Ditto when you SSH into a host server, only then - guess what? No GUI. You can still move files around on the server when your only access to it is via SSH.
The problem you're referring to only arises when you have a GUI-driven proprietary admin interface on the client that talks to the server, you need to upload large files via this interface and the interface is written such that it will only upload files from the local client.
In the circumstances described, this is a fantastically stupid way to put your admin interface together. But you shouldn't underestimate the ability of commercial software firms to do such things.
Now, I accept that you may be able to administer that entirely through a CLI, but there's not a great deal of point in no GUI support of any description for the enduser of a TS server.
Haven't used Endpoint Protection, but I never had a big problem with their Enterprise AV product. Small, unobtrusive, easy to manage - what more do you want?
Then make yourself a utility that crashes your system or takes over your startup entries, or does exactly what any virus will do and see how it fares against the same tests. I'd be very surprised if *any* of them picked it up, even with "heuristics" turned on.
Contrariwise, I'm a big fan of scripting away work for efficiency gains - and I've noticed some heuristic scanners have a tendency to block a lot of functionality in many scripts. You're buggered either way.
No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.
I'd like to know how you'd propose getting around that in general terms with any modern OS.
gksudo and the prompt on OS X - once you've persuaded the person to enter their password, you're away. You've got root access, you can do literally anything you like. Up to and including patching the kernel so that you are more-or-less impossible to remove.
This isn't Symantec AV we all know and love(!) at the heart of these complaints. It's one of those "sooper-registry-optimizer!!11" programs that Symantec apparently offer.
Now, these strike me as somewhat odd. I've been dealing with Windows in one form or another since before the registry even existed - and I've never yet seen one of these tools do the slightest bit of good. Sure, if there's a specific problem (eg. malware) then a specific tool to deal with it may well help - but every single generic registry optimiser I've ever seen seems to be optimised to suck £20-30 from the customer's bank account rather than actually help them in any way.
The Arduino has only a serial output. In order to do any work on it from more than a few feet away, you'd need to plug it into a networked computer of some sort. With the raspberry pi, that networking is already built in.
How does that work? If you import two items at $10 each and assemble them, is the tax greater on the two $10 items greater than the tax on the final item at $25? I've looked at some similar rules for countries that have VAT//GST and they tax the $10 items at exactly the same rate as the $25 item, so the cumulative tax would be the same.
You're looking at the wrong tax. Raspberry Pi are talking about import duty, which varies depending on what sort of thing you're importing. My guess is that if you write "electronic components" on the import duty form, you get charged rather more than if you write "computers". And until they're assembled, they're components, not computers.
Blu-ray uses about 40megaBITS/second, and that includes audio as well as video. So if we were to say a couple of megabits/second for control (which is probably generous); that means each drone sends out the equivalent of over a hundred totally separate high-def video feeds each with 5.1 channel DTS surround sound.
My personal guess is film will be dead, or at least relegated to the realms of artist and art students within the next decade
It more-or-less is already.
The majority of pro photographers, AFAICT, are reasonably pragmatic - yes they know that 35mm film has enormous theoretical resolution - but they don't need it. They need resolution that's at least as good as their lenses (which digital hit some time ago), acceptable when printed at the size they're likely to print at (seldom much bigger than 24x36") from normal viewing distances. In other words, on those rare occasions you are asked to photograph something that's going to be printed on an advertising billboard, the question isn't "can you see the blockiness from a foot away?", it's "can you see the blockiness from 20 or 30 feet away?". As long as the alternative to film can do all that - something that digital reached years ago - the only remaining question is "is there any benefit using this over traditional film?".
To which the answer is "yes because you don't have to get anything developed and you can easily switch film speeds between individual frames." Everything else - like being able to easily order fancy products like photo books from some specialist supplier halfway around the world without having to either risk the original negs/slides or mess around copying them - is just icing on the cake.
For the iPod I think it's to build the library metadata files.
That's exactly what it is. You can use the iPod from Linux - but because support has been reverse engineered, you may occasionally get things that don't quite work as intended, and it's usually not a good idea to buy the latest, just-released-last-week model.
If business was slowing down a lot, why weren't they sacking workers and reducing expenditure? I think this is more of a failure on management to restructure the company in a way that identifies that they can't really compete in the digital age how they once used to. I think that sometimes the management just have to realise that the company can't exist like it once did, and in order for the company to remain and still employ some people, they'll have to downsize a lot more than management might be comfortable about.
When you have a small company, it's pretty easy to do that. The CEO or someone very close to him visits the affected departments like the Angel of Death and when he leaves, staff levels have been cut by 40%.
When you have a huge multi-national, it's really hard. You've got a vast number of departments spread out in all sorts of locations, employment law varies between locations (meaning you may not be able to go in and sack everyone even if you wanted to) - and even the most efficient set of management accounts is lacking in some detail. So rather than visiting like some dark angel, you carry out a full review of operations to get an idea of what departments are contributing and what departments aren't.
Well and good, but the people directly below you didn't get that far by being stupid. They're pretty good at office politics themselves, they know which way the wind is blowing, they know what a full review of operations means, they've spent years building up their little empire. No way they're letting it go without a fight. So when the instruction comes down from on high, you can be more-or-less certain that the report that goes back will show their department to be the one thing that's keeping the company afloat. (This, BTW, is why it's quite common to hire in outside consultants or make big staffing changes at a senior level before doing these things...)
Not to mention that such a review works great if the problem can be neatly divided in departmental lines. If it can't - if instead all your teams are contributing but none are contributing anywhere near what they need to be to keep the company afloat - things now become a lot harder.
That's why when we hear of huge companies turning things around and improving their situation dramatically where before they looked doomed, it's really big news. IBM and Apple have done it, but as a rule it's pretty rare. It's rather more common for the numbers on the balance sheet to drop steadily over a period of time until they can no longer sustain the business - and when that happens, creditors get jumpy. Frequently they get so jumpy that there simply isn't time to go in and turn the business around, they've already asked a court to declare you bankrupt.
Absolutely - this comes up every few months on/. and there's a huge circle jerk about how "Company X hasn't done this! Open systems will save us!" or words to that effect - totally unaware of the fact that not only is it something reasonably common in the telecoms industry, it's actually baked into the specifications for things like GSM.
Is that really so? Because I've been browsing through HP's offering of printers and I don't really see the overlap. Sure, a few of them are more-or-less the same, but most of what they're selling (at least by the looks) appear to be quite different.
I've just drilled through the A4/letter size ink jets to test this theory. I have made the following assumptions:
If two printers take the same cartridge, they're based on more-or-less the same engine - though they may be in a slightly different plastic case. As HP cartridges include the printhead - and an inkjet printer is little more than a couple of stepper motors to feed the paper, move the printhead and some driver electronics to control it - this seems reasonable to me.
I've limited this to A4 ink jets because I don't have time to go through every printer on the site. Feel free to pick up where I left off!
My findings are as follows:
Total number of printers examined: 13 Different types of cartridge used: 4
Detail:
Deskjet 1000, 3000, 3050 all take the refill known as "61". The 3000 is basically a 1000 with WLAN, the 3050 introduces MFD (scanning & copying) abilities.
Officejet 6000, 6000 Wireless, 6500A all take the refill known as "920". The 6000 Wireless introduces Wireless networking; the 6500A introduces MFD abilities complete with an automated document feeder. There are two separate product lines for the 6500A listed - one of them comes with a couple of extra cartridges.
Photosmart 5510, 5514, Premium, 6510, eAll In One Plus, PS Plus ePlus all take the refill known as "564". The 5514 is a 5510 with duplex; the 6510 introduces an "automatic photo tray" (whatever that is), the Premium has a larger screen. I'm not sure what's added with the "Plus" models.
Officejet 4500 takes the refill known as 901. It is an MFD with wired networking. As it doesn't support WLAN (most of the others do), it isn't labelled as "new" and it's the only one that takes the 901 refill, I suspect it's the last remaining one from a line that's shortly to be discontinued. If I had to hazard a guess, probably in favour of the OfficeJet 6500A - though the 4500 is rather cheaper.
HP right now has 89 printers on sale [hp.com], and those are only the current models. You see the same thing with virtually every tech company.
Quite a few of those are the exact same printer but with the optional extra duplex unit/network card/wireless LAN fitted in the factory. The car industry simply calls it one car, several trim levels and gives you a list of optional extras you can choose to have fitted. If they were to call it a separate model name for each trim level and each optional extra, you'd see the same thing.
Why don't geeks have the ability to understand consumers? is it like a lesion in the brain that simply blinds them to everyone not like them? As someone who builds and sells all matter of electronic gizmos to the consumer I'll be happy to tell you why they really don't give a shit how locked down a phone is, you ready?
It's fairly common human nature to base your opinions of others (including "what you think they think") using yourself as a template.
Pretty sure that was one of the first thoughts of the designers of this feature, too, and that the design accounts for that.
I've heard "I'm sure they'll have thought of that" before.
IME, 99 times out of 100 it means "I have such little understanding of the issue, and so much faith - however misplaced - in The Powers That Be to deal with it - that I shall abdicate any thought over it".
They'd never do that - people would too easily realise how empty most movies are without the eye candy of the explosions. Worst case scenario, people might actually start demanding well written stories that aren't full of holes.
No, but they do do the reverse.
You buy the DVD, you get the movie.
Alternatively, you buy the "Directors Cut", you pay $3 more and get it with a couple of extra scenes which were left on the cutting room floor for a good reason and a director's commentary (which it turns out is fantastically boring and you can't bear to watch more than 5 minutes of).
You could buy the "Special Edition" a couple of years later for $8 more. You get the Directors Cut version but the box is in a tin and includes a poster. The tin doesn't quite fit your bookcase and makes it look all untidy next to all the normal DVD cases; the poster you never take out and indeed you're surprised when a friend who's a real movie buff shows you it - you didn't even notice it in the tin.
If you're patient and want something special, you buy the "10th Anniversary Special Edition" ten years after release for $10 more, you get the Directors' Cut, a "Making Of" documentary (where they cobbled together some footage from the original green-screen shots; occasionally these are interesting but as often as not you find the guys who make the movies are excellent behind the camera but terrible in front of it) and version with a different ending. Why was the ending different? Turned out that the original idea that looked great on paper really didn't work when it was filmed and edited, so they had to write another ending. You watch the original ending once, then never again.
When you make $150 profit on a simple 600-page textbook, you can afford the muscle.
You don't, as it happens. It's a very similar business model to records, in many ways. There's vast costs that the general public not only doesn't see, they're barely aware even exist - things like proofreading, editing, marketing - over and above the basic print and distribute bits that we all know about. (Free clue: A lot of books on the market today would be borderline unreadable without massive editing and proofreading effort.)
The only difference between textbooks and records in this case is that the publisher has a better idea how many buyers they'll attract - and that buyers are less likely to be put off by a high price - so they've got a pretty good idea how much they'll need to charge to cover all these costs. Even so, quite a few books never really make much money.
Also, perhaps the reason that Linux does not support file-system compression on the fly is because it's a horrid idea, and should never actually be used?
Ah, the "Terrible idea" objection.
This is a common objection to implementing ideas on Linux - so common, in fact, that it's successfully held Linux back for at least ten years.
Multi-master LDAP replication? Terrible idea. Remained terrible for several years after literally every commercial LDAP server on the planet supported multi-master replication, only became non-harmful when OpenLDAP started to support it in version 2.4.
Active Directory support? Such a terrible idea that it's held Samba development back by at least five years. Even now, where Windows Vista deprecates NT4-style policies and 7 deprecates NT 4 domain support altogether (which is about all you get from Samba 3); Samba 4 is considered alpha software.
Some sort of centralised work-together system that integrates email, address book, calendars, task-list? Terrible idea. So much so that Exchange (despite being way too complicated for its own good) is still an extremely popular email solution and the closest you can get to a viable F/OSS alternative either requires your users to completely re-think how they collaborate (yuck) or buy the commercial version simply because the free version lacks vital features.
Free clue to all naysayers who work on F/OSS projects: If you spent as long trying to think of ways to make something work as you do thinking of objections to existing implementations and explaining how you're right and everyone else is wrong, you wouldn't be ten years behind the times.
because any simple solution like OpenSSH must be bad
The problem with OpenSSH - indeed the problem with most of these "simple" solutions is that they're only simple from the perspective of the IT department. They utterly fail the Marcus test.
(Before you ask - "Marcus" is a hypothetical employee. He is a man of perfectly normal intelligence but relatively little in the way of computer skills. If you're expecting him to do anything clever with his computer such as connect to the corporate network remotely, you need the instructions to be as short as possible, as easy to follow as possible with the bare minimum of extra boxes to tick or dialogs to fill in. Anything that gets in the way of that is a Bad Thing. If your instructions for Marcus are 30 steps spread across 6 pages of closely-typed text with no illustrations, he's got precisely zero chance of following them.)
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Ditto when you SSH into a host server, only then - guess what? No GUI. You can still move files around on the server when your only access to it is via SSH.
The problem you're referring to only arises when you have a GUI-driven proprietary admin interface on the client that talks to the server, you need to upload large files via this interface and the interface is written such that it will only upload files from the local client.
In the circumstances described, this is a fantastically stupid way to put your admin interface together. But you shouldn't underestimate the ability of commercial software firms to do such things.
Two words for you: Terminal Services.
Now, I accept that you may be able to administer that entirely through a CLI, but there's not a great deal of point in no GUI support of any description for the enduser of a TS server.
Haven't used Endpoint Protection, but I never had a big problem with their Enterprise AV product. Small, unobtrusive, easy to manage - what more do you want?
Then make yourself a utility that crashes your system or takes over your startup entries, or does exactly what any virus will do and see how it fares against the same tests. I'd be very surprised if *any* of them picked it up, even with "heuristics" turned on.
Contrariwise, I'm a big fan of scripting away work for efficiency gains - and I've noticed some heuristic scanners have a tendency to block a lot of functionality in many scripts. You're buggered either way.
No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.
I'd like to know how you'd propose getting around that in general terms with any modern OS.
gksudo and the prompt on OS X - once you've persuaded the person to enter their password, you're away. You've got root access, you can do literally anything you like. Up to and including patching the kernel so that you are more-or-less impossible to remove.
This isn't Symantec AV we all know and love(!) at the heart of these complaints. It's one of those "sooper-registry-optimizer!!11" programs that Symantec apparently offer.
Now, these strike me as somewhat odd. I've been dealing with Windows in one form or another since before the registry even existed - and I've never yet seen one of these tools do the slightest bit of good. Sure, if there's a specific problem (eg. malware) then a specific tool to deal with it may well help - but every single generic registry optimiser I've ever seen seems to be optimised to suck £20-30 from the customer's bank account rather than actually help them in any way.
The Arduino has only a serial output. In order to do any work on it from more than a few feet away, you'd need to plug it into a networked computer of some sort. With the raspberry pi, that networking is already built in.
How does that work? If you import two items at $10 each and assemble them, is the tax greater on the two $10 items greater than the tax on the final item at $25? I've looked at some similar rules for countries that have VAT//GST and they tax the $10 items at exactly the same rate as the $25 item, so the cumulative tax would be the same.
You're looking at the wrong tax. Raspberry Pi are talking about import duty, which varies depending on what sort of thing you're importing. My guess is that if you write "electronic components" on the import duty form, you get charged rather more than if you write "computers". And until they're assembled, they're components, not computers.
500MB/sec isn't right in a million years.
Blu-ray uses about 40megaBITS/second, and that includes audio as well as video. So if we were to say a couple of megabits/second for control (which is probably generous); that means each drone sends out the equivalent of over a hundred totally separate high-def video feeds each with 5.1 channel DTS surround sound.
Good point - but many pros were using slide film for years, and that has similarly poor exposure latitude.
My personal guess is film will be dead, or at least relegated to the realms of artist and art students within the next decade
It more-or-less is already.
The majority of pro photographers, AFAICT, are reasonably pragmatic - yes they know that 35mm film has enormous theoretical resolution - but they don't need it. They need resolution that's at least as good as their lenses (which digital hit some time ago), acceptable when printed at the size they're likely to print at (seldom much bigger than 24x36") from normal viewing distances. In other words, on those rare occasions you are asked to photograph something that's going to be printed on an advertising billboard, the question isn't "can you see the blockiness from a foot away?", it's "can you see the blockiness from 20 or 30 feet away?". As long as the alternative to film can do all that - something that digital reached years ago - the only remaining question is "is there any benefit using this over traditional film?".
To which the answer is "yes because you don't have to get anything developed and you can easily switch film speeds between individual frames." Everything else - like being able to easily order fancy products like photo books from some specialist supplier halfway around the world without having to either risk the original negs/slides or mess around copying them - is just icing on the cake.
For the iPod I think it's to build the library metadata files.
That's exactly what it is. You can use the iPod from Linux - but because support has been reverse engineered, you may occasionally get things that don't quite work as intended, and it's usually not a good idea to buy the latest, just-released-last-week model.
If business was slowing down a lot, why weren't they sacking workers and reducing expenditure? I think this is more of a failure on management to restructure the company in a way that identifies that they can't really compete in the digital age how they once used to. I think that sometimes the management just have to realise that the company can't exist like it once did, and in order for the company to remain and still employ some people, they'll have to downsize a lot more than management might be comfortable about.
When you have a small company, it's pretty easy to do that. The CEO or someone very close to him visits the affected departments like the Angel of Death and when he leaves, staff levels have been cut by 40%.
When you have a huge multi-national, it's really hard. You've got a vast number of departments spread out in all sorts of locations, employment law varies between locations (meaning you may not be able to go in and sack everyone even if you wanted to) - and even the most efficient set of management accounts is lacking in some detail. So rather than visiting like some dark angel, you carry out a full review of operations to get an idea of what departments are contributing and what departments aren't.
Well and good, but the people directly below you didn't get that far by being stupid. They're pretty good at office politics themselves, they know which way the wind is blowing, they know what a full review of operations means, they've spent years building up their little empire. No way they're letting it go without a fight. So when the instruction comes down from on high, you can be more-or-less certain that the report that goes back will show their department to be the one thing that's keeping the company afloat. (This, BTW, is why it's quite common to hire in outside consultants or make big staffing changes at a senior level before doing these things...)
Not to mention that such a review works great if the problem can be neatly divided in departmental lines. If it can't - if instead all your teams are contributing but none are contributing anywhere near what they need to be to keep the company afloat - things now become a lot harder.
That's why when we hear of huge companies turning things around and improving their situation dramatically where before they looked doomed, it's really big news. IBM and Apple have done it, but as a rule it's pretty rare. It's rather more common for the numbers on the balance sheet to drop steadily over a period of time until they can no longer sustain the business - and when that happens, creditors get jumpy. Frequently they get so jumpy that there simply isn't time to go in and turn the business around, they've already asked a court to declare you bankrupt.
Oh indeed. But it's easy to be a consumer psychologist when your next meal doesn't depend on it.
Something similar could be said for the desktop PC. Yeah yeah so Linux gives you all this freedom. Tell me, what's Linux's desktop share these days?
Absolutely - this comes up every few months on /. and there's a huge circle jerk about how "Company X hasn't done this! Open systems will save us!" or words to that effect - totally unaware of the fact that not only is it something reasonably common in the telecoms industry, it's actually baked into the specifications for things like GSM.
There's something called "lawful intercept" built right into the GSM specs. No idea how far that extends to data transfer.
Is that really so? Because I've been browsing through HP's offering of printers and I don't really see the overlap. Sure, a few of them are more-or-less the same, but most of what they're selling (at least by the looks) appear to be quite different.
I've just drilled through the A4/letter size ink jets to test this theory. I have made the following assumptions:
My findings are as follows:
Total number of printers examined: 13
Different types of cartridge used: 4
Detail:
Deskjet 1000, 3000, 3050 all take the refill known as "61". The 3000 is basically a 1000 with WLAN, the 3050 introduces MFD (scanning & copying) abilities.
Officejet 6000, 6000 Wireless, 6500A all take the refill known as "920". The 6000 Wireless introduces Wireless networking; the 6500A introduces MFD abilities complete with an automated document feeder. There are two separate product lines for the 6500A listed - one of them comes with a couple of extra cartridges.
Photosmart 5510, 5514, Premium, 6510, eAll In One Plus, PS Plus ePlus all take the refill known as "564". The 5514 is a 5510 with duplex; the 6510 introduces an "automatic photo tray" (whatever that is), the Premium has a larger screen. I'm not sure what's added with the "Plus" models.
Officejet 4500 takes the refill known as 901. It is an MFD with wired networking. As it doesn't support WLAN (most of the others do), it isn't labelled as "new" and it's the only one that takes the 901 refill, I suspect it's the last remaining one from a line that's shortly to be discontinued. If I had to hazard a guess, probably in favour of the OfficeJet 6500A - though the 4500 is rather cheaper.
HP right now has 89 printers on sale [hp.com], and those are only the current models. You see the same thing with virtually every tech company.
Quite a few of those are the exact same printer but with the optional extra duplex unit/network card/wireless LAN fitted in the factory. The car industry simply calls it one car, several trim levels and gives you a list of optional extras you can choose to have fitted. If they were to call it a separate model name for each trim level and each optional extra, you'd see the same thing.
Why don't geeks have the ability to understand consumers? is it like a lesion in the brain that simply blinds them to everyone not like them? As someone who builds and sells all matter of electronic gizmos to the consumer I'll be happy to tell you why they really don't give a shit how locked down a phone is, you ready?
It's fairly common human nature to base your opinions of others (including "what you think they think") using yourself as a template.
Pretty sure that was one of the first thoughts of the designers of this feature, too, and that the design accounts for that.
I've heard "I'm sure they'll have thought of that" before.
IME, 99 times out of 100 it means "I have such little understanding of the issue, and so much faith - however misplaced - in The Powers That Be to deal with it - that I shall abdicate any thought over it".
That's my view, too. Constructive dismissal has existed as grounds to take your employer to a tribunal in the UK for years.
They'd never do that - people would too easily realise how empty most movies are without the eye candy of the explosions. Worst case scenario, people might actually start demanding well written stories that aren't full of holes.
No, but they do do the reverse.
You buy the DVD, you get the movie.
Alternatively, you buy the "Directors Cut", you pay $3 more and get it with a couple of extra scenes which were left on the cutting room floor for a good reason and a director's commentary (which it turns out is fantastically boring and you can't bear to watch more than 5 minutes of).
You could buy the "Special Edition" a couple of years later for $8 more. You get the Directors Cut version but the box is in a tin and includes a poster. The tin doesn't quite fit your bookcase and makes it look all untidy next to all the normal DVD cases; the poster you never take out and indeed you're surprised when a friend who's a real movie buff shows you it - you didn't even notice it in the tin.
If you're patient and want something special, you buy the "10th Anniversary Special Edition" ten years after release for $10 more, you get the Directors' Cut, a "Making Of" documentary (where they cobbled together some footage from the original green-screen shots; occasionally these are interesting but as often as not you find the guys who make the movies are excellent behind the camera but terrible in front of it) and version with a different ending. Why was the ending different? Turned out that the original idea that looked great on paper really didn't work when it was filmed and edited, so they had to write another ending. You watch the original ending once, then never again.
When you make $150 profit on a simple 600-page textbook, you can afford the muscle.
You don't, as it happens. It's a very similar business model to records, in many ways. There's vast costs that the general public not only doesn't see, they're barely aware even exist - things like proofreading, editing, marketing - over and above the basic print and distribute bits that we all know about. (Free clue: A lot of books on the market today would be borderline unreadable without massive editing and proofreading effort.)
The only difference between textbooks and records in this case is that the publisher has a better idea how many buyers they'll attract - and that buyers are less likely to be put off by a high price - so they've got a pretty good idea how much they'll need to charge to cover all these costs. Even so, quite a few books never really make much money.
Also, perhaps the reason that Linux does not support file-system compression on the fly is because it's a horrid idea, and should never actually be used?
Ah, the "Terrible idea" objection.
This is a common objection to implementing ideas on Linux - so common, in fact, that it's successfully held Linux back for at least ten years.
Multi-master LDAP replication? Terrible idea. Remained terrible for several years after literally every commercial LDAP server on the planet supported multi-master replication, only became non-harmful when OpenLDAP started to support it in version 2.4.
Active Directory support? Such a terrible idea that it's held Samba development back by at least five years. Even now, where Windows Vista deprecates NT4-style policies and 7 deprecates NT 4 domain support altogether (which is about all you get from Samba 3); Samba 4 is considered alpha software.
Some sort of centralised work-together system that integrates email, address book, calendars, task-list? Terrible idea. So much so that Exchange (despite being way too complicated for its own good) is still an extremely popular email solution and the closest you can get to a viable F/OSS alternative either requires your users to completely re-think how they collaborate (yuck) or buy the commercial version simply because the free version lacks vital features.
Free clue to all naysayers who work on F/OSS projects: If you spent as long trying to think of ways to make something work as you do thinking of objections to existing implementations and explaining how you're right and everyone else is wrong, you wouldn't be ten years behind the times.
because any simple solution like OpenSSH must be bad
The problem with OpenSSH - indeed the problem with most of these "simple" solutions is that they're only simple from the perspective of the IT department. They utterly fail the Marcus test.
(Before you ask - "Marcus" is a hypothetical employee. He is a man of perfectly normal intelligence but relatively little in the way of computer skills. If you're expecting him to do anything clever with his computer such as connect to the corporate network remotely, you need the instructions to be as short as possible, as easy to follow as possible with the bare minimum of extra boxes to tick or dialogs to fill in. Anything that gets in the way of that is a Bad Thing. If your instructions for Marcus are 30 steps spread across 6 pages of closely-typed text with no illustrations, he's got precisely zero chance of following them.)