Bah. I've upgraded many computers from one version of Windows to another. I never had any problems.
This is especially true with a 9x to 2000/XP upgrade. For the most part, it installs fresh, and then migrates your program registry, desktop settings, and start menu over. It doesn't migrate drivers or anything like that. It's not some mystical magic blending that happens and causes problems.
I upgraded Windows 2000 pro on my windows workstation over to Windows XP pro, and had no problems. The only thing I had to do was install a 3rd party skin utility and download a new skin to replace the ridiculous default Windows XP skins.
>Anyone who's dual booting will continue to use NTFS or FAT32.
Unfortunately from what I know about Longhorn (or whatever) it's not going to be an option. If you want to use it, you have to switch to the new filesystem. At least for the OS and many Microsoft and following applications.
I'm positive however that you'll be able to read and write to FAT/FAT32/NTFS from windows for a long, long time. A dual-booter could have a shared partition for data files.
When it was @home, I had a static IP address, no cap on speed (I would occationally see 10mbit download speeds and 100k/sec uploads), no ports blocked, and much better uptime.
I live in Pawtucket. I've always had a problem with Cox. My first cablemodem was an old Motorola cablemodem (wasn't docsis) and it was blazingly fast. Then they switched to Docsis, and the motorola modems had a problem on the network (they worked... barely..) I had to buy my own cablemodem since they wouldn't upgrade mine for free.
So then they switch away from @home since it went out of business. Now I have blocked ports, slower speeds (although still better then my friend in Mass with 1.5Mbit downstream cap, but he has no blocked ports... and 5 IP's for free.)
Then my cablemodem broke, so I had to get a new one. They wouldn't let me do it over the phone until I took the old one back to some service place in Warwick. Then they screwed up the serial numbers and mac, so the new one wouldn't work. Two weeks later calling twice a day I finally got someone on the phone that said "Hey, the serial and mac are in the wrong fields. Fixed."
I lose my connection twice a week, or more. And their DHCP servers are down so much that I just assigned myself an IP on their network. Every three months or so I have to assign myself a new one because someone gets mine.
They charge $15 a month for rental of a cablemodem. My buddy in MA pays $1.50. If you have your own modem it's hard to get service to come to the house..
One time they shut off my cablemodem after service because the tech said I was running servers. Took me a week to explain that I work in IT and I have a lot of machines so that I can learn job skills at home.
>Stop thinking can't unless you have legitimate reasons.
Following your resoning, everything is possible. Really, it's a nice notion. Not everything is possible. You can't turn wood to gold. You can't add 2+2 and get 5. There's pratical limitations all around us.
>When we had 28k modems we didn't even think there were going to be DSL, CABLE, and fiber to the home, because at the time it wasn't cost effective. Now it is. So take a little jump forward and see were we go next.
It's more of the same. It's an extention of the existing principals. No new concepts here.
> Once upon a time not so long ago we thought there would always be a main frame and terminals,personal computers where unheard of, no such thing as cell phones and who would need or even want a computer that fit in your poket.
More of the same. Personal computers evolved out of existing technologies. Mainframes got smaller, and onto the desktop. (or under.) Cell phones are an extention of the radio. Pocket PC's are more of the same.
> Opps your right. No chance for any change in the future. I just mailed in my check for a typewriter. Give me a break.
Have fun typing on the typewriter. You have a skill for missing the point. Hone in on that skill, you could become management.
> One last point. Linux. Free and people had to come up with it. I could name a dozen more but theres no need. While it might not be a physical good, it was produced. It did take time to design, build, and distribute.
Linux is free. You're right! And it took a lot of time to get it to the point it's at now. (And it does cost money to distribute it.)
> I know it doesn't need manufactured and it doesn't require resources to make.
Software != hardware. Software can be created with the tools you already have. All it takes is time. Hardware deployment to the masses is a VERY different story. Assuming that someone somehow invented all the necessary technology for free in their basement, it still means nothing since it needs to be manufactured (which means you need plastics, machines, metal, etc... these things are not free.) Software does not need to be manufactured.
> They just thought that after buying it, you could use it to tie into a large net of other peoples wireless network and all share it.
Other peoples what? How could you tie into something that does not exist? If there's no controlling system/backbone then there's no network.
I'm forced to guess that in his idea, every wireless device would be a controlling system, and it's not practical, and won't be, not for a LONG LONG time. Personally, I don't give a rats ass what could be feasable in 70 years. It's dreaming.
I won't even comment on your last thing about the world being flat or whatever.
Well, it depends. My DSL in NYC had no limits, the line speed was the limit. It was a "7 megabit" DSL, but it synced at 8400 since I was so close to the CO (It was across the street.) Upstream was still less then T1 (1mbit.)
T1 lines are also regulated. The ISP must have the bandwidth to support their T1 line customers. A DSL is not guarenteed bandwidth; I was lucky enough to get an ISP that just happened to always give me all the bandwidth I could use.
I'm willing to pay for the bandwidth, if I can get the line to the house. And I was figuring the 4Mbit version, not the 150Mbit version.
As far as DSL to my house right NOW, 768/128 is still less then half of my cablemodem, which is 3Mbit/300kbit. And the DSL would be twice as expensive. I'd love to have my port 80 back (as well as 21, 25, 53udp....) but 128kbit is useless.
When I lived in NYC I paid $200/mo for a 8400Kbit/1000kbit DSL. I was less then a thousand feet from the CO. It was amazingly good. $200 was a bargain for the amount of bandwidth I got; not to mention as many IP's that I needed, and always full speed. I used the bandwidth. If you don't, then you don't really need it I guess..
Now that I live in RI again, I can't get DSL. I'm 12,000 feet from the CO. 128/128 dsl does not compare to my Cablemodem, even though my cablemodem is heavily nerfed (blocked ports, capped speeds, etc..)
Something like this could allow me to once again use DSL and choose my ISP. Something like this would also open up DSL to a lot more subscribers, and perhaps the cost would start to come down.
At least it's not "uhh.. reboot." or "re-install windows" or "update your drivers." Like you would get on a Windows forum.
There's asses everywhere, and in my experience the asses don't rule the Linux support community. Most people are pretty nice and good about giving out suggestions.
Mailing lists are usually a great source of good help. On Slashdot, you get a lot of trolls.
Think ahead into the land of make believe, is what you're saying.
> remember 28k modems when they were fast and 56k when they were as fast as you'd ever need.
What does this have to do with anything? It's a completely out of context statement. Not to mention the root question here isn't how FAST it would be using P2P garbage, rather how pratical it is.
But, to go with the speed point.. Land lines provide a huge amount of bandwidth. I know of no other (non physical) technology that can provitde the insane speeds of fibre. (and I mean pratically speaking.) These speeds will only get faster, and they are here now.
So as far as the speed issue goes, I feel that physical land lines will always be faster, now and in 100 years from now. Not to say that wireless won't be fast too... But you can't deny that a physical medium is better connected and more reliable. Clouds won't make a buried fibre line slow down.
Okay but enough about bandwidth.
P2P has it's place, but not as the basis of a sophisticated network that people depend on. For wireless wide-scale networking, it won't work for anything more then a nitche market of perhaps something like text messaging in metro areas.
The concept of a "network" won't change. Central services (backbones) with nodes connected to that, not each other. It just works. The nodes can talk to each other, but they do it via the backbone, server, whatever.
Even the so-called P2P networks work this way. Napster had central servers everyone connected to. Same with Kazaa. Gnutella is a little more distributed (and a lot more inneficient).
I dunno. p2p is not the answer. And it will never be free (what is free besides air anyways?). Real people have to come up with this stuff, manufacture hardware, deploy it, and maintain it. They need to get paid too, and the money has to come from somewhere.
There's a difference between "thinking ahead" and dreaming of Star Trek world.
I never had a problem with Trillian crashing. Well okay, maybe it's crashed once or twice, but never bringing the machine down. What are you running, Windows 95?
> I tell my clients about the benefits to open source, instead of telling them not to buy MS because of my personal feelings.
I agree. See, the way to promote something isn't to say "well, at least it's not MS."
If you don't like Microsoft, that's great. But trying to get people to use your OS of choice, be it linux or OSX, isn't to bash or boycott the competition. That's too simple of an approach and it doesn't work.
The way to get people to switch is to show them that you have a better way. Show them what you can do, and show them that it's free. (well, with Linux..)
> If you find yourself contributing to something you wouldn't want, you're partly responsible.
Naa. I think this is bogus. They are going to do what they are going to do, no matter if JoeDeveloper writes a few lines of code or not. Like I said above, boycotting isn't the way to get something done. I can't think of one example where a successful boycott campaign changed anything in the technology world.
It's not an easy problem to solve. I agree with you, I hate the idea of Palladium. I won't personally buy into it, but a lot of people will because they won't know any better.
All I can think of is to just keep supporting a free operating system. Keep on helping people that need help. Until someone figures out a better way, this is what I plan on continuing.
But, I digress. We've gone way off topic here. All I wanted to point out originally is that not all people associated with Microsoft are morons, dumb, or braindead. It's very popular to say so, especially on slashdot, and people get some instant gratification of getting their posts automatically modded up with any anti-ms sentiments.
I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed and I'm not going to give this headache of a thread any more thought.
I guess you missed it. I WORKED FOR MSSUPPORT. NT and Exchange. I worked there for three years. We didn't take close to 30 calls a day. Most calls for NT were about an hour, most calls for exchange were about an hour and a half. This is the average. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.
> Besides, listening in or not has absolutely nothing to do with them offering jobs or the reality of what you're commenting on.
I replied to:
> eh, most tech support calls are monitored? > whats the fucking point in that?
I guess you didn't read the thread or something.
Anyways, I'm not going to argue with someone looking to pick a fight. "Period."
Well WNight, I appreciate a post that's not "M$$ Money BAGZ SUCKS AND YOU R DUMB!" just because I said something that wasn't "LINUX IS THE BEST."
Either way, I know how your friend at work feels. I mean, not every tech is any good. And now, who knows, maybe it's degraded quite a bit. I do know that almost every one of the people I worked with (we kept in touch pretty well) were really great support techs and we've all moved on to other jobs.
It just gets to me when people are always so "screw M$!" about everything. Real people work for them. Some really nice people. It's not the average employee's fault if the company they work for isn't favored. We all work for one reason: to get paid. And let's face it, there's some serious talent working for Microsoft. A lot of their software is very good, and I have no problems saying so. It doesn't mean that I don't enjoy Linux more (I do) and it doesn't mean that there's not fantastic software for Linux (there is.)
I take a different approach to supporting my OS of choice (which is Linux.) I don't run around everywhere trying to force everyone into believing that MS is the devil. I don't try to prove that Linux is better. I use it, I like it a lot. I answer questions for people when I can. I talk highly of it, but I don't bash the competition. I think that there's a lot of good stuff in Windows, and anyone that thinks otherwise is a blinded zealot. Every day Linux gets better and better, and I enjoy watching what people do with it. It only gets better from here!
When I worked for Microsoft Support, I had a few Linux boxes under the desk. I'd let everyone connect to it so they could play around with sendmail and such; we needed to know at least a little bit about it since a lot of people used it for relaying to Exchange.
I enjoy the fact that with OSS, you can generally get in touch with the people responsible for the development of the software you are having trouble with. It's very nice, it's personal, it works. In my opinion though, like anything, it will become more and more difficult to have this close relationship as Linux keeps replacing Windows. It will always be better then support from companies like IBM, Sun, MS, etc, though.
If these large companies weren't so bent on protecting their precious "Intellectual Property" then we'd probably get much better support. It's not the tech's fault. (okay, sometimes it is!)
I don't think MS has the best technical support by a long shot, but when I worked there we weren't a bunch of brain-deads like (some) people think - the only reasoning being it's Microsoft.
--
As a footnote... it's amazing how much the folks moderating will mod down anything that's not "MS SUCKS" or "Linux RULES!!" I love slashdot, but I don't love biased moderation. Ah well it doesn't matter, my Karma is still Excellent.
It works kind of differently at MS. There is no "second level support" so to speak.
There are times when someone up the food chain might get on the phone, but they aren't 2nd level support. They are generally there to support the phone techs, not take calls for when the phone techs can't handle it.
There were Technical Leads, and "Mentors", but these people didn't take any calls.
There were of course times when a major problem was at hand, and you could hand the call off to a special "closer to the development house" tech, but these cases were extremely rare. Of the three years I did support, I heard of two such cases. All other cases were handled by our groups.
We handled everything from dumb trivial problems (yay! an easy call!) to complicated 16-hour calls involving dozens of people. The worst were the military calls.
I remember one time I had a call from the Army, they were having problems with their DMS setup. It was a hella of a bitch to figure out the problem, and I was on speaker phone with some general. The people I was working with were all "Yes, sir. I don't know, sir." and I thought it was funny to talk to him like "dude, no, this needs to be done this way. Sorry man." But, I digress.
You're assuming I'm pro-MS here, and I'm not. How do you assume to assume anything about me?
> See, it's this kind of stuff that gets me. There's NO reason that problems like these can't be pushed up to the development level.
Eventually, problems do get pushed up to development, even with companies like Sun, IBM, and Microsoft. We're not just talking about MS here anymore, if your big problem is that there's no direct communication between developers and end-users.
I just don't unserstand how you believe that anyone should be able to get in touch with a developer of a software package, no matter how big or wide-spread the usage of it is.
Would you, as a developer of say, Windows Explorer, want to be answering tech support questions all day long, or do you want to actually *develop*?
Direct communication works fine with smaller software packages. Which gets me to your first question.
> You don't think that there are more than a few copies of Linux out there?
What *IS* Linux? The kernel? Samba? MySQL? XFree? Linux is broken up into pretty small parts. Individually, you have the ability to post a message to a forum or mailing list that a developer of these packages *might* respond to.
Otherwise, you could call RedHat support (or something similar), and you won't be talking to the developers, you'll be talking to someone at RedHat.
> Look, I'm not bashing the people. I'm bashing the methods.
That's fine, but you must understand some things here. When supporting any major product that has a vast number of users, you're going to recieve a vast number of support calls. You have to sift out the bug calls from the user-error calls from the common problem calls.
It would be great if every time you called Microsoft or IBM you were talking to the guy that developed the product, or someone that wrote the documentation on it, but it's not feasable. These people are EXPENSIVE. When you have a high call volume, you can't afford to put 2,000 tech support engineers on the phone and pay them $100,000 a year each.
There are REAL financial issues when supporting a product, and there is no magic bullet to make it all run perfectly.
If everyone answering the phone cared about their job, was as good as they can be at the product, and everyone around them (higher level support, etc) were supportive too, it would work well. But, people are people no matter where you go. What can be done about this? Putting developers on the phone isn't the answer.
Compared to Windows, the users of Linux are *usually* more knowledgable about their computers, about the software, etc. The userbase is also a lot smaller then Windows. When you post a question to a mailing list, you may very well get into contact with a core developer because there aren't 10,000 people trying to get help for their problems at the same time.
Training and evaluation are the two top reasons. What, you don't ever get evaluated by your boss? The only way to make sure a tech is doing good work is to listen in on the calls.
The WHOLE reason I responded is because you put all MS support techs under the umbrella of being "Braindead."
Such comments are always untrue no matter WHAT you're talking about. Haven't we learned ANYTHING about prejudices?
I simply said that the people I worked with were some of the brightest people I ever worked with and we would always be able to fix any problem with the products we supported. This directly opposes you; we're not all braindead.
No matter how much you want to keep pushing on your experiences, or what your post got modded to, or whatever; the fact remains, you were incorrect and I'm responding in defense of myself and anyone else I worked with that were top of their game.
Now you go on to talk about pushing the software "to the limit" - again drifting off topic.
And just to humor you, I'll comment about the "direct pipeline to the developers." There are millions and millions of copies of microsoft software out there. What if you, the developer, had to respond to everyone and their mother that had a problem with something you wrote? You would cease becoming a developer and you'd become a full time support person.
LOOK. I am not defending MS. I am not defending the support structure. I am not defending the techs that YOU worked with. I *AM* defending myself and others I know that are very good at what they do, while you had one bad experience and call us all braindead.
Did you ever notice that it's only the ones WITH the problems that are ever vocal?
> Site Server CE wasn't really a NT or Exchange problem, it did ride the SQL Server engine
Not sure what you're getting at here. You're right, site server used the SQL engine core. It has nothing to do with Exchange or NT. I don't know much about Site Server, but if it uses the SQL "engine" like Exchange does, it has nothing to do with actual SQL.
> And anyway, I see I'm not alone in thinking this way.
THis is Slashdot. What did you expect? Anything anti-MS gets modded up.
Well, most people that call support haven't experienced the problem before, don't know what to do to work-around it or fix it, and don't want to spend three hours browsing the web to find a possible solution.
The support people deal with such problems on a daily basis, should have a better understanding of the software, and can help you get up and running quicker.
So I guess that's the point.
Re:Software Support
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Bah. I've upgraded many computers from one version of Windows to another. I never had any problems.
This is especially true with a 9x to 2000/XP upgrade. For the most part, it installs fresh, and then migrates your program registry, desktop settings, and start menu over. It doesn't migrate drivers or anything like that. It's not some mystical magic blending that happens and causes problems.
I upgraded Windows 2000 pro on my windows workstation over to Windows XP pro, and had no problems. The only thing I had to do was install a 3rd party skin utility and download a new skin to replace the ridiculous default Windows XP skins.
They know that FAT32 can be used for partitions well over 64GB and that a drive > 64GB is pretty common these days, but they want you to use NTFS.
I have a firewire drive that's 100GB and it's FAT32.
>Anyone who's dual booting will continue to use NTFS or FAT32.
Unfortunately from what I know about Longhorn (or whatever) it's not going to be an option. If you want to use it, you have to switch to the new filesystem. At least for the OS and many Microsoft and following applications.
I'm positive however that you'll be able to read and write to FAT/FAT32/NTFS from windows for a long, long time. A dual-booter could have a shared partition for data files.
Good for you! But that wasn't the point of my post...
Cox in RI was much better when it was @home.
When it was @home, I had a static IP address, no cap on speed (I would occationally see 10mbit download speeds and 100k/sec uploads), no ports blocked, and much better uptime.
I live in Pawtucket. I've always had a problem with Cox. My first cablemodem was an old Motorola cablemodem (wasn't docsis) and it was blazingly fast. Then they switched to Docsis, and the motorola modems had a problem on the network (they worked... barely..) I had to buy my own cablemodem since they wouldn't upgrade mine for free.
So then they switch away from @home since it went out of business. Now I have blocked ports, slower speeds (although still better then my friend in Mass with 1.5Mbit downstream cap, but he has no blocked ports... and 5 IP's for free.)
Then my cablemodem broke, so I had to get a new one. They wouldn't let me do it over the phone until I took the old one back to some service place in Warwick. Then they screwed up the serial numbers and mac, so the new one wouldn't work. Two weeks later calling twice a day I finally got someone on the phone that said "Hey, the serial and mac are in the wrong fields. Fixed."
I lose my connection twice a week, or more. And their DHCP servers are down so much that I just assigned myself an IP on their network. Every three months or so I have to assign myself a new one because someone gets mine.
They charge $15 a month for rental of a cablemodem. My buddy in MA pays $1.50. If you have your own modem it's hard to get service to come to the house..
One time they shut off my cablemodem after service because the tech said I was running servers. Took me a week to explain that I work in IT and I have a lot of machines so that I can learn job skills at home.
I don't like Cox.
The speed of light is no longer a limit?
Hmm. You are dreaming.
Warp 5 captian!
Okay so it's like this eh?
>Stop thinking can't unless you have legitimate reasons.
Following your resoning, everything is possible. Really, it's a nice notion. Not everything is possible. You can't turn wood to gold. You can't add 2+2 and get 5. There's pratical limitations all around us.
>When we had 28k modems we didn't even think there were going to be DSL, CABLE, and fiber to the home, because at the time it wasn't cost effective. Now it is. So take a little jump forward and see were we go next.
It's more of the same. It's an extention of the existing principals. No new concepts here.
> Once upon a time not so long ago we thought there would always be a main frame and terminals,personal computers where unheard of, no such thing as cell phones and who would need or even want a computer that fit in your poket.
More of the same. Personal computers evolved out of existing technologies. Mainframes got smaller, and onto the desktop. (or under.) Cell phones are an extention of the radio. Pocket PC's are more of the same.
> Opps your right. No chance for any change in the future. I just mailed in my check for a typewriter. Give me a break.
Have fun typing on the typewriter. You have a skill for missing the point. Hone in on that skill, you could become management.
> One last point. Linux. Free and people had to come up with it. I could name a dozen more but theres no need. While it might not be a physical good, it was produced. It did take time to design, build, and distribute.
Linux is free. You're right! And it took a lot of time to get it to the point it's at now. (And it does cost money to distribute it.)
> I know it doesn't need manufactured and it doesn't require resources to make.
Software != hardware. Software can be created with the tools you already have. All it takes is time. Hardware deployment to the masses is a VERY different story. Assuming that someone somehow invented all the necessary technology for free in their basement, it still means nothing since it needs to be manufactured (which means you need plastics, machines, metal, etc... these things are not free.) Software does not need to be manufactured.
> They just thought that after buying it, you could use it to tie into a large net of other peoples wireless network and all share it.
Other peoples what? How could you tie into something that does not exist? If there's no controlling system/backbone then there's no network.
I'm forced to guess that in his idea, every wireless device would be a controlling system, and it's not practical, and won't be, not for a LONG LONG time. Personally, I don't give a rats ass what could be feasable in 70 years. It's dreaming.
I won't even comment on your last thing about the world being flat or whatever.
Well, it depends. My DSL in NYC had no limits, the line speed was the limit. It was a "7 megabit" DSL, but it synced at 8400 since I was so close to the CO (It was across the street.) Upstream was still less then T1 (1mbit.)
T1 lines are also regulated. The ISP must have the bandwidth to support their T1 line customers. A DSL is not guarenteed bandwidth; I was lucky enough to get an ISP that just happened to always give me all the bandwidth I could use.
I'm willing to pay for the bandwidth, if I can get the line to the house. And I was figuring the 4Mbit version, not the 150Mbit version.
As far as DSL to my house right NOW, 768/128 is still less then half of my cablemodem, which is 3Mbit/300kbit. And the DSL would be twice as expensive. I'd love to have my port 80 back (as well as 21, 25, 53udp....) but 128kbit is useless.
When I lived in NYC I paid $200/mo for a 8400Kbit/1000kbit DSL. I was less then a thousand feet from the CO. It was amazingly good. $200 was a bargain for the amount of bandwidth I got; not to mention as many IP's that I needed, and always full speed. I used the bandwidth. If you don't, then you don't really need it I guess..
Now that I live in RI again, I can't get DSL. I'm 12,000 feet from the CO. 128/128 dsl does not compare to my Cablemodem, even though my cablemodem is heavily nerfed (blocked ports, capped speeds, etc..)
Something like this could allow me to once again use DSL and choose my ISP. Something like this would also open up DSL to a lot more subscribers, and perhaps the cost would start to come down.
There were also some informative posts.
At least it's not "uhh.. reboot." or "re-install windows" or "update your drivers." Like you would get on a Windows forum.
There's asses everywhere, and in my experience the asses don't rule the Linux support community. Most people are pretty nice and good about giving out suggestions.
Mailing lists are usually a great source of good help. On Slashdot, you get a lot of trolls.
Think ahead into the land of make believe, is what you're saying.
> remember 28k modems when they were fast and 56k when they were as fast as you'd ever need.
What does this have to do with anything? It's a completely out of context statement. Not to mention the root question here isn't how FAST it would be using P2P garbage, rather how pratical it is.
But, to go with the speed point.. Land lines provide a huge amount of bandwidth. I know of no other (non physical) technology that can provitde the insane speeds of fibre. (and I mean pratically speaking.) These speeds will only get faster, and they are here now.
So as far as the speed issue goes, I feel that physical land lines will always be faster, now and in 100 years from now. Not to say that wireless won't be fast too... But you can't deny that a physical medium is better connected and more reliable. Clouds won't make a buried fibre line slow down.
Okay but enough about bandwidth.
P2P has it's place, but not as the basis of a sophisticated network that people depend on. For wireless wide-scale networking, it won't work for anything more then a nitche market of perhaps something like text messaging in metro areas.
The concept of a "network" won't change. Central services (backbones) with nodes connected to that, not each other. It just works. The nodes can talk to each other, but they do it via the backbone, server, whatever.
Even the so-called P2P networks work this way. Napster had central servers everyone connected to. Same with Kazaa. Gnutella is a little more distributed (and a lot more inneficient).
I dunno. p2p is not the answer. And it will never be free (what is free besides air anyways?). Real people have to come up with this stuff, manufacture hardware, deploy it, and maintain it. They need to get paid too, and the money has to come from somewhere.
There's a difference between "thinking ahead" and dreaming of Star Trek world.
Agreed. Remote X is very cool, but the cirtix ICA protocol is very, very quick, even on modems.
VNC is *okay* but it doesn't have the robustness of ICA.
Yea, I know, ICA isn't free; but that doesn't make it no good.
/shrug.
I never had a problem with Trillian crashing. Well okay, maybe it's crashed once or twice, but never bringing the machine down. What are you running, Windows 95?
> I tell my clients about the benefits to open source, instead of telling them not to buy MS because of my personal feelings.
I agree. See, the way to promote something isn't to say "well, at least it's not MS."
If you don't like Microsoft, that's great. But trying to get people to use your OS of choice, be it linux or OSX, isn't to bash or boycott the competition. That's too simple of an approach and it doesn't work.
The way to get people to switch is to show them that you have a better way. Show them what you can do, and show them that it's free. (well, with Linux..)
> If you find yourself contributing to something you wouldn't want, you're partly responsible.
Naa. I think this is bogus. They are going to do what they are going to do, no matter if JoeDeveloper writes a few lines of code or not. Like I said above, boycotting isn't the way to get something done. I can't think of one example where a successful boycott campaign changed anything in the technology world.
It's not an easy problem to solve. I agree with you, I hate the idea of Palladium. I won't personally buy into it, but a lot of people will because they won't know any better.
All I can think of is to just keep supporting a free operating system. Keep on helping people that need help. Until someone figures out a better way, this is what I plan on continuing.
But, I digress. We've gone way off topic here. All I wanted to point out originally is that not all people associated with Microsoft are morons, dumb, or braindead. It's very popular to say so, especially on slashdot, and people get some instant gratification of getting their posts automatically modded up with any anti-ms sentiments.
I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed and I'm not going to give this headache of a thread any more thought.
I guess you missed it. I WORKED FOR MSSUPPORT. NT and Exchange. I worked there for three years. We didn't take close to 30 calls a day. Most calls for NT were about an hour, most calls for exchange were about an hour and a half. This is the average. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.
> Besides, listening in or not has absolutely nothing to do with them offering jobs or the reality of what you're commenting on.
I replied to:
> eh, most tech support calls are monitored?
> whats the fucking point in that?
I guess you didn't read the thread or something.
Anyways, I'm not going to argue with someone looking to pick a fight. "Period."
Well WNight, I appreciate a post that's not "M$$ Money BAGZ SUCKS AND YOU R DUMB!" just because I said something that wasn't "LINUX IS THE BEST."
Either way, I know how your friend at work feels. I mean, not every tech is any good. And now, who knows, maybe it's degraded quite a bit. I do know that almost every one of the people I worked with (we kept in touch pretty well) were really great support techs and we've all moved on to other jobs.
It just gets to me when people are always so "screw M$!" about everything. Real people work for them. Some really nice people. It's not the average employee's fault if the company they work for isn't favored. We all work for one reason: to get paid. And let's face it, there's some serious talent working for Microsoft. A lot of their software is very good, and I have no problems saying so. It doesn't mean that I don't enjoy Linux more (I do) and it doesn't mean that there's not fantastic software for Linux (there is.)
I take a different approach to supporting my OS of choice (which is Linux.) I don't run around everywhere trying to force everyone into believing that MS is the devil. I don't try to prove that Linux is better. I use it, I like it a lot. I answer questions for people when I can. I talk highly of it, but I don't bash the competition. I think that there's a lot of good stuff in Windows, and anyone that thinks otherwise is a blinded zealot. Every day Linux gets better and better, and I enjoy watching what people do with it. It only gets better from here!
When I worked for Microsoft Support, I had a few Linux boxes under the desk. I'd let everyone connect to it so they could play around with sendmail and such; we needed to know at least a little bit about it since a lot of people used it for relaying to Exchange.
I enjoy the fact that with OSS, you can generally get in touch with the people responsible for the development of the software you are having trouble with. It's very nice, it's personal, it works. In my opinion though, like anything, it will become more and more difficult to have this close relationship as Linux keeps replacing Windows. It will always be better then support from companies like IBM, Sun, MS, etc, though.
If these large companies weren't so bent on protecting their precious "Intellectual Property" then we'd probably get much better support. It's not the tech's fault. (okay, sometimes it is!)
I don't think MS has the best technical support by a long shot, but when I worked there we weren't a bunch of brain-deads like (some) people think - the only reasoning being it's Microsoft.
--
As a footnote... it's amazing how much the folks moderating will mod down anything that's not "MS SUCKS" or "Linux RULES!!" I love slashdot, but I don't love biased moderation. Ah well it doesn't matter, my Karma is still Excellent.
It works kind of differently at MS. There is no "second level support" so to speak.
There are times when someone up the food chain might get on the phone, but they aren't 2nd level support. They are generally there to support the phone techs, not take calls for when the phone techs can't handle it.
There were Technical Leads, and "Mentors", but these people didn't take any calls.
There were of course times when a major problem was at hand, and you could hand the call off to a special "closer to the development house" tech, but these cases were extremely rare. Of the three years I did support, I heard of two such cases. All other cases were handled by our groups.
We handled everything from dumb trivial problems (yay! an easy call!) to complicated 16-hour calls involving dozens of people. The worst were the military calls.
I remember one time I had a call from the Army, they were having problems with their DMS setup. It was a hella of a bitch to figure out the problem, and I was on speaker phone with some general. The people I was working with were all "Yes, sir. I don't know, sir." and I thought it was funny to talk to him like "dude, no, this needs to be done this way. Sorry man." But, I digress.
You're assuming I'm pro-MS here, and I'm not. How do you assume to assume anything about me?
> See, it's this kind of stuff that gets me. There's NO reason that problems like these can't be pushed up to the development level.
Eventually, problems do get pushed up to development, even with companies like Sun, IBM, and Microsoft. We're not just talking about MS here anymore, if your big problem is that there's no direct communication between developers and end-users.
I just don't unserstand how you believe that anyone should be able to get in touch with a developer of a software package, no matter how big or wide-spread the usage of it is.
Would you, as a developer of say, Windows Explorer, want to be answering tech support questions all day long, or do you want to actually *develop*?
Direct communication works fine with smaller software packages. Which gets me to your first question.
> You don't think that there are more than a few copies of Linux out there?
What *IS* Linux? The kernel? Samba? MySQL? XFree? Linux is broken up into pretty small parts. Individually, you have the ability to post a message to a forum or mailing list that a developer of these packages *might* respond to.
Otherwise, you could call RedHat support (or something similar), and you won't be talking to the developers, you'll be talking to someone at RedHat.
> Look, I'm not bashing the people. I'm bashing the methods.
That's fine, but you must understand some things here. When supporting any major product that has a vast number of users, you're going to recieve a vast number of support calls. You have to sift out the bug calls from the user-error calls from the common problem calls.
It would be great if every time you called Microsoft or IBM you were talking to the guy that developed the product, or someone that wrote the documentation on it, but it's not feasable. These people are EXPENSIVE. When you have a high call volume, you can't afford to put 2,000 tech support engineers on the phone and pay them $100,000 a year each.
There are REAL financial issues when supporting a product, and there is no magic bullet to make it all run perfectly.
If everyone answering the phone cared about their job, was as good as they can be at the product, and everyone around them (higher level support, etc) were supportive too, it would work well. But, people are people no matter where you go. What can be done about this? Putting developers on the phone isn't the answer.
Compared to Windows, the users of Linux are *usually* more knowledgable about their computers, about the software, etc. The userbase is also a lot smaller then Windows. When you post a question to a mailing list, you may very well get into contact with a core developer because there aren't 10,000 people trying to get help for their problems at the same time.
Can't you use your brain?
Training and evaluation are the two top reasons. What, you don't ever get evaluated by your boss? The only way to make sure a tech is doing good work is to listen in on the calls.
Why do I even bother explaining.
Go home Anonymous Coward.
The WHOLE reason I responded is because you put all MS support techs under the umbrella of being "Braindead."
Such comments are always untrue no matter WHAT you're talking about. Haven't we learned ANYTHING about prejudices?
I simply said that the people I worked with were some of the brightest people I ever worked with and we would always be able to fix any problem with the products we supported. This directly opposes you; we're not all braindead.
No matter how much you want to keep pushing on your experiences, or what your post got modded to, or whatever; the fact remains, you were incorrect and I'm responding in defense of myself and anyone else I worked with that were top of their game.
Now you go on to talk about pushing the software "to the limit" - again drifting off topic.
And just to humor you, I'll comment about the "direct pipeline to the developers." There are millions and millions of copies of microsoft software out there. What if you, the developer, had to respond to everyone and their mother that had a problem with something you wrote? You would cease becoming a developer and you'd become a full time support person.
LOOK. I am not defending MS. I am not defending the support structure. I am not defending the techs that YOU worked with. I *AM* defending myself and others I know that are very good at what they do, while you had one bad experience and call us all braindead.
Did you ever notice that it's only the ones WITH the problems that are ever vocal?
Ohh and to add to this, how to YOU prepose to stop Microsoft? By "boycotting" them? Well, good luck, because that isn't the way to get anything done.
Ohh no, Anonymous Coward is on my foes list.
I think you need to lighten up a little bit buddy.
Fanatic zealots are never a good thing, no matter which side they are on.
I'm a huge supporter of OSS/Linux/GNU/Free. I run it on every single machine I own, even my Xbox. Woe to you for thinking you know who I am.
> Site Server CE wasn't really a NT or Exchange problem, it did ride the SQL Server engine
Not sure what you're getting at here. You're right, site server used the SQL engine core. It has nothing to do with Exchange or NT. I don't know much about Site Server, but if it uses the SQL "engine" like Exchange does, it has nothing to do with actual SQL.
> And anyway, I see I'm not alone in thinking this way.
THis is Slashdot. What did you expect? Anything anti-MS gets modded up.
Well, most people that call support haven't experienced the problem before, don't know what to do to work-around it or fix it, and don't want to spend three hours browsing the web to find a possible solution.
The support people deal with such problems on a daily basis, should have a better understanding of the software, and can help you get up and running quicker.
So I guess that's the point.
What a dumb comment.
Ur t0o l337 4 m3.