What I'd like to know if this is recent, I would expect that in a country with apparently low unemployment figures and therefore presumably a very competitive employment market for employers, would be one where everything favours the employee, you'd expect rising wages and benefits and good treatment from potential employers, not the opposite. I certainly wouldnt expect nor tolerate much of what you describe for any position, much less a low paying one. (As I said in my previous post, there are certain very specific circumstances where this kind of intrusion is justifiable, working at a local supermarket or in an unskilled position certainly do not qualify, working for a government agency or in a significant position of trust may alter that a little but not totally negate ones expectation of privacy. Not to mention that there should be legislation preventing abuses of this kind of thing.)
Its it fairly insane, I wouldn't expect, nor consent to a credit check for employment unless it was employment that involved working with very sensitive information (in which case it would presumably be carried out along side background checks and criminal record checks etc. and may be justifiable) and I trusted the potential employer, criminal record checks are fine but my credit history, good or bad is not their business.
As for health checks / access to medical information, I would under pretty much no circumstances allow it, it is none of an employers business, if they have a specific requirement for a specific job (a job that requires a certain level of fitness for example, not simply to figure out if I had 1 or 10 sick days in the last 5 years)then fair enough, they can ask and give reasoning, but a license to access things they don't need would not be forthcoming.
I should point out that I am not in the US, and cant think of a single time that either was requested - outside of government work, but then I have fairly decent references...
Not to mention your insurance provider, employer, girlfriend.... centralised and easily accessible medical records are clearly a good idea, but they could create some interesting problems too...
The disks for your wii can happily be used to provide updates as they are known to be going into a wii, a DVD may be used with any one of a thousand possible devices (including PC's) all with different firmware. SO whilst a good idea in principal it doesn't seem possible unless there is a huge amount of standardisation where DVD player firmware is involved.
Personally if my DVD player, CD player, whatever player didn't work when I put the right kind of disk into it then I'd take it back to the shop and ask for my money back (not an update), I can handle issues in software and work around them, I expect an appliance to simply work, that's what the premium in terms of price is for.
As an aside it makes me laugh when people complain that to 'fix' a Linux issue is usually more difficult as it involves editing text files, whereas repairing windows issues more often than not either involves editing the registry, manually replacing various system files or re-installing.
But most of your other points are valid, that's why I talk about an experienced individual setting stuff up, much like you would want with windows to get things right, its all about experience not inherent deficiency.
Anyone who thinks KDE is ready for their mom or your average office worker is clearly kidding themselves and I invite them to conduct their own study. The biggest benefit and possibly also the biggest issue that any given Linux distro has is that it is massively configurable, as such a default KDE installation may look a bit blocky and may not be the most intuitive thing to use it is certainly easy to get it looking and working in a far superior way to the normal windows desktop for almost any class of user. The issue here as always is that people are *used* to windows, the various distros could I suppose mimic XP 10% and be done with it, but I don't think that's a good idea (the XP desktop may be familiar but its hardly the best solution). KDE in particular can do everything XP can do and more (as related to the UI), configuration is easy, it is considerably less resource intensive and potentially much prettier.
Just like when you go and set up XP for a non technical person you install a firewall, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spyware and all those programs that they actually need and mess with the various settings to make it nice and simple to use, well you need to do that with Linux as well, after you have installed whatever distro you have chosen (I always go for Debian as it is stable and only takes about 20 minutes to install - no massive updates required.. and what does the distro matter if the user is non technical.) set it up porperly, get that desktop looking welcoming, spend half an hour installing all the various office/graphical/audio applications etc... then purge the kmenu for unneeded cruft and make sure everything works, it will take less time than XP and the end result will be significantly better.
(Obviously for office machines use this as the basis for your skeleton home directory and document what you did!!)
I think integration is the key, (and with open standards and documented api's etc.. wouldn't be a problem) you may wish to embed a slide into a text document (or data add a data source or graph etc.. without doing it statically (i.e. the contents of the text document reflecting changes in the slide etc.. Email doesn't come into it, and whilst I agree that adding an email client could be justified, well, so could adding pretty much anything from project management, IM, web browser through to.. well anything. I tend to believe that an office suite should contain the 'productivity' tools whilst a PIM should do all the communicating, address storage and time management, sure make it possible to hook the two together but also make it possible to divorce the two.
If your private server hosts the Federal Ministry of Justice website and is holding data beyond legal retention limits then yeah you may have an issue. Personally the servers I have sat in Germany will continue to use IP addresses where necessary and for everything else I will continue to use anonymised data, (i.e. for trend analysis) that way I shouldn't breach either German, UK or EU privacy laws.
* the reason for this comment is that I actually read it as such initially and thought that not speaking about something may not be the best way of advocating anything, as for "Wir speichern nicht" wouldn't the closest translation be we don't store? Although without specifying what.. - By the way did I miss a joke?
The fact that there is no need for an email application I can agree with you on but since this is an office suite, not a word processor, an application to deal with presentations is a must for any corporate user (it justifies the projector and whiteboard in the boardroom, and also the meetings themselves, plus people love it (in all seriousness (some)situations do benefit from this kind of presentation)).
Sorry about the parenthesis not sure what happened, I haven't touched LISP in a while...
I guess the issue at hand is that MS may well have a brilliant threat modelling process, it could be the best in the world for all I know, but it should feed back into all the areas it impacts upon (not saying it doesn't, just addressing your post.). It is not sufficient to have one or even a few great security procedures and practices if you are unable or unwilling to apply them consistently, or if they fail to address any given known or predictable issue. It comes back to the fact that 'security is everyone's responsibility' if one person or group drops the ball due to other pressures (or any reasons at all) then all the other work done relating to security is significantly diminished, if not totally invalidated.
As for the Microsoft is Bad, Linux is good question, it depends on what you are testing for, and most importantly what 'good' and bad' are relative to.
10 years ago everyone thought all 'bacteria' were dangerous to one degree or another, about 5 years we found out that are 'good' bacteria, that they taste fruity and live in drinks and yoghurt's, so now we stay healthy by drinking 'good' bacteria.
2 Years ago everyone thought E. coli was dangerous under certain circumstances, luckily now we all know that there is 'good' E. coli and 'bad' E. coli, so we can avoid the 'bad' E. coli and not have to worry!.
Of course now that everything people don't understand has to be labelled 'good' or 'bad' for simplicity's sake, so anything that has negative effects under some (any/unlikely) circumstances, regardless of any other benefits is bad, hence (over a given period); radiation is bad, DDT is bad, vaccinations are bad, chocolate is bad, beer is bad, foreigners are bad, socialism is bad etc.. etc.. If something cannot be labelled good or bad then its far too confusing to be dealt with and can safely be ignored.
Its strange that 10 years ago I went out and bought a Psion/Viacom FAx modem that let me hook up my then ultra modern Ericsson T10 to my laptop, I spent a good year using that card with a couple of 0800 internet providers (Orange were not charging for 0800 numbers at the time if I remember) giving me practically free mobile internet access, then it all changed, for data you were charged extra (quite a significant amount) and 0800 numbers ceased to be free. There is nothing like a step backwards to put things into perspective.
OT in the same vein, has anyone noticed that in the UK, since they introduced competition for directory enquiries (replacing 192 with 118XXX services) those services have deteriorated and are much more expensive than the original? Not to mention all the free offerings have disappeared! - dial 0800600900 (talking pages) for a really good laugh, its a free number that used to offer a directory service, now it includes a message saying it has been bought / moved and you can dial 118XXX for the improved service.... at 49p per connection and 13p per minute.
Its interesting to see just how badly this is being handled though.
Your initial paragraph about restoring any device going for a warranty repair to its "factory defaults" is sound advice, and will prevent all sorts of problems, if carrying out a reset is possible of course. I had two experiences with this with two separate vendors;
First off, a few years ago I had a laptop develop red vertical lines on screen, these were visible on boot and I assumed were caused by a problem either with the video card or with the screen itself, (I've seen it a few times when there are cracks in the ribbons connecting the screen to the graphics card). I took the machine back to the shop where I bought it (this was within 10 days of purchase) and was told they could not do anything about it as the laptop had been 'modified' i.e. it was no longer running Windows, well that was annoying but simple to solve, the next day when I took the laptop back again, it was running windows and a new laptop was handed over.
The second incident was a little different, I modified the firmware on my IPAQ, I basically changed the bootloader from whatever the HP one is to LAB (Linux As Bootloader) so that I could run Familiar Linux on it, unfortunately about three months after purchasing the IPAQ it stopped booting at all, (there is a stage one bootloader before LAB that you should see regardless), I also couldn't restore the firmware that I had backed up, the IPAQ was simply unresponsive, so I spoke to HP and was told to send it to them, which I did. I received an email stating that the problem was with the device and that they would send a new one out to me, there was no reference to the non-standard firmware, nor any indication that there would be any warranty issues, then sure enough a few days later a nice new IPAQ arrived, and to my surprise it came not with the standard HP bootloader and Windows Mobile, but with my nice LAB bootloader all ready and waiting. Now I don't know if I should thank someone specific at HP for that, or if they simply transfer everything from the broken device to the new one as a matter of course, but either way, it was a pleasant experience.
So would I go and buy another laptop from the first guys I dealt with? No I wouldn't, there is enough competition out there and frankly the custoemr service experience was generally poor, would I buy another IPAQ? Yes I would, in fact I would prefer to buy an IPAQ than any other PDA and that is largely due to the fact that when I hit a problem it was solved, quickly and sensibly.
No offence, but would you like to check who you are responding to?
Just because you know *some* people who "make a living being ill" doesn't mean that everyone does, the person referenced by the parent poster may well fit into this category, but claiming that *everyone* who is ill is somehow untrustworthy is, as I said, pretty stupid.
People generally don't care too much about sharing with other OSes
Monoculture's are bad - you just pointed out part of the catch 22 that stops us getting away from 95% market dominance by Microsoft, even if you prefer windows and would stick to MS products, you would benefit by the fact that there would be real competition in the OS sector, affecting prices and with luck spurring innovation, lock ins prevent you from benefiting from competition because, well you are a captive audience.
Hell, I'll better pay for a closed source solution in that case. That's only true of your propriety software does what the open source software could potentially do.
The whole kernel hacking grandma is a misnomer when it comes to company's, even small ones, mainly because they either have access to technical experience, or they aren't getting even close to the most out of their IT systems (FOSS or Proprietary).
You have small organisations that tend to use stuff "out of the box", which basically means they don't. nor have the expertise to, use the more useful features within the software they already own. Things like Windows Update Server, Remote Installation Services, Active Directory, Print Servers, IIS, it all gets ignored, at best you might have a file server and a load of desktops. So in that instance they would benefit from some IT expertise regardless of whether they are using FOSS or not *and* if they need to grab someone with IT experience anyway then they could replace windows with an open OS and see many benefits, without modifying a single piece of code.
These small organisations wouldn't even consider looking at bespoke proprietary software, and the normal COTS products wont be perfect for them, so its not like they lose anything moving to OSS, and they can gain rather a huge amount, not to mention the fact that many small (as in cheap enough for SME's) software packages from less well known vendors are not exactly very good to begin with, all those crappy PHP CMS's et al you see in the OSS world also exist in proprietary land, except there you need to pay for them, and you cant fix them yourself.
So how do you get the benefits of a working complete, comprehensive secure and stable system, whilst still having a large amount of choice *and* the ability to get modifications made if you wish (and at a more reasonable price than having something custom made/faster than having a vendor provide a patch)? Easy use OSS software. It gives choice, doesn't stop you using proprietary software where it is best, doesn't lock you in and best of all doesn't inhibit growth due to licensing costs, and scalability issues.
If you do switch, don't do it everywhere at once if you don't want to (don't do some bits at all if you prefer), a gradual transition is possible, and probably easier. That leaves you with a choice. Oh and get someone to do it for you or with you, (that goes for an OSS or a MS based system, IT systems can make such a huge difference to a company that it is worthwhile contacting your local IT people, or even better a local college and trying to get someone to help you out. Any small business that goes down the 100% MS route will find itself without any *viable* options at all a short way down the road.
Having said all the above I should point out that I would find it extremely difficult to put myself into a non IT literate company owners shoes and figure out what I would see as best, I would guess choice stability, reliability, scalability, security etc.. would be good, but sometimes you just want to be able to point out you spent X thousands on a new IT system over lunch, and make your friends jealous.
That comment is pretty much insane. What has the fact that someone is ill have to do with the accuracy of any information they provide? All this takes is a bit of common sense, if someone goes to the doctor and claims they have terrible backache should that information be ignored as they are ill? Of course if you disregard the information they provide on the grounds that they are ill then they are clearly not ill, so what then?
I can see potential issues with patients not having sufficient experience or understanding to completely accurately describe symptoms, but then a doctor can work through that, I can see that a person with mental health issues could offer inaccurate, false or contradictory information, I understand there could be issues with people claiming undetectable illness regularly, as a possible indication of hypochondria (or a sign of illness of course) or someone claiming they are ill to evade some objectionable activity (like a test, work, or similar), but in all these cases a doctor can us common sense and good judgement to decide his course of action. Simply suggesting that ill people are incapable of providing a doctor with information about their illness or symptoms (especially if it is a medical history or a list of drug treatments) is rather insensible, if not downright stupid.
The unknown are literally unknown, but since when is operating system detection reliable, I seem to spend half my time masquerading as IE on XP, and I don't suppose I am unique, I might have to look at a longer period and get a better picture of what is going on, but then I'm not using the stats other than to determine when I can get rid of IE4-IE5.5 hacks, Im just happy when people are looking at the site.
Interesting, here are the stats for this week for a uk corporate site, that is geared toward IT (hence Linux having a higher percentage that you would probably expect), obviously the usual scepticism toward OS detection applies. Oh and for interest the Mac's are split 50/50 PPC/Intel, and I hope whoever is using 2003 Server to browse the web is doing it from a desktop that happens to run a server OS rather than an admin somewhere on a production box.
Anyway, given those stats Vista use is marginally higher than Mac, and BSD usage is equal to the usage of WinME in this instance, for this period, and for this site.
1. Windows 352 73.03%
1. XP 295 83.81%
2. 2000 24 6.82%
3. Vista 17 4.83%
4. Server 2003 8 2.27%
5. 98 7 1.99%
6. ME 1 0.28% wow 2. Linux 111 23.03% 3. Macintosh 14 2.90% 4. Unknown 2 0.41% 5. SunOS 2 0.41% 6. FreeBSD 1 0.21%
Slashdot Mirror
What I'd like to know if this is recent, I would expect that in a country with apparently low unemployment figures and therefore presumably a very competitive employment market for employers, would be one where everything favours the employee, you'd expect rising wages and benefits and good treatment from potential employers, not the opposite. I certainly wouldnt expect nor tolerate much of what you describe for any position, much less a low paying one. (As I said in my previous post, there are certain very specific circumstances where this kind of intrusion is justifiable, working at a local supermarket or in an unskilled position certainly do not qualify, working for a government agency or in a significant position of trust may alter that a little but not totally negate ones expectation of privacy. Not to mention that there should be legislation preventing abuses of this kind of thing.)
Its it fairly insane, I wouldn't expect, nor consent to a credit check for employment unless it was employment that involved working with very sensitive information (in which case it would presumably be carried out along side background checks and criminal record checks etc. and may be justifiable) and I trusted the potential employer, criminal record checks are fine but my credit history, good or bad is not their business.
As for health checks / access to medical information, I would under pretty much no circumstances allow it, it is none of an employers business, if they have a specific requirement for a specific job (a job that requires a certain level of fitness for example, not simply to figure out if I had 1 or 10 sick days in the last 5 years)then fair enough, they can ask and give reasoning, but a license to access things they don't need would not be forthcoming.
I should point out that I am not in the US, and cant think of a single time that either was requested - outside of government work, but then I have fairly decent references...
Not to mention your insurance provider, employer, girlfriend.... centralised and easily accessible medical records are clearly a good idea, but they could create some interesting problems too...
The disks for your wii can happily be used to provide updates as they are known to be going into a wii, a DVD may be used with any one of a thousand possible devices (including PC's) all with different firmware. SO whilst a good idea in principal it doesn't seem possible unless there is a huge amount of standardisation where DVD player firmware is involved.
Personally if my DVD player, CD player, whatever player didn't work when I put the right kind of disk into it then I'd take it back to the shop and ask for my money back (not an update), I can handle issues in software and work around them, I expect an appliance to simply work, that's what the premium in terms of price is for.
As an aside it makes me laugh when people complain that to 'fix' a Linux issue is usually more difficult as it involves editing text files, whereas repairing windows issues more often than not either involves editing the registry, manually replacing various system files or re-installing.
But most of your other points are valid, that's why I talk about an experienced individual setting stuff up, much like you would want with windows to get things right, its all about experience not inherent deficiency.
The issue here as always is that people are *used* to windows, the various distros could I suppose mimic XP 10% and be done with it, but I don't think that's a good idea (the XP desktop may be familiar but its hardly the best solution). KDE in particular can do everything XP can do and more (as related to the UI), configuration is easy, it is considerably less resource intensive and potentially much prettier.
Just like when you go and set up XP for a non technical person you install a firewall, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spyware and all those programs that they actually need and mess with the various settings to make it nice and simple to use, well you need to do that with Linux as well, after you have installed whatever distro you have chosen (I always go for Debian as it is stable and only takes about 20 minutes to install - no massive updates required.. and what does the distro matter if the user is non technical.) set it up porperly, get that desktop looking welcoming, spend half an hour installing all the various office/graphical/audio applications etc... then purge the kmenu for unneeded cruft and make sure everything works, it will take less time than XP and the end result will be significantly better.
(Obviously for office machines use this as the basis for your skeleton home directory and document what you did!!)
Ground control to Major Tom:
Your circuit's dead,
there's something wrong.
Can you hear me Major Tom....?
I think integration is the key, (and with open standards and documented api's etc.. wouldn't be a problem) you may wish to embed a slide into a text document (or data add a data source or graph etc.. without doing it statically (i.e. the contents of the text document reflecting changes in the slide etc.. Email doesn't come into it, and whilst I agree that adding an email client could be justified, well, so could adding pretty much anything from project management, IM, web browser through to.. well anything. I tend to believe that an office suite should contain the 'productivity' tools whilst a PIM should do all the communicating, address storage and time management, sure make it possible to hook the two together but also make it possible to divorce the two.
If your private server hosts the Federal Ministry of Justice website and is holding data beyond legal retention limits then yeah you may have an issue. Personally the servers I have sat in Germany will continue to use IP addresses where necessary and for everything else I will continue to use anonymised data, (i.e. for trend analysis) that way I shouldn't breach either German, UK or EU privacy laws.
That would be "Wir sprechen nicht"....
* the reason for this comment is that I actually read it as such initially
and thought that not speaking about something may not be the best way of
advocating anything, as for "Wir speichern nicht" wouldn't the closest
translation be we don't store? Although without specifying what.. - By the way did I
miss a joke?
The fact that there is no need for an email application I can agree with you on but since this is an office suite, not a word processor, an application to deal with presentations is a must for any corporate user (it justifies the projector and whiteboard in the boardroom, and also the meetings themselves, plus people love it (in all seriousness (some)situations do benefit from this kind of presentation)).
Sorry about the parenthesis not sure what happened, I haven't touched LISP in a while...
Since its not being recycled but reused wouldn't that mean that there is no recycling fee? Savings all round.
Not sure why you are modded as 'Troll' but hey.
I guess the issue at hand is that MS may well have a brilliant threat modelling process, it could be the best in the world for all I know, but it should feed back into all the areas it impacts upon (not saying it doesn't, just addressing your post.). It is not sufficient to have one or even a few great security procedures and practices if you are unable or unwilling to apply them consistently, or if they fail to address any given known or predictable issue. It comes back to the fact that 'security is everyone's responsibility' if one person or group drops the ball due to other pressures (or any reasons at all) then all the other work done relating to security is significantly diminished, if not totally invalidated.
As for the Microsoft is Bad, Linux is good question, it depends on what you are testing for, and most importantly what 'good' and bad' are relative to.
Its all about incremental improvements,
10 years ago everyone thought all 'bacteria' were dangerous to one degree or another, about 5 years we found out that are 'good' bacteria, that they taste fruity and live in drinks and yoghurt's, so now we stay healthy by drinking 'good' bacteria.
2 Years ago everyone thought E. coli was dangerous under certain circumstances, luckily now we all know that there is 'good' E. coli and 'bad' E. coli, so we can avoid the 'bad' E. coli and not have to worry!.
Of course now that everything people don't understand has to be labelled 'good' or 'bad' for simplicity's sake, so anything that has negative effects under some (any/unlikely) circumstances, regardless of any other benefits is bad, hence (over a given period); radiation is bad, DDT is bad, vaccinations are bad, chocolate is bad, beer is bad, foreigners are bad, socialism is bad etc.. etc.. If something cannot be labelled good or bad then its far too confusing to be dealt with and can safely be ignored.
You are in marketing aren't you?
(I'm sold anyway)
Its strange that 10 years ago I went out and bought a Psion/Viacom FAx modem that let me hook up my then ultra modern Ericsson T10 to my laptop, I spent a good year using that card with a couple of 0800 internet providers (Orange were not charging for 0800 numbers at the time if I remember) giving me practically free mobile internet access, then it all changed, for data you were charged extra (quite a significant amount) and 0800 numbers ceased to be free. There is nothing like a step backwards to put things into perspective.
OT in the same vein, has anyone noticed that in the UK, since they introduced competition for directory enquiries (replacing 192 with 118XXX services) those services have deteriorated and are much more expensive than the original? Not to mention all the free offerings have disappeared! - dial 0800600900 (talking pages) for a really good laugh, its a free number that used to offer a directory service, now it includes a message saying it has been bought / moved and you can dial 118XXX for the improved service.... at 49p per connection and 13p per minute.
Its interesting to see just how badly this is being handled though.
Your initial paragraph about restoring any device going for a warranty repair to its "factory defaults" is sound advice, and will prevent all sorts of problems, if carrying out a reset is possible of course. I had two experiences with this with two separate vendors;
First off, a few years ago I had a laptop develop red vertical lines on screen, these were visible on boot and I assumed were caused by a problem either with the video card or with the screen itself, (I've seen it a few times when there are cracks in the ribbons connecting the screen to the graphics card). I took the machine back to the shop where I bought it (this was within 10 days of purchase) and was told they could not do anything about it as the laptop had been 'modified' i.e. it was no longer running Windows, well that was annoying but simple to solve, the next day when I took the laptop back again, it was running windows and a new laptop was handed over.
The second incident was a little different, I modified the firmware on my IPAQ, I basically changed the bootloader from whatever the HP one is to LAB (Linux As Bootloader) so that I could run Familiar Linux on it, unfortunately about three months after purchasing the IPAQ it stopped booting at all, (there is a stage one bootloader before LAB that you should see regardless), I also couldn't restore the firmware that I had backed up, the IPAQ was simply unresponsive, so I spoke to HP and was told to send it to them, which I did. I received an email stating that the problem was with the device and that they would send a new one out to me, there was no reference to the non-standard firmware, nor any indication that there would be any warranty issues, then sure enough a few days later a nice new IPAQ arrived, and to my surprise it came not with the standard HP bootloader and Windows Mobile, but with my nice LAB bootloader all ready and waiting. Now I don't know if I should thank someone specific at HP for that, or if they simply transfer everything from the broken device to the new one as a matter of course, but either way, it was a pleasant experience.
So would I go and buy another laptop from the first guys I dealt with? No I wouldn't, there is enough competition out there and frankly the custoemr service experience was generally poor, would I buy another IPAQ? Yes I would, in fact I would prefer to buy an IPAQ than any other PDA and that is largely due to the fact that when I hit a problem it was solved, quickly and sensibly.
No offence, but would you like to check who you are responding to?
Just because you know *some* people who "make a living being ill" doesn't mean that everyone does, the person referenced by the parent poster may well fit into this category, but claiming that *everyone* who is ill is somehow untrustworthy is, as I said, pretty stupid.
People generally don't care too much about sharing with other OSes
Monoculture's are bad - you just pointed out part of the catch 22 that stops us getting away from 95% market dominance by Microsoft, even if you prefer windows and would stick to MS products, you would benefit by the fact that there would be real competition in the OS sector, affecting prices and with luck spurring innovation, lock ins prevent you from benefiting from competition because, well you are a captive audience.
(don't sue)
The whole kernel hacking grandma is a misnomer when it comes to company's, even small ones, mainly because they either have access to technical experience, or they aren't getting even close to the most out of their IT systems (FOSS or Proprietary).
You have small organisations that tend to use stuff "out of the box", which basically means they don't. nor have the expertise to, use the more useful features within the software they already own. Things like Windows Update Server, Remote Installation Services, Active Directory, Print Servers, IIS, it all gets ignored, at best you might have a file server and a load of desktops. So in that instance they would benefit from some IT expertise regardless of whether they are using FOSS or not *and* if they need to grab someone with IT experience anyway then they could replace windows with an open OS and see many benefits, without modifying a single piece of code.
These small organisations wouldn't even consider looking at bespoke proprietary software, and the normal COTS products wont be perfect for them, so its not like they lose anything moving to OSS, and they can gain rather a huge amount, not to mention the fact that many small (as in cheap enough for SME's) software packages from less well known vendors are not exactly very good to begin with, all those crappy PHP CMS's et al you see in the OSS world also exist in proprietary land, except there you need to pay for them, and you cant fix them yourself.
So how do you get the benefits of a working complete, comprehensive secure and stable system, whilst still having a large amount of choice *and* the ability to get modifications made if you wish (and at a more reasonable price than having something custom made/faster than having a vendor provide a patch)? Easy use OSS software. It gives choice, doesn't stop you using proprietary software where it is best, doesn't lock you in and best of all doesn't inhibit growth due to licensing costs, and scalability issues.
If you do switch, don't do it everywhere at once if you don't want to (don't do some bits at all if you prefer), a gradual transition is possible, and probably easier. That leaves you with a choice. Oh and get someone to do it for you or with you, (that goes for an OSS or a MS based system, IT systems can make such a huge difference to a company that it is worthwhile contacting your local IT people, or even better a local college and trying to get someone to help you out. Any small business that goes down the 100% MS route will find itself without any *viable* options at all a short way down the road.
Having said all the above I should point out that I would find it extremely difficult to put myself into a non IT literate company owners shoes and figure out what I would see as best, I would guess choice stability, reliability, scalability, security etc.. would be good, but sometimes you just want to be able to point out you spent X thousands on a new IT system over lunch, and make your friends jealous.
That comment is pretty much insane. What has the fact that someone is ill have to do with the accuracy of any information they provide? All this takes is a bit of common sense, if someone goes to the doctor and claims they have terrible backache should that information be ignored as they are ill? Of course if you disregard the information they provide on the grounds that they are ill then they are clearly not ill, so what then?
I can see potential issues with patients not having sufficient experience or understanding to completely accurately describe symptoms, but then a doctor can work through that, I can see that a person with mental health issues could offer inaccurate, false or contradictory information, I understand there could be issues with people claiming undetectable illness regularly, as a possible indication of hypochondria (or a sign of illness of course) or someone claiming they are ill to evade some objectionable activity (like a test, work, or similar), but in all these cases a doctor can us common sense and good judgement to decide his course of action. Simply suggesting that ill people are incapable of providing a doctor with information about their illness or symptoms (especially if it is a medical history or a list of drug treatments) is rather insensible, if not downright stupid.
The unknown are literally unknown, but since when is operating system detection reliable, I seem to spend half my time masquerading as IE on XP, and I don't suppose I am unique, I might have to look at a longer period and get a better picture of what is going on, but then I'm not using the stats other than to determine when I can get rid of IE4-IE5.5 hacks, Im just happy when people are looking at the site.
Interesting, here are the stats for this week for a uk corporate site, that is geared toward IT (hence Linux having a higher percentage that you would probably expect), obviously the usual scepticism toward OS detection applies. Oh and for interest the Mac's are split 50/50 PPC/Intel, and I hope whoever is using 2003 Server to browse the web is doing it from a desktop that happens to run a server OS rather than an admin somewhere on a production box.
Anyway, given those stats Vista use is marginally higher than Mac, and BSD usage is equal to the usage of WinME in this instance, for this period, and for this site.
1. Windows 352 73.03%
1. XP 295 83.81%
2. 2000 24 6.82%
3. Vista 17 4.83%
4. Server 2003 8 2.27%
5. 98 7 1.99%
6. ME 1 0.28% wow
2. Linux 111 23.03%
3. Macintosh 14 2.90%
4. Unknown 2 0.41%
5. SunOS 2 0.41%
6. FreeBSD 1 0.21%
Whilst reading your post I got the urge to launch xcalc, so I would have to say that Debian Stable *is* vulnerable.....