Posts by Trevor_Pott

If you use the M4 config editor, it will indeed blow away all other changes in the .mc. I don't know that I'd ever "ignore that fact," Vic. It's pretty much the way M4 is support to work. If you use tools that edit the .mc directly - or you enjoy going in and editing the .mc by hand - then do not use the sendmail module in webmin. Period.

That said, I was taught emphatically to never edit the .mc file in sendmail directly. In fact, I have been berated and mocked by sendmail devs for doing so. If I go onto a sendmail forum for help, or I try the mailing list, etc...I am repeatedly and forcefully told that I am never to do anything outside of M4. M4 is where configuration changes are "supposed" to be made, and so I make them there.

Things like virtuser and aliases as generally include files nowadays, so I can use the Sendmail webmin module to edit those without clobbering my config every time I touch M4. This means that the Sendmail module will allow me to do things “properly,” which means that when I need support from the community, I have at least a snowball’s chance in a neutron star of getting it.

That said, I would never berate someone for editing the .mc directly. There are so many different ways to do something in Linux that I don’t feel it’s my place to tell someone that their method is “wrong,” so long as it works consistently for them. I don’t have the jihadi attitude about such things that is so prevalent amongst Linux nerds.

So if you are following the “rules” as laid out by the Sendmail devs, you are using M4 to generate ever config change, with aliases, virtuser, generics etc pulled out as includes so they don’t get clobbered by M4 regeneration. In that case, I highly recommend the Sendmail module, because it works…even when something else edits the M4 or the includes.

If however you edit the .mc directly, the sendmail module in Webmin will screw up your Sendmail something fierce and you should stay away from it!

Re: @ Trevor Pott 's reasoning

Linux systems never get compromised? That's a larf. They most certainly do; almost always through some badly coded PHP something or other. (To be fair, they also tend to compromise windows systems.)

Yes, you generally need anti-malware on Linux systems. If for no other reason than to ensure that your web applications haven't been hijacked by someone looking to poison the rest of the net. Or do you have even the remotest shred of evidence to say that every single compromised website is IIS based? How do you dismiss a decade's worth of evidence that shows several thousands new LAMP systems compromised every month?

I’m legitimately curious.

Re: Who is this article aimed at?

Article is aimed at Windows admins who are cautiously branching out by deploying a few Linux systems.

Sendmail module on webmin has "M4 configuration." Use that, then have it build your .mc. I have been using it for >5 years, works like a hot damn.

Re: @Trevor

@eulampios Careful now, your bias and intellectual dishonesty is showing. Windows Core does a hell of a lot more than Debian squeeze. Yet you insist on comparing them, why? Windows Core's more direct comparison is CentOS 6 without X installed. The install size and default RAM requirements, just by the by, are nearly identical in that situation. Also note that Windows Core - like all Windows since Vista - is an image based installer. It installs an image of a default instal that contains its complete package repository. So all that you need to add any of the features included with the OS is copied to the disk at that time, not pulled from a remote repository.

It is of interest to me that you can't make technical distinctions like this.

Furthering my concern regarding your bias is that you brush aside valid concerns regarding the state of Linux’s desktop readiness with a thinly veiled conspiracy theory. Let me try to spell something out for you here: the problem with Linux on Tier 1 hardware is the chicken and the egg.

Linux takes more money to prototype and eventually support in a desktop environment due to limited hardware support. (All of us “pretentious” people demanding things like graphics cards that work well enough to play games or run multimedia without artifacts.) The costs on this won’t go down until more Tier 1 OEMs offer Linux on their devices, thus having a vested financial interest in bringing requisite pressure to bear on device manufacturers to provide proper support.

Without pressure from Tier 1s, device manufacturers have no reason to provide support, so there is crappy driver support which in turn means that Tier 1s don’t want to ship Linux.

Compare this to Microsoft where Microsoft itself is the size of two or three Tier 1 players on its own. Here Microsoft can lean on manufacturers right alongside the Tier 1 OEMs. There are thus good reasons to ship Microsoft on your hardware.

No conspiracies are required here; shipping Microsoft instead of Linux is a sound financial decision.

So for this reason I will support Dell’s Linux Ultrabook. This is Dell taking a risk. They are inserting themselves into this chicken-and-egg cycle here. They will not make money on this Ultrabook and they know it…but they are doing it anyways. They are giving open source a chance here by attempting to create a market that can eventually bring the kind of pressure to bear on manufacturers that the Microsoft ecosystem to exert.

Dell’s move here might well be one of the only chances that open source gets this decade for a real, honest to god chance at becoming something real in the desktop space.

And you – with your well demonstrated pro-open source, anti-Microsoft bias – want to piss on that olive branch? Out of what…some offence taken at actions a decade ago that you mistakenly believe indicate back room collusion must still be occurring today?

Wow.

Just...wow...

Re: @Trevor

Maybe my Linux complaints are pretentious. Oh well, so be it. When I pay money for something, it had damned well better deliver. Whether that be hardware or software.

Unlike some, I don’t seek out “free, as in beer.” I do have a philosophical soft spot for “free, as in speech,” however I prefer “actually works” to both. When I encounter an open source project that I end up using, I typically find a way to donate money to it.

With RHEL, this is straightforward: I pay for support. Other projects – such as CentOS or Apache – require me to hunt a donation button. On occasion, I even run into someone who outright refuses to let me donate (the Notepad++ guy springs to mind.) In general however, I believe that a man’s labours deserve to be rewarded. I don’t like to owe anything to anyone; legally or morally.

By the same token, I expect anyone working on anything to have pride in their work. I expect every person who undertakes a task – from flipping burgers to writing a kernel – to give it the absolute best they possibly can. If and when I encounter professional apathy I take my custom elsewhere.

Is demanding commitment and quality pretentious? I suppose only the reader can answer that. I can honestly say that I try very hard to meet the same standards I set for other people. When I slack off, I am typically quite unhappy with myself and end up feeling guilty enough to kick my own ass back into working hard.

So this colours how I approach computer selection. Be it software or hardware, I expect whatever I am putting on my systems to work and work well. For the most part, Linux does. But Linux is certainly not perfect. There are flaws and there are areas that need improvement.

Some of these areas are things that open source developers can do nothing about; they rely on vendors to pull their socks up and do the right thing. While these issues may not be the “fault” of the open source community, failure of vendors to work with the open source community does in fact diminish the value of Linux (and similar projects) when trying to create a workable, production-ready environment.

Similarly, there are issues within the open source community itself. Communications issues, personality conflicts, jihads about every which little thing. These issues come to a head in the weirdest ways. An upstream developer outright refusing to make a minor change for philosophical reasons, the result of which is that their package has to either be maintained by a third party in order to make it into certain distributions or that it simply never does.

Security updates can lag behind for these sorts of reasons too, as can bugfixes. How many times have I had to completely reinstall an anti-spam VM with a newer distro because bloody ClamAV and Fedora/Ubuntu/RHEL couldn’t get whatever communications issue they have solved enough to get the latest ClamAV versions into the repo? For the record: this happens about once every 8 months.

Criticising the open source community – and the vendor community – for failing to work together isn’t blasphemy. It isn’t an attack on you, personally, your beliefs or some sort of failure in my critical thinking capability.

There are flaws in Linux. There are flaws in Windows. There are flaws in every flavour of Unix, VMS, OSX and any other operating system, application, business process, economic model, political philosophy and so forth that you care to name.

To allow yourself to become so completely wedded to anything – corporation, operating system, philosophy, political ideology – that you take every criticism as a personal slight is to limit your own thinking and ability to objectively consider alternatives.

I believe it is morally, ethically, philosophically and economically wrong to alter our expectations regarding software and hardware to suit what is available. I far prefer the model where we as consumers, systems administrators and business owners continually hold the products we purchase and the projects we support to ever higher standards.

This – in my opinion – is what drives innovation. Voting with out wallets is one tool; providing support in terms of manpower, knowledge or otherwise is another. Continually pushing barriers and never being satisfied with “good enough” is how we get “better.”

You make comments about how a “comparable” windows setup needs more resources than a Linux one. I call utter bullshit on that. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but in the past ten years, Microsoft got this “ambition” thing down pat. Windows 7 can kick some serious ass, even on low-spec machines.

If you want to go even lower spec, there’s Windows core for servers, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone for ARM. Believe it or not, these systems pack quite a punch, even on systems I wouldn’t have thought it possible for them to operate on.

Feature for feature, I honestly believe that Windows can match Linux for performance. It is only with a great deal of intellectual dishonesty (comparing a stripped down Linux GUI with zero bells and whistles to a full-fat, all-the-shiny-on Windows GUI, for example) that you can really make Linux come out ahead.

I can make Windows 7 (classic mode) about as responsive on my crappy single core P4 1Gig as XFCE in CentOS6. Then again, I’ve got 15 years as a Windows admin, and at least 10 working with Linux. I know what I’m doing in both arenas.

Despite this, standing up and saying “hey, you know what, you’re wrong about Windows” doesn’t make me a Windows fanboy. My posting history – in the comments as well as my articles, my personal website and my twitter account – will verify that.

I’m an agnostic; I care about the best tool for the job, period.

So I maintain: sometimes that’s Linux…but just as often not. Windows owns the desktop for a reason, though Linux is slowly getting better.

Dell being willing to support an Ultrabook shipping Linux is huge. It could mean that we will finally see the kind of pressure we need brought to bear against vendors to finally bring Linux the rest of the way towards a true competitor with Microsoft on the desktop.

Apple is in the mix too; what works for Apple should more-or-less work for Linux, and Valve’s nice Steam-for-Ubuntu announcement brings yet another 800lb gorilla into the fight. (Indeed, I am of the opinion that the Valve console rumours will end up being a Steam-for-Ubuntu box on a fixed set of hardware…but that is probably just wishful thinking on my part.)

The point is: an open source philosophy and happy thoughts aren’t enough to make Linux truly competitive on the desktop. Slapping recalcitrant vendors around with a trout is periodically required. In the history of Linux as an operating system, “the community” has had precious few victories in this regard. Now, with Google, Apple, Dell and Valve having vested interests in Linux/Unix drivers, we might finally see the kind of hardware support that “pretentious” folk like me demand of our systems.

At that point, a prominent presence on the desktop becomes a very real possibility.

Re: @Trevor

@eulampios

I don't think you hold your operating system choices to much of a standard. "2D is good enough?" No. A properly set up system will deliver me 200fps on my games, even when running in WINE.

You talk a lot about how much "better" Linux is than Windows, but at the same time simply pooh-pooh any desire I have to actually utilise the performance of my hardware as irrelevant.

If all you are looking for is a flat, basic, 2D environment that can run a command line…then Linux will do that on just about any hardware. I’m sorry to tell you however that this isn’t good enough. This isn’t “working.’

My phone provides superior performance to that.

A desktop needs to be able to do everything I throw at it. Compile code, run 3D simulations, play games, remote into other computers, run virtual machines, run peripherals, browse the internet, play multimedia, serve as a communications center, teleconference with people around the world, operate a colour calibratable monitor using DDC/CI, and so very much more.

Bare bones basic functionality is fine…for a child’s toy. Any desktop I use – or deliver to a customer – is going to be able to make full use of its hardware. In the Linux world that pretty universally means not relying on the drivers built into the kernel.

If all you want is a palm pilot, grand. I need me a proper smartphone. If all you want is Windows 3.1-era tech, grand. I want colour calibrated real-time 3D with blinding FPS and 10.2 smell-o-vision in sensesurround. Anything less than the ability to use every single feature of the hardware I purchase is a failure of the installed software.

So I'm not a "fan" of any software. Or any development houses. I'm not emotionally attached to any operating system, application or programming philosophy. I use whatever works and works best. What helps me get the most productivity for the least amount of money, effort and support hours.

Sometimes that is Linux, but just as often…it’s not.

Re: Ultrabook with Ubuntu and Steam for Linux?

Why wouldn't I persist? Windows XP/2003 wasn't much better, stats-wise. How much time did we spend back then finding exactly the right driver ToE to work, or for that video game to not crash? We don't think of it like that, because "that's just the way it is." I look at Linux the same way. Most people don't go all the way, get every hardware element to work as its designers intended. I do. It's part of being a sysadmin; it simply comes with the job.

"It passes packets" ian't good enough; I want tcp offloading. "The desktop works in 2D" isn't good enough; I want my games in WINE to be delivering 200fps. "Works" and "works properly" are separate concepts; and the latter is very much hit-or-miss in the Linux world at the moment.

This may be largely due to vendors being douches - isn't it always? - but it still degrades the value of Linux in a desktop role.

Re: Ultrabook with Ubuntu and Steam for Linux?

I've probably installed Ubuntu, Fedora or CentOS on 200 different hardware configurations in the past 3 months. ~95% of them "work," where "work" is defined as "meets the minimum functionality for that device. ~60% of them actually work, where "work" is "utilises the full functionality of a device, such as TCP offloading or full 3d graphics."

~5% of hardware configurations won’t work at all, and require a component swap. Such is my life with Linux; and the diversity of hardware I work with.

Re: Linux = Good idea, Ultrabook = Bad Idea

They do. I have several. My favourite is the Asus Transformer. As I recall, Android is a Linux distribution, and the Asus Transformer very much so runs on an ARM processor.

I get 12 hours of typing into an RDP session while it is using WiFi to connect through my cell phone to the internet. Oh, and it's generally charging said cell phone off the USB port most of that time...

Re: Ultrabook with Ubuntu and Steam for Linux?

@Chemist: I am aware how much Linux's hardware support has increased over the years. By the same token, I am describing issues I am having right now, today, with hardware varying between 6 years old and brand-new-COTS equipment. This equipment ranges from cheap-as-derp to high-end-server-gear.

I am sorry to have to say it, but in my professional capacity as a systems administrator based on more than a decade's everyday experience with Linux (in many incarnations) there are still significant hardware issues that plague support. You cannot simply buy any old off-the-shelf system and have it work properly. For all the ills and evils of Microsoft's business strategies, hardware support remains superior within the Microsoft ecosystem.

@eulampios

First off, Intel Video Drivers (especially for anything Nahalem or Older) are ass. they are not regular ass, they are as special kind of ass for which an entirely separate wing of hell was created.

nVidia anything is...well...Torvalds said it well. AMD isn't far behind. There are some binaries that work well in some configurations...and in others mysteriously cause X to lock hard, requiring me to drop to command line, INIT 3 and then INIT 5 again.

This is nothing like the stability of Windows 7 on (for example) my Alienware MX18. I haven’t rebooted that thing in about 6 months. Lots of hibernating and suspending, not a single reboot. Still runs my games like a charm.

I’ve had issues with TCP offloading using Broadcom-based NICs, as well as older Intel NICs. This used to be a big issue under Windows 2003, but went away (mostly) on these same cards with Server 2008 R2. For love nor money I can’t get them to behave in CentOS unless I kill all the offloading with fire.

I have issues with Adpatec RAID cards under Linux. Specifically 3805 series cards with the latest firmware. I have had all sorts of problem with Ricoh card readers under both Ubuntu and FC17 and there is a very special place in my heart reserved for the trauma induced by trying to get various flavours of barcode and slip printer to work.

Oh, and I have a whole 5-page unpublished article on the rageface caused by CentOS 5/6 and some Intel Atom board I bought a dozen of. There is some absolutely bizarre bug in the NIC drivers. If you have an add-in-gigabit Ethernet card, then every single device on the same broadcast domain must talk at the same speed, or the NIC freaks out and throttles everything to 1Mbit/sec.

No, I don’t understand it etiher. Yes, this is a switched environment. No, I’m not crazy, this is completely reproducible across multiple pieces of hardware, and verified by four other sysadmins.

If I have a 1Gbit NIC attached to a gigabit switch and there is a 100Mbit –only device on that same switch, this Atom box will suddenly not communicate at anything faster than 1Mbit until you reboot it. That’s with all the offloading turned off, everything. Both NICs on the system (both Intel-based, but different models) will behave this way. Use only one NIC? No problem. Use a Broadcom or Realtek instead of an Intel for the add-on? No problem.

Damned if I know why, but it was frustrating as hell and cost me about a week of my life.

I run into these things all the time with Linux. I used to run into this crap with Windows…but most of that went away around the time Server 2008 R2 started becoming mainstream.

Understand me here; I’m not bashing Linux. I use it all the time. But I have yet to find a distro – any distro – that I can simply install on any random bit of hardware I pick up at the local computer shop and start playing games.

Run a webserver with Webmin, or a nice ridiculous DPI firewall? Usually. (Except for that one NIC bug…)

But “just works” desktop? Linux just isn’t there yet, sorry. Maybe with moves from companies like Dell and this Ultrabook, one day it will be.

Re: Ultrabook with Ubuntu and Steam for Linux?

The honest truth? Support. Specifically driver support for graphics.

Dell releasing an officially supported Linux notebook has a much higher chance of releasing it with a combination of Distro version and hardware that actually has driver support that isn't complete ass. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of dealing with shitty driver support on Linux. (I’m look at you, nVidia, Intel and AMD!) I want the damned thing to “just work.”

Linux does what I need it to do in nearly every case…except for the hardware support. It’s terrible. It’s Vista-right-at-release terrible, and its been that way for ages. Even Apple can’t get these guys to play nice with the graphics drivers, for $deity’s sake!

So I am not going to put myself up against Apple for quality control here. I am not arrogant enough to believe that I am capable of vetting hardware on the level of a corporation worth a significant chunk of Europe. Nor do I have the raw money required to buy prototype models for testing on a regular basis!

Dell however stands a reasonably good chance of being able to work this out. They have experience trying to do the hardware thing for Windows with a diversity of devices that would make Apple weep in terror.

So would I like a Linux device provided to me wrapped in a nice little bow and with driver updates handled by the vendor? You bet your ass!

Look, I’m not into open source because I’m a giant nerd wanting to tinker with Linux’s internals all day long, program some widget, compile packages from source or futz with a config file.

I want to use Linux because Windows 8 is asstastic. Worse, Microsoft’s recent actions have proven to me that they refuse to listen to SME clients and as such I cannot bet my business on them. I want to use Linux because I need to exit the Microsoft ecosystem based on trust issues, not philosophical ones.

But I still want a similar alternative. One where a vendor provides me an OS that simply works; where updates are pre-vetted by the vendor and where common software configurations are well tested.

To be honest, Android is more and more filling this role for me. Apple is also ready for the enterprise. But Android docking stations are rare as hen’s teeth, and they don’t support multiple external displays. Apple is simply too expensive for me to run my business on; we’re still too small yet.

So that leaves me looking for at vendor that will provide me with a Linux notebook, desktop and other such things. I don’t need Microsoft to run my business, nor do I feel I can trust them with my company’s future. But I like a lot of the things that used to be part of the Microsoft ecosystem. I’m hoping that this move by Dell – combined by others such as Steam porting to Ubuntu – are the first steps in building a business-class user endpoint ecosystem surrounding a mainstream Linux distro.

Why won’t I “just install Linux on another notebook?” Because I’m voting with my wallet here. To tell Dell “more of this, please.” To encourage a mainstream vendor to take a risk, to provide me the ecosystem and support that I want to see. I’ll buy this because its there…and I want more like it.

Re: Ultrabook with Ubuntu and Steam for Linux?

I can drive. Frankly, if I am forced to choose between a 12hr (each way) road trip with my wife through some lovely mountains and national parks (oh no!) and buying a Macbook...

...then the gas and wear+tear on my vehicle is totally worth it.

After all, even with the distance travelled to obtain the device, it'll still be cheaper than the Mac. I'm sure the fact that my clients will request I bring back several dozen to cover off their needs will make it a worthwhile trip. Ubuntu is really catching on up here. Maybe if enough of us try to register our shiny new Dell ultrabooks from Canada, Dell will relent and allow us to purchase them (and support them!) here in Canada.

It isn't the perfect solution...but it beats having to use a Mac.

Re: Yawn

Well there's the issue then; I've only had to contact Microsoft for support regarding SQL Server twice, and they were acceptibly mediocre about support both times!

Re: Yawn

I never said that you should "spend money only on open source." I said - very narrowly at access - that everything I've ever had to do with it I can do faster and easier with MySQL and PHP. When I need a real database for real things, I use Microsoft SQL.

Just because I advocate open source for particular use cases does not mean I advocate it for all.

What unbelievable prejudice and narrowness of thinking you have. Don't reject a solution simply because you dislike the company or economic model behind the product. Consider all solutions and choose the one which does the job with the best balance of ease-of-use, compatibility, extensibility and price.

Just don't go whinging on the internets because the sweet spot is more and more "not Microsoft." Go agitate for change inside your preferred vendor instead. It is far more helpful.

Re: Yawn

Companies spend money on IT so that IT can solve a problem. Solving that problem in a manner cheaper than paying a human to do the same task, either because it performs the task faster, with fewer errors, or both.

They do not pay for IT because someone told them they should. They do not buy a specific product because an astroturfer or marketer told them to. They pay for IT because the specific solution at hand meets the requirements of the task, is the cheapest solution that does so and won't endanger future productivity by limiting options or compatibility.

There are wide ranging considerations to all aspects of IT. I advise my clients to think about many things. I don’t simply say “Microsoft is bad.” Indeed, I push Microsoft solutions when and where they are appropriate, which is to nearly every client I have.

I do not however push Microsoft’s client operating system or office package. Why? Because there is simply no need to do so. It isn’t something my clients absolutely must have, and it isn’t necessarily the best fit for their requirements.

Which has been the whole goddamned point of my recent articles, including this one. Microsoft is falling away from “the default, de facto item.” At the fringes first (SMEs,) but this will spread. I am starting to see it now even in large deployments.

The endpoints can be whatever the user wants. Windows. Mac. Linux. Android…who cares? As long as the apps can be found to do the job…the choice of OS here isn’t nearly as relevant today as it was five years ago.

I don’t need my client to “give me the opportunity to work on something I think is cool.” Writing for The Register does that. I can ask a vendor; they’ll usually let me try their latest widget.

In addition, I run my own company. If I wanted to use the latest Linux/Mac/Windows/whatever, I simply choose to do so. Don’t be so presumptuous as to believe that I would force my predjudices upon my customers or advise them to choose something simply because I “like a company” or “dislike that other one.”

That’s bullshit, and you know it.

If Windows is the best OS for a customer, I’ll tell them to buy Windows. If it’s not, I’ll tell them to buy something else. In almost every case however, I am in the position to ask the customer “what do you want to use?” Because those customers’ needs can be met by any modern operating system.

And it’s a great thing to live in a world where that is true.

Re: Yawn

Where have I ever stated that I don't like Microsoft? More precisely, where have I ever stated that I dislike Microsoft specifically, as though with prejudice? I like plenty of people who work for Microsoft. I like many of the departments, divisions and products produced by Microsoft. I believe Microsoft to be in many ways one of the more ethical actors in the IT landscape; for example, the license all their patents to competitors, instead of keeping them tightly tucked close the vest, as bludgeons to prevent competition.

But you can like many aspects of a multinational corporation while loathing others. You can like certain actions or choices made by the body corporate whilst still believing that the larger corporate direction is flawed. In this case, I honestly and earnestly believe that the decisions made by Microsoft will rain down ruination upon not only Microsoft proper, but the entire Microsoft ecosystem, from partners and resellers to the very systems administrators that are paid to support their product.

I don’t write much in the way of “news” here on the register. I periodically write in depth reviews of some products, and I do some technical deep dives into things. But the Systems Administrator’s blog is just that: a blog. It isn’t “news.” It isn’t the latest feeds and speeds and regurgitated press releases.

As I see it, the sysadmin blog is a discussion of “things” that affect systems administrators. These could be products, they could be legal issues. The “things” we need to care about could the direction of a corporation or a security vulnerability resulting from an unforeseen interaction between two applications.

This isn’t a place to simply reword some press releases. You have a whole rest of the website for that. The kind folks who publish my articles helpfully label my opinion column as a “sysadmin blog,” in case you are offended by something other than the bland delivery of pre-vetted fact.

I do try for objectivity in my writing. There are limits to objectivity however; when dealing with theoretical or opinion, the prognostication involved extends beyond the mere reporting of fact. This has been the basis of opinion columns since we have had mass publication. I present to you what I believe to be true…and why I believe it to be so. I will even engage with you in the comments if you feel I am mistaken…and I have had my arguments defeated soundly before.

Rhetoric, however, simply will not sway me. The plaintive cries of a wounded ego of the visceral evocations of emotive “reasoning” will not alter my opinion. If you wish to alter my views about the world – and by consequence what I write about – then you must make a sound logic argument grounded in unimpeachable logic and backed by clearly verifiable fact.

I will then engage you in some debate. Probe the logic you display. What assumptions underlie your arguments; what values underpin the judgements you make? Raw science shouldn’t require value judgements and here my opinion is shaped by fundamental science and repeatable, peer-reviewed works.

But economic and ethical arguments become trickier. I believe very strongly in the following:

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but the needs of the few outweigh the desires of the many. The fact that most people are not capable of separating need from desire is where most strife occurs.

If you fundamentally disagree with my ethical viewpoint above, then many economic, ethical or political opinion topics will never be resolvable between us. We simply disagree at too fundamental a level for any of the higher order operations to work themselves out.

If however we can agree on that fundamental basis of ethics, then productive debate is possible. We simply have to follow the flow of logic from this basic assumption to its application in the current environment.

But that is how opinion columns work. They are distinct from news. If you want to prevent my opinion from being aired you have two choices:

Convince me that I am wrong, or appeal to The Powers That Be to censor me.

Calling me names on the internet and saying Mean Things however is not going to dissuade me.

tl;dr: Bitch please, I’m from the Internet.

Re: outside of a few Excel power users ...

Everything I could do with Access, I could do with PHP and MySQL while drunk out of my mind and in half the time to boot.

*shrug*

Anyone who complains that Access is "just easier" is simply someone afraid to take the ~4 hours out that is required to learn PHP. Once you learn that, you'll never - ever - go back to Access.

Microsoft Access is Velcro, invented by committee and implemented by wage slave who view the end user as the enemy.

PHP/MySQL is proper shoelaces. Still not the best, but a damned sight better than most alternatives, and easily understood by the common man.

Eventually, someone with very deep pockets is going to scream antitrust...and this time it'll stick. Microsoft walk a very fine line with these shenanigans.

Re: You think MS don't know this?

I have enterprise Apple deployments in the real world. I even have Linux-on-the-desktop and a trail of Android-on-the-desktop.

For Microsoft to stay relevant, they have to prove to be offering superior value, even in the enterprise. Their name is mud. It is associated with lock-in, change to promote more lock-in, high prices and product differentiation that promotes more lock-in.

Maybe you like their interface choices. Good for you! Most don't. Even if you do - and that's a smallish chunk of people - you have to balance that against hard economic questions. "Is this a company that I am willing to bet my business on? Will they screw me? How hard?"

You advocate faith in Microsoft. I think that's certifiably insane. I don't have faith in a deity, why would I have faith in a corporation? More to the point, why would I have faith in a corporation that has done nothing to earn my trust and everything to take advantage of me and mine for decades?

Microsoft isn’t the default or the de facto solution anymore. And they are ill equipped to compete in the new world. Novell took a long time to die, too. And RIM is still twitching. But both are shadows of their former selves.

I believe that short of a dramatic overhaul in "listening to (and not screwing) customers," Microsoft is locked irrevocably on the same course.

Re: "The application suite has been rewritten from the ground up"

Um...duh? But retina displays are the only high-res displays even close to affordable, and they can be operated in "maximum workspace" instead of "retina" mode. I was pretty clear about wanting WORKSPACE not RETINA MARKETING CRAP. The retina Macbooks can provide either...assuming you have telescopic glasses.

What I *want* is a 50 inch display at 4k resolution for sub $1000 so that I can get as much utility out of a Windows-8/Office 2013 setup as I do today with a Windows 7/Office 2003 rig. That, or a suite of Microsoft software designed to MAXIMISE WORKSPACE by MINIMISING THE DAMNED INTERFACE while allowing me to use OVERLAPPING, RESIZEABLE WINDOWS.

If Microsoft are going to subsidise the cost of replacing all my displays with higher resolution ones in order to accommodate their design aesthetic, I'll write a lovely article about how they understand the needs of customers and are combining marketplace product development and acceleration with great design.

But if they expect me to have to pay more to get the same amount of work done, I am NOT going to be singing their praises.

Office 2013/Win 8/etc may one day be a great product…if the hardware ever catches up. Right now, today, they have a product that seems to me less useable than one of its antecedents, and there is zero indication of a shift in consumer electronics pricing and availability required to regain what was lost.

Let’s use a much-hated car analogy. Let’s say you’re the owner of a fleet of commercial vehicles. You’ve been using the Ford Taurus for 15 years, and it has served you well. Your entire business is build on this car, you know the ins and ours.

Ford announces tomorrow that the new Taurus will have limited self-driving capabilities. Hurrah! An upgrade! Unfortunately, it will only run on jet fuel. Ford simultainiously cancels all of its Taurus-like vehicles (so there is nothing like the old Taurus available,) and halts production of spare parts for your existing fleet of vehicles.

I think you’d be pretty pissed. Jet fuel is bloody expensive.

Now, if Ford was also announcing simultainiously that they were opening 50 jet fuel refineries in an effort to increase global supply (and drive prices down to the point where they are near parity with petrol,) then you would be far more inclined to migrate your Taurus fleet to the new jet-fuel pseudo-self-driving ones, but I bet you’d still be irritated you can’t get spare parts for the old ones.

This is Microsoft 2012. The difference is they aren’t out there building me the jet fuel refineries. They aren’t driving down the cost of the hardware to the point that throwing away 15 years of investment and buying newer, sleeker stuff to get the same functionality as before is even remotely palatable.

Fortunately, I have the same option as the Ford Taurus guy would: simply tell Microsoft to go fuck themselves and buy from another vendor.

Captialism!

Re: Sigh...

Well, Office 2013 is an interesting hybrid. It's not metro. It's actually a "classic destop application" that is Metro-styled.

So it addresses one of the most important concerns: it allows for multi-windowed multitasking. But the interface still eats way more of the screen than Office 2003, and I can't make ubitmenu work properly on it. For what? Paste preview and cloud sync? (Pretty much the two features I feel it has over Office 2003.)

Heck of a tradeoff...

Re: Why is it..

Some changes are good. Others are bad.

Cloud sync is awesome. The push for using the cloud-based crippled rental app however...

Re: "The application suite has been rewritten from the ground up"

Office 2013 isn't "dire." It's Office, it does the same thing. It has some actually quite nice cloud sync stuff. It has some irritating and intrusive Bing/Internet social media stuff.

What is dire is the interface. That's partly an aesthetic thing, but it is also a pragmatic consideration for those of us who value screen real estate. I'd say "this is the office suite designed for a retina Mac," except that I can't use a retina Mac at it's native res because my eyes won't make out pixels that small from a reasonable distance.

When Retina-class displays start becoming common in 24" and larger screens for less than $500, I will be the first person to jump up and down and say "goddamn, this new interface paradigm is kinda sexy, and that's awesome!"

"Kinda sexy" however is of no use to me whatsoever in a 1920x1200-or-smaller world where I need every single pixel of real estate for multitasking.

There are a whole bunch of extra features here that most of us (Register readers) will simply never care about, one that we might (cloud sync) a push towards Office 365 (which I promise you is more dire than Libre Office) and an interface that, while aesthetically appealing to a certain segment of the population, takes up far too much space on already too-small screens.

The fact that we don’t all have 4K screens isn’t Microsoft’s fault, not at all. But they do have to design for the realities of the world. Not for a happy fairy unicorn future in which we all either only use one application at a time, or we have screens with enough resolution to handle that kind of massive interface bloat.

I just want to type a damned document. I don’t care if the borders are white, grey, faded, or contain a social media update from twitter.

It’s just a word document.

Re: Me Thinks :

It isn't "bashing" to point out flaws. Especially not when you devote at least as much time to pointing out the things done right.

As I have said before, Microsoft have some truly great stuff. Hyper-V for example, or System Center 2012. SMB 3.0 deserves a nod, as do Microsoft's efforts regarding NFS of late. I think SQL server is grand, and I am increasingly impressed by IIS. Microsoft Dynamics is a decent product that is coming along nicely and I think the xbox is finally coming into its own. (As an "own your whole living room" content delivery platform, complete with original/unique or first run content that Microsoft pays for.)

I even think that Windows Phone was a decently designed platform, even if I happened to prefer Android's interface. (At least WP7 was tight to the hardware with decent battery life and stellar performance!)

I have written articles to this effect. I give praise where it is due.

But this Office cloudy 8 Metro fingerpaints edition?

Lock that sideways.

Re: Me Thinks :

Why exactly should we be positive?

Fact: Metro is ass.

Fact: The goddamned ribbon bar is STILL ass, years later.

Fact: The "cloud" offerings are also ass.

Fact: Microsoft isn't paying the rest of us to astroturf.

So why, exactly should we be positive? Have faith in your favourite company? Why? I don't have faith in a deity. Why would I have faith in a company that doesn't listen to me, actively discriminates against my customers and goes out of its way to prevent the kind of innovation I would like to implement with its products for my customers. (Multitennant Windows 7 service-provider based VDI, as one example.)

Microsoft has some great technologies and great people. But the licensing department, Windows 8, Office post-2003 and Office 365 are not among them.

Re: self contradictory

Cherenkov radiation is a photon. WIMPs barf up a photon AND an electron; which causes another Cherenkov event. Thus the pattern and frequency of the events can tell you one from the other.

That, and a god-awful amount of maths.

Re: self contradictory

Neutrinos aren't considered radiation. A neutrino smacking into something can cause Cherenkov radiation, but neutrinos themselves are not considered a form of radiation.

Please go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation

Catch up on the different types of particles (Photons, Neutrons, Electrons, relativistic Protons and relativistic Helium) that we consider to be radiation.

These particles are radiation, and can all be considered ionising radiation under the right circumstances. Some can pass through quite a bit of material - especially the gasses that make up out atmosphere - and will cause Cherenkov radiation when they impact the detector.

We need to bury detectors so far underground that that the chances of an accidental Cherenkov event are functionally eliminated. (As it is through Cherenkov radiation that we detect things like neutrinos.) WIMP interactions are no different than the standard rules for neutrino detectors. WIMPs basically don't interact with anything. Except on the *very* rare occasions that they do. When they do so, they ought to produce something very similar to Cherenkov radiation.

Now, we have a good handle on the frequency of Cherenkov events due to neutrinos, and we can filter the background noise of such events due to radioactivity from things like the materials used to make the detector. But is we plopped the thing on the surface the potential sources of noise would be so high - overwhelmed by actual radiation - that we couldn't take useful measurements.

In an ideal world, you'd filter out even neutrinos, but that is simply impossible. So the best we can do in the search for WIMPs is to build our detectors as far away from radiation as possible, and crank the sensitivity on the sensors up as high as our manufacturing processes will allow.

Then the only things we have to filter are neutrinos and virtual particle collisions. Relatively simple…where simple is building a widget to detect particles that don’t interact with anything excepting through gravitational force.

But no, the statement isn’t a contradiction…

FOSS versus Crowdsourcing

FOSS development gets a bunch of people together to develop something for a non-profit (or even charitable) cause. The labout is free, but so is the end product.

Crowdsourcing outside FOSS is almos universally an attempt by a for-profit organisation to get large quantities of labour from skilled individual for free.

See: The Huffington Post.

In short: FOSS is good, we all get something from it. But fuck for-profit crowdsourcers with 4 Vesta. Dry.

Re: As a small business owner, and systems administrator for SME clients...

When have I ever said I trusted Microsoft, hmm? I have said - and I maintain to this day - three things:

1) They have some great technology. Server 2012, System Center 2012, Hyper-V 3.0, SMB 3...they make shite a lot of the time (Metro), but they also turn out top notch stuff too.

2) They have a lot of good people at that company who are dedicated to making the best products in as open and standards-compliant a manner as possible. They also have a bunch of derpy proprietary lock-in fetishists, but significantly less of them in the past few years than the decade before that.

3) Microsoft's licensing department is powered by sadness and the tears of the innocent. There is nothing - nothing whatsoever - positive that can be said about them. Every customer- friendly move the rest of Microsoft makes which might earn them a little customer loyalty is instantly undone by licensing.

Whatever goodwill they might have earned through openness, kick-ass tech or so forth they immediately flushed down the toilet with user-hostile decisions (mandatory nature of Metro) and everything-hostile licensing.

I do not trust Microsoft. I will not trust Microsoft until they fly my ass down to Redmond to help them deal with their horrifically negative public image and help set licensing in the SME space to rights. (And actually IMPLEMENT those changes!) I am not far; I can even drive.

Ordinarily I abhor travelling, but I would be willing to go out of my way to help MS help SMEs. SMEs are my clients, after all. In the meantime however, every hostile licenceing decision they make to try to increase revenue results instead in a loss of more customers.

I can and do respect the technology Microsoft brings to the table. I can and do respect truly excellent individuals within Microsoft - like Jose Barreto - who strive to make the products on offer the best they can. I simultainiously believe wholeheartedly that Microsoft is pissing away its market, its customer base and its future.

People are voting with their wallets.