I'm part of a team looking into moving our company to Linux in the long term. Some 3000+ workstations with windows XP, MS office, exchange, etc.

Currently we're looking at Ubuntu and servers in Debian. My assessment is:
- You need directory services. Fedora Directory services (389 server) is hard to install on Debian/Ubuntu and has a lot of trouble with their two way AD replication. Other people who have worked with OpenLDAP report severe corruption when synchronizing multiple masters across unreliable links. Both arer a pain to set up windows clients for.
- Both Ubuntu 9.10 and Macs can join Active Directory using Likewise Open. Ubuntu 10.04 included it in their main repository, adverrtised the integration and completely fucked it up. Most of the bugs are fixed in the PPA, but they haven't bothered to put the fixes in their supported repositories for the last 6 months, and the same bugs are in 10.10. Upgrading 9.10 -> 10.04 with break your configuration, unless you know enough to add the PPAs beforehand or a private repo. With the PPAs it works well, but single-sign-on doesn't work (worked in 9.10) and it has problems when working from home.
- Some things aren't implemented. Windows can authenticate with Radius (WPA Enterprise, VPN, etc) with the machine's AD password. Ubuntu + Likewise doesn't have that capability, though it's relatively easy to script yourself. You have to log in and enter a password for the wireless, (hard if you need the wireless to log in) or set your password to be used for anyone who uses the computer (bad if you ever change your password)
- Ubuntu has a bunch of embarrassing bugs that prevent me from just giving it to one of my users. The original OOo in 10.04 couldn't even join cells selected with the mouse. It's sad when MS's products have more quality than yours.

Maybe we'll start over looking at Fedora, I'd like to hear about people's experiences with their quality assurance.

All that aside, the other big points to watch:
- Email is a problem. Web based solutions preclude you from having PSTs locally for personal history/backups (which is very common at my company). If you don't switch to a web based solution then Evolution is a mess with its exchange integration. The old connector only connects through OWA, and loses synchronization (says there are unread emails but won't show you them or download them, silently stops updating, etc) and crashes every once in a while. The MAPI connector has some weird issues with character encoding. You can use Thunderbird but you lose all the Gnome integration. And either you switch windows users to thunderbird too or support two different programs. You could install a Linux based email and calendaring server too, that can sync email, appointments and everything else with linux windows, macs and phones , but it's nontrivial. Just choosing the right combination of solutions is a big project.
- Access and excel macros have to be rebuilt. A lot of people at our company use them. Every department seems to have a VBA expert building mini-applications and data analysis spreadsheets connected to our data warehouse that then become business-critical. This is not a problem until you want to switch.
- MS Project. If your people use it and need it, there is just no good replacement. Serena Openproj is the closest, but it hasn't been updated in two years and has a bunch of bugs. Plus it's missing things like multi-project and a bunch of features our users need.
- Custom apps: Our intranet won't show well under Firefox and we have a bunch of custom apps (VB and other languages). The former have to be redone anyway to update for a new IE, but the latter are a lot of work in our case.

A migration project is a big undertaking that probably won't be completely justified by cost. On the other hand I don't agree with just laying on your laurels and mindlessly updating to the latest MS offering. Do look into switching every once in a while. If things are good enough for you then switch, even if it takes a lot of work. You can also switch bits and pieces. Migrating the back-end away from exchange and the workstations to web or Thunderbird might lower your costs, simplify your support and simplify a later full migration. It won't be easy, at all, but how else are you going to justify your paycheck? :-)

On the back end, DHCP/DNS are easy. Squid/Squidguard instead of ISA server are pretty easy except for the AD integration, but they're not too hard either. There is a JBoss doc somewhere showing how to create a service/machine account in AD that can later be used in a kerberos keytab to authenticate your users with single-sign-on, and Squidguard can use their AD account to check their access rights if you add Samba to your server. Email is next on our list. Puppet is supposed to be a great tool for reducing your workload, as is Nagios. Postgres is easy to set up, but redoing all your store procedures and porting your apps can be a big job. MS Analysis Services is harder to replace.

Seriously, study the solutions, decide for yourself. Don't just assume it'll work, and don't just assume it won't.

More like 2s

I mean, that's just unnatural.

Actually he's right. The statement is pure bullshit.

Or maybe that's too much. Kurzweil just doesn't understand how Kolmorogrov complexity works.

Let's say the brain as a machine is the output of a process. How complicated is that process? The Kolmorogrov complexity of a string (or whatever) is the minimum size of the data that you have to give to a machine in order to produce the string. E.g. a string of 100 0s is simpler than a string of alternating 0s and 1s and simpler than encoding the first 100 digits of pi. Write code for each of those and you'll see the measure works (and it's actually a lower limit, but it's the closest concept...)

But the crucial point is that the size of this string depends on the kind of machine. The size of the input (program) for a Turing machine is very different than that for an actual computer.

So, yes. 800MB of code. But that's not the library code. The library that interprets that program is the egg that grows those 800MB of data into a human, together with all the laws of physics and chemistry involved in the process.

Take all the chromosomes encoding a whole human genome and drop it into a test tube of distilled water. Does it grow a brain? What if you put it into a chicken egg. What grows out? Putting those 800 MB into a computer doesn't do anything if you don't provide the equivalent of the egg. The bootstrap structure and the underlying architecture are as important as the code in understanding the whole system.

Myers is right. In order to understand the human brain directly from the genes you have to understand all chemistry that interacts with it, all the self replicating machinery provided by the mother and simulate that at a molecular level.

So the upper bound is NOT 800 MB. It's 800 MB plus the size of a codebase good enough to simulate every interaction at an atomic level plus a full 3D scan at an atomic level of the egg provided by the mother. Or simplified models of all those things, provided by the chemists and biologists out there, as Myers points out. (Plus data equivalent to a few years of training like we do with children)

Not saying that simulating the brain is necessarilly that hard, it's just that Kurzweil's pseudo-scientific measurement is just bullshit.

She pushes the mouse as she clicks?

I once worked in a somewhat similar arrangement. We had L-shaped desks in a cross arrangement. Each person sat in one of the inside corners of the cross.

Pros:
- It was easy to talk to each other.
Cons:
- It was harder to look at the person across from you over the monitors
- If you ever wanted to show each other your code, one of you had to walk around the desk or roll around it in your chair.

That last one was the dealbreaker. It might be easier on a round table (but then each would have very little room for their stuff), but you'd have the same problem to talk to someone who is not right next to you: you'd still have to walk around your neighbors.

I'm currently working in another department with the same desks, but arranged as the outside of the square. Takes up about the same space but it is much easier to roll over to someone's desk and work with them. You can take your laptop if you want (and wifi permitting).

And let's face it, it's just as easy to turn around to talk to someone behind you as to someone next to you. And if they are wearing headphones they won't hear you either way. Add rolling chairs and anything but carpet and it's just as easy to take something to show them too. Even without the corner desks, you can set them up in two rows back to back and it still works.

You could add a small central table for quick meetings, but I prefer the back to back arrangement any day.

(And people tend not to slack off as much because someone might be looking over their shoulder :) )

Pity I don't have mod points. I'd mod you up just for that.

Nope. One of his moves a few years ago was to set up the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) which absorbed a bunch of parties that supported him at one time and he's campaigned for people to see this as the only socialist party in existence. Of course he controls it and it would only propose him for president. Anyone leading another party is politically a nobody

There are other socialist politicians. Real socialists, even some that have been fighting for change for decades and are appalled at what Chavez is doing now. One of them said lately that Chavez is not a socialist but a communist, for example. There are, of course, people who were with Chavez but have fallen out of favor and might want to set themselves up as new socialists leaders, but without the PSUV's backing they are not getting anywhere.

So, no.

A lot of people love their dear leader and his personality more than the ideology. And a lot of people like socialism, but believe socialism is whatever Chavez says, or that letting the opposition get any foothold will make them lose "all they've fought for". Others think Chavez simply can do no wrong, whatever he does. All of them still insist on calling a 10 year old entrenched government "the revolution" and anyone who doesn't like whatever Chavez says is "against the process" (and some of them say it with a "they deserve death" attitude)

Bringing up that they could back another better socialist is a good way to make them face the fact that they love him more than the process or the ideology.

As to the Putin scenario, he's not going to do that. Why would he back a constitutional reform whose only point was to allow him to run again in the next presidential elections?

He also managed to get the last opposition guy to run against him to flee the country, so there's no credible person to run against him from the opposition anyway. But that's a story for another post.

Sorry, I didn't mean a TV Show like a sitcom or whatever. La Hojilla was a news/opinion show with a guy discussing the day's events, and so on.

It never pretended to be fiction, or fiction pretending to be reality, or anything like that.

Actually, the venezuelan government has been trying to close Globovision for a while now, and one of the biggest problems is that they have NEVER advocated any kind of violence against the government, be it the president or anyone else. It would cost too much international support for them to close another oposition TV station without a good reason.

The other two big independent TV stations have been scared off enough that they don't dare play anything political. The only other one is VTV, the government's channel (and I don't mean Bush' Fox, I mean wholly owned by the government). They do play show like "La Hojilla" (The razor blade) that openly advocated a few times killing oposition as a legitimate means of defending "the revolution".

Not to mention Chavez himself sometimes applauding relatively violent acts in his defense.

Now, I won't say that Globovision is fair and balanced, but as far as I can tell they never outright lied about anything. I understand Fox news to be more radical and distorting than Globovision and yet I don't see the Fox owners being hounded for years and finally arrested like Zuloaga.

FWIW, it seems Zuloaga was released after appearing in court, with a prohibition against leaving the country. We'll see whether he'll fold and close Globovision or be thrown in jail on trumped up charges.

Disclaimer on my stance on the government: Chavez has been in power for 10 years. He's changed the constitution multiple times, tried out different reforms all while oil was at an all time high and money was flowing into the country like crazy. He's had a BIG chance to reform the country and It's all been a failure. Lately all he's doing helps the government more than the people.

Hell, we even have rolling blackouts now, when we used to export electricity. This is a situation that was predicted over a year ago, but 10 years of ignoring the power infrastructure have left its mark, and yet he blames it all on el niño and the previous governments.

If you want change, don't prop up the same old government. If you're a socialist, elect a different socialist president. If you're a capitalist, same thing. There's no reason to maintain Chavez in power for another 50 years.

The Import question was a long conversation in IRC actually. The conclusion is that it doesn't really add anything to split open and import, while save/export does.

Yes it is different from other programs, but the only one I can think of OOo, and the other formats (word, etc) do save enough info to keep your work.

Currently when you open a PNG, the export item becomes "Overwrite foo.png" so it's very obvious in the menu. After you export the menu gets overwrite foo.png, export to bar.png export to... plus the usual save and save to. The overwrite item goes away when you save to a XCF.

Yes very nonstandard, that's one of the things I dislike.

My biggest annoyance with all this is that when you type in foo.png in the save dialog it'll show a very unfriendly "You can use this dialog to save to the GIMP XCF format. Use File ->export to export to other file formats". The obvious thing to do would be to add an export button to that dialog or a "take me to the export dialog" so the user doesn't have to waste time navigating to the right directory again. But, in the words of the UI guy "we cannot allow the user to think of the save dialog as an unofficial way to export".

And yes, they now have a "UI expert" designing things. So it's not random developers coming up with weird things. Some of his ideas are good, but not down to the details IMHO. And he has a real NIH syndrome problem. Look at the export dialog, the adjustment layers and the non-MDI single window UI for examples.

Int his case I think the feature does make sense, but it does need some changes, liek the ones you suggest. The double save-path export offers does seem very useful for something like GImp.

I've been running SVN versions for a while now, and I was skeptical of the change too, but when I found out the reason why it makes perfect sense.

Let's say you're editing an image to put up in a web page. You have a .xcf with all the layers and data and a jpg you are putting up. In the old version you could save the jpg and then forget to update the xcf, so you'd lose data unknowingly (Say, you closed the Gimp and it didn't tell you you had a modified image).

The current version keeps track of whether a file has been saved and whether it has been exported. If you want to update the xcf you hit ctrl-s. If you want to reexport the jpg you hit ctrl-e. If you close Gimp it'll tell you you have unsaved changes even if you have exported the picture. Hitting export as a second time will place you in the directory you were exporting to (not necessarily the one you saved to). It's nice for repeated saving and testing (to web, blender, whatever) while keeping track of update to you XCF for you.

Yes, it is nonstandard but the Gimp is one of the few programs whose internal format is not what is published or used as part of a workflow, but still needs to keep up to date with your work.

Also note that the export dialog does do "Intelligent Save". You type in the file name you want and it'll guess the file type.

Either way don't worry about it too much. Current estimate is to release 2.8 in December 2010, but they'll probably cut some features before then.