Here's to the IT Observer staff! They successfully copied and pasted a press release verbatim and now are going to get the page views from Slashdot!
If you've ever written slightly technical press releases you'll know the best possible outcome is they don't edit, as it would be either factually incorrect, or totally miss the point, if they did.
My guess is they didn't understand it, and for once KNEW they didn't understand it.
Open Office came from Star Office, which had it's own desktop interface - weird but long dead, and I assume the easlier comment must refer to that long dead interface. Since these days Open Office looks like "just another Word processor".
I assume GIMP must have tried to copy some of the Photoshop interface, as plagarising an existing well known interface has to be the only plausible excuse for such an awful interface.
The same thing happened to sodopi, a great application with a pig awful interface. Then someone reworked some of the magic into Inkscape, and a usable product was born.
Then again I think with both GIMP and Inkscape you really do have to learn a bit upfront to use the applications well (as I'm sure you do with Photoshop). But the getting started is particularly painful with GIMP.
I sat down once with a "howto do web banners in GIMP" document, and despite my lack of artistic ability was soon banging out a lot of pretty banner. But without the HOWTO I'd never even have known GIMP had features for doing that sort of thing, or what half of them meant even if I had stumbled across them in the menus.
Abandon Ubuntu back for Debian on the one box I did persist with Ubuntu on - turns out something bad happened to the libraries named used in Ubuntu.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Ubuntu Live CD, and I've used it to recover several poorly PCs, but you do get the feeling it was forked from an early "unstable" in both senses version of Debian.
I'm sure the Ubuntu effort is helping push Debian to new heights, but this release every 6 months turns out software more like Microsoft's than Debian's, and if I wanted a computer that half works much of the time I could run XP home. How did GNOME ship without a graphical menu editor? How did the early Ubuntu version ship without working DVD software?
Similarly tried YUM on Redhat - it works, but the packages just weren't good enough in terms of dependencies, so that you could tell it to "get apache" and reasonably expect to come back to a working webserver.
But then it is all perspective, I look back at Redhat and criticise it because it can't do stuff Debian just does in terms of packaging, but Redhat is way ahead of certain OSes, that reboot for almost every patch, and take numerous reboots to get from installed to patched, and then it may only have patched the core OS not all the applications.
I think the problem is people lack the patience to wait for software to be ready. We all like shiny and new, up to the point it crashes and burns.
Debian also suffers from applying the same rules too all type of packages. This was especially noticable with the firefox releases, where Debian Sarge tried to make minimal patches, when even most stable users can cope with point releases of a graphical browser if it is needed for security. However I'm not sure what the right rules to apply are, if I knew that I'd be either rich or on the Debian release team.
"This article, while interesting, was riddled with spelling errors. Enough to make reading it a chore."
I was too busy coping with the bizarre font changes, to notice any spelling mistakes (not that I can spell).
Still interesting article. Eventually I'll find enough time to peel the shrinkwrap off the Xandros v3 Deluxe edition here, and build a PC for my partners father.
"if you don't change everything back so I can get my email in the next 30 minutes"
Outlook is quite capable of spontaneously stopping people from reading their email for half an hour without any help from Linux servers (or Exchange).
I seem to remember several versions do quite a good job of this when you get more than 2^16 email in one folder. Then there is Microsofts idea of "security" which is to make it so complex to use certain sorts of attachments no one will ever try.
Heck I sent my boss an email with a text inline part before an HTML inline part, and Outlook just hid the text part - cool.
If the guy is looking to lose the grief of Microsoft software Outlook, and Outlook Express, are my idea of low hanging fruit. Heck I moved a guy at the Office to Thunderbird because he needed IMAP4 (yeah right Outlook supports IMAP4 - meanwhile back in the real world....).
I was selling and installing embedded Linux devices for the Enterprise Infrastructure market about 8 years ago. I'm willing to bet some of them are still deployed and working, although I think the loss of hardware support will have caused some people to upgrade. Hey the vendor had to preserve its revenue somehow, perils of capitalism, not the software.
I think Gartner should make it clear they mean 5 years in the past, that would explain why the number of years away from Linux going mainstream are getting bigger all the time.
Also a lot of the Free Software works better on Linux. Certainly I've seen far less issues with Firefox and Thunderbird on well set-up Debian installs.
Although no doubt a lot of that is "systems decay", due to far too mellow policies on software installation.
"I run multiple firewalls on my systems AT HOME, plus antivirus and antispyware programs. I actually review my logs. I don't run any program that was written more recently than my AV updates. I'm what most "normal" people would consider paranoid. And I still run into issues."
Funny on my home system, I have one firewall, I don't run antivirus, I don't run antispyware, none of the code I run is signed (or if it is the installation utility doesn't check the signature (yet)), I visit all the worse places, I've run honeypots, and tarpits on the box, and I review the logs erratically usually only when I fiddle and break something, and I've never run into any security issues in 5 years.
I did have to release a patch for a piece of software in response to a Bugtraq post at one point, no boxes were known to be compromised by that flaw.
I think perhaps your problem is not selecting the software you use carefully enough.
"In other words - if you talk to a good Windows admin they'll think that the Linux system is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to Windows. If you talk to a *nix admin they'll tell you Windows is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to *nix."
Yes but Windows is an order of magnitude worse, even when you do come to understand it.
Pick anything from copying a file upwards, Windows introduces unnecessary complexity, and general bad design decisions.
I can make a good case for Windows being worse on;
file copying file deleting
And this just covers basic things like naming, and semantics, not even touching on things like file security (or as today finding you don't have permissions to delete a file as administrator, and being told "file is in use" as the error message ).
Heck my recent experience shows several of Microsoft's own system developers don't understand the Active Directory handling of user accounts, and it has been the default for over 5 years outside of MS, and presumably longer inside.
"I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW."
The hardware may be obselete, but if it is still doing the job you replace it when it fails (or ideally just before). Not having a replacement plan could be an issue, and I suspect these people don't.
The idea there is some perpetual upgrade path we all must walk is a myth created by the IT industry to keep sales figures high, and sustained in part by bad software engineering.
It isn't even obvious they have a management issue, just because they get outside help to sort problems on the boxes, if they only have an issue every few years it is cheaper not to employ the expertise.
I've had 10 year old systems fail whilst still under vendor support contracts, fixed and returned to service inside 24 hours, why should we have replaced them if the economics didn't justify it?
Mind interface features are often a matter of taste and experience.
Last night I watched some BBC online program where the presenter was extolling the virtues of some Windows add-on that lets you fix a Windows to remain on top of other Windows. I wasn't even aware Windows was lacking this feature, I certainly haven't missed it, despite using it all the time on GNU/Linux, but most X Window managers have done this since pretty much the beginning.
There is no intuitive interface (except possibly the nipple), and it took me a while to figure out how to talk to the Macos X chess program (although I did beat it in my first couple of games;-). You'd think talking would be pretty intuitive to me;-)
Certainly I don't think MacosX is stunningly different in ease of use, but does seem to be a tad more coherent than some other offerings in terms of centralising settings.
A good example is Web Proxies, where Windows Update just ignores the settings in IE, where as MacosX and GNOME make them a central setting (although not everything then reuses them). This is not rocket science, but it can make the difference between pleasant and frustrating.
When the Debian installer took to both remembering the proxy settings throughout the install, AND recording them for later use by the OS, my life was just that little bit better. But I don't think they then the default option in GNOME alas.
Please give data for a three decade long cooling trend.
All I see if an unusual warming glitch covering roughly the period of the second world war, and then a fairly neutral period for two decades.
But even if there had been a cooling period, this still doesn't give an explanation for the sudden acceleration in warming in the last thirty years.
I think also too soon to say the data has peaked.
Currently by global surface temperature we have hottest year on record 1998, second hottest 2002, third 2003, fourth 2004, but unless something radical happens 2005 is set to grab the number 2 spot.
The problem with the solar activity theories, is you either believe there is a big lag in the system, or the system hasn't cooled down inspite of lulls in solar activity. Either way those betting on global cooling before 2017 should have asked for odds. Betting against extrapolation isn't the smart move.
I don't believe there are any experiments showing information transfer >C (speed of photons in a vacuum), except possibly as the thread discusses over very short distances where the impedance is less than that of the vacuum of space.
Pair spin experiments can not transmit information (in the sense of sending an email) unless it has moved on since I studied quantum mechanics (which is possible).
Information transmission >C permits all sorts of paradoxes to arise if our current understanding of space and time is even vaguely close to right, so finding such would be major news in Physics.
"You're dead right there - if immense regions of the world started to catastrophically change in environmental terms, it would indeed be cause for significant alarm."
Go read about the thickness, and extent of the Arctic Ice cap.
It is hard to simply quantify it, the extent of ice was estimated to be decreasing by about 3% a decade since 1960. However there is some evidence that the thickness of the ice has decreased significantly faster, suggesting we are losing significantly more than 5% by volume every decade.
The extent of multiyear ice is estimated to be receding by 7% a decade. Probably a reasonable back of the envelope number to work with. Suggests some/. readers will live to see a one ice cap planet.
Of course only polar bears live in the arctic, but alas it is crucial to affecting global ocean currents.
These are catastrophic changes in climate. Of course they could be caused by natural variability in climate, it is likely that our current civilisation would only develop in a particularly favourable natural climate. However the evidence is for a very sudden acceleration in warming since 1960, and the sceptics need to explain that.
'"Reboot the machine and lets see what happens". Honestly, most of time the reboot does fix the problem.'
I hate to be picky, but rebooting very rarely solves a software problem. I have seen a couple of boxes boot, and the boot scripts correct whatever was wrong, but that is perhaps a couple of times in a career, and I'd worry about whoever wrote those boot scripts writing any more software for me, because it is exactly that sort of thing that makes managing IT systems difficult.
Rebooting might work around a problem (maybe this workaround is "good enough"). It might make the system work okay for a bit, but the underlying problem is still there.
When you say weird quirks in proprietary software, do you get these quirks as often on the AS/400, HP-UX, or Oracle?
Last time I looked SUN hardware was remarkably cheap, certainly competitive in the rackmount area with generic x86 servers.
Sure it gets expensive at the big end of the market, but very few organisation actually need big hardware like that. Certainly far fewer than think they need it.
A cynic might suggest it only gets sold to IT directors who use to work on multimillion pound machines, and thus think anything less that 250,000USD must be very suspect.
My experience is Windows administration is a lot harder than Unix.
Unix/Linux boxes tend to do what you tell them, and just not work till you get it right.
Windows boxes will often kind of work if you clicked roughly the right buttons, and ticked roughly the right boxes, only to discover a few days later you missed something vital, or you need some obscure registry settings to make it work correctly.
Windows boxes will then suddenly do something weird, and apparently unrelated, and a few hours of downtime later you find the relevant knowledgebase article, and think "what the hell?", or "why me?".
Just compare the complexity of something like name resolution.
*nix - check/etc/hosts then ask the DNS (maybe ask NIS if the admins are insanely stupid or keen, possibly search some extra domains in the DNS if the admin is lazy).
Windows - ponder my registry a bit, decide what sort of node I am and in what order to do things, check hosts file, check lmhosts, check all the DNS servers in case the admin is clueless about DNS, ask a WINS (or maybe something did that for it already) server, shout in case anyone around knows the answer. Oh time to register my name in the DNS again. Is my domain "shortname" or "shortname.ads.example.com"?
The only reason Windows admins get paid less is there are a lot of people who think they are Windows admins who depress the market prices.
Most of the really bright people I know try desparately not to be Windows admins, because bashing your head against Redmond's connundrums on a daily basis isn't fun, and occaisonally nerve racking. Interspersed with remarkably long and dull periods of reinstalling, and/or rebooting.
As such I'm sure in a more developed market you would have to pay a premium for Windows admins.
In this case Google got the context, it was just exercising it's sarcasm module;)
On the other hand possibly there aren't that many "Longhorn" related adverts yet in Adsense, beside I assume it is the cattle breeder who chose "longhorn" as a keyword, Google may not know what he is selling. Probably he is selling the same thing as Microsoft, except by the sack load.
"http" 2.1 billion Yahoo claims, 2.36 billion Google claims, and Google was back in half the time.
But Yahoo gives you a page titled "Hypertext Tranfer Protocol Overview www.w3.org/Protocols", Google gives you the Microsoft website (huh?) in first place.
Hmm, after trying a few others I've decided I need a simpler ranking system. As the results are far too evenly balanced to call.
Yahoo gives me higher ranking for my own name than Google, so clearly it has a better algorithmn, anyone who disagrees will have to fight my ego.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever written slightly technical press releases you'll know the best possible outcome is they don't edit, as it would be either factually incorrect, or totally miss the point, if they did.
My guess is they didn't understand it, and for once KNEW they didn't understand it.
Next weeks
Neither are blatant rip offs.
Open Office came from Star Office, which had it's own desktop interface - weird but long dead, and I assume the easlier comment must refer to that long dead interface. Since these days Open Office looks like "just another Word processor".
I assume GIMP must have tried to copy some of the Photoshop interface, as plagarising an existing well known interface has to be the only plausible excuse for such an awful interface.
The same thing happened to sodopi, a great application with a pig awful interface. Then someone reworked some of the magic into Inkscape, and a usable product was born.
Then again I think with both GIMP and Inkscape you really do have to learn a bit upfront to use the applications well (as I'm sure you do with Photoshop). But the getting started is particularly painful with GIMP.
I sat down once with a "howto do web banners in GIMP" document, and despite my lack of artistic ability was soon banging out a lot of pretty banner. But without the HOWTO I'd never even have known GIMP had features for doing that sort of thing, or what half of them meant even if I had stumbled across them in the menus.
Can we make that +6 ;)
Abandon Ubuntu back for Debian on the one box I did persist with Ubuntu on - turns out something bad happened to the libraries named used in Ubuntu.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Ubuntu Live CD, and I've used it to recover several poorly PCs, but you do get the feeling it was forked from an early "unstable" in both senses version of Debian.
I'm sure the Ubuntu effort is helping push Debian to new heights, but this release every 6 months turns out software more like Microsoft's than Debian's, and if I wanted a computer that half works much of the time I could run XP home. How did GNOME ship without a graphical menu editor? How did the early Ubuntu version ship without working DVD software?
Similarly tried YUM on Redhat - it works, but the packages just weren't good enough in terms of dependencies, so that you could tell it to "get apache" and reasonably expect to come back to a working webserver.
But then it is all perspective, I look back at Redhat and criticise it because it can't do stuff Debian just does in terms of packaging, but Redhat is way ahead of certain OSes, that reboot for almost every patch, and take numerous reboots to get from installed to patched, and then it may only have patched the core OS not all the applications.
I think the problem is people lack the patience to wait for software to be ready. We all like shiny and new, up to the point it crashes and burns.
Debian also suffers from applying the same rules too all type of packages. This was especially noticable with the firefox releases, where Debian Sarge tried to make minimal patches, when even most stable users can cope with point releases of a graphical browser if it is needed for security. However I'm not sure what the right rules to apply are, if I knew that I'd be either rich or on the Debian release team.
"This article, while interesting, was riddled with spelling errors. Enough to make reading it a chore."
I was too busy coping with the bizarre font changes, to notice any spelling mistakes (not that I can spell).
Still interesting article. Eventually I'll find enough time to peel the shrinkwrap off the Xandros v3 Deluxe edition here, and build a PC for my partners father.
"if you don't change everything back so I can get my email in the next 30 minutes"
Outlook is quite capable of spontaneously stopping people from reading their email for half an hour without any help from Linux servers (or Exchange).
I seem to remember several versions do quite a good job of this when you get more than 2^16 email in one folder. Then there is Microsofts idea of "security" which is to make it so complex to use certain sorts of attachments no one will ever try.
Heck I sent my boss an email with a text inline part before an HTML inline part, and Outlook just hid the text part - cool.
If the guy is looking to lose the grief of Microsoft software Outlook, and Outlook Express, are my idea of low hanging fruit. Heck I moved a guy at the Office to Thunderbird because he needed IMAP4 (yeah right Outlook supports IMAP4 - meanwhile back in the real world....).
"However I think to be really mainstream Linux needs more *advertising*."
How about Linus gives them a discount on the licence fee if they paste "$COMPANY recommends Linux" on their website and marketing material.
I was selling and installing embedded Linux devices for the Enterprise Infrastructure market about 8 years ago. I'm willing to bet some of them are still deployed and working, although I think the loss of hardware support will have caused some people to upgrade. Hey the vendor had to preserve its revenue somehow, perils of capitalism, not the software.
I think Gartner should make it clear they mean 5 years in the past, that would explain why the number of years away from Linux going mainstream are getting bigger all the time.
Agreed.
Also a lot of the Free Software works better on Linux. Certainly I've seen far less issues with Firefox and Thunderbird on well set-up Debian installs.
Although no doubt a lot of that is "systems decay", due to far too mellow policies on software installation.
"I run multiple firewalls on my systems AT HOME, plus antivirus and antispyware programs. I actually review my logs. I don't run any program that was written more recently than my AV updates. I'm what most "normal" people would consider paranoid. And I still run into issues."
Funny on my home system, I have one firewall, I don't run antivirus, I don't run antispyware, none of the code I run is signed (or if it is the installation utility doesn't check the signature (yet)), I visit all the worse places, I've run honeypots, and tarpits on the box, and I review the logs erratically usually only when I fiddle and break something, and I've never run into any security issues in 5 years.
I did have to release a patch for a piece of software in response to a Bugtraq post at one point, no boxes were known to be compromised by that flaw.
I think perhaps your problem is not selecting the software you use carefully enough.
Streuth - you are saying we sign code to prove it was written or approved by us, whatever next.
Next your be claiming the "always trust Microsoft" box means you trust Microsoft to manage their certificates correctly.
In other news SPF failed to stop the spam problem, but did ensure email from Paypal.com came from Paypal.com.
"In other words - if you talk to a good Windows admin they'll think that the Linux system is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to Windows. If you talk to a *nix admin they'll tell you Windows is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to *nix."
Yes but Windows is an order of magnitude worse, even when you do come to understand it.
Pick anything from copying a file upwards, Windows introduces unnecessary complexity, and general bad design decisions.
I can make a good case for Windows being worse on;
file copying
file deleting
And this just covers basic things like naming, and semantics, not even touching on things like file security (or as today finding you don't have permissions to delete a file as administrator, and being told "file is in use" as the error message ).
Heck my recent experience shows several of Microsoft's own system developers don't understand the Active Directory handling of user accounts, and it has been the default for over 5 years outside of MS, and presumably longer inside.
"I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW."
The hardware may be obselete, but if it is still doing the job you replace it when it fails (or ideally just before). Not having a replacement plan could be an issue, and I suspect these people don't.
The idea there is some perpetual upgrade path we all must walk is a myth created by the IT industry to keep sales figures high, and sustained in part by bad software engineering.
It isn't even obvious they have a management issue, just because they get outside help to sort problems on the boxes, if they only have an issue every few years it is cheaper not to employ the expertise.
I've had 10 year old systems fail whilst still under vendor support contracts, fixed and returned to service inside 24 hours, why should we have replaced them if the economics didn't justify it?
"You mean open source doesn't solve every software problem?"
;)
Even the mere scent of open source software can cut your HP-UX running costs
Mind interface features are often a matter of taste and experience.
;-). You'd think talking would be pretty intuitive to me ;-)
Last night I watched some BBC online program where the presenter was extolling the virtues of some Windows add-on that lets you fix a Windows to remain on top of other Windows. I wasn't even aware Windows was lacking this feature, I certainly haven't missed it, despite using it all the time on GNU/Linux, but most X Window managers have done this since pretty much the beginning.
There is no intuitive interface (except possibly the nipple), and it took me a while to figure out how to talk to the Macos X chess program (although I did beat it in my first couple of games
Certainly I don't think MacosX is stunningly different in ease of use, but does seem to be a tad more coherent than some other offerings in terms of centralising settings.
A good example is Web Proxies, where Windows Update just ignores the settings in IE, where as MacosX and GNOME make them a central setting (although not everything then reuses them). This is not rocket science, but it can make the difference between pleasant and frustrating.
When the Debian installer took to both remembering the proxy settings throughout the install, AND recording them for later use by the OS, my life was just that little bit better. But I don't think they then the default option in GNOME alas.
"He also believe's it's wrong to get paid for programming"
How do you think he has earned his living (okay up to the point people started giving him big sums of money for being a nice guy).
I suspect he thinks the publishing model where you get paid again and again for something you did once, a long time ago, is less than ideal.
But typing "cp" isn't programming as far as I can tell.
Please give data for a three decade long cooling trend.
All I see if an unusual warming glitch covering roughly the period of the second world war, and then a fairly neutral period for two decades.
But even if there had been a cooling period, this still doesn't give an explanation for the sudden acceleration in warming in the last thirty years.
I think also too soon to say the data has peaked.
Currently by global surface temperature we have hottest year on record 1998, second hottest 2002, third 2003, fourth 2004, but unless something radical happens 2005 is set to grab the number 2 spot.
The problem with the solar activity theories, is you either believe there is a big lag in the system, or the system hasn't cooled down inspite of lulls in solar activity. Either way those betting on global cooling before 2017 should have asked for odds. Betting against extrapolation isn't the smart move.
You need to get your science from somewhere other than the New York Times.
I don't believe there are any experiments showing information transfer >C (speed of photons in a vacuum), except possibly as the thread discusses over very short distances where the impedance is less than that of the vacuum of space.
Pair spin experiments can not transmit information (in the sense of sending an email) unless it has moved on since I studied quantum mechanics (which is possible).
Information transmission >C permits all sorts of paradoxes to arise if our current understanding of space and time is even vaguely close to right, so finding such would be major news in Physics.
"You're dead right there - if immense regions of the world started to catastrophically change in environmental terms, it would indeed be cause for significant alarm."
/. readers will live to see a one ice cap planet.
Go read about the thickness, and extent of the Arctic Ice cap.
It is hard to simply quantify it, the extent of ice was estimated to be decreasing by about 3% a decade since 1960. However there is some evidence that the thickness of the ice has decreased significantly faster, suggesting we are losing significantly more than 5% by volume every decade.
The extent of multiyear ice is estimated to be receding by 7% a decade. Probably a reasonable back of the envelope number to work with. Suggests some
Of course only polar bears live in the arctic, but alas it is crucial to affecting global ocean currents.
These are catastrophic changes in climate. Of course they could be caused by natural variability in climate, it is likely that our current civilisation would only develop in a particularly favourable natural climate. However the evidence is for a very sudden acceleration in warming since 1960, and the sceptics need to explain that.
'"Reboot the machine and lets see what happens". Honestly, most of time the reboot does fix the problem.'
I hate to be picky, but rebooting very rarely solves a software problem. I have seen a couple of boxes boot, and the boot scripts correct whatever was wrong, but that is perhaps a couple of times in a career, and I'd worry about whoever wrote those boot scripts writing any more software for me, because it is exactly that sort of thing that makes managing IT systems difficult.
Rebooting might work around a problem (maybe this workaround is "good enough"). It might make the system work okay for a bit, but the underlying problem is still there.
When you say weird quirks in proprietary software, do you get these quirks as often on the AS/400, HP-UX, or Oracle?
Last time I looked SUN hardware was remarkably cheap, certainly competitive in the rackmount area with generic x86 servers.
/etc/hosts then ask the DNS (maybe ask NIS if the admins are insanely stupid or keen, possibly search some extra domains in the DNS if the admin is lazy).
Sure it gets expensive at the big end of the market, but very few organisation actually need big hardware like that. Certainly far fewer than think they need it.
A cynic might suggest it only gets sold to IT directors who use to work on multimillion pound machines, and thus think anything less that 250,000USD must be very suspect.
My experience is Windows administration is a lot harder than Unix.
Unix/Linux boxes tend to do what you tell them, and just not work till you get it right.
Windows boxes will often kind of work if you clicked roughly the right buttons, and ticked roughly the right boxes, only to discover a few days later you missed something vital, or you need some obscure registry settings to make it work correctly.
Windows boxes will then suddenly do something weird, and apparently unrelated, and a few hours of downtime later you find the relevant knowledgebase article, and think "what the hell?", or "why me?".
Just compare the complexity of something like name resolution.
*nix - check
Windows - ponder my registry a bit, decide what sort of node I am and in what order to do things, check hosts file, check lmhosts, check all the DNS servers in case the admin is clueless about DNS, ask a WINS (or maybe something did that for it already) server, shout in case anyone around knows the answer. Oh time to register my name in the DNS again. Is my domain "shortname" or "shortname.ads.example.com"?
The only reason Windows admins get paid less is there are a lot of people who think they are Windows admins who depress the market prices.
Most of the really bright people I know try desparately not to be Windows admins, because bashing your head against Redmond's connundrums on a daily basis isn't fun, and occaisonally nerve racking. Interspersed with remarkably long and dull periods of reinstalling, and/or rebooting.
As such I'm sure in a more developed market you would have to pay a premium for Windows admins.
I thought IBM was supporting Linux just fine by NOT porting Lotus Notes to it.
The HP-UX Notes client was the only program I ever needed to reboot a Unix workstation to fix a problem with!
In this case Google got the context, it was just exercising it's sarcasm module ;)
On the other hand possibly there aren't that many "Longhorn" related adverts yet in Adsense, beside I assume it is the cattle breeder who chose "longhorn" as a keyword, Google may not know what he is selling. Probably he is selling the same thing as Microsoft, except by the sack load.
Okay try some large results searches.
"http" 2.1 billion Yahoo claims, 2.36 billion Google claims, and Google was back in half the time.
But Yahoo gives you a page titled "Hypertext Tranfer Protocol Overview www.w3.org/Protocols", Google gives you the Microsoft website (huh?) in first place.
Hmm, after trying a few others I've decided I need a simpler ranking system. As the results are far too evenly balanced to call.
Yahoo gives me higher ranking for my own name than Google, so clearly it has a better algorithmn, anyone who disagrees will have to fight my ego.