Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes “Windows 2000 Users: The Clock Is Ticking. June 30 marks the end of mainstream support for both the client and server Windows 2000 releases. A Windows 2000 rollup pack is still due by midyear.”
Time to start evaluating your options for your next operating system. There are lots of good choices out there. Me? I’m thinking Tiger, Ubuntu, Fedora and perhaps a little SuSE ought to do me.
OSNews also points to Linux Insider: How Linux Saved Microsoft. “Rob Enderle has an commentary at LinuxInsider discussing the effect Linux has had on Microsoft. An excerpt: “As I look at how Microsoft is changing to address the Linux threat, one that may actually turn out to be no more real then Netscape’s was, I can’t help but see how Microsoft has dramatically benefited from it — and much more broadly so than they did from the rise of Netscape.”
I think Enderle is right on when he talks about the effect that Open Source is having with Microsoft. “Competition breeds Innovation.” However, I think he falls off the deep end in his last section “False Threat?” where he tries to explain what Open Source is.
… “open source” which, in turn, is based on a false concept. This concept is that people actually want to look at source code. No, it’s that people want the security of knowing that the code is there for a community to maintain, support and enhance, that a monopolistic code owner can’t take away the freedom to run the code they have.
Finally, we know that what is largely holding the open-source community together is a dislike for Microsoft. Little holds the community together! 🙂 But the individuals who choose Open Source each choose it for their own reasons, often freedom of choice, freedom to experiment, freedom to extend, integrate, modify and hack together the solution to their own problem. It’s not about Microsoft, nor Computer Associates, nor IBM, nor any other one target.
… unless something dramatically changes, by 2015 we’ll be largely wondering what all the fuss surrounding Linux was really about. Perhaps, Rob. See you in 2015 and we can compare notes.
OSNews points to a Fortune magazine story Microsoft’s New Mantra: ‘It Just Works’. “Microsoft’s Jim Allchin says that the number one design goal for Longhorn has been: “it just works.” In other words, a lot of the fiddly, annoying tasks that computer users have become accustomed to (or never quite got the hang of) such as searching for files, defragmenting, changing network configurations, and tweaking security settings, will happen automatically.”
It’s an interesting piece, especially reading between the lines on the marketing message Allchin is trying to deliver. Microsoft has at least another year before they deliver the OS they have been talking about for a long, long time. Watch how the message changes.
Ars System Guide: April 2005 edition. “For the true PC enthusiast, nothing beats building your own system. Enter the Ars Technica System Guide. It covers every component you’ll need to build (or upgrade) your system, from the RAM to the power supply. The April 2005 guide sees some serious updates from the last time we did this. Most importantly, we go 64-bit across the board. That’s right Ö even the Budget Box gets a heaping spoonful of 64-bit loving from us. And there’s more… read on to find out what’s new.” By news@arstechnica.com (Ars Technica).
Three remarkable systems, all 64-bit, priced around $800, $1500 and $10,000. Check ’em out.
Jeffrey Zeldman via his Apartness persona blogs “How to Include Web Standards in an RFP.” An excellent idea, and one that should be included in all RFPs, imho.
PEBCAK: Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard.
Check. Spent way too long trying to figure out why a machine would not communicate with an UPS, no matter what the settings. Varied everything. Checked the BIOS. Tried a different driver. RTFM. RTF-FAQs. Searched the mailing list archives. Googled everything I could think of. Finally pulled the cable and tried the tests again. Same result. Doh. Serial ports blown. Darn hardware.
Slashdot posts: MS: Beta Software Good Enough for Production Use. “RMX writes “CNet is reporting that Microsoft is starting to license test software for real-world use. In particular, Visual Studio 2005 and the April “community technology preview” of SQL Server 2005 are both supposed to be released sometime in the second half of the year. But Microsoft is claiming the pre-release versions are stable already, so they’re licensing the pre-released versions on the grounds that they ‘are already suitable for running production business applications.'”
Where do you start with an article like this? Microsoft knew they were throwing bloody meat into a tank of hungry sharks.
The good angel pops up on the right shoulder and says “Now, Ted, there’s nothing to gain by commenting on this.” The little devil, looking a lot like the BSD daemon, speaks up “Burn them! Burn them!”
The cheap punchlines are irresistable: “How can you tell Microsoft software is in beta?” “It’s shipping.” *rimshot*
The truth is always somewhere in the middle of extreme positions. I had the honor of working with the Fox Software and Microsoft FoxPro team over the past fifteen years, and when they shipped a beta, it was a beta: feature-complete, pretty much documented, passes a smoke test, not likely to destroy your data, nearly impossible to destroy your machine, solid and nearly ready for production. The Fox Team understood beta meant ready for testing in a form unlikely to cause heartache for their customers, top-notch database application developers.
“Beta” on the other hand, means different things in different parts of Microsoft. An associate devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to mastering BizTalk in Beta One, only to have Beta Two ship with so many changes that it was effectively a new product. A huge waste of time and effort trying to lead the market and “partner” with Microsoft.
Rick Schummer over at Shedding Some Light reacts: “I for one would never deploy a production version of my custom applications with beta products at this stage of development, and I have worked with some rock solid beta versions in the past. What happens to your production products when Microsoft decides to pull a feature out of the product because it cannot be tested sufficiently or they decide it was poorly designed or implemented?”
The Free/Open Source Software community seems to have a different perspective on the idea. Software is hardly ever complete. And if the software is complete, the problem has probably changed, or there’s new hardware to support, a new language to translate, or a new interface to support. So, if the software is sufficiently mature, there’s usually a “stable” version that’s been around for a while, an “unstable” version with new features, but not a lot of history, and an “cutting-edge” version, sometimes a nightly build, for those who want to help develop or test the source hot off the keyboards. So, you pick the version that’s right for you. You find the version that has the features that you need, balances your risk aversion with reports of problems, and see if it meets your needs. Download, build, install, test, evaluate and go live.
I’ve become a big fan of SSH for creating secure tunnels to remote clients. Using the port redirection facilities of SSH, you can remotely access databases, web servers and other services without exposing the services themselves to the Internet. SSH also includes support for remote file transfer to let you download data from a client or upload a new script.
While single files are easy from the command line, a two-pane file manager interface is easier for more complex tasks. WinSCP works well in this role for Windows clients and is licensed under the GPL. Yesterday, I trolled around a bit and found fugu for Mac OS X, a similar interface, licensed under a BSD-like interface. Both make file transfer a snap.
NUT, the Network UPS tools, consists of three small programs that run interdependently: the driver for the particular UPS, which understands the protocol it speaks, the upsd daemon, which communicates with the driver and responds to client requests, and the client software, which can reside locally or remotely. Having three separate tools provides great flexibility: several low-power devices can share one UPS and listen to the one daemon. One daemon can maintain communication with several UPS drivers. Clients are available on multiple platforms for interoperability. Elegant and simple design. Visit the home page at http://www.networkupstools.org/
UPDATE: A handy reference for installing and configuring NUT so that it automatically starts on bootup of OS X: http://www.llondel.org/ups.shtml
Slashdot points to a disturbing survey on Toms hardware showing that only 24% of corporate computers running XP have been patched to the latest version. It is worrisome that so many people have to work on machines with known exploits.