The biggest problem with MCSE is that it's not an independent academic qualification... It's created and sponsored by a company who's primary goal is to sell products. As such it is in their best interest to have as many "qualified" MCSEs out there as possible acting as marketing agents. Making the test hard and forcing people to actually learn runs counter to their goal of increasing sales. Similarly, teaching people how to troubleshoot buggy software would require admitting that its buggy - not a good way to increase sales.
The problem is market pollution... You get a lot of totally clueless people claiming to have windows experience, which really means they've used a desktop at home to access facebook.
Clueless people are extremely unlikely to claim to have linux experience, most of them have no idea what linux is.
Thus, 99% of people claiming to have linux/unix experience genuinely do have useful experience, while the percentage for windows is much lower.
You then have the problem of poor interviewing, whereby someone with extremely limited skills and no experience will get the job because the people doing the interview don't know any better.
And yes, i have encountered mediocre unix admins, but even the poorest of unix admins don't come anywhere close to the poorest windows admins i've encountered.
The problem is a lot of bias, a lot of commercial software is often not the best solution either and yet many businesses live for years with inferior products.
Building a car not only requires knowledge, but also specialist equipment and parts, and because of its physical nature is very difficult to share. Your mechanic brother in law may have far superior knowledge to any single engineer working for Mercedes, but it's harder for him to pool his knowledge with other people and he has access to less resources. He may be the best in the world at building engines, but useless at building transmissions, someone else may be great at transmissions but then you have the problem of building 2 engines and 2 transmissions and getting the finished goods to the other person.
Software is entirely different, the internet enables sharing of both knowledge and "the goods"... People can write the parts they are good at and share their work with others who can help fill in the other bits. There is no extra work required to give a copy of your work to others.
There is also no specialist equipment required, you need a computer and an internet connection, both of which are widely available extremely cheaply these days and all the software you require can be downloaded for free.
1048576 - thats the number of rows supported by the beta version of LibreOffice... As does version 3.2.1 as shipped with ubuntu 10.10 (didnt 10.04 have the same version?)
Not sure what earlier versions support, but considering MS only got support for more then 65535 rows this year they're hardly that far behind if at all.
That said, why would you use a spreadsheet for something so large? Surely by that point you should be moving into database territory...
As for the other issues, instead of complaining on slashdot have you submitted them as bugs? try submitting them to go-oo or libreoffice instead of oracle, they should be more responsive.
Yeah, loading large apps brings the whole machine to a crawl, a time machine backup kicking off in the background makes video playback stall, my older one didn't have these problems at all.
Thunderbird gets slow over 2gb... Exchange and outlook until the most recent version couldn't handle more than 2gb at all because of the way the database format it uses was addressed using a signed 32bit integer. I'd rather have it work slowly than not work at all...
I always found huge documents (thousands of pages) in OOo were slow, but those same documents were either much slower in word, plagued by random problems/corruption or made it crash completely.
Like lada (russian brand of car, always had a very poor reputation in europe) parts are best when you drive a lada...
Exchange is designed to make using any client other than outlook extremely difficult, just like outlook is designed to force people onto exchange. Neither are especially good and are completely unusable on their own.
What i don't see, is why calendaring and email need to be integrated, they are two separate functions...
The biggest problem tho, is that outlook doesn't support the same standards as everyone else for calendars, and very poorly supports email standards like imap.
Zimbra we use at work, but i don't use the zimbra web interface or fat client - instead i have a mail client which talks to the imap server, and ical which talks to the caldav server. I also connect a jabber client to the xmpp server built in to zimbra.
Also, does outlook actually bother setting the in-reply-to header yet? or does it still turn threaded conversations into an unthreaded unreadable mess?
Security holes... Old versions are no longer supported, will never be patched and are still full of glaring security holes that will get you owned.
Also while they may do everything you actually need to do, people will send you files in the newer formats which you can't open using your old version.
OO is much better in this respect, third parties like Debian will maintain security patches for old versions, while new versions are free anyway.
Those "little grey boxes" are the bounding boxes, showing you where the image ends... OO shows them by default but word does not. OO also shows you your defined page margins, which again word does not... It's quite disturbing how many people send around files where they have blindly placed stuff over the defined margins (and print borders).
I have sometimes been asked to perform incident response work on behalf of clients, these are typically corporate users and every single system i've inspected has had up to date antivirus from one of the major vendors and almost all systems were up to date with microsoft patches.. Yet they still got infected. Sometimes the particular strain of malware is not detected by the AV they use but is picked up by others, sometimes nothing picks it up yet. AV will just protect you against lingering traces of long abandoned botnets, all the serious bot operators will be pushing new malware which isn't picked up by anything yet.
Convincing a clueless user to save an emailed piece of malware somewhere, change the permissions to make it executable and then execute it via gsudo is a much longer process than that required to convince them to click an executable inside of their windows based email client which is already running with elevated privileges.
The more complicated your social engineering instructions, the greater chance that the user will fail or start to smell a rat somewhere along the lines.
Now that depends on your distro, linux gives you a choice... there are distros designed to be lightweight, there are distros like gentoo which are designed to place decisions like this in the hands of the user etc... There is nothing inherent in the linux kernel which requires consolekit.
Windows does not, you have to have IE, outlook express, media player, directx and all kinds of other stuff, even if you have the supposed "server" versions of windows.
No, the best solution is to get rid of the monoculture which ensures the malware creators get such a high return on their investment...
If you have 4-5 different platforms with equal marketshare, malware authors need to invest significantly more to see the same level of returns.. Also competition between platforms would significantly increase the improvement work being done. As you point out, unix is inherently more secure but microsoft have no reason to match or exceed unix because people are still buying windows as bad as it is.
Thinning out the population of malware creators is a complete waste of money and effort, malware is a competitive business and by eliminating some competitors you are just increasing profits for those who are left and making the market more attractive for anyone new looking to enter it. You will just end up with malware authors in jurisdictions where you can't get to them reaping all the rewards.
I don't believe any linux mail client will provide a facility to execute directly from the client... You will have to explicitly save the file somewhere, and then you will need to change its permissions to make it executable.. Then in order to properly embed itself into the system and hide itself, it will also require a working privilege escalation exploit, or for you to run it as root which requires you to perform yet another additional step.
Sure, most people on slashdot know how to do that, but then most people who know how to do that also know not to do that.
Technical shortcomings of windows make it much easier, and therefore more likely, for bad things like this to happen.
If linux or macos had a dominant market share the same problem would occur, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad...
Linux/Mac users are already used to running as an unprivileged user, providing an extra obstacle for any malware (sure malware can still do bad things without root, but it's much more difficult to hide and make itself difficult to remove), windows is only just starting to move towards this decades old best practice.
On a unix box, files are not deemed executable based on their name alone, if you download a file by default it will not be executable and an extra step is required to make it so.
Unix boxes not only don't rely on file extension to determine if a file is executable, they also don't hide the file extensions by default... A common attack on windows systems is to create a file called picture.jpg.exe and assign it an icon which looks like the default windows icon for a jpeg file, windows will dutifully hide the.exe part so users only see picture.jpg, assume its a picture and try to open it. Clever malware will even embed a picture inside the binary and when you run it, will save the embedded picture to a temporary location and spawn a viewer to display it. Using file extensions to determine file type, and then hiding those extensions by default is an extremely stupid and very dangerous flaw.
Unix systems also don't execute anything by default which is stored in an inserted piece of media, simply inserting the media won't infect you, you would have to explicitly go and execute the malware - which would result in very low infection rates.
So sure, if linux or mac had 95% of the market people would be looking to attack them, but the lack of many of the inherent security flaws in windows would make these attacks far less effective.
That said, linux having a 95% marketshare would be almost as undesirable as windows having it, diversity is extremely important - if there are 3 common systems with 30% market share each the job of a malware author becomes much harder and less profitable.
I do however predict, that in a 30/30/30 windows/linux/mac marketshare split, malware authors would still primarily target windows because it represents a softer target.
What microsoft fails to understand, is that the people operating these malware networks are not large slow monolithic corporations, just because a piece of malware which was common a few months ago is now dying out doesn't mean the problem is gone, it just means that the authors of that malware have moved on to their latest creations...
After all, why would you continue pushing an old piece of malware which has been reverse engineered and is detectable by every anti malware program out there, when you can write something new that will have a new window of opportunity before anything can detect it.
How is the april macbook pro? I have the previous version from mid 2009 and it seems to choke under heavy disk io, which earlier models didn't seem to do so badly..
That still screws the 20% of users who didn't pirate it...
Regardless, the original point holds - why allow your business to become dependent on anything which is only available from a single source that can be pulled out from under you at any time?
Apple managed to do it with iOS... Palm managed to do it with WebOS.. Blackberry are reinventing their OS to be based on QNX.. Google managed it with Android.
It can't really be all that difficult.
Surely MS have sufficient resources to create something new, or atleast a proper touchscreen oriented interface on top of a half decent unix compatible kernel like everyone else seems to have managed.
Apple are good at taking existing ideas and producing better more usable implementations backed by strong marketing, this has always been their strategy.
MS provide save to XML, but it's using their own proprietary schema... XML in this context is about as standard as binary, sure at the most basic level it's either 0 or 1 but that doesn't help you much with the actual data. PDF export is also write only, so hardly better than print in that respect. They still try to lock you in, and the recent publicised mess with ISO shows just how far they're willing to go to ensure that lock in.
I can't speak for lotus, but openoffice provides far superior functionality for me (multiple macro languages and an easily parseable file format) and seems to offer everything 99% of users will ever need. I certainly doubt there are many cases when the difference between msoffice and openoffice (or lotus or whatever) is worth $200 (or whatever it costs these days).
As you bring up keynote, that's another problem... it shouldn't matter what tools people are using, the data formats should be standard. The reason MS fight against this so hard is because lock-in is their biggest selling point, i know countless companies who are paying through the nose for msoffice and giving it to staff who do absolutely trivial work with it - tasks which could easily be satisfied by wordpad in many cases.
I will always be against any product that attempts to lock people in, because it takes away freedom of choice from other people. I want to be free to choose what i use, as should everyone else be. I don't care what you're running so long as it doesn't impact on me, and unfortunately the wide spread of msoffice has a negative impact on me today.
To give an example, my grandmother occasionally writes very simple 1-2 page letters which she prints and mails. She also sometimes (2-3 times a year) receives emails containing documents in proprietary MS formats. Should someone with this usage pattern have to pay $200 or more for msoffice?
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The biggest problem with MCSE is that it's not an independent academic qualification...
It's created and sponsored by a company who's primary goal is to sell products. As such it is in their best interest to have as many "qualified" MCSEs out there as possible acting as marketing agents.
Making the test hard and forcing people to actually learn runs counter to their goal of increasing sales.
Similarly, teaching people how to troubleshoot buggy software would require admitting that its buggy - not a good way to increase sales.
The problem is market pollution...
You get a lot of totally clueless people claiming to have windows experience, which really means they've used a desktop at home to access facebook.
Clueless people are extremely unlikely to claim to have linux experience, most of them have no idea what linux is.
Thus, 99% of people claiming to have linux/unix experience genuinely do have useful experience, while the percentage for windows is much lower.
You then have the problem of poor interviewing, whereby someone with extremely limited skills and no experience will get the job because the people doing the interview don't know any better.
And yes, i have encountered mediocre unix admins, but even the poorest of unix admins don't come anywhere close to the poorest windows admins i've encountered.
The problem is a lot of bias, a lot of commercial software is often not the best solution either and yet many businesses live for years with inferior products.
Building a car not only requires knowledge, but also specialist equipment and parts, and because of its physical nature is very difficult to share. Your mechanic brother in law may have far superior knowledge to any single engineer working for Mercedes, but it's harder for him to pool his knowledge with other people and he has access to less resources.
He may be the best in the world at building engines, but useless at building transmissions, someone else may be great at transmissions but then you have the problem of building 2 engines and 2 transmissions and getting the finished goods to the other person.
Software is entirely different, the internet enables sharing of both knowledge and "the goods"... People can write the parts they are good at and share their work with others who can help fill in the other bits. There is no extra work required to give a copy of your work to others.
There is also no specialist equipment required, you need a computer and an internet connection, both of which are widely available extremely cheaply these days and all the software you require can be downloaded for free.
1048576 - thats the number of rows supported by the beta version of LibreOffice... As does version 3.2.1 as shipped with ubuntu 10.10 (didnt 10.04 have the same version?)
Not sure what earlier versions support, but considering MS only got support for more then 65535 rows this year they're hardly that far behind if at all.
That said, why would you use a spreadsheet for something so large? Surely by that point you should be moving into database territory...
As for the other issues, instead of complaining on slashdot have you submitted them as bugs? try submitting them to go-oo or libreoffice instead of oracle, they should be more responsive.
Yeah, loading large apps brings the whole machine to a crawl, a time machine backup kicking off in the background makes video playback stall, my older one didn't have these problems at all.
Thunderbird gets slow over 2gb...
Exchange and outlook until the most recent version couldn't handle more than 2gb at all because of the way the database format it uses was addressed using a signed 32bit integer.
I'd rather have it work slowly than not work at all...
I always found huge documents (thousands of pages) in OOo were slow, but those same documents were either much slower in word, plagued by random problems/corruption or made it crash completely.
Like lada (russian brand of car, always had a very poor reputation in europe) parts are best when you drive a lada...
Exchange is designed to make using any client other than outlook extremely difficult, just like outlook is designed to force people onto exchange. Neither are especially good and are completely unusable on their own.
What i don't see, is why calendaring and email need to be integrated, they are two separate functions...
The biggest problem tho, is that outlook doesn't support the same standards as everyone else for calendars, and very poorly supports email standards like imap.
Zimbra we use at work, but i don't use the zimbra web interface or fat client - instead i have a mail client which talks to the imap server, and ical which talks to the caldav server. I also connect a jabber client to the xmpp server built in to zimbra.
What are the features which calc lacks?
Also, does outlook actually bother setting the in-reply-to header yet? or does it still turn threaded conversations into an unthreaded unreadable mess?
Security holes... Old versions are no longer supported, will never be patched and are still full of glaring security holes that will get you owned.
Also while they may do everything you actually need to do, people will send you files in the newer formats which you can't open using your old version.
OO is much better in this respect, third parties like Debian will maintain security patches for old versions, while new versions are free anyway.
Those "little grey boxes" are the bounding boxes, showing you where the image ends... OO shows them by default but word does not.
OO also shows you your defined page margins, which again word does not... It's quite disturbing how many people send around files where they have blindly placed stuff over the defined margins (and print borders).
I have sometimes been asked to perform incident response work on behalf of clients, these are typically corporate users and every single system i've inspected has had up to date antivirus from one of the major vendors and almost all systems were up to date with microsoft patches.. Yet they still got infected.
Sometimes the particular strain of malware is not detected by the AV they use but is picked up by others, sometimes nothing picks it up yet. AV will just protect you against lingering traces of long abandoned botnets, all the serious bot operators will be pushing new malware which isn't picked up by anything yet.
Convincing a clueless user to save an emailed piece of malware somewhere, change the permissions to make it executable and then execute it via gsudo is a much longer process than that required to convince them to click an executable inside of their windows based email client which is already running with elevated privileges.
The more complicated your social engineering instructions, the greater chance that the user will fail or start to smell a rat somewhere along the lines.
Now that depends on your distro, linux gives you a choice... there are distros designed to be lightweight, there are distros like gentoo which are designed to place decisions like this in the hands of the user etc... There is nothing inherent in the linux kernel which requires consolekit.
Windows does not, you have to have IE, outlook express, media player, directx and all kinds of other stuff, even if you have the supposed "server" versions of windows.
No, the best solution is to get rid of the monoculture which ensures the malware creators get such a high return on their investment...
If you have 4-5 different platforms with equal marketshare, malware authors need to invest significantly more to see the same level of returns.. Also competition between platforms would significantly increase the improvement work being done. As you point out, unix is inherently more secure but microsoft have no reason to match or exceed unix because people are still buying windows as bad as it is.
Thinning out the population of malware creators is a complete waste of money and effort, malware is a competitive business and by eliminating some competitors you are just increasing profits for those who are left and making the market more attractive for anyone new looking to enter it. You will just end up with malware authors in jurisdictions where you can't get to them reaping all the rewards.
I don't believe any linux mail client will provide a facility to execute directly from the client...
You will have to explicitly save the file somewhere, and then you will need to change its permissions to make it executable..
Then in order to properly embed itself into the system and hide itself, it will also require a working privilege escalation exploit, or for you to run it as root which requires you to perform yet another additional step.
Sure, most people on slashdot know how to do that, but then most people who know how to do that also know not to do that.
Technical shortcomings of windows make it much easier, and therefore more likely, for bad things like this to happen.
If linux or macos had a dominant market share the same problem would occur, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad...
Linux/Mac users are already used to running as an unprivileged user, providing an extra obstacle for any malware (sure malware can still do bad things without root, but it's much more difficult to hide and make itself difficult to remove), windows is only just starting to move towards this decades old best practice.
On a unix box, files are not deemed executable based on their name alone, if you download a file by default it will not be executable and an extra step is required to make it so.
Unix boxes not only don't rely on file extension to determine if a file is executable, they also don't hide the file extensions by default... A common attack on windows systems is to create a file called picture.jpg.exe and assign it an icon which looks like the default windows icon for a jpeg file, windows will dutifully hide the .exe part so users only see picture.jpg, assume its a picture and try to open it. Clever malware will even embed a picture inside the binary and when you run it, will save the embedded picture to a temporary location and spawn a viewer to display it. Using file extensions to determine file type, and then hiding those extensions by default is an extremely stupid and very dangerous flaw.
Unix systems also don't execute anything by default which is stored in an inserted piece of media, simply inserting the media won't infect you, you would have to explicitly go and execute the malware - which would result in very low infection rates.
So sure, if linux or mac had 95% of the market people would be looking to attack them, but the lack of many of the inherent security flaws in windows would make these attacks far less effective.
That said, linux having a 95% marketshare would be almost as undesirable as windows having it, diversity is extremely important - if there are 3 common systems with 30% market share each the job of a malware author becomes much harder and less profitable.
I do however predict, that in a 30/30/30 windows/linux/mac marketshare split, malware authors would still primarily target windows because it represents a softer target.
What microsoft fails to understand, is that the people operating these malware networks are not large slow monolithic corporations, just because a piece of malware which was common a few months ago is now dying out doesn't mean the problem is gone, it just means that the authors of that malware have moved on to their latest creations...
After all, why would you continue pushing an old piece of malware which has been reverse engineered and is detectable by every anti malware program out there, when you can write something new that will have a new window of opportunity before anything can detect it.
We've had snow leopard, so perhaps clouded leopard is the next one!
How is the april macbook pro? I have the previous version from mid 2009 and it seems to choke under heavy disk io, which earlier models didn't seem to do so badly..
That still screws the 20% of users who didn't pirate it...
Regardless, the original point holds - why allow your business to become dependent on anything which is only available from a single source that can be pulled out from under you at any time?
Apple managed to do it with iOS...
Palm managed to do it with WebOS..
Blackberry are reinventing their OS to be based on QNX..
Google managed it with Android.
It can't really be all that difficult.
Surely MS have sufficient resources to create something new, or atleast a proper touchscreen oriented interface on top of a half decent unix compatible kernel like everyone else seems to have managed.
Neither xbox live nor apple are innovative...
Apple are good at taking existing ideas and producing better more usable implementations backed by strong marketing, this has always been their strategy.
MS provide save to XML, but it's using their own proprietary schema... XML in this context is about as standard as binary, sure at the most basic level it's either 0 or 1 but that doesn't help you much with the actual data.
PDF export is also write only, so hardly better than print in that respect. They still try to lock you in, and the recent publicised mess with ISO shows just how far they're willing to go to ensure that lock in.
I can't speak for lotus, but openoffice provides far superior functionality for me (multiple macro languages and an easily parseable file format) and seems to offer everything 99% of users will ever need. I certainly doubt there are many cases when the difference between msoffice and openoffice (or lotus or whatever) is worth $200 (or whatever it costs these days).
As you bring up keynote, that's another problem... it shouldn't matter what tools people are using, the data formats should be standard. The reason MS fight against this so hard is because lock-in is their biggest selling point, i know countless companies who are paying through the nose for msoffice and giving it to staff who do absolutely trivial work with it - tasks which could easily be satisfied by wordpad in many cases.
I will always be against any product that attempts to lock people in, because it takes away freedom of choice from other people. I want to be free to choose what i use, as should everyone else be. I don't care what you're running so long as it doesn't impact on me, and unfortunately the wide spread of msoffice has a negative impact on me today.
To give an example, my grandmother occasionally writes very simple 1-2 page letters which she prints and mails. She also sometimes (2-3 times a year) receives emails containing documents in proprietary MS formats. Should someone with this usage pattern have to pay $200 or more for msoffice?