Oh, it's not the all caps that's difficult to parse - heck, that's the easy part. It's when you need to pass such wonderful keys as "\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{243368F5-67C9-3510- 9424-335A8A67772F}" and have to know what's really going on there. That said, the registry isn't all bad - it's kind of nice to be able to just do a quick CTRL-F and search for a particular value that I know needs to be changed everywhere (think server names when a new server comes on line, that kind of thing). I just wish it wasn't just marginally comprehensible.
Apple has done a decent job lately without touching the gamer crowd, though it could be argued that this is in part due to some gamers purchasing Apple hardware and running something like Boot Camp. That said, I don't see that being a very significant portion of the gamer market, especially since most gamers prefer to either make or mod their own systems.
If there's one thing that can be learned from Apple, though, it's that, for Linux to succeed, adoption has to be driven by the "early adopters", who then preach the benefits of the new product to the world. For Apple, that's primarily the creative professional crowd, which plays into their upscale, "hip" image. Linux, however, has no prayer right now of attracting that crowd, and that's okay - Linux isn't upscale. Instead, Linux can work the market from the bottom-up, which is precisely what it's starting to do - get college kids on it that don't want to deal with pirated Windows and don't have the money for a Mac, get engineers on it who just want something that works, and sell the Enterprise on it as a system with a much lower TCO than MS or Apple that works "well enough".
On a more personal note, I'm a Mac guy, but I don't have the money for a Mac right now. Since I want to save up for a Mac, I didn't want to spend money on Windows, so I grabbed an Ubuntu Breezy Badger disk from work. Since then, I upgraded to Dapper Drake (sticking to the LTS non-beta versions) and, at some point, will probably upgrade to Feisty Fawn. It works "well enough", which means that, though hardware support is a little painful, I've had to play far too many games with the ATI card on my machine, and doing basic multimedia tasks like playing an MP3 playlist or watching a DVD just "feels" more painful than it does on a Windows machine (I can't objectively describe it - sorry), it gets the job done for cheap. Thanks to my exposure to Ubuntu, I've started looking at the enterprise side of Linux to see if I can't find something that works "well enough" that can replace things like Exchange, Windows Server 2003, or even the work PBX (hello, Asterisk!). Thus far, I haven't found a lot that's as easy to use as any of those products, but they cost a lot less and get the job done.
Consequently, based on my own anecodotal experience, I'd say the gamer crowd isn't that critical for Linux - the games will come to Linux when everyone else comes to it.
I'll admit, I'm not too worried about Windows security these days, though it does disturb me a little when I walk into my bank and find it full of XP terminals.
So, where did the numbers come from? The original article makes it sound like Symantec got the numbers by counting the number of patches, but it's worse than that. According to the whitepaper, it's coming from volunteers (page 38):
Symantec operates one of the most popular forums for the disclosure and discussion of vulnerabilities on
the Internet, the BugTraq(TM) mailing list, which has approximately 50,000 direct subscribers who contribute,
receive, and discuss vulnerability research on a daily basis. Symantec also maintains one of the world's
most comprehensive vulnerability databases, currently consisting of over 20,000 vulnerabilities (spanning
more than a decade) affecting more than 45,000 technologies from over 7,000 vendors. The following
discussion of vulnerability trends is based on a thorough analysis of that data.
So, in short, Symantec chose the vulnerabilities based on what people in their mailing list told them. Later in the paper, it also discloses that they also got to pick the severity:
Symantec classified four percent of all vulnerabilities disclosed during this period as high severity,
69 percent were medium severity, and 27 percent were low severity.
So, what did they find, using self-generated vulnerability counts and self-generated severity levels? That's right - the one operating system that actually uses Symantec products is, of course, the one with the fewest vulnerabilities and shortest patch times.
Following the "number of patches = number of vulnerabilities" school of thought, though, does lead me to conclude that my Ubuntu box must be highly insecure and buggy - it keeps trying to update some random package or other almost daily!
I don't know why I feel compelled to step into this, but I will.
First, some background:
I have a Mac, though, for various reasons, it's been semi-retired. I've used both MS Office (v.X, I believe - not the current one, but the first one for OS X) and NeoOffice. In fact, I did substantial coursework using OpenOffice for X11, then switched to NeoOffice when I learned about that. Here's what I can tell you based on this admittedly anecdotal experience:
1. OO.o, either in X11 form or NeoOffice form, was definitely slower on my computer than MS Office. Since I was running OS 10.3 on a G3/333 iMac with 160 MB of RAM, I noticed any speed differences very acutely. They were both slow but, on that computer, what wasn't? However, when you move elements around in PowerPoint and they barely hose your computer and, in contrast, you move them around in NeoOffice and you have to wait five minutes for your computer to finish paging before your mouse does what it's supposed to do, guess what product is going to get preferred?
2. Font support is better on NeoOffice than it is on OO.o. So is printer support. More importantly, so is clipboard support - I don't know if they fixed the X11 clipboard limitation in 10.4, but at least in 10.3 (unless there's some manual setting to change, which wouldn't surprise me) there was a 64kB size limitation to what you could put into the clipboard. This proves to be exceptionally obnoxious when you're copying and pasting flowcharts into a document. This is what motivated me to find NeoOffice in the first place. For this reason, and this reason alone, OO.o on X11 was a deal-breaker for me. Throw in lousy font support and sketchy printer support and it made it so much easier. This may have been fixed, though - I haven't checked on that side in a while.
3. NeoOffice just looks bad compared to MS Office. I'm sorry, but MS Office looks gorgeous, and, when you have a Mac, looks count. To MS's credit, they do a wonderful job of making that software look like it belongs on a Mac. OO.o has, thus far, done a wonderful job of making their software look like it belongs on a Linux workstation (not in a good way), no matter what platform it's on. That barely flies in the Windows world and doesn't fly at all on a Mac.
4. There were little idiosyncrasies with NeoOffice that just bugged me - hitting ENTER in Calc would go to the beginning of the next row, whereas Excel drops you down one element, layout of the menus, odd formatting issues with sections, etc. I seem to remember charts being pretty poor, too - I had an easier time getting AppleWorks 5 to generate the graphs I wanted than NeoOffice and, well, let's just say AppleWorks is not a "power tool" by any stretch of the imagination.
I do think OpenOffice and its derivatives have a place. I do think they can fill some needs for some Mac users. It filled a need for me - I needed an office suite to make some documentation in that was light on my wallet and I wanted something useful so I could finally ditch the pirated version of Office I had on my machine. However, for most Mac users, spending some money on something that looks good and works reasonably well is going to be preferred over something that's free (in any sense), looks bad, and runs worse. I mean, that's why we get Macs in the first place, right?
Of course, what do I run now? Ubuntu Dapper Drake with OpenOffice 2 on it... but it actually looks like it belongs there! That's probably because it does.
I had an employer ask me to do this for them as well. Since it was a Windows AD environment, I just set the internal DNS server to point myspace.com to 127.0.0.1 and set DHCP to hand out only the internal DNS server, which is what you want in an AD environment anyways. Obviously, it'd be fairly easy to circumvent (manually plug in an ISP's DNS server - problem solved), but it kind of ties into that "fence" idea mentioned in an earlier reply here, in that, for someone to figure out why Myspace wasn't working, they'd need to troubleshoot it, at which point they'd discover where Myspace was pointing and realize, "Hmm, someone probably intentionally did that."
I will point out that this was for a smallish company (25 people), not a school or anywhere else where the end-user can basically be assumed to be at least somewhat malicious. But, it does get the job done if you're in a hurry.
However, in principle, Venezuela is going through the same power-consolidation process as Russia and the US. Would now be a good time to point out which party won both houses of Congress in the last US election? Doesn't seem to be much power consolidating here. Also, they're not exactly 'representing the people' when the opposition doesn't show up for the election and they voluntarily hand their powers to Chavez. Besides, it's not like dictators periodically rig elections or anything.
"Classic Mode": A Windows sandbox for legacy apps (definitely Win9x apps, probably NT/2000/XP and some Vista). "Carbon": Apps based on shared Windows/Linux APIs - think Mono & WINE, only with M$ putting some real programming heft into the WINE project. Seeing as Novell is already a big supporter of Mono, this might not be far off. Microsoft would have a heck of a time getting Vista's APIs ported, but they do have the advantage of having all of the source code and insanely deep pockets. It also wouldn't need to support EVERY Vista API - many of them are for backwards compatibility. Just port enough for most important Vista applications (think DirectX 10 and the DRM schemes, for example) to work and whatever calls more obscure APIs can just run in "Classic Mode". "Cocoa": Apps strictly for Windows X or whatever they call it. This would be the set of APIs and the runtime environment that, in theory, would 'add value' to a Linux-based Windows, so that people don't just take WINE and SuSE and make their own Windows X.
I really don't see OpenOffice.org as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office - it's nowhere near pretty enough, formatting can be somewhat strange (I remember having to struggle with section breaks A LOT more than I would've liked when using it, though that might still be some repressed flashbacks of OOo 1.1, and I'm happy to hear that charting hasn't improved), and these days collaboration is THE big buzzword right now - OOo doesn't even come close in that department.
To be fair here, I really don't think OOo should try to face off against Microsoft Office - that's a pretty big gorilla to try and take down. I do think it is an excellent replacement for the Microsoft Works-level packages of the world, especially since it does everything those lighter packages do and then some for a better price point. I can easily see it gaining traction at home, since it does everything that Microsoft Office does "well enough" for people to do some productive work on their off hours in it, albeit not necessarily running an entire office off of it. The interface for OOo is also a lot closer to what people use at work than Microsoft Works, too, if you ignore the GTK theming.
I actually like OOo - it reminds me a lot of ClarisWorks, which was a wonderful suite I had on my Mac Classic WAY back in the day. I do have some issues with it, though - documentation is spotty (especially with Base), the UI is uglier than sin, and the way Base uses Writer docs for its forms almost forces you to take ugly to strange new places that you never want to go. I mean, Access apps aren't pretty - for Base to create even worse looking ones by default is just astounding, if not criminal.
There's also FreeNAS. The rub here, though, is that, at least when I last tried it, it's the only thing that should be installed on the box. On the other hand, if you have an old PC and a couple of hard drives, it'll let you make a software mirror between them and share files on it. I won't claim my experience with it is authoritative, but it was pretty easy to figure out.
Assuming you didn't try to set it up to do a domain, here are some quick tips... and I can't believe someone modded you insightful, either. Good heavens.
1. To share files on Windows Server 2003 in a workgroup environment, you have two choices. You can either create a login for each person that will access them on the server or you can set the NTFS permissions to "Everybody->Read" on your shares. Make sure that share permissions are "Everybody->Full Access" - this actually isn't a security hole since Windows Server 2003 grants the least permissions it can based on what you give it, which means it'll run off NTFS permissions instead, which are far more flexible. This will also give you one place to look for permissions issues, instead of trying to guess how NTFS and share permissions are working together that day.
2. You probably didn't set your IIS page to allow anonymous access. This is as easy as right-clicking on the web site in IIS, choosing "Properties", then going to "Directory Security", clicking the first "Edit" button at the top, and then checking the "Enable anonymous logon" box.
I'm not a big fan of Windows, but it's not THAT difficult. That's not to say you didn't do better by going with Samba and Apache, either.
We call that "blaming the victim" here - it's sort of like blaming your wife for pissing you off and *making* you hit her. I mean, if she'd simply put out, do the dishes, and not give you flak when you get home...
Besides, do you really want the culture that's blowing up everything to run things? I mean, unless you're a fan of removing just about every right from anybody with a pair of X chromosomes, killing anyone who writes anything that insults your "prophet", and views death not as something to be avoided but, instead, as something to be celebrated, with dozens of virgins and all that... seems to me predatory capitalism is better than THAT alternative, at least.
After reading this guy's article and a few of the side articles that it links to, I realize that the point he's trying to make is:
1. Apple made the Next Big Thing (Macintosh).
2. Apple sat on its lead and did nothing (OS 7, 8, 9; attempted to sue Microsoft, Copland, etc.)
3. Apple was saved by acquiring vision from a failing competitor (NeXT)
4. Profit!
Meanwhile...
1. Microsoft made the Next Big Thing (a Macintosh-like interface that worked on computers people could actually afford - Windows 95)
2. Microsoft is sitting on its lead and is doing nothing (Windows Me, Vista, odd security glitches, etc.)
3. ???
He claims that Microsoft is sitting square at #2, trying to live off vaporware and bloat. Since Microsoft isn't going to get away on its own, now what? But, what company is out there that Microsoft could purchase that could give Microsoft everything it needs (an OS that runs on commodity hardware) without all of the baggage, is failing enough where Microsoft could get away with buying it, and which supports other parts of Microsoft's stack (Mono, OpenExchange)?
That's right - Novell.
After reading the articles and looking at the market, I sincerely think that Microsoft is getting ready to groom Novell and the market for a NeXT-like sweep of the market, replacing NT with Linux, replacing VB with Mono, replacing Exchange with OpenExchange, and maybe even propping WINE up to kill some time, sort of like Mac and its Classic environment.
Targeting the home market is not where Linux needs to go - that's why all those whistles are there to begin with. Apple tried to focus on the home market, ignoring the enterprise market. What happened? Everyone decided Mac was great, wonderful to look at, but... it wasn't what they used at work. The rest is history.
Linux has many of the same problems, but from a different angle, that Apple had (and still largely has). Linux is used at work by people like us, which is why people like us use it. However, the average person uses Windows at work. So, what are most people going to use when they get home? That's right - Windows. Why? Because it's what they're used to. Could they use Linux or Mac? Sure - Microsoft has had a version of Office for Mac since the '80s. Linux has OpenOffice, KOffice, and even Microsoft Office will sometimes work under WINE. But, it's not what people are used to, so most people don't use it.
Where I work, we've been debating whether or not we should start actively pushing and supporting Linux. The problem that we've found is that most of the applications that our customers use are Windows applications. Need an accounting package for small business, like Timberline, ACCPAC (*shudder*), MasterBuilder, or anything beefier than Quicken? Good luck finding it on Linux - I know GNU's working on an open-source one, but, as I understand it, it's got a long way to go. Thing is, the accountants are the ones writing the checks, so if you tell them, "Well, we're going to run XP on you and Linux on everyone else," they're going to say, "No, we'll pay for XP everywhere, thanks," and that'll be the end of that. I know this - I've seen it in action.
In short, if you want people to use Linux, Mac, BSD, Solaris, Amiga, OS/2, or whatever at home, they need to be able to do all of their work on it, and the first people that need to be able to do work on it needs to be the beancounters. Once that happens, the rest will fall into place.
I hear people claim that illegal immigration holds down the wages of the American worker, but, with offshoring and outsourcing, is that really true? How do we know that, if a company couldn't hire an illegal immigrant for $5.15/hour, that the company would just hire a legal American for $10/hour instead of just building the plant in Mexico and hiring them for $2.50/hour? Maybe the illegal immigrants are making it possible for there to be some of these jobs in the US in the first place.
Superpower wars aren't about military force anymore(if they ever were). It's about economic force.
This is true, and, in fact, is where China is even further behind.
China's GDP was $7.2 trillion in 2001, compared to the USA, which clocked in at $11.75 trillion in 2001. Plus, thanks to China's 'free' government and its 'honesty and trustworthiness', there's no guarantee China's numbers are even that high, nor that they've been growing that fast.
Assuming these numbers, which are supposed to be newer, are correct, the USA single-handedly beats out the European Union and is a solid $3.5 trillion ahead of China. Considering how the USA has about 2/3 the population of the EU and less than 1/4 of China's population, that's pretty impressive.
Sorry, but China's growth rate is a prime example of the catch-up effect. In short, China's growth rate is double-digits (or near there) because they were using their labor so inefficiently until recently that they only have one direction to go. Besides, if GDP growth was proof of a country's greatness, perhaps China better look in their rear-view mirror, because Azerbaijan is catching up fast.
As for China being the next world superpower, call me when they get a navy. Sure, they can nuke us, but they can't even get past Chile's navy to hold the nuked territory, much less our own, and it's not like we don't have a few nukes to play with. Heck, the US has 2/3 of the quantitative aircraft carrier fleet in the world, and 4/5 of the deck space.
I don't know what Windows installer the GP's been using, but every one I've tried over the years starts with grey-on-blue text, vague instructions that are often repetitive, no ability to choose what programs I want on there first, no confirmation that it's properly detected my hardware and installed drivers for it until it's already on the machine... even Sarge was better than that.
R2 is basically Server 2003 SP1 with the resource kit and the other various little free downloads included (there's a little more to it than that, but not much), but you do have to pay for it (i.e. you can't use an SP1 key on an R2 installation, or vice-versa).
Signing statements don't change anything; they are only a written interpretation of what he *thinks* the law means when he signs it. The idea is to give the SCOTUS something else to draw from other than legislative opinion when determining the purpose of a law. In other words, they're about as legally binding as a friend-of-the-court brief, which is 'not very'.
Inferno does meet many of the requirements outlined thus far... it can run locally as a virtual machine or as a base install, it can run in a web browser (only IE at the moment, but they're working on others), it's a full-featured OS... assuming they get this running on some other browsers sometime in the near future, what's missing?
I live in Nevada, and I can tell you precisely why.
1. Finding sufficiently trained employees for the kind of work Apple does would be very difficult. The only way Apple could get the kind of talent they need would be to hire them in CA and relocate them, which a lot of companies do. This is great and good, of course, until somebody quits; since there's little native talent, who do you replace them with? UNR/UNLV grads? They're both getting better, mind you, but they're nowhere near good enough to pull that off, and neither university is cranking out grad students anywhere near fast enough to meet existing local demand, much less staffing another Apple campus. This is why tech companies group together in the first place.
2. Our unemployment rate is around 3.5-4%, meaning finding talent of any sort is especially difficult right now.
3. Nevada is becoming more expensive to live and set up shop in. Getting a new home in Reno used to cost about $150k 5-10 years ago; that number is now somewhere past $300k, and with water rights selling around $40k/acre-foot, that's not going down anytime soon. LV prices, as I understand it, are comparable. Granted, they're still less than Bay Area prices, but the only place that isn't these days is NYC.
4. Proximity to existing staff - this has already been mentioned, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's not the all caps that's difficult to parse - heck, that's the easy part. It's when you need to pass such wonderful keys as "\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Interface\{243368F5-67C9-3510- 9424-335A8A67772F}" and have to know what's really going on there. That said, the registry isn't all bad - it's kind of nice to be able to just do a quick CTRL-F and search for a particular value that I know needs to be changed everywhere (think server names when a new server comes on line, that kind of thing). I just wish it wasn't just marginally comprehensible.
Apple has done a decent job lately without touching the gamer crowd, though it could be argued that this is in part due to some gamers purchasing Apple hardware and running something like Boot Camp. That said, I don't see that being a very significant portion of the gamer market, especially since most gamers prefer to either make or mod their own systems.
If there's one thing that can be learned from Apple, though, it's that, for Linux to succeed, adoption has to be driven by the "early adopters", who then preach the benefits of the new product to the world. For Apple, that's primarily the creative professional crowd, which plays into their upscale, "hip" image. Linux, however, has no prayer right now of attracting that crowd, and that's okay - Linux isn't upscale. Instead, Linux can work the market from the bottom-up, which is precisely what it's starting to do - get college kids on it that don't want to deal with pirated Windows and don't have the money for a Mac, get engineers on it who just want something that works, and sell the Enterprise on it as a system with a much lower TCO than MS or Apple that works "well enough".
On a more personal note, I'm a Mac guy, but I don't have the money for a Mac right now. Since I want to save up for a Mac, I didn't want to spend money on Windows, so I grabbed an Ubuntu Breezy Badger disk from work. Since then, I upgraded to Dapper Drake (sticking to the LTS non-beta versions) and, at some point, will probably upgrade to Feisty Fawn. It works "well enough", which means that, though hardware support is a little painful, I've had to play far too many games with the ATI card on my machine, and doing basic multimedia tasks like playing an MP3 playlist or watching a DVD just "feels" more painful than it does on a Windows machine (I can't objectively describe it - sorry), it gets the job done for cheap. Thanks to my exposure to Ubuntu, I've started looking at the enterprise side of Linux to see if I can't find something that works "well enough" that can replace things like Exchange, Windows Server 2003, or even the work PBX (hello, Asterisk!). Thus far, I haven't found a lot that's as easy to use as any of those products, but they cost a lot less and get the job done.
Consequently, based on my own anecodotal experience, I'd say the gamer crowd isn't that critical for Linux - the games will come to Linux when everyone else comes to it.
So, where did the numbers come from? The original article makes it sound like Symantec got the numbers by counting the number of patches, but it's worse than that. According to the whitepaper, it's coming from volunteers (page 38): So, in short, Symantec chose the vulnerabilities based on what people in their mailing list told them. Later in the paper, it also discloses that they also got to pick the severity: So, what did they find, using self-generated vulnerability counts and self-generated severity levels? That's right - the one operating system that actually uses Symantec products is, of course, the one with the fewest vulnerabilities and shortest patch times.
Following the "number of patches = number of vulnerabilities" school of thought, though, does lead me to conclude that my Ubuntu box must be highly insecure and buggy - it keeps trying to update some random package or other almost daily!
The value of cash is pretty volatile as well - maybe not quite as much so as Google stock, but certainly volatile nonetheless.
In the case of the United States, the Dollar has been fairly consistently falling against the Euro for the past 120 days or so.
I suppose I could just install that in Userspace, though...
I don't know why I feel compelled to step into this, but I will.
First, some background:
I have a Mac, though, for various reasons, it's been semi-retired. I've used both MS Office (v.X, I believe - not the current one, but the first one for OS X) and NeoOffice. In fact, I did substantial coursework using OpenOffice for X11, then switched to NeoOffice when I learned about that. Here's what I can tell you based on this admittedly anecdotal experience:
1. OO.o, either in X11 form or NeoOffice form, was definitely slower on my computer than MS Office. Since I was running OS 10.3 on a G3/333 iMac with 160 MB of RAM, I noticed any speed differences very acutely. They were both slow but, on that computer, what wasn't? However, when you move elements around in PowerPoint and they barely hose your computer and, in contrast, you move them around in NeoOffice and you have to wait five minutes for your computer to finish paging before your mouse does what it's supposed to do, guess what product is going to get preferred?
2. Font support is better on NeoOffice than it is on OO.o. So is printer support. More importantly, so is clipboard support - I don't know if they fixed the X11 clipboard limitation in 10.4, but at least in 10.3 (unless there's some manual setting to change, which wouldn't surprise me) there was a 64kB size limitation to what you could put into the clipboard. This proves to be exceptionally obnoxious when you're copying and pasting flowcharts into a document. This is what motivated me to find NeoOffice in the first place. For this reason, and this reason alone, OO.o on X11 was a deal-breaker for me. Throw in lousy font support and sketchy printer support and it made it so much easier. This may have been fixed, though - I haven't checked on that side in a while.
3. NeoOffice just looks bad compared to MS Office. I'm sorry, but MS Office looks gorgeous, and, when you have a Mac, looks count. To MS's credit, they do a wonderful job of making that software look like it belongs on a Mac. OO.o has, thus far, done a wonderful job of making their software look like it belongs on a Linux workstation (not in a good way), no matter what platform it's on. That barely flies in the Windows world and doesn't fly at all on a Mac.
4. There were little idiosyncrasies with NeoOffice that just bugged me - hitting ENTER in Calc would go to the beginning of the next row, whereas Excel drops you down one element, layout of the menus, odd formatting issues with sections, etc. I seem to remember charts being pretty poor, too - I had an easier time getting AppleWorks 5 to generate the graphs I wanted than NeoOffice and, well, let's just say AppleWorks is not a "power tool" by any stretch of the imagination.
I do think OpenOffice and its derivatives have a place. I do think they can fill some needs for some Mac users. It filled a need for me - I needed an office suite to make some documentation in that was light on my wallet and I wanted something useful so I could finally ditch the pirated version of Office I had on my machine. However, for most Mac users, spending some money on something that looks good and works reasonably well is going to be preferred over something that's free (in any sense), looks bad, and runs worse. I mean, that's why we get Macs in the first place, right?
Of course, what do I run now? Ubuntu Dapper Drake with OpenOffice 2 on it... but it actually looks like it belongs there! That's probably because it does.
I had an employer ask me to do this for them as well. Since it was a Windows AD environment, I just set the internal DNS server to point myspace.com to 127.0.0.1 and set DHCP to hand out only the internal DNS server, which is what you want in an AD environment anyways. Obviously, it'd be fairly easy to circumvent (manually plug in an ISP's DNS server - problem solved), but it kind of ties into that "fence" idea mentioned in an earlier reply here, in that, for someone to figure out why Myspace wasn't working, they'd need to troubleshoot it, at which point they'd discover where Myspace was pointing and realize, "Hmm, someone probably intentionally did that."
I will point out that this was for a smallish company (25 people), not a school or anywhere else where the end-user can basically be assumed to be at least somewhat malicious. But, it does get the job done if you're in a hurry.
Would now be a good time to point out which party won both houses of Congress in the last US election? Doesn't seem to be much power consolidating here. Also, they're not exactly 'representing the people' when the opposition doesn't show up for the election and they voluntarily hand their powers to Chavez. Besides, it's not like dictators periodically rig elections or anything.
You're thinking of Vulcans, you insensitive and probably sarcastic clod!
Actually, the Apple model would be about right.
"Classic Mode": A Windows sandbox for legacy apps (definitely Win9x apps, probably NT/2000/XP and some Vista).
"Carbon": Apps based on shared Windows/Linux APIs - think Mono & WINE, only with M$ putting some real programming heft into the WINE project. Seeing as Novell is already a big supporter of Mono, this might not be far off. Microsoft would have a heck of a time getting Vista's APIs ported, but they do have the advantage of having all of the source code and insanely deep pockets. It also wouldn't need to support EVERY Vista API - many of them are for backwards compatibility. Just port enough for most important Vista applications (think DirectX 10 and the DRM schemes, for example) to work and whatever calls more obscure APIs can just run in "Classic Mode".
"Cocoa": Apps strictly for Windows X or whatever they call it. This would be the set of APIs and the runtime environment that, in theory, would 'add value' to a Linux-based Windows, so that people don't just take WINE and SuSE and make their own Windows X.
I really don't see OpenOffice.org as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office - it's nowhere near pretty enough, formatting can be somewhat strange (I remember having to struggle with section breaks A LOT more than I would've liked when using it, though that might still be some repressed flashbacks of OOo 1.1, and I'm happy to hear that charting hasn't improved), and these days collaboration is THE big buzzword right now - OOo doesn't even come close in that department.
To be fair here, I really don't think OOo should try to face off against Microsoft Office - that's a pretty big gorilla to try and take down. I do think it is an excellent replacement for the Microsoft Works-level packages of the world, especially since it does everything those lighter packages do and then some for a better price point. I can easily see it gaining traction at home, since it does everything that Microsoft Office does "well enough" for people to do some productive work on their off hours in it, albeit not necessarily running an entire office off of it. The interface for OOo is also a lot closer to what people use at work than Microsoft Works, too, if you ignore the GTK theming.
I actually like OOo - it reminds me a lot of ClarisWorks, which was a wonderful suite I had on my Mac Classic WAY back in the day. I do have some issues with it, though - documentation is spotty (especially with Base), the UI is uglier than sin, and the way Base uses Writer docs for its forms almost forces you to take ugly to strange new places that you never want to go. I mean, Access apps aren't pretty - for Base to create even worse looking ones by default is just astounding, if not criminal.
There's also FreeNAS. The rub here, though, is that, at least when I last tried it, it's the only thing that should be installed on the box. On the other hand, if you have an old PC and a couple of hard drives, it'll let you make a software mirror between them and share files on it. I won't claim my experience with it is authoritative, but it was pretty easy to figure out.
Assuming you didn't try to set it up to do a domain, here are some quick tips... and I can't believe someone modded you insightful, either. Good heavens.
1. To share files on Windows Server 2003 in a workgroup environment, you have two choices. You can either create a login for each person that will access them on the server or you can set the NTFS permissions to "Everybody->Read" on your shares. Make sure that share permissions are "Everybody->Full Access" - this actually isn't a security hole since Windows Server 2003 grants the least permissions it can based on what you give it, which means it'll run off NTFS permissions instead, which are far more flexible. This will also give you one place to look for permissions issues, instead of trying to guess how NTFS and share permissions are working together that day.
2. You probably didn't set your IIS page to allow anonymous access. This is as easy as right-clicking on the web site in IIS, choosing "Properties", then going to "Directory Security", clicking the first "Edit" button at the top, and then checking the "Enable anonymous logon" box.
I'm not a big fan of Windows, but it's not THAT difficult. That's not to say you didn't do better by going with Samba and Apache, either.
We call that "blaming the victim" here - it's sort of like blaming your wife for pissing you off and *making* you hit her. I mean, if she'd simply put out, do the dishes, and not give you flak when you get home...
Besides, do you really want the culture that's blowing up everything to run things? I mean, unless you're a fan of removing just about every right from anybody with a pair of X chromosomes, killing anyone who writes anything that insults your "prophet", and views death not as something to be avoided but, instead, as something to be celebrated, with dozens of virgins and all that... seems to me predatory capitalism is better than THAT alternative, at least.
After reading this guy's article and a few of the side articles that it links to, I realize that the point he's trying to make is:
1. Apple made the Next Big Thing (Macintosh).
2. Apple sat on its lead and did nothing (OS 7, 8, 9; attempted to sue Microsoft, Copland, etc.)
3. Apple was saved by acquiring vision from a failing competitor (NeXT)
4. Profit!
Meanwhile...
1. Microsoft made the Next Big Thing (a Macintosh-like interface that worked on computers people could actually afford - Windows 95)
2. Microsoft is sitting on its lead and is doing nothing (Windows Me, Vista, odd security glitches, etc.)
3. ???
He claims that Microsoft is sitting square at #2, trying to live off vaporware and bloat. Since Microsoft isn't going to get away on its own, now what? But, what company is out there that Microsoft could purchase that could give Microsoft everything it needs (an OS that runs on commodity hardware) without all of the baggage, is failing enough where Microsoft could get away with buying it, and which supports other parts of Microsoft's stack (Mono, OpenExchange)?
That's right - Novell.
After reading the articles and looking at the market, I sincerely think that Microsoft is getting ready to groom Novell and the market for a NeXT-like sweep of the market, replacing NT with Linux, replacing VB with Mono, replacing Exchange with OpenExchange, and maybe even propping WINE up to kill some time, sort of like Mac and its Classic environment.
Am I insane?
Targeting the home market is not where Linux needs to go - that's why all those whistles are there to begin with. Apple tried to focus on the home market, ignoring the enterprise market. What happened? Everyone decided Mac was great, wonderful to look at, but... it wasn't what they used at work. The rest is history. Linux has many of the same problems, but from a different angle, that Apple had (and still largely has). Linux is used at work by people like us, which is why people like us use it. However, the average person uses Windows at work. So, what are most people going to use when they get home? That's right - Windows. Why? Because it's what they're used to. Could they use Linux or Mac? Sure - Microsoft has had a version of Office for Mac since the '80s. Linux has OpenOffice, KOffice, and even Microsoft Office will sometimes work under WINE. But, it's not what people are used to, so most people don't use it. Where I work, we've been debating whether or not we should start actively pushing and supporting Linux. The problem that we've found is that most of the applications that our customers use are Windows applications. Need an accounting package for small business, like Timberline, ACCPAC (*shudder*), MasterBuilder, or anything beefier than Quicken? Good luck finding it on Linux - I know GNU's working on an open-source one, but, as I understand it, it's got a long way to go. Thing is, the accountants are the ones writing the checks, so if you tell them, "Well, we're going to run XP on you and Linux on everyone else," they're going to say, "No, we'll pay for XP everywhere, thanks," and that'll be the end of that. I know this - I've seen it in action. In short, if you want people to use Linux, Mac, BSD, Solaris, Amiga, OS/2, or whatever at home, they need to be able to do all of their work on it, and the first people that need to be able to do work on it needs to be the beancounters. Once that happens, the rest will fall into place.
I hear people claim that illegal immigration holds down the wages of the American worker, but, with offshoring and outsourcing, is that really true? How do we know that, if a company couldn't hire an illegal immigrant for $5.15/hour, that the company would just hire a legal American for $10/hour instead of just building the plant in Mexico and hiring them for $2.50/hour? Maybe the illegal immigrants are making it possible for there to be some of these jobs in the US in the first place.
This is true, and, in fact, is where China is even further behind.
China's GDP was $7.2 trillion in 2001, compared to the USA, which clocked in at $11.75 trillion in 2001. Plus, thanks to China's 'free' government and its 'honesty and trustworthiness', there's no guarantee China's numbers are even that high, nor that they've been growing that fast.
Assuming these numbers, which are supposed to be newer, are correct, the USA single-handedly beats out the European Union and is a solid $3.5 trillion ahead of China. Considering how the USA has about 2/3 the population of the EU and less than 1/4 of China's population, that's pretty impressive.
Sorry, but China's growth rate is a prime example of the catch-up effect. In short, China's growth rate is double-digits (or near there) because they were using their labor so inefficiently until recently that they only have one direction to go. Besides, if GDP growth was proof of a country's greatness, perhaps China better look in their rear-view mirror, because Azerbaijan is catching up fast.
As for China being the next world superpower, call me when they get a navy. Sure, they can nuke us, but they can't even get past Chile's navy to hold the nuked territory, much less our own, and it's not like we don't have a few nukes to play with. Heck, the US has 2/3 of the quantitative aircraft carrier fleet in the world, and 4/5 of the deck space.
I don't know what Windows installer the GP's been using, but every one I've tried over the years starts with grey-on-blue text, vague instructions that are often repetitive, no ability to choose what programs I want on there first, no confirmation that it's properly detected my hardware and installed drivers for it until it's already on the machine... even Sarge was better than that.
R2 is basically Server 2003 SP1 with the resource kit and the other various little free downloads included (there's a little more to it than that, but not much), but you do have to pay for it (i.e. you can't use an SP1 key on an R2 installation, or vice-versa).
Signing statements don't change anything; they are only a written interpretation of what he *thinks* the law means when he signs it. The idea is to give the SCOTUS something else to draw from other than legislative opinion when determining the purpose of a law. In other words, they're about as legally binding as a friend-of-the-court brief, which is 'not very'.
Inferno does meet many of the requirements outlined thus far... it can run locally as a virtual machine or as a base install, it can run in a web browser (only IE at the moment, but they're working on others), it's a full-featured OS... assuming they get this running on some other browsers sometime in the near future, what's missing?
1. Finding sufficiently trained employees for the kind of work Apple does would be very difficult. The only way Apple could get the kind of talent they need would be to hire them in CA and relocate them, which a lot of companies do. This is great and good, of course, until somebody quits; since there's little native talent, who do you replace them with? UNR/UNLV grads? They're both getting better, mind you, but they're nowhere near good enough to pull that off, and neither university is cranking out grad students anywhere near fast enough to meet existing local demand, much less staffing another Apple campus. This is why tech companies group together in the first place.
2. Our unemployment rate is around 3.5-4%, meaning finding talent of any sort is especially difficult right now.
3. Nevada is becoming more expensive to live and set up shop in. Getting a new home in Reno used to cost about $150k 5-10 years ago; that number is now somewhere past $300k, and with water rights selling around $40k/acre-foot, that's not going down anytime soon. LV prices, as I understand it, are comparable. Granted, they're still less than Bay Area prices, but the only place that isn't these days is NYC.
4. Proximity to existing staff - this has already been mentioned, though.