The mouthpiece of conventional wisdom. I'm been seeing more interest in Linux stemming from the progress in Ubuntu development than anything.
I never got the impression that anyone choosing Windows over Linux was doing so because of the SCO case. It may have been just one more excuse but I can't think of a time it was the primary reason a customer picked.NET over a LAMP stack. YMMV, of course.
I believe we will see more interest in Linux, mainly because interest was already picking up, not because of this ruling. And that includes Linux on the desktop. Again, mainly because it makes a nice desktop, not because of this case.
If Microsoft loses share in the server or desktop market they've got no one to blame but themselves. Vista was a giant FUM-BLE at a time they really needed to hit one out of the park. If you don't mind me mixing sports metaphors.;) But the big problems aren't related to Vista. Byzantine license requirements, ever escalating fees, product activation, DRM, back-stabbing EULA's...those problems will continue to haunt Microsoft.
The endless security measures imposed on society as a result of the "war on terror" have become overblown and intrusive, according to Microsoft Redmond senior security analyst Steve Riley.
I agree with Microsoft on something. Great, just perfect. Now I have to get ready for the 4 horsemen, a rain of fire and the end of time.
On the plus side that means I won't have to mow this week.
We should gather every employee in a room & stand them on a table one-by-one...
Yeah! We could hire people the same way. Let different departments bid on them. Make them take their shirts off and show their teeth so you know they're nice and healthy. And, just for their safety and protection, we might want to chain them together, so they don't get scared and fall off the table. And maybe a small but tasteful whip, strictly to make sure things move along and people don't waste all day bidding on new employees. And make them sing worker songs, because people really like that. Swiiiing low, sweet cub-i-cle wor-ker...headed for the break room at niiiiiine. That's my favorite.
Dang, it seems so obvious. Why hasn't anyone thought of that before?
Oh, yeah? Well, what about the giant man-like alien, frozen in the ice for thousands of years after its space ship crash landed on our planet? Wait until it thaws out and starts looking for blood to water its little alien plant space babies. Then you won't feel so safe. Will you, Mr. Smarty Pants Scientist?
It's your father's puke saber. This is the weapon of the Homeland Security Jedi. Not as clumsy or as random as a taser, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support.
That only holds true if vendors can write a single driver for Linux. If they have to write five different Linux drivers, they're going to scoff.
But it's okay that they have to support drivers for five different versions of Windows, that's no problem. But I guarantee they'll get all pissy pants if they have to support more than one distro of Linux.
Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.
There's something to that observation. If management spends millions on Microsoft products and something stops working, there's the convenience of blaming Microsoft. Strangely, that appears to work. There's no accountability assigned to the people suggesting they spend millions on products that require near constant tweaking to keep working right. Or that a less expensive and more reliable solution was overlooked.
I'm a hired gun so I'll use whatever the customer wants. It all pays the same whether I'm setting up a LAMP server or 2003. I do make certain to present both alternatives, so when the costs of the Microsoft environment balloon out control I can point back to the fact that they made the choice.
They just never seem to learn. Once in a while the light bulb comes on. I have one small office customer replacing his laptops and workstations with Macs. Not all at once, just as the machines are due for replacement. Many of those office workers would have been fine on Ubuntu, but he just wasn't ready to go that far yet. Another mid-size customer lost their Windows-or-die admin and want to talk about replacing the 20 seats in their call center workstations with Linux. That's pretty much a slam dunk since the call center apps are all web-enabled.
Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I support Windows all day at customer sites but run Linux at home. It's so much easier to maintain my home network, though I did have to restart one of the five Ubuntu machines the other day. It's not knocking Windows to acknowledge the obvious. But I don't think Ubuntu or any other Linux distro should go to far with Windows compatibility. Part of what makes the Linux experience so positive in my book is that it doesn't try to emulate Windows.
The release is being delayed in order to provide greater media compatibility
As much as I like Ubuntu, getting some of the media types working was a royal pain. The average user would have difficulty and they certainly don't understand the legal reasons for the exclusion.
I realize most here on slashdot probably won't agree with this, and think that "copyright", or at least its current form in the US, which is the basis for prohibiting things like recording in movie theaters, ought to be done away with completely.
You create a straw man with no basis in reality. There are probably a few who would do away with copyright protections but I'd be willing to bet they're a minority...on the level with the minority who think they're a grapefruit.
absurd examples don't really serve any function in having any real change
Oh, but I think they do. Examples like this point out how absurd laws do little besides involve otherwise law abiding citizen in the criminal justice system. That person has an arrest record that will follow them for life, impact their ability to get a job, a security clearance, a mortgage. It's not just a bad law, it's f'ing insane.
other than being able to be used as a rallying cry for people who DO fundamentally believe that we should be able to record entire movies in movie theaters, or entire TV shows, or entire DVDs, and post them to torrent sites, with no fear of retribution.
Now you're mixing different activities. Recording and distributing. They don't necessarily follow. But you assume they do.
Flawed logic and flawed arguments used to support a flawed law and the ruination of an innocent person's life.
The thing that made the dot-com bubble unique was that it affected damn near every corner of the industry
It was insane. Unsustainable valuations that reminded me more of tulip bulb trading. Companies with absolutely no background in tech were opening up IT consulting branches. Yes, I'm looking at you KPM&G.
If anything what we're currently experiencing is a correction from an industry that was over-sold in the wake of the dot-com collapse in 2000 and then the outsourcing insanity that followed after. That was a double whammy that dried up the pipeline of IT students in college almost overnight.
It doesn't feel like tulip bulb trading this time. This is a correction and we're still playing catch up.
Re:almost everything is "niche business applicatio
on
A CIO's View of Ubuntu
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· Score: 1
MS Office itself is a critical business application in corporate-land
Not everywhere and not every user even in Microsoft-centric customers. OpenOffice is quite capable for the vast majority of users. And so many productivity apps are going online, just doesn't seem to be the show-stopper it once was.
I'd mod the author's distribution. I'd use Ubuntu on the desktop for most users, Mac for the advertising and graphics people, and set up Windows as kiosks for Windows only applications.
Even a three OS mix sounds like a lot, but Windows would account for more service calls than the other two put together. I can look at the trouble tickets for this customer a mixed Mac/Windows environment and the service calls for Windows run 3 to 1 higher. Once the Macs are set up and working right, trouble is rare. Business customers notice that kind of thing. Replacing the enterprise desktops with Mac might be cost prohibitive, but replacing them with a Mac/Ubuntu mix is not.
I've spoken to many people who have used and hated Vista and a few who have sworn if off entirely.
What's really relevant is that Vista came out at a time Microsoft desperately needed to hit a home run. Instead Vista turns out to be a one-hopper to the short stop. An unexpected bonus for Linux and especially Apple.
The culture that produced Vista didn't arise overnight, it's been building for ten years. Vista is the product that comes out of a broken corporate environment.
Ballmer needs to go. He's not the only one, but he needs to go first.
That's a tough one. I think it would be worth trading a lot of mice for a cure.
In the meantime it might be helpful to bring attention to the absolutely abysmal state of mental health care in this country. Something you won't know about unless you or a close relative has a serious mental illness. Half the people you see living on the street are there because they have mental illness and can't navigate the byzantine legal process to get disability benefits. Apparently the right wing thinks they're faking so they not work and drink all day. Even if they could stop trying to self-medicate with alcohol, most wouldn't be able to manage a checkbook even if they could get through the process and there's nowhere for them to go. Your options around here are the crisis line, which is useless, or primary care (the mental hospital). If they don't have health insurance they'll get a T&R (treat and release) and that's how they end up on park benches.
Most states have closed their assisted living centers and state mental hospitals because of cutbacks in federal funding. Where to you think those people go? They usually get lumped in with people with AIDS and criminals. Great atmosphere for recovery. The druggies steal their meds and they're right back to having street lights sending them messages from the mother ship. It varies. Some states are better than others, but overall mental health care in the US, if you don't have health insurance, sucks ass. That doesn't get much attention, but let them leave "In God We Trust" off a dollar coin and people are all up about that. Hypocrites.
It boggles the mind. You've heard of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Here we have the Three Stooges of copyright enforcement. Oh, a wise guy, eh? Wo-wo-wo-wo.
Except the Three Stooges were funny and, overall, I think they could do a better job of copyright enforcement.
So why bother mentioning it unless you're trying to establish some sort of political agenda of your own?
If they're actually doing the deed, and it appears they are, what difference does the motivation of the whistle blower make? Why would you defend this heavy handed stupidity under any circumstances?
Anyone with the wherewithal to develop a launch vehicle can simply purchase one from the Russians...already assembled and working, complete with the ground support crew to service it. If the Russians can't handle the order they could go to the Chinese, India, or Pakistan. They're not going to try duplicating a multi-stage liquid fuel lift vehicle based on 30 year old technology.
How does that old phrase go? Strain out a gnat and swallow a camel? Something like that.
With TrueCrypt you can create a hidden volume within an encrypted volume with separate passwords. If pressured you give up the password for the outer volume where you put something mildly important so they...whoever they is in that scenario...think they got something.
What's really a shame is that anyone in the US has to even think in those terms. Sad world we have made.
Anyone besides me wish that you could run Thunderbird in a tab inside Firefox, ala FireFTP? If the interface was Gmail-esque and ran in a tab, with a shared Sunbird calendar in another tab, that would be the killer arrangement for me. If those apps all came bundled in server side application suite along with a portal and company wiki so you could either setup and manage it internally or hire out hosted services, that might be very appealing in the business world.
My sense is we're on the verge of moving away from client-centric software to a hosted application model. There is some functionality still a ways off but email, calendar and web browsing are certainly there now. Google apps is showing the potential for hosted productivity apps, SugarCRM...the big pieces are already there. There just isn't any unifying force...the Standard Oil of OSS. Oddly the application community seems to be moving apart instead of coming together, but it's always been a contentious environment.
Slashdot Mirror
The mouthpiece of conventional wisdom. I'm been seeing more interest in Linux stemming from the progress in Ubuntu development than anything.
I never got the impression that anyone choosing Windows over Linux was doing so because of the SCO case. It may have been just one more excuse but I can't think of a time it was the primary reason a customer picked .NET over a LAMP stack. YMMV, of course.
I believe we will see more interest in Linux, mainly because interest was already picking up, not because of this ruling. And that includes Linux on the desktop. Again, mainly because it makes a nice desktop, not because of this case.
If Microsoft loses share in the server or desktop market they've got no one to blame but themselves. Vista was a giant FUM-BLE at a time they really needed to hit one out of the park. If you don't mind me mixing sports metaphors. ;) But the big problems aren't related to Vista. Byzantine license requirements, ever escalating fees, product activation, DRM, back-stabbing EULA's...those problems will continue to haunt Microsoft.
You guys know it's bad karma to dance on someone's grave, even if it's SCO.
Well....
Ah, what the hell? tipptity-tippity-tippity-tap-tap-tap Maybe just this once. tipptity-tappity-tippity-tappity-tap-tap-tap
The endless security measures imposed on society as a result of the "war on terror" have become overblown and intrusive, according to Microsoft Redmond senior security analyst Steve Riley.
I agree with Microsoft on something. Great, just perfect. Now I have to get ready for the 4 horsemen, a rain of fire and the end of time.
On the plus side that means I won't have to mow this week.
We should gather every employee in a room & stand them on a table one-by-one...
Yeah! We could hire people the same way. Let different departments bid on them. Make them take their shirts off and show their teeth so you know they're nice and healthy. And, just for their safety and protection, we might want to chain them together, so they don't get scared and fall off the table. And maybe a small but tasteful whip, strictly to make sure things move along and people don't waste all day bidding on new employees. And make them sing worker songs, because people really like that. Swiiiing low, sweet cub-i-cle wor-ker...headed for the break room at niiiiiine. That's my favorite.
Dang, it seems so obvious. Why hasn't anyone thought of that before?
Also somehow they are sure that this is safe.
Oh, yeah? Well, what about the giant man-like alien, frozen in the ice for thousands of years after its space ship crash landed on our planet? Wait until it thaws out and starts looking for blood to water its little alien plant space babies. Then you won't feel so safe. Will you, Mr. Smarty Pants Scientist?
It's your father's puke saber. This is the weapon of the Homeland Security Jedi. Not as clumsy or as random as a taser, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support.
That only holds true if vendors can write a single driver for Linux. If they have to write five different Linux drivers, they're going to scoff.
But it's okay that they have to support drivers for five different versions of Windows, that's no problem. But I guarantee they'll get all pissy pants if they have to support more than one distro of Linux.
I actually thinks this plays into MSFT's hand.
Read more for additional references and a photo showing how the researchers monitor beer bubbles.
People are getting paid to study beer? Where do I sign up?
Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.
There's something to that observation. If management spends millions on Microsoft products and something stops working, there's the convenience of blaming Microsoft. Strangely, that appears to work. There's no accountability assigned to the people suggesting they spend millions on products that require near constant tweaking to keep working right. Or that a less expensive and more reliable solution was overlooked.
I'm a hired gun so I'll use whatever the customer wants. It all pays the same whether I'm setting up a LAMP server or 2003. I do make certain to present both alternatives, so when the costs of the Microsoft environment balloon out control I can point back to the fact that they made the choice.
They just never seem to learn. Once in a while the light bulb comes on. I have one small office customer replacing his laptops and workstations with Macs. Not all at once, just as the machines are due for replacement. Many of those office workers would have been fine on Ubuntu, but he just wasn't ready to go that far yet. Another mid-size customer lost their Windows-or-die admin and want to talk about replacing the 20 seats in their call center workstations with Linux. That's pretty much a slam dunk since the call center apps are all web-enabled.
Some signs of progress. :)
Ubuntu is still far behind Microsoft Windows, when it comes to Windows compatibility.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I support Windows all day at customer sites but run Linux at home. It's so much easier to maintain my home network, though I did have to restart one of the five Ubuntu machines the other day. It's not knocking Windows to acknowledge the obvious. But I don't think Ubuntu or any other Linux distro should go to far with Windows compatibility. Part of what makes the Linux experience so positive in my book is that it doesn't try to emulate Windows.
The release is being delayed in order to provide greater media compatibility
As much as I like Ubuntu, getting some of the media types working was a royal pain. The average user would have difficulty and they certainly don't understand the legal reasons for the exclusion.
Proprietary file formats are from the devil.
We must work hard to seek out alternative media outlets that want to foster our rights, rather than abuse them for profit.
www.magnatunes.com
I realize most here on slashdot probably won't agree with this, and think that "copyright", or at least its current form in the US, which is the basis for prohibiting things like recording in movie theaters, ought to be done away with completely.
You create a straw man with no basis in reality. There are probably a few who would do away with copyright protections but I'd be willing to bet they're a minority...on the level with the minority who think they're a grapefruit.
absurd examples don't really serve any function in having any real change
Oh, but I think they do. Examples like this point out how absurd laws do little besides involve otherwise law abiding citizen in the criminal justice system. That person has an arrest record that will follow them for life, impact their ability to get a job, a security clearance, a mortgage. It's not just a bad law, it's f'ing insane.
other than being able to be used as a rallying cry for people who DO fundamentally believe that we should be able to record entire movies in movie theaters, or entire TV shows, or entire DVDs, and post them to torrent sites, with no fear of retribution.
Now you're mixing different activities. Recording and distributing. They don't necessarily follow. But you assume they do.
Flawed logic and flawed arguments used to support a flawed law and the ruination of an innocent person's life.
The thing that made the dot-com bubble unique was that it affected damn near every corner of the industry
It was insane. Unsustainable valuations that reminded me more of tulip bulb trading. Companies with absolutely no background in tech were opening up IT consulting branches. Yes, I'm looking at you KPM&G.
If anything what we're currently experiencing is a correction from an industry that was over-sold in the wake of the dot-com collapse in 2000 and then the outsourcing insanity that followed after. That was a double whammy that dried up the pipeline of IT students in college almost overnight.
It doesn't feel like tulip bulb trading this time. This is a correction and we're still playing catch up.
MS Office itself is a critical business application in corporate-land
Not everywhere and not every user even in Microsoft-centric customers. OpenOffice is quite capable for the vast majority of users. And so many productivity apps are going online, just doesn't seem to be the show-stopper it once was.
I'd mod the author's distribution. I'd use Ubuntu on the desktop for most users, Mac for the advertising and graphics people, and set up Windows as kiosks for Windows only applications.
Even a three OS mix sounds like a lot, but Windows would account for more service calls than the other two put together. I can look at the trouble tickets for this customer a mixed Mac/Windows environment and the service calls for Windows run 3 to 1 higher. Once the Macs are set up and working right, trouble is rare. Business customers notice that kind of thing. Replacing the enterprise desktops with Mac might be cost prohibitive, but replacing them with a Mac/Ubuntu mix is not.
I've spoken to many people who have used and hated Vista and a few who have sworn if off entirely.
What's really relevant is that Vista came out at a time Microsoft desperately needed to hit a home run. Instead Vista turns out to be a one-hopper to the short stop. An unexpected bonus for Linux and especially Apple.
The culture that produced Vista didn't arise overnight, it's been building for ten years. Vista is the product that comes out of a broken corporate environment.
Ballmer needs to go. He's not the only one, but he needs to go first.
Schizophrenia runs in my family
That's a tough one. I think it would be worth trading a lot of mice for a cure.
In the meantime it might be helpful to bring attention to the absolutely abysmal state of mental health care in this country. Something you won't know about unless you or a close relative has a serious mental illness. Half the people you see living on the street are there because they have mental illness and can't navigate the byzantine legal process to get disability benefits. Apparently the right wing thinks they're faking so they not work and drink all day. Even if they could stop trying to self-medicate with alcohol, most wouldn't be able to manage a checkbook even if they could get through the process and there's nowhere for them to go. Your options around here are the crisis line, which is useless, or primary care (the mental hospital). If they don't have health insurance they'll get a T&R (treat and release) and that's how they end up on park benches.
Most states have closed their assisted living centers and state mental hospitals because of cutbacks in federal funding. Where to you think those people go? They usually get lumped in with people with AIDS and criminals. Great atmosphere for recovery. The druggies steal their meds and they're right back to having street lights sending them messages from the mother ship. It varies. Some states are better than others, but overall mental health care in the US, if you don't have health insurance, sucks ass. That doesn't get much attention, but let them leave "In God We Trust" off a dollar coin and people are all up about that. Hypocrites.
It boggles the mind. You've heard of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Here we have the Three Stooges of copyright enforcement. Oh, a wise guy, eh? Wo-wo-wo-wo.
Except the Three Stooges were funny and, overall, I think they could do a better job of copyright enforcement.
and turn into ordinary hypocrites?
Not sure a Bush supporter has any business calling anyone else a hypocrite. That goes way beyond the pot calling the kettle black.
You support corrupt, incompetent people and make excuses for their behavior.
So why bother mentioning it unless you're trying to establish some sort of political agenda of your own?
If they're actually doing the deed, and it appears they are, what difference does the motivation of the whistle blower make? Why would you defend this heavy handed stupidity under any circumstances?
Anyone with the wherewithal to develop a launch vehicle can simply purchase one from the Russians...already assembled and working, complete with the ground support crew to service it. If the Russians can't handle the order they could go to the Chinese, India, or Pakistan. They're not going to try duplicating a multi-stage liquid fuel lift vehicle based on 30 year old technology.
How does that old phrase go? Strain out a gnat and swallow a camel? Something like that.
With TrueCrypt you can create a hidden volume within an encrypted volume with separate passwords. If pressured you give up the password for the outer volume where you put something mildly important so they...whoever they is in that scenario...think they got something.
What's really a shame is that anyone in the US has to even think in those terms. Sad world we have made.
Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day.
First read as "Hungry Officials Raid Microsoft Office". Well, buy them a pizza.
It's as if a billion computers all cried out at once in terror and said, "It appears you are being suddenly silenced. Cancel or allow?"
Anyone besides me wish that you could run Thunderbird in a tab inside Firefox, ala FireFTP? If the interface was Gmail-esque and ran in a tab, with a shared Sunbird calendar in another tab, that would be the killer arrangement for me. If those apps all came bundled in server side application suite along with a portal and company wiki so you could either setup and manage it internally or hire out hosted services, that might be very appealing in the business world.
My sense is we're on the verge of moving away from client-centric software to a hosted application model. There is some functionality still a ways off but email, calendar and web browsing are certainly there now. Google apps is showing the potential for hosted productivity apps, SugarCRM...the big pieces are already there. There just isn't any unifying force...the Standard Oil of OSS. Oddly the application community seems to be moving apart instead of coming together, but it's always been a contentious environment.