Linux-Advocacy Digest #942, Volume #27 Tue, 25 Jul 00 04:13:06 EDT
Contents:
Re: MS advert says Win98 13 times less reliable than W2k ("Spud")
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From: "Spud" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: MS advert says Win98 13 times less reliable than W2k
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 00:55:36 -0700
[snips]
"R.E.Ballard ( Rex Ballard )" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:8lj2nd$qon$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Tell you what, why don't you do all the work, and I'll collect your
> paycheck.
No, thanks, I'm not stupid enough to fall for that.
> Furthermore, I'll use some of the money I collect from
> you paycheck to make sure that you can't quit, can't ask for a raise
> without giving me 80% of the raise, and furthermore, I'll have all
> rights to you wife, your children, your sisters, your mother, and
> the income of your father and brother too.
>
> Essentially, this is what Microsoft has done to the UNIX community.
What, the UNIX community *is* stupid enough to hand over their
paychecks? Silly them; maybe they should get some people with a clue.
> The UNIX community developed a set of standards, published them
under
> a public license contract, enjoyed billions of dollars worth of
support
> from some of the top people in the profession who worked as
volunteers,
> sometimes as much as 1000 hours/week, to create the infrastructure
> for what became a $1 trillion industry. Now Microsoft is demanding
> the right to make proprietary enhancements. They are demanding that
> the UNIX community be excluded from all future innovation. They are
> demanding that all future standards be designed exclusively for
> Microsoft destop machines. They refuse to follow any of the
standards
> which are available (upon which their standards are based) without
> making proprietary enhancements (even when such enhancements are
> explicitly forbidden in the license contract).
Ah, wait now, you're suggesting something different. Up above, it was
voluntary on the part of the "victim"; now you're saying it isn't,
it's being forced on them; which is it?
> To make matters worse, Microsoft seems to feel justified in
bankrupting
> not only it's competitors, but also any allies who establish a
> profitable niche to the point where it might be attractive to
> Microsoft.
So what you're saying, then, really, is that MS, unlike the *nix
vendors, understands business and is willing to do what it takes to
win.... even if it sometimes gets them into hot water. Yeah, so?
Welcome to the wonderful world of business; if you don't want to play
the game, try fishing instead.
All I really see from the above is "We made something public - which
means someone else can use it, modify it, extend it, adapt it - but
when they do, we wanna take our marbles and go home." Well, if you
wanted to retain the control over it, why the hell didn't you do
exactly that?
If I create a compression scheme and publish the details of how it's
done, the file format I use, etc... it's damn near certain someone,
somewhere, is going to come up with some variation of it tailored to
their needs, and quite probably incompatible with my version. If I
didn't want them doing that, well... why the hell did I publish the
details in the first place? I guess I'm just an idiot.
The wonderful thing about public information... you can't control
what's done with it. Don't like it? Fine; don't do it.
> Bill Gates assumes that anything that doesn't have the Microsoft
brand
> exclusively attached is worthless, and anything that does have the
> Microsoft brand attached is worth all future pay increases.
He's in business to promote that idea, yes. What, you'd expect Ford
to start advertising how wonderful Chevys are?
> There are
> about 600 CEOs who agree with him, and they control the choices of
21
> million employees. I'm not sure I'd want to work for those
companies,
> or buy from them, or even do business with them - - if I had a
choice.
Of course you have a choice. First, you can work for a company that
doesn't fit that description. If you can't find one in your area, you
can go into business for yourself. IF you can't hack that, you can
try another field; fishing, book editing, reporting, whatever. "If I
had a choice." Bah. What, someone's holding a gun to your head?
> In fact, I don't.
Yup, apparently your evil employers really *are* holding a gun to your
head, forcing you to stay in their job, doing things their way. That
would make you, as far as I can tell, absolutely unique in this work
force.
> When I'm offered a 4% raise because my Employer
> decided to spend 20% of my salary on Microsoft driven PC upgrades,
> I switch jobs.
20% of your salary? That suggests either you have a pathetically low
salary, or he's funding an entire organization's upgrades of your
personal wages. Let's see...
Suppose you make 60,000 a year. A typical annual PC upgrade runs
about $300. Well, call it $600 with software upgrades. Nope, that
doesn't work out to 20%; as I calculate it, you'd have to be earning a
mere $3000 a year for it to be 20% of your salary.
Okay, so assume you're actually making that 60,000; 20% of that is
$12,000. That would pay for upgrading 20 machines. That's a little
more in tune with your 20% figure, based on your supposition it's
derived from PC uprade costs.
Hmm... wait a sec. Do *you* use all 20 of those PCs? Exclusively? I
suspect not; I suspect there's probably 20 people in the office, each
with a PC. So, either the boss really hates you, and is targetting
your salary specifically, or that 20% applies to all the users in the
office. Okay, let's assume an average salary of, say, $40,000. At
20%, that's $8,000 per employee, $160,000 total, in upgrades. That
means there's actually about 267 machines being upgraded. No, wait,
that doesn't work...
Okay, so how do you make these numbers work? More to the point, how
did you determine that the specific figure, 20%, that your salary was
supposedly chopped (or not increased, if you prefer) by, was
specifically and only due to "Microsoft driven PC upgrades" and not a
single cent of that was related to, oh, increased insurance costs and
the like?
> So do a lot of people. Some companies are finding
> it hard to keep people because it's easier for them to "jump" for
> a 20% raise than to "stick" and give Microsoft all of their
> incentives.
Sure; you find me a company that'll offer me a 20% raise just for
walking in the door, I'd be interested, too. The question is, how do
you support your assertion that this 20% was, in fact, specifically
due to MS costs, and not insurance, office rent, and other costs?
> Many professionals are taking the approach "I'll buy my own
computer,
> upgrade it when I feel like it, and run what I want to run on it".
> Then they turn around and charge DOUBLE, even TRIPLE their salaries
> to the Fortune 500 companies who decided that the loyalty of
Microsoft
> was more important than the loyalty of employees.
Don't see how you get any of that.
My company uses MS products. My company also goes a hell of a long
way out of its way, regularly, to demonstrate that the employees are,
in fact, the most important asset the company has. Being an MS shop
hasn't prevented that. Maybe your problem is that you're just working
at a crappy outfit. Well, either that, or you're in an MS shop and
constantly whinge on about how bad Windows is. Managers notice that
sort of thing. "Hmm; we produce and use Windows software; this yipyo
can't keep his mouth shut for five minutes without telling us how
crappy Windows is, how stupid anyone who uses it by choice is. Well,
guess what? We use it by choice... and we sign the paychecks. Guess
who isn't getting the employee incentive award this year?"
> > 98 supports USB just fine, thanks.
>
> Microsoft took over the USB standard and then promoted proprietary
> protocols above the frame layer.
And I should care why? My USB hardware works just fine; whether it's
running a reference protocol or an extended one, I could care less.
> > Well, so?
> > It's not as if Microsoft is selling Wine,
>
> But Microsoft feels that it has the right to take software developed
> by the UNIX community, for the purpose of expanding the UNIX market,
> and violating the licenses under which they obtained these
intellectual
> property rights.
Really? They did that? Got a specific example? That is, a specific
example of a tool MS licensed from the UNIX community, where the
license they signed expressly forbids them extending it or modifying
it, yet they did anyway? No, Java won't cut it; Java *does* allow for
extensions; MS just applied them in the wrong manner; that may be the
subject of another discussion, but it's not relevant to this one.
> Microsoft feels that they have the right to be the pig
> at the trough when it comes to expropriating IETF standards, TCP/IP,
> WWW, HTML, SGML, XML, C, C++, Java, and nearly all of the other
> technology which constitutes the backbone of the Internet,
Umm... excuse? Last I checked, I could get the specs to most of those
for free, without paying any license fees, signing any agreements, or
agreeing to any terms. Given that, I can do with them as I damn well
please. If you don't like it that way, don't publicize the fool
things that way; at the least impose a proper license which has to be
signed, one stating flat out that no, you're not allowed to extend,
modify, or otherwise tamper with the operations of the core
technology.
I don't recall signing any such license in order to get the specs for
HTML; apparently I was drugged, carried off while I was unconscious,
and forced to sign some agreement without being aware of it. First,
I'd like to note that such a contract wouldn't be legally enforceable,
since it wasn't entered into willfully by both parties, and second,
I'd like to note that the whole concept is patently absurd. The fact
is, the details of those are publicly available - and are, as a
result, open to be mangled, munged, misinterpreted or massaged by
every Tom, Dick, Harry or Bill that comes down the pike. Again, don't
like it? Fine: DON'T DO IT.
> and of the
> Corporate technology infrastructure, and feels that it has no moral,
> ethical, or legal obligation to give ANYTHING in return without
> encapsulating it in a blanket of nondisclosure and trade secrecy
> protections which often explicitly exclude the Linux and UNIX
markets.
Yes, and? MS apparently isn't as silly as these other folks. "Gee,
we give things away, and people change them! Wahh! Oh, wait, we're
not allowed to see the details of the changes! Wahh." Gimme a break.
It's the mating call of the Linux zealot - we want everything, we want
it for free, and we'll whine and whimper whenever we don't get our
way.
> > Let's take these in order.
> >
> > >format which is neither efficient (uses a great deal of> storage)
> >
> > Can actually store in about 2 dozen formats, with varying degrees
of
> > size and features.
>
> Yes, and most of those formats are portable, flexible, and can be
used
> by both Linux and Windows users.
Right; so stop whining about it.
> > >secure (microviruses, activeX viruses, vbscript viruses, embedded
ole
> > viruses...)
> >
> > If you don't embed a virus, you can certainly save the document
> > without them. Why simply saving a document would magically cause
it
> > to become virus-ridden, I'm not sure... if you're really that
paranoid
> > about it, save as RTF.
>
> BINGO!!! Saving as RTF gives you some control and security.
Not security; you seem to be confusing cause and effect. You don't
magically get viruses embedded in your Office documents - or
applications, or... - just by writing them to disk. No, you get
viruses in them because you've *already* let a virus into your system,
let it wreak its havoc, and totally failed to apply safe computing
practices. No file format is going to save you at this point... the
damage is done, and your machine is a hot zone for infectious agents,
it should be quarantined, and the operator should be taken out and
shot as a preventative measure. Or maybe just given a shot, say
upside the head, to make them learn what safe practices involve.
> > >not practically searchable
> >
> > Funny... I just saved an office document, told "search" to look
for
> > any documents in the folder which contain the word "release" and
> > voila! Got one - in Word 2K native format. I can search 'em,
even if
> > you can't.
>
> Now, try that with about 2 million documents.
I'd be very surprised if there were any trouble with it at all,
actually. I regularly search many thousands of documents in that and
other formats. I just did a test. I have 153,247 documents available
for searching; doing a search for a keyword matched 998 documents in
well under a second. 1680 matches took about a half second. 58
matches was done so fast I didn't have time to blink; call it a tenth
second.
So, let's see; 2 million documents is about 13 times more than I have
ready for searching. Using the slowest of the returned results, and
doubling for the sake of making you happy, means 1/2 second * scaling
factor of 13 * happiness factor of 2 = 13 seconds. Okay, 13 seconds
to do a keyword query across 2 million documents doesn't seem terribly
unreasonable to me - and that's _after_ doubling it, just to make you
feel better.
Aw, hell, let's try something else. Same document set...
Search: SMTP AND protocol AND free
Found: 12 matches.
Time: About 1/4 second.
Search: teen AND freedom
Found: 23 records
Time: About 1/10 second
And so on.
> If you have a large
> company, with just 100,000 employees, and each one issues only one
> communication a day as a Word attachment to an outlook document,
> you'll have 30 million documents to sort through.
No, you have 100,000; where's your math gone? 100,000 users * 1
document == 100,000 documents. Oh, you meant per month, right? No
problem; even a little beater box such as mine can handle 100,000
documents a day... and in fact, a lot more than that. Without hosing
the machine's usefulness. Now doing this on, say, a server, where
you've configured the machine for a little extra speed, well, let's
just say it's not an issue.
> Now, if you
> suddenly have a lawsuit and you have to come up with all relevant
> documents from the last 10 years, you are going to have to sort
> through 300 million documents.
Okay. We've gone from 2 million at about 13 seconds, to 150 times
that, or about a half an hour. And that's _still_ incorporating a
factor-of-two increase just to keep you happy.
> Let's make it really interesting.
> Let's assume that each document contains an average of 10 pages.
> You now have 3 billion documents
No, you have 3 billion pages; 300 million documents.
> - and that's just within you own
> company. Now, consider that each employee has contacts with an
> average of 10 other people each day.
Fine; now it takes a background process 10 times as long, or about 5
hours, to do a search across your _entire_ 10-year documentation
history. That is actuallly pretty damned good... but I suspect that
it's _vastly_ overestimated; a halfway decent indexing system scales a
lot better than that.
> > "Archivable"? InfoZip had no problem with this document. I can
also
> > readily burn it to CD for my archives, store it to tape for
backups...
> > not sure what the issue here is.
>
> There's a difference between sticking a pile of documents into a
trash
> compactor and storing the crunched documents in an moldy storage
shed
> (will you actually be able to use Office 2010 to read those 10-year
old
> documents?)
Well, let's see; I can still _save as_, never mind just reading as,
Word for Windows 2.0 format. what was the release date on that? In
any case... yes.
> and having billions of documents stored in such a way that
> you don't have people sending thousands of copies of the same
document
> to hundreds of people. The classic:
>
> To: Everybody
> From: CEO
> Subject: Annual Report
>
> Please feel free to review the attached copy of the company
> annual report. This year we've included more pictures, charts,
> photographs, and charts
>
> <Attachment: AnnualReport.doc size: 128,000,000 bytes>
Uh huh; he's going to blast a 128Mb document around as an e-mail
attachment. What planet do you live on?
> And everybody includes every one of their 100,000 employees,
> every one of their 1 million investors, and every on of their
> 300,000 corporate customers.
Doesn't happen in our environment. See, we have these neat things
called "mail servers". One of the things they can do is limit the
amount of duplicated traffic. The CEO, netadmin, maybe one or two
others, can e-mail everyone; anyone else doing it, the mail server
contemplates whether the action is going to bring LAN traffic to a
crawl, and either you're doing something sensible, or it tells you to
go blow yourself.
Of course, using multiple distributed servers also helps... and with
100,000 employees, NOT doing that is just silly.
> > >displayable to non-O2K systems.
> >
> > No? The last version of WordPerfect I used couldn't be viewed on
> > other systems... unless you had appropriate translators for your
> > program. Corel Draw doesn't seem particularly suited to that sort
of
> > thing, either. Nor do any of the CAD programs I've used. Nor
do....
>
> Again, there are plenty of published standards including SGML, XML,
Yippee. You had a point, it was about _Word_. The fact that other
tools have exactly the same "failing" shows that this is not an
argument about Office, but about file format choice in general;
therefore perhaps the subject of another debate, but irrelevant here.
> Furthermore both Office and Linux support all of
> them. But NOOOOOO. MICROSOFT wants you to use Office <latest
version>
See? There you go again; it's MS who does it! MS is bad! Despite
the fact it's common practice in the industry as a whole. No, no,
gotta be MS's fault - even if you're working with a document format
which has never existed outside of HP.
Well, either that, or your comments are _not_ MS specific... in which
case, what's all the anti-MS crap here got to do with anything?
> > Oddly enough, most of these - including all versions of Office
I've
> > ever seen - offer other formats you can export to if you need to
send
> > the data to incompatable platforms. Can't do it in the native
format?
> > Whoopee.
>
> This is precisely my point.
A minute ago, your point was something about Word, then about MS.
Corel Draw, as an example, is neither. How this even *possibly*
relates to your point, I failt to see.
> You asserted that I had to be able
> to read and write all documents in your proprietary formats.
I asserted no such thing. For one, I don't know where you live, so
attempting to force you - to support the "had to" clause of that -
would be silly.
> > >can't publish or distribute (because of the viruses)
> >
> > No such issue; we publish and distribute Office documents all
around
> > the enterprise on a regular basis.
>
> And if one of those machines has a virus that hasn't been plugged
> into your virus guard, you suddenly have outlook pumping ILOVEYOU
> all over the internet.
Twaddle; We had a couple folks get hit by ILOVEYOU. Soon as it
happened, a netadmin post came out, to the effect "Don't open this";
as if most of us needed the warning. About 2 minutes later, the
servers had their rules modified such that any such message was killed
at the server, before it ever reached another internal - or external -
machine. End of problem.
> The problem with a proprietary format which allows you to embed
> executables, unreadable scripts, and modify files (create, execute,
> read, write) is that you really dont know what you are getting.
> You could be getting a resume from a terrific candidate, or you
could
> be getting a stealth virus from one of your competitors.
Uh huh. Guess what happens whenever I open a document with an
embedded script in it? I get a warning; it says soemthing to the
effect of "Look, bonehead, these things can contain viruses. Don't
enable macro support unless you're goddamned certain the person
sending it knows what he's doing. Now, do you _really_ want to enable
macro support?"
Not those exact words, of course, but that's the gist of it. Guess
what? I've yet to be infected by these ILOVEYOU and variants...
because I _don't_ enable macro support unless I am sure. Nor do about
99.5% of the users in the company. (There's always a couple of folks
who just won't pay attention... but that's okay, the mail server deals
with them.)
Oh... one side note. I did, once, in the office, go to open a
document which, it turns out, had a virus. Guess what? Up pops a
little dialog box, saying something to the effect of "Document X has a
virus in it; the document will not be opened." Um... okay. A quick
e-mail to the sender, a quick scan of her machine, everyone's happy.
Total disruption of user work time... about 2 minutes. Our of about
three years.
> > >can't display them without very expensive equipment
> >
> > Expensive? Oh, right; the $1,000 machine we were talking about
> > earlier, the bottom end of the currently shipping machines scale.
> > Okay, so it's not a bottom-feeder system, but it's hardly "very
> > expensive".
>
> Were we talking about a machine that could read and write Office
2000
> formats, ran Windows 2000, and could publish and receive these
exclusive
> formats? And print it on USB printers and compose using USB
scanners?
Umm... okay, and? Lessee; I have two boxes here, both of which are
quite capable of doing the job. Total cost, including scanner,
printer *and* software, was about $2400, or about $1200 per PC. Then
again, they're not bottom-feeder machines, or at least, not quite.
So, what's this "very expensive equipment" you were talking about?
> Because if we're talking about exchanging RTF, HTML, GIF, and JPEG
> files I can use either a really cheap Windows 95 machine or a really
> cheap Linux machine.
Or a really cheap BeOS machine, or a really cheap Win2K machine, or...
> I'd have to pay a bit more (quite a bit more)
> for Windows 98, and MUCH more for Windows 2000, I could go hog wild
> and get a Linux on PPC or ALPHA - that'd be really expensive! :-).
> Or how about Solaris on an Ultra?
You can get an Ultra with Solaris - and a printer, and a scanner, and
let's make that two boxes - for under $2500?
> Hey, what the heck, I plug my Ultra into a cluster of E-10Ks or
S-80s
> and generate my MPEGs from simulation software in real-time.
Bully for you.
> And guess what, you'd be able to read all of the above on Linux,
> Windows, and UNIX.
Again, nully for you. Guess what? I can save my O2K documents as
HTML, if I want to. What's your point?
> No, I was thinking more in terms of a text search engine such as
> freeWAIS, Verity, TexIS, Lycos, or Google. There are over a dozen
> really good search engines for HTML/XML/SGML, but the few I know of
> for Office 2000 proprietary-format documents are limited to only
> a few thousand documents.
Oh, well. The one I use readily handles hundreds of thousands of
documents, including O2K format... or indeed, any format which has an
OLE-style access method which the search tool can use to access the
document types it doesn't understand natively.
>
> > >You can print them,
> > > but you can't publish them in a format that can be printed by
> > others.
> >
> > What format would you like? RTF? Word Perfect 5.0? HTML? ASCII
> > Text?
>
> Precisely!
I _can_ publish them in those formats; you just got through saying
"you can't...".. Which is it?
> > Or you buy a clue. If you're an enterprise, the cost of hardware
and
> > software is completely insignificant in the first place... and if
you
> > want to save a few bucks, you bulk-purchase your hardware and you
buy
> > *licenses* for the software - at a much lower price.
>
> But you still pay installation (including back-up, hardware
replacement,
> restoration, training, and disposal costs - several hundred times
the
> cost of the licenses). The only time you can simply drop a ghosted
> machine onto somebody's desk is for new-hires. Other than that,
> a typical upgrade from NT to 2K can take 8-16 hours, which
translates
> to about 10-20 staff-hours.
Twaddle. The gf, who is hardly a computer genius, has no trouble at
all migrating between 98, ME, and 2K. Took her about 30 seconds to
get accustomed to it - because *I* organize things a little
differently than *she* does... but voila, she's up and running.
> Actually, most of the companies I've dealt with make purchase
> guarantees of 10,000 to 40,000 within 12 months. They get them for
> about $700 each.
Right... at a savings of something like a grand a machine. Voila;
your software licensing prices, plus enough left over for an office
party.
> Unfortunately, when Microsoft comes out with the
> next "really big thing" (Windows 2000, Office 2000) the prices jump,
> or the vendor goes on "allocation" making the newest machines (the
> ones that can run the new goodies) available at a premium price
> (usually $1000 each).
Weird; we don't have that problem; we keep paying reasonable license
fees, MS keeps sending us licenses.
> > That's $1000 per machine per year. Our office schedules $300 per
> > machine per year, and has been cutting that *back*. Why? Because
> > having initially invested in halfway decent machines (PIII-300's w
> > 10Gb drives as the base), 90% of the upgrading costs are dropping
> > extra RAM in. Since there's no need to drop in another 128Mb of
RAM
> > every year, the $300 per machine budget is overkill.
>
> This was certainly adaquate for Win NT with Office 2K, but when you
> are running W2K, O2K, Project 2k, SQL, VB, VC++, or some other
> nasting combination - adding in for saving documents passed around
> on outlook - you'll be running out of disk drive space really quick.
Excuse? My startup folder, at work, contains the following:
Outlook 2K
Outlook Express 5.5
Visual SourceSafe 6
A bug-tracking database client
ICQ
On top of that, I'm generally also running DevStudio 6, Word 2000, and
IE5.5. I'll occasionally also fire something else up, such as VB, or
more frequently, ISWI. The only time I have any trouble is when doing
builds with ISWI; that thing sucks RAM like you wouldn't believe.
Drive space? Not an isse; my personal stuff is my problem, company
stuff I'm not actively working on right this minute lives on the
network. We have multiple servers, but the one I do most of my work
on has about 200Gb online storage... running out isn't a concern for
the forseeable future, and if it does become an issue, we just drop
another drive into the server drive array.
No disk space worries, RAM's more than adequate for most daily tasks
(and I'm the only one running ISWI... so it's not an issue other than
for me, hardly as basis for changing the common configurations out).
Sorry, I missed the isses about drive space. or RAM. Or expensive
machines. Or expensive upgrades.
> You probably have 100/T ethernet, but the switches and routers get
> clogged, and when you do get to shared servers, the hard drives fill
> up even faster than the software.
Again, twaddle. If your drives fill that fast, it's because your
netadmin didn't do a proper needs analysis. Let's put the blame where
it belongs - in this case with the guy who figures saving $50 on a
drive is okay, because, after all, 40Gb of server storage is fine for
100+ users, right?
> I'm going based on budgets established over the last several years
> from experience in several very large corporations. I deal with
those
> decisions up-close-and-ugly. More often, I deal with the decisions
> after the fact, trying to clean up the mess that happened because
some
> new manager figured the $1000/year/user/machine was too high and
> then blew away his budget.
It's *way* too high.
> Under Linux, I can deploy sensibly, in a more relaxed time frame (no
> panic to get to the next upgrade),
No panics on our end; why would you panic?
> the machines can be rotated more
> slowly,
As in, whenever convenient, the way we do? Other than in cases of
actual system failures, that is.
> and there is less of a crisis to purchase when supplies are
> at their tightest. I can book contractors who are happy to get the
> work during quieter periods, and I won't have as many retraining
> costs (after the first release of Linux).
We don't have much in the way of retraining costs, either, so none of
this really matters in terms of Linux vs Windows advantages or
disadvantages.
> Again, by adopting corporate standards that support BOTH Windows
> AND Linux, I don't even have to panic-upgrade everybody to Linux.
We avoid that, generally, by standardizing on one platform.... then
again, we're a Windows development shop, makes sense. Still, we don't
have the issues of deling with rolling out two radically different
OSen.
> I can start with programmers (who should be learning Linux to better
> handle UNIX servers),
Since when are programming and network administration even related?
Hell, even the old SMS script approach is severely dated.
> Customer Service people (who need more reliable
> machines, faster access to multiple information sources, ability to
> switch desktops based on needs, and ability to get real-time
feedback
> on a proactive basis (as opposed to polling).
Like we do, in our tech support department, quite happily under
Windows? Okay, I'm still missing your point here....
> > Why would MS want to force you into buying more hardware? Are
they
> > getting kickbacks from Kingston Memory Systems, Quantum and
Maxtor?
> Actually, they get OEM contracts on terms that they would otherwise
> never get. Microsoft waits until the market is lame, prices are
> falling like a rock, then tells the OEM that unless he signs a
contract
> that excludes all competitiors from the marketplace, he will be
> selling last-year's product next year (kiss of death for any OEM).
Well, bully for MS. Doesn't force me into buying that hardware, does
it? No. That *was* the point, though, right? MS wanting to force
*you*, not some hardware vendor, into buying hardware. They've never
done it with me, they've never done it with our office, how do they do
it with you? Does Guido come over with his gun and say "I'm from
Microsoft; you will buy a new hard drive"?
All in all, I'm very confused what your point was.... other than an
underlying impression that whomever you have running your network
administration really has no clue at all and should be replaced -
likely at large savings to your organization.
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