Huh? What do you mean? Intel gets a certified partner status with Red Hat.. Red Hat talks with customer who needs Linux solution, customer buys Intel because it is certified to work in "complex architectural deployments".
So company buys intel chips, motherbords, network adapters, telephony, embedded solutions, yada yada yada..
Gives me a warm fuzzy knowing a company is backing its hardware, providing drivers and support for my operating system. While community built drivers are nice it doesn't necessarily extract the full performance of my hardware, so its nice to know a vendor provides this level of support.
The *theory* is most exploits occur AFTER a patch is released by Microsoft (reverse engineer the patch). As a result, by scheduling a time the patches are released, it allows IT departments to schedule time to review and deploy the patches in a timely manner.
The issue arises when exploits are known in the wild before the patch is available. When is a suitable time to release the patch? How big of a risk does a exploit need to be before it is considered critical enough to justify an out-of-schedule patch release (and thus interupt set IT patching schedules)? If the theory holds true that *most* exploits occur AFTER the patch is released then by doing an out-of-schedule patch can put customers at risk (longer mean time from patch released to patch applied to the network).
Whats the point? As an IT administrator, I get lots more business doing the Windows thing:
1. Easy sell to management 2. More prone to issues 3. Less capable per server (more servers = more $$) 4. Less resistance from end-users (employees, etc..) 5. Less personal liability (if it doesn't work, its Microsoft fault, 3rd party developers fault, etc..)
Compare this to pushing a FOSS solution:
1. Much harder sell to management (not the norm) 2. Less prone to issues (if configured properly) 3. More capable per server.. less hardware, lower chance of failure 4. More resistance from end-users (ahh! I only know Windows and MS Office!!) 5. More personal liability (unless you opt for support contracts, which I find a surprising number of small businesses elect not to do)
From a purely economics pov (techie) it seems like deploying microsoft makes much more sense. When I deploy FOSS it seems like the isntall is done and. . nothing. No problems, no issues, no need for support, lower budget, etc.. whats the fun in that?
If the % of FOSS use increased significantly, it has the potential of major economic impact (even more techies out of work, more bottom line profit by companies (rich get richer, yada yada..))
The day linux takes 15% of the desktop market, you'll see microsoft scrambling to actually turn windows into a good OS.
s/turn/make/ s/into/look like/
Reference: Internet Explorer 7. Their solution was to change up the interface as a priority. The actual rendering of web pages is still far inferior to all other modern browsers.
Repeat after me: With Microsoft, it has never been about making a good product. It has been about making a product that is good enough to generate revenue, even if it is by force.
The funny part about this is Vista (in its original design) might have actually been about making a good product and taking computing to the next level. However, it is apparent that the marketing-centric Microsoft management style is unable to innovate enough to make this happen and as a result, Vista (when released) will bring very little to the table (not that this matters).
I'm glad to hear that these low-end Linux boxes are selling. Perhaps the majority of these boxes will get a pirated version of Windows installed but who cares?
I would imagine that this Linspire is profiting on these units. Linspire has provided financial support to a wide variety of projects which is a good thing.
If sales are as good as this article makes out -- it would stand to reason that these retails (And others) would be more open to stocking additional models (perhaps higher end) and provide some additional numbers for hardware manufacturers to provide support (drivers, etc).
Oh, you mean the same languages (C/C++ generally speaking) that were/are used to create Linux, Unix, MacOSX, and many of the wares that run on them also?
More or less. Microsoft uses those tools, touts.NET for other developers.. Isn't there a saying about eating your own dogfood? I still don't understand it. If.NET is technically superior, faster to develop, more secure than C/C++, then why did they elect not to use it? Sure, I can understand lower level drivers/kernel/etc not being written at a higher level like.NET, but that is clearly only a small percent of the code of all of Vista.
No wonder Unix, Linux, BSD variants such as MacOS X had more security and vulnerability issues in 2005 according to CERT findings than Windows & its wares did...
Lets see.. Unix, Linux, BSD, MacOS X grouped all together is a LOT of code.. then CERT tops it off with a LOT of 3rd party apps that doesn't get counted against Windows and posts more issues. Not to mention MOST of that code is open source and much easier to discover vulerabilities than the close sourced Windows. Also, not to mention that Windows still had a much higher % of critical vulnerabilities and _most_ *nix systems were not impacted with the *nix vulnerabilities, while most Windows systems were suspectable to the reported Windows vulnerabilities.
Bottom line: the underlying platform for *nix is much different than Windows. Microsoft realized this, developed.NET to address the issue and enhance productivity of programmers while create a (according to them) more secure development environment. Then they turn around and don't use it. It doesn't make any sense to me.
1. Internet Explorer 7 still has major security issues that plague Internet Explorer 6
2. Microsoft Office is delayed
3. Vista is delayed.
4. Microsoft restructures the Windows division before a major OS release
5. Daniel Lyons from Forbes is underwhelmed with the Vista presentation and finds it complex and of little added value.
6. Microsoft elected not to utilize its.NET tools in developing bundled applications that will ship with Vista, instead opting for lower level languages that are more suspectible to security issues.
7. Throughout all of this, the security team at Microsoft decided to school Apple on security (I wonder if no one at Microsoft was paying attention?)
8. Businesses sold on the "Software Assurance" and other licensing gimmicks are getting very aggervated at was could be considered bait-and-switch (get SA, get updates.. oh wait, we don't have updates because we are delaying ALL of our major products..)
9. There is the possibility of major rewrites to Vista (though until it is confirmed by another source, I'll take it with a grain of salt..).
Postfix is licensed under the IBM Public License v1.0. I am unsure how compatible that is with the GPL (and perhaps the primary reason for it not being included). Exim is GPL.. not quite sure why it isn't more popular among the distros (perhaps sendmail history wins out?)
Why shouldn't people write valid HTML code? It's not that difficult to correct the bugs.
What are you talking about? It is a PITA to fix the bugs. I do XHTML/CSS design work (table-less designs) and spend a LOT OF TIME fixing the designs to look ok in Internet Explorer. It absolutely sucks. The design looks great in Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, Links/Lynx, etc but IE will effectively crap on the design. Most of the time making it work in IE (or atleast look presentable) can consume up to *half* the design time for a site. Needless to say, spending twice as much time on a design just to work around bugs is not something most customers want to pay for.
Ultimately it *can* be done and I have done quite a lot of sites that look acceptable across browsers and do fully validate. However, this does come at the cost of CSS utilization (lowest-common-demoniator) and design compromise.
I'll bite.. For an average person that is working with Windows XP exclusively, yah.. the perceived benefit of a linux desktop is not enough to overcome the resistance to change.
Now for a *business desktop* there is a monetary issue involved. Sure, the $500 Dell desktop comes with Windows, unfortunately it is Windows Home edition. Hooking this up to a controlled network? You need WinXP Pro (+$100).. Now you will most likely need a server running Active Directory (+$800 for 2003 Server software and +$33 per computer for a Client access license). Of course, if you set it up per MS recommendations, you'll setup a backup ADS server (another +$800).
Now you need antivirus software. Again, centrally managed software is the key so something like Norton Antivirus Corporate edition fits the bill (~$30/computer). On top of this, central control of software distribution is good so you end up needing to make MSI files to distribute via group policy (or getting another distribution system) -- of course, not all software on Windows follows this guideline, so you might end up needing multiple methods of software distribution. On top of this, securing users into a lock down mode may break software (I run in to issues ALL THE TIME where software writes to protected areas of registry and file system (outside of user folders)) so add in support time to troubleshoot these issues (I've had WAY TOO many companies clamor "just run as admin" -- ha!)
Once this is setup and installed, for this 20 person network, your looking at $663 per system of direct cost (hardware/software), perhaps $200 in cost for the backend servers/licenses per client system ($863) and dozens of hours of configuration and troubleshooting of software issues as they arise (regmon/filemon, tweaking registry security, tweaking file system security settings, etc..) @ $65/hr ($780 -- $39 per system). So all said, that $500 computer is now over $900 and this is assuming relatively moddest needs.
Now from a Linux side, the package management is standardized so updates to all systems is straight forward and doesn't require purchasing extra software. Same for backups (lots of backup solutions vs pricey backup solutions such as BackupExec on Windows). In addition, for light users, the use of thin clients is a major possibility -- run these systems off the server and administration gets significantly simplified (install software once on the server.. and thats it.)
There is no antivirus scanners, spyware scanners or other crap that needs to be installed and maintained on the computers. User mode actually *works* on Linux so you can run users underprivleged without worrying about poorly written software that attempts to access restricted areas of the system (so very common even in 2006). The rights given to users are sane -- ever try running Windows as a regular user? You can't even pull up the calendar when double clicking on the task bar time (lame).
Bottom line -- the system is more than ready for corporate adoption. I particularly like the thin client model -- I have older PCs (useless for a full WinXP SP2 install) that can act as thin clients.. I can access my network remotely via NX for fast access to my desktop. I can access my desktop anywhere without the kludge that is "roaming profiles" or the massive additional cost associated with Windows Terminal Services. The biggest issue is support (I'm particularly scared to run Windows only apps in emulation on Linux simply due to lack of vendor support). As a result, it comes down to determining if the software availability on the Linux desktop meets the needs.
If it does, then whats the issue? It ends up being cheaper, more reliable, easy to maintain, more flexible and does not result in exclusive vendor lockin like with Windows.
Spam sucks. The amount of spam I need to filter on a daily basis for my not-so-well-known domains is huge (40-50% of all incoming email). I make it manageable with the use of greylisting, realtime black lists, enforcement of correct smtp handshakes, content filters, virus filters, yada yada yada.
Fortunately a lot of this gets axed with the greylisting and rbl's so I am not having to accept the full message (bandwidth + cpu processing). Even trying to be conservative, there are false positives as well as spam getting through the filters. It sucks.
Now looking at AOL, it is one of the most popular domain names on the Internet and millions use aol.com for their email. Spammers see aol users as generally "newbies" and as a result, is a great target for spamming.. There is no doubt that their spam to legitimate email ratio is MUCH higher than mine.
Needless to say, it is a big problem for AOL. Even with a lot of the blocking they are currently doing (outright IP blocks) and undoubtedly many of us have experienced (especially hosting providers) it still is mostly ineffective in their fight against spam. Spam continues to be a major nusciance and phishing schemes continue to get much more stealthy and hard to discern.
So whats the solution? Some of you point to SPF but if AOL only accepted email from domains with SPF, that would be much more restrictive than this tax concept (though with a major player forcing this issue, it might make SPF viable even though it does represent some major hurdles of its own (use of a secondary SMTP to deliver legitimate email (very common)). Honestly it sucks. I don't like the tax idea, Bill Gate's war on Spam didn't seem effective, the use of extremely long chains of spam/virus/malware software are more of a short-term roadblock than a true solution.
Why doesn't someone tell me why Dell screws my company out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year selling them overpriced server equipment?
Because your company buys it? If it is costing your company hundreds of thousands, perhaps IT consultants should be hired that can stop this unnecessary spending (though if it is like any other company, reducing your budget = lower budget next year which is not favorable either..)
Or why the Dell reps attempt to bribe our IT department with cash and free laptops if they'll continue to purchase only Dell equipment.
Cost of doing business? Same reason companies will wine and dine other customers.. sad part, it works.
Or howabout why our Dell contract reads that installing any non-dell equipment on our network violates our warranties?
Seriously? Why would a company want to do that? Insane. Did you ever think its your companies fault for signing, buying and being bribed?
In anycase.. after spending over a half year dealing with a problem that THEY CREATED and giving me a serious runaround (lying about the cost of equipment, putting an order through dell financing when it was paid with check, etc..) I cannot recommend Dell to any of my customers. Its a shame because it wasn't more than a few years ago that Dell was a completely different company.
However, if I had a computer company and was able to get hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales every year for the cost of a few laptops.. I think I'd do the same thing.. if I could also tie in the same company to buy from me exclusively, yahoo!
i am semi-involved in a (currently ongoing) project to migrate a K-8 private school from Windows 2000 to a thin-client configuration (solaris/suse linux). In total it ends up being ~140 computers (~90 being thin clients).
The first phase was last fall (Deployment in December) for the computer lab + in-classroom computers (administrative computers will migrate this summer).
The transition, with careful planning, ended up being quite smooth. Initially StarOffice was loaded on the Windows PCs last spring along with Firefox and other cross-platform application to start getting students and staff use to those applications. Once the systems were migrated, some of the benefits included:
- Increased software availability. More _free_ software on the Linux side allowed us to provide more capabilities for students and teachers.
- reduced costs -- administration likes the lower power consumption of the thin clients, the ability to remote admin the entire network (less IT costs), the ability to connect to their desktop from home (NX) and the increased reliability and consistency (only a handful of servers to maintain instead of over a hundred individual installations of Windows)
- Mobility. With the thin clients, a teacher could be working on a system in their classroom, go to the computer lab, pull up their desktop as they left it.. continue to work.. go home and (if needed) login remotely over the internet and get to their desktop. As a result, there is less need for them to manage multiple copies of their documents and risk loss (working from a server farm provides more reliability than remembering to copy over important documents to the server to backup (yes the old backup policy was pretty bad)).
- virus/malware issues vanished (obviously) = less support costs, increased productivity, etc..
Of course, this is without some downside.. Flash/Shockwave sites are hit-and-miss.. with that age group, it is important and some alternatives needed to be found. Some apps we had were Windows only. Attempting to work with Wine was not successful *enough* and (currently) requires the use of rdesktop to a Windows 2003 server. We *hope* to get rid of these apps by the next school year.
In anycase, we are not the first to do this, nor will be the last. It is very important to plan. You need to determine if it is able to meet your needs. You need to add benefit to end users to make it worthwhile to learn and provision some classes for teachers to get-up-to-speed. It might be worthwhile to create a live CD that they can boot on their home systems.
If you have a LUG or similar in your area, it might be worthwhile to see if they want to get involved. This may provide additional knowledge and expertise to the planning, setup and maintenance of the new systems.
If money is a concern, it might be worthwhile to investigate a thin client configuration. This way, old donated computers can be added to the network easily but with high-end performance.
1. No true "killer app". So many of the great tools that originated on *nix have been ported to Windows. To an extent, many of the features of KDE have enticed people I've demo'd it to, but even KDE is making a migration to Windows.. The fact that these ports will run NATIVE on Windows (versus emulated Windows apps on Linux) is quite nice.
2. No OEM commitment. It would be great to go to a tier-1 hardware vendor and get some _choice_ in various hardware categories (PCs, laptops, printers, multifunction devices, etc..) that were -certified- linux compatible (read: I can call someone and get support if I run into issues). The fact that it is difficult to determine hardware compatibility with a particular pre-built machine is rather aggervating.
3. No support network. "my buddy knows this guy who is a tech wiz..".. while I cringe at the fixes/troubleshooting ability of these self proclaimed Windows gurus, the fact that there is someone to call and _physically_ troubleshoot a computer is reassuring to _most_ people. While this is mostly a market percentage issue, the support network is huge for most people.
4. Windows-centric content. Need I say more? Sites requiring the latest flash plugin, media encoded in WMV and other Windows-centric formats, sites tested or requiring internet explorer, sites using shockwave, yada yada yada.. it sucks. It would be nice to see web devs only coding to standards and perhaps some nice good open standards for media encoding (yah i know, I am asking a LOT).
5. Lack of consistency.. given the few pre-installed Linux choices available, assuming me and my friends did buy pre-installed Linux machines, the distro used has a high probability of being different. With a different distro, the GUI tools are generally different (or completely different interfaces!), the default apps are different, the file system might be different, etc.. needless to say, this fragments the support network very much. I can easily see hardware vendors only supporting a given distro (yikes!). Atleast with Windows, even if there is 7 different versions of Vista, the base system will be largely the same and buying different computers from different OEMs will still allow a support network to function.
Having said that.. the thing thats nice about Linux and OSS in general is the lack of shareholder accountability. There is no need for Linux/OSS to meet quarterly obligations, meet profit expectations, etc.. Given this, it provides a HUGE advantage to the FOSS community to work on a much larger time schedule. Even if growth is at a much slower pace, every time someone new gets involved, the community becomes that much stronger and the very nature of FOSS allows that individual to build upon the work of others (instead of building from scratch). As a result, as a community, we can largely afford to wait. I personally think the advancements in desktop-centric distros and desktop use has already started to make Linux viable for niches and I truly expect to see a gradual increase in usage.
We already know Microsoft's answer, but how does Apple deal with bugs in Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9? (And does anyone still use Mac OS 7?)
Is it realistic to still assume support for any of those systems? Mac OS 9 was released in Oct 1999.. Besides that, OS 9 was, for all intents and purposes, OS 8.7.. so now your looking at a system that was originally released in 1997! I don't think any vendor is still providing support for these older systems.
This was a full product called Giant Anti-spyware that MS acquired. "Beta" is their term.
Its pretty amazing how MS is so good at taking good software and umm.. making it 'beta', a security issue and mediocre (at best). hehe.. (ref: NT development).. stay tune for their antivirus software to do something similar (RAV AV was pretty good in its day before MS acquired it..)
Well actually, there are 3rd parties providing both MSI's and group policy-like features (with the use of login/logoff scripts to modify the user.js) that tie into the MS AD/Group Policy. Unfortunately from my experience, the group policy options are not feature-complete and they break silently between minor versions (ie 1.0.4 to 1.0.7). Creating MSI's was slated for 1.5, not sure what the rationale was to axe it (the third party MSI works quite well, but tends to lag the official releases by a few weeks).
I definitely dislike not being able to uninstall IE and simply having Firefox be my html rendering engine (ie for apps, etc..) but that does not stop Mozilla from supporting AD/Group Policy/MSIs for easier deployment/management of Firefox in a corporate setting.
Bottom line, if a company elects to pay Microsoft for its products and IE7 provides the base-line functionality required (adequate standards compliance, good security track record, etc..) then why add redundant, less easier-to-maintain software to the mix? *assuming* IE7 is similar *enough* to firefox (ie6 is a joke and hense the reason for the current use of Firefox) then Firefox doesn't bring anything to the table and infact, adds IT costs to maintain it on the network + user confusion (two apps doing the same job), additional tool to support, yada yada..
Others say that all Microsoft has to do is to just be "good enough" and they can keep their near-monopoly market share of the browsing environment.
Why sure.. as a sys admin managing a Windows network, I'm looking for ways to minimize the amount of software I need to maintain. If IE7 is *good enough* (for me this means standards compliance on-par with other modern browsers and minimal security issues) what is the point of keeping, updating and maintaining Firefox on those desktops? Firefox doesn't integrate nicely with active directory/group policies (no official support), it requires 3rd party MSI's for distribution, etc.. all-in-all a PITA (from an administrator POV).. on top of this, I end up having to support two browsers which is redundant and costly.
Of course, as a/. & FOSSer, there are personal advantages for keeping Firefox on the desktop (exposure for others to FOSS, cross platform compatibility, etc..) but when it comes down to company priorities, if IE is *good enough* and the company is Windows-centric, I really have a hard time justifying installing/maintaining another browser if IE7 meets the minimium criteria.
A CMS by definition is a content management system. As a result, it is crucially important to determine the content you want the system to manage and how you want the system to manage the content.
A few starter questions:
1. What content do I have or expect to have? (web pages? documents? discussion forums? image galleries?)
2. Where does this content come from? (departments? users? myself? Internet sources? databases? third-party apps?)
3. How should the system manage this content? (workflows? editors? fine-grained access control?)
4. How should this content be displayed? (xhtml/css? pdf? print/paper? cell phones? xml? rss?)
5. How much separation of content and design do you require?
6. How extensible should the CMS be? (in-house development? modular? out-sourced development? completely opensource?)
7. What are the administrative requirements? (*nix? mysql/postgresql? apache? php? python?)
8. What is the anticipated load and can the CMS manage that? (quite different from a 5,000 hits/day site vs 20,000,000 hits/day)
9. What is the estimated lifetime of the website? What changes to the site are forseeable and should be considered?
Assuming your doing something more than a personal blog site, most likely pre-existing workflow processes and organizational resources already exist and those should be analyzed when making a CMS choice.
Don't get overly focused on initial setup times. The cost of administration, development and resources will far outweigh the initial setup costs on all but the smallest of sites.
Unless the bugs are vulnerability vectors this is called 'doing business'. Unlike FLOSSies, software companies write code for profit and part of that means finding workarounds for stupid design mistakes (like using undocumented internals) made by other companies that write software for your platform.
I don't understand.. lots of FOSS has extension/plugin architectures and have to deal with the same issues.. however, I don't see FOSS developers catering to individuals/companies that elect NOT TO PROGRAM to established APIs. It seems like even companies such as Apple tend to have the same view point.. this seems like a Microsoft-ism.. I'm guessing its due in part to the fact that they themselves utilize many undocumented internals.
The "many eyes no bugs" mantra goes south in a hurry when you have a 10-million line codebase and a few hundred actually qualified people looking at it.
Thats crap. First, if this code was available, it could be utilized by thousands of CS students as a learning tool (and thus additioanl eye-balls checking out the code). In addition to this, there are LOTS of companies that develop for Windows. If something doesn't function properly, don't you think that these individuals would LOVE to get into the source to see whats going on? Sure, it might be a very small portion of the source, but nevertheless, being able to get in there to analyze/understand/adapt and report bugs goes a long way.
Needless to say, Windows was designed as a non-networked, single user system. While they have cobbled together multiuser and network features, the history of Windows continues to plague the platform. Anyway you slice it, the optimal choice would have been to sandbox backwards compatibility and rebuild Windows from scratch (or from a solid network/multiuser code base).. sure the transition period might be painful, but I don't think it would have been nearly as painful as the continued security issues of the current code base.
MICHAEL: It's pretty brilliant. What it does is where there's a bank transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into your account.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? What do you mean? Intel gets a certified partner status with Red Hat .. Red Hat talks with customer who needs Linux solution, customer buys Intel because it is certified to work in "complex architectural deployments".
So company buys intel chips, motherbords, network adapters, telephony, embedded solutions, yada yada yada..
Gives me a warm fuzzy knowing a company is backing its hardware, providing drivers and support for my operating system. While community built drivers are nice it doesn't necessarily extract the full performance of my hardware, so its nice to know a vendor provides this level of support.
I asked google.. and it told me.. Brilliant!
The *theory* is most exploits occur AFTER a patch is released by Microsoft (reverse engineer the patch). As a result, by scheduling a time the patches are released, it allows IT departments to schedule time to review and deploy the patches in a timely manner.
The issue arises when exploits are known in the wild before the patch is available. When is a suitable time to release the patch? How big of a risk does a exploit need to be before it is considered critical enough to justify an out-of-schedule patch release (and thus interupt set IT patching schedules)? If the theory holds true that *most* exploits occur AFTER the patch is released then by doing an out-of-schedule patch can put customers at risk (longer mean time from patch released to patch applied to the network).
Whats the point? As an IT administrator, I get lots more business doing the Windows thing:
.. less hardware, lower chance of failure
1. Easy sell to management
2. More prone to issues
3. Less capable per server (more servers = more $$)
4. Less resistance from end-users (employees, etc..)
5. Less personal liability (if it doesn't work, its Microsoft fault, 3rd party developers fault, etc..)
Compare this to pushing a FOSS solution:
1. Much harder sell to management (not the norm)
2. Less prone to issues (if configured properly)
3. More capable per server
4. More resistance from end-users (ahh! I only know Windows and MS Office!!)
5. More personal liability (unless you opt for support contracts, which I find a surprising number of small businesses elect not to do)
From a purely economics pov (techie) it seems like deploying microsoft makes much more sense. When I deploy FOSS it seems like the isntall is done and. . nothing. No problems, no issues, no need for support, lower budget, etc.. whats the fun in that?
If the % of FOSS use increased significantly, it has the potential of major economic impact (even more techies out of work, more bottom line profit by companies (rich get richer, yada yada..))
The day linux takes 15% of the desktop market, you'll see microsoft scrambling to actually turn windows into a good OS.
s/turn/make/
s/into/look like/
Reference: Internet Explorer 7. Their solution was to change up the interface as a priority. The actual rendering of web pages is still far inferior to all other modern browsers.
Repeat after me: With Microsoft, it has never been about making a good product. It has been about making a product that is good enough to generate revenue, even if it is by force.
The funny part about this is Vista (in its original design) might have actually been about making a good product and taking computing to the next level. However, it is apparent that the marketing-centric Microsoft management style is unable to innovate enough to make this happen and as a result, Vista (when released) will bring very little to the table (not that this matters).
I'm glad to hear that these low-end Linux boxes are selling. Perhaps the majority of these boxes will get a pirated version of Windows installed but who cares?
I would imagine that this Linspire is profiting on these units. Linspire has provided financial support to a wide variety of projects which is a good thing.
If sales are as good as this article makes out -- it would stand to reason that these retails (And others) would be more open to stocking additional models (perhaps higher end) and provide some additional numbers for hardware manufacturers to provide support (drivers, etc).
Oh, you mean the same languages (C/C++ generally speaking) that were/are used to create Linux, Unix, MacOSX, and many of the wares that run on them also?
.NET for other developers.. Isn't there a saying about eating your own dogfood? I still don't understand it. If .NET is technically superior, faster to develop, more secure than C/C++, then why did they elect not to use it? Sure, I can understand lower level drivers/kernel/etc not being written at a higher level like .NET, but that is clearly only a small percent of the code of all of Vista.
.NET to address the issue and enhance productivity of programmers while create a (according to them) more secure development environment. Then they turn around and don't use it. It doesn't make any sense to me.
More or less. Microsoft uses those tools, touts
No wonder Unix, Linux, BSD variants such as MacOS X had more security and vulnerability issues in 2005 according to CERT findings than Windows & its wares did...
Lets see.. Unix, Linux, BSD, MacOS X grouped all together is a LOT of code.. then CERT tops it off with a LOT of 3rd party apps that doesn't get counted against Windows and posts more issues. Not to mention MOST of that code is open source and much easier to discover vulerabilities than the close sourced Windows. Also, not to mention that Windows still had a much higher % of critical vulnerabilities and _most_ *nix systems were not impacted with the *nix vulnerabilities, while most Windows systems were suspectable to the reported Windows vulnerabilities.
Bottom line: the underlying platform for *nix is much different than Windows. Microsoft realized this, developed
1. Internet Explorer 7 still has major security issues that plague Internet Explorer 6
.NET tools in developing bundled applications that will ship with Vista, instead opting for lower level languages that are more suspectible to security issues.
.. oh wait, we don't have updates because we are delaying ALL of our major products..)
2. Microsoft Office is delayed
3. Vista is delayed.
4. Microsoft restructures the Windows division before a major OS release
5. Daniel Lyons from Forbes is underwhelmed with the Vista presentation and finds it complex and of little added value.
6. Microsoft elected not to utilize its
7. Throughout all of this, the security team at Microsoft decided to school Apple on security (I wonder if no one at Microsoft was paying attention?)
8. Businesses sold on the "Software Assurance" and other licensing gimmicks are getting very aggervated at was could be considered bait-and-switch (get SA, get updates
9. There is the possibility of major rewrites to Vista (though until it is confirmed by another source, I'll take it with a grain of salt..).
Interesting.
Postfix is licensed under the IBM Public License v1.0. I am unsure how compatible that is with the GPL (and perhaps the primary reason for it not being included). Exim is GPL .. not quite sure why it isn't more popular among the distros (perhaps sendmail history wins out?)
Why shouldn't people write valid HTML code? It's not that difficult to correct the bugs.
What are you talking about? It is a PITA to fix the bugs. I do XHTML/CSS design work (table-less designs) and spend a LOT OF TIME fixing the designs to look ok in Internet Explorer. It absolutely sucks. The design looks great in Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, Links/Lynx, etc but IE will effectively crap on the design. Most of the time making it work in IE (or atleast look presentable) can consume up to *half* the design time for a site. Needless to say, spending twice as much time on a design just to work around bugs is not something most customers want to pay for.
Ultimately it *can* be done and I have done quite a lot of sites that look acceptable across browsers and do fully validate. However, this does come at the cost of CSS utilization (lowest-common-demoniator) and design compromise.
*ahem..*
s/legal/super rich/g
I'll bite.. For an average person that is working with Windows XP exclusively, yah .. the perceived benefit of a linux desktop is not enough to overcome the resistance to change.
Now for a *business desktop* there is a monetary issue involved. Sure, the $500 Dell desktop comes with Windows, unfortunately it is Windows Home edition. Hooking this up to a controlled network? You need WinXP Pro (+$100).. Now you will most likely need a server running Active Directory (+$800 for 2003 Server software and +$33 per computer for a Client access license). Of course, if you set it up per MS recommendations, you'll setup a backup ADS server (another +$800).
Now you need antivirus software. Again, centrally managed software is the key so something like Norton Antivirus Corporate edition fits the bill (~$30/computer). On top of this, central control of software distribution is good so you end up needing to make MSI files to distribute via group policy (or getting another distribution system) -- of course, not all software on Windows follows this guideline, so you might end up needing multiple methods of software distribution. On top of this, securing users into a lock down mode may break software (I run in to issues ALL THE TIME where software writes to protected areas of registry and file system (outside of user folders)) so add in support time to troubleshoot these issues (I've had WAY TOO many companies clamor "just run as admin" -- ha!)
Once this is setup and installed, for this 20 person network, your looking at $663 per system of direct cost (hardware/software), perhaps $200 in cost for the backend servers/licenses per client system ($863) and dozens of hours of configuration and troubleshooting of software issues as they arise (regmon/filemon, tweaking registry security, tweaking file system security settings, etc..) @ $65/hr ($780 -- $39 per system). So all said, that $500 computer is now over $900 and this is assuming relatively moddest needs.
Now from a Linux side, the package management is standardized so updates to all systems is straight forward and doesn't require purchasing extra software. Same for backups (lots of backup solutions vs pricey backup solutions such as BackupExec on Windows). In addition, for light users, the use of thin clients is a major possibility -- run these systems off the server and administration gets significantly simplified (install software once on the server.. and thats it.)
There is no antivirus scanners, spyware scanners or other crap that needs to be installed and maintained on the computers. User mode actually *works* on Linux so you can run users underprivleged without worrying about poorly written software that attempts to access restricted areas of the system (so very common even in 2006). The rights given to users are sane -- ever try running Windows as a regular user? You can't even pull up the calendar when double clicking on the task bar time (lame).
Bottom line -- the system is more than ready for corporate adoption. I particularly like the thin client model -- I have older PCs (useless for a full WinXP SP2 install) that can act as thin clients.. I can access my network remotely via NX for fast access to my desktop. I can access my desktop anywhere without the kludge that is "roaming profiles" or the massive additional cost associated with Windows Terminal Services. The biggest issue is support (I'm particularly scared to run Windows only apps in emulation on Linux simply due to lack of vendor support). As a result, it comes down to determining if the software availability on the Linux desktop meets the needs.
If it does, then whats the issue? It ends up being cheaper, more reliable, easy to maintain, more flexible and does not result in exclusive vendor lockin like with Windows.
Spam sucks. The amount of spam I need to filter on a daily basis for my not-so-well-known domains is huge (40-50% of all incoming email). I make it manageable with the use of greylisting, realtime black lists, enforcement of correct smtp handshakes, content filters, virus filters, yada yada yada.
.. There is no doubt that their spam to legitimate email ratio is MUCH higher than mine.
Fortunately a lot of this gets axed with the greylisting and rbl's so I am not having to accept the full message (bandwidth + cpu processing). Even trying to be conservative, there are false positives as well as spam getting through the filters. It sucks.
Now looking at AOL, it is one of the most popular domain names on the Internet and millions use aol.com for their email. Spammers see aol users as generally "newbies" and as a result, is a great target for spamming
Needless to say, it is a big problem for AOL. Even with a lot of the blocking they are currently doing (outright IP blocks) and undoubtedly many of us have experienced (especially hosting providers) it still is mostly ineffective in their fight against spam. Spam continues to be a major nusciance and phishing schemes continue to get much more stealthy and hard to discern.
So whats the solution? Some of you point to SPF but if AOL only accepted email from domains with SPF, that would be much more restrictive than this tax concept (though with a major player forcing this issue, it might make SPF viable even though it does represent some major hurdles of its own (use of a secondary SMTP to deliver legitimate email (very common)). Honestly it sucks. I don't like the tax idea, Bill Gate's war on Spam didn't seem effective, the use of extremely long chains of spam/virus/malware software are more of a short-term roadblock than a true solution.
Why doesn't someone tell me why Dell screws my company out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year selling them overpriced server equipment?
.. I think I'd do the same thing.. if I could also tie in the same company to buy from me exclusively, yahoo!
Because your company buys it? If it is costing your company hundreds of thousands, perhaps IT consultants should be hired that can stop this unnecessary spending (though if it is like any other company, reducing your budget = lower budget next year which is not favorable either..)
Or why the Dell reps attempt to bribe our IT department with cash and free laptops if they'll continue to purchase only Dell equipment.
Cost of doing business? Same reason companies will wine and dine other customers.. sad part, it works.
Or howabout why our Dell contract reads that installing any non-dell equipment on our network violates our warranties?
Seriously? Why would a company want to do that? Insane. Did you ever think its your companies fault for signing, buying and being bribed?
In anycase.. after spending over a half year dealing with a problem that THEY CREATED and giving me a serious runaround (lying about the cost of equipment, putting an order through dell financing when it was paid with check, etc..) I cannot recommend Dell to any of my customers. Its a shame because it wasn't more than a few years ago that Dell was a completely different company.
However, if I had a computer company and was able to get hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales every year for the cost of a few laptops
i am semi-involved in a (currently ongoing) project to migrate a K-8 private school from Windows 2000 to a thin-client configuration (solaris/suse linux). In total it ends up being ~140 computers (~90 being thin clients).
.. continue to work .. go home and (if needed) login remotely over the internet and get to their desktop. As a result, there is less need for them to manage multiple copies of their documents and risk loss (working from a server farm provides more reliability than remembering to copy over important documents to the server to backup (yes the old backup policy was pretty bad)).
The first phase was last fall (Deployment in December) for the computer lab + in-classroom computers (administrative computers will migrate this summer).
The transition, with careful planning, ended up being quite smooth. Initially StarOffice was loaded on the Windows PCs last spring along with Firefox and other cross-platform application to start getting students and staff use to those applications. Once the systems were migrated, some of the benefits included:
- Increased software availability. More _free_ software on the Linux side allowed us to provide more capabilities for students and teachers.
- reduced costs -- administration likes the lower power consumption of the thin clients, the ability to remote admin the entire network (less IT costs), the ability to connect to their desktop from home (NX) and the increased reliability and consistency (only a handful of servers to maintain instead of over a hundred individual installations of Windows)
- Mobility. With the thin clients, a teacher could be working on a system in their classroom, go to the computer lab, pull up their desktop as they left it
- virus/malware issues vanished (obviously) = less support costs, increased productivity, etc..
Of course, this is without some downside.. Flash/Shockwave sites are hit-and-miss.. with that age group, it is important and some alternatives needed to be found. Some apps we had were Windows only. Attempting to work with Wine was not successful *enough* and (currently) requires the use of rdesktop to a Windows 2003 server. We *hope* to get rid of these apps by the next school year.
In anycase, we are not the first to do this, nor will be the last. It is very important to plan. You need to determine if it is able to meet your needs. You need to add benefit to end users to make it worthwhile to learn and provision some classes for teachers to get-up-to-speed. It might be worthwhile to create a live CD that they can boot on their home systems.
If you have a LUG or similar in your area, it might be worthwhile to see if they want to get involved. This may provide additional knowledge and expertise to the planning, setup and maintenance of the new systems.
If money is a concern, it might be worthwhile to investigate a thin client configuration. This way, old donated computers can be added to the network easily but with high-end performance.
1. No true "killer app". So many of the great tools that originated on *nix have been ported to Windows. To an extent, many of the features of KDE have enticed people I've demo'd it to, but even KDE is making a migration to Windows.. The fact that these ports will run NATIVE on Windows (versus emulated Windows apps on Linux) is quite nice.
.. while I cringe at the fixes/troubleshooting ability of these self proclaimed Windows gurus, the fact that there is someone to call and _physically_ troubleshoot a computer is reassuring to _most_ people. While this is mostly a market percentage issue, the support network is huge for most people.
.. given the few pre-installed Linux choices available, assuming me and my friends did buy pre-installed Linux machines, the distro used has a high probability of being different. With a different distro, the GUI tools are generally different (or completely different interfaces!), the default apps are different, the file system might be different, etc.. needless to say, this fragments the support network very much. I can easily see hardware vendors only supporting a given distro (yikes!). Atleast with Windows, even if there is 7 different versions of Vista, the base system will be largely the same and buying different computers from different OEMs will still allow a support network to function.
2. No OEM commitment. It would be great to go to a tier-1 hardware vendor and get some _choice_ in various hardware categories (PCs, laptops, printers, multifunction devices, etc..) that were -certified- linux compatible (read: I can call someone and get support if I run into issues). The fact that it is difficult to determine hardware compatibility with a particular pre-built machine is rather aggervating.
3. No support network. "my buddy knows this guy who is a tech wiz.."
4. Windows-centric content. Need I say more? Sites requiring the latest flash plugin, media encoded in WMV and other Windows-centric formats, sites tested or requiring internet explorer, sites using shockwave, yada yada yada.. it sucks. It would be nice to see web devs only coding to standards and perhaps some nice good open standards for media encoding (yah i know, I am asking a LOT).
5. Lack of consistency
Having said that.. the thing thats nice about Linux and OSS in general is the lack of shareholder accountability. There is no need for Linux/OSS to meet quarterly obligations, meet profit expectations, etc.. Given this, it provides a HUGE advantage to the FOSS community to work on a much larger time schedule. Even if growth is at a much slower pace, every time someone new gets involved, the community becomes that much stronger and the very nature of FOSS allows that individual to build upon the work of others (instead of building from scratch). As a result, as a community, we can largely afford to wait. I personally think the advancements in desktop-centric distros and desktop use has already started to make Linux viable for niches and I truly expect to see a gradual increase in usage.
We already know Microsoft's answer, but how does Apple deal with bugs in Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9? (And does anyone still use Mac OS 7?)
.. Besides that, OS 9 was, for all intents and purposes, OS 8.7 .. so now your looking at a system that was originally released in 1997! I don't think any vendor is still providing support for these older systems.
Is it realistic to still assume support for any of those systems? Mac OS 9 was released in Oct 1999
Hmm.. Some do..
This was a full product called Giant Anti-spyware that MS acquired.
.. stay tune for their antivirus software to do something similar (RAV AV was pretty good in its day before MS acquired it..)
"Beta" is their term.
Its pretty amazing how MS is so good at taking good software and umm.. making it 'beta', a security issue and mediocre (at best). hehe.. (ref: NT development)
Well actually, there are 3rd parties providing both MSI's and group policy-like features (with the use of login/logoff scripts to modify the user.js) that tie into the MS AD/Group Policy. Unfortunately from my experience, the group policy options are not feature-complete and they break silently between minor versions (ie 1.0.4 to 1.0.7). Creating MSI's was slated for 1.5, not sure what the rationale was to axe it (the third party MSI works quite well, but tends to lag the official releases by a few weeks).
I definitely dislike not being able to uninstall IE and simply having Firefox be my html rendering engine (ie for apps, etc..) but that does not stop Mozilla from supporting AD/Group Policy/MSIs for easier deployment/management of Firefox in a corporate setting.
Bottom line, if a company elects to pay Microsoft for its products and IE7 provides the base-line functionality required (adequate standards compliance, good security track record, etc..) then why add redundant, less easier-to-maintain software to the mix? *assuming* IE7 is similar *enough* to firefox (ie6 is a joke and hense the reason for the current use of Firefox) then Firefox doesn't bring anything to the table and infact, adds IT costs to maintain it on the network + user confusion (two apps doing the same job), additional tool to support, yada yada..
Others say that all Microsoft has to do is to just be "good enough" and they can keep their near-monopoly market share of the browsing environment.
.. on top of this, I end up having to support two browsers which is redundant and costly.
/. & FOSSer, there are personal advantages for keeping Firefox on the desktop (exposure for others to FOSS, cross platform compatibility, etc..) but when it comes down to company priorities, if IE is *good enough* and the company is Windows-centric, I really have a hard time justifying installing/maintaining another browser if IE7 meets the minimium criteria.
Why sure.. as a sys admin managing a Windows network, I'm looking for ways to minimize the amount of software I need to maintain. If IE7 is *good enough* (for me this means standards compliance on-par with other modern browsers and minimal security issues) what is the point of keeping, updating and maintaining Firefox on those desktops? Firefox doesn't integrate nicely with active directory/group policies (no official support), it requires 3rd party MSI's for distribution, etc.. all-in-all a PITA (from an administrator POV)
Of course, as a
A CMS by definition is a content management system. As a result, it is crucially important to determine the content you want the system to manage and how you want the system to manage the content.
A few starter questions:
1. What content do I have or expect to have? (web pages? documents? discussion forums? image galleries?)
2. Where does this content come from? (departments? users? myself? Internet sources? databases? third-party apps?)
3. How should the system manage this content? (workflows? editors? fine-grained access control?)
4. How should this content be displayed? (xhtml/css? pdf? print/paper? cell phones? xml? rss?)
5. How much separation of content and design do you require?
6. How extensible should the CMS be? (in-house development? modular? out-sourced development? completely opensource?)
7. What are the administrative requirements? (*nix? mysql/postgresql? apache? php? python?)
8. What is the anticipated load and can the CMS manage that? (quite different from a 5,000 hits/day site vs 20,000,000 hits/day)
9. What is the estimated lifetime of the website? What changes to the site are forseeable and should be considered?
Assuming your doing something more than a personal blog site, most likely pre-existing workflow processes and organizational resources already exist and those should be analyzed when making a CMS choice.
Don't get overly focused on initial setup times. The cost of administration, development and resources will far outweigh the initial setup costs on all but the smallest of sites.
MSN experienced the largest number of IM security incidents in both 2004 and 2005
.. go Microsoft!
So they have over 50% of the market on IM security incidents
Just curious, what is their marketshare for IM? I tried looking it up w/o success.
Unless the bugs are vulnerability vectors this is called 'doing business'. Unlike FLOSSies, software companies write code for profit and part of that means finding workarounds for stupid design mistakes (like using undocumented internals) made by other companies that write software for your platform.
I don't understand.. lots of FOSS has extension/plugin architectures and have to deal with the same issues.. however, I don't see FOSS developers catering to individuals/companies that elect NOT TO PROGRAM to established APIs. It seems like even companies such as Apple tend to have the same view point.. this seems like a Microsoft-ism.. I'm guessing its due in part to the fact that they themselves utilize many undocumented internals.
The "many eyes no bugs" mantra goes south in a hurry when you have a 10-million line codebase and a few hundred actually qualified people looking at it.
Thats crap. First, if this code was available, it could be utilized by thousands of CS students as a learning tool (and thus additioanl eye-balls checking out the code). In addition to this, there are LOTS of companies that develop for Windows. If something doesn't function properly, don't you think that these individuals would LOVE to get into the source to see whats going on? Sure, it might be a very small portion of the source, but nevertheless, being able to get in there to analyze/understand/adapt and report bugs goes a long way.
Needless to say, Windows was designed as a non-networked, single user system. While they have cobbled together multiuser and network features, the history of Windows continues to plague the platform. Anyway you slice it, the optimal choice would have been to sandbox backwards compatibility and rebuild Windows from scratch (or from a solid network/multiuser code base).. sure the transition period might be painful, but I don't think it would have been nearly as painful as the continued security issues of the current code base.
PETER: Well, how does it work?
MICHAEL: It's pretty brilliant. What it does is where there's a bank
transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in
fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it
takes those remainders and puts it into your account.
PETER: This sounds familiar.
MICHAEL: Yeah. They did this in Superman III.
PETER: Yeah. What a good movie.