyone else at Microsoft could be called foolish (idiot just isn't right, sorry), it's that one: they still believe that Microsoft is the best, period. However, the 900 pound gorilla is now down to about 700 pounds and doesn't know it.
Your experience sounds similar to mine. At my new employer, employees are given the choice of a Dell or a MacBook Pro (nearly all computers issued now are notebooks; we're mostly not doing desktops anymore). I could have any OS I want on a Dell, but anything other than Windows I would have to install myself. I wanted to get right down to work, so I chose a Mac (which most people in our engineering department do).
As a Mac n00b, I spent enough time learning the Mac and getting it set up the way I like it that I might just as well have installed Kubuntu on a Dell (might have taken less time, actually), however, I'm very happy with the Mac and wouldn't go to the trouble to migrate off of it now that I have it.
But- if my choice were between the Mac and a Dell with factory-installed Linux, I probably would have taken the Dell. Don't get me wrong, I love the Mac and will probably get one for my wife (kids are already on Linux ), but overall, Linux is still my preferred OS.
At least based on my experience here, and how most of our engineers choose Mac, I think it's pretty clear that Dell is losing sales by not offering factory-installed Linux. Nice to see they're taking a serious look at it.
Maybe we don't *need* a government-sponsored TV upgrade, however, as other(s) have pointed out, the government wants to sell of the VHF spectrum. To that end, they have mandated that after the cut-off date people will no longer be able to use their otherwise perfectly usable TVs to watch TV. These TVs are not being artificially obsoleted for some clear greater good such as safety issues or environmental preservation (indeed, all the SDTVs getting junked for HDTVs will doubtless have a negative impact on the environment), but solely for the convenience of both the broadcast television industry and the government itself.
IMO, this makes the government ethically liable to pay for adapters. Yes, I know that it's myself and other US taxpayers who are actually paying for it, and I think that sucks, but the point at which to stop that suckage is long past: when HDTV was mandated. Now we just have to clean up the mess.
I firmly believe that the free market should have been allowed to decide when SDTV went away. Big government strikes again.
I pretty well agree with this. I'm a Republican, a right-wing one with a libertarian bent. I have been using Free software for nearly 10 years now. My OS breakdown:
Me: primarily Linux, with one XP machine, one MacBook Pro, and one FreeBSD box. The Mac is my company computer, so it's the one I spend the most time with. It's my first Mac, and I think it's great. Overall I still prefer Linux, but I'm very happy with the Mac and can see myself purchasing one for my own use at some point. I run Kubuntu in a Parallels VM on it.
Wife: XP on a Thinkpad
Kids: Edubuntu
Why do I use Free software? Well, for one thing, it's free. Buying proprietary equivalents of all the free software I use would almost certainy exceed the price of the hardware. For another, I believe in the OSS development model as a way to produce quality software. It's great to build a business on it. My current employer is the fourth company I've worked for that did so. I like the community. Many of them are liberals and I'm a conservative, but we have common ground in FOSS. I believe FOSS can really drive economic growth by commoditizing software. Bad for Microsoft, sure. Somewhat bad for Apple, Sun, IBM, HP, et all, but not as much b/c they all sell hardware, too. Commoditized software is bad for MS in the same way that commoditized hardware is bad for hardware vendors, but commoditizing both is good for business that use hardware and software, which is nearly all of them.
A $500 cheap busines PC may easily have $500 or more of software on it. Use FOSS and that PC may now have $0 worth of software on it. You've just seriously cut your IT costs. Start looking at the server side and considering the cost of Windows 2003 Server, Exchange, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, Lotus, Groupwise, etc., and comparing that to the cost of FOSS alternatives, and again, huge savings. Even if you decide you need a proprietary database or messaging software, you can still save a lot of money by running it on a FOSS operating system.
I use Free software because it makes sense to me on so many levels. Economically, ethically, socially, it just works for me.
I think it more likely that MS is trying to kill the *nix world through their deal with Novell - how much longer before software that was Open Source/GPLd becomes MS' property and whole sections of *nix need to be re-written?
Anything that is currently available under GPL (2 or 3, doesn't matter) and not already patented or at least filed on, can never really be owned by MS, Novell, or anyone else. The fact that prior art exists and is GPLed would make any future attempt to patent it easily defeasible because that prior art is widely available and would be noticed, esp. now that USPTO and the courts are finally starting to wake up to this stuff.
WRT copyright, Novell could change the license of anything for which they hold copyright and release it under a proprietary license going forward, but all that get them is a fork based on the last GPLed version and not many users of their proprietary version in comparison. This is one of the things the GPL is designed for, and a comparison of SSH and OpenSSH is a good example of this in practice. SSH was taken proprietary, a fork was made of the last GPLed version, and now OpenSSH totally dominates the market.
I'm not advocating a relaxation of vigilance - MS is a fierce competitor and will do anything to win - but these are approaches that would not work well for them, if at all.
At my company, the majority of the technical staff and a good-sized (and increasing, I believe) percentage of the non-technical staff are using Macs. Most people also use XP under Parallels for Outlook (and an online meeting service that only works in IE 6), although I use Entourage instead.
However, Entourage isn't for everyone, and that's one of the big obstacles IMO to broader corporate desktop use: there is no *good* native Exchange client for Mac and from the viewpoint of an IT department, if you have to run XP in Parallels anyway, it's cheaper to just keep running XP natively.
Entourage is not good by any reasonable definition, and it uses WebDAV, not MAPI; whether Outlook itself is good or not is another argument altogether. I've tried building Evolution on OS X from time to time, but no luck so far. Evo IMO is a much better client than Entourage, if it only worked on Mac. Still, what I'd really like to see is for Apple to produce its own native Exchange client, or at least some conduits to connect Mail.app and iCal to Exchange.
The only fundamental flaw in prop. 13 is that it allows for a reassessment when a property is sold. Even *that* should be prohibited. My monthly taxes on a house I bought in '05 are 1/3 of the mortgage amount, which is ridiculous.
Time for a Prop. 13.5, to roll back the taxes again and prohibit reassessment at transfer (I could maybe go for a 10% boost at transfer, but no more).
As others in this thread have noted, California is enjoying windfall profits from reassessment resulting from the real estate boom of 2004 - 2005, has one of the highest sales taxes in the nation, and the government *still* manages to make a financial mess of things through wasteful spending. They have no right to the amount of money they get in taxes, much less to get more by reassessment, in light of their terrible track record.
And how did this travesty of government come about? Because most Californians continue to foolishly vote Democrat. Vote Libertarian and Republican (Libertarian preferred) and watch problems with government shrink. But if you vote Republican, make sure it's a true conservative like Tom McClintock. Lots of Republicans are just as bad as Democrats, and largely indistinguishable in their policies (The Governator, for instance).
Sure, I want to use Linux to run Free software too, and with very few exceptions, that's all I do run on it. Buuuuut, one of those exceptions is an nvidia binary driver. If you've ever used openGL without it, you know why I'm using the binary driver.
There's nothing about the Canonical/Linspire deal that in any way restricts you from using exclusively Free software. It just makes non-free alternatives available for people whose needs just aren't met by Free ones. I stick to Free as much as possible, and will take "Free and good enough" over "proprietary and better" as long as "good enough" really is. The nvidia driver is one of those places where "good enough" wasn't.
This deal will help raise the overall profile of Linux, raise the popularity and mindshare of Linux, and get more vendor recognition of both Linux in general and even of why open is good. In the long term, it will help close more of the gap between Linux the way it is and Linux the way you (and I) want it.
If Macs have a slight edge in ease of use over Windows, than an M-16 has a slight edge over a muzzle-loading musket as an infantry weapon. Looking on from the Windows or Linux side of the fence, you may not realize just how much better OS X is than Windows, but the gulf really is about that large.
Price? XP Pro isn't exactly cheap. Software availability? For most users, there are no areas where either the same or workalike software isn't available. Better still, in cases where there is both a Win and Mac version of a software product, the Mac version is usually better. There's more Windows software out there, but a lot of it's crappy and nowhere near worth the price. Mac software covers all the important areas and is usually much better in quality.
Also, consider this: if price and software availability are really all that matter to most people, they should all be using Debian or one of its clones: they're free and there's something like 7000 packages in the Debian repositories, any of which can be installed free of charge with a few clicks of the mouse.
Why, then, do most people use Windows? Because it's what their computer came with and they don't know anything else/know any better. If they did know anything else, they'd switch. The fact of the matter is that in terms of the quality of the UI, Windows has fallen far behind both Mac and Linux. Vista does a lot to offset that, but it brings so much other crap with it that it's not worth switching, IMO. If you're going to learn a whole different UI anyway, might as well forget Vista and Aeroglass and get something better and cheaper, like OS X or Kubuntu.
Uhh, don't look now, but that's not the truth. At least, it's not an objective truth. Linux is subjectively harder than Windows if you've been using (only) Windows for a while and have built up a skillset with it, or at least are good at the things you need it for. That's also true about Macs.
I recently became a Mac user when I took a new job and my company asked me if I'd like a Mac or a PC. I decided to try a Mac. I know Windows well and I know Linux better, but Macs are new to me. The first week had a pretty steep learning curve. Macs may have *nix under the hood, but on the outside they are very different, although Kubuntu has clearly taken some pages from Apple's play book, so I had to learn a lot of new ways of doing things.
Three weeks on, I'm not about to dump my Linux machines - Kubuntu remains my OS of choice, and I have Kubuntu installed in a Parallels VM as well, although I rarely use it (along with XP; we use a conferencing product called Raindance that only works in IE; so far I've never needed it but XP is there just in case). At the same time, however, my attitude towards this Mac has become "They'll pry it from my cold, dead fingers." I understand now why longtime Mac users would have nothing else.
It's pretty unusual for anyone to switch off of Linux or Mac to anything else, but I really can see Windows users switching to Mac or (some distros of) Linux. Macs are clearly easier to use and more stable than Windows. I find the same to be true of Linux, although both KDE and GNOME are not yet as polished as OS X. However, in most respects they are easier to use than Windows. Plus, they're cheaper, more secure, more stable, faster on some hardware, and like OS X, they rarely get in my way or piss me off the way that Windows does.
So, if we want to tell prospective Linux users the truth, we'll say something like "Linux is more secure and more stable than Windows, it needs fewer hardware upgrades to keep performing well (which, combined with the fact that you can get it for little or no cost, makes it much cheaper to own and use), has little or no vendor lock-in, and in most respects it's easier to use. However, there are still some rough edges in a few areas. Tell me more about what you need from your computer, and I can help you assess whether Linux might be something you should try right now, or whether you should wait a year or two for those rough edges to be smoothed out."
That's the truth about Linux today: it's better than Windows in most respects, including ease of use, but it's not (yet) for everyone.
As the CP says, two weeks is the norm in the US, and even that is only a matter of tradition and courtesy, not a matter of law. If you decide one day to quit your job, you can just say "I quit" and walk out and that's that.
Microsoft did sue Google, but they settled out of court, and Lee works for Google today.
Even if the guy being sued did sign a non-compete without realizing, they still can only sue to block him from working for a competitor. They can't sue him just for quitting. And depending on what Texas courts think of non-competes, they might still be on thin ice. Here in California, courts have generally held non-competes to unenforceable. I have a non-compete, like most other tech workers, and the major reason courts have generally held them unenforceable is that (especially in a narrow specialty like mine), a two-year non-compete clause would be tantamount to forcing me to leave my chosen career completely and work for a lot less money in some other industry.
Add to that the fact that the standard employment agreement states that you have an at-will relationship with your employer. They can terminate your employment at any time, for any reason, or for none. Likewise, you can quit at any time, for any reason, or for none. If an employee is going to be at-will (yes, you can still sue for wrongful termination in some circumstances, I know), companies can't expect to have it both ways. If they can do whatever they want with respect to their employees' employment, employees likewise should be able to do so.
I agree with that idea, both because I'm an employee, and because I have fairly libertarian principles regarding the free market for goods and services. My job skills, like my house, stocks, car, or any other assets, should be worth whatever the market will bear, to offer to any bidder, without restriction. If a company can keeps its employees happy (and that takes a lot more than salary; salary may not even be the top thing; I'd rather make a medium salary at a great place to work than a top-of-market salary at a bad place to work), they'll stay there and work. If it can't, they'll go elsewhere. Maybe to a competitor. That's fair. Employees should have the same relationship with a company that customers do: make them unhappy and you'll lose them.
Perhaps not a short-term threat, but it might be more of a long-term one. I'm a former Microsoft employee (by acquisition, not my fault ), and even I see nothing new in Vista. At home I have a mix of a couple XP machines, some Linux machines, and a FreeBSD box. The XP machines will remain XP machines; I have no intention of every migrating to Vista. There's nothing compelling there for me.
At my current employer, you get a choice of a PC with XP or a Mac when you go to work there. Or you can install FreeBSD or Linux on your PC if you care to, and some people choose that option. I decided to try a Mac, since I haven't touched one since a brief experience with OS 7.6.1 10 years ago. Company wide, my eyeball survey says about 1/3 of the staff have Macs. Among newer hires, the majority are going Mac; everyone in my new hire orientation group chose a Mac; everyone. If it keeps going at this rate, in a year we'll be a majority Mac shop.
We have an Exchange server and a Windows network. The Mac fits in well. My Linux and XP machines play nicely together at home. Since getting this Mac and adjusting to it (it's very different than either Linux or Windows), I know why so many Mac users are so fanatic. It (almost) never pisses me off, it very rarely gets in my way, it just works. In quite a few respects, it's better than a Linux machine, although I still overall prefer a Linux machine runnning KDE. That said, there's a lot KDE could learn from the Mac UI, and Kubuntu has obviously taken a look at the system preferences panel.
The fact of the matter is that today, the Mac is easier to use, more stable, and more productive than Windows. So is KDE (it's true; put a competent Windows user on a KDE box for a month or so and they'll be fine). Maybe GNOME is,too, but I haven't used it in so many years that I couldn't say.
It's true that none of this is a short-term threat to Microsoft. However, Macs and (moreso) Linux are making small but steady inroads. Windows has already had it's highest level of market penetration, and while it's clearly still the market leader and will be for some time to come, there's an important fact to keep in mind: nobody switches *to* Windows from Mac or Linux. The migration, while it may still be just a trickle, is always off of Windows.
I'm a recent first-time Mac owner (except for a brief stint on 7.6.1 on some Motorola-based Mac in the late nineties; that sucked), and do you know what? Windows machines (not PCs; Linx machines are mostly PCs, too) do suck relative to the competition in most respects.
Honestly, unless you're really into PC games, there aren't many areas where a Mac isn't >= to a Windows machine. Granted, one of those areas is that there is no Exchange client on Mac that is as good as Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 on Windows. Microsoft Entourage is adequate, though, and Mail.app can handle the mail part of dealing with an Exchange server just fine (I'd love to see Apple add calendar integration, though; the best thing Apple could do here is put out their own complete Exchange client). Mac Office 2004 is decent, and at my company - which my eyeball estimate says is 1/4 - 1/3 Mac, some Linux and FreeBSD, and majority Windows - the Macs work just fine on the Windows network.
Mac is a no-brainer for ease of use, but what may come as a surprise to many is that among the three platforms, I also consider Linux to beat XP for ease of use in most areas (roaming between wireless networks is not one of them, which is one reason I chose a Mac; I move around the building a lot and don't want to have to mess with wireless problems). The main reason most Windows users today would say Windows is easier to use is because it's what they're used to. If they switched to a Mac, they would also find it "harder" than Windows at first, but once they got used to it over a month or so of use, they'd realize there's no way they'd go back.
I don't see myself going over to Mac as my primary system instead of Linux, I just like Linux to much. But migrating my parents from Linux to Mac? Yeah, I can see myself encouraging them to get a Mac. My dad likes to tinker too much to ever give up Linux, but I think they'd really enjoy a Mac as their "real work" computer.
I had never seen the ad because I was living abroad at the time, not using Macs (just Linux, but I have a Mac at work now, a MacBook Pro 15; I like it almost as much as a Linux box, and better in a few specific areas), and AFAIK it wasn't broadcast on Japanese television.
Now that I have seen, I don't see what the big deal was. It's hardly something that would compel me to want a Mac, unlike the current Mac and PC ads, which are hilarious. And she's absolutely right that it's creepy how so many people were so into her and are still so into the 14-year old her.
May well be true. Even Portola's expedition discovered the bay by climbing over the peninsula in the vicinity of what is now San Bruno. At first, they couldn't even see it because of the lay of the land. They were up on the peninsula for two or three days before they came to a place that had an overview of the bay.
I bet there was much cussing to be heard when they realized that if they'd just sailed a few more miles to the north they'd have found it without climbing those big hills
You can compare that to Asia, too. Tokyo, Osaka, and Saigon both have massive urban sprawl. They remind me very much of the greater LA area (well, Tokyo and Osaka; Saigon is big, but not that big). I lived in Asia for nine years, and in 3.5 years I gained 30 pounds (worked off about 10 of it now, but I'm still on the chunky side).
Because of urban sprawl? Nope. Had urban sprawl in Japan and Viet Nam too, but I wasn't fat. Why, then? B/c you have to drive everywhere in frigging California. I just moved from SoCal up to the Bay area, and while there are trains and seemingly better bus routes here, the BART and other trains aren't like the ones in Japan: you have to frigging *drive* to the train station, so you lose the exercise that walking to the station provides for people in Japan. I used to walk several kilometers a day in Japan just as part of commuting. Not here. Urban sprawl doesn't cause gut sprawl, the lack of exercise coming from our poorly designed public transportation system does. Most Tokyoites living within a 10 or 15 minute walk of a train station and work even closer to one. The only place in the US where that might be true is New York City.
Besides the driving, having kids now leaves me with far less time to work out, which doesn't help.
Is urban sprawl bad? Heck no. I love it. I want a house in the 'burbs with a yard and a view of the sky. Evidently, so do most other people. Urban sprawl is simply a product of a free market. The "smart growth" types can go live in the middle of the city if they want, and have no yard for their kids to play, but I won't be joining them. And if they think they're going to legislate us out of the 'burbs, they'll just be voted out of a job, too.
Also, when I was a kid (60s and 70s), there was a lot of urban sprawl then too, but fat kids were rare. There were only a few in any school, and they were very often made fun of for being fat. Now, fat kids are so common in school they're probably not even a minority in some places. All the kids who lived next door to me in SoCal were fat. The oldest one is on a *diet* - but it doens't seem to be helping. Her mom and her aunt are both fat, too, and they used to be really thin and hot. What's the difference, if there was sprawl then and now?
Umm, could it be how much people eat, and what they eat? Restaurant portions are way bigger than they used to be, and all kinds of drinks and other food are filled with high-fructose corn syrup, when those same foods used regular sugars when I was a kid. HFC is bad news from a dietary standpoint.
Finally, another thing that makes (most) Americans get fat easier is we're more genetically predisposed towards it. Consider the case of my wife, who is east Asian. We had two kids back to back, born a year apart. Less than a year after our second one was born, my wife was back at the same weight she was when we met (100 pounds). And she did *nothing* to achieve that. No dieting. No exercise. Nothing. Eating the same food as her every day, I made the weight gain mentioned above. And there's nothing at all unusual about her. You see that all the time in Asia. You rarely see it here. White, among others, (maybe as a result of eating a lot during warm periods to get through long, lean winters for thousands of years) seem more predisposed to get fat than Asians. Heck, one of the best 20 year old bodies I've ever seen turned out to be on a fifty-somthing woman in Tokyo (you could have knocked me over with a feather when I finally got to an angle where I could see her face ).
Thanks for all this useful info! I do now have my Applications folder back (I actually have two, for some reason; the second one only contains Office 2004, Parallels, and the Cisco VPN client.
:)
:) Even at my old company, where Windows PCs were all they handed out, five out of my staff of eight brought in their personal Macs and used them to do most of their work, saving the Windows machines for the internal stuff that could only be done on Windows.
:) It's the end of my first week with this Macbook and it has been neither turned off nor rebooted since I got it.
WRT your second post, I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the usefulness of having a start menu
I do know about Spaces in the upcoming Leopard and will request an upgrade from our IT department as soon as it's available. VirtueDesktops is usable but unstable (it dies at least once per day).
Our IT dept. actually does know what they're doing on Macs, but the IT department only has one Mac guy and he's rather over-burdened. We have ~450 employees and my eyeball survey guesstimate is that about 1/3 of us have Macs, and among more recent hires such as myself, that number may be even higher. There were four people in my new employee orientation group this week. When you're hired, they ask if you want a Mac or a PC (if you take a PC, you're free to install the OS of your choice on it if you don't like Windows; if the PC hardware was a Thinkpad I would have gone that way, but it's Dell and I don't much care for their notebooks. Thinkpads and Macs are the only notebooks I would buy with my own money), and three of the people in my group had chosen Macs. When the other guy saw we were all taking Macs, he changed his mind and asked for a Mac as well
Overall, I'm very pleased with my first modern Mac. I have a few nits to pick with the UI, all of which are long-standing design choices by Apple, and since those things will never change, I will just have to live with them. Overall, it's a very good OS and super stable. At my old job I had a Toshiba tablet notebook with XP on it, and I couldn't go more than three days without having to reboot the thing. In a bad week, reboots were a daily occurrence. I was very happy to turn it in on my last day
One thing is for sure: if I knew somebody with an old PC who was considering buying a new one to get Vista, I would definitely recommend they go and spend some time with a Mac first, even renting one for a week if possible. You meet a lot of people who use Windows but don't like it. You meet some people who tried Linux but went back to Windows. But you never, ever meet anybody who owns a Mac and hates it and wishes they had some other system. That says a lot. I think a lot of Windows users who spent a week with a Mac (or even a Linux system, for some of them) would switch.