Are you advocating Microsoft create it's own software repositories, vet all submissions to make sure they are not malware, and only allow windows to install software from those repositories?
Apt-get is great, if the software you want is available from your distributions repositories. If it isn't, like the last piece of software I installed on my Ubuntu box, then you are left to download a.deb and install it with dpkg. Now, if I write some nasty little app that turns your box into a spambot, roll it into a deb and put it up on a website as "Cool_new_gaim_smileys.deb", what is going to stop little Johnny from downloading and installing it? Remember, once he types in his root password, he is totally screwed.
The alternative of course is to only install packages from your distributions repos. Which is all well and good, until you want something they don't contain. As soon as you allow a user the ability to install non-distro-approved software, you allow them to install malware. There is absolutely no workable way around this which does not either remove the users control over their system, or third party vendors ability to distribute software without the approval of the distro vendor. If I know the root password for a box, and I can install any program I want on it, then I can break it. That holds true for Linux, OSX, Windows, or any other OS you care to mention.
Apple could have made a stand, but it would have hurt them too much financially to make that stand. So they designed a DRM scheme that is at least somewhat palatable.
Assuming that you're talking about itunes and it's associated DRM (and I can't think what else you would be talking about), then what makes you think Apple would want to make a stand against DRM? Apple undeniably benefits from the DRM used on itunes. Imagine you have an ipod and 300 tracks you bought on itunes, but it's a first gen ipod, the battery is not what it used to be and you've dropped it a few times. Now, lets say a new music player comes out, it has wireless and more space than a nomad, it's not lame. You decide you want to upgrade, but then discover that to take your music with you will have to burn 30 CDs and re-rip them, and after you switch you can never use itunes again. Or you could just buy a new ipod.
I'm not saying Apple are evil. for all I know, Steve Jobs would like nothing more that to offer every track on itunes as a DRM-free ogg file, if only he could get the RIAA to play along. However, I have no reason to believe that to be the case, and if anyone else does, then they're are ignoring the very obvious benefit to Apple of the itunes lock in.
Actually, I see this as even less likely than home users upgrading. I really can't see much of a business case for going around upgrading your desktops to Vista. Actually, plenty of large companies are still on win 2000. I've no doubt businesses will adopt Vista, but I think that it will happen slowly, and it will happen in line with the regular hardware upgrade cycle.
They might have a point if millions of people were going to rush out and buy Vista. But thats not going to happen, so the Green Party is, sadly, talking rubbish.
Far and away the vast majority of PC users will be sticking with their current XP install until they buy a new PC, which will come pre-loaded with Vista. And even then, people don't tend to throw away their old PCs if they still work. They tend to keep it around as a second machine, or pass it on to a relative (instant recycling).
I hate DRM as much as the next Slashbot, but come on. Thousand of people dumping perfectly good hardware so they can watch HD-DVD movies? I don't think so.
Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm genuinly curious. I can't remember the last time I saw any hardware that shipped a driver on a floppy disk. And if you have any leagcy hardware that does, and you think you're still going to be using it in, say, ten years, when getting hold of a floppy drive really is impossible, just back it up on CD.
Incidently, I have an XP machine which has been happily runnning without a floppy drive since august 2004.
Actually, I have a slightly different take on this.
Lets assume HD TV adoption really takes off in the next year or two, to the extent that by, say, 2010, SD sets are a real minority (-30 percent of sets).
Lets also assume, and it's probably not too far from the truth, that MS has a bottomless pit of money, and are willing to do prety much anything to bury Sony.
Now, lets stop assuming things and look at stuff we know. The X-box had a four year life cycle (2001 - 2005). The PS3 is being sold at a loss, so sony need it to have a nice long life cycle in order to recoup their investment. They have publicly stated that they expect the PS3 to have 10 year life cycle. Nintendo on the other hand, make money on every Wii they sell.
OK, time for some more suppositon. Suppose MS decides to stick to four year turnaround, and X-box 3 launches in 2009. This would put Sony in a virtually impossible position. They would have only had three years of PS3 at that point, would be unlikely to have a PS4 ready to launch any time soon, and if the new X-box was significantly better than the PS3 and started to steal its sales, they might be looking at taking a loss on the PS3 overall
Nintendo, on the on the other hand, probably wouldn't care. They don't sell the Wii off the back of power or pretty graphics. The X-box 360 is already more powerful than the Wii, so if X-box 3 was even more powerfull, who cares? And if it really became an issue, if the market was really demanding an HD Wii, well OK. Nintendo aren't selling at a loss, they are likely to have made plenty of cash off the Wii in three years time, so they could just shrug their shoulders, move to four year structure themselves, and launch the Hii Dii in 2010.
I'm pretty sure every game system currently published by Games Workshop uses only regular six sided dice. I think the last game using anyhting else was second edition 40K, but that went all-D6 with third edition.
Oh, and Blood Bowl uses some custom dice, but they're just D6s with pictures instead of numbers.
I don't think Apple has to "open its DRM", I think licensing it to third parties would be enough. Microsoft already does this, I have a non-MS MP3 player that will play WMA files.
2. I don't particularly care, for example, editing/etc/x.org/fuckoffanddie/settings.conf to change the refresh rate.
2. Go get and try the new Ubuntu, and you'll see you're 6-months old point is too old now.
I happen to be running the new Ubuntu right now, and in order to get the graphics card working (and by working I mean able to actually display graphics) I did in fact have to edit xorg.conf from the command line.
if you are forced to upgrade, you presumably throw the old computer. And acquire a new one. This makes more trash.
On the whole, I think most people will eventually get Vista in the from of a pre-installed version when they buy their next PC, which they would have bought anyway, Vista or no Vista. I have no doubt that there will be new machines being bought so that people can run Vista, but this will be a pretty small percentage. You would have to really need the OS to be willing to buy a new PC just to run it.
Blair is leaving this year... the trick is to force him out before the May election,
You do realise that the next general election is not required to be held until June 2010, don't you? I think we can be fairly sure blair will be gone by then, since he's on record as saying he'll quit before September this year.
how do these people think they can do their jobs in five years time and not be replaced by someone that makes an effort.
Easy. They can support all the hardware and software we currently have. If the company decided to switch to something else, the company would have to train its staff on the new system. Why put the effort in on your own when you can just wait till it's actaully needed and do it on the company's time?
I believe linux is the default system for teaching computer science students detailed things about computers now
Well, you believe wrong. Some universities use it, some don't. I used unix on my degree, but my girlfriend never did on hers. In any case, even if hey had, a couple of degree modules ten years ago are probably going to be pretty much forgotton if you never touched it in the intervening decade.
Did they go straight from high school to MSCE?
Actually, in one guys case, yes he did just that. Whats wrong with that exactly?
Do these people take their jobs seriously?
Yes, but they don't love IT. I'm going to assume from the fact that you're posting on Slashdot that you are fairly interested in this kind of thing, to the extent that I bet you mess around with it at home. I know I do. If I had a non-IT job, I'd still be building machines, trying out different distros and writing code in my spare time. The thing is though, not everyone who works in IT feels that way. To a lot of them, it's just a job. They do what they have to do, they know what they have to know, and when they clock off at the end of the day, they head down the pub or put their feet up in front of Lost. They certainly aren't interested in learning how to support stuff they don't have to in their own time. If the company ever decides to buy some macs, or switch to Linux, thats fine, they can send them on some training courses, on company time and company money.
why are they working professionally with computers?
Yes, I know. The comment I replied to made just that point, and went on to say that once the transistion to OO.o on windows was complete, they would be one step closer to being able to move to linux, since they would no longer be tied to MS Office. The grandparent of that post (and the originator of the thread) was suggesting moving entirely to Linux. Thats why the thread title is "well if you're gonna switch, why not.." the rest of the sentance is "move to linux".
Of course if you had thought to read the post I replied to before attempting to educate me, you might have known all that already.
Well done for ignoring what the parent was saying, and replying to what you wished he had said instead. What he was saying was that switching is not a small decision, because there would be a large costs involved in retraining the IT staff who had to support the new Linux systems. I can tell you for a fact that out of the half dozen support staff I work with, at least four of them have never seen a PC running Linux, nevermind supported one.
In terms of applications needed by the business, we could pretty much switch 90 per cent of our staff tommorrow. The reason I would never suggest this is that it would not be cost effective. The whole IT infrastructure of the company is set up around supporting Windows. Switching over is not just case of burnig a few Ubuntu ISOs and showing some managers how to use Evolution. We would have to extensivly retrain our IT staff, find a hardware vendor who supported Linux (which might well be somewhat more expensive), and that's before we even begin to get into the day to day hassle of dealing with all the little problems it would throw up.
Case in point, I was setting up a laptop with a GPRS card on one of our salesmens laptop last week, and it wasn't working. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong at this end, I called the service providers support line. The friendly phone drone on the other end ran through a series of troubleshooting steps over the phone before coming to the same conclusion I had, and then discovering that the reason it wasn't working was because they had not turned the account on.
Now, suppose that was a linux laptop. For arguments sake, lets assume the card actually runs under Linux. Here is how the conversation might well have panned out:
Phone Drone: Click on the start menu...
Me: This machine is running Linux.
PD: Ah, right, I just need to put you hold for a second.
(Hold music)
PD: Sorry, we don't support Linux, you'll need to install this on a windows PC.
Yes, I expect that with much wrangling and arguing I could still make him go and check things their end, but we make calls like this every day. We would have to go through that every time. And no, we would not just be able to choose service providers who support Linux. In the example cited above, we have a choice of four networks for GPRs cards. To my knowledge, none of them support Linux.
There is no doubt that moving to OO.o would remove "an important part of the need to keep the Windows platform ". Unfortunatly, there are dozens more very good reasons why companies keep the Windows platform.
No, they don't care. But even though they don't care, even though they aren't submitting bug reports and writing patches, we would still all benifit from having them.
The benifits would come in the form of hardware manufactures saying "hmmm, Linux has 15 percent of the desktop market. Maybe we should write some drivers so that all those customers ours who use Linux can sync their mobile phones with it". Commercial software vendors would start porting apps. This would remove more barriers to switching, and so create a snowball effect.
Now I realise you probably don't want to use any commercial software, but unfortunatly, sometimes it's the only stuff that will do the job.
And just to prove that the plural of anecdote is not data:
I've seen quite a few fights in the various British towns I live in. In fact, just this past saturday I stepped aboard a train in Nottingham and walked past a bunch of drunken yobs slumped in one of the carriges, one of whom was in the process of explaining to his friend how he'd aquired the still bleeding wound on his forehead "He just fucking nutted me".
On the journey back, I was sat in front of a guy who was on his mobile phone to his girlfriend describing how he'd had to run out of bar to escape a brawl. I'm not sure if this is the same fight the other people had been involved in. Sure, I never actually saw either of these fights, but I have seen plaenty of others.
So, are you lucky to have never seen any sort of trouble? No, not really.
Many years ago, I went on an all day bender one bank holiday Monday in my hometown. My friend and I went to our favourite bar, a squalid little dive on the first floor of a building with a view over the town square, sat down at a window table, and engaged in a solid ten hours of drinking. Over the course of those ten hours, we saw at least four fights break out in the town square below us. Which is apparently four times as many as you have seen in your entire life.
But think about this for a minute. Four fights in ten hours. And most fights, as anyone who's ever seen one will tell you, do not last very long. A minute or two at most. So, unless you just so happened to walk accross the town square at the precise same time as one of those fights kicked off, you'd have never seen it. If there are (just going to pull some numbers out of my ass) fifty fights every saturday in London, each lasting, say, two or three minutes, then the chances of you being on the right street at the right time to see one are really fairly low. Londons a big place, a night is a long time, and most of the time you spend out drinking is spent inside a pub or club. Most fights occur outside pubs.
I just wish US presidents were made to answer questions in a similar fashion
You should watch it sometime.
In years of watching PMQs (Prime Ministers Questions) I have rarely, if ever, seen a sitting PM actually answer a question. They reply to them certainly, but that's not the same thing as answering them.
For instance, at a recent PMQs, David Camaron, the opposition leader, asked Tony Blair (who, if you don't know, will be stepping down next year) "Does the Prime Minister support Gordon Brown as his successor" (I'm paraphrasing) Tony's so called answer was " I know the honourable gentleman doesn't want to talk about his policies, but I'm going to anyway..."
How the hell is that an answer? Only if the question was "Does the PM know what I don't want to talk about?" could that be an answer.
Having said that, PMQs, and indeed the whole parliamentary system, does serve serve one useful purpose; it prevents a complete moron from achieving truly high office. The adversarial nature of the House of Commons means that to survive in a high-ranking cabinet position, a minister has to be able to think on their feet and answer questions under pressure. George Bush could not do this, and would be humiliated every time he stepped up the dispatch box. Remember him being unable to answer when a journalist asked him his biggest mistake in Iraq?
Sure, some of our ministers have been poor at their jobs. Some have been out of touch with reality. One or two past and present ministers even come across as, well, completly fucking batshit insane. But no morons.
If it takes a little longer to get election results, so be it... there's almost two months between election day and inauguration day.
Actually, it shouldn't even take that long. Here in the UK we run our general elections on a pen and paper ballot system, and we get the result the night of the election. As you say, the system scales extremly well.
Congratulations. That's the most ignorant comment I've read in this thread so far, and let me tell you, it's up against some pretty stiff competition.
From the McAfee site linked to in TFA:
Infection occurs when a removable storage device or a mapped drive hosting a copy of W32/Rjump.worm is accessed and the user agrees to the auto run prompt for execution of the worm.
Yes, that's right, you have to agree to install the dammed thing. Now, if you plug an MP3 player into your computer and it prompts you to ok a software installation, there are only two reasons to agree to do it:
1) You trust the vendor in question, and are happy to install their software, even if you aren't too sure exactly what it is.
2)You really have no idea what this prompt is, you're not too interested either, and you just blindly click ok because you think if you don't you're new toy won't work.
Now, just supposing you were using Linux, and the phrase "click ok" was replaced with "enter root password", what would happen? I'll tell you what would happen. The same people who clicked OK would just tap in their passwords.
The problem here is not windows insecurity. The problem is that a trusted vendor was shipping infected hardware. End of story.
ANYBODY can hear the difference. Start encoding MP3s at lower bitrates until they sound like crap, then encode to vorbis at the same bitrate... The MP3 will sound like crap, wile the Ogg won't.
But I don't encode at lower bitrates. And my entire CD collection still comes to less than 12 GB. I will happily concede this may bay an advantage for some people, but MP3 player storage capacities are so huge now that there really can't be many people who need to encode at a lower bit rate.
And even if there weren't... MP3 got insanely popular long before DAPs came around, so putting it on your iPod isn't the only use for lossy audio compression.
Very true. I had my CD collection as MP3s years before I bought an MP3 player. Mind you, thinking back, the hard drive on the machine that held all those MP3s was the same size as the one on my current MP3 player. Back to my earlier point about storage capacity.
Of course, the real driver for MP3s adoption was file trading. MP3 was compressed enough to transfer a whole album over dial up and have it finish in a semi-resonable amount of time. These days, when I think nothing of downloading a 1 or 2 gig file, and even my dad has broadband, there's just no need for an even more compressed format.
Yes, and back when I was thinking of buying an ogg player, I considered getting an iRiver. But the point is, if I encode all my music to MP3 then every single player on the market can play it. My choice of player is not limited to 5.
My current MP3 player fitted every single requirement I had for a portable device. It's 20GB, tiny, shows up as a standard USB disk drive and lets me drag and drop music to it, and was reasonably cheap. In order to get one that played ogg, I would have had to compromise on some or all of those points. If I had done so, how would I have been better off?
I used to think along the same lines. I was planning to buy a player that supported ogg, but I never found one that I liked, and I have since given up on the ogg format. It is simply never, ever, going to be widely adopted enough for the player manufacturers to bother supporting it. Sorry.
The reasons are many and varied, but the main one is, quite simply, the problem it solves is not a problem many people actually have. Ogg was an attempt to create a compressed audio standard unencumbered by licensing, which could replace MP3. Which is all well and good, except I have never, since the day I first became aware of MP3, been unable to download a piece of free (as in beer) software which would encode MP3s for me. I have never been unable to do something with an MP3 because of the license the format is issued under. In short, MP3 is free enough for me.
If you look at the two other most widely used compressed audio formats, WMA and AAC, they both have (near) monopolies pushing them. The most popular digital audio player and online music store uses AAC. The OS preinstalled on 90+ percent of computers sold in the world ships with a media player that supports playing and ripping WMAs. Who is pushing ogg?
The market for ogg is basically limited to linux users, and most of us are using MP3 anyway. There is no reason for any company to push it, and really very little reason to use it. I know it's supposed to be highter quality, but A, I can't hear the difference, and B, why would I want a high quality compressed audio format? To play on my portable music player, which supports which formats? Oh, yeah.
*NOTE TO PEDANTS - Yes, I am aware of the difference between the ogg container format and the vorbis codec. I just can't be bothered to type ogg vorbis every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you advocating Microsoft create it's own software repositories, vet all submissions to make sure they are not malware, and only allow windows to install software from those repositories?
.deb and install it with dpkg. Now, if I write some nasty little app that turns your box into a spambot, roll it into a deb and put it up on a website as "Cool_new_gaim_smileys.deb", what is going to stop little Johnny from downloading and installing it? Remember, once he types in his root password, he is totally screwed.
Apt-get is great, if the software you want is available from your distributions repositories. If it isn't, like the last piece of software I installed on my Ubuntu box, then you are left to download a
The alternative of course is to only install packages from your distributions repos. Which is all well and good, until you want something they don't contain. As soon as you allow a user the ability to install non-distro-approved software, you allow them to install malware. There is absolutely no workable way around this which does not either remove the users control over their system, or third party vendors ability to distribute software without the approval of the distro vendor. If I know the root password for a box, and I can install any program I want on it, then I can break it. That holds true for Linux, OSX, Windows, or any other OS you care to mention.
Also, the option to resolve dependencies and install as a statically linked blob would be awesome for legacy stuff.
I've been screaming about this for years, I just don't understand why it's not a standard option in every package manager.
Apple could have made a stand, but it would have hurt them too much financially to make that stand. So they designed a DRM scheme that is at least somewhat palatable.
Assuming that you're talking about itunes and it's associated DRM (and I can't think what else you would be talking about), then what makes you think Apple would want to make a stand against DRM? Apple undeniably benefits from the DRM used on itunes. Imagine you have an ipod and 300 tracks you bought on itunes, but it's a first gen ipod, the battery is not what it used to be and you've dropped it a few times. Now, lets say a new music player comes out, it has wireless and more space than a nomad, it's not lame. You decide you want to upgrade, but then discover that to take your music with you will have to burn 30 CDs and re-rip them, and after you switch you can never use itunes again. Or you could just buy a new ipod.
I'm not saying Apple are evil. for all I know, Steve Jobs would like nothing more that to offer every track on itunes as a DRM-free ogg file, if only he could get the RIAA to play along. However, I have no reason to believe that to be the case, and if anyone else does, then they're are ignoring the very obvious benefit to Apple of the itunes lock in.
Actually, I see this as even less likely than home users upgrading. I really can't see much of a business case for going around upgrading your desktops to Vista. Actually, plenty of large companies are still on win 2000. I've no doubt businesses will adopt Vista, but I think that it will happen slowly, and it will happen in line with the regular hardware upgrade cycle.
They might have a point if millions of people were going to rush out and buy Vista. But thats not going to happen, so the Green Party is, sadly, talking rubbish.
Far and away the vast majority of PC users will be sticking with their current XP install until they buy a new PC, which will come pre-loaded with Vista. And even then, people don't tend to throw away their old PCs if they still work. They tend to keep it around as a second machine, or pass it on to a relative (instant recycling).
I hate DRM as much as the next Slashbot, but come on. Thousand of people dumping perfectly good hardware so they can watch HD-DVD movies? I don't think so.
Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm genuinly curious. I can't remember the last time I saw any hardware that shipped a driver on a floppy disk. And if you have any leagcy hardware that does, and you think you're still going to be using it in, say, ten years, when getting hold of a floppy drive really is impossible, just back it up on CD.
Incidently, I have an XP machine which has been happily runnning without a floppy drive since august 2004.
Actually, I have a slightly different take on this.
Lets assume HD TV adoption really takes off in the next year or two, to the extent that by, say, 2010, SD sets are a real minority (-30 percent of sets).
Lets also assume, and it's probably not too far from the truth, that MS has a bottomless pit of money, and are willing to do prety much anything to bury Sony.
Now, lets stop assuming things and look at stuff we know. The X-box had a four year life cycle (2001 - 2005). The PS3 is being sold at a loss, so sony need it to have a nice long life cycle in order to recoup their investment. They have publicly stated that they expect the PS3 to have 10 year life cycle. Nintendo on the other hand, make money on every Wii they sell.
OK, time for some more suppositon. Suppose MS decides to stick to four year turnaround, and X-box 3 launches in 2009. This would put Sony in a virtually impossible position. They would have only had three years of PS3 at that point, would be unlikely to have a PS4 ready to launch any time soon, and if the new X-box was significantly better than the PS3 and started to steal its sales, they might be looking at taking a loss on the PS3 overall
Nintendo, on the on the other hand, probably wouldn't care. They don't sell the Wii off the back of power or pretty graphics. The X-box 360 is already more powerful than the Wii, so if X-box 3 was even more powerfull, who cares? And if it really became an issue, if the market was really demanding an HD Wii, well OK. Nintendo aren't selling at a loss, they are likely to have made plenty of cash off the Wii in three years time, so they could just shrug their shoulders, move to four year structure themselves, and launch the Hii Dii in 2010.
Of course that's probably all bullshit.
Maybe I could be an analyst too.
Ah yes, I forgot about that one.
Come to think of it, Necromunda might still use some odd dice as well.
I'm pretty sure every game system currently published by Games Workshop uses only regular six sided dice. I think the last game using anyhting else was second edition 40K, but that went all-D6 with third edition.
Oh, and Blood Bowl uses some custom dice, but they're just D6s with pictures instead of numbers.
The link I'm sure everyone will want: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29361_XFpTc
I don't think Apple has to "open its DRM", I think licensing it to third parties would be enough. Microsoft already does this, I have a non-MS MP3 player that will play WMA files.
2. I don't particularly care, for example, editing /etc/x.org/fuckoffanddie/settings.conf to change the refresh rate.
2. Go get and try the new Ubuntu, and you'll see you're 6-months old point is too old now.
I happen to be running the new Ubuntu right now, and in order to get the graphics card working (and by working I mean able to actually display graphics) I did in fact have to edit xorg.conf from the command line.
if you are forced to upgrade, you presumably throw the old computer. And acquire a new one. This makes more trash.
On the whole, I think most people will eventually get Vista in the from of a pre-installed version when they buy their next PC, which they would have bought anyway, Vista or no Vista. I have no doubt that there will be new machines being bought so that people can run Vista, but this will be a pretty small percentage. You would have to really need the OS to be willing to buy a new PC just to run it.
Blair is leaving this year ... the trick is to force him out before the May election,
You do realise that the next general election is not required to be held until June 2010, don't you? I think we can be fairly sure blair will be gone by then, since he's on record as saying he'll quit before September this year.
how do these people think they can do their jobs in five years time and not be replaced by someone that makes an effort.
Easy. They can support all the hardware and software we currently have. If the company decided to switch to something else, the company would have to train its staff on the new system. Why put the effort in on your own when you can just wait till it's actaully needed and do it on the company's time?
I believe linux is the default system for teaching computer science students detailed things about computers now
Well, you believe wrong. Some universities use it, some don't. I used unix on my degree, but my girlfriend never did on hers. In any case, even if hey had, a couple of degree modules ten years ago are probably going to be pretty much forgotton if you never touched it in the intervening decade.
Did they go straight from high school to MSCE?
Actually, in one guys case, yes he did just that. Whats wrong with that exactly?
Do these people take their jobs seriously?
Yes, but they don't love IT. I'm going to assume from the fact that you're posting on Slashdot that you are fairly interested in this kind of thing, to the extent that I bet you mess around with it at home. I know I do. If I had a non-IT job, I'd still be building machines, trying out different distros and writing code in my spare time. The thing is though, not everyone who works in IT feels that way. To a lot of them, it's just a job. They do what they have to do, they know what they have to know, and when they clock off at the end of the day, they head down the pub or put their feet up in front of Lost. They certainly aren't interested in learning how to support stuff they don't have to in their own time. If the company ever decides to buy some macs, or switch to Linux, thats fine, they can send them on some training courses, on company time and company money.
why are they working professionally with computers?
So they can feed their families.
Yes, I know. The comment I replied to made just that point, and went on to say that once the transistion to OO.o on windows was complete, they would be one step closer to being able to move to linux, since they would no longer be tied to MS Office. The grandparent of that post (and the originator of the thread) was suggesting moving entirely to Linux. Thats why the thread title is "well if you're gonna switch, why not.." the rest of the sentance is "move to linux".
Of course if you had thought to read the post I replied to before attempting to educate me, you might have known all that already.
Well done for ignoring what the parent was saying, and replying to what you wished he had said instead. What he was saying was that switching is not a small decision, because there would be a large costs involved in retraining the IT staff who had to support the new Linux systems. I can tell you for a fact that out of the half dozen support staff I work with, at least four of them have never seen a PC running Linux, nevermind supported one.
In terms of applications needed by the business, we could pretty much switch 90 per cent of our staff tommorrow. The reason I would never suggest this is that it would not be cost effective. The whole IT infrastructure of the company is set up around supporting Windows. Switching over is not just case of burnig a few Ubuntu ISOs and showing some managers how to use Evolution. We would have to extensivly retrain our IT staff, find a hardware vendor who supported Linux (which might well be somewhat more expensive), and that's before we even begin to get into the day to day hassle of dealing with all the little problems it would throw up.
Case in point, I was setting up a laptop with a GPRS card on one of our salesmens laptop last week, and it wasn't working. After coming to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong at this end, I called the service providers support line. The friendly phone drone on the other end ran through a series of troubleshooting steps over the phone before coming to the same conclusion I had, and then discovering that the reason it wasn't working was because they had not turned the account on.
Now, suppose that was a linux laptop. For arguments sake, lets assume the card actually runs under Linux. Here is how the conversation might well have panned out:
Phone Drone: Click on the start menu...
Me: This machine is running Linux.
PD: Ah, right, I just need to put you hold for a second.
(Hold music)
PD: Sorry, we don't support Linux, you'll need to install this on a windows PC.
Yes, I expect that with much wrangling and arguing I could still make him go and check things their end, but we make calls like this every day. We would have to go through that every time. And no, we would not just be able to choose service providers who support Linux. In the example cited above, we have a choice of four networks for GPRs cards. To my knowledge, none of them support Linux.
There is no doubt that moving to OO.o would remove "an important part of the need to keep the Windows platform ". Unfortunatly, there are dozens more very good reasons why companies keep the Windows platform.
No, they don't care. But even though they don't care, even though they aren't submitting bug reports and writing patches, we would still all benifit from having them.
The benifits would come in the form of hardware manufactures saying "hmmm, Linux has 15 percent of the desktop market. Maybe we should write some drivers so that all those customers ours who use Linux can sync their mobile phones with it". Commercial software vendors would start porting apps. This would remove more barriers to switching, and so create a snowball effect.
Now I realise you probably don't want to use any commercial software, but unfortunatly, sometimes it's the only stuff that will do the job.
And just to prove that the plural of anecdote is not data:
I've seen quite a few fights in the various British towns I live in. In fact, just this past saturday I stepped aboard a train in Nottingham and walked past a bunch of drunken yobs slumped in one of the carriges, one of whom was in the process of explaining to his friend how he'd aquired the still bleeding wound on his forehead "He just fucking nutted me".
On the journey back, I was sat in front of a guy who was on his mobile phone to his girlfriend describing how he'd had to run out of bar to escape a brawl. I'm not sure if this is the same fight the other people had been involved in. Sure, I never actually saw either of these fights, but I have seen plaenty of others.
So, are you lucky to have never seen any sort of trouble? No, not really.
Many years ago, I went on an all day bender one bank holiday Monday in my hometown. My friend and I went to our favourite bar, a squalid little dive on the first floor of a building with a view over the town square, sat down at a window table, and engaged in a solid ten hours of drinking. Over the course of those ten hours, we saw at least four fights break out in the town square below us. Which is apparently four times as many as you have seen in your entire life.
But think about this for a minute. Four fights in ten hours. And most fights, as anyone who's ever seen one will tell you, do not last very long. A minute or two at most. So, unless you just so happened to walk accross the town square at the precise same time as one of those fights kicked off, you'd have never seen it. If there are (just going to pull some numbers out of my ass) fifty fights every saturday in London, each lasting, say, two or three minutes, then the chances of you being on the right street at the right time to see one are really fairly low. Londons a big place, a night is a long time, and most of the time you spend out drinking is spent inside a pub or club. Most fights occur outside pubs.
I just wish US presidents were made to answer questions in a similar fashion
You should watch it sometime.
In years of watching PMQs (Prime Ministers Questions) I have rarely, if ever, seen a sitting PM actually answer a question. They reply to them certainly, but that's not the same thing as answering them.
For instance, at a recent PMQs, David Camaron, the opposition leader, asked Tony Blair (who, if you don't know, will be stepping down next year) "Does the Prime Minister support Gordon Brown as his successor" (I'm paraphrasing) Tony's so called answer was " I know the honourable gentleman doesn't want to talk about his policies, but I'm going to anyway..."
How the hell is that an answer? Only if the question was "Does the PM know what I don't want to talk about?" could that be an answer.
Having said that, PMQs, and indeed the whole parliamentary system, does serve serve one useful purpose; it prevents a complete moron from achieving truly high office. The adversarial nature of the House of Commons means that to survive in a high-ranking cabinet position, a minister has to be able to think on their feet and answer questions under pressure. George Bush could not do this, and would be humiliated every time he stepped up the dispatch box. Remember him being unable to answer when a journalist asked him his biggest mistake in Iraq?
Sure, some of our ministers have been poor at their jobs. Some have been out of touch with reality. One or two past and present ministers even come across as, well, completly fucking batshit insane. But no morons.
If it takes a little longer to get election results, so be it... there's almost two months between election day and inauguration day.
Actually, it shouldn't even take that long. Here in the UK we run our general elections on a pen and paper ballot system, and we get the result the night of the election. As you say, the system scales extremly well.
Congratulations. That's the most ignorant comment I've read in this thread so far, and let me tell you, it's up against some pretty stiff competition.
From the McAfee site linked to in TFA:
Infection occurs when a removable storage device or a mapped drive hosting a copy of W32/Rjump.worm is accessed and the user agrees to the auto run prompt for execution of the worm.
Yes, that's right, you have to agree to install the dammed thing. Now, if you plug an MP3 player into your computer and it prompts you to ok a software installation, there are only two reasons to agree to do it:
1) You trust the vendor in question, and are happy to install their software, even if you aren't too sure exactly what it is.
2)You really have no idea what this prompt is, you're not too interested either, and you just blindly click ok because you think if you don't you're new toy won't work.
Now, just supposing you were using Linux, and the phrase "click ok" was replaced with "enter root password", what would happen? I'll tell you what would happen. The same people who clicked OK would just tap in their passwords.
The problem here is not windows insecurity. The problem is that a trusted vendor was shipping infected hardware. End of story.
ANYBODY can hear the difference. Start encoding MP3s at lower bitrates until they sound like crap, then encode to vorbis at the same bitrate... The MP3 will sound like crap, wile the Ogg won't.
But I don't encode at lower bitrates. And my entire CD collection still comes to less than 12 GB. I will happily concede this may bay an advantage for some people, but MP3 player storage capacities are so huge now that there really can't be many people who need to encode at a lower bit rate.
And even if there weren't... MP3 got insanely popular long before DAPs came around, so putting it on your iPod isn't the only use for lossy audio compression.
Very true. I had my CD collection as MP3s years before I bought an MP3 player. Mind you, thinking back, the hard drive on the machine that held all those MP3s was the same size as the one on my current MP3 player. Back to my earlier point about storage capacity.
Of course, the real driver for MP3s adoption was file trading. MP3 was compressed enough to transfer a whole album over dial up and have it finish in a semi-resonable amount of time. These days, when I think nothing of downloading a 1 or 2 gig file, and even my dad has broadband, there's just no need for an even more compressed format.
Yes, and back when I was thinking of buying an ogg player, I considered getting an iRiver. But the point is, if I encode all my music to MP3 then every single player on the market can play it. My choice of player is not limited to 5.
My current MP3 player fitted every single requirement I had for a portable device. It's 20GB, tiny, shows up as a standard USB disk drive and lets me drag and drop music to it, and was reasonably cheap. In order to get one that played ogg, I would have had to compromise on some or all of those points. If I had done so, how would I have been better off?
I used to think along the same lines. I was planning to buy a player that supported ogg, but I never found one that I liked, and I have since given up on the ogg format. It is simply never, ever, going to be widely adopted enough for the player manufacturers to bother supporting it. Sorry.
The reasons are many and varied, but the main one is, quite simply, the problem it solves is not a problem many people actually have. Ogg was an attempt to create a compressed audio standard unencumbered by licensing, which could replace MP3. Which is all well and good, except I have never, since the day I first became aware of MP3, been unable to download a piece of free (as in beer) software which would encode MP3s for me. I have never been unable to do something with an MP3 because of the license the format is issued under. In short, MP3 is free enough for me.
If you look at the two other most widely used compressed audio formats, WMA and AAC, they both have (near) monopolies pushing them. The most popular digital audio player and online music store uses AAC. The OS preinstalled on 90+ percent of computers sold in the world ships with a media player that supports playing and ripping WMAs. Who is pushing ogg?
The market for ogg is basically limited to linux users, and most of us are using MP3 anyway. There is no reason for any company to push it, and really very little reason to use it. I know it's supposed to be highter quality, but A, I can't hear the difference, and B, why would I want a high quality compressed audio format? To play on my portable music player, which supports which formats? Oh, yeah.
*NOTE TO PEDANTS - Yes, I am aware of the difference between the ogg container format and the vorbis codec. I just can't be bothered to type ogg vorbis every time.