One of the gripes that Linux-haters trumpet is that one needs to use typed commands and text files to do some things on the system. Well, M$ has done such a fine job of convincing IT people that a GUI is the way to go that folks in small businesses are having a devil of a time putting their thousands of e-mail addresses into M$’s cloud solution. At a time when skilled IT people are becoming scarce again and M$ wants to go “all-in”, they want ordinary folks to brush up on their shell scripting…
“Microsoft did not deny that it requires PowerShell to import addresses into the Global Address List. PowerShell is also required to create shared mailboxes for email aliases — which, for example, would let any employee respond from a generic address, such as “sales@company.com.”"

Chuckle… After decades of telling people “GUI good, CLI bad“, M$ is having to tell the world they were just joking. I have worked for many years and oldman is the first person I have encountered who even knew PowerShell existed.

see Jon Brodkin, Network World- Microsoft’s Office 365 not ready to leave beta, analyst says

I must say typing and programming are two skills one should not be without. I remember being at a place that switched from something to 2000 Server and one poor sap had to sit in the server room for many hours entering account information into a GUI, multiple clicks and lots of typing for each account. A few years later when I was nearing the end of installing a complete new system for a school I had to create 700 accounts late one night. It took a few minutes to write a script and a few minutes to generate the accounts and I went home to sleep. Too bad M$’s loyal customers have been weaned off those skills so they can’t use M$’s next wonderful product…

M$ is all-in for the cloud but leaving all its foot-soldiers slogging in the mud. M$ will pay the channel for the first sale of cloud services but M$ wants the subscriptions all to itself… That’s one of ten reasons Don Reisinger gives for M$ failing in the clouds. Not supporting all mobile operating systems is another… Oops. Does M$ not realize mobile is huge and that they have no monopoly on it?

see Don Reisinger – Channel Insider- 10 Reasons Microsoft`s Cloud Efforts Don`t Hold Up

There’s a report out about phishing attacks on LAMP servers.

“The most frequently attacked operating system among survey respondents was Linux OS (76%). Attack victims reported that they used Apache as their web server in 81 percent of the responses, MySQL as their database application in 81 percent of the responses, and PHP/Java as their application platform in 82 percent of responses.

While we acknowledge that ―LAMP‖—Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP—is the most popular web operating environment, the APWG IPC is concerned that this profile is exploited with such apparent frequency. “

Let’s see… they investigated 270 attacks on 203 million sites and they are concerned about the frequency of attacks on LAMP sites… Hmmm. That other OS runs 18% of sites and gets 19% of the attacks reported…

Let’s define frequency folks… How about a one in 851000 chance of a LAMP site being attacked by phishers and reporting the attack? I like those odds. How about all of the sites that did not report phishing details? Think any of them were using closed-source software?

As a teacher, I love analogies. They connect what students know with what is being taught. They condense a web of ideas into a simplified picture of the essential elements.

I came across an analogy for Free versus non-FREE software on Italo Vignoli’s blog today. The blog is in Italian which Google translates passibly but the analogy is an image of people under an umbrella, a dependence on some supplier of non-free software, and a bowl, filled with people sharing. The idea is that the umbrella works and keeps off the rain, but one has to keep paying the holder of the umbrella or one gets wet whereas the sharing can go on indefinitely. I would choose a different model. Instead of an umbrella, the dependency should be a spider with users in hand, waiting to be released from lock-in or devoured.

Supplier of Non-Free Software as a Spider

OpenOffice.org had centralized control of the project in SUN/Oracle’s hands and they stifled the creativity of developers. Now that The Document Foundation is organizing things in a much more open fashion, developers are flocking in with good ideas:
“”LibreOffice is going to become a completely different product in time,” he said.
“For example we’ve completely changed the way icons are handed from Openoffice. That had duplication of icons, not a single, central icon repository. Our developers completely changed this.”
The development team, which has grown from 20 initial members to over 120, has now got the final download cut down to under 30MB, and has reconfigured the office applications around a more modular framework. It’ll be faster to load Vignoli promised, and a number of Java dependencies have also been removed, as they slowed the system down too much.”
see http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2077979/document-foundation-promises-enterprise-ready-libreoffice-august

Yes, indeed. The download for OpenOffice.org on that other OS is 137 MB without Java and 151 MB with. TDF has gone from 214 MB for 3.3.2 to 188 MB for 3.4.0. It looks like TFA has a miscommunication. I think it should read, “cut down by 30MB”. Whatever. LibreOffice works wonderfully well and is getting better, not bigger over time.

“SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch believes that mobile devices are the future of the internet as they continue to gain power and mobile broadband develops.
…
Adobe’s CTO told the crowd in London that mobile devices will be used for internet access more than desktops in 2013 and that mobile broadband speeds will surpass wired soon.”

see TheInquirer – Mobile devices will rule over desktops

This is a major change in IT but inevitable. The reasoning, I suppose, is that mobile devices can be with users 24×7 so the user is never off-line. It might suppose that users will stay on-line while moving, a dangerous concept but one we see with smart phones and GPS functions. ARM, with its low power consumption, is the front-runner in this space. Linux will dominate in this space because it is so portable and flexible an OS. If mobile rules, the monopoly should be truly dead by 2013. That could be a bit optimistic but we see dying started in 2010 and was a certainty by 2011. The size of the monopoly means it could survive one way or another for five years. Two more years must surely be the lowest estimate.

The last hope for Wintel is “8″. It is a faint hope. One does not expect to be able to board a passenger train while it is moving at top speed. In 2010, we saw many new ARMed personal computing devices come into being as smart phones. In 2011, the train picked up speed in the form of all manner of tablets and docked smart phones. By the end of 2011, the train will be travelling at top speed and well on its way. Wintel will be left behind. At best, Wintel may survive as just another competitor in a sea of competition, no longer a monopoly except perhaps in a few niches out of the mainstream.

In 2011, more smart thingies will be shipped than Wintel ships. By 2013 the whole world will be running smart thingies and “8″ will be a tiny slice, something like Phoney “7″ with its 7% share. The longer it takes M$ to release “8″ the smaller will be its share of devices using it and share of retail shelf-space. “8″ will be starting from zero in a space with many hundreds of millions of smart thingies operating. The majority of smart thingies in production are smart phones but tablets have maxed out their supply-chains. By the end of 2011 everyone will see that tablets are here to stay and will have redoubled capacity. By the end of 2012, Wintel may only dominate shipments of desktops and even those will be switching to thin clients running GNU/Linux often.

The only doubt about 2013 is bandwidth. We have seen Wifi overwhelmed at conferences. Does the world have the energy to supply the need for global wifi so quickly? It might take a year or two longer, I expect, but the mobile devices will still work in the home, office, or on the street in business districts. That’s enough to finish off Wintel.

If Adobe’s CTO has this view of IT, I wonder how long it will be before Adobe produces PhotoShop for GNU/Linux or Android/Linux? We see smart thingies producing 1080P for hours on a charge. Surely they could run PS. The question is whether they will produce a version for “8″ on ARM or Linux on ARM…. HEHEHE.