Probably because a lot of perfectly capable developers have a huge blind spot with understanding the practicalities of doing the same thing 10,000, 1,000 or even 10 times.
I swear I will strangle the next person who tells me that the official way to install their software on a network of PCs is to go to every PC in turn, log in as an admin and go Start, Run, \\servername\share\install.exe and click "Next" a few times - and then tell me it's really not difficult to do that.
loss of value when someone loses unbacked up data in a machine failure.
Trivially easy to nail in AD so you can't easily save to the local hard disk. Actually, now I think of it you could nail that with NT-4 policies, FFS.
Downtime due to hardware failure (thin clients => simpler repair procedure).
Any business that is large enough to get a substantial benefit from thin clients should have PCs imaged to a standard build so hardware failure is a matter of "switch box first, ask questions later". Otherwise, they are most definitely Doing It Wrong.
Well, for one, you don't really need specialized hardware at all. That cost would make thin clients pretty pointless. And, as others mentioned, one benefit that also offsets the up-front migration cost is the fact that you no longer have to replace your desktops every three years.
Really? It's been a while, but every commercial thin client solution I've ever seen involved having your thin client boot off the network - and you didn't get an image you can integrate with an existing PXE infrastructure. You had to run the installer, which requires a specific version (and sometimes even sub-version) of a specific server OS configured in a specific fashion and they had some fairly absurd requirements (like "Make sure you don't have a DHCP server currently on your network").
Once either the server OS or the installer is out of support, you're SOL.
I have been in IT for some years, and I have never yet seen a business which treated their systems like a religion. Usually, they go for what works for them - and if that means spending money, so be it.
It seems that business drives IT, rather than the other way around. Who'd have thunk it?
If what you're suggesting is actually what's going on then that is very bad for MS, because their strategy only works when hardly anybody threatens to go Linux. If governments and large corporations left and right are using it as a bargaining chip to vitiate Microsoft's licensing revenues then they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they keep offering sweetheart deals to everybody then they destroy their revenue base, but if they don't then some number of entities will start actually making the transition and the more who do, the more the others realize that it's doable.
Which is precisely what a lot of large organisations - particularly governmental organisations - have been doing for the last 5 years or so. I bet you anything you like at least one or two savvy IT managers have spotted this.
Unix systems are easy enough to integrate with Kerberos & LDAP, but the entire system sets you up for failure in a number of ways.
1. AFAICT, nothing uses DNS service records. So you have to configure your systems with the LDAP server by hand. 2. The "free as in speech, set up your systems however you like" attitude means that there's about a dozen different ways you can configure it. The only problem is, different configurations aren't necessarily compatible with each other and there's quite a few variants which sort-of-work most of the time until they break. Then you realise the documentation wasn't quite as complete as you thought, and certainly wasn't put together with any thought given to robustness. 3. Because of (2), the only reliable way to get it to work is you put together a known-good configuration, store it somewhere and religiously apply that every time. Ideally, you also need a way to distribute updates to everything in case you made a mistake.
If you don't do this (instead relying on yourself being able to follow either your own documentation or that from somewhere else every time), you wind up with small discrepancies and some servers working just fine, others rather less so.
This level of discipline is seldom seen in smaller organisations, and hence you wind up with Unix admins saying "LDAP is hard and prone to breakage".
AD (at least from the perspective of client systems) on the other hand, only has one configuration and that's the one that's applied when you join the domain. It's much harder to mess up, and so much more likely to be reliably rolled out.
Really... there is nothing, I repeat NOTHING which is as robust or catered to large enterprise user/LAN management than Active Directory. This is one of the major reasons why large enterprises have not left Microsoft.
It's my impression that the Linux community just doesn't "get it". Am I wrong, or perhaps they're not even targeting business customers? Linux devs focus on creating a good desktop, but there's really so much more than that to consider.
You're quite right, but you have to consider that the community isn't a bunch of people who are aiming at getting big businesses to switch. They're individuals who by and large don't have to manage 10,000 PCs in their basement.
RedHat, SuSE et al don't seem to be so bothered beyond centralised user management, but then they're mostly aiming at the server market where something like AD is substantially less useful.
Before anyone flames me: LDAP (which runs just fine on Linux) deals with the user management side. It does precisely nothing at all for the PC management side; with AD you join a Windows desktop to the domain and it automagically picks up all the settings it needs for fiddly little things like configuring email, setting up the web browser to use the corporate proxy, mapping drive letters, putting bookmarks in the user's web browser, putting appropriate shortcuts on the desktop.
None of this happens with Linux, you'd have to put together something yourself - maybe with cfengine, puppet (both of which AFAICT are research projects put together by people who are blissfully unaware that the problem they're researching has already been solved on other platforms) or do your own scripting.
It's probably not as big an issue in the UK and Europe in general given that they seem to be at least halfway serious about holding financial institutions responsible when they lose customer data. Around here the best you can hope for is a minor slap on the wrist.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!! You are having a fucking laugh!
Seriously, have you ever thought of going into stand up? My own mortgage company was raked over the coals for losing a laptop with customer data on it. IIRC the fine wasn't huge by mortgage company standards - around £500,000. It got in the news all right - it was still one of the biggest fines that had been levied at the time. They're not a bank, they're a building society. I don't know if these things exist in the US, but essentially it's a money-lending institution owned by its customers.
They wrote me (along with, I imagine, all their other customers) a letter.
It was a couple of years ago and I can't remember the exact wording, but broadly speaking they said:
"As you may be aware, we have been fined for losing all this customer data. We don't think it's fair to take it out of the chairman's bonus, so instead we're passing it on to you lot. Thank you for being a customer".
You're making a classic mistake; I've heard about it being made in reverse (by someone who used to work in a bank getting a job in a company that wasn't a bank).
If you were a business, that debt would go on your list of liabilities. You'd like it to disappear of its own accord with no action from you.
You would also have a list of assets, and you certainly wouldn't let them disappear of their own accord.
The important thing is that if you are the bank, other people's debts appear in your list of assets. And other people's assets (ie. bank accounts in credit) appear in your list of debts.
Maybe in time Windows will climb up to the level of Linux when it comes to manageability but right now i spend most of my time doing repetitive stuff on my Windows boxes while i write scripts that handles anything on the Linux boxes.
I doubt it. Even relatively recently, I've had serious conversations with tech support at companies where they don't put someone with the IQ of a pot plant on the phone explaining that I need to automate something and you would not believe the number of times I've been told something along the lines of "Why would you want to do that? It's not that complicated - just a couple of clicks."
Getting the message across that it's a couple of clicks to you, it's a couple of clicks possibly several hundred times to me is too often an exercise in pain and futility.
There's at least a few apps I would like nothing better to get to speak to the dev team leader and ask them why, on FSM's sweet earth, they decided to do that. Was some deranged PHB involved or is there some sort of requirement that nobody can be hired to develop for Windows unless they point-blank refuse to log a single damn thing?
I'm in two minds. A CLI is a fantastically powerful tool, but at the same time some quick & easy way to change small settings that doesn't require you to go back to the manual (because the last time you looked at this item was eight months ago, and you can't remember a single damn thing) is damn handy.
Seems to be far worse for Windows applications than Unix ones, and worse for commercial rather than F/OSS applications.
I've no idea why this is, but I swear to God that Windows developers have no concept of logging. It really makes me wonder how the hell they debug the application - debuggers only ever go so far.
Don't you believe it. I hesitate to say it's common, but it's by no means unknown for women to marry an ugly nurturing man then have a wild affair with a rugged, good-looking bloke.
The ugly man winds up bringing up the good-looking man's kids as his own.
I don't know if it's always planned - my guess is it's got more to do with some primeval instinct to have the kids of the man with the best genes but have them looked after by the most kind sweet & thoughtful man.
I get the distinct impression that Skype was always designed with a maximum of a few hundred, maybe a couple of thousand users in mind - and since then they've been running around trying desperately to retrofit the sort of reliability that would have been there from day 1 had that reliability been part of the original design.
Your business trusts a bank to handle their money? A payroll bureau to handle payroll? An accountant to deal with tax issues? Are these not also things which you'd rather the world didn't learn about?
There are lots of things that are considered and values assigned when these things are brought up, and the fact of the matter is that your concerns are almost invariably given a remarkably low priority these days. Doubtless five or ten years from now we'll come full circle and solid, reliable server equipment with the sort of resilience that today we associate with clusters, SANs and virtualisation will be so cheap that it'd be barking mad to outsource it to someone you can't have any real trust in when you could run your own for much the same, if not less money.
You don't, but the Pirate Bay actively encourages people to go out and buy branded T-shirts and such which support them; this merchandise is manufactured and sold by a third party (of which there are many). I've no doubt other sites do something similar.
Watch how quickly the merchandising companies drop them if Mastercard approach and say "Nice business you got here. Be a shame if you weren't able to accept credit cards any more." The already did something similar with allofmp3.ru.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because a lot of perfectly capable developers have a huge blind spot with understanding the practicalities of doing the same thing 10,000, 1,000 or even 10 times.
I swear I will strangle the next person who tells me that the official way to install their software on a network of PCs is to go to every PC in turn, log in as an admin and go Start, Run, \\servername\share\install.exe and click "Next" a few times - and then tell me it's really not difficult to do that.
loss of value when someone loses unbacked up data in a machine failure.
Trivially easy to nail in AD so you can't easily save to the local hard disk. Actually, now I think of it you could nail that with NT-4 policies, FFS.
Downtime due to hardware failure (thin clients => simpler repair procedure).
Any business that is large enough to get a substantial benefit from thin clients should have PCs imaged to a standard build so hardware failure is a matter of "switch box first, ask questions later". Otherwise, they are most definitely Doing It Wrong.
Well, for one, you don't really need specialized hardware at all. That cost would make thin clients pretty pointless. And, as others mentioned, one benefit that also offsets the up-front migration cost is the fact that you no longer have to replace your desktops every three years.
Really? It's been a while, but every commercial thin client solution I've ever seen involved having your thin client boot off the network - and you didn't get an image you can integrate with an existing PXE infrastructure. You had to run the installer, which requires a specific version (and sometimes even sub-version) of a specific server OS configured in a specific fashion and they had some fairly absurd requirements (like "Make sure you don't have a DHCP server currently on your network").
Once either the server OS or the installer is out of support, you're SOL.
I have been in IT for some years, and I have never yet seen a business which treated their systems like a religion. Usually, they go for what works for them - and if that means spending money, so be it.
It seems that business drives IT, rather than the other way around. Who'd have thunk it?
"Enterprise" in IT doesn't mean what you'd expect it to.
It usually means "far too complicated for its own good".
How do you think they get the price down?
If what you're suggesting is actually what's going on then that is very bad for MS, because their strategy only works when hardly anybody threatens to go Linux. If governments and large corporations left and right are using it as a bargaining chip to vitiate Microsoft's licensing revenues then they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they keep offering sweetheart deals to everybody then they destroy their revenue base, but if they don't then some number of entities will start actually making the transition and the more who do, the more the others realize that it's doable.
Which is precisely what a lot of large organisations - particularly governmental organisations - have been doing for the last 5 years or so. I bet you anything you like at least one or two savvy IT managers have spotted this.
Unix systems are easy enough to integrate with Kerberos & LDAP, but the entire system sets you up for failure in a number of ways.
1. AFAICT, nothing uses DNS service records. So you have to configure your systems with the LDAP server by hand.
2. The "free as in speech, set up your systems however you like" attitude means that there's about a dozen different ways you can configure it. The only problem is, different configurations aren't necessarily compatible with each other and there's quite a few variants which sort-of-work most of the time until they break. Then you realise the documentation wasn't quite as complete as you thought, and certainly wasn't put together with any thought given to robustness.
3. Because of (2), the only reliable way to get it to work is you put together a known-good configuration, store it somewhere and religiously apply that every time. Ideally, you also need a way to distribute updates to everything in case you made a mistake.
If you don't do this (instead relying on yourself being able to follow either your own documentation or that from somewhere else every time), you wind up with small discrepancies and some servers working just fine, others rather less so.
This level of discipline is seldom seen in smaller organisations, and hence you wind up with Unix admins saying "LDAP is hard and prone to breakage".
AD (at least from the perspective of client systems) on the other hand, only has one configuration and that's the one that's applied when you join the domain. It's much harder to mess up, and so much more likely to be reliably rolled out.
Really... there is nothing, I repeat NOTHING which is as robust or catered to large enterprise user/LAN management than Active Directory. This is one of the major reasons why large enterprises have not left Microsoft.
It's my impression that the Linux community just doesn't "get it". Am I wrong, or perhaps they're not even targeting business customers? Linux devs focus on creating a good desktop, but there's really so much more than that to consider.
You're quite right, but you have to consider that the community isn't a bunch of people who are aiming at getting big businesses to switch. They're individuals who by and large don't have to manage 10,000 PCs in their basement.
RedHat, SuSE et al don't seem to be so bothered beyond centralised user management, but then they're mostly aiming at the server market where something like AD is substantially less useful.
Before anyone flames me: LDAP (which runs just fine on Linux) deals with the user management side. It does precisely nothing at all for the PC management side; with AD you join a Windows desktop to the domain and it automagically picks up all the settings it needs for fiddly little things like configuring email, setting up the web browser to use the corporate proxy, mapping drive letters, putting bookmarks in the user's web browser, putting appropriate shortcuts on the desktop.
None of this happens with Linux, you'd have to put together something yourself - maybe with cfengine, puppet (both of which AFAICT are research projects put together by people who are blissfully unaware that the problem they're researching has already been solved on other platforms) or do your own scripting.
That was not what he meant. The technology is tried and testes.
That's a load of balls.
Someone ought to FoI them asking what the other 2,480 suspects were.
Well, Volkswagen made the Lupo back in the 90s. It was able to achieve 78 miles to the US gallon with a 1.2L diesel engine.
So, I guess he's full of it, if the battery pack on the big American cars are unable to store enough energy.
That isn't an unusual level of fuel economy in Europe. It's just we don't have a phobia of small diesel engines.
It's probably not as big an issue in the UK and Europe in general given that they seem to be at least halfway serious about holding financial institutions responsible when they lose customer data. Around here the best you can hope for is a minor slap on the wrist.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!! You are having a fucking laugh!
Seriously, have you ever thought of going into stand up? My own mortgage company was raked over the coals for losing a laptop with customer data on it. IIRC the fine wasn't huge by mortgage company standards - around £500,000. It got in the news all right - it was still one of the biggest fines that had been levied at the time. They're not a bank, they're a building society. I don't know if these things exist in the US, but essentially it's a money-lending institution owned by its customers.
They wrote me (along with, I imagine, all their other customers) a letter.
It was a couple of years ago and I can't remember the exact wording, but broadly speaking they said:
"As you may be aware, we have been fined for losing all this customer data. We don't think it's fair to take it out of the chairman's bonus, so instead we're passing it on to you lot. Thank you for being a customer".
You're making a classic mistake; I've heard about it being made in reverse (by someone who used to work in a bank getting a job in a company that wasn't a bank).
If you were a business, that debt would go on your list of liabilities. You'd like it to disappear of its own accord with no action from you.
You would also have a list of assets, and you certainly wouldn't let them disappear of their own accord.
The important thing is that if you are the bank, other people's debts appear in your list of assets. And other people's assets (ie. bank accounts in credit) appear in your list of debts.
Maybe in time Windows will climb up to the level of Linux when it comes to manageability but right now i spend most of my time doing repetitive stuff on my Windows boxes while i write scripts that handles anything on the Linux boxes.
I doubt it. Even relatively recently, I've had serious conversations with tech support at companies where they don't put someone with the IQ of a pot plant on the phone explaining that I need to automate something and you would not believe the number of times I've been told something along the lines of "Why would you want to do that? It's not that complicated - just a couple of clicks."
Getting the message across that it's a couple of clicks to you, it's a couple of clicks possibly several hundred times to me is too often an exercise in pain and futility.
WTF are you talking about?
With Windows, you need the CALs for the user to access any application running on the OS in the first place.
Any self-respecting sysadmin gets attacked by the alligator, it's alligator steak for dinner.
IME you're doing well if you get that.
There's at least a few apps I would like nothing better to get to speak to the dev team leader and ask them why, on FSM's sweet earth, they decided to do that. Was some deranged PHB involved or is there some sort of requirement that nobody can be hired to develop for Windows unless they point-blank refuse to log a single damn thing?
I'm in two minds. A CLI is a fantastically powerful tool, but at the same time some quick & easy way to change small settings that doesn't require you to go back to the manual (because the last time you looked at this item was eight months ago, and you can't remember a single damn thing) is damn handy.
Seems to be far worse for Windows applications than Unix ones, and worse for commercial rather than F/OSS applications.
I've no idea why this is, but I swear to God that Windows developers have no concept of logging. It really makes me wonder how the hell they debug the application - debuggers only ever go so far.
Don't you believe it. I hesitate to say it's common, but it's by no means unknown for women to marry an ugly nurturing man then have a wild affair with a rugged, good-looking bloke.
The ugly man winds up bringing up the good-looking man's kids as his own.
I don't know if it's always planned - my guess is it's got more to do with some primeval instinct to have the kids of the man with the best genes but have them looked after by the most kind sweet & thoughtful man.
I get the distinct impression that Skype was always designed with a maximum of a few hundred, maybe a couple of thousand users in mind - and since then they've been running around trying desperately to retrofit the sort of reliability that would have been there from day 1 had that reliability been part of the original design.
Your business trusts a bank to handle their money? A payroll bureau to handle payroll? An accountant to deal with tax issues? Are these not also things which you'd rather the world didn't learn about?
There are lots of things that are considered and values assigned when these things are brought up, and the fact of the matter is that your concerns are almost invariably given a remarkably low priority these days. Doubtless five or ten years from now we'll come full circle and solid, reliable server equipment with the sort of resilience that today we associate with clusters, SANs and virtualisation will be so cheap that it'd be barking mad to outsource it to someone you can't have any real trust in when you could run your own for much the same, if not less money.
Well and good, but the Pirate Bay have always contended that what they're doing is not illegal in Sweden.
(Not that it's always done them a lot of good, but I note the site's still there....)
You don't, but the Pirate Bay actively encourages people to go out and buy branded T-shirts and such which support them; this merchandise is manufactured and sold by a third party (of which there are many). I've no doubt other sites do something similar.
Watch how quickly the merchandising companies drop them if Mastercard approach and say "Nice business you got here. Be a shame if you weren't able to accept credit cards any more." The already did something similar with allofmp3.ru.