Frankly, this is why I gave up about Linux-on-the-desktop back in, I'm not sure, 2000 or so.
Right. So in other words, because Linux wasn't what you wanted eight years ago, you threw your toys out the pram then and have never bothered to pick them up since.
If that's your decision, then I respect it. But none of us emerged from the womb with an innate ability to operate a PC, Windows & a mouse. Everyone went through a learning curve with every OS they ever used, the only difference with Windows is that it's less obvious.
If by impossible to match you mean an email server that needs to be mothered and looked after then yes, the alternatives can't match the flakey Exchange server.
Whilst I entirely agree with your sentiment, I think you're still missing the point. Enterprises KNOW that Exchange servers need a lot of maintenance and have the people to do that in place by now.
Yes, we could both argue that the UNIX philosophy of having simple tools to do a simple job is better, both Exchange and Outlook are, by their complexities, prone to problems - but the fact is that businesses now understand the limitations of those products and have appropriate contingencies in place.
I myself don't like the bloat of Outlook and would love to be in a position at home where I could ditch my dual-booting XP installations on my desktop and laptop to move everything 100% to Linux. But one thing stopping me from doing that is synchronising data with my mobile phone/PDA which I cannot find a way of doing from a Linux desktop.
This is precisely why proprietary standards for interfaces don't work - because they lock users into particular products, even though they are technically inferior.
He went on to make "Starcops", one of the best grown-up SF series ever (despite the cheesy title), with even sharper scripts and characters.
One of the most appealing things about "Starcops" are the long sections of dialogue where everyone is just throwing snappy, one-line & smug answers back & forth at each other. I do like the series because it's basically a bunch of smart-arsed miserable British in space and there's no way the Yanks could remake it as they just wouldn't understand it!
In other words, then, you preferred them when they were four musicians all racing each other to get to the end of the song first rather than later on when they were sucking on the teat of their record company.
I've been a rock & metal fan for 30+ years now & when Metallica killed Napster I sold all of their CDs on eBay & vowed never to listen to anything of their's again. No, I wholeheartedly disagree with unlicensed music copying but I also buy huge amounts of CDs, will never buy anything with DRM on it & found it very impossible to have any pity for multi-millionaire Lars Ulrich's loud-mouthed whining about Napster, purely because he couldn't change his Rolls Royce because the ashtray's were full in the old one.
These days I've broadened my musical taste considerably & whilst I do think Radiohead are a bit up their own asses, they have made some excellent music & I believe their hearts are in the right places.
And let's face it, Metallica need to make some kind of directional change since their last few albums have essentially flopped.
Perhaps their next album should be a sequel - "Mastered As Puppets (Of The Record Company)".
I have several major clients in London and Canary Wharf that I visit occasionally. I do have a glance at the machines on people's desks as I'm making my way to a server room somewhere but I can't recall ever seeing a Mac.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your statement, it's just a matter of experience. If anything, whilst I do see a few Linux PCs in my travels (I'm primarily a Linux user myself) I don't see as many on desktops as I thought I would - though I guess the far majority of Linux machines are in server rooms.
It's actually very easy to understand - Microsoft wants every XP user to buy Vista and to make it as difficult as possible for those of us who are "hanging on to dear life" to XP.
Apple sold well over 8M Macs in the last year, that's a whole lot of sales to beat.
As I've said on here many times before, I've worked in the telecoms/IT industry for 25+ years now as a techie of various types.
And in ***ALL*** that time here in the UK, I have seen a total of ***THREE*** Macs anywhere - one was a notebook owned by an American trainer on a course I did, my friend has a Mac gathering dust in its box in his study because his boss gave it to him not knowing what to do with it and he doesn't know what to do with it either, and the third was a student posing with one in a local coffee store.
Yes, Macs may have a higher penetration in the US, I'm not arguing that. But over here in the UK (and I suspect Europe), I suspect more people still own Amigas than they do Macs - they really are ***LOW*** penetration over here.
Also, please bear in mind that in Europe, Linux penetration is far higher than it is in the US which also goes some way to explaining why Macs are very uncommon.
You need to realise that despite the very good Euro/Dollar & Sterling/Dollar exchange rates currently, over here we never benefit too much from those because US manufacturers consistently rip us off for pricing. Only the other day, I picked up an O'Reilly book in a bookshop that had a $49.99 cover price but was £39.99 to buy in Sterling - nowhere near the 2:1 Sterling/Dollar exchange rate that there is currently.
This is exactly what happens when you have a bunch of idiots running webservers. Come on people, it is not that hard to keep up with your updates...morons. For example, my site has been reviewed for security flaws by many, and has never had any problems, even with the php and MySql. Simply because I keep up with the patches. See for yourself: www.onesullivan.com
To be honest, I'm not sure I'd give you much credit in the intelligence stakes either, my friend.
I mean, bragging on Slashdot that you're web site has never been hacked and then posting it's URL???
I could argue that when I used my ISPs email servers (which, in effect, I paid for due to the monthly payment to my ISP), I ended up using my Linux server as a local mail filter to apply Procmail filtering against so that I could filter out all of the spam before I ever saw it.
Whilst I actually quite enjoyed fiddling about with Procmail and SpamAssassin configurations, now I've moved to Gmail their spam filtering does it all for me. And yes, I do use the Gmail web interface occasionally but most of the time I use IMAP access - consequently, the already "subtle" Google adverts on the web interface just don't really affect me at all.
So if I'm already getting this as a free service (along with a few Gigabytes of storage to boot), why would I bother with a paid for service?
Sure, if you have a legitimate need to send out hundreds or thousands of emails via a mailshot, then you probably would be prepared to pay for such a service - after all, if you, say, have a PC components company and mailshot those people who have bought from you in the past, then you probably get quite a good amount of repeat business from it anyway.
Oh Boy - here come the endless "we should do THIS" scenarios.... we should pay for each e-mail... we should all whitelist... we should throttle how many messages a person can send each day... we should outlaw webmail like Yahoo or Gmail...
I don't think we should pay for email but I do think a small one-off nominal charge that relies upon divulging a credit card number of Paypal ID would be a great deterrent against someone anonymously using these accounts for spam generation.
In the RW people like to change e-mail addresses, or create new ones for specific needs.
If I've ever changed an email address then it's because of either finding a better service or just changing it due to the volume of spam I was getting. If the method above inhibits spam generation in the first place, then the need to change email address would surely be reduced.
In the RW a lot of people and businesses send a lot of bulk e-mail, very legitimate opted-in e-mail.
Then use some kind of sender authentication service for the scenario where the same email goes to, say, more than 20 people.
No, what's needed is a real ground-up redesign of how e-mail works. we need something that encompasses the ease of current POP/IMAP/Webmail services, but which somehow includes ways to authenticate and/or block mail without user intervention, and which does so with near perfect reliability. And which maintains some backwards compatibility for at least a few years.
It's not the mail services themselves that are the problem, it's the authentication required to use those services on certain mail servers. The real problem is that in many cases, it's very easy to create an email account anonymously and it's that point that should be changed - if you can always link an email account to a real live person then you can deal with them quickly when they abuse that account.
From the outset, I should say that I really like Windows XP once it's been stripped down and run through nLite to get as much of the excess baggage out of it as possible - as other people have said already, XP can be stripped down a helluva lot and whilst I don't (yet!) own a EEEPC, running XP on a box of the EEEPC's specification is no biggie - with the exception of the screen resolution possibly.
But bearing in mind that these days my computing time is split 80%/20% in favour of Linux over XP, my real problem with XP is the registry.
If I'm going to buy a EEEPC then I will do so because of it's portability for where I can't easily use my desktop PC or a laptop. Therefore a EEEPC won't be my main computing platform but a means to carry about some of the applications that I regularly use, whether or not I buy the Linux or XP based EEEPC.
And here is where Linux has a distinct advantage over XP. Whilst no-one is denying that many users find configuring Linux a daunting task that often involves manually editing text configuration files for applications, the fact is that once they are written, it's very easy to copy the configuration files over to another PC to have those applications work in precisely the same way on that other PC. A case in point is the Vim editor where I've spent a long time over the years creating and changing a configuration file that does all manner of wonderful things with shortcuts and macros. And because Vim's configuration files are held in my home Linux directory (along with the configuration files of just about every other application that I've customised), then it's dead easy to manually copy them to a new machine, or get a shell script with a little rsync knowledge to update config files across machines pretty much automatically.
Unfortunately, in the case of Windows, most commercial applications obfuscate their configurations deliberately inside the registry and it's pretty much impossible to find and export those parts of the registry so that, when one of those applications gets used on another machine, it's difficult to bring its configuration across with it.
This is why, with XP, I am doing my utmost to wean myself off of any commercial Windows applications - simply because many of the free and Open Source ones already come in "portable" versions that can be stuck on a USB memory stick, for example, so that all configuration files are held locally to the application. Additionally, a lot of the applications are moving to XML-based configuration files which, again, can just be copied across between machines.
This is where Microsoft's "me, myself and I" mentality is really beginning to cause it some problems - the fact is that people are now own more than one computing device and don't want to have to fully install and configure every application (or the desktop environment even) on each new device. With Linux, just copy your home directory over and you can be pretty sure the configuration file you need has gone with it.
And if someone can explain to me the logic behind the "Documents and Settings" folder in Windows, I'd be grateful. Why-oh-why are there protected and inaccessible files (when Windows is running) in there such that you can't just copy the whole thing off to another machine when you need to?
If someone can explain the logic behind the registry I'd be grateful - again, I've used Windows since Windows For Workgroups and (with the exception of ME and maybe Vista) it's got better with each new iteration - but the registry must be the most ***STUPID*** design decision within Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean bridge that previously impassable void between adolescent giggling girl & overwieght middle-aged grumpy fat bloke? Impossible!
I'm waiting for the next Ubuntu release to be called "Pink Python" or "Skin Snake" - then the headline would be even better!
Right. So in other words, because Linux wasn't what you wanted eight years ago, you threw your toys out the pram then and have never bothered to pick them up since.
If that's your decision, then I respect it. But none of us emerged from the womb with an innate ability to operate a PC, Windows & a mouse. Everyone went through a learning curve with every OS they ever used, the only difference with Windows is that it's less obvious.
"Gor blimee, luv! Go a bit easier on the hardy heron, will ya? I'm still wearing me truss!"
...1-800-GIVASHIT.
Whilst I entirely agree with your sentiment, I think you're still missing the point. Enterprises KNOW that Exchange servers need a lot of maintenance and have the people to do that in place by now.
Yes, we could both argue that the UNIX philosophy of having simple tools to do a simple job is better, both Exchange and Outlook are, by their complexities, prone to problems - but the fact is that businesses now understand the limitations of those products and have appropriate contingencies in place.
I myself don't like the bloat of Outlook and would love to be in a position at home where I could ditch my dual-booting XP installations on my desktop and laptop to move everything 100% to Linux. But one thing stopping me from doing that is synchronising data with my mobile phone/PDA which I cannot find a way of doing from a Linux desktop.
This is precisely why proprietary standards for interfaces don't work - because they lock users into particular products, even though they are technically inferior.
One of the most appealing things about "Starcops" are the long sections of dialogue where everyone is just throwing snappy, one-line & smug answers back & forth at each other. I do like the series because it's basically a bunch of smart-arsed miserable British in space and there's no way the Yanks could remake it as they just wouldn't understand it!
In other words, then, you preferred them when they were four musicians all racing each other to get to the end of the song first rather than later on when they were sucking on the teat of their record company.
I've been a rock & metal fan for 30+ years now & when Metallica killed Napster I sold all of their CDs on eBay & vowed never to listen to anything of their's again. No, I wholeheartedly disagree with unlicensed music copying but I also buy huge amounts of CDs, will never buy anything with DRM on it & found it very impossible to have any pity for multi-millionaire Lars Ulrich's loud-mouthed whining about Napster, purely because he couldn't change his Rolls Royce because the ashtray's were full in the old one.
These days I've broadened my musical taste considerably & whilst I do think Radiohead are a bit up their own asses, they have made some excellent music & I believe their hearts are in the right places.
And let's face it, Metallica need to make some kind of directional change since their last few albums have essentially flopped.
Perhaps their next album should be a sequel - "Mastered As Puppets (Of The Record Company)".
I have several major clients in London and Canary Wharf that I visit occasionally. I do have a glance at the machines on people's desks as I'm making my way to a server room somewhere but I can't recall ever seeing a Mac.
I'm not saying you're wrong in your statement, it's just a matter of experience. If anything, whilst I do see a few Linux PCs in my travels (I'm primarily a Linux user myself) I don't see as many on desktops as I thought I would - though I guess the far majority of Linux machines are in server rooms.
It's actually very easy to understand - Microsoft wants every XP user to buy Vista and to make it as difficult as possible for those of us who are "hanging on to dear life" to XP.
Ooh! Touched a nerve, have I?
As I've said on here many times before, I've worked in the telecoms/IT industry for 25+ years now as a techie of various types.
And in ***ALL*** that time here in the UK, I have seen a total of ***THREE*** Macs anywhere - one was a notebook owned by an American trainer on a course I did, my friend has a Mac gathering dust in its box in his study because his boss gave it to him not knowing what to do with it and he doesn't know what to do with it either, and the third was a student posing with one in a local coffee store.
Yes, Macs may have a higher penetration in the US, I'm not arguing that. But over here in the UK (and I suspect Europe), I suspect more people still own Amigas than they do Macs - they really are ***LOW*** penetration over here.
Also, please bear in mind that in Europe, Linux penetration is far higher than it is in the US which also goes some way to explaining why Macs are very uncommon.
You need to realise that despite the very good Euro/Dollar & Sterling/Dollar exchange rates currently, over here we never benefit too much from those because US manufacturers consistently rip us off for pricing. Only the other day, I picked up an O'Reilly book in a bookshop that had a $49.99 cover price but was £39.99 to buy in Sterling - nowhere near the 2:1 Sterling/Dollar exchange rate that there is currently.
And let me guess... all of it is legal Linux distros.
To be honest, I'm not sure I'd give you much credit in the intelligence stakes either, my friend.
I mean, bragging on Slashdot that you're web site has never been hacked and then posting it's URL???
And that, my friend, is why the rest of us consider most Mac people to be arogant braggards.
"Well, Steve, in your own time then..."
...fanbois expected to start queueing outside stores in May.
"NYPD Blue Screen"
Ugh... debelopuhs... debelopuhs... debelopuhs... ugh... chair... me throw...
"Ghosts In The Shell - from the animation style that brought you 'Marine Boy'
Whilst I actually quite enjoyed fiddling about with Procmail and SpamAssassin configurations, now I've moved to Gmail their spam filtering does it all for me. And yes, I do use the Gmail web interface occasionally but most of the time I use IMAP access - consequently, the already "subtle" Google adverts on the web interface just don't really affect me at all.
So if I'm already getting this as a free service (along with a few Gigabytes of storage to boot), why would I bother with a paid for service?
Sure, if you have a legitimate need to send out hundreds or thousands of emails via a mailshot, then you probably would be prepared to pay for such a service - after all, if you, say, have a PC components company and mailshot those people who have bought from you in the past, then you probably get quite a good amount of repeat business from it anyway.
I don't think we should pay for email but I do think a small one-off nominal charge that relies upon divulging a credit card number of Paypal ID would be a great deterrent against someone anonymously using these accounts for spam generation.
In the RW people like to change e-mail addresses, or create new ones for specific needs.
If I've ever changed an email address then it's because of either finding a better service or just changing it due to the volume of spam I was getting. If the method above inhibits spam generation in the first place, then the need to change email address would surely be reduced.
In the RW a lot of people and businesses send a lot of bulk e-mail, very legitimate opted-in e-mail.
Then use some kind of sender authentication service for the scenario where the same email goes to, say, more than 20 people.
No, what's needed is a real ground-up redesign of how e-mail works. we need something that encompasses the ease of current POP/IMAP/Webmail services, but which somehow includes ways to authenticate and/or block mail without user intervention, and which does so with near perfect reliability. And which maintains some backwards compatibility for at least a few years.
It's not the mail services themselves that are the problem, it's the authentication required to use those services on certain mail servers. The real problem is that in many cases, it's very easy to create an email account anonymously and it's that point that should be changed - if you can always link an email account to a real live person then you can deal with them quickly when they abuse that account.
But bearing in mind that these days my computing time is split 80%/20% in favour of Linux over XP, my real problem with XP is the registry.
If I'm going to buy a EEEPC then I will do so because of it's portability for where I can't easily use my desktop PC or a laptop. Therefore a EEEPC won't be my main computing platform but a means to carry about some of the applications that I regularly use, whether or not I buy the Linux or XP based EEEPC.
And here is where Linux has a distinct advantage over XP. Whilst no-one is denying that many users find configuring Linux a daunting task that often involves manually editing text configuration files for applications, the fact is that once they are written, it's very easy to copy the configuration files over to another PC to have those applications work in precisely the same way on that other PC. A case in point is the Vim editor where I've spent a long time over the years creating and changing a configuration file that does all manner of wonderful things with shortcuts and macros. And because Vim's configuration files are held in my home Linux directory (along with the configuration files of just about every other application that I've customised), then it's dead easy to manually copy them to a new machine, or get a shell script with a little rsync knowledge to update config files across machines pretty much automatically.
Unfortunately, in the case of Windows, most commercial applications obfuscate their configurations deliberately inside the registry and it's pretty much impossible to find and export those parts of the registry so that, when one of those applications gets used on another machine, it's difficult to bring its configuration across with it.
This is why, with XP, I am doing my utmost to wean myself off of any commercial Windows applications - simply because many of the free and Open Source ones already come in "portable" versions that can be stuck on a USB memory stick, for example, so that all configuration files are held locally to the application. Additionally, a lot of the applications are moving to XML-based configuration files which, again, can just be copied across between machines.
This is where Microsoft's "me, myself and I" mentality is really beginning to cause it some problems - the fact is that people are now own more than one computing device and don't want to have to fully install and configure every application (or the desktop environment even) on each new device. With Linux, just copy your home directory over and you can be pretty sure the configuration file you need has gone with it.
And if someone can explain to me the logic behind the "Documents and Settings" folder in Windows, I'd be grateful. Why-oh-why are there protected and inaccessible files (when Windows is running) in there such that you can't just copy the whole thing off to another machine when you need to?
If someone can explain the logic behind the registry I'd be grateful - again, I've used Windows since Windows For Workgroups and (with the exception of ME and maybe Vista) it's got better with each new iteration - but the registry must be the most ***STUPID*** design decision within Windows.
Yep... and good luck to you twatting the endless rootkits that come with them.