Clear documentation is important... If a protocol is still changing, then the software implementing it is still in pre-beta stages... Any release-ready versions should have stable protocols...
Documented protocols are incredibly important, without them the internet would not work. I'm sure to access slashdot you're using at the very least:
The damage and destruction would last a lot longer than that... Think of all the people locked in to proprietary microsoft formats and protocols?
Admittedly it was incredibly stupid to get into a position of being so dependant on a single vendor, but now that they are many organisations would lose access to large amounts of their data.
Those options do not remove the apps, look at how big it thinks they are... It merely removed the links to those apps, they are all still installed using your diskspace and could potentially get executed (and exploited through security holes).
Small players don't have the power to limit user options and choices, microsoft do. There are plenty of small players, you can choose between them and they will compete with each other so it's not in their interest to limit options and choices, infact they will increase choices so as to differentiate themselves from the competition.
In earlier versions of XP, you couldn't even remove the shortcuts other than doing it by hand.
It is microsoft who are keeping these technologies down, current versions of windows for x86/amd64 don't support EFI (but the ia64 version does) and they don't support SATA out of the box.
Redhat do not have a stranglehold over the linux market, there are many other distributions you can use. Any of these programs bundled with redhat can be removed and/or replaced. Infact, Redhat do not produce an OS, they provide the service of supplying a ready-to-go OS with support, like the local computer shop that will install windows and potentially some other apps for you.
Windows includes options to remove *some* components, like paint and the default games, but it won't let you remove outlook express, media player or ie by default, you have to do it by hand or install additional tools!
Microsoft should provide a basic OS, with no apps (just the basic "os" component), and leave it to distributors (dell, hp etc) to assemble a complete system (as they do with hardware)
Sure you *CAN*, but many companies take the view that if they've paid for something, then they're gonna use it, and won't replace it even with something that's free.
Solaris, *BSD, etc.. Since the survey mentions linux and windows seperately, it's safe to assume that any other unix-alike OS will be lumped together with "unix".
Your talking about NFS2, which is fairly old... Modern systems support NFS4 which can be used with kerberos and such.. Sure, older systems only support NFS2 or NFS1, but older windows systems only support SMB with LM auth (case insensitive passwords, hashed with a 40bit algorithm and sent over the network!)...
NFS comes from the days when none of the users had root on anything, just accounts on large machines managed by someone else, so the danger of a user having root and stealing an IP wasn't considered.
That's very true... SUN for instance, still support old systems running Solaris 2.5.1, as do IBM, and even most modern solaris apps will still run on these systems.
Large unix vendors also sell very big systems which are not economical to replace every few years, unlike commodity intel boxes.
And unix has got a lot less expensive, both sun and ibm are producing much cheaper hardware and solaris is now available for free.
Most people running linux don't buy machines preinstalled, they buy a machine with windows (because its often cheaper) or one without an OS... Factory installs of an OS are usually poorly configured and need to be reinstalled up to company standard in any case, and there's nothing to stop you sourcing linux elsewhere for free and saving on the cost of having it preinstalled..
Which is still very usefull... You can have a single backend SAN, and hookup more machines to it as you need more images... And you can hook up newer hardware and migrate the images live to the new machines without needing to reboot any of them.
But what makes it incredibly usefull, is the ability to transparently migrate to newer hardware without the image ever going down... You can keep an image running for years across multiple hardware revisions easily.
Most people are not even aware that software has "licenses"... As far as they're concerned, they purchase it off the shelf and own it like any other electronic device, with no stupid restrictions like how many computers they can install it on.
Many people would be horrified if they actually read these license agreements, and would most likely ignore it anyway.
It just says it has to have an apple label, not a label depicting an apple computer company registered trademark... Just writing the word "apple" on your computer would make it apple-labelled.
It tends to work better if you use APM instead of ACPI...
Linux implements ACPI according to Intel's specs, while most hardware manufacturers implement it according to what works with microsoft's broken and undocumented implementation.
APM works really well on my Thinkpad T42, even hibernation to disk works perfectly (and it uses the bios, not the os, software suspend is very flakey) with one caveat, you have to change to a text or framebuffer console before you hibernate (if you hibernate from X11 it sometimes won't resume properly, but you can make a script to switch to console when you press hibernate and switch back when you resume)
The only issue i do have, is cpufreq... It has frequency tables for the slightly older pentium-m chips, but not the one in my thinkpad, so it needs acpi tables in order to work.. i really need to look into programming the cpufreq tables for this cpu into the kernel driver
But this becomes useless if the old boot-floppy method gets removed as a result, what if you have another os installed? Or you need the bios update before windows will run?
Bios updates should be useable from multiple types of bootable media, cd, usb, floppy etc...
Or the bios itself should have an update function, whereby it can read a FAT or iso9660 filesystem from USB, floppy, CD or HD and open the appropriate update program... DEC's AlphaBios did this very nicely, and giving someone a file and saying "save this file on a cd, usb stick or floppy" is much easier than giving them programs to create bootable floppies, or even worse, requiring they create a bootable dos floppy themselves
And in a free market that could happen. Unfortunately, microsoft has enough influence to destroy the concept of a free market, so government intervention is the only way to return to a free state.
Because they cause lock-in, and it's _NEVER_ desireable to get locked in to a single vendor under any circumstances. This is a huge overriding factor for many people, and in any other industry would be a massive problem for businesses too and yet for some reason they overlook it when buying computers (?!?) or have already been screwed over by the lock-in and are now stuck.
I would _NEVER_ lock my business in to a single vendor, that would be a grossly negligent act.
And when a company's products lock users in, it gives that company far less incentive to improve product quality... Why invest money improving your products to make people *want* them, when you can force them to keep buying anyway?
So, when microsoft start supporting open standards i will evaluate their products alongside other vendors. Until then, lack of lockin isn't just desireable, its a REQUIREMENT.
Any organisation forces products upon it's staff, and there's no way to avoid that in this immature industry...
The larger vendors don't bother following standards, so your stuck with very limited (or no) choice, and can't easily have a diverse setup.
Consider in contrast to a company car, sometimes you get an allowance to obtain any car you can afford.. Your free to choose the car you want.
Once the IT industry matures, and protocols/formats become standardised, it will be a lot easier and there will no longer be any need to force people to use a particular product.
But training is the purpose of a university... Surely you want people at university to be trained and to learn new skills, it worked fine a few years ago when university systems were all unix or dos based. I know lots of people who read their mail using pine at university, it may not have looked very pretty but it worked very well and was problem free.
Running as a privileged user is ALWAYS a problem... Sometimes it's necessary (binding to low ports, raw sockets, manipulation of hardware drivers etc) and most os developers are looking for ways to minimise the need for such privileges (look at linux capabilities for instance)
Slashdot Mirror
Clear documentation is important...
If a protocol is still changing, then the software implementing it is still in pre-beta stages... Any release-ready versions should have stable protocols...
Documented protocols are incredibly important, without them the internet would not work.
I'm sure to access slashdot you're using at the very least:
DNS
HTTP
ARP
TCP
UDP
Ethernet
HTML
if not a lot more...
The damage and destruction would last a lot longer than that...
Think of all the people locked in to proprietary microsoft formats and protocols?
Admittedly it was incredibly stupid to get into a position of being so dependant on a single vendor, but now that they are many organisations would lose access to large amounts of their data.
Those options do not remove the apps, look at how big it thinks they are...
It merely removed the links to those apps, they are all still installed using your diskspace and could potentially get executed (and exploited through security holes).
Small players don't have the power to limit user options and choices, microsoft do. There are plenty of small players, you can choose between them and they will compete with each other so it's not in their interest to limit options and choices, infact they will increase choices so as to differentiate themselves from the competition.
In earlier versions of XP, you couldn't even remove the shortcuts other than doing it by hand.
EFI has been around for years, as has SATA...
It is microsoft who are keeping these technologies down, current versions of windows for x86/amd64 don't support EFI (but the ia64 version does) and they don't support SATA out of the box.
Redhat do not have a stranglehold over the linux market, there are many other distributions you can use.
Any of these programs bundled with redhat can be removed and/or replaced.
Infact, Redhat do not produce an OS, they provide the service of supplying a ready-to-go OS with support, like the local computer shop that will install windows and potentially some other apps for you.
Windows includes options to remove *some* components, like paint and the default games, but it won't let you remove outlook express, media player or ie by default, you have to do it by hand or install additional tools!
Microsoft should provide a basic OS, with no apps (just the basic "os" component), and leave it to distributors (dell, hp etc) to assemble a complete system (as they do with hardware)
Sure you *CAN*, but many companies take the view that if they've paid for something, then they're gonna use it, and won't replace it even with something that's free.
Solaris, *BSD, etc..
Since the survey mentions linux and windows seperately, it's safe to assume that any other unix-alike OS will be lumped together with "unix".
Your talking about NFS2, which is fairly old... Modern systems support NFS4 which can be used with kerberos and such..
Sure, older systems only support NFS2 or NFS1, but older windows systems only support SMB with LM auth (case insensitive passwords, hashed with a 40bit algorithm and sent over the network!)...
NFS comes from the days when none of the users had root on anything, just accounts on large machines managed by someone else, so the danger of a user having root and stealing an IP wasn't considered.
That's very true...
SUN for instance, still support old systems running Solaris 2.5.1, as do IBM, and even most modern solaris apps will still run on these systems.
Large unix vendors also sell very big systems which are not economical to replace every few years, unlike commodity intel boxes.
And unix has got a lot less expensive, both sun and ibm are producing much cheaper hardware and solaris is now available for free.
Most people running linux don't buy machines preinstalled, they buy a machine with windows (because its often cheaper) or one without an OS...
Factory installs of an OS are usually poorly configured and need to be reinstalled up to company standard in any case, and there's nothing to stop you sourcing linux elsewhere for free and saving on the cost of having it preinstalled..
Which is still very usefull...
You can have a single backend SAN, and hookup more machines to it as you need more images... And you can hook up newer hardware and migrate the images live to the new machines without needing to reboot any of them.
But what makes it incredibly usefull, is the ability to transparently migrate to newer hardware without the image ever going down... You can keep an image running for years across multiple hardware revisions easily.
The open-xchange plugins are commercial, but you can use many other clients for free with them.
On the other hand, if your using exchange or lotus notes you need both commercial clients *and* servers, so it's still a lot cheaper.
Most people are not even aware that software has "licenses"... As far as they're concerned, they purchase it off the shelf and own it like any other electronic device, with no stupid restrictions like how many computers they can install it on.
Many people would be horrified if they actually read these license agreements, and would most likely ignore it anyway.
Not necessarily...
What if your buying your first computer, how will you read the website until after you've got the machine up and running?
It just says it has to have an apple label, not a label depicting an apple computer company registered trademark... Just writing the word "apple" on your computer would make it apple-labelled.
It tends to work better if you use APM instead of ACPI...
Linux implements ACPI according to Intel's specs, while most hardware manufacturers implement it according to what works with microsoft's broken and undocumented implementation.
APM works really well on my Thinkpad T42, even hibernation to disk works perfectly (and it uses the bios, not the os, software suspend is very flakey) with one caveat, you have to change to a text or framebuffer console before you hibernate (if you hibernate from X11 it sometimes won't resume properly, but you can make a script to switch to console when you press hibernate and switch back when you resume)
The only issue i do have, is cpufreq... It has frequency tables for the slightly older pentium-m chips, but not the one in my thinkpad, so it needs acpi tables in order to work.. i really need to look into programming the cpufreq tables for this cpu into the kernel driver
Only on some systems...
But this becomes useless if the old boot-floppy method gets removed as a result, what if you have another os installed? Or you need the bios update before windows will run?
Bios updates should be useable from multiple types of bootable media, cd, usb, floppy etc...
Or the bios itself should have an update function, whereby it can read a FAT or iso9660 filesystem from USB, floppy, CD or HD and open the appropriate update program... DEC's AlphaBios did this very nicely, and giving someone a file and saying "save this file on a cd, usb stick or floppy" is much easier than giving them programs to create bootable floppies, or even worse, requiring they create a bootable dos floppy themselves
And in a free market that could happen.
Unfortunately, microsoft has enough influence to destroy the concept of a free market, so government intervention is the only way to return to a free state.
Because they cause lock-in, and it's _NEVER_ desireable to get locked in to a single vendor under any circumstances.
This is a huge overriding factor for many people, and in any other industry would be a massive problem for businesses too and yet for some reason they overlook it when buying computers (?!?) or have already been screwed over by the lock-in and are now stuck.
I would _NEVER_ lock my business in to a single vendor, that would be a grossly negligent act.
And when a company's products lock users in, it gives that company far less incentive to improve product quality... Why invest money improving your products to make people *want* them, when you can force them to keep buying anyway?
So, when microsoft start supporting open standards i will evaluate their products alongside other vendors. Until then, lack of lockin isn't just desireable, its a REQUIREMENT.
Any organisation forces products upon it's staff, and there's no way to avoid that in this immature industry...
The larger vendors don't bother following standards, so your stuck with very limited (or no) choice, and can't easily have a diverse setup.
Consider in contrast to a company car, sometimes you get an allowance to obtain any car you can afford.. Your free to choose the car you want.
Once the IT industry matures, and protocols/formats become standardised, it will be a lot easier and there will no longer be any need to force people to use a particular product.
But training is the purpose of a university...
Surely you want people at university to be trained and to learn new skills, it worked fine a few years ago when university systems were all unix or dos based. I know lots of people who read their mail using pine at university, it may not have looked very pretty but it worked very well and was problem free.
I have voicemail-as-email too, asterisk does it by default, and uses standard SMTP so it works with whatever mail system you might be using.
How about systems with NFS mounted filesystems? The network might be the disk!
Running as a privileged user is ALWAYS a problem... Sometimes it's necessary (binding to low ports, raw sockets, manipulation of hardware drivers etc) and most os developers are looking for ways to minimise the need for such privileges (look at linux capabilities for instance)