February 2006, Flight from Singapore to Frankfurt, Singapore Airlines.
About an hour into the flight I get out my laptop to quickly check my email. Wifi connection is great, browser shows a login page that asks for my credit card number. $29.95 for the whole flight. Well, whatever. Man gönnt sich ja sonst nichts.
I briefly consider using http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html [NSTX] and fumble around for a bit, then decide to shell out the dollars because I can't get a connection to my NSTX master. (Later found out it wasn't running since the last reboot, which had happened over a year ago.) I open the browser window again and reload.
The lights go out briefly and come on again. The plane shudders a bit.
The stewardess anounces over the microphone that we are experiencing some turbulences and would everybody please fasten their seat belts and keep the lids on any hot drinks.
I quickly shut down my notebook and put it away.
About five hours and a brief nap later, I try again. Again, I switch on my laptop and within two minutes of running the Wifi connection the plane encounters "turbulences". Again, I give up. Again, no turbulences for the rest of the flight.
The funny bit here is that I was on my way back from a conference about EMC shielding in vehicles.
That is exactly the picture that Microsoft would be trying very hard to create in your mind, yes.
Say "Foo Kitchens" has 80% market share, is built into every new home by default (unless you specify something else before they start), is supported by most appliance manufacturers, has the biggest recipe and tool market etc.
But "Foo Kitchens" uses cheap wood for their cupboards, has a history of selling food that rots three times as quickly as the competition, the fridge needs to be de-iced twice a week etc. And, on top of it all, you need to buy lots of chemicals to take care of the regular woodworm and ant epidemics.
No wonder that people are not satisfied with it and many look for alternatives. Many turn to different kitchen companies that might not have such a big market share, and such a big third party share (who needs sixteen kinds of white flour, or a dozen different ways to mash potatoes, anyway?). Or you can build your own kitchen, there are a lot of HOWTOs available on the 'net.
I'm sure there are still holes to this analogy, but I'm still pretty convinced it's still a valid analogy.;)
The reason there are OS wars is that the operating system in todays hardware creates a huge dependancy regarding third party solutions.
Imagine if you had to decide for a kitchen outfit. (ie. stove, cupboards, fridge, etc.). And once you decided for Bosch, Siemens, whatever, everything in your kitchen - from the blender to the towel - also had to be from Siemens (or third parties claiming to be "Siemens compatbile"), or it wouldn't work. Blender manufacturers would have to produce several versions of their products, each for a different kitchen type. [-> drivers, hardware support]
Your friend has his kitchen equipped by Bosch and you couldn't borrow his coffee machine / steak knife / dishwasher salt because it wouldn't work in your kitchen. Recipes you read in books would have to be specially tailored for your specific kitchen - if they weren't, you wouldn't be able to make them. [-> applications|
Imagine you baking a cake and wanting to carry it over to your friend's house and being unable to eat it there because he has a different kitchen manufacturer. And if you do manage to eat it, it might taste slightly differently than at your place, or even be bitter, or might explode and damage your friend's kitchen! [proprietary document formats, reading with foreign applications, compatability]
The choice of operating system can make you - your producitivy, your data, your work - a hostage of the OS manufacturer. That's why OS decisions are far more basic than, say, a descision for a car, or a piece of clothing.
Yes, that does not apply to embedded systems directly. But indirectly, it does. Suppose that Company X had the IT department of a bank chain in its firm grip and the only ATMs that were "compatible" with the bank's databases were also from Company X. See?
Jens
"I'm not even talking about the "slowness" or "bloat"--there are fundamental architectural reasons why we need to get off this 20 year old application that still requires us to configure it with a bizarrely formatted text file."
Ah. So you want a binary-only, non-editable "registry" that contains all your configuration, is only viewable with one application (what if that crashes?) which requires a GUI (what if the GUI is b0rken?) and is probably also slow as hell (10 seconds to search 2MB of data for a string on a 2GHz P4)?
Thanks, but I'll keep my text configuration files and GUI frontends, which make absolutely no difference for the end user except for when the GUI tools don't work.
Remember: it doesn't matter one bit whether you create a mess in one binary file (registry) or if you create a mess in one directory (/etc). The latter is only more practical when things break.
"If afterwards the students bought MS products for themselves, so what, they are likely to anyway. If some of the students went on to be programmers and favored the Windows OS and Visual Studio, so what, it is already likely. Coke and Pepsi already give money to schools to put in only their product."
Coke and Pepsi don't prevent you from putting anything else in your fridge once you have 'installed' their product. They don't tie their products with other products that tie you in, they don't take your knowledge hostage (.doc.xls.ppt.wm?) so you can only retrieve what YOU created if you keep their product.
I'm sure they're evil all the same, but their evil is a different kind of evil. More short-term.
And I bet most of the "millions of dollars" they "donate" are Windows licenses. Hah, big donation.
"Anybody who wanted to cause real damage would write a virus that spends 24 hours spreading itself, and then silently wipes the "drives" starting at Z: and working backwords to C:. That would cause a few heart attacks in the corporate world. It would also force the world to switch away from MS. The MSBlast virus was just a warning shot, and I doubt it was written by someone who actually wants to harm MS."
That's not so easy. KLEZ did that already. Other variants searched your network and infected MP3 files and MS Office files, everything that was writeable.
Many companies are not going to switch because they are locked in. They have three or four years worth of expertise, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in applications, and their users are used to Windows. No matter how often it breaks (and most people assume it's "normal" for a computer network to totally crash once a week at least), they will continue to use this stuff, until
their killer apps are available for other platforms (which often not only means groupware, but also specialized apps for niche markets)
somebody bribes the descision maker more than MS does.
And that last point is VERY hard. In 1999, the administration of Schleswig-Holstein (North Germany) published they wanted to update their systems and a consulting company did the math for them:
Upgrade to Linux: ?300'000 in education, ?10'000 in licenses
Upgrade to Windows: ?200'000 in education, ?200'000 in licenses, ?400'000 in necessary hardware upgrades
The ?10'000 for Linux was for commercial products (I think databases) which eased the switch, and support by SuSE. Education was mostly needed for the admins. The users were desktop users that only needed their "office" and "email" and "browser" buttons and not much more.
Of course, they decided for Linux (provided by IBM and SuSE). Only, very strangely, a Microsoft representative visited them shortly after this descision was made. And half a year later they suddenly had switched to Windows 2000 and nobody had noticed. Another couple months later, the Schleswig-Holstein IT representative - the guy who had decided for Windows despite the horrendous costs - unexpectedly left the facilities.
Business works with money. And if you cannot convince somebody with a better product, you can often convince them with bribery - and you don't even need to call it that. Rumour has it that Intel (or was it Compaq?) only accepted the "early adopter program" for Windows 2003 for their publicly visible servers because Microsoft agreed to pay all their hardware upgrades AND the admins.
Another important point is that Windows users are "used to things not working". At my GF's house there are altogether 12 PCs and laptops (and two Macs) wirelessly LAN'ed together with an Airport router. The router is a WIn98 machine with some kind of LAN software. IT crashes about thrice a day. I wanted to put fli4l on it and show Linux to my GF, but she doesn't want it - yet, because she doesn't know what to do if things break. Rebooting XP a couple times a day and reinstalling printer drivers because XP forgets them maybe once a week is apparently "normal" for her, and I don't blame her, that seems to be the accepted procedure with computers for many people.
Filter all incoming mail using spam assassin. The rules are reasonably exact. Mail which is declared SPAM doesn't reach my inbox.
Automatically report spam that exceeds SA score 7.5 to spamcop.
So far, I've only had one problem, and that was a stupid abuse@ department auto-reply which quoted the entire SPAM (thus got re-filtered by Spamassassin, re-submitted to Spamcop, triggered the same auto-reply, etc etc yadda yadda).
This procedure could well be extended to filter all URLs out of the spam and auto-wget them.
If anybody wants the spamasassin+spamcop scripts, mail me. It's a hack though (uses maildrop, qmail, perl, etc).
"Anybody who won't adapt a piece of software just because of the name is dumber then a box of rocks."
Sure. So? What if this dumb brick of rock could sign a $x0,000 contract if things went its way?
I demoed SuSE and Debian for a couple server installations at a company recently.
They chose SuSE. Why? Not because of performance, stability or whatever. (Both systems did everything they were configured to do, flawlessly.). No. Pointing to the Debian boot messages, I was asked
"Whats with all the error messages? That doesn't look good." Those weren't error messages, they were normal boot messages, I told them.
"So... it's normal for this system to show so much text on startup?" Yes.
"So... why does the other system not show them? That looks much better." *boggle*
They finally chose SuSE. Because it had a splash screen and "built-in graphics" and was therefore 'cleaner' and 'more professional' by definition. Boy, am I glad that I'm not responsible for those systems.
(The same reason why Linux is seldomly shown on photos in non-linux-specific publications, even if several OS are talked about. Linux is not 'pretty' by default. If a photographer takes a photo of a high-end server system and needs something pretty to show on the screen, "bash#" or a mc screen just doesn't cut it. But a nice pretty Windows XP login screen will do.
I've seen this on a business presentation at a local ISP who uses 99% Linux: They toured the visitors through their datacenter - running Linux almost everywhere - but the central admin console was showing a Windows.NET login screen. This has a HIGH psychological impact on the visitors, if they see 5000 computers humming along and one Windows logo...)
People, OSS developers, NAMES ARE IMPORTANT. At least to business people who will probably spend a fair bit of money on your product('s support or extensions). Please don't call your application kFooBar, use a name that
people can pronounce
gives non-hackers an idea what the application is about
That is far more important than many OSS developers think! Just think telling somebody about the program. "Hey, I've just installed kfrbzlcighw, and it's really great!" - "kWHAT?" -...
200 years ago, streets were cleaned with a broom and a dozen people at once. Nowadays, it's a big truck with automated brushes driven by one, or two, people. Did anybody complain? Why not, each such vehicle destroyed 10 jobs!
I like Asimov. I read about two meters worth of bookshelf space of Asimov. But I think he's totally wrong about robots in the first place, and robots taking over "good old paying jobs" in the second.
Aditionally, I think robots will never come to reality in this way. Here's why:
1. Robots will, if any, take over jobs that nobody wants to do. We will need less janitors, less street cleaners, and less McDonalds deep frying machine degreasers.
2. But somebody will have to build, and repair if necessary, the robots. Meaning we will need more good jobs, engineers, developers, mechanics, machine builders, etc. High profile jobs earning a better income than flipping burgers for sure.
3. Thus, there will be more demand of high education, which can only be good for us. Better pay for us, more taxes for the state, etc.
4. A slave state doesn't work. Which is exactly what Asimov predicted in his Spaces vs. Settlers episodes. A slave state, where the slaves are the robots and obey you all the time, and take all the work off your back, will become corrupt, decadent and fail ultimately. It will destroy values. ("Who cares if you are an architect or construction worker, my robot just downloaded a complete plan for my new house off the internet and will build it on his own in a week!" That's why it's not gonna happen.
Imagine if we had replicators like in Star Trek. Imagine you could replicate food, items, cars, even houses for just a bit of energy and What would have any value left? Raw mass?
I advocated the purchase of pre-installed Linux boxes throughout my neighborhood and relatives. Well, most people also want a Windows version to play with (literally), and I can understand that.
But why buy a Linux computer for EUR X, and then shell out another $200 for a Windows CD, when you can buy the same computer with Windows preinstalled for EUR X, and download a Linux ISO image from the net? (Assuming you don't want to be a "bad illegal criminal" and just use your neighbor's CD.)
Either the computers need to be significantly cheaper than with Windows preinstalled (and Microsoft is working very hard to prevent this, because they want to gag you into mandatory Windows licensing - their idea of "fighting piracy" is forcing everybody to own at least one copy of Windows!) or Linux needs to disappear from public FTP sites.
While most of the SPAM my SpamAssassin catches is personalized (containing my name or email address in the body), this might be so. So what? Sign the mail with the recipient's public key. Get the key from a public key database. Any mail that is not signed properly will be discarded - or, better (during the transition time), will require manual confirmation from the sender.
"One simple approach would be to have the taxing authority issue 'e-stamps'. The receiving e-mail program would check the e-stamp for validity and non-reuse..."
We already have this. It's called a PGP signature.
The cost is a couple CPU cycles. Per email. Non-reusable, quick, easy and efficient. If everybody would start using PGP (which IMHO is a hell of a lot more likely than everybody switching to an "email-tax compatible" state-mandated commercial email client), we wouldn't have a spam problem any more.
Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature. It's too expensive in CPU cycles. And note that the point here is NOT to validate the sender, it's just to validate that the sender had to burn a couple CPU cycles (which takes maybe a second on a 500MHz computer, for each email) to send it.
"Yeah, we have this funny thing here called "free markets", "
That which you call "free markets" in the US has long since been perverted by
the patent system which finances itself and therefore patents everybody and their granddaughter (there's a patent on the wheel in the US, and IBM owns a patent on "sending electrical impulses through metallic conductors", ie. electricity).
the legislative system which, in general, will allow big boys with much money and more lawyers to "win", even if they were the ones breaking the law (the MS trial is *one* example, but there are many others)
political parties and politicians being paid by *one* company, to argue
for the companie's opinion, instead of the opinion of the voters. Of
course, sponsoring exists in Europe - but parties are usually sponsored by
dozens to hundreds of sources, not just one to a few.
the voting system which lets somebody win who did not have the majority
of votes (I'm not calling this a democracy on purpose)
Just as some examples. I prefer to call the US system a 'corporate
oligarchy', than a democracy.
"Now, a free market doesn't always pick the best technology (or everyone would be using OSX), but it does allow for new ideas to get a shot."
Ah, so that is why there are so few (quasi-)monopolies out there in the US.
"European overlegislation and overtaxation is not appealing to us.
That's why we here, and didn't stay there."
Sometimes, a new idea must be protected while it cannot defend itself yet,
or it will be trampled down or assimilated by the old dinosaurs. Give me
some examples of "overlegislation" in Europe, please, while I read lawguru.com.
"I'm willing to match up, bottle for bottle, our California wines
against any French wine you could name. (and no, we don't mix it with Coke,
for that matter. Where do you get this stuff?)"
Oh, very simple. We have friends and relatives in the US. For them, it's
apparently normal. Just like 'Alsterwasser' or 'Radler') in Germany, which
is a mixture of Beer (real beer, capital B) with lemonade.
"The thing is, we didn't ban French fries, -toast and -kissing, We
merely temporarily renamed them. Why? Because after spending a significant
of American blood to free Europe in the first half of the last century, you
have turned your back on us when we needed you, and I think you've
forgotten that you need us more than we need you."
You still don't understand Europe, and this renaming made people all over
Europe laugh about the US. Germany especially.
Most Germans (while the fraction of americans against the war is
apparently also over 50%, here it's almost 100%) have a basic problem
with war, any kind of war, for any kind of reason whatsoever. Period.
There are people who commit suicide rather than go into combat. (I
witnessed such a thing).
Most Germans (and other Europeans) have a problem with a war that
was not approved by the UN and is therefore, strictly speaking,
illegal.
Yes, the US helped us during WWII, which was obviously a good thing.
More to the point though, the US rescued us from somebody who started
a war. (That's exactly how many Europeans see Bush now.)
You want this debt paid back now?
Read our constitution. The one YOU wrote after WWII. Germany is not
allowed to participate in any kind of non-defensive warfare - whether it is
being hidden behind the "anti-terrorism" blanket or not. Strictly speaking,
we aren't allowed to "help" you.
And I'd doubt that we need the US more than the other way round. Europe has
survived for thousands of years without the US, it'll keep surviving
without it if needs be. Of course we'll probably miss mcDonalds and
Hollywood, but you'll probably miss more important things.
"As for hamburgers, yes, they have a European origin. Much of our food
does. Not surprising, when
Actually, I thought otherwise about Italy, but I'm obviously mistaken. I wasn't really awake when I wrote it.
The statue of Liberty should be claimed back by its owner. You have a point there.
And, when Americans claim "we should be thankful that they rescued us from Hitler", my reply usually is:
Yes. The US rescued Germany. The US rescued Germany from somebody who started a war.
Perhaps now it's our turn?
Re:Bitching about NT4 not being patched...
on
Windows 2003 Going Gold
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Think Linus would care if there were a flaw found in 1.3.75? DOUBTFUL.
Actually, there's a maintainer for every (stable) version of the kernel. 1.3.x is not stable. But 2.2, 2.0, 1.2, 1.0, including even the 0.0x series, have a maintainer. And those maintainers do fix bugs if they are found. Embedded systems and special machines still use 1.2 or 2.0 nowadays. Recently a couple bugs was even fixed in v0.01.
Yeah, most of them do it for the kicks, or because they/their businesses need it. Your point was?
"CDMA system would benefit American companies, such as California-based Qualcomm, while GSM would favor European companies. Currently, GSM is the most widely used mobile standard in surrounding countries."
Don't you love half-truths when you see 'em? GSM is not only the most widely used standard "in surrounding countries", it's the most widely used standard, period.
GSM: 330 million world wide users
CDMA: 67 million world wide users
But, it seems more important to purchase national patriotic technology than good technology. (That must be why Americans still use Windows. After all, Linux originates in Europe and must so be inferior, by definition.;)
Let's buy steel from US companies, even if it's more expensive because they neglected to modernize their factories (in Europe, just about everything was rebuilt after WW2 - and the debts for foreign help, also from the US, have long since been paid. It was a very painful process, but it paid off). And because foreign steel is now cheaper and better, phone George to introduce some nice import taxes.
Forget that the white "paint" which is used for most national buildings (eg. white house) is made in Germany. Forget that most of the cars that run the US are produced in Germany or by German companies. (BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, anyone?). Forget that under the hood of most cars made in the US you see European labels like Bosch, Siemens, Philips, etc.
While you're at it, ban not only french fries, french toast, and french kissing, but also french red wine (which might be considered a merciful fate for the wine, considering that Americans mix it with Coke!). And all that just for the fact that - understandably - most of Europe has a problem with war, for any reason whatsoever. It's even in the German constitution: Germany is not allowed to participate in non-defensive warfare. The constitution which was written by the US after WW2.
I'm waiting for the USA to ban Hamburgers, which originate from Hamburg (the 'ham' story is a myth!), Franfurters, Schnitzel, Mortadella, etc.
I remember a quote from a demonstrant in the US: "If we had invested the money now spent in war in proper education soon enough, the war wouldn't even have started."
"MS's OEM license agreement for OEM software marries that license to the hardware. you are not legally allowed to move it to another computer even if you delete it off the old one."
That's what I like about laws here. In Germany there are no "OEM" versions. It is legal to re-sell your OEM versions, it is even legal to sell a "recovery" version - and if it doesn't work, it is legal to burn a copy of a full version and sell it together with the recovery license.
ct magazine once had a detailed explanation of what files from a full retail Windows you'd need to turn a recovery version into a full version.
That said, sites like EBay are "of course" bribed by MS and refuse you your right to sell software - with unnecessary consequences: I know of a Debian CD reseller who got threatened by EBay because he "was advertising and/or selling unlicensed software".
Whenever I see an advert I tend to phone them and ask for laptops for my business. Just for the fun of it, I'll go through the whole order process and just before the end when it comes to software, I say "none". I want the laptops blank. Usually, that's the end of it... but the more people do this, the more the companies will notice there is a need for blank laptops.
Vobis (www.vobis.de) sells blank machines. They come with "PC DOS 2000" preinstalled which is just a lame excuse for not violating the MS gag agreement. The XP preinstalled models are 100.- more expensive.
Dell doesn't claim they do, but for corporate customers they do sell some of their machines without preinstalled OS, and they are cheaper than the regular ones. At least I found this out when I phoned Dell Germany some months ago... they actually transferred me to somebody who claimed he'd be able to sell me a laptop without pre-installed software.
"Linux (also in win) you have many different ways to protect your partitions:
None of those ways are very easy to do for a normal user. But 2K/XP make that trivial to do..."
So you have never installed SuSE 7.x to 8.x anywhere? They ship this and you can enable it upon installation.
"I''ve been in love with Debian for years as well, but this comment about Windows 2000 is simply far from truth."
... on your machine. As I said, I have some "power" Windows users here as well and even on _their_ machines, which according to them are "rock solid stable", I occasionally crash Explorer or the desktop disappears and restarts.
I'm not saying everyone has these problems. Windows NT5 aka 2000 doesn't crash as often as Win98 or NT4 did, which means it's become useable. But when I use it, it misbehaves (not necesarily crashes) often enough for my taste to annoy me enough to have switched.
"I use Windows because for $200, I get a system that is easy to use and never breaks or needs tweaking of any kind."
That is the first time I heard somebody say that about Windows. (It's just about the first time I heard someone actually paying for his copy of Windows either - most get it with the machine, many just "borrow" a CD).
Both of the "hardcore" convinced Windows users I know (they don't want anything else, have second machines to try out new betas, adore Bill Gates, etc but both have seriously tried out Linux and so I accept their personal opinion) are consistently fiddling with driver problems, Office installations that upgrade half your system without you knowing, registry hacks, and so on. I suppose you are the casual user who uses two or three apps and hasn't really changed, upgraded or re-installed anything in his system, because I couldn't imagine how your Windows installation endured for so long, otherwise.
Even my father, who is a MBA with a laptop running just about nothing except MS Office and some tax savings calculator program (and he knows that he doesn't know anything about computer, so he doesn't fiddle around with it), has had to have his laptop re-installed twice in the last six months, because "suddenly" Windows (XP, btw.) refused to boot. Nobody knows why.
"Good talking to you, and good luck with school! "
I'm not sure I'm familiar with the terms but if "school" in English also includes working on a diploma thesis, thank you very much.:-)
"Gratuitous alternative desktop environment suggestion: don't let applications save user documents to 'just anywhere' like Windows does. Then, create a user-level system browser that keeps the user out of the stuff that is irrelevant to them."
Already done. You can customize the paths that Konqueror's tree view pane shows, and insert your own structure (as an admin). Of course you can still manually enter the path, but with KDE's kiosk mode you can completely restrict opening and viewing files to the home directory of the user and maybe the CDROM mount point. Everything else is none of his business.
"And don't even get me started on a standard for program installs. Currently, a Windows install can put crap in the following places:"
KDE has been doing this since v.001. The apps that are installed are sorted in categories like Network, Internet, Utilities, System, Settings, etc. Only apps that don't fit a specific category (like a CD burner frontend or a cookbook database) are in "Applications".
The infrastructure is there, now we only need distributors to use it. The current SuSE (and probably other) distributions begin to understand that a system menu with 1500 entries is not really what a new user wants, and put the most important apps on the desktop as well. (Office, Web-browser, Home directory, and a couple others)
"While I appreciate the history of your life, I can't figure out how in the hell you're breaking W2K! "
Shall we leave the obvious methods (SMBdie, exploits, scripts that exploit IE holes, etc) aside. I just used it. Explorer tends to hang (the system, not just the process) when generating thumbnails or when browsing FTP sites. It's worse when in the nethood and some machine reboots or for some reason decides not to answer, or you have a big network - the whole desktop freezes for as long as Explorer needs to search the network. I had most of the Windows systems installed, configured and maintained by friends who knew Windows a HELL of a lot better than me, or "standard installations" done by administrators in the companies I worked with.
Everywhere I had problems, on many systems the same problems. For example in Office 97 occasionally in 2000 I had the problem that when I closed Word or Excel and re-opened (ie. clicked on a xls file) before the process was completely finished, I wasn't able to open Office again AT ALL until I rebooted. In w2k, logging out and in again helped sometimes. Don't ask me what happened, these were standard installations without weird tools or registry hacks, and with a single digit number of installed applications (contrast to the 3-digit number of apps in Linux that I installed and use, plus those part of the system anyway).
You're right, I might not be the "standard user" that Microsoft perhaps expects. Just about the first thing I do when I start working with Windows is install some virtual desktop utiliy to have more screen space. (Before you ask: every time I had a problem I tried without the utility, of course, and the problem remained the same most of the time.) I seldomly use less than three apps at the same time, the "typical" Windows user maybe just uses them consecutively, not simultaneously.
I guess I just have a bad influence on Windows systems. When I went to my parents last Christmas (and this is no joke!) and went into my brother's room to say hello, he was playing some strategy game on his machine. (I think he's using XP) He turned around to meet me and said something like ".. but don't get near my computer, it always crashes when you are nearby, it just doesn't like Linux users". I went like "ha, ha" and turned around (being about 5 meters away from his machine) just to hear a VERY angy "TOLD YOU SO! And I didn't even save my game!" from behind me.
I don't like windows. I admit that freely. But I use it when I have to to get a job done. And I don't break it on purpose when I want a job done. But with me, it breaks nevertheless, even when I'm being taught by Windows users how to 'be careful'. Don't ask me why.
"and I've never even *heard* of the problems that you're talking about, like having to open fewer apps, having to reinstall, Windows slowing down by just installing new things, etc"
You apparently never e.g. compared boot times before and after MS Office installs or IE upgrades, and that's _without_ the additional MS Office panel. MS seems to install loads of DLLs that load at boot-time so that Word & Co. come up quickly when you start the actual application. On one machine I had (in 1997) the difference was about 20 seconds, and the system was noticeably slower after the install, and (because?) less memory was available for apps (other than MS Office).
There's the registry which is kept in memory and which keeps growing unless you manually export and re-import it under DOS. (this keeps getting mentioned in the press) There's all the PC magazines that keep telling us the "top 333 ways to speed up and optimize windows" and "registry clean up utilities" and so on. Even if YOUR system doesn't suffer from these disabilities I don't think these magazines print their registry optimization stuff just for the fun of it.
" It sounds like this is completely made up. I kind of doubt that you're the only person on the planet trying to open up multiple apps at the same time with W2K."
I made none of this up. Come visit me if you want. I live in Hamburg. The most infamous part of Hamburg, in fact - three blocks away from Atta Mohammed's place, or rather where he used to live.
That has nothing to do with my Windows problems though (or with anything else).:-)
"And you think that all of these people are all sitting around happily with crashing computers when they can go buy RedHat at Best Buy?"
Most of the people I know use Windows, and aren't happy with it - but many of the Windows users I know don't even know there are alternatives. I go to a technical university and my estimate is that about a quarter of the students there have used or currently use Linux, which is quite a sizeable percentage. But many of the others think it's NORMAL to have to reinstall every couple months, or if you are extra careful, perhaps once a year. After all, all their friends have the problem, except for the few who use Mac or Linux.
More to the point: Almost nobody uses Windows voluntarily. Most use it because they haven't yet seen (or seriously considered) alternatives. Many use it because they depend on apps that are only available for Windows. Many of those are gamers, which I understand completely. Many use it because they don't get a choice (in companies). But well, at least I know nobody who uses it just because it's Windows. Do you?
During my studies I worked as an adminsitrator in a department. They had a Windows NT machine as a printer server. The machine crashed about 2-3 times a day. Except for a FTP server application, the printer spooler, and some Postscript driver, NO APPLICATIONS were installed on this system. And you weren't able to cancel print jobs, for some reason. I don't know who configured this system but he didn't know what he was doing, for sure. (I'm not necessarily putting the blame on NT. I simply don't know whose fault it was that his machine was down 3 times a day.)
I asked why they continued to use this system. They said because they knew how to reset and re-install it when it broke down completely, which had happened three times in the last year. I asked, and everybody is OK with that? They said, yes, after all Windows is the standard and you have to live with it.
After some quarrels I was allowed to set up a Linux based printer server for testing. We didn't tell the others (just me and the full time admin), just swapped network cables. It worked, never crashed, and ran perfectly. (which was probably just as much because of us as Linux). After some time, we also installed Samba file sharing, Mail server, webmail, moved the department web site from the central uni server to our own, added user accounts, and told the users how to use the new features. Everyone was really happy about the new server. Nobody knew it ran Linux, that was the plan.
After some months the department head came to us and asked if we had reinstalled the server, and told us, see, it IS possible to get Windows running smoothly. We told him it wasn't running Windows any more. He went berserk and asked what the hell we thought we were doing and what are his people gonna do when the machne breaks down, and when you can't stop a print job, etc. We asked him exactly how often had the machine broken down in the last eight months? Zero times? Ah. And how often have you used the new CUPS web interface to control your print jobs, and how often have you had a problem with that? Ah.
I imagine that if we had told people beforehand that we had switched the server to Linux, there would have been many, many more complaints - just for psychology reasons. When people don't expect something unknown or new, they tend to accept changes more easily, I think.
We are now running 4 (out of about 20) workstations under Linux in this department, and an additional server. Those are the (only) 4 workstations that kept running during the mail and worm epidemics that plagued the Windows machines in our network. People were happy that they could check their mail without having to fear every mouse click.
Now this has become much longer as I wanted, but maybe it was worth the effort and you understand a little better now.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
February 2006, Flight from Singapore to Frankfurt, Singapore Airlines.
About an hour into the flight I get out my laptop to quickly check my email. Wifi connection is great, browser shows a login page that asks for my credit card number. $29.95 for the whole flight. Well, whatever. Man gönnt sich ja sonst nichts.
I briefly consider using http://thomer.com/howtos/nstx.html [NSTX] and fumble around for a bit, then decide to shell out the dollars because I can't get a connection to my NSTX master. (Later found out it wasn't running since the last reboot, which had happened over a year ago.) I open the browser window again and reload.
The lights go out briefly and come on again. The plane shudders a bit.
The stewardess anounces over the microphone that we are experiencing some turbulences and would everybody please fasten their seat belts and keep the lids on any hot drinks.
I quickly shut down my notebook and put it away.
About five hours and a brief nap later, I try again. Again, I switch on my laptop and within two minutes of running the Wifi connection the plane encounters "turbulences". Again, I give up. Again, no turbulences for the rest of the flight.
The funny bit here is that I was on my way back from a conference about EMC shielding in vehicles.
Jens
That is exactly the picture that Microsoft would be trying very hard to create in your mind, yes.
;)
Say "Foo Kitchens" has 80% market share, is built into every new home by default (unless you specify something else before they start), is supported by most appliance manufacturers, has the biggest recipe and tool market etc.
But "Foo Kitchens" uses cheap wood for their cupboards, has a history of selling food that rots three times as quickly as the competition, the fridge needs to be de-iced twice a week etc. And, on top of it all, you need to buy lots of chemicals to take care of the regular woodworm and ant epidemics.
No wonder that people are not satisfied with it and many look for alternatives. Many turn to different kitchen companies that might not have such a big market share, and such a big third party share (who needs sixteen kinds of white flour, or a dozen different ways to mash potatoes, anyway?).
Or you can build your own kitchen, there are a lot of HOWTOs available on the 'net.
I'm sure there are still holes to this analogy, but I'm still pretty convinced it's still a valid analogy.
Jens
The reason there are OS wars is that the operating system in todays hardware creates a huge dependancy regarding third party solutions. Imagine if you had to decide for a kitchen outfit. (ie. stove, cupboards, fridge, etc.). And once you decided for Bosch, Siemens, whatever, everything in your kitchen - from the blender to the towel - also had to be from Siemens (or third parties claiming to be "Siemens compatbile"), or it wouldn't work. Blender manufacturers would have to produce several versions of their products, each for a different kitchen type. [-> drivers, hardware support] Your friend has his kitchen equipped by Bosch and you couldn't borrow his coffee machine / steak knife / dishwasher salt because it wouldn't work in your kitchen. Recipes you read in books would have to be specially tailored for your specific kitchen - if they weren't, you wouldn't be able to make them. [-> applications| Imagine you baking a cake and wanting to carry it over to your friend's house and being unable to eat it there because he has a different kitchen manufacturer. And if you do manage to eat it, it might taste slightly differently than at your place, or even be bitter, or might explode and damage your friend's kitchen! [proprietary document formats, reading with foreign applications, compatability] The choice of operating system can make you - your producitivy, your data, your work - a hostage of the OS manufacturer. That's why OS decisions are far more basic than, say, a descision for a car, or a piece of clothing. Yes, that does not apply to embedded systems directly. But indirectly, it does. Suppose that Company X had the IT department of a bank chain in its firm grip and the only ATMs that were "compatible" with the bank's databases were also from Company X. See? Jens
Ah. So you want a binary-only, non-editable "registry" that contains all your configuration, is only viewable with one application (what if that crashes?) which requires a GUI (what if the GUI is b0rken?) and is probably also slow as hell (10 seconds to search 2MB of data for a string on a 2GHz P4)?
Thanks, but I'll keep my text configuration files and GUI frontends, which make absolutely no difference for the end user except for when the GUI tools don't work.
Remember: it doesn't matter one bit whether you create a mess in one binary file (registry) or if you create a mess in one directory (/etc). The latter is only more practical when things break.
Coke and Pepsi don't prevent you from putting anything else in your fridge once you have 'installed' their product. They don't tie their products with other products that tie you in, they don't take your knowledge hostage (.doc .xls .ppt .wm?) so you can only retrieve what YOU created if you keep their product.
I'm sure they're evil all the same, but their evil is a different kind of evil. More short-term.
And I bet most of the "millions of dollars" they "donate" are Windows licenses. Hah, big donation.
That's not so easy. KLEZ did that already. Other variants searched your network and infected MP3 files and MS Office files, everything that was writeable.
Many companies are not going to switch because they are locked in. They have three or four years worth of expertise, invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in applications, and their users are used to Windows. No matter how often it breaks (and most people assume it's "normal" for a computer network to totally crash once a week at least), they will continue to use this stuff, until
- their killer apps are available for other platforms (which often not only means groupware, but also specialized apps for niche markets)
- somebody bribes the descision maker more than MS does.
And that last point is VERY hard. In 1999, the administration of Schleswig-Holstein (North Germany) published they wanted to update their systems and a consulting company did the math for them:Upgrade to Linux: ?300'000 in education, ?10'000 in licenses
Upgrade to Windows: ?200'000 in education, ?200'000 in licenses, ?400'000 in necessary hardware upgrades
The ?10'000 for Linux was for commercial products (I think databases) which eased the switch, and support by SuSE. Education was mostly needed for the admins. The users were desktop users that only needed their "office" and "email" and "browser" buttons and not much more.
Of course, they decided for Linux (provided by IBM and SuSE). Only, very strangely, a Microsoft representative visited them shortly after this descision was made. And half a year later they suddenly had switched to Windows 2000 and nobody had noticed. Another couple months later, the Schleswig-Holstein IT representative - the guy who had decided for Windows despite the horrendous costs - unexpectedly left the facilities.
Business works with money. And if you cannot convince somebody with a better product, you can often convince them with bribery - and you don't even need to call it that. Rumour has it that Intel (or was it Compaq?) only accepted the "early adopter program" for Windows 2003 for their publicly visible servers because Microsoft agreed to pay all their hardware upgrades AND the admins.
Another important point is that Windows users are "used to things not working". At my GF's house there are altogether 12 PCs and laptops (and two Macs) wirelessly LAN'ed together with an Airport router. The router is a WIn98 machine with some kind of LAN software. IT crashes about thrice a day. I wanted to put fli4l on it and show Linux to my GF, but she doesn't want it - yet, because she doesn't know what to do if things break. Rebooting XP a couple times a day and reinstalling printer drivers because XP forgets them maybe once a week is apparently "normal" for her, and I don't blame her, that seems to be the accepted procedure with computers for many people.
- Filter all incoming mail using spam assassin . The rules are reasonably exact. Mail which is declared SPAM doesn't reach my inbox.
- Automatically report spam that exceeds SA score 7.5 to spamcop .
So far, I've only had one problem, and that was a stupid abuse@ department auto-reply which quoted the entire SPAM (thus got re-filtered by Spamassassin, re-submitted to Spamcop, triggered the same auto-reply, etc etc yadda yadda).This procedure could well be extended to filter all URLs out of the spam and auto-wget them.
If anybody wants the spamasassin+spamcop scripts, mail me. It's a hack though (uses maildrop, qmail, perl, etc).
Of course Linux is more geeky than Windows. Tell me something new.
I don't remember the name of the person (and probably would get into trouble when I told you) but the company was Philips Semiconductors.
"If you are selling this as an ISV then you cna legally rename the product. The GPL does not say anything about that. "
Good. I didn't know that.
Sure. So? What if this dumb brick of rock could sign a $x0,000 contract if things went its way?
I demoed SuSE and Debian for a couple server installations at a company recently.
They chose SuSE. Why? Not because of performance, stability or whatever. (Both systems did everything they were configured to do, flawlessly.). No. Pointing to the Debian boot messages, I was asked
"Whats with all the error messages? That doesn't look good."
Those weren't error messages, they were normal boot messages, I told them.
"So... it's normal for this system to show so much text on startup?"
Yes.
"So... why does the other system not show them? That looks much better."
*boggle*
They finally chose SuSE. Because it had a splash screen and "built-in graphics" and was therefore 'cleaner' and 'more professional' by definition. Boy, am I glad that I'm not responsible for those systems.
(The same reason why Linux is seldomly shown on photos in non-linux-specific publications, even if several OS are talked about. Linux is not 'pretty' by default. If a photographer takes a photo of a high-end server system and needs something pretty to show on the screen, "bash#" or a mc screen just doesn't cut it. But a nice pretty Windows XP login screen will do. .NET login screen. This has a HIGH psychological impact on the visitors, if they see 5000 computers humming along and one Windows logo ...)
I've seen this on a business presentation at a local ISP who uses 99% Linux: They toured the visitors through their datacenter - running Linux almost everywhere - but the central admin console was showing a Windows
People, OSS developers, NAMES ARE IMPORTANT. At least to business people who will probably spend a fair bit of money on your product('s support or extensions). Please don't call your application kFooBar, use a name that
- people can pronounce
- gives non-hackers an idea what the application is about
That is far more important than many OSS developers think! Just think telling somebody about the program. "Hey, I've just installed kfrbzlcighw, and it's really great!" - "kWHAT?" -I like Asimov. I read about two meters worth of bookshelf space of Asimov. But I think he's totally wrong about robots in the first place, and robots taking over "good old paying jobs" in the second.
Aditionally, I think robots will never come to reality in this way. Here's why:
1. Robots will, if any, take over jobs that nobody wants to do. We will need less janitors, less street cleaners, and less McDonalds deep frying machine degreasers.
2. But somebody will have to build, and repair if necessary, the robots. Meaning we will need more good jobs, engineers, developers, mechanics, machine builders, etc. High profile jobs earning a better income than flipping burgers for sure.
3. Thus, there will be more demand of high education, which can only be good for us. Better pay for us, more taxes for the state, etc.
4. A slave state doesn't work. Which is exactly what Asimov predicted in his Spaces vs. Settlers episodes. A slave state, where the slaves are the robots and obey you all the time, and take all the work off your back, will become corrupt, decadent and fail ultimately. It will destroy values. ("Who cares if you are an architect or construction worker, my robot just downloaded a complete plan for my new house off the internet and will build it on his own in a week!" That's why it's not gonna happen.
Imagine if we had replicators like in Star Trek. Imagine you could replicate food, items, cars, even houses for just a bit of energy and What would have any value left? Raw mass?
I advocated the purchase of pre-installed Linux boxes throughout my neighborhood and relatives. Well, most people also want a Windows version to play with (literally), and I can understand that.
But why buy a Linux computer for EUR X, and then shell out another $200 for a Windows CD, when you can buy the same computer with Windows preinstalled for EUR X, and download a Linux ISO image from the net? (Assuming you don't want to be a "bad illegal criminal" and just use your neighbor's CD.)
Either the computers need to be significantly cheaper than with Windows preinstalled (and Microsoft is working very hard to prevent this, because they want to gag you into mandatory Windows licensing - their idea of "fighting piracy" is forcing everybody to own at least one copy of Windows!) or Linux needs to disappear from public FTP sites.
Well... what is more likely? :-)
While most of the SPAM my SpamAssassin catches is personalized (containing my name or email address in the body), this might be so. So what? Sign the mail with the recipient's public key. Get the key from a public key database. Any mail that is not signed properly will be discarded - or, better (during the transition time), will require manual confirmation from the sender.
We already have this. It's called a PGP signature.
The cost is a couple CPU cycles. Per email. Non-reusable, quick, easy and efficient. If everybody would start using PGP (which IMHO is a hell of a lot more likely than everybody switching to an "email-tax compatible" state-mandated commercial email client), we wouldn't have a spam problem any more.
Spammers just can't afford to sign their mails - with any signature. It's too expensive in CPU cycles. And note that the point here is NOT to validate the sender, it's just to validate that the sender had to burn a couple CPU cycles (which takes maybe a second on a 500MHz computer, for each email) to send it.
That which you call "free markets" in the US has long since been perverted by
Just as some examples. I prefer to call the US system a 'corporate oligarchy', than a democracy.
"Now, a free market doesn't always pick the best technology (or everyone would be using OSX), but it does allow for new ideas to get a shot."
Ah, so that is why there are so few (quasi-)monopolies out there in the US.
"European overlegislation and overtaxation is not appealing to us. That's why we here, and didn't stay there."
Sometimes, a new idea must be protected while it cannot defend itself yet, or it will be trampled down or assimilated by the old dinosaurs. Give me some examples of "overlegislation" in Europe, please, while I read lawguru.com.
"I'm willing to match up, bottle for bottle, our California wines against any French wine you could name. (and no, we don't mix it with Coke, for that matter. Where do you get this stuff?)"
Oh, very simple. We have friends and relatives in the US. For them, it's apparently normal. Just like 'Alsterwasser' or 'Radler') in Germany, which is a mixture of Beer (real beer, capital B) with lemonade.
"The thing is, we didn't ban French fries, -toast and -kissing, We merely temporarily renamed them. Why? Because after spending a significant of American blood to free Europe in the first half of the last century, you have turned your back on us when we needed you, and I think you've forgotten that you need us more than we need you."
You still don't understand Europe, and this renaming made people all over Europe laugh about the US. Germany especially.
And I'd doubt that we need the US more than the other way round. Europe has survived for thousands of years without the US, it'll keep surviving without it if needs be. Of course we'll probably miss mcDonalds and Hollywood, but you'll probably miss more important things.
"As for hamburgers, yes, they have a European origin. Much of our food does. Not surprising, when
The statue of Liberty should be claimed back by its owner. You have a point there.
And, when Americans claim "we should be thankful that they rescued us from Hitler", my reply usually is:
Yes. The US rescued Germany. The US rescued Germany from somebody who started a war.
Perhaps now it's our turn?
Actually, there's a maintainer for every (stable) version of the kernel. 1.3.x is not stable. But 2.2, 2.0, 1.2, 1.0, including even the 0.0x series, have a maintainer. And those maintainers do fix bugs if they are found. Embedded systems and special machines still use 1.2 or 2.0 nowadays. Recently a couple bugs was even fixed in v0.01.
Yeah, most of them do it for the kicks, or because they/their businesses need it. Your point was?
Don't you love half-truths when you see 'em? GSM is not only the most widely used standard "in surrounding countries", it's the most widely used standard, period.
GSM: 330 million world wide users
CDMA: 67 million world wide users
But, it seems more important to purchase national patriotic technology than good technology. (That must be why Americans still use Windows. After all, Linux originates in Europe and must so be inferior, by definition. ;)
Let's buy steel from US companies, even if it's more expensive because they neglected to modernize their factories (in Europe, just about everything was rebuilt after WW2 - and the debts for foreign help, also from the US, have long since been paid. It was a very painful process, but it paid off). And because foreign steel is now cheaper and better, phone George to introduce some nice import taxes.
Forget that the white "paint" which is used for most national buildings (eg. white house) is made in Germany. Forget that most of the cars that run the US are produced in Germany or by German companies. (BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, anyone?). Forget that under the hood of most cars made in the US you see European labels like Bosch, Siemens, Philips, etc.
While you're at it, ban not only french fries, french toast, and french kissing, but also french red wine (which might be considered a merciful fate for the wine, considering that Americans mix it with Coke!). And all that just for the fact that - understandably - most of Europe has a problem with war, for any reason whatsoever. It's even in the German constitution: Germany is not allowed to participate in non-defensive warfare. The constitution which was written by the US after WW2.
I'm waiting for the USA to ban Hamburgers, which originate from Hamburg (the 'ham' story is a myth!), Franfurters, Schnitzel, Mortadella, etc.
I remember a quote from a demonstrant in the US: "If we had invested the money now spent in war in proper education soon enough, the war wouldn't even have started."
Right.
That's what I like about laws here. In Germany there are no "OEM" versions. It is legal to re-sell your OEM versions, it is even legal to sell a "recovery" version - and if it doesn't work, it is legal to burn a copy of a full version and sell it together with the recovery license.
ct magazine once had a detailed explanation of what files from a full retail Windows you'd need to turn a recovery version into a full version.
That said, sites like EBay are "of course" bribed by MS and refuse you your right to sell software - with unnecessary consequences: I know of a Debian CD reseller who got threatened by EBay because he "was advertising and/or selling unlicensed software".
Vobis (www.vobis.de) sells blank machines. They come with "PC DOS 2000" preinstalled which is just a lame excuse for not violating the MS gag agreement. The XP preinstalled models are 100.- more expensive.
Dell doesn't claim they do, but for corporate customers they do sell some of their machines without preinstalled OS, and they are cheaper than the regular ones. At least I found this out when I phoned Dell Germany some months ago... they actually transferred me to somebody who claimed he'd be able to sell me a laptop without pre-installed software.
Perhaps that helps. Otherwise, buy a Powerbook. ;)
None of those ways are very easy to do for a normal user. But 2K/XP make that trivial to do
So you have never installed SuSE 7.x to 8.x anywhere? They ship this and you can enable it upon installation.
I'm not saying everyone has these problems. Windows NT5 aka 2000 doesn't crash as often as Win98 or NT4 did, which means it's become useable. But when I use it, it misbehaves (not necesarily crashes) often enough for my taste to annoy me enough to have switched.
That is the first time I heard somebody say that about Windows. (It's just about the first time I heard someone actually paying for his copy of Windows either - most get it with the machine, many just "borrow" a CD).
Both of the "hardcore" convinced Windows users I know (they don't want anything else, have second machines to try out new betas, adore Bill Gates, etc but both have seriously tried out Linux and so I accept their personal opinion) are consistently fiddling with driver problems, Office installations that upgrade half your system without you knowing, registry hacks, and so on. I suppose you are the casual user who uses two or three apps and hasn't really changed, upgraded or re-installed anything in his system, because I couldn't imagine how your Windows installation endured for so long, otherwise.
Even my father, who is a MBA with a laptop running just about nothing except MS Office and some tax savings calculator program (and he knows that he doesn't know anything about computer, so he doesn't fiddle around with it), has had to have his laptop re-installed twice in the last six months, because "suddenly" Windows (XP, btw.) refused to boot. Nobody knows why.
"Good talking to you, and good luck with school! "
I'm not sure I'm familiar with the terms but if "school" in English also includes working on a diploma thesis, thank you very much. :-)
"How do I contribute to usability improvements? Linux is at its infancy and has the chance to do everything right."
Join the KDE Usability team. http://usability.kde.org/
"Gratuitous alternative desktop environment suggestion: don't let applications save user documents to 'just anywhere' like Windows does. Then, create a user-level system browser that keeps the user out of the stuff that is irrelevant to them."
Already done. You can customize the paths that Konqueror's tree view pane shows, and insert your own structure (as an admin). Of course you can still manually enter the path, but with KDE's kiosk mode you can completely restrict opening and viewing files to the home directory of the user and maybe the CDROM mount point. Everything else is none of his business.
"And don't even get me started on a standard for program installs. Currently, a Windows install can put crap in the following places:"
KDE has been doing this since v.001. The apps that are installed are sorted in categories like Network, Internet, Utilities, System, Settings, etc. Only apps that don't fit a specific category (like a CD burner frontend or a cookbook database) are in "Applications".
The infrastructure is there, now we only need distributors to use it. The current SuSE (and probably other) distributions begin to understand that a system menu with 1500 entries is not really what a new user wants, and put the most important apps on the desktop as well. (Office, Web-browser, Home directory, and a couple others)
Shall we leave the obvious methods (SMBdie, exploits, scripts that exploit IE holes, etc) aside. I just used it. Explorer tends to hang (the system, not just the process) when generating thumbnails or when browsing FTP sites. It's worse when in the nethood and some machine reboots or for some reason decides not to answer, or you have a big network - the whole desktop freezes for as long as Explorer needs to search the network. I had most of the Windows systems installed, configured and maintained by friends who knew Windows a HELL of a lot better than me, or "standard installations" done by administrators in the companies I worked with.
Everywhere I had problems, on many systems the same problems. For example in Office 97 occasionally in 2000 I had the problem that when I closed Word or Excel and re-opened (ie. clicked on a xls file) before the process was completely finished, I wasn't able to open Office again AT ALL until I rebooted. In w2k, logging out and in again helped sometimes. Don't ask me what happened, these were standard installations without weird tools or registry hacks, and with a single digit number of installed applications (contrast to the 3-digit number of apps in Linux that I installed and use, plus those part of the system anyway).
You're right, I might not be the "standard user" that Microsoft perhaps expects. Just about the first thing I do when I start working with Windows is install some virtual desktop utiliy to have more screen space. (Before you ask: every time I had a problem I tried without the utility, of course, and the problem remained the same most of the time.) I seldomly use less than three apps at the same time, the "typical" Windows user maybe just uses them consecutively, not simultaneously.
I guess I just have a bad influence on Windows systems. When I went to my parents last Christmas (and this is no joke!) and went into my brother's room to say hello, he was playing some strategy game on his machine. (I think he's using XP) He turned around to meet me and said something like ".. but don't get near my computer, it always crashes when you are nearby, it just doesn't like Linux users". I went like "ha, ha" and turned around (being about 5 meters away from his machine) just to hear a VERY angy "TOLD YOU SO! And I didn't even save my game!" from behind me.
I don't like windows. I admit that freely. But I use it when I have to to get a job done. And I don't break it on purpose when I want a job done. But with me, it breaks nevertheless, even when I'm being taught by Windows users how to 'be careful'. Don't ask me why.
"and I've never even *heard* of the problems that you're talking about, like having to open fewer apps, having to reinstall, Windows slowing down by just installing new things, etc"
You apparently never e.g. compared boot times before and after MS Office installs or IE upgrades, and that's _without_ the additional MS Office panel. MS seems to install loads of DLLs that load at boot-time so that Word & Co. come up quickly when you start the actual application. On one machine I had (in 1997) the difference was about 20 seconds, and the system was noticeably slower after the install, and (because?) less memory was available for apps (other than MS Office).
There's the registry which is kept in memory and which keeps growing unless you manually export and re-import it under DOS. (this keeps getting mentioned in the press) There's all the PC magazines that keep telling us the "top 333 ways to speed up and optimize windows" and "registry clean up utilities" and so on. Even if YOUR system doesn't suffer from these disabilities I don't think these magazines print their registry optimization stuff just for the fun of it.
" It sounds like this is completely made up. I kind of doubt that you're the only person on the planet trying to open up multiple apps at the same time with W2K."
I made none of this up. Come visit me if you want. I live in Hamburg. The most infamous part of Hamburg, in fact - three blocks away from Atta Mohammed's place, or rather where he used to live. :-)
That has nothing to do with my Windows problems though (or with anything else).
"And you think that all of these people are all sitting around happily with crashing computers when they can go buy RedHat at Best Buy?"
Most of the people I know use Windows, and aren't happy with it - but many of the Windows users I know don't even know there are alternatives. I go to a technical university and my estimate is that about a quarter of the students there have used or currently use Linux, which is quite a sizeable percentage. But many of the others think it's NORMAL to have to reinstall every couple months, or if you are extra careful, perhaps once a year. After all, all their friends have the problem, except for the few who use Mac or Linux.
More to the point: Almost nobody uses Windows voluntarily. Most use it because they haven't yet seen (or seriously considered) alternatives. Many use it because they depend on apps that are only available for Windows. Many of those are gamers, which I understand completely. Many use it because they don't get a choice (in companies). But well, at least I know nobody who uses it just because it's Windows. Do you?
During my studies I worked as an adminsitrator in a department. They had a Windows NT machine as a printer server. The machine crashed about 2-3 times a day. Except for a FTP server application, the printer spooler, and some Postscript driver, NO APPLICATIONS were installed on this system. And you weren't able to cancel print jobs, for some reason. I don't know who configured this system but he didn't know what he was doing, for sure. (I'm not necessarily putting the blame on NT. I simply don't know whose fault it was that his machine was down 3 times a day.)
I asked why they continued to use this system. They said because they knew how to reset and re-install it when it broke down completely, which had happened three times in the last year. I asked, and everybody is OK with that? They said, yes, after all Windows is the standard and you have to live with it.
After some quarrels I was allowed to set up a Linux based printer server for testing. We didn't tell the others (just me and the full time admin), just swapped network cables. It worked, never crashed, and ran perfectly. (which was probably just as much because of us as Linux). After some time, we also installed Samba file sharing, Mail server, webmail, moved the department web site from the central uni server to our own, added user accounts, and told the users how to use the new features. Everyone was really happy about the new server. Nobody knew it ran Linux, that was the plan.
After some months the department head came to us and asked if we had reinstalled the server, and told us, see, it IS possible to get Windows running smoothly. We told him it wasn't running Windows any more. He went berserk and asked what the hell we thought we were doing and what are his people gonna do when the machne breaks down, and when you can't stop a print job, etc. We asked him exactly how often had the machine broken down in the last eight months? Zero times? Ah. And how often have you used the new CUPS web interface to control your print jobs, and how often have you had a problem with that? Ah.
I imagine that if we had told people beforehand that we had switched the server to Linux, there would have been many, many more complaints - just for psychology reasons. When people don't expect something unknown or new, they tend to accept changes more easily, I think.
We are now running 4 (out of about 20) workstations under Linux in this department, and an additional server. Those are the (only) 4 workstations that kept running during the mail and worm epidemics that plagued the Windows machines in our network. People were happy that they could check their mail without having to fear every mouse click.
Now this has become much longer as I wanted, but maybe it was worth the effort and you understand a little better now.
-- Jens