Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Terrorism (Score 1) 868

In a word: no. Terrorism is almost definitionally non-government organizations engaged in violence to effect political change.

Or for that matter to keep the status quo...

When governments do it, we call it various other things based on our own perspective of the situation: war, policing, tyranny, among others.

Definitions of "terrorist" and "government" often have more to do with politics (and if somone supports or opposes a group) rather than what actually happens. There have also been many historical cases of "terrorists" winding up as "politicians" (even "heads of state"). Usually that way around too.

Comment Re:Don't allow missils to be fired... (Score 1) 868

from your territitory and chances are good that you won't get missles fired back at you. Sign a document to that effect and you will most likely have peace.

This would be a difficult condition for even the most well run state with the best equipped and well trained police force to fulfil. Something which certainly dosn't apply to Gaza.

Comment Re:Elop (Score 1) 149

Lets not forget that Nokia was floundering before Elop went in.

AIUI corporate officers are given wide lattitude to do what they belive is in the best interests of the company. Otherwise you'd get a flood of lawsuits whenever a descision turned out badly. So you would basically have to prove that Elop did not belive that going the MS route was in the best interests of the community.

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

"the world runs windows?" have you ever entered in a real server room? do you know google, facebook, yahoo, rackspace and every other "big player" on internet?

Even if they just ment "on the desktop" Do they mean Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 ? (Not even considering the various sub versions of these.) There might even be some Win95, Win98, WinME, NT4, Windows 2000 still around. Commercial companies can be very reluctant to spend money "fixing" something which isn't "broken".

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

For maintaining a farm of identical servers, I agree with you completely. For maintaining Grandma's desktop remotely, I agree with you completely. But for maintaining an enterprise desktop environment, Microsoft simply has the best tools for the job. Linux AD-via-Samba quite simply doesn't even come close for the convenience of centralized GP maintenance, and has aothing anywhere near the convenience of drag-and-drop group-based software installation (though Linux does have non-stock application deployment packages available, like Puppet, that partially fill that last point). Linux has nothing even remotely like (W)SUS. And those two alone count as complete showstoppers when it comes to minimizing the number of people required to maintain a large network.

On the other hand Windows dosn't have anything like apt :) or the ability to replace major sections of the system without rebooting.
The whole idea of "deploying" applications is very much a "Windows way of doing things" too. In many cases even Windows applications can run from networked drives.
There's also the Windows profile mechanism, with it's half baked writeback caching, which makes no sense at all in many situations.

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

My experience is the opposite of yours with installing Windows/Linux. I've found that ghosting Windows installs requires that the hardware be virtually identical. Having a different disk controller, or switching between ATA and AHCI modes usually causes blue screens and failure to boot.

My experience is that it's Windows which is a lot more fussy about hardware and imaging that Linux. This having been the case for at least 15 years. Even to the point of Windows wanting reinstall drivers when a USB device changes which USB port it is plugged into.

Any modern Linux distro, however can quite happily run even by putting the installed hard disk into a completely different machine.

Ironically it's fairly recent additions to Linux, such as UDEV "persistant-rules" and using disk UUIDs which can make this more complex than it was in the past.

Comment Re: TCO (Score 1) 158

I support a university campus and I'm tired (not really, but it gets boring) of being asked for copies of university software by students for whom there is no licenced copy available. The reason? The teacher will be accostumed to using that software and doesn't even consider changing to another.

Both the students and the teachers don't understand how software licencing works. Ironically OSS can easily be used the way they want.

Mind you, I'm not even talking about changing to Linux or some open source program. I'm talking about students (teachers too) persistently asking for Windows XP-compatible software to be installed in their Windows 8 computers when we aren't allowed to do it and asking for us to help them when the magically appearing copy of our licenced software doesn't work with their computers' Windows 7 or 8

Even if a piece OSS written for Windows XP refuses to run/install under Windows 7/8 there are several possible ways to fix this. Whereas with proprietary software you are utterly at the "mercy" of the vendor. They may have gone out of businessor only want to sell a much later version.

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

Some time ago someone built their business practices around the tools that were available on the platform they chose at the time. If they choose a new platform there should be an expectation of flexibility in the business practices to match the new platform. It doesn't matter which direction you go or what you're changing. It will never be 100% the same as the old solution.

That's true even if you "stick with" Microsoft. With many organisations just recently having undergone a very complex and painful migration from Windows XP (plus Office 2003) to Windows 7/8 (plus Office 2010/2013).
With the irony that a change to Ubuntu (plus LibreOffice) may have been less of a shock to the end users.

Comment Re:TCO (Score 1) 158

From my experience you need less Linux sysadmins to begin with. Its easier to do remote admin.

Also whilst there might be plenty of MSCEs highly skilled Windows sysadmins are hard to find. (They might even be the same people as Linux sysadmins...) There's also a certain irony in "Power Shell" becoming an important Windows admin tool.

So the TCO numbers Microsoft claims are usually bullshit.

TCO numbers are generally political bovine excrement. It dosn't matter if they are applied to computer software, electricity generation or whatever. Usually trick is to ignore some of costs associated with the "right" choice.

Comment Re:Not everything that shines is gold... (Score 1) 158

I wonder how much influence the absence of Valencian Catalan support in Windows but availability of support for at least large parts of Linux systems influenced the adoption of this system (Windows can apparently be made to display some of its UI in Catalan, but the translation is incomplete, and the local Valencian dialect of the language is entirely unsupported).

You also see something similar with the "English" version of Microsoft Windows. With only US specific spellings being used whatever the location is set to...

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Working...