How will that help if the system's running Windows? Sure, you'll change the local admin password. But the local admin password won't achieve a whole lot on the network.
You do realise that in a Windows domain, even if the workstation is trusted, you still need a valid username/password for the domain itself to get anything? And they're not stored on workstations...
Agreed. I think open plan offices are more common in the UK (which I assume you're in from mention of the Official Secrets Act); whereas AFAICT cubes and offices are still reasonably common in the US.
In an ideal world, you'd lock down the machines such that using the local disk to store information is more-or-less impossible. Further, workstations are set to boot directly from disk and BIOS access is passworded. Then you've just got a fileserver to secure, and that's much easier as it should be in a locked room which few have access to. Knoppix? Who cares. Not like it gets you very far without passwords.
However, this world is not ideal. People still keep things on their PC, and still give out their password for a bar of chocolate. And there's more things people might find valuable than data - at a former job we had a workstation which miraculously went from having 128MB of RAM to 64MB overnight. I wonder why....
I took delivery of a shiny new mac mini last week. Gorgeous build quality, quiet and it's stone cold to the touch (and it's been running the last few hours). I didn't wait because I'm slightly concerned that the first few Intel based macs off the line are likely to suffer from a bunch of problems and I'd have to wait a year for those to be sorted out.
I think Mr. Gates killing all the competition was a double-edged sword.
If his goal was "make himself fantastically rich and the company one of the most well-known on the planet", yeah, well done.
If his goal was "make computers work better", well, perhaps he shouldn't have been so ruthless at destroying the competition. There simply isn't a way around the fact that, in a capitalist society, if a company is to continually improve its products (rather than just slap a new coat of paint on and call it "all new"), there is no substitute for the concentration it gets from having competition.
Large corporations and governments also have thousands of existing documents to convert. And when you're a large enough organisation, there's no such thing as "list price".
"Free" is all well and good, but "fails to open a significant percentage of documents and half of our staff point-blank refuse to use it without training" suddenly looks like a big problem. Very few businesses can successfully sack 50% of their staff;)
1. JDI - Migrate everyone's desktop to Linux overnight! Pros: It's fr33 s0ftw4r3, d4mm1t! Cons: Everyone's happy with this idea, right?
2. JDI - Fileserver has keeled over at 17:00 on a Friday. Fileserver *must* be working for 08:00 Monday. Windows install media not available, strong suspicion it was illegal in the first place. A samba server suddenly sounds rather attractive. Pros: Not only is it free, it gets you out of a tight spot. Cons: None, provided you can configure it correctly.
Guess which one gets you sacked and which one is good to put on your annual appraisal?
Next the market will be flooded with 10,000 software products, open-office ad-ons, etc, 99% will be crap. A few major competitors will emerge, with products which are competitive with MS's
Sounds rather like the computer world circa 1987-1992.
I'll get modded to hell and back for this, so let me make this clear. I agree./. is full of MS hating crackpots.
However, lest we forget, MS is a business. Which has historically liked to monopolise markets. Why on Earth would they implement OpenDocument in a reasonably sensible fashion unless they had literally no choice? (ie. enough invitations to tender were coming out which said "Must support OpenDocument").
Not quite sure why you've been modded Troll. Seems like a perfectly valid concern to me.
I can just picture an organisation testing Office 2010 with a whole bunch of fairly straightforward OpenDocument files, finding it's OK, awarding the contract to Microsoft.... then 3 weeks later discovering it breaks completely on anything vaguely complicated.
Certainly, the US has considerable technical capabilities. Indeed, I very much doubt Google blanking out parts of the maps they make available would have a significant impact on US military capability.
It's just difficult to accept that Windows is the best user interface. Particularly because the Windows user interface seems to be changing with every release now.
Not sure I follow you. Are you saying flat out "Windows has the best user interface"?
Because I call bull.
The best user interface is the one that your user can use easily and be most productive in. Sure, for some that will be Windows. For some, Macs. For some, Linux. Heck, I was rather fond of RISC OS.
IME, the great majority of Windows users aren't so much happy with the Windows user interface as used to it. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched somebody working only for a dialog box to pop up and they mutter "go away" under their breath and just click OK without reading it. I swear if I wrote a program which popped up a dialog saying "About to nip around to your house and shoot your dog. You OK with that?", 90% of day-to-day users would just click "OK". That's not easy to use. That's "learnt to put up with".
ActiveX - Not sure, but wasn't it supposed to be an alternative to Java in an attempt to derail Netscape/Sun? Not exactly innovative then...
Legal attrition - By your own admission, neither a product nor particularly innovative. I don't think we've seen the full depths Microsoft will sink to by a long way yet. But then, there are other companies equally prepared to sink to pretty disgusting depths - http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
Admin/User confusion - I'm not sure that this qualifies as "successful", unless you mean that Microsoft deliberately set out to build a security and administration model which was complicated, inconsistent and illogical and succeeded in this aim.
Active Directory - Or, as the rest of the world calls it, LDAP. It's an X.500 hierarchical database - not exactly a new and innovative idea. Integrating it with the innards of the operating system (rather than just providing a security API so others can integrate what they want, a la pam on Unix) is perhaps innovative - I s'pose you can have a half for that one.
If you're referring to ActiveX, IIRC it's purpose was to ensure Java never got a significant foothold in the market. Which would suggest that it post-dates Java.
Microsoft can hardly lay claim to having invented networked gaming. I was playing Doom across a network in 1996.
I'm not going to argue whether or not they've created a good implementation - I don't own an XBox. But it's not really spectacular innovation, more "adding something which had existed on PCs for some time".
While I'm generally system-agnostic (It'll get me modded to oblivion, but IMO the best system is the one which does what you want it to do), there is one minor historical fact here.
Microsoft are not an innovative company, technology-wise. Innovation, invention, call it what you will, implies either creating something totally new or at the very least putting an original spin on something which already exists.
Where Microsoft do excel is in marketing. They have historically been masters at looking at the market and making their decisions based on where the market is going - generally by buying out or essentially copying the competition. cf. Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape vs. IE (granted, Netscape 4 was more than a little bloated and crufty, but I don't think the outcome would have been much different if it was sleek and efficient).
Don't get me wrong, they do have a few good products in their portfolio (I don't care whether or not YOU find shared calendars in Exchange useful, the business world does). But practically nothing that's particularly innovative.
There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
The Siebel sales representative doesn't want to speak to you. He wants to speak to the IT director who's either been tasked with or taken it upon himself to figure out some way of using technology to get "closer" to the customers.
Say the magic word "Customer Relationship Management" and this suddenly sounds like a dream come true. Why spend months developing something in house when you can do the enterprise equivalent of trotting down to PC World, picking a box from the shelf and installing it? Much easier.
And the golf course around the corner from their head office is particularly interesting...
Slashdot Mirror
why doesn't Microsoft start from scratch and make a secure, stable OS?
They've already done that once when they started the plan to move everyone from '9x to an OS in the NT family. Look how well that worked.
How will that help if the system's running Windows? Sure, you'll change the local admin password. But the local admin password won't achieve a whole lot on the network.
You do realise that in a Windows domain, even if the workstation is trusted, you still need a valid username/password for the domain itself to get anything? And they're not stored on workstations...
Agreed. I think open plan offices are more common in the UK (which I assume you're in from mention of the Official Secrets Act); whereas AFAICT cubes and offices are still reasonably common in the US.
I'm a sysadmin as well.
In an ideal world, you'd lock down the machines such that using the local disk to store information is more-or-less impossible. Further, workstations are set to boot directly from disk and BIOS access is passworded. Then you've just got a fileserver to secure, and that's much easier as it should be in a locked room which few have access to. Knoppix? Who cares. Not like it gets you very far without passwords.
However, this world is not ideal. People still keep things on their PC, and still give out their password for a bar of chocolate. And there's more things people might find valuable than data - at a former job we had a workstation which miraculously went from having 128MB of RAM to 64MB overnight. I wonder why....
I had been considering a mac for ages.
I took delivery of a shiny new mac mini last week. Gorgeous build quality, quiet and it's stone cold to the touch (and it's been running the last few hours). I didn't wait because I'm slightly concerned that the first few Intel based macs off the line are likely to suffer from a bunch of problems and I'd have to wait a year for those to be sorted out.
Do it, you won't regret it.
Possible to recover the system without a GUI if needed?
Yes
Modular kernel which can be stripped of unneccesary features?
Yes
Does what you tell it to reliably and regularly rather than suddenly deciding one day to do things totally differently for no apparent reason?
Not sure about that one. XP's better, mind. That being said, I got fed up of waiting. Linux doesn't have that problem, and so far neither does MacOS.
I think Mr. Gates killing all the competition was a double-edged sword.
If his goal was "make himself fantastically rich and the company one of the most well-known on the planet", yeah, well done.
If his goal was "make computers work better", well, perhaps he shouldn't have been so ruthless at destroying the competition. There simply isn't a way around the fact that, in a capitalist society, if a company is to continually improve its products (rather than just slap a new coat of paint on and call it "all new"), there is no substitute for the concentration it gets from having competition.
Large corporations and governments also have thousands of existing documents to convert. And when you're a large enough organisation, there's no such thing as "list price".
;)
"Free" is all well and good, but "fails to open a significant percentage of documents and half of our staff point-blank refuse to use it without training" suddenly looks like a big problem. Very few businesses can successfully sack 50% of their staff
There are two "Just Do It" approaches to take.
1. JDI - Migrate everyone's desktop to Linux overnight!
Pros: It's fr33 s0ftw4r3, d4mm1t!
Cons: Everyone's happy with this idea, right?
2. JDI - Fileserver has keeled over at 17:00 on a Friday. Fileserver *must* be working for 08:00 Monday. Windows install media not available, strong suspicion it was illegal in the first place. A samba server suddenly sounds rather attractive.
Pros: Not only is it free, it gets you out of a tight spot.
Cons: None, provided you can configure it correctly.
Guess which one gets you sacked and which one is good to put on your annual appraisal?
If the iPod Nano can have it, why not my next iBook?
Because the price per megabyte is about 10x higher?
Next the market will be flooded with 10,000 software products, open-office ad-ons, etc, 99% will be crap. A few major competitors will emerge, with products which are competitive with MS's
Sounds rather like the computer world circa 1987-1992.
I'll get modded to hell and back for this, so let me make this clear. I agree. /. is full of MS hating crackpots.
However, lest we forget, MS is a business. Which has historically liked to monopolise markets. Why on Earth would they implement OpenDocument in a reasonably sensible fashion unless they had literally no choice? (ie. enough invitations to tender were coming out which said "Must support OpenDocument").
Not quite sure why you've been modded Troll. Seems like a perfectly valid concern to me.
I can just picture an organisation testing Office 2010 with a whole bunch of fairly straightforward OpenDocument files, finding it's OK, awarding the contract to Microsoft.... then 3 weeks later discovering it breaks completely on anything vaguely complicated.
Certainly, the US has considerable technical capabilities. Indeed, I very much doubt Google blanking out parts of the maps they make available would have a significant impact on US military capability.
It's just difficult to accept that Windows is the best user interface. Particularly because the Windows user interface seems to be changing with every release now.
Not sure I follow you. Are you saying flat out "Windows has the best user interface"?
Because I call bull.
The best user interface is the one that your user can use easily and be most productive in. Sure, for some that will be Windows. For some, Macs. For some, Linux. Heck, I was rather fond of RISC OS.
IME, the great majority of Windows users aren't so much happy with the Windows user interface as used to it. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched somebody working only for a dialog box to pop up and they mutter "go away" under their breath and just click OK without reading it. I swear if I wrote a program which popped up a dialog saying "About to nip around to your house and shoot your dog. You OK with that?", 90% of day-to-day users would just click "OK". That's not easy to use. That's "learnt to put up with".
Flight Sim - Started out on the Apple II, originally produced by subLogic. http://fshistory.simflight.com/fsh/timeline.htm
ActiveX - Not sure, but wasn't it supposed to be an alternative to Java in an attempt to derail Netscape/Sun? Not exactly innovative then...
Legal attrition - By your own admission, neither a product nor particularly innovative. I don't think we've seen the full depths Microsoft will sink to by a long way yet. But then, there are other companies equally prepared to sink to pretty disgusting depths - http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
Admin/User confusion - I'm not sure that this qualifies as "successful", unless you mean that Microsoft deliberately set out to build a security and administration model which was complicated, inconsistent and illogical and succeeded in this aim.
Active Directory - Or, as the rest of the world calls it, LDAP. It's an X.500 hierarchical database - not exactly a new and innovative idea. Integrating it with the innards of the operating system (rather than just providing a security API so others can integrate what they want, a la pam on Unix) is perhaps innovative - I s'pose you can have a half for that one.
If you're referring to ActiveX, IIRC it's purpose was to ensure Java never got a significant foothold in the market. Which would suggest that it post-dates Java.
MS did not pioneer this technology,
The whole point of the argument is "Microsoft don't innovate, they buy/borrow/steal".
but when they (Bill) took/stole/bought the existing tech, and made the deal with IBM, the floodgates opened. The combo of IBM-PC hardware
And Compaq reverse engineering the BIOS.... The PC wasn't intended to be nearly as open as it wound up being.
and cheap DOS software made it possible for many people and companies, at the time, to have a kick at the cat.
Atari, Acorn, Commodore - all were producing reasonably cheap systems at the time. But none of them had this kind of advertising.
Afraid you don't get the pint.
Microsoft can hardly lay claim to having invented networked gaming. I was playing Doom across a network in 1996.
I'm not going to argue whether or not they've created a good implementation - I don't own an XBox. But it's not really spectacular innovation, more "adding something which had existed on PCs for some time".
Not at all. I'm simply saying that Exchange is one of the better options currently available.
While I'm generally system-agnostic (It'll get me modded to oblivion, but IMO the best system is the one which does what you want it to do), there is one minor historical fact here.
Microsoft are not an innovative company, technology-wise. Innovation, invention, call it what you will, implies either creating something totally new or at the very least putting an original spin on something which already exists.
Where Microsoft do excel is in marketing. They have historically been masters at looking at the market and making their decisions based on where the market is going - generally by buying out or essentially copying the competition. cf. Excel vs. Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape vs. IE (granted, Netscape 4 was more than a little bloated and crufty, but I don't think the outcome would have been much different if it was sleek and efficient).
Don't get me wrong, they do have a few good products in their portfolio (I don't care whether or not YOU find shared calendars in Exchange useful, the business world does). But practically nothing that's particularly innovative.
There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
Will this be the next concorde?
I'm sure Airbus will be chuffed to bits if it is. Concorde only had one major accident in something like 20 years of flying.
superscalar
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar
The Siebel sales representative doesn't want to speak to you. He wants to speak to the IT director who's either been tasked with or taken it upon himself to figure out some way of using technology to get "closer" to the customers.
Say the magic word "Customer Relationship Management" and this suddenly sounds like a dream come true. Why spend months developing something in house when you can do the enterprise equivalent of trotting down to PC World, picking a box from the shelf and installing it? Much easier.
And the golf course around the corner from their head office is particularly interesting...
That might be because there are very few 65-million year old pieces of photographic evidence.