We all know that 99% of the people on/. would rather rant about MS from afar than actually fill in the survey and attempt to change anything.
I see lots of people posting their comments here; why not just fill out the survey? Are you afraid that MS might take your ideas and *gasp* build their OS better and more secure, adding competition to the market which benefits everyone?
I'd like to see all you armchair referees tell MS what you really think. MS is literally "asking for it", so tell them their OS sucks and why Linux is better. Isn't this what you always wanted to do?
I know, I agree. Just because a support channel is there doesnt mean its worth a damn.
But sometimes its just about having that channel at all. It's the accountability that managers crave.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the number one reason I have seen why companies want to go with a commercial solution versus an open-source project: its easier to sue a company when something fucks up.
Call it capitalism, call it stupid, call it whatever you want, but just dont dilude yourself into thinking thats not how it works. I'm not saying its what I believe in, but its just reality.
My post had little to do with the cost of the product or the support, as you're making it out to be.
Companies that cant afford to tinker with the source code of software that solves their problem are going to look for support plans that take care of that. If some obscure package with a minimal team solves their problem but cant provide certain levels of support (paid or otherwise) the company will find another solution that can. When dealing with their livelyhood companies just wont take a risk, perceived or imagined. Let's be honest, not every package out there comes from a large, well-known team like apache or samba, or is even a blip on the support radar of Red Hat or IBM. If it solves someones problem, a company will look at it.
Dont turn this into a pronoun war with "your type" and "paragons... like yourself". Dont make this a "you versus slashdot".
Finally, I meant that I am physically incapable of caring any less than I currently do about whether one of my posts gets moderated into the toilet:)
a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.
Skipping the alarmist "virus creators" and the generalized "too young" parts, how wrong is he?
That is definitely the majority corporate feeling towards open source solutions, the "My app patches are hinged on a 14-year-old in Korea? No 24/7/365 telephone support? No promises in writing that he'll timely fix problems? I'll pass." stigma that is stamped across anything open source. No, I'm not picking on Korea, and no, I'm not referring to the top 5% of the corporate world that has their own uber-programmers and OSI zealots already in-house.
Perhaps its the overwhelmingly condescending attitude of said community towards any newcomer digging into open source who didnt come out of the womb with the intrinsic knowledge of absolutely everything. God help them if they used Windows all their lives and are looking to change but dont know all the "lingo" necessary to obtain simple answers to mundane questions.
And while I know this will get moderated as a troll post, most users (including this one) couldnt physically care less.
He is about 15% accurate on the Linux Zealot part... that couldve been written much better.
I dont agree on the whole terrorist thing.
But it is really funny how accurate he is about Pros and Priests, yet all the Pros and Priests here (and the zealots) continue to debate that. That I find fucking hilarious.
I really wonder if Microsoft has so many more bugs and so many more patches than Linux.
I mean, after I install an average workstation of redhat 9.0 I see a lot more patches downloaded from up2date than the 36 or so for a fresh XP Pro install. Of course I mean for all the apps, not just core kernel stuff.
Minor version numbers for *nix packages seem to increase faster, which is a good thing because that means more holes getting patched faster [than Windows].
I guess my comment is that we need to see more Windows patches at a much faster rate, and stop being surprised when MS issues 4 patches in one day. Hell, up2date issues 4 new updates a day on a slow day;)
Sure, Linux users don't automagically receive training in basic email knowledge, because there isn't a grave need for it. Most Linux users grow into common sense when it comes to these things. That, or they quit using Linux because they "couldn't get it".
I believe that we as corporations should educate users on the vices of email perils, etc. Most linux users grow common sense, yes, but those are users who are adept enough to "get" linux in the first place. I'm talking about thrusting it upon users who barely know how to operate Windows. The mindless masses. The non-techie users. The sheep.
Moving linux to the corporate desktop isnt about convincing the techies, its about convincing the sheep. I would love to hear a linux advocate stand up and say "We understand the corporate masses need to be treated differently than techie users." But all I hear is "the users will conform to our way of thinking" and that just isnt gonna happen unfortunately.
Do you really think secretaries should be running foreign executables? Somebody who doesn't understand permissions, or what it means to "make something executable" shouldn't be doing it, period. And with a well-designed system, they will almost never need to. It makes more sense to set things up so that the secretary has to consult with a more knowledgable person (i.e. the system administrator) to do such a thing.
Administrative staff are constantly bombarded by email attachments. Doc files, images, all kinds of stuff that are necessary to get their job done. If you think you're going to require a secretary to just not open things because they cant understand permissions, it simply wont work. With years of training and coersion yes, I'm sure they could get into that habit. But to expect them to just stop, at this point, is unrealistic. It's counter to the way offices currently work; for linux to succeed here the first step has to be integrating nicely with the way people work, not trying to rewrite how they work. That can come later in smaller doses, gradually. But users will despise it early on.
In order to make a linux corporate desktop transition be successful, the easiest path is to make the transition easy. Secretaries wont be bothered to ask sysadmins how to open things, and sysadmins are too busy to be bothered on that level. Its counter-intuitive at that point and if thats how it currently works that model definitely has to be revisited.
Finally, if there is an attachment, it does not automatically run... ever. Instead, I have to click it, and when I do, I get a dialog box offering me three options: "Save As..." (the default), "Open With...", and "Cancel". If I have mapped a file type to a specific program - for instance, I have associated PDFs with the PS/PDF Viewer, then "Open With..." instead says "Open", and if I choose "Open", then the file opens in the PS/PDF Viewer. However, in either case, the dialog box always contains a warning advising the user that attachments can compromise security. This is all good, very good.
So it behaves exactly how OutlookXP behaves? This is all good, very good. Oh by the way, users always read dialog boxes, right?
Yet some Linux machines definitely need anti-virus software.
Some?? Why not all? What Linux box would you like me to leave unprotected in your utopian society? The one that runs your LDAP directory, or perhaps the one that processes your company's credit card purchases?
To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.
Cute catchphrase, unfortunately it doesnt mean shit. It must be nice to have the luxury of not having your OS be installed on 90% of the worlds computing resources. It buys you a nice buffer. Now if you could only port that into a usable windows-esque product I would switch in a NY minute.
a Linux user would have to read the email, save the attachment, give the attachment executable permissions, and then run the executable.
Ok, so basically all things absolutely opposite to intrinsic corporate (read: secretary) thinking. Glad to see we're comparing apples and oranges here. Come back to planet Earth, please.
Even as less sophisticated users begin to migrate to Linux, they may not understand exactly why they can't just execute attachments, but they will still have to go through the steps.
Damn right they wont understand the steps. Less sophisticated users wont migrate to Linux unless forced, an expensive proposition in the corporate world.
Further, due to the strong community around Linux, new users will receive education and encouragement in areas such as email security that are currently lacking in the Windows world, which should help to alleviate any concerns on the part of newbies.
Bwahahahahaa. From where?!?! IRC?? New linux users receive nothing but pain and torment from anyone other than paid technical support. Get over yourselves and just admit this simple folly. Right here this guy lost all credability. All of it.
Please, I emplore the Linux community, as a Windows admin, I want you to develop a better corporate desktop. But please please please get rid of this fantastic notion that the average user (the kind that make up 95% of Windows' userbase) has ANY fucking clue about anything! They dont understand permissions, they dont understand "making something executable", they dont understand package dependancy, they dont understand almost everything. It's sad, but a reality that must be recognized before it can be changed. Is it terrible? Yes. Do we wish it was different? Of course. Is it going to change by instituting rigid learn-permissions-or-die attitude? Hahaha, of course not, as I install another patch.
People like this, who spout off about changing how 2 billion people compute in the corporate office as if it were as easy as changing their socks, need a serious reality wakeup call. I'm a windows admin and I know windows is swiss cheeze. I dont deny it. Playing nice in a domain, browser elections, a disgusting reliance on RPC, abhorrent permission expectations, the need to be "chatty" with every fucking box on the network, poor quota enforcement (lack thereof for groups), poor multiple desktop support.. we know all of this. We know its bad in many areas.
But changing it starts by losing this utopian attitude that "the user will just adapt". Bullshit. That reeks of corporate office mentality inexperience. Understand your target audience before you try converting them.
I would be very interested to learn how a Linux corporate office operates. And not 10 or 20 or 100 people in the office. I'm talking 6,000 or 7,000 non-domain-managed, secretary-level-of-technical-knowledge employees. Let's stop screwing around.
Ok so that covers 1 good TV, 1 good computer, and a handful of other toys like surround sound, tivo, consoles and games. They havent even gotten to rack-mounted gigabit networking, print and file servers, gbics, and a nice laser printer.
I look around my apartment and it would take a lot more than $15k to bring myself back up to speed, let alone a family.
The company is "looking very seriously" at requiring future versions of Windows to accept automatic software fixes unless the user specifically refuses to receive them,
but linux is a long way off from 20% market share, longer than 2008 IMO. unless linux makes some abnormally large strides in (with desktop users in mind, ie - secretaries, etc) usability, package installment/dependency resolution, driver support, AD/domain support, etc the list goes on, i dont think 20% is a reasonable expectation. Maybe half that based on current growth.
I'm a windows guy, and I like/run several linux desktops and servers. I want it to be as good if not better than windows as a corporate desktop because I feel that by then linux will have been so matured and reworked that it has no choice but to be rock solid, and I look forward to that.
But I dont dilude myself with visions of grandeur. Secretaries wont understand: why copy/paste doesnt work in every app and behave consistently, why they need to download other packages just to get one program to work (or why it isnt done transparently for them), why they cant eject their cdrom by pushing the button on the front of the drive when they want to, why fonts sometimes look different, why domain credentials are no longer transparent, etc.
Maybe some of these are already solved and I am just behind the times. But I deal with non-IT end users all the time and linux would just befuddle them to no end in some of these cases. But I also know that they could learn another office suite other than MS Office, and they can fathom the purpose of multiple desktops, and they would be happy when they dont get virii so often.
I really want to see linux work even better than it is. But take it in small steps, and lose the holier-than-thou attidude that most of you have against windows [users] and we might actually take notice.
FFS it's not as if it's attacking via port 80... No properly administered system should ever get this. Home users, maybe but businesses????
Sorry but you dont obviously dont know what RPC is used for on windows. It's used from everything ranging from Outlook client connecting to Exchange, to accessing a UNC share, to authenticating to a AD domain controller. Unless your server never talks to any outside machines, and basically isnt on a network, this worm concerns you.
It's very easy to get this in a business environment, prolly moreso than at home (though home machines would stay infected longer and therefore infect more people due to home users' lax firewalling and virus dat updating habits).
Which part of "I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work." did you not understand?
The part where "cheaper" means $25/hr in America or $2.99USD per hour in India. Oh yea, people in US are willing to work "cheaper" (read: maybe make $45,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr) but with a glut of IT workers and the COL of being in India, companies can get the same job filled in India for like $12,500USD.
Ok I made most of those numbers up but you get the point.
Mr. Gates said the company was considering the possibility of charging for some of its software updates that are now made available free over the Internet.
I guess people cant think out loud anymore? Not like RedHat does anything like this (*cough* http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/offerings/). I dont think they plan on charging for what you have in mind, people. MS isnt hurting for money that bad.
As someone living in northern NJ, the most congested area in the nation (NYC metro) and the most densly-populated state in the nation, I can say from experience that carpool lanes simply do not work. For whatever bad traffic you think you have, its nothing compared to the NJ/NY area. I dont care where you are. It isnt.
Everything from inflatable people to mannequins were used just to get in that left (yes the left!) carpool lane, reffered to years ago when they were in use as "Diamond Lanes". All it did was force more cars into already-jammed right-most lanes, and when traffic was really bad that diamond lane jammed up like all the others. It was un-enforcable, impractical, and outright dangerously lethal in many cases.
To make people scramble and pay(!) to use a free road as if its going to save time or something, these people either a) havent thought this out thoroughly, or b) just dont have as bad of traffic as they think they do.
Even our NJ Turnpike has a seperate "express" lane thats free, and that backs up. Minimum speed is about 85mph on those. Toll roads are worse, because when you have this much traffic, the tolls are jammed, the express lanes are jammed, EZ-Pass lanes are jammed, there is just no where for the cars to go so why try to sell them that?:(
VBscript? ASP?.BAT? Did we forget these? Maybe they are not the gcc that people might be thinking of, but anyone who thinks you cant interact with Windows hasnt read a WSH book.
Slashdot Mirror
Get up! Get up! *kick*
Dont do this to me wonder wheel! We've been through so much.. I love you Wonder Wheel. Noooo!
I see lots of people posting their comments here; why not just fill out the survey? Are you afraid that MS might take your ideas and *gasp* build their OS better and more secure, adding competition to the market which benefits everyone?
I'd like to see all you armchair referees tell MS what you really think. MS is literally "asking for it", so tell them their OS sucks and why Linux is better. Isn't this what you always wanted to do?
...this may be the release that adds speed.
But sometimes its just about having that channel at all. It's the accountability that managers crave.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the number one reason I have seen why companies want to go with a commercial solution versus an open-source project: its easier to sue a company when something fucks up.
Call it capitalism, call it stupid, call it whatever you want, but just dont dilude yourself into thinking thats not how it works. I'm not saying its what I believe in, but its just reality.
Companies that cant afford to tinker with the source code of software that solves their problem are going to look for support plans that take care of that. If some obscure package with a minimal team solves their problem but cant provide certain levels of support (paid or otherwise) the company will find another solution that can. When dealing with their livelyhood companies just wont take a risk, perceived or imagined. Let's be honest, not every package out there comes from a large, well-known team like apache or samba, or is even a blip on the support radar of Red Hat or IBM. If it solves someones problem, a company will look at it.
Dont turn this into a pronoun war with "your type" and "paragons ... like yourself". Dont make this a "you versus slashdot".
Finally, I meant that I am physically incapable of caring any less than I currently do about whether one of my posts gets moderated into the toilet :)
Skipping the alarmist "virus creators" and the generalized "too young" parts, how wrong is he?
That is definitely the majority corporate feeling towards open source solutions, the "My app patches are hinged on a 14-year-old in Korea? No 24/7/365 telephone support? No promises in writing that he'll timely fix problems? I'll pass." stigma that is stamped across anything open source. No, I'm not picking on Korea, and no, I'm not referring to the top 5% of the corporate world that has their own uber-programmers and OSI zealots already in-house.
Perhaps its the overwhelmingly condescending attitude of said community towards any newcomer digging into open source who didnt come out of the womb with the intrinsic knowledge of absolutely everything. God help them if they used Windows all their lives and are looking to change but dont know all the "lingo" necessary to obtain simple answers to mundane questions.
And while I know this will get moderated as a troll post, most users (including this one) couldnt physically care less.
He is 100% accurate about Linux Priests.
He is about 15% accurate on the Linux Zealot part... that couldve been written much better.
I dont agree on the whole terrorist thing.
But it is really funny how accurate he is about Pros and Priests, yet all the Pros and Priests here (and the zealots) continue to debate that. That I find fucking hilarious.
IBM can spend $50m in their sleep in one week on legal fees.
I mean, after I install an average workstation of redhat 9.0 I see a lot more patches downloaded from up2date than the 36 or so for a fresh XP Pro install. Of course I mean for all the apps, not just core kernel stuff.
Minor version numbers for *nix packages seem to increase faster, which is a good thing because that means more holes getting patched faster [than Windows].
I guess my comment is that we need to see more Windows patches at a much faster rate, and stop being surprised when MS issues 4 patches in one day. Hell, up2date issues 4 new updates a day on a slow day ;)
I believe that we as corporations should educate users on the vices of email perils, etc. Most linux users grow common sense, yes, but those are users who are adept enough to "get" linux in the first place. I'm talking about thrusting it upon users who barely know how to operate Windows. The mindless masses. The non-techie users. The sheep.
Moving linux to the corporate desktop isnt about convincing the techies, its about convincing the sheep. I would love to hear a linux advocate stand up and say "We understand the corporate masses need to be treated differently than techie users." But all I hear is "the users will conform to our way of thinking" and that just isnt gonna happen unfortunately.
Administrative staff are constantly bombarded by email attachments. Doc files, images, all kinds of stuff that are necessary to get their job done. If you think you're going to require a secretary to just not open things because they cant understand permissions, it simply wont work. With years of training and coersion yes, I'm sure they could get into that habit. But to expect them to just stop, at this point, is unrealistic. It's counter to the way offices currently work; for linux to succeed here the first step has to be integrating nicely with the way people work, not trying to rewrite how they work. That can come later in smaller doses, gradually. But users will despise it early on.
In order to make a linux corporate desktop transition be successful, the easiest path is to make the transition easy. Secretaries wont be bothered to ask sysadmins how to open things, and sysadmins are too busy to be bothered on that level. Its counter-intuitive at that point and if thats how it currently works that model definitely has to be revisited.
Finally, if there is an attachment, it does not automatically run ... ever. Instead, I have to click it, and when I do, I get a dialog box offering me three options: "Save As ..." (the default), "Open With ...", and "Cancel". If I have mapped a file type to a specific program - for instance, I have associated PDFs with the PS/PDF Viewer, then "Open With ..." instead says "Open", and if I choose "Open", then the file opens in the PS/PDF Viewer. However, in either case, the dialog box always contains a warning advising the user that attachments can compromise security. This is all good, very good.
So it behaves exactly how OutlookXP behaves? This is all good, very good. Oh by the way, users always read dialog boxes, right?
Yet some Linux machines definitely need anti-virus software.
Some?? Why not all? What Linux box would you like me to leave unprotected in your utopian society? The one that runs your LDAP directory, or perhaps the one that processes your company's credit card purchases?
To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.
Cute catchphrase, unfortunately it doesnt mean shit. It must be nice to have the luxury of not having your OS be installed on 90% of the worlds computing resources. It buys you a nice buffer. Now if you could only port that into a usable windows-esque product I would switch in a NY minute.
a Linux user would have to read the email, save the attachment, give the attachment executable permissions, and then run the executable.
Ok, so basically all things absolutely opposite to intrinsic corporate (read: secretary) thinking. Glad to see we're comparing apples and oranges here. Come back to planet Earth, please.
Even as less sophisticated users begin to migrate to Linux, they may not understand exactly why they can't just execute attachments, but they will still have to go through the steps.
Damn right they wont understand the steps. Less sophisticated users wont migrate to Linux unless forced, an expensive proposition in the corporate world.
Further, due to the strong community around Linux, new users will receive education and encouragement in areas such as email security that are currently lacking in the Windows world, which should help to alleviate any concerns on the part of newbies.
Bwahahahahaa. From where?!?! IRC?? New linux users receive nothing but pain and torment from anyone other than paid technical support. Get over yourselves and just admit this simple folly. Right here this guy lost all credability. All of it.
Please, I emplore the Linux community, as a Windows admin, I want you to develop a better corporate desktop. But please please please get rid of this fantastic notion that the average user (the kind that make up 95% of Windows' userbase) has ANY fucking clue about anything! They dont understand permissions, they dont understand "making something executable", they dont understand package dependancy, they dont understand almost everything. It's sad, but a reality that must be recognized before it can be changed. Is it terrible? Yes. Do we wish it was different? Of course. Is it going to change by instituting rigid learn-permissions-or-die attitude? Hahaha, of course not, as I install another patch.
People like this, who spout off about changing how 2 billion people compute in the corporate office as if it were as easy as changing their socks, need a serious reality wakeup call. I'm a windows admin and I know windows is swiss cheeze. I dont deny it. Playing nice in a domain, browser elections, a disgusting reliance on RPC, abhorrent permission expectations, the need to be "chatty" with every fucking box on the network, poor quota enforcement (lack thereof for groups), poor multiple desktop support.. we know all of this. We know its bad in many areas.
But changing it starts by losing this utopian attitude that "the user will just adapt". Bullshit. That reeks of corporate office mentality inexperience. Understand your target audience before you try converting them.
I would be very interested to learn how a Linux corporate office operates. And not 10 or 20 or 100 people in the office. I'm talking 6,000 or 7,000 non-domain-managed, secretary-level-of-technical-knowledge employees. Let's stop screwing around.
Please god stop the agony.
I look around my apartment and it would take a lot more than $15k to bring myself back up to speed, let alone a family.
Microsft SMS and McAfee ePO.
You can turn it off. Relax. Fucking zealots.
I'm a windows guy, and I like/run several linux desktops and servers. I want it to be as good if not better than windows as a corporate desktop because I feel that by then linux will have been so matured and reworked that it has no choice but to be rock solid, and I look forward to that.
But I dont dilude myself with visions of grandeur. Secretaries wont understand: why copy/paste doesnt work in every app and behave consistently, why they need to download other packages just to get one program to work (or why it isnt done transparently for them), why they cant eject their cdrom by pushing the button on the front of the drive when they want to, why fonts sometimes look different, why domain credentials are no longer transparent, etc.
Maybe some of these are already solved and I am just behind the times. But I deal with non-IT end users all the time and linux would just befuddle them to no end in some of these cases. But I also know that they could learn another office suite other than MS Office, and they can fathom the purpose of multiple desktops, and they would be happy when they dont get virii so often.
I really want to see linux work even better than it is. But take it in small steps, and lose the holier-than-thou attidude that most of you have against windows [users] and we might actually take notice.
Umm both DOOM 3 and Quake IV are 2004 games, not 2003.
Umm, that's an IPC not an RPC. Very different :)
FFS it's not as if it's attacking via port 80... No properly administered system should ever get this. Home users, maybe but businesses????
Sorry but you dont obviously dont know what RPC is used for on windows. It's used from everything ranging from Outlook client connecting to Exchange, to accessing a UNC share, to authenticating to a AD domain controller. Unless your server never talks to any outside machines, and basically isnt on a network, this worm concerns you.
It's very easy to get this in a business environment, prolly moreso than at home (though home machines would stay infected longer and therefore infect more people due to home users' lax firewalling and virus dat updating habits).
Which part of "I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work." did you not understand?
The part where "cheaper" means $25/hr in America or $2.99USD per hour in India. Oh yea, people in US are willing to work "cheaper" (read: maybe make $45,000/yr instead of $50,000/yr) but with a glut of IT workers and the COL of being in India, companies can get the same job filled in India for like $12,500USD.
Ok I made most of those numbers up but you get the point.
I guess people cant think out loud anymore? Not like RedHat does anything like this (*cough* http://www.redhat.com/software/rhn/offerings/). I dont think they plan on charging for what you have in mind, people. MS isnt hurting for money that bad.
Everything from inflatable people to mannequins were used just to get in that left (yes the left!) carpool lane, reffered to years ago when they were in use as "Diamond Lanes". All it did was force more cars into already-jammed right-most lanes, and when traffic was really bad that diamond lane jammed up like all the others. It was un-enforcable, impractical, and outright dangerously lethal in many cases.
To make people scramble and pay(!) to use a free road as if its going to save time or something, these people either a) havent thought this out thoroughly, or b) just dont have as bad of traffic as they think they do.
Even our NJ Turnpike has a seperate "express" lane thats free, and that backs up. Minimum speed is about 85mph on those. Toll roads are worse, because when you have this much traffic, the tolls are jammed, the express lanes are jammed, EZ-Pass lanes are jammed, there is just no where for the cars to go so why try to sell them that? :(
VBscript? ASP? .BAT? Did we forget these? Maybe they are not the gcc that people might be thinking of, but anyone who thinks you cant interact with Windows hasnt read a WSH book.