It can be done, but there's a few things you have to bear in mind:
1. Lots of existing products (and this is becoming more common as the years go on) expect an AD-backed domain. Samba + (insert name of LDAP server here) currently can only emulate an NT4-type domain. Samba 4 claims to eliminate this issue but the last time I checked it wasn't even in beta. You'd be nuts to implement it in production at this stage. If your employer's been heavily into Windows for some time, don't be too surprised to find you need to replace quite a lot.
2. Do you have a lot of policies pushed out through AD? (If you're a school, the answer should be "yes". Unless you like making work for yourself...) The closest equivalent is NT4- style policies - which aren't as flexible, don't offer as much and suitable precooked template files are becoming much harder to find.
3. Do you use Exchange anywhere? Exchange doesn't have a directory of its own, relying heavily on AD. You'd have to replace it, and while there are lots of projects claiming to replace Exchange, few come anywhere close in the real world. Most of the projects seem to be driven by people who have heard of Exchange and had it described to them, but never actually used it much.
4. Is your network heavily subnetted? AD doesn't really care about this because it uses DNS to find services it requires (such as the domain controllers). NT-4 type domains use broadcast packets, and can be a dog to get everything working properly where a lot of subnets are involved.
5. The information stored in AD about who owns and has permissions over which files is stored as unique IDs ("SIDS"). As far as I know, there is no easy pre-cooked way to migrate these SIDs between AD and Samba. So you're going to have to be very careful at replicating this information in your shiny new LDAP-backed system otherwise who has access to which files is going to be thrown all over the place. If that means one pupil gets read-access to another pupils work, that's annoying. If that means all the students get write access to a file storing their grades, that goes out annoying and through the other side.
Basically, if you already have a strong investment in Windows servers and associated licenses, this carries very high risk, will cost an inordinate amount of time and inevitably mean substantial upheaval for your end users. And (assuming you currently have AD running fairly nicely and you do a good job), you'll come out the other side with there being little or no perceivable benefit to anyone else.
Of course, where Idiocracy does make a few mistakes are where it assumes that high-tech things (eg. the diagnostic machine in the hospital, all the equipment that runs the television station) can be kept operating more or less indefinitely by a bunch of people who can't manage a more coherent word than "shit". And assumes that in the event of a serious worldwide food shortage which, let's be honest, would have been bordering on famine, the entire world would have been sitting in front of the TV thinking "Damn. But you can't do anything about it".
My guess is that we'd be looking at another period of time like the dark ages. A lot of knowledge would be forgotten and in the course of a few generations (which, with current population levels, would almost certainly include some pretty nasty wars) we'd be scratching a living off the fields again.
Forget factors like poverty, education of women, and social expectations. It's being stupid that drives up the birth rate.
In either case, the whole point of the movie is that evolution favours those that breed the most.
So by your definition you eventually wind up with a population full of poor people with badly educated women and no social expectations. Similar net result, different cause.
But (and this is the crucial difference between you and the OP), you bought the drives from Dell (who presumably manufactured the server which they were to be fitted to) on the express instruction that they had to fit a particular server model.
It's therefore Dell's problem to get it right and the drives can keep on going back until they do.
Unlike judges before her, she knows they are lying. They know they are lying. Nesson knows they are lying. The case is a blackmail scam and everyone involved knows it, this time, even the judge.
Unless she's a pisspoor judge, she won't have any definite opinion on the matter in hand - or if she does, she'll keep it very much to herself.
She may, on the other hand, want to make absolutely certain that every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed. Which I would think is a very good quality in a judge.
Contrary to the belief of many on/., a lot of people simply have no clue how to use the Internet. This makes sense when you consider the level of computer understanding among the general public before the Internet. What made you think they'd understand the Internet properly?
They have, however, noticed that "(company name).com" generally works.
You'd be amazed how many people think "searching on the Internet" means "type the word followed by.com into the address bar".
Do that and click on the first link that comes up. Looks very sleek, very professional - and is indeed one of these sleazy "we'll charge you a fair chunk of money for what you should have just googled for".
Or they could just use the roadside test as evidence to haul you down to the station for another test using a different system. Good luck arguing that both are flawed.
Printers - particularly laser printers - are much less of a problem than they used to be.
Myself I'd still be inclined to look for a Postscript printer because quite often with these cheapie units they're shipping a binary driver for a winprinter and it may or may not work with Linux the next time you carry out a major upgrade.
Petrol in a diesel screws your car up - the diesel is also a lubricant for many important components and the petrol strips it away. If you notice before you start the engine, however, you might be OK. But it'll have to be drained and refuelled.
Diesel in a petrol car results in thick smoke out of the exhaust and isn't something you want to make a habit of, but shouldn't seriously screw it up. Ideally you'd still want to drain and refuel (and in some countries you'll be stopped because your car is spewing out thick smoke - certainly in the UK) but it won't kill it.
And then, apparently, her solution [...] was to call the local news!
Which leads me to think that she is on the Microsoft paybook. Her story perfectly fits in the MS war against Linux and open source, and it needs as much media coverage as possible. Remember, spread the FUD.
It's a very high risk strategy with stories like this one, however.
There was always the chance that it would come across as "${NAME} cannot deal with simple problems by themselves. If the toilet paper were to run out, they would walk around for the rest of the day with a shitty backside."
Microsoft's marketing machine is seldom that crass.
If that worked, ILOVEYOU would have been the last ever thing to spread through Outlook and companies wouldn't need to enact blanket banning policies on emailing executable files.
You know, you really don't win friends and influence people by calling random people dumbasses.
If the meal's ruined (which, for the sake of argument, we'll say it was), do you:
A: Continue to starve? B: Find something else to eat?
============
If, despite all the assurances of the supplier, you are unable to do your college course because of the operating system on your PC, do you:
A: Change the operating system. Cost: about US$100, possibly a bit more if you need to pay someone to install it for you. Time: A few hours.
B: Complain to the vendor and demand a laptop running Windows. Cost: If you can get someone to actually accept the RMA, free. Or at most the cost of shipping the laptop back. Time: A few days while it's turned around. Note: If you choose this option and it doesn't work out for whatever reason, you have not eliminated A. The article suggests that this is exactly what happened.
Let us assume (again for the sake of argument) that you know so little about computers you are unaware that option A is even physically possible and the vendor's technical support has not explained this. Let us also assume that you don't have a great deal of money left for a replacement laptop. This leaves another couple of options:
C: Buy a cheap & cheerful laptop which ships with Windows. D: Sell the laptop you've just bought and put the money towards a slightly less cheap and cheerful laptop.
However, this lady chose E:
E: Drop out of the college course altogether. Cost: Potentially a great deal in lost earnings, any fees which you've already paid will probably not be refundable. Time: At least until the next round of enrolment, which could easily be a year.
Putting aside the issue of how appropriate or not any given operating system was to her, I really cannot see any argument in which option E makes any sense. If you can give a reasoned, cogent argument which does, I'd love to hear it.
She blames Dell because an Ubuntu fanboy at Dell convinced her that her laptop could do everything she needed it to do, which was a lie.
If the Ubuntu fanboy had listened to her and done as she asked, she would not have any problems.
While I don't doubt that she had problems getting Ubuntu to do what she needed, if you planned a meal based on chicken only to find you had none in the house, would you go out and buy some, plan an alternate meal or starve?
Forget arguments against for now. It's something we don't have and will cost a lot of money, so what are the arguments for? What advantage does it offer the general population over the status quo?
Reduce the risk of terrorist attacks? What, like the 9/11 hijackers who all had valid, legitimately issued passports?
Reduce the risk of forgery? Maybe at borders where it's practical to fit sophisticated equipment to check, but what idiot carries around an obviously forged legal document on a regular basis anyway?
Reduce criminal activities? Well, petty criminals who mug little old ladies for their pension money (which, let us be honest, probably represents about 80% of crime in many countries) aren't bothering with sophisticated fake IDs anyway, and major organised criminal gangs aren't going to collectively say "Darn! Have to go back to an honest job!" just because it became a bit harder to get a fake EU passport.
So, what's the benefit? Bear in mind that similar questions regarding ID cards have been asked many times in the UK already. Every time the politicians come up with an answer it gets discredited and they come up with another. I've yet to see them actually nail a real, tangible benefit.
why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?
Probably because it addresses a need which hasn't been terribly well addressed by anyone else - providing a platform-independent mechanism to ship around information which you can more-or-less guarantee will look the same to everyone who opens the file, where the file will be hard to edit but easy to create, where the file will look much the same on screen as it will printed out (notwithstanding the limitations of the printer or indeed its driver).
Probably because the legal definition of insanity in order for it to be a defence isn't "The person did something that nobody in their right mind would consider appropriate, they're therefore insane". It's "The person was not aware that what they were doing was wrong, they're therefore insane".
Were this not the case, most of the world's prisons would be significantly less crowded and most of the world's mental hospitals significantly more crowded.
Whether or not this is right and proper is something I leave to the peanut gallery.
Remember the story about Amtrak security forcing someone to delete the photos they had taken? With the preponderance of hot spots and more and more cameras supporting Wi-Fi, this would mean that the concept of deleting photos may soon be an anachronism (and none too soon).
That's a double edged sword.
"Erm... I can't undelete it, it's already been put on the Internet and stored in three separate geographical locations over which you have no jurisdiction" may work with a security guard or it may wind up escalating the conflict.
Do unsolicited gifts laws apply in the us? about being forced to pay for in coming texts? Has any one taking that to court?
This is like a COD that they say it hear YOU PAY NOW! You don't want it WE SHIPPED to you so YOU PAY.
Nobody's forced to have a cellphone, though.
(Having said that, nobody's forced to have a postal address to which Fedex may deliver, but anyone trying to use that as an excuse would be considered to be nuts).
Slashdot Mirror
It can be done, but there's a few things you have to bear in mind:
1. Lots of existing products (and this is becoming more common as the years go on) expect an AD-backed domain. Samba + (insert name of LDAP server here) currently can only emulate an NT4-type domain. Samba 4 claims to eliminate this issue but the last time I checked it wasn't even in beta. You'd be nuts to implement it in production at this stage. If your employer's been heavily into Windows for some time, don't be too surprised to find you need to replace quite a lot.
2. Do you have a lot of policies pushed out through AD? (If you're a school, the answer should be "yes". Unless you like making work for yourself...) The closest equivalent is NT4- style policies - which aren't as flexible, don't offer as much and suitable precooked template files are becoming much harder to find.
3. Do you use Exchange anywhere? Exchange doesn't have a directory of its own, relying heavily on AD. You'd have to replace it, and while there are lots of projects claiming to replace Exchange, few come anywhere close in the real world. Most of the projects seem to be driven by people who have heard of Exchange and had it described to them, but never actually used it much.
4. Is your network heavily subnetted? AD doesn't really care about this because it uses DNS to find services it requires (such as the domain controllers). NT-4 type domains use broadcast packets, and can be a dog to get everything working properly where a lot of subnets are involved.
5. The information stored in AD about who owns and has permissions over which files is stored as unique IDs ("SIDS"). As far as I know, there is no easy pre-cooked way to migrate these SIDs between AD and Samba. So you're going to have to be very careful at replicating this information in your shiny new LDAP-backed system otherwise who has access to which files is going to be thrown all over the place. If that means one pupil gets read-access to another pupils work, that's annoying. If that means all the students get write access to a file storing their grades, that goes out annoying and through the other side.
Basically, if you already have a strong investment in Windows servers and associated licenses, this carries very high risk, will cost an inordinate amount of time and inevitably mean substantial upheaval for your end users. And (assuming you currently have AD running fairly nicely and you do a good job), you'll come out the other side with there being little or no perceivable benefit to anyone else.
=== SPOILERS BELOW ===
Of course, where Idiocracy does make a few mistakes are where it assumes that high-tech things (eg. the diagnostic machine in the hospital, all the equipment that runs the television station) can be kept operating more or less indefinitely by a bunch of people who can't manage a more coherent word than "shit". And assumes that in the event of a serious worldwide food shortage which, let's be honest, would have been bordering on famine, the entire world would have been sitting in front of the TV thinking "Damn. But you can't do anything about it".
My guess is that we'd be looking at another period of time like the dark ages. A lot of knowledge would be forgotten and in the course of a few generations (which, with current population levels, would almost certainly include some pretty nasty wars) we'd be scratching a living off the fields again.
Forget factors like poverty, education of women, and social expectations. It's being stupid that drives up the birth rate.
In either case, the whole point of the movie is that evolution favours those that breed the most.
So by your definition you eventually wind up with a population full of poor people with badly educated women and no social expectations. Similar net result, different cause.
But (and this is the crucial difference between you and the OP), you bought the drives from Dell (who presumably manufactured the server which they were to be fitted to) on the express instruction that they had to fit a particular server model.
It's therefore Dell's problem to get it right and the drives can keep on going back until they do.
Unlike judges before her, she knows they are lying. They know they are lying. Nesson knows they are lying. The case is a blackmail scam and everyone involved knows it, this time, even the judge.
Unless she's a pisspoor judge, she won't have any definite opinion on the matter in hand - or if she does, she'll keep it very much to herself.
She may, on the other hand, want to make absolutely certain that every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed. Which I would think is a very good quality in a judge.
It's similar to how XP and Vista have minimum requirements of 800x600.
Truly, spoken like a man who has never tried to run a recent Microsoft OS at the minimum resolution.
Because God knows nobody at the Ministry of Defence ever needs to schedule a meeting with a bunch of people.
Depends largely upon the jurisdiction.
Certainly here in the UK, if you owe me money and I'm not a licensed credit broker, I can't do anything with your credit rating directly.
But I can certainly sue you for the money. If I win, the judgement against you will go on your credit rating and that can certainly harm it.
Contrary to the belief of many on /., a lot of people simply have no clue how to use the Internet. This makes sense when you consider the level of computer understanding among the general public before the Internet. What made you think they'd understand the Internet properly?
They have, however, noticed that "(company name).com" generally works.
Do that with OpenOffice and see what happens.
You'd be amazed how many people think "searching on the Internet" means "type the word followed by .com into the address bar".
Do that and click on the first link that comes up. Looks very sleek, very professional - and is indeed one of these sleazy "we'll charge you a fair chunk of money for what you should have just googled for".
Or they could just use the roadside test as evidence to haul you down to the station for another test using a different system. Good luck arguing that both are flawed.
Printers - particularly laser printers - are much less of a problem than they used to be.
Myself I'd still be inclined to look for a Postscript printer because quite often with these cheapie units they're shipping a binary driver for a winprinter and it may or may not work with Linux the next time you carry out a major upgrade.
Petrol in a diesel screws your car up - the diesel is also a lubricant for many important components and the petrol strips it away. If you notice before you start the engine, however, you might be OK. But it'll have to be drained and refuelled.
Diesel in a petrol car results in thick smoke out of the exhaust and isn't something you want to make a habit of, but shouldn't seriously screw it up. Ideally you'd still want to drain and refuel (and in some countries you'll be stopped because your car is spewing out thick smoke - certainly in the UK) but it won't kill it.
And then, apparently, her solution [...] was to call the local news!
Which leads me to think that she is on the Microsoft paybook. Her story perfectly fits in the MS war against Linux and open source, and it needs as much media coverage as possible. Remember, spread the FUD.
It's a very high risk strategy with stories like this one, however.
There was always the chance that it would come across as "${NAME} cannot deal with simple problems by themselves. If the toilet paper were to run out, they would walk around for the rest of the day with a shitty backside."
Microsoft's marketing machine is seldom that crass.
By educating people.
If that worked, ILOVEYOU would have been the last ever thing to spread through Outlook and companies wouldn't need to enact blanket banning policies on emailing executable files.
Seriously, she should take some classes on critical thinking or something...
I seriously doubt she possesses the faculty to recognise that need in herself.
You know, you really don't win friends and influence people by calling random people dumbasses.
If the meal's ruined (which, for the sake of argument, we'll say it was), do you:
A: Continue to starve?
B: Find something else to eat?
============
If, despite all the assurances of the supplier, you are unable to do your college course because of the operating system on your PC, do you:
A: Change the operating system. Cost: about US$100, possibly a bit more if you need to pay someone to install it for you. Time: A few hours.
B: Complain to the vendor and demand a laptop running Windows. Cost: If you can get someone to actually accept the RMA, free. Or at most the cost of shipping the laptop back. Time: A few days while it's turned around. Note: If you choose this option and it doesn't work out for whatever reason, you have not eliminated A. The article suggests that this is exactly what happened.
Let us assume (again for the sake of argument) that you know so little about computers you are unaware that option A is even physically possible and the vendor's technical support has not explained this. Let us also assume that you don't have a great deal of money left for a replacement laptop. This leaves another couple of options:
C: Buy a cheap & cheerful laptop which ships with Windows.
D: Sell the laptop you've just bought and put the money towards a slightly less cheap and cheerful laptop.
However, this lady chose E:
E: Drop out of the college course altogether. Cost: Potentially a great deal in lost earnings, any fees which you've already paid will probably not be refundable. Time: At least until the next round of enrolment, which could easily be a year.
Putting aside the issue of how appropriate or not any given operating system was to her, I really cannot see any argument in which option E makes any sense. If you can give a reasoned, cogent argument which does, I'd love to hear it.
She blames Dell because an Ubuntu fanboy at Dell convinced her that her laptop could do everything she needed it to do, which was a lie.
If the Ubuntu fanboy had listened to her and done as she asked, she would not have any problems.
While I don't doubt that she had problems getting Ubuntu to do what she needed, if you planned a meal based on chicken only to find you had none in the house, would you go out and buy some, plan an alternate meal or starve?
This lady, it seems, would starve.
Forget arguments against for now. It's something we don't have and will cost a lot of money, so what are the arguments for? What advantage does it offer the general population over the status quo?
Reduce the risk of terrorist attacks? What, like the 9/11 hijackers who all had valid, legitimately issued passports?
Reduce the risk of forgery? Maybe at borders where it's practical to fit sophisticated equipment to check, but what idiot carries around an obviously forged legal document on a regular basis anyway?
Reduce criminal activities? Well, petty criminals who mug little old ladies for their pension money (which, let us be honest, probably represents about 80% of crime in many countries) aren't bothering with sophisticated fake IDs anyway, and major organised criminal gangs aren't going to collectively say "Darn! Have to go back to an honest job!" just because it became a bit harder to get a fake EU passport.
So, what's the benefit? Bear in mind that similar questions regarding ID cards have been asked many times in the UK already. Every time the politicians come up with an answer it gets discredited and they come up with another. I've yet to see them actually nail a real, tangible benefit.
why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?
Probably because it addresses a need which hasn't been terribly well addressed by anyone else - providing a platform-independent mechanism to ship around information which you can more-or-less guarantee will look the same to everyone who opens the file, where the file will be hard to edit but easy to create, where the file will look much the same on screen as it will printed out (notwithstanding the limitations of the printer or indeed its driver).
Good question.
Probably because the legal definition of insanity in order for it to be a defence isn't "The person did something that nobody in their right mind would consider appropriate, they're therefore insane". It's "The person was not aware that what they were doing was wrong, they're therefore insane".
Were this not the case, most of the world's prisons would be significantly less crowded and most of the world's mental hospitals significantly more crowded.
Whether or not this is right and proper is something I leave to the peanut gallery.
Software does not break because of old-age, unlike hardware.
Addendum: In order for this to work, you need source-level access to the entire software stack from the OS upwards.
Bound to be some pillock who won't do that, though. And I'm sure they'll be all over the news when that happens.
(I'm also fairly sure that a lot of organisations will suddenly become a lot more jumpy about cameras)
Remember the story about Amtrak security forcing someone to delete the photos they had taken? With the preponderance of hot spots and more and more cameras supporting Wi-Fi, this would mean that the concept of deleting photos may soon be an anachronism (and none too soon).
That's a double edged sword.
"Erm... I can't undelete it, it's already been put on the Internet and stored in three separate geographical locations over which you have no jurisdiction" may work with a security guard or it may wind up escalating the conflict.
Do unsolicited gifts laws apply in the us? about being forced to pay for in coming texts? Has any one taking that to court?
This is like a COD that they say it hear YOU PAY NOW! You don't want it WE SHIPPED to you so YOU PAY.
Nobody's forced to have a cellphone, though.
(Having said that, nobody's forced to have a postal address to which Fedex may deliver, but anyone trying to use that as an excuse would be considered to be nuts).