Had this gone in, vendors would write a very small kernel driver which they're not afraid of GPL'ing. This "driver" would do nothing more than expose the necessary IRQs and registers to userspace, where they can then have a proprietary driver which does the donkey work.
In other words, just as likely to break a system horribly as a binary blob, if not more so as now any userland program running as root can speak directly to the hardware. With the added bonus that you've just demonstrated to every hardware vendor out there that not only do you not like binary drivers, you'll go out of your way to make their life harder.
Very likely. And the OS company would have still had a monopoly in operating systems, the Apps company would still have a monopoly in Office applications and the Server company would still be working very hard towards a monopoly in servers.
myxomatosis was released back in 1950, and suppressed the rabbit population quite thoroughly for a couple of decades before they started to evolve immunity.
Steady on. You'll start a flamewar with the creationists.
What if a bunch of rabbits intelligently designed immunity?
I'm starting to see more Apple stuff appearing in the business space.
A couple of years ago I interviewed with a web design company. Everyone (and I mean literally everyone, even the accounts folk) had an iMac on their desk. At my current gig, there's one chap with a mac and one or two others who bring in Mac laptops - nobody bats an eyelid. I've made clear that I have no problem whatsoever supporting Apple on the desktop (though that's mainly because I'm fairly sure I'd have to do almost zero extra work for that). In 5 years time, I can easily see people being allowed to choose in some of the smaller, less strict organisations. Larger organisations, OTOH, will probably always force their vision of a desktop on you.
It sucks at police work and occupying an angry populace.
I will get modded to hell for this, but here we go....
The populace is angry because Saddam (who, don't get me wrong, was a complete mental case) was about the only thing stopping the country descending into all-out civil war. The US have gone in, removed the complete mental case with no plan as to how they will prevent the descent into all-out civil war, and now are finding it hard work because there's angry locals everywhere they look. Well surprise surprise. Wonder why they're angry?
That for all its "innovation", Microsoft have never in the whole of history released a truly new product. Everything they've ever produced (right the way down to Microsoft Paint - once upon a time there was a DOS version produced by someone else) has been either bought or rehashed from someone else.
Sure, they've played around with things a bit - changed the interface here and there, come up with slight tweaks, But at the end of the day, it's not the tweaks that get recognised as innovation; it's the whole new products.
OK, so support has ended for NT. But from the perspective of a large, conservative organisation like a bank, that's not necessarily the end of the world.
Will the desktops magically stop working? No.
Does a migration solve any existing problems which they haven't already solved somehow? Probably not.
What is the risk of sticking with NT 4 on the desktop? No more security updates.
How does that represent a risk? Well, with a reasonably carefully designed network with internal firewalls as well as perimeter ones - probably not a great deal. (Bear in mind that 95% of organisations don't worry that much about internal threats, despite evidence to suggest that they should).
What work is involved in migrating? Checking every application used across the whole company works, and updating/replacing those which don't. Reimaging (and almost certainly replacing) every workstation.
How much would this cost? Hundreds of thousands in man-hours.
Cost/benefit wise, I can see how it would be hard to justify such a project.
"Leaving to pursue other Open Source Opportunities" : he's sacked.
"refocusing the scope of [their] work to better align resources with [their] revenues...'" : we've just realised that for all that we do, very little actually brings money in. This is a problem. So if it doesn't bring money in, it's either canned or changed such that it does.
Not particularly nice if you work for OSDL, but it happens in business from time to time...
I had a talk about that back when I was in school. The chap giving it was of the opinion that the reason why things are so much better today is that a lot of Taiwanese companies got a bit fed up of being the butt of everyone else's "low quality" jokes (and probably figured it would be a lot easier to sell things worldwide if they did something about quality) and promptly instigated some reforms to do something about it.
Legend has it, a few years later a UK company placed an order for a million items (history doesn't relate what they were), with a note attached saying "We would expect your quality control to be so good that there would be no more than three faulty parts per million".
Fast forward a couple of months, the order came off the boat and arrived in their warehouse with a note saying "Please find enclosed the three faulty items under separate wrapper, though we can't imagine why you want them."
As has already been mentioned, the most important thing you need (particularly from your IT staff) is discipline. The scenario you describe would be major long project to migrate to Linux, not something you could do in a couple of months. I don't think it's necessary (or even desirable) to do a 100% migraiton, and trying to would probably cause more problems than it would solve.
Application Compatability: As others have pointed out, you can use Wine (either commercial or free versions) - but you'll have to test every application thoroughly. You'd probably have to do that if migrating to Vista, but the testing would probably end up being rather less formal. The generally accepted alternative method (and, to be honest, probably the best) is to set up a small Citrix server farm to handle the apps for which there is no Linux equivalent. If you find that you'd need an absolutely massive server farm, costing more in licensing and support than you'll save, perhaps the move isn't appropriate.
Training: Depends to a certain extent on your staff. In the UK public sector, staff can (and will) refuse to use a pocket calculator if they "haven't been trained". But don't imagine you'll be able to get away with none. A lot of it depends on your IT staff providing a sensible desktop that staff can live with - I don't know of anything Linux based which is analagous to Active Directory in terms of configuring machines for what's on the desktop, what's locked down across a large network.
There's a very real chance that your IT staff will need more training than everyone else, as IT operations work tends to be "jack of all trades" stuff, whereas a lot of the organisation's other staff are "master of one or two".
Peripherals: Rule of Thumb: The less common your peripherals, the more trouble you'll have. Business card scanners aren't terribly common, so you might have trouble there. Linux software doesn't tend to be as closely integrated as Windows software, so even if you can scan in business cards you might have fun importing the resulting data.
Application Compatability: This is going to be sticky. If it's necessary for some random person to be able to throw a CD containing educational software into a PC and have it work with at least a 90%+ probability, I would keep a lab of Windows PCs for that purpose. Otherwise the IT department needs to be involved every single time such a piece of software appears - and that will get very painful very quickly.
Real World: Here's a question you need to ask: Are you teaching people "this is how you use Word, click here, here and here", or are you teaching people "This is what a word processor is, this is what it does"? IMO, education should be more about the latter than the former, but IME the real world tends to disagree. And there's a very strong likelihood that the entire staff are more of the former mindset, in which case trying to force Linux down everyone's throat is probably a very good way to get sacked.
More Real World: I don't know about where you work, but in every place I've ever worked there's been a tendency for departments to go out and source their own IT solution for a problem, and not involve the IT department until they've already handed over the cash and taken delivery of the software/hardware. That is never going to work if they're running Linux on all their desktops - how would you deal with it?
How many companies will buy PCs with Vista Business EOM pre-installed, or buy the Vista Business OEM package, then exercise downgrade rights and put XP on them?
Speaking as an IT manager, in my case: as soon as I can't get Windows XP preinstalled on the hardware I want.
How many volume license owners will pay for a Vista license but install XP now and upgrade later, on THEIR timetable?
Funny you say that, I've just gone out and bought a corporate volume license for XP for exactly that purpose - previously, we didn't bother because it's a small company that's been around for rather less time than Windows XP and every PC had it preinstalled. I can see it being very difficult to buy a PC without Vista in 12-18 months time.
Keyword here is "airline". If it was the airport rather than the airline (or they can introduce doubt into the matter such that it/may/ have been), then you're back to 17 SDR/kilo (which equates to £/$hardly anything)
I suspect the "unlimited liability in the event of negligence" is probably more to do with passenger safety - the airline industry's very heavily regulated, and if negligence caused a plane crash there would be serious head-rolling.
Yes, I'd agree with that definition. With every major software release, Microsoft innovates at least a dozen ways for the IT industry to tear its hair out and scream in frustration.
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Had this gone in, vendors would write a very small kernel driver which they're not afraid of GPL'ing. This "driver" would do nothing more than expose the necessary IRQs and registers to userspace, where they can then have a proprietary driver which does the donkey work.
In other words, just as likely to break a system horribly as a binary blob, if not more so as now any userland program running as root can speak directly to the hardware. With the added bonus that you've just demonstrated to every hardware vendor out there that not only do you not like binary drivers, you'll go out of your way to make their life harder.
Could someone explain in lay terms exactly how water can be deemed to be scarce when the Earth's surface is two-thirds covered in the stuff?
Scarcity of pure, clean water - now that I can believe.
Very likely. And the OS company would have still had a monopoly in operating systems, the Apps company would still have a monopoly in Office applications and the Server company would still be working very hard towards a monopoly in servers.
myxomatosis was released back in 1950, and suppressed the rabbit population quite thoroughly for a couple of decades before they started to evolve immunity.
Steady on. You'll start a flamewar with the creationists.
What if a bunch of rabbits intelligently designed immunity?
Never fuck up a remove again! It might get annoying, but at least you know you won't screw anything up.
Until you're on a system which isn't set up the way you expect, and you've developed a cavalier approach with commands like rm.
I'm starting to see more Apple stuff appearing in the business space.
A couple of years ago I interviewed with a web design company. Everyone (and I mean literally everyone, even the accounts folk) had an iMac on their desk. At my current gig, there's one chap with a mac and one or two others who bring in Mac laptops - nobody bats an eyelid. I've made clear that I have no problem whatsoever supporting Apple on the desktop (though that's mainly because I'm fairly sure I'd have to do almost zero extra work for that). In 5 years time, I can easily see people being allowed to choose in some of the smaller, less strict organisations. Larger organisations, OTOH, will probably always force their vision of a desktop on you.
It sucks at police work and occupying an angry populace.
I will get modded to hell for this, but here we go....
The populace is angry because Saddam (who, don't get me wrong, was a complete mental case) was about the only thing stopping the country descending into all-out civil war. The US have gone in, removed the complete mental case with no plan as to how they will prevent the descent into all-out civil war, and now are finding it hard work because there's angry locals everywhere they look. Well surprise surprise. Wonder why they're angry?
Chief Ethics Officer? In a company like HP? That's going to be a boring job.
On the plus side, I guess you can have "CEO" on your business cards.
That for all its "innovation", Microsoft have never in the whole of history released a truly new product. Everything they've ever produced (right the way down to Microsoft Paint - once upon a time there was a DOS version produced by someone else) has been either bought or rehashed from someone else.
Sure, they've played around with things a bit - changed the interface here and there, come up with slight tweaks, But at the end of the day, it's not the tweaks that get recognised as innovation; it's the whole new products.
Breakage caused by massive change is substantially more likely than breakage caused by no change, and also likely to be more expensive.
And the person who signs off that change will be internal, not an outside vendor.
OK, so support has ended for NT. But from the perspective of a large, conservative organisation like a bank, that's not necessarily the end of the world.
Will the desktops magically stop working? No.
Does a migration solve any existing problems which they haven't already solved somehow? Probably not.
What is the risk of sticking with NT 4 on the desktop? No more security updates.
How does that represent a risk? Well, with a reasonably carefully designed network with internal firewalls as well as perimeter ones - probably not a great deal. (Bear in mind that 95% of organisations don't worry that much about internal threats, despite evidence to suggest that they should).
What work is involved in migrating? Checking every application used across the whole company works, and updating/replacing those which don't. Reimaging (and almost certainly replacing) every workstation.
How much would this cost? Hundreds of thousands in man-hours.
Cost/benefit wise, I can see how it would be hard to justify such a project.
"Leaving to pursue other Open Source Opportunities" : he's sacked.
"refocusing the scope of [their] work to better align resources with [their] revenues...'" : we've just realised that for all that we do, very little actually brings money in. This is a problem. So if it doesn't bring money in, it's either canned or changed such that it does.
Not particularly nice if you work for OSDL, but it happens in business from time to time...
I had a talk about that back when I was in school. The chap giving it was of the opinion that the reason why things are so much better today is that a lot of Taiwanese companies got a bit fed up of being the butt of everyone else's "low quality" jokes (and probably figured it would be a lot easier to sell things worldwide if they did something about quality) and promptly instigated some reforms to do something about it.
Legend has it, a few years later a UK company placed an order for a million items (history doesn't relate what they were), with a note attached saying "We would expect your quality control to be so good that there would be no more than three faulty parts per million".
Fast forward a couple of months, the order came off the boat and arrived in their warehouse with a note saying "Please find enclosed the three faulty items under separate wrapper, though we can't imagine why you want them."
Maybe you missed the part about the US trying to kill Castro, who was not merely a foreign citizen but a foreign national leader?
Maybe Cuba decided that declaring all-out war on the US was a bad idea?
As has already been mentioned, the most important thing you need (particularly from your IT staff) is discipline. The scenario you describe would be major long project to migrate to Linux, not something you could do in a couple of months. I don't think it's necessary (or even desirable) to do a 100% migraiton, and trying to would probably cause more problems than it would solve.
Application Compatability: As others have pointed out, you can use Wine (either commercial or free versions) - but you'll have to test every application thoroughly. You'd probably have to do that if migrating to Vista, but the testing would probably end up being rather less formal. The generally accepted alternative method (and, to be honest, probably the best) is to set up a small Citrix server farm to handle the apps for which there is no Linux equivalent. If you find that you'd need an absolutely massive server farm, costing more in licensing and support than you'll save, perhaps the move isn't appropriate.
Training: Depends to a certain extent on your staff. In the UK public sector, staff can (and will) refuse to use a pocket calculator if they "haven't been trained". But don't imagine you'll be able to get away with none. A lot of it depends on your IT staff providing a sensible desktop that staff can live with - I don't know of anything Linux based which is analagous to Active Directory in terms of configuring machines for what's on the desktop, what's locked down across a large network.
There's a very real chance that your IT staff will need more training than everyone else, as IT operations work tends to be "jack of all trades" stuff, whereas a lot of the organisation's other staff are "master of one or two".
Peripherals: Rule of Thumb: The less common your peripherals, the more trouble you'll have. Business card scanners aren't terribly common, so you might have trouble there. Linux software doesn't tend to be as closely integrated as Windows software, so even if you can scan in business cards you might have fun importing the resulting data.
Application Compatability: This is going to be sticky. If it's necessary for some random person to be able to throw a CD containing educational software into a PC and have it work with at least a 90%+ probability, I would keep a lab of Windows PCs for that purpose. Otherwise the IT department needs to be involved every single time such a piece of software appears - and that will get very painful very quickly.
Real World: Here's a question you need to ask: Are you teaching people "this is how you use Word, click here, here and here", or are you teaching people "This is what a word processor is, this is what it does"? IMO, education should be more about the latter than the former, but IME the real world tends to disagree. And there's a very strong likelihood that the entire staff are more of the former mindset, in which case trying to force Linux down everyone's throat is probably a very good way to get sacked.
More Real World: I don't know about where you work, but in every place I've ever worked there's been a tendency for departments to go out and source their own IT solution for a problem, and not involve the IT department until they've already handed over the cash and taken delivery of the software/hardware. That is never going to work if they're running Linux on all their desktops - how would you deal with it?
the retailer looks at them like if they asked to dance naked in the middle of rush-hour traffic in the winter???
That's a good idea. I'll ask them to do that next time.
but if they did, they'd be an even more effective contraceptive. You'll be too busy trying to mop up the blood to have sex.
Bitlocker might be a great solution to keep stolen laptops from causing so much damage.
.mac subscription I'd have a program called Backup, which I believe is at version 3.
Oh, right, you mean like FileVault on MacOS X.
Built in apps for managing photos and your calendar are nice to have.
Gotcha. A bit like iPhoto and iCal, yes?
Built in Search works well.
Oh, so they've licensed Spotlight?
Backup and Restore are nice if you can afford the "right" version of Vista.
Funny you say that, if I paid for the
Windows Meeting space is neat.
Can't say I've ever used iChat myself.
How many companies will buy PCs with Vista Business EOM pre-installed, or buy the Vista Business OEM package, then exercise downgrade rights and put XP on them?
Speaking as an IT manager, in my case: as soon as I can't get Windows XP preinstalled on the hardware I want.
How many volume license owners will pay for a Vista license but install XP now and upgrade later, on THEIR timetable?
Funny you say that, I've just gone out and bought a corporate volume license for XP for exactly that purpose - previously, we didn't bother because it's a small company that's been around for rather less time than Windows XP and every PC had it preinstalled. I can see it being very difficult to buy a PC without Vista in 12-18 months time.
Keyword here is "airline". If it was the airport rather than the airline (or they can introduce doubt into the matter such that it /may/ have been), then you're back to 17 SDR/kilo (which equates to £/$hardly anything)
I suspect the "unlimited liability in the event of negligence" is probably more to do with passenger safety - the airline industry's very heavily regulated, and if negligence caused a plane crash there would be serious head-rolling.
Yes, I'd agree with that definition. With every major software release, Microsoft innovates at least a dozen ways for the IT industry to tear its hair out and scream in frustration.
The first "exploits" announced will be simply userland Trojans, as will most that follow.
You mean like a lot of spyware today is? Like LoveLetter, MyDoom and Bagle all are?
They may not be kernel-level exploits. But they're still destructive, they still get everywhere.
the fact that they can probably claim back everything from the airline anyway
Not true. The Warsaw Convention strongly limits the amount airlines are obliged to pay for lost baggage.
If you're living in a country where copyright infringement is a criminal offence, 10 minutes is too slow. 10 seconds is probably too slow.
Thermite is probably the best solution.
Probably this:
http://www.slate.com/id/2124884