Despite all the linux hype, it is still harder to install, maintain, and use than windows is.
I honestly think that's changed over the past six months or so. The latest versions of Mandrake & Suse are really slick. Easier to install than Windows as near as I can tell. RedHat has always been a little behind, but then they don't really care about desktop users.
As far as maintenance goes, I'm not aware of any ongoing maintenance requirement for Linux over Windows. Both operating systems work day-to-day, but Windows used to (and maybe still does - I just haven't used recent versions) eat itself slowly until you eventually had to re-install. In that respect Linux is actually easier to maintain.
My point, though, is that although it may be just as easy to learn a particular linux bundle as it is to learn windows, until I can do all the things I do under windows, I won't get rid of it, neither will I advise anyone else to.
This is still a legitimate criticism. If you're somebody who spends all day in Microsoft Office then Linux is probably not ready for you yet. There are also a lot of little apps for Windows that don't have a Linux equivilent: games, educational programs, tax software.
The MS-Office problem will be solved soon - say another year or two before OpenOffice is really nice. (It's actually pretty good feature-wise, but the user interface - ick.)
The small app. problem is harder to solve. It requires a large installed base. But DOS had the same problem when it was first introduced. The Apple II had much better application support, but slowly that was overcome.
At $9.95/month, now you have a free OS that ends up costing you the same as the full version of XP Home after just over a year and a half.
But you get a lot more than a Windows XP replacement. You also get an MS-Office replacement (OpenOffice, Evolution).
Now if you don't use this stuff, then of course it's not worth it. But if you actually use the applications that are provided through the service then it's a great deal.
I'd bet large amounts of money (if I had it:-) that your managers dismiss this news and go ahead with the project anyway. That's politics. Nobody likes to lose budget dollars that have already been approved.
Re:not as easy as you might think
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This thing is clearly a hoax, but..
I don't think this would be all that difficult. It's not like the hack has to be obvious. You wouldn't put something like:
if( strcmp( username, "osama" ) ) {
uid=0;
}
That would be too obvious.
But something more subtle in the logic could easily get through, given the number of such bugs that have made it through without deliberate sabotage.
The ultimate fan would...
on
Swaying CPU Fans
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...somehow use the heat from the CPU to power the fan. As the CPU got hotter, the fan would move faster.
I have no idea how this could be done, but there must be a way.
It's probably worthwhile to correct this guy, if only because some other dumb manager is going to come by later, read the policy, look at your infrastructure (and figure out that it's Open Source), and force you to replace everything at great expense. There are tons of manager who blindly follow stupid rules.
You can probably sell it by figuring what he really means when he forbids Open Source. Chances are he really means "we don't install unsupported software". That's probably a policy everybody could live with much more easily.
It depends on the movie. I often walk out of a movie thinking 'why didn't they just cut the last 45 minutes?'. This normally happens when the scriptwriter feels the need to resolve some cheesy plot-line explicitely, rather than just leaving it to the imagination.
On the other hand, the Harry Potter movie was, IMHO, way too short even at 210 (?) minutes. They tried to cram the whole book in and the film ended up being a montage of short scenes resembling a music video with no time for character development. They should either have cut out more of the book, or split it into two movies. The director has already suggested that he may do that with the fourth book, since it's much longer.
would the number of developers with different agendas not be proportional to the number of *users* with different agendas?
Not in general with proprietary software. A lot of people use Sun hardware for a lot of different things, but only one group of developers (or one 'agenda' assuming those developers are kept on a tight leash) actually gets direct input. So if Sun management decides that massively parrallel SMP boxes are where the money is, users who want to cluster a few hundred 2 processor systems together get less attention.
Re:Ecosystem biased against small players?
on
The Evolution of Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm not sure the number of users is important so much as the number of developers/contributers. Or if Linus is correct, the number of developers with different agendas.
In fact the whole debate starts to sound a bit like ESR's Cathedral & Bazaar.
Maybe it's just because I'm used to it, but I think the interface is quite good. There's a lot of information (the links on the side, all the articles on the front page, the slashboxes), but it's presented in a managable way.
Also, things have changed over the years, but in small ways. Check the preferences section some time to see just how customizable things are nowadays - it didn't used to be that way.
Re:Finally Learning From The Open Source Community
on
Windows XP Embedded
·
· Score: 2
Are you sure that's the reason? Amiga nuts, BBSers, and Apple II users all had communities in their day.
I think the main reason for a Linux community is that many Linux users actually enjoy working with their OS. Tinkering is an end unto itself. MS products just aren't as much fun to play with, so the technical people that would build a community don't use it.
I know I'm biased, but honestly it's been my experience that highly technical people - the ones who enjoy their work - prefer Unix and Linux. Most of the MS administrators are just in it for the money. If street cleaning paid as well then they'd be doing that.
Something similar happened to me a few years ago. An OS/2 based ATM crashed while I was making a withdrawal. The cash dispensor made funny noises for a little while and, just before it should have given me my money, it died.
I was worried about my transaction and went to the next machine to see if the money was gone from my account. Sure enough, the withdrawal had been recorded but I had no money. Worried, I called my bank immediately.
Then something neat happened. While I was on hold the crashed ATM went through it's startup sequence and apparently counted it's till! By the time I actually got through to a bank CSR, the machine had noticed that it had more money than it should and reversed my failed transaction, all without human intervention.
I'd mostly agree, except I'd exclude some high-end hardware. It'll take another couple of years before you're running Linux happily on a 64 CPU box.
But if you're comfortable running NT or SCO in your enterprise, then Linux should be no problem. I'd even go so far as to say that Linux has always been more enterprise-ready than NT. The first version of NT that was reasonably stable was Windows 2000. Linux was solid much sooner.
You're right of course, but don't underestimate the power of having Linux distributed to all those users, even if most of them blow it away.
The fact that Linux actually ships with the system means that users in China have a real choice to make, whereas in the rest of the world most users have no idea that non-Windows operating systems exist. Microsoft actually has to compete on merit.
As Microsoft takes steps to reduce piracy in China (including things like product activation), things will get really interesting. Nobody is going to pay the full price for Windows/Office - it's just not that much better. MS will either lose tons of market share, or they'll have to reduce the price in China. In fact, they'll probably find a compromise price to maximize revenue. That compromise will end up giving Linux a pretty decent market share.
I guess you have to look at those one by one. I don't know anything about about Chili!ASP, but presumably it could be used to support legacy code that can't be ported easily. Other apps. could probably be replaced with PHP or Perl. If none of that is feasible then it might be necessary to keep the odd Windows box around for a few years.
In any case, it's no reason to avoid switching. You just have to plan things out properly.
So would you consider starting an online venture to try to take advantage of alternative forms of distribution? I think it would be really great if a bunch of indie labels got together and did it right.
There are a lot of ways to do it, but say that your band and others like it sell memberships to a web site at their concerts. Say for £10 the fan gets an account and the right to download as much as they want for 12 months. £5 goes to the band that sold the membership, the rest is split up amongst all the member bands in proportion to downloads (with some taken off the top for running the site).
I think this would work great for smaller local bands that have a following, but aren't big enough to sell a million records.
I don't have any experience in Linux installation of that scale, but I still have some suggestions:
Don't try a wholesale migration. Especially at a University, you've got a lot of different groups with a lot of different needs.
Go from easy to hard in order to build experience. The obvious first step is to replace the IIS boxes with Linux/Apache. It's easy and proven and there's really no reason not to do it.
E-mail and DNS could easily move next.
Next up, build a directory system using Linux.
Start building a nice Intranet so that people spend more time in their browsers and less in MS specific applications. This might be a good time to install Netscape or Mozilla everywhere so that the Linux transition is easier later on.
Then replace those file and print servers with Samba. By this time you should have a good deal of Linux experience to help you through the rough spots.
When StarOffice 6.0 ships, start loading it everywhere. Don't upgrade MS-Office, but don't push people to use SO yet either.
Finally, pick specific student labs for transition. Work with the instructors to make sure all the software the students need is available. Replace the labs one by one over time.
Lastly, the most difficult group is administration. They're stubborn and a lot less willing to learn new things. Again, it might help to go one department at a time. You may find that certain departments can't make the switch because of some legacy software.
This kind of a phased approach should make things a lot easier and it'll be easier to sell to the administration. They can always back out or slow things down if there are problems. Also, if you phase it in over two years, by the time you get to your toughest customers - the admin staff - the Linux desktop interface and applications will have matured another generation.
Re:What about gimp?
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 5, Informative
It exists, but I don't think it's maintained as well. The primary developers don't really care about Win32, so maintaining it is left to a few masochists:-).
Qt if you need Win32
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I actually prefer GTK+ and I think it's a better bet long-term, but I don't think the cross-platform aspect of the library gets much developer attention.
Being cross-platform is a major selling point for commerical Qt users, however, so if you need your apps to work on Windows then it's clearly the way to go.
Stable is totally relative. The 2.2.x tree has had a lot longer to mature. It'll probably be a year before 2.4.x is as solid. This is true with most operating systems. If you have a mission critical server that's been working flawlessly on 2.2.x, then you have no reason to upgrade to 2.4.x. Since the old series is still maintained with security fixes, you can stay with the old kernel for a long time.
On the other hand, if you're installing a new machine you might benefit from some of the 2.4.x features. As long as the machine isn't really critical, you might as well go for it. If you're starting a project that won't be deployed for another six months or so, then 2.4.x is definately the way to go. Likewise on a desktop machine.
In your particular case, you need to evaluate how stable your Unreal Tournament server needs to be. Will you go out of business if it crashes? If not then I'd go ahead and upgrade. Chances are it'll be rock solid, and if not you can always go back.
In the end there will probably be a small handful of business models that are really successful. But things are still evolving to quickly to really know what will work. Especially given the current 'irrational negativity' (in contrast to the 'irrational exuberance' of recent memory), it's too early to tell what will work and what won't.
RedHat is, in a way, in the same position as IBM. They've already established a strong reputation and consulting organization and don't need proprietary IP to compete. A small company with no track record can't successfully compete with RedHat.
The same isn't true for a lot of smaller Open Source companies. Small companies can spend a lot of time and money developing an Open Source product, and then find a competitor selling against them using the same product, but with no investment in R&D. The client can't tell the difference, so in the end it comes down to straight marketing, with no points given for actually having developed the product.
My company has faced this situation in the past and now we develop custom proprietary applications on top of an Open Source platform. We still believe in Open Source, but for now we need to keep some stuff to ourselves in order to compete effectively. I'm hopeful that over time we can swing back towards Free software - after all it does help to produce better software. Perhaps after we've had more time in the market and are a little more established. Or perhaps we'll open up certain pieces of the product while keeping more specialized functionality to ourselves. It's hard to say.
It is clear that Open Source/Free Software is here to stay and will take a big chunk of the software market, but individual participants have to find a formula that works.
Slashdot Mirror
The file you reference mentions the story, but doesn't claim it's a myth (it doesn't claim otherwise either).
It sounds like whales prey on the squid, but not vice-versa. It's possible that this particular whale just took a squid that was too large for it.
I honestly think that's changed over the past six months or so. The latest versions of Mandrake & Suse are really slick. Easier to install than Windows as near as I can tell. RedHat has always been a little behind, but then they don't really care about desktop users.
As far as maintenance goes, I'm not aware of any ongoing maintenance requirement for Linux over Windows. Both operating systems work day-to-day, but Windows used to (and maybe still does - I just haven't used recent versions) eat itself slowly until you eventually had to re-install. In that respect Linux is actually easier to maintain.
This is still a legitimate criticism. If you're somebody who spends all day in Microsoft Office then Linux is probably not ready for you yet. There are also a lot of little apps for Windows that don't have a Linux equivilent: games, educational programs, tax software.
The MS-Office problem will be solved soon - say another year or two before OpenOffice is really nice. (It's actually pretty good feature-wise, but the user interface - ick.)
The small app. problem is harder to solve. It requires a large installed base. But DOS had the same problem when it was first introduced. The Apple II had much better application support, but slowly that was overcome.
But you get a lot more than a Windows XP replacement. You also get an MS-Office replacement (OpenOffice, Evolution).
Now if you don't use this stuff, then of course it's not worth it. But if you actually use the applications that are provided through the service then it's a great deal.
I'd bet large amounts of money (if I had it :-) that your managers dismiss this news and go ahead with the project anyway. That's politics. Nobody likes to lose budget dollars that have already been approved.
This thing is clearly a hoax, but..
I don't think this would be all that difficult. It's not like the hack has to be obvious. You wouldn't put something like:
if( strcmp( username, "osama" ) ) { uid=0; }That would be too obvious.
But something more subtle in the logic could easily get through, given the number of such bugs that have made it through without deliberate sabotage.
...somehow use the heat from the CPU to power the fan. As the CPU got hotter, the fan would move faster.
I have no idea how this could be done, but there must be a way.
I've never used Exchange, so I'm seriously interested in what people like about it. Why do companies feel it's better than a standard IMAP/LDAP setup?
You're assuming the user is in the U.S. In most of the world it's perfectly legal.
It's probably worthwhile to correct this guy, if only because some other dumb manager is going to come by later, read the policy, look at your infrastructure (and figure out that it's Open Source), and force you to replace everything at great expense. There are tons of manager who blindly follow stupid rules.
You can probably sell it by figuring what he really means when he forbids Open Source. Chances are he really means "we don't install unsupported software". That's probably a policy everybody could live with much more easily.
It depends on the movie. I often walk out of a movie thinking 'why didn't they just cut the last 45 minutes?'. This normally happens when the scriptwriter feels the need to resolve some cheesy plot-line explicitely, rather than just leaving it to the imagination.
On the other hand, the Harry Potter movie was, IMHO, way too short even at 210 (?) minutes. They tried to cram the whole book in and the film ended up being a montage of short scenes resembling a music video with no time for character development. They should either have cut out more of the book, or split it into two movies. The director has already suggested that he may do that with the fourth book, since it's much longer.
Not in general with proprietary software. A lot of people use Sun hardware for a lot of different things, but only one group of developers (or one 'agenda' assuming those developers are kept on a tight leash) actually gets direct input. So if Sun management decides that massively parrallel SMP boxes are where the money is, users who want to cluster a few hundred 2 processor systems together get less attention.
I'm not sure the number of users is important so much as the number of developers/contributers. Or if Linus is correct, the number of developers with different agendas.
In fact the whole debate starts to sound a bit like ESR's Cathedral & Bazaar.
Maybe it's just because I'm used to it, but I think the interface is quite good. There's a lot of information (the links on the side, all the articles on the front page, the slashboxes), but it's presented in a managable way.
Also, things have changed over the years, but in small ways. Check the preferences section some time to see just how customizable things are nowadays - it didn't used to be that way.
Are you sure that's the reason? Amiga nuts, BBSers, and Apple II users all had communities in their day.
I think the main reason for a Linux community is that many Linux users actually enjoy working with their OS. Tinkering is an end unto itself. MS products just aren't as much fun to play with, so the technical people that would build a community don't use it.
I know I'm biased, but honestly it's been my experience that highly technical people - the ones who enjoy their work - prefer Unix and Linux. Most of the MS administrators are just in it for the money. If street cleaning paid as well then they'd be doing that.
Something similar happened to me a few years ago. An OS/2 based ATM crashed while I was making a withdrawal. The cash dispensor made funny noises for a little while and, just before it should have given me my money, it died.
I was worried about my transaction and went to the next machine to see if the money was gone from my account. Sure enough, the withdrawal had been recorded but I had no money. Worried, I called my bank immediately.
Then something neat happened. While I was on hold the crashed ATM went through it's startup sequence and apparently counted it's till! By the time I actually got through to a bank CSR, the machine had noticed that it had more money than it should and reversed my failed transaction, all without human intervention.
That's some seriously cool programming.
I'd mostly agree, except I'd exclude some high-end hardware. It'll take another couple of years before you're running Linux happily on a 64 CPU box.
But if you're comfortable running NT or SCO in your enterprise, then Linux should be no problem. I'd even go so far as to say that Linux has always been more enterprise-ready than NT. The first version of NT that was reasonably stable was Windows 2000. Linux was solid much sooner.
You're right of course, but don't underestimate the power of having Linux distributed to all those users, even if most of them blow it away.
The fact that Linux actually ships with the system means that users in China have a real choice to make, whereas in the rest of the world most users have no idea that non-Windows operating systems exist. Microsoft actually has to compete on merit.
As Microsoft takes steps to reduce piracy in China (including things like product activation), things will get really interesting. Nobody is going to pay the full price for Windows/Office - it's just not that much better. MS will either lose tons of market share, or they'll have to reduce the price in China. In fact, they'll probably find a compromise price to maximize revenue. That compromise will end up giving Linux a pretty decent market share.
I guess you have to look at those one by one. I don't know anything about about Chili!ASP, but presumably it could be used to support legacy code that can't be ported easily. Other apps. could probably be replaced with PHP or Perl. If none of that is feasible then it might be necessary to keep the odd Windows box around for a few years.
In any case, it's no reason to avoid switching. You just have to plan things out properly.
So would you consider starting an online venture to try to take advantage of alternative forms of distribution? I think it would be really great if a bunch of indie labels got together and did it right.
There are a lot of ways to do it, but say that your band and others like it sell memberships to a web site at their concerts. Say for £10 the fan gets an account and the right to download as much as they want for 12 months. £5 goes to the band that sold the membership, the rest is split up amongst all the member bands in proportion to downloads (with some taken off the top for running the site).
I think this would work great for smaller local bands that have a following, but aren't big enough to sell a million records.
I don't have any experience in Linux installation of that scale, but I still have some suggestions:
This kind of a phased approach should make things a lot easier and it'll be easier to sell to the administration. They can always back out or slow things down if there are problems. Also, if you phase it in over two years, by the time you get to your toughest customers - the admin staff - the Linux desktop interface and applications will have matured another generation.
It exists, but I don't think it's maintained as well. The primary developers don't really care about Win32, so maintaining it is left to a few masochists :-).
I actually prefer GTK+ and I think it's a better bet long-term, but I don't think the cross-platform aspect of the library gets much developer attention.
Being cross-platform is a major selling point for commerical Qt users, however, so if you need your apps to work on Windows then it's clearly the way to go.
Stable is totally relative. The 2.2.x tree has had a lot longer to mature. It'll probably be a year before 2.4.x is as solid. This is true with most operating systems. If you have a mission critical server that's been working flawlessly on 2.2.x, then you have no reason to upgrade to 2.4.x. Since the old series is still maintained with security fixes, you can stay with the old kernel for a long time.
On the other hand, if you're installing a new machine you might benefit from some of the 2.4.x features. As long as the machine isn't really critical, you might as well go for it. If you're starting a project that won't be deployed for another six months or so, then 2.4.x is definately the way to go. Likewise on a desktop machine.
In your particular case, you need to evaluate how stable your Unreal Tournament server needs to be. Will you go out of business if it crashes? If not then I'd go ahead and upgrade. Chances are it'll be rock solid, and if not you can always go back.
In the end there will probably be a small handful of business models that are really successful. But things are still evolving to quickly to really know what will work. Especially given the current 'irrational negativity' (in contrast to the 'irrational exuberance' of recent memory), it's too early to tell what will work and what won't.
RedHat is, in a way, in the same position as IBM. They've already established a strong reputation and consulting organization and don't need proprietary IP to compete. A small company with no track record can't successfully compete with RedHat.
The same isn't true for a lot of smaller Open Source companies. Small companies can spend a lot of time and money developing an Open Source product, and then find a competitor selling against them using the same product, but with no investment in R&D. The client can't tell the difference, so in the end it comes down to straight marketing, with no points given for actually having developed the product.
My company has faced this situation in the past and now we develop custom proprietary applications on top of an Open Source platform. We still believe in Open Source, but for now we need to keep some stuff to ourselves in order to compete effectively. I'm hopeful that over time we can swing back towards Free software - after all it does help to produce better software. Perhaps after we've had more time in the market and are a little more established. Or perhaps we'll open up certain pieces of the product while keeping more specialized functionality to ourselves. It's hard to say.
It is clear that Open Source/Free Software is here to stay and will take a big chunk of the software market, but individual participants have to find a formula that works.
Heh heh. I noticed that too. Too bad I can't really claim credit for my sig :-).