I appreciate the concern, really do, and I can see how you had this impression. However, it is different, fortunately. My post meant to explain the situation of our consultants and the resulting difficulty to migrate them to OOo.
However, I am not a consultant and my situation is very different. It was also 5 in the morning when I posted, so I wrote quickly, and I *was* annoyed about the original "well MSO has issues, too"-reply, which only could have come from someone with little clue about (my part of) the real world. Change is hard here. We will finally migrate to Firefox soon (at least partly - IE7 will also be installed for the crappy-and-as-of-yet-unfixed parts of the intranet) and while I had no place in the actual decision, I do hope that my incessant lobbying did contribute to this a little bit.
Oh, and re the point about "well why did you choose MS Office in the first place" in the post I replied to, I need to add that this decision was made more than 10 years ago without any involvement by me whatsoever. And while OOo3 is not that bad (though still worse than MSO), I hope nobody will tell me that the StarOffice of 1995 was a viable alternative.
I am the tech head of one of the large graphics departments, the aforementioned do-or-die policy does not apply to us (just to consultants), however it is still a very demanding environment, which I like. I have fantastic colleagues, many of which have become real friends, and in addition to my management tasks have been taking care of a (very successful) software development project for the past 6 years, with nobody higher up ever *really* interfering except helpfully. The pay is good, the benefits great, and amenities are such that I'd be afraid to list them here for fear of being called a liar:p
Ethically the whole thing is kind of dubious, but what isn't -- and there are many good aspects, too. Have a nice weekend.
You are completely correct of course. But if you worked in a business consultancy with more than 10,000 users; which has constant file exchange with clients numbering several times that, all using MS Office; a corporate policy that creates extremely intense competition on purpose, which leads to anyone who does not climb the next career step within 5 years max being removed from the company; and consequently a permanent influx of new users who only know MS Office; plus nobody having *any* room or spare nerves to deal with anything unknown on the IT side due to insane stress levels; then you'd have a hard time switching them around to an office suite that is simply different, more so if it does not do usable change tracking and other vital things, like halfway usable charting, even if you were the CIO - and I am not.:)
Look, don't tell me this shit. Yes, their compatibility across version leaves ample room for improvement, and I am no MS apologist, not. at. all. But shots from your hip do not amount to useful free software advocacy.
As I said, doc compatibility of MS Office is nearly there. Nevertheless, you experience more problems than when opening O2007 docx with the import filter that MS provided for O2003. You know, file format compatibility does not only cover fonts and stuff.
Aside from doc though, compatibility is a fucking mess. And before you fire another shot, I *know* that this is MS's fault. This does not change anything, though, for now. Your PPT doc starts with slide 0 for the title? Well, bad luck, Impress will still show it as slide 1 (and your in-text references will al be wrong). Your PPT file uses hidden objects (Application.ActiveWindow.Selection.ShapeRange.Visible = False)? Bad luck, Impress will display them. (Yes, I am about to file these, I just found out recently).
And again yes, PPT sucks and is used waaay too much. And yes, veryone should do their charts in R, or GNUplot (OOo unfortunately does not cut it, it sucks even more than MS Graph already does). But the fact is that this does not happen yet and won't for quite some time. So.
Not in my world, no. There exists no real alternative to MS Office (OOo unfortunately does NOT count yet), especially if you need file format compatibility (doc is nearly there, the others not so much). In fact, what I am certainly NOT locked into is PC hardware. I might be locked into the PC *platform* (which really is just a result of MS being lazy again), but migrating all our PC hardware from HP to Lenovo was, well, not even interesting.
I agree about the names, I'd appreciate if they let it be. Nevertheless, that's no reason for 90% of each/. discussion being about the name.
Regarding brown I dunno, why would it be weird for the distro announcement to mention UI changes. And again, whatever the case there, the/. reaction is just... sad.
The real name is 9.10. Slashdot is the most depressing when a new Ubuntu release is being announced. It's all about the color brown and names, like in fucking kindergarten. "Oooh it's the color of shit, hahahahahaaa". Yeah, and the color of chocolate, the soil we live off, etc.
All the while there are exciting technical news in the announcements, but discussion about that is drowned by the morons. Fuck off, seriously.
I don't know, I don't think that you can really "solve" it. The question might be whether it needs to be solved. As an admin and dev, are you really in danger of downloading malware that can, for example, change your login scripts and your $PATH?
As long as you can login, you can always export your own PATH, no matter being tricked to do so or not. You don't even need that --- nothing prevents an attacker tricking the user to qualify the evil script by it's path (./runThisToWin10000).
Of course this requires/home and/tmp to be mounted noexec. This is/. and so I did not think that I needed to write that explicitly.
I don't think you solve a problem here, unless you are saying you shouldn't have exec and write privileges at the same time anywhere (and to me that sounds as useful as "just don't turn on your pc").
It's a very common setup in the real world. Someone who is only a user (not an admin and not a developer) does not need to have wx anywhere.
Dude, the guy wrote, "Say what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing they aren't is fail. Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of.", and this is what I quoted. Only after this part did he go on about Vista sales, which might be true, but does not in any way qualify his blanket statement about how their biggest fail still makes money, which is simply not true.
Anyway, I have not seen a Zune once because they don't even sell it in Europe, while everyone and his dog has an iPod of some sort. And it's still irrelevant because Zune is just a failure, not their biggest failure and hence has no place in a discussion about how "Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of".
Windows Server is Windows, no? And AD is a part of a Windows server environment, thus also Windows. "Fails" was meant in the given context of making money, and indeed I have no idea whether Exchange or SQL Server can be considered commercial successes. They might be or not, I did not feel like googling - I think it's pretty obvious that stating "their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of" is ridiculous when their biggest fails have sunk billions of dollars, which is not disputed.
The Xbox division may have made money for a few months, I don't know, but the fact stands that the whole Xbox adventure has cost them billions to date, overall.
Whether the Zune is good or not is irrelevant in the give context of "their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of", which is what I replied to. I think we can agree that the Zune was not a storming commercial success and not something any reputable global company would consciously strive for.
Keyboards and mice I dunno, I don't have a need for them. And anyway, for a company of MS's size this is peanuts.
As for the rest of your comment ("ignoring Windows and Office"), you seem to have forgotten what you replied to, as I already wrote above it was about the statement that their biggest fails still make considerable money, which is utter crap. How much money did MS Bob make?
Say what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing they aren't is fail. Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of.
Are you insane or an Astroturfer? IIRC all that makes money is Windows and Office, everything else fails. Or do you count the 4 billion or whatever it is that they lost on the Xboxes a success? Zune, anyone? Get real!
I thought host/slave only comes into play for USB On-the-go?
But anyway, what I am annoyed about is that my digicam and my mp3 player are both roughly the same size, perform the same function as far as USB is concerned (both are mass storage devices), and plug into a computer with an standard A-series plug, but they still require two different plugs on the device side, a micro-A and a micro-B, respectively. That's just madness.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate the concern, really do, and I can see how you had this impression. However, it is different, fortunately. My post meant to explain the situation of our consultants and the resulting difficulty to migrate them to OOo.
However, I am not a consultant and my situation is very different. It was also 5 in the morning when I posted, so I wrote quickly, and I *was* annoyed about the original "well MSO has issues, too"-reply, which only could have come from someone with little clue about (my part of) the real world. Change is hard here. We will finally migrate to Firefox soon (at least partly - IE7 will also be installed for the crappy-and-as-of-yet-unfixed parts of the intranet) and while I had no place in the actual decision, I do hope that my incessant lobbying did contribute to this a little bit.
Oh, and re the point about "well why did you choose MS Office in the first place" in the post I replied to, I need to add that this decision was made more than 10 years ago without any involvement by me whatsoever. And while OOo3 is not that bad (though still worse than MSO), I hope nobody will tell me that the StarOffice of 1995 was a viable alternative.
I am the tech head of one of the large graphics departments, the aforementioned do-or-die policy does not apply to us (just to consultants), however it is still a very demanding environment, which I like. I have fantastic colleagues, many of which have become real friends, and in addition to my management tasks have been taking care of a (very successful) software development project for the past 6 years, with nobody higher up ever *really* interfering except helpfully. The pay is good, the benefits great, and amenities are such that I'd be afraid to list them here for fear of being called a liar :p
Ethically the whole thing is kind of dubious, but what isn't -- and there are many good aspects, too. Have a nice weekend.
You are completely correct of course. But if you worked in a business consultancy with more than 10,000 users; which has constant file exchange with clients numbering several times that, all using MS Office; a corporate policy that creates extremely intense competition on purpose, which leads to anyone who does not climb the next career step within 5 years max being removed from the company; and consequently a permanent influx of new users who only know MS Office; plus nobody having *any* room or spare nerves to deal with anything unknown on the IT side due to insane stress levels; then you'd have a hard time switching them around to an office suite that is simply different, more so if it does not do usable change tracking and other vital things, like halfway usable charting, even if you were the CIO - and I am not. :)
Look, don't tell me this shit. Yes, their compatibility across version leaves ample room for improvement, and I am no MS apologist, not. at. all. But shots from your hip do not amount to useful free software advocacy.
As I said, doc compatibility of MS Office is nearly there. Nevertheless, you experience more problems than when opening O2007 docx with the import filter that MS provided for O2003. You know, file format compatibility does not only cover fonts and stuff.
Aside from doc though, compatibility is a fucking mess. And before you fire another shot, I *know* that this is MS's fault. This does not change anything, though, for now. Your PPT doc starts with slide 0 for the title? Well, bad luck, Impress will still show it as slide 1 (and your in-text references will al be wrong). Your PPT file uses hidden objects (Application.ActiveWindow.Selection.ShapeRange.Visible = False)? Bad luck, Impress will display them. (Yes, I am about to file these, I just found out recently).
And again yes, PPT sucks and is used waaay too much. And yes, veryone should do their charts in R, or GNUplot (OOo unfortunately does not cut it, it sucks even more than MS Graph already does). But the fact is that this does not happen yet and won't for quite some time. So.
Not in my world, no. There exists no real alternative to MS Office (OOo unfortunately does NOT count yet), especially if you need file format compatibility (doc is nearly there, the others not so much). In fact, what I am certainly NOT locked into is PC hardware. I might be locked into the PC *platform* (which really is just a result of MS being lazy again), but migrating all our PC hardware from HP to Lenovo was, well, not even interesting.
You could say the same thing about anything and everything, though:
[Whatever happens], it will make the society change in ways that are hard to foresee
reciting him Mormonic prose?
That would be a possibility! :)
For example, a homophobic deed towards a gay man is sentenced harder than the same act towards a straight man, due to gay rights political pressure.
What is "a homophobic deed [...] against a straight man"?
Also, [citation needed]
I agree about the names, I'd appreciate if they let it be. Nevertheless, that's no reason for 90% of each /. discussion being about the name.
Regarding brown I dunno, why would it be weird for the distro announcement to mention UI changes. And again, whatever the case there, the /. reaction is just ... sad.
The real name is 9.10. Slashdot is the most depressing when a new Ubuntu release is being announced. It's all about the color brown and names, like in fucking kindergarten. "Oooh it's the color of shit, hahahahahaaa". Yeah, and the color of chocolate, the soil we live off, etc.
All the while there are exciting technical news in the announcements, but discussion about that is drowned by the morons. Fuck off, seriously.
Personally, I really can't imagine this to happen to me, but I totally agree about the sentiment in the original article.
Perhaps it would help not so browse pr0n when concentrating on solving your own problems and getting my own code to work ;)
I don't know, I don't think that you can really "solve" it. The question might be whether it needs to be solved. As an admin and dev, are you really in danger of downloading malware that can, for example, change your login scripts and your $PATH?
As long as you can login, you can always export your own PATH, no matter being tricked to do so or not. You don't even need that --- nothing prevents an attacker tricking the user to qualify the evil script by it's path (./runThisToWin10000).
Of course this requires /home and /tmp to be mounted noexec. This is /. and so I did not think that I needed to write that explicitly.
I don't think you solve a problem here, unless you are saying you shouldn't have exec and write privileges at the same time anywhere (and to me that sounds as useful as "just don't turn on your pc").
It's a very common setup in the real world. Someone who is only a user (not an admin and not a developer) does not need to have wx anywhere.
(or possibly /home/)
Gah, sorry. /home/<untrustedusers>
True. Though just as the first case can be prevented by mounting /home (or possibly /home/) noexec, this once can be prevented by doing same with /tmp
If the PATH variable has a path that the user has write access to,
then the machine admin (or distro creator) is a moron.
Yeah, I don't see this having any success either, though, at least not in Europe.
Oh and I have no idea why you are dragging Apple into this.
Is it true that the greatest failures of MS make more money than what most companies dream of or is it not true?
Dude, the guy wrote, "Say what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing they aren't is fail. Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of.", and this is what I quoted. Only after this part did he go on about Vista sales, which might be true, but does not in any way qualify his blanket statement about how their biggest fail still makes money, which is simply not true.
Anyway, I have not seen a Zune once because they don't even sell it in Europe, while everyone and his dog has an iPod of some sort. And it's still irrelevant because Zune is just a failure, not their biggest failure and hence has no place in a discussion about how "Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of".
Windows Server is Windows, no? And AD is a part of a Windows server environment, thus also Windows. "Fails" was meant in the given context of making money, and indeed I have no idea whether Exchange or SQL Server can be considered commercial successes. They might be or not, I did not feel like googling - I think it's pretty obvious that stating "their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of" is ridiculous when their biggest fails have sunk billions of dollars, which is not disputed.
The Xbox division may have made money for a few months, I don't know, but the fact stands that the whole Xbox adventure has cost them billions to date, overall.
Whether the Zune is good or not is irrelevant in the give context of "their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of", which is what I replied to. I think we can agree that the Zune was not a storming commercial success and not something any reputable global company would consciously strive for.
Keyboards and mice I dunno, I don't have a need for them. And anyway, for a company of MS's size this is peanuts.
As for the rest of your comment ("ignoring Windows and Office"), you seem to have forgotten what you replied to, as I already wrote above it was about the statement that their biggest fails still make considerable money, which is utter crap. How much money did MS Bob make?
Say what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing they aren't is fail. Their biggest fails to date still make more money than most companies dream of.
Are you insane or an Astroturfer? IIRC all that makes money is Windows and Office, everything else fails. Or do you count the 4 billion or whatever it is that they lost on the Xboxes a success? Zune, anyone? Get real!
Probably because they can think 10 years into the future.
I thought host/slave only comes into play for USB On-the-go?
But anyway, what I am annoyed about is that my digicam and my mp3 player are both roughly the same size, perform the same function as far as USB is concerned (both are mass storage devices), and plug into a computer with an standard A-series plug, but they still require two different plugs on the device side, a micro-A and a micro-B, respectively.
That's just madness.