... "and an open source companies biggest asset isn't their customers, it's their community"
That's a nice feel-important statement for all community members, but it's wrong. No customers = no company. I ain't saying the community has zero value, but if you were company and could keep only one of these two assets (customers or community), what would be the obvious choice?
Thank you for saying this - if I had mod points I'd use 'em.
Real sysadmins (you know, the ones with more than 20 users depending on them) don't just rip/slash/burn in-use software and system because the've got an ideological bee in their bonnet. They sit down and figure out the longterm effects on system stability and usability. They polish up their points into empirically provable or at least reasonable arguments, and they go visiting stakeholders, explaining why the short-term pain is offset by long-term increases in comfort.
I too am tired of the 'I run my games on a server OS' wannabes posing as actual working sysadmins.
OK, this is conspiracy theory... and could never work.
Here you posit MS forming entire teams of people to... pretend to develop software in order to throw the FOSS community off the scent. Meanwhile, other teams on the same campus will ACTUALLY develop the same or similar software, which of course beats the pants off the stuff developed by the faux-coders.
And no one will ever figure this out and blog it. Riiiight.
Finally someone who gets it. An equipment rack is not a work of art, and more cableties/velcro/string are NOT automatically better on the plug side of the rack. Hey, go hogwild with your cableties on the punchdown side, guys. But some of us have actual WORK to do on the plug side!
On the plug side:
Use the right cable length; use vertical and horizontal rackmount wiremanagers. Tywrap is a timewaster. Bundles should be neat but a little loose. Strip out unused cables right away.
First you said we've had reparse points since day one of NTFS. Not true; those came with Windows 2000 (RTM December of '99). NTFS is older than that. Arggh, this is the sort of quibbling I promised not to do.
No, I didn't mention the newer TCP/IP stack; others did. I mentioned a few specific new features, like save-able profiles, who's point you seem to have missed.
Finish your sentence... there is *nothing* new of valueto you. Others will differ, as I've said. And yes, there are many things that make their debut in Vista. See the wikipedia article I mentioned. For those areas where Vista fleshes out pre-existing features, the fleshing-out and the increased manageability of those things are new value.
But I don't need to sell Vista to you. Only to make the point that it is NOT, as you earlier tried to suggest, simply an Aero-ized Solitaire upgrade.
I could quibble with your valuations of the things mentioned - but I won't. Perhaps you wouldn't immediately depend on the new security features of Vista - that doesn't mean others will choose your strategy. Maybe your org wishes to continue licensing Ghost - but maybe other orgs don't. And so on. Value is in the eye of the beholder!
While we actually haven't had *usable* symlinks 'since day 1 of NTFS', again, that's not the point. The point is, many potentially valuable features do exist in Vista. *You* may not see value in them, but that's your right. Still, blowing off the whole thing as simple a new Aero-ized Solitaire is way, way too simplistic.
So, perhaps you can name a SINGLE "useful new feature" that is worth $170k
in new desktops across my enterprise. And when I say "useful", I mean it'll
earn that $170k BACK somehow.
Here are several for ya.
I'll just lump UAC, the more-secure IE7 running in protected mode, Mandatory
Integrity Control, Session 0 isolation, BitLocker drive encryption, Address
Space Layout Randomization,and, oh, a handful of other security
features into this one little bullet point. Properly taken advantage of,
these could deliver that $170k of ROI all by themselves, in the form of less
3rd-party security requirements, managment of same, and management of
security incidents.
Speech recognition that works. Not sure if you want a cube-farm full of
blabbering knowledge workers, but hey. I can see some orgs using this to
good advantage.
IPV6, much better wireless support, saved network profiles.
mklink -- create, modify and delete junctions, hard links, and
symbolic links.
Completely re-written image-based installation will make deployment a
lot easier. It'll also make it a snap to move an employee from old computer
to new computer, preserving all apps and settings without extra frobbing by
IT staff (or the user!)
Deadlock detection should remove most hang conditions. User-mode drivers
should also be worthwhile in this respect.
New task manager can perform specific actions in response to system events,
or even multiple triggers.
Restart Manager should make most reboots a thing of the past.
Services For Unix - will run most *nix apps. NFS support.
RDP 6 allows application-level remoting.
There's
more,
of course. These are just a few of the things I see as big wins for the IT
department that deploys Vista over existing XP/2000 systems. Yes, Vista really is more than just Aero Glass. Who would've thought it?
... is the one after the Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I always wanted to hear Mike's story of where he went after the FN hit Luna, and to see him finish growing up and achieve his potential.
I suspect Varley would be a good pick for this. Of course it would still be a Varley novel, but that would be the icing on the cake!
Hell as an example, *Quickbooks* demands administrative access to function. WTF?
Incorrect. Intuit documents the permissions needed. I will grant that Intuit should be setting these permissions properly during the install process, and it is a pain to make the changes. But it's not that hard to do. And, Intuit's bumble shouldn't be considered an MS issue.
NTFS ACLs actually provide a very robust permissioning system. Too bad the Windows installer creates users as Administrators by default, and fails to tell the user this is being done. That's the root of this issue, not 'flawed access rights and permissions' as you suggest.
So then google should charge for returning search results?... if they want to, yes. The point is that the content owner sets the selling price. Those who don't pay that price, shouldn't get the content.
So. I can write a book and give it away. Or I can set the price at $10,000 per copy. My content: my choice. At $10k/copy, I can be reasonably sure no one will buy my book. So, I might wanna come down a little.
Quick! Nine innocent citizens and one heinous (but unidentified) criminal are standing in a group. You have a license to shoot the criminal. Ready, aim... fire!
Oh, wait. Which one is the criminal?
The first step to stopping malware is to identify it.
You are vastly misunderstanding the EU's decision regarding Microsoft. While they cite the Jackson court's decision in the US, they do not themselves hold Microsoft guilty of monopoly abuse. Instead, they say thet Microsoft is abusing "a dominant position" in the 'workgroup server market' by refusing to deliver certain information at the request of their competitors. The difference between 'monopoly' and 'dominant position' isn't a small one! So we can start by removing 'monopoly abuse' from your thinking.
So. Forgetting the bundling of Windows Media Player for now, what 'abuses' does the EU charge MS with? Basically it boils down to having refused to give Sun enough information to re-create an Active Directory Domain Controller (as well as file/print services completely interoperable with, and basically indistiguishable from, those MS offers) on their own.
The basic theory of the decision, then, is that by refusing Sun the ability to clone MS's AD/file/print services, MS was blocking Sun from the market for a centralized directory of accounts and file/print services.
The decision states that "it was necessary to show that supply [of MS's interface specs in this case] is indispensable to carry on business in the market, which means that there is no realistic actual or potential substitute to it." (paragraph 585, pg 158) I don't have much difficulty thinking of actual or potential substitutes to MS's AD/file/print services - do you?
Heck, two paragraphs later, the EU decision notes that UNIX & Novell entered the workgroup server market before MS did! Following this paragraph, the EU then summarizes a lot of market research which essentially states that "actual and potential substitutes" to MS's AD & file/print services do exist... they just do not have much market traction at present. But they could gain that traction, if they played their cards right. As shown by the way MS managed to edge Novell out of its dominant NOS position a few years back.
Personally, I wish MS would just go ahead and publish all the info Sun originally asked for (Sun's original request is what metastized into the the EU proceedings), and a whole lot more besides. Where we differ is that I don't think anyone has the right to force MS to give up this data, and especially not for the mere purpose of allowing MS's competitors a free ride on the technology MS spent years of hard work developing.
Excellent summation, and I thank you for it. I also note that no one bothers to answer the actual question! (What guarantee is there that GNU programmers can get the work done?")
But, given your clear lucid thinking and refusal to be sidetracked by the usual/. Jedi mind tricks of arguing tangential issues, I'm guessing you may have a throbbing headache now...
"This is the EU's way of saying: open up your protocols, your fileformats and your system or we'll force you to."
And that's the trouble. Government shouldn't be forcing business to give away its IP.
Now if EU had said: We will not buy any product that has closed file formats & protocols... and we encourage our citizens to do the same!... well, then I would have been completely in agreement.
All kidding aside, 'geek aura' is easy to explain.
That thing that did not work when the user tried it? User's mind wasn't really on the task at hand. Instead of paying attention to the controls or dialogs presented to him, he was really thinking of other things. Then it didn't work, and he called in the geek, who said 'show me how you made the problem occur'.
Now the user's mind is on the task at hand, and some little part of him doesn't want to look stupid in front of the geek. So he's seeing cues he missed before, and responding appropriately. The problem doesn't recur, and both the geek and the user come away thinking the geek has The Aura Which Makes Machines Work Properly.
First: I wrote that, and I am not a Microsoft shill. You'll find the original quote on my website. I don't work for MS, never have, probably never will.
Second: It's pretty difficult nowadays to get a mail attachment to run just by clicking it in Windows. You have to actively turn off included safeties to make that happen. If you did that, running nonadmin would protect you from the majority of damage the malware could do.
Third: your idea that "Windows is unusable if you don't" [run as admin], is incorrect. Millions of people run Windows nonadmin every day, without problems and, once they get a few new habits in place, without hassle.
Fourth: "That's just because MS never explained security to them, and just told them it was "easy".I agree, 100%... and at least some folks at MS agree. One of them admitted it in the comments to my article linked above. Many more of them are working damn hard right now to eliminate this huge mistake from the next versions of Windows.
The security architecture and systems in NT-based versions of Windows have always been pretty good, actually. The shame is that MS drool-proofed the installer to the point where just about everyone runs with Administrator privs by default, never knowing there was an alternative. The saddest part is the number of developers running with Admin privs, being ignorant of the security system because of this, and ultimately creating apps which need special tweaking in order to run non-admin.
Slashdot Mirror
... "and an open source companies biggest asset isn't their customers, it's their community"
That's a nice feel-important statement for all community members, but it's wrong. No customers = no company. I ain't saying the community has zero value, but if you were company and could keep only one of these two assets (customers or community), what would be the obvious choice?
Thank you for saying this - if I had mod points I'd use 'em.
Real sysadmins (you know, the ones with more than 20 users depending on them) don't just rip/slash/burn in-use software and system because the've got an ideological bee in their bonnet. They sit down and figure out the longterm effects on system stability and usability. They polish up their points into empirically provable or at least reasonable arguments, and they go visiting stakeholders, explaining why the short-term pain is offset by long-term increases in comfort.
I too am tired of the 'I run my games on a server OS' wannabes posing as actual working sysadmins.
So
OK, this is conspiracy theory ... and could never work.
... pretend to develop software in order to throw the FOSS community off the scent. Meanwhile, other teams on the same campus will ACTUALLY develop the same or similar software, which of course beats the pants off the stuff developed by the faux-coders.
Here you posit MS forming entire teams of people to
And no one will ever figure this out and blog it. Riiiight.
You can get Ubuntu support. http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid $250/desktop/year
Finally someone who gets it. An equipment rack is not a work of art, and more cableties/velcro/string are NOT automatically better on the plug side of the rack. Hey, go hogwild with your cableties on the punchdown side, guys. But some of us have actual WORK to do on the plug side!
On the plug side:
Use the right cable length; use vertical and horizontal rackmount wiremanagers. Tywrap is a timewaster. Bundles should be neat but a little loose. Strip out unused cables right away.
First you said we've had reparse points since day one of NTFS. Not true; those came with Windows 2000 (RTM December of '99). NTFS is older than that. Arggh, this is the sort of quibbling I promised not to do.
No, I didn't mention the newer TCP/IP stack; others did. I mentioned a few specific new features, like save-able profiles, who's point you seem to have missed.
Finish your sentence ... there is *nothing* new of value to you. Others will differ, as I've said. And yes, there are many things that make their debut in Vista. See the wikipedia article I mentioned. For those areas where Vista fleshes out pre-existing features, the fleshing-out and the increased manageability of those things are new value.
But I don't need to sell Vista to you. Only to make the point that it is NOT, as you earlier tried to suggest, simply an Aero-ized Solitaire upgrade.
I could quibble with your valuations of the things mentioned - but I won't. Perhaps you wouldn't immediately depend on the new security features of Vista - that doesn't mean others will choose your strategy. Maybe your org wishes to continue licensing Ghost - but maybe other orgs don't. And so on. Value is in the eye of the beholder!
While we actually haven't had *usable* symlinks 'since day 1 of NTFS', again, that's not the point. The point is, many potentially valuable features do exist in Vista. *You* may not see value in them, but that's your right. Still, blowing off the whole thing as simple a new Aero-ized Solitaire is way, way too simplistic.
So, perhaps you can name a SINGLE "useful new feature" that is worth $170k in new desktops across my enterprise. And when I say "useful", I mean it'll earn that $170k BACK somehow.
Here are several for ya.
There's more, of course. These are just a few of the things I see as big wins for the IT department that deploys Vista over existing XP/2000 systems. Yes, Vista really is more than just Aero Glass. Who would've thought it?
Wouldn't it make more sense for Microsoft to work to change the current totally broken patent system?
Yes. But until and unless there is actual change in the system, they have to play the game the way the rules are written.
That'd be the spirit of willingly tossing out all ability to think reasonably when it comes to anything a certain Redmond-based company does?
... is the one after the Cat Who Walks Through Walls. I always wanted to hear Mike's story of where he went after the FN hit Luna, and to see him finish growing up and achieve his potential. I suspect Varley would be a good pick for this. Of course it would still be a Varley novel, but that would be the icing on the cake!
Incorrect. Intuit documents the permissions needed. I will grant that Intuit should be setting these permissions properly during the install process, and it is a pain to make the changes. But it's not that hard to do. And, Intuit's bumble shouldn't be considered an MS issue.
NTFS ACLs actually provide a very robust permissioning system. Too bad the Windows installer creates users as Administrators by default, and fails to tell the user this is being done. That's the root of this issue, not 'flawed access rights and permissions' as you suggest.
Riiight. Because no other OS has ever patched a flaw.
If you wanna argue points like this, try to stay current. Using past/patched flaws is just a waste of time. Unless FUD is your goal.
1: MS doesn't provide it, but if you want to read/write ext2/3 from any NT-based Windows, http://fs-driver.org/
2: Yes, MS does provide support for mounting NFS. It's called Services for Unix, check it out sometime..
So then google should charge for returning search results? ... if they want to, yes. The point is that the content owner sets the selling price. Those who don't pay that price, shouldn't get the content.
So. I can write a book and give it away. Or I can set the price at $10,000 per copy. My content: my choice. At $10k/copy, I can be reasonably sure no one will buy my book. So, I might wanna come down a little.
Quick! Nine innocent citizens and one heinous (but unidentified) criminal are standing in a group. You have a license to shoot the criminal. Ready, aim ... fire!
Oh, wait. Which one is the criminal?
The first step to stopping malware is to identify it.
So. Forgetting the bundling of Windows Media Player for now, what 'abuses' does the EU charge MS with? Basically it boils down to having refused to give Sun enough information to re-create an Active Directory Domain Controller (as well as file/print services completely interoperable with, and basically indistiguishable from, those MS offers) on their own.
The basic theory of the decision, then, is that by refusing Sun the ability to clone MS's AD/file/print services, MS was blocking Sun from the market for a centralized directory of accounts and file/print services.
The decision states that "it was necessary to show that supply [of MS's interface specs in this case] is indispensable to carry on business in the market, which means that there is no realistic actual or potential substitute to it." (paragraph 585, pg 158) I don't have much difficulty thinking of actual or potential substitutes to MS's AD/file/print services - do you?
Heck, two paragraphs later, the EU decision notes that UNIX & Novell entered the workgroup server market before MS did! Following this paragraph, the EU then summarizes a lot of market research which essentially states that "actual and potential substitutes" to MS's AD & file/print services do exist ... they just do not have much market traction at present. But they could gain that traction, if they played their cards right. As shown by the way MS managed to edge Novell out of its dominant NOS position a few years back.
Personally, I wish MS would just go ahead and publish all the info Sun originally asked for (Sun's original request is what metastized into the the EU proceedings), and a whole lot more besides. Where we differ is that I don't think anyone has the right to force MS to give up this data, and especially not for the mere purpose of allowing MS's competitors a free ride on the technology MS spent years of hard work developing.
But, given your clear lucid thinking and refusal to be sidetracked by the usual /. Jedi mind tricks of arguing tangential issues, I'm guessing you may have a throbbing headache now ...
And that's the trouble. Government shouldn't be forcing business to give away its IP.
Now if EU had said: We will not buy any product that has closed file formats & protocols ... and we encourage our citizens to do the same! ... well, then I would have been completely in agreement.
That thing that did not work when the user tried it? User's mind wasn't really on the task at hand. Instead of paying attention to the controls or dialogs presented to him, he was really thinking of other things. Then it didn't work, and he called in the geek, who said 'show me how you made the problem occur'.
Now the user's mind is on the task at hand, and some little part of him doesn't want to look stupid in front of the geek. So he's seeing cues he missed before, and responding appropriately. The problem doesn't recur, and both the geek and the user come away thinking the geek has The Aura Which Makes Machines Work Properly.
Second: It's pretty difficult nowadays to get a mail attachment to run just by clicking it in Windows. You have to actively turn off included safeties to make that happen. If you did that, running nonadmin would protect you from the majority of damage the malware could do.
Third: your idea that "Windows is unusable if you don't" [run as admin], is incorrect. Millions of people run Windows nonadmin every day, without problems and, once they get a few new habits in place, without hassle.
Fourth: "That's just because MS never explained security to them, and just told them it was "easy". I agree, 100% ... and at least some folks at MS agree. One of them admitted it in the comments to my article linked above. Many more of them are working damn hard right now to eliminate this huge mistake from the next versions of Windows.
The security architecture and systems in NT-based versions of Windows have always been pretty good, actually. The shame is that MS drool-proofed the installer to the point where just about everyone runs with Administrator privs by default, never knowing there was an alternative. The saddest part is the number of developers running with Admin privs, being ignorant of the security system because of this, and ultimately creating apps which need special tweaking in order to run non-admin.