And this is how millions of small businesses around the world get their IT support - be it Windows or Linux based, as soon as the company using the system needs any infrastructure beyond "2 standalone desktop PCs" the setup & support is outsourced. Yet still CNET,/.'ers and recently digg'ers harp on about how "Linux must become as easy to configure and install as Windows!"
No it doesn't. For a lot of uses, it just needs to be easy enough, and customisable enough that a company with the right expertise can seriously consider offering services based on it.
In order for this to become reality, there needs to be a clear business benefit to Microsoft.
If Office is about the only thing keeping people on Windows (and you can bet Microsoft won't willingly give up that monopoly), then a port has no benefit.
Let's look at this from the reverse perspective: benefit to Microsoft customers.
You can get Microsoft site licensing for just Office (on the assumption that you'll be buying every PC with an OS license anyway and you pay for any upgrades individually as and when).
Where is the business benefit in me shifting all desktops to Linux if I intend to maintain a Microsoft site license? Because I bet you anything you like a Microsoft site license which includes "Office (Linux Edition)" would be more expensive than the "Office for Windows" equivalent. And I'm still stuck with all my data in a proprietary format.
Most organisations following a desktop Linux migration have been either to save money or (more commonly) to avoid having to store data in a proprietary format. Licensing Microsoft "Office for Linux" would eliminate both of those benefits.
Linux can be done - I know of at least one company in the area that does it. They don't sell it as Linux; they sell it as an "entire IT system in a box for solicitors".
You would have to streamline everything a lot though:
- The customer isn't expected to do anything with the server. That's the support companies job (this isn't a million miles away from how a lot of these places work anyhow, so that's not a big deal). - Installation is nailed down to "insert CD, turn system on". All the configuration is pre-done by the support company, and every customer gets the same configuration. The customer doesn't do the install anyhow, the company sends someone to site if necessary, but the fact that everything is already nailed down means that you could get away with shaving a chimpanzee, putting them in a shirt and tie and sending them out to site. - Server hardware is specified (and usually supplied by) the support company. - Desktops aren't heavily locked down, but are locked down enough to minimise the likelihood of someone completely hosing their system. Combine that with Ghost, and running as much as possible from the server, and the desktop support overhead almost evaporates.
You could easily charge £a few thousand per company per annum doing this - for the customer, it's a lot cheaper than paying a fulltime IT person when they probably only need a couple of man days a month, and gives them peace of mind.
I checked the silly stuff like "is the driver compiled in". Seeing as the box hadn't ever been rebooted (and/usr/bin/uptime confirmed this) in between it going from working to non-working, this kind of ruled out the kernel losing the driver.
The card could see the tape drive, in fact IIRC so could the kernel. It just wouldn't write to it.
The replacement kernel was configured with the same configuration options as the previous one - "make oldconfig" is your friend.
You have never seen the picture on a newer CRT to form a comparison.
Your CRT has achieved a minor miracle of longevity. I doubt it's producing an image of the same quality as it did when it left the factory, but the fact that you find it's still acceptable is still pretty good going.
I've seen enough hardware to accept that #3 could conceivably be true.
What I was driving at is that there is every possibility that future software updates to their search appliance may well include a version of Writely which is run on the search appliance and doesn't send anything upstream, rather than run at Google HQ.
Provided this version can still export to open formats, I don't see a huge problem with it. And the great majority of businesses today are still giving money to Microsoft as the Office tax - albeit perhaps more grudgingly than they did 5 years ago - so the "I refuse to have my documents tied to proprietary software" argument clearly doesn't hold much water in the real world.
Often there is a free solution which works but it generally lacks a lot of the refinement of its commercial brethren - and sometimes you need that refinement.
Commercial software cannot hope to compete with free software on price. So it shouldn't. It should compete on other things - for example, ease of use, support, integration with proprietary patent-encumbered things. From where I'm standing, it seems a lot of commercial software that exists in the Linux world is doing exactly this.
All the budget in the world wouldn't have helped here, unless I'd decided to use "tape drive not working" as an excuse to competely replace my entire backup system from end to end.
Hardware doesn't work? Isolate it and replace it. Other than freezing an old hard drive to free up bearings to get data off before you throw it out, it's not worth the aggravation.
You've not dealt with much real-world hardware, have you?
True story: recent problem I had with a SCSI tape drive. For no apparent reason, it had stopped working. The possible culprits were:
- SCSI board
- Tried it on a different computer with a different SCSI board, it worked fine. Tried changing the SCSI board on the server it was meant to be plugged into, it didn't help at all. - Tape drive itself
- Had it replaced under warranty, the replacement had the exact same problems. - SCSI cable
- Replaced, yet the problem persisted. - Motherboard
- Rebooted the server into Knoppix, it worked fine. - Software
- No recent changes, it had been running the same linux kernel without a reboot for weeks with no trouble and the tape archive software was GNU tar.
Put a newer version of the Linux kernel on the server, and abracadabra it works fine - even though it had until recently been running quite happily with no changes to the kernel.
Because if not, surely a threat that if you are found with a copied CD they will send someone to violate an intimate part of your anatomy using their middle finger could be construed as digital protection?
15 or 20 years ago the same was true about computers in general. Businesses were buying them, people were not. Then they became cheap enough for ordinary folk, and software which might actually be useful to ordinary people started to appear.
And the DVD forum declared that all DVDs must follow a specific standard, and therefore anything which can't implement that standard is the thing at fault.
The fact that the standard was intentionally made hard for "unauthorised" soft/hardware is nothing to do with this. And where does this "unable to play DVDs" guff come from anyway? Two or three years ago, I'd say "hard to play DVDs" - certainly not "unable". But today?
I think it's a shame you've been modded flamebait, as you make an important point (though perhaps not in a terribly politically-correct fashion).
99.9% of people out there choose their computer (and hence the OS - if you believe that there are that many people who would be prepared to install ANY operating system from scratch you are sorely mistaken) on the basis of what they want to do with it. They want a tool to do a job, not a religion.
The best OS available isn't Linux, or Windows or Mac OS - it's the one which does what you need.
Wireless cards are notoriously picky - far more so than most other hardware.
Various reasons for this exist. One is that a number of the more common wireless chipsets, in complete contrast to almost every other bit of hardware out there, are produced by vendors who are notoriously reticent about releasing Linux drivers or sufficient documentation to write them. The other is the "FCC excuse" (and that's all it is, an excuse, as the FCC has no power beyond US shores) that the power output of radios such as found in many wireless cards may not be user-adjustable - and in many cases the power output is set by software on the PC, rather than the firmware on the card.
Why they couldn't nail it in the firmware I don't know - I suspect cheap manufacturers trying to move all the intelligence out of the card and into the driver, where it's cheaper to develop.
True, but returning to the Linux topic, Konqueror supports plugins for browsing different things: suitable plugins already exist for Samba, Audio CDs (makes each track appear as a separate "file", and drag & drop works perfectly - the plugin rips the music, optionally encoding as MP3 or Ogg when it's dragged & dropped).
I don't see why there can't be an iPod plugin which presents the music to the user according to artist/album (rather than using the hashing system that the iPod itself uses) and automatically updates the iPods database when changes are made.
Ignoring the West while the West continued interfering with the middle east didn't exactly achieve much, did it?
I don't think anybody really expected the West to immediately pull out of the Middle East and mind its own business. That's not expected in the short term. But in the long term.... who knows? Got to be better than sitting around doing nothing.
It helps if you don't think about them as morons. More "their skills are more appropriate for the job they've got".
OK, it is a bitter pill when those skills appear to be "play golf, make worse decisions than a crack-smoking chimpanzee and stab people in the back left and right". If that's the case at your company, you probably need to either find a new employer or take up hard drugs and golf.
As an anonymous coward has already remarked, I was talking about the turning point for the browser wars.
At the time, I installed a late IE4 beta on NT 4 Workstation. After the obligatory shutdown it never booted again and I had to reinstall NT - this was before the days of Recovery Console or any of the nice rollback stuff that's present in XP. I figured if that was the kind of quality Microsoft considered late beta, Netscape had nothing to worry about. Boy was I wrong.
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And this is how millions of small businesses around the world get their IT support - be it Windows or Linux based, as soon as the company using the system needs any infrastructure beyond "2 standalone desktop PCs" the setup & support is outsourced. Yet still CNET, /.'ers and recently digg'ers harp on about how "Linux must become as easy to configure and install as Windows!"
No it doesn't. For a lot of uses, it just needs to be easy enough, and customisable enough that a company with the right expertise can seriously consider offering services based on it.
In order for this to become reality, there needs to be a clear business benefit to Microsoft.
If Office is about the only thing keeping people on Windows (and you can bet Microsoft won't willingly give up that monopoly), then a port has no benefit.
Let's look at this from the reverse perspective: benefit to Microsoft customers.
You can get Microsoft site licensing for just Office (on the assumption that you'll be buying every PC with an OS license anyway and you pay for any upgrades individually as and when).
Where is the business benefit in me shifting all desktops to Linux if I intend to maintain a Microsoft site license? Because I bet you anything you like a Microsoft site license which includes "Office (Linux Edition)" would be more expensive than the "Office for Windows" equivalent. And I'm still stuck with all my data in a proprietary format.
Most organisations following a desktop Linux migration have been either to save money or (more commonly) to avoid having to store data in a proprietary format. Licensing Microsoft "Office for Linux" would eliminate both of those benefits.
Linux can be done - I know of at least one company in the area that does it. They don't sell it as Linux; they sell it as an "entire IT system in a box for solicitors".
You would have to streamline everything a lot though:
- The customer isn't expected to do anything with the server. That's the support companies job (this isn't a million miles away from how a lot of these places work anyhow, so that's not a big deal).
- Installation is nailed down to "insert CD, turn system on". All the configuration is pre-done by the support company, and every customer gets the same configuration. The customer doesn't do the install anyhow, the company sends someone to site if necessary, but the fact that everything is already nailed down means that you could get away with shaving a chimpanzee, putting them in a shirt and tie and sending them out to site.
- Server hardware is specified (and usually supplied by) the support company.
- Desktops aren't heavily locked down, but are locked down enough to minimise the likelihood of someone completely hosing their system. Combine that with Ghost, and running as much as possible from the server, and the desktop support overhead almost evaporates.
You could easily charge £a few thousand per company per annum doing this - for the customer, it's a lot cheaper than paying a fulltime IT person when they probably only need a couple of man days a month, and gives them peace of mind.
I checked the silly stuff like "is the driver compiled in". Seeing as the box hadn't ever been rebooted (and /usr/bin/uptime confirmed this) in between it going from working to non-working, this kind of ruled out the kernel losing the driver.
The card could see the tape drive, in fact IIRC so could the kernel. It just wouldn't write to it.
The replacement kernel was configured with the same configuration options as the previous one - "make oldconfig" is your friend.
I've seen enough hardware to accept that #3 could conceivably be true.
What I was driving at is that there is every possibility that future software updates to their search appliance may well include a version of Writely which is run on the search appliance and doesn't send anything upstream, rather than run at Google HQ.
Provided this version can still export to open formats, I don't see a huge problem with it. And the great majority of businesses today are still giving money to Microsoft as the Office tax - albeit perhaps more grudgingly than they did 5 years ago - so the "I refuse to have my documents tied to proprietary software" argument clearly doesn't hold much water in the real world.
I'm not free to run Writely on my own LAN
Yet.
Where do you think Google get their money from, the Invisible Money Fairy? They sell more than just advertising, you know.
I think sometimes you have to be a bit pragmatic.
Often there is a free solution which works but it generally lacks a lot of the refinement of its commercial brethren - and sometimes you need that refinement.
Commercial software cannot hope to compete with free software on price. So it shouldn't. It should compete on other things - for example, ease of use, support, integration with proprietary patent-encumbered things. From where I'm standing, it seems a lot of commercial software that exists in the Linux world is doing exactly this.
All the budget in the world wouldn't have helped here, unless I'd decided to use "tape drive not working" as an excuse to competely replace my entire backup system from end to end.
Hardware doesn't work? Isolate it and replace it. Other than freezing an old hard drive to free up bearings to get data off before you throw it out, it's not worth the aggravation.
You've not dealt with much real-world hardware, have you?
True story: recent problem I had with a SCSI tape drive. For no apparent reason, it had stopped working. The possible culprits were:
- SCSI board
- Tried it on a different computer with a different SCSI board, it worked fine. Tried changing the SCSI board on the server it was meant to be plugged into, it didn't help at all.
- Tape drive itself
- Had it replaced under warranty, the replacement had the exact same problems.
- SCSI cable
- Replaced, yet the problem persisted.
- Motherboard
- Rebooted the server into Knoppix, it worked fine.
- Software
- No recent changes, it had been running the same linux kernel without a reboot for weeks with no trouble and the tape archive software was GNU tar.
Put a newer version of the Linux kernel on the server, and abracadabra it works fine - even though it had until recently been running quite happily with no changes to the kernel.
Do they define "digital protection"?
Because if not, surely a threat that if you are found with a copied CD they will send someone to violate an intimate part of your anatomy using their middle finger could be construed as digital protection?
15 or 20 years ago the same was true about computers in general. Businesses were buying them, people were not. Then they became cheap enough for ordinary folk, and software which might actually be useful to ordinary people started to appear.
And the DVD forum declared that all DVDs must follow a specific standard, and therefore anything which can't implement that standard is the thing at fault.
The fact that the standard was intentionally made hard for "unauthorised" soft/hardware is nothing to do with this. And where does this "unable to play DVDs" guff come from anyway? Two or three years ago, I'd say "hard to play DVDs" - certainly not "unable". But today?
I think it's a shame you've been modded flamebait, as you make an important point (though perhaps not in a terribly politically-correct fashion).
99.9% of people out there choose their computer (and hence the OS - if you believe that there are that many people who would be prepared to install ANY operating system from scratch you are sorely mistaken) on the basis of what they want to do with it. They want a tool to do a job, not a religion.
The best OS available isn't Linux, or Windows or Mac OS - it's the one which does what you need.
Wireless cards are notoriously picky - far more so than most other hardware.
Various reasons for this exist. One is that a number of the more common wireless chipsets, in complete contrast to almost every other bit of hardware out there, are produced by vendors who are notoriously reticent about releasing Linux drivers or sufficient documentation to write them. The other is the "FCC excuse" (and that's all it is, an excuse, as the FCC has no power beyond US shores) that the power output of radios such as found in many wireless cards may not be user-adjustable - and in many cases the power output is set by software on the PC, rather than the firmware on the card.
Why they couldn't nail it in the firmware I don't know - I suspect cheap manufacturers trying to move all the intelligence out of the card and into the driver, where it's cheaper to develop.
True, but returning to the Linux topic, Konqueror supports plugins for browsing different things: suitable plugins already exist for Samba, Audio CDs (makes each track appear as a separate "file", and drag & drop works perfectly - the plugin rips the music, optionally encoding as MP3 or Ogg when it's dragged & dropped).
I don't see why there can't be an iPod plugin which presents the music to the user according to artist/album (rather than using the hashing system that the iPod itself uses) and automatically updates the iPods database when changes are made.
Ah, good thinking. Like Gandhi?
Ignoring the West while the West continued interfering with the middle east didn't exactly achieve much, did it?
I don't think anybody really expected the West to immediately pull out of the Middle East and mind its own business. That's not expected in the short term. But in the long term.... who knows? Got to be better than sitting around doing nothing.
You don't happen to know of a download site for VüDü?
As I've already noted, the late beta I tried hosed the computer.
It helps if you don't think about them as morons. More "their skills are more appropriate for the job they've got".
OK, it is a bitter pill when those skills appear to be "play golf, make worse decisions than a crack-smoking chimpanzee and stab people in the back left and right". If that's the case at your company, you probably need to either find a new employer or take up hard drugs and golf.
A few weeks ago I was standing in line for Space Mountain at Disney Land
This is Disney Land as in LA? And Space Mountain is still there?
Heck, I went on that ride in about 1989.
As an anonymous coward has already remarked, I was talking about the turning point for the browser wars.
At the time, I installed a late IE4 beta on NT 4 Workstation. After the obligatory shutdown it never booted again and I had to reinstall NT - this was before the days of Recovery Console or any of the nice rollback stuff that's present in XP. I figured if that was the kind of quality Microsoft considered late beta, Netscape had nothing to worry about. Boy was I wrong.
IE7 from Microsoft is looking like a little too little too late.
You know, I thought the same about the time IE 4 was in Beta.
One of the most amazing things I've seen is how Lotus 1-2-3 macros turned accountants and clerks into programmers (spehgetti perhaps, but it ran)
Not sure if you mean amazing in a good way there.