Severe

[altivo]

Severe everything. Well, mostly thunderstorms. We're on a watch now, and they're lighting up the radar just 150 miles or so upwind of here. Looks like something will hit us before morning. It was a pretty afternoon though.

While we were making supper a bird hit the dining room window, but apparently a glancing blow. I looked just in time to see him flutter erratically to the nearest fence rail. It was a downy woodpecker, and looked kind of small and scrawny. Then I realized that he was probably a new young one. Sure enough, he sat there making what sounded rather like embarrassed giggles, and his mother showed up and started feeding him. Now this guy was old enough that you could already see the little crown of red on the back of his head, but mom was still taking care of him. I wonder if she has any others hiding out there in the bushes or something.

Initialized the second Windows 7 machine at work today. After the first, I know some of the pitfalls and managed to skirt around them. I can see the visual appeal and how it might be pleasing to those who don't care to look under the hood, but I still find it incredibly irritating from the viewpoint of a network administrator who wants to control settings rather than letting them go to defaults. M$ has made it very difficult to get at things. Fortunately it really is still all configurable, but finding the way to get at some of it is tortuous indeed.

The next two are not going to run Windows, even though they came with it installed. Apparently Dell is trapped in some agreement not to sell machines with no OS on them, why I don't know, so it costs the same whether you get Windows, Linux, or just FreeDOS on most machines. I took Windows 7 with installation media on all of them, but these two are going to run Userful's library public user software, which is Linux-based. I'll just put the restore CDs aside so they can later be returned to Windows 7 if it should be necessary. The last one is to replace my own desktop machine, that has been limping along for months. We seem to have gotten several machines some five years back that develop problems with overheating, or thinking they are overheated. Mine is one of those. I'll be running Linux too, but will probably carve off a partition that can boot Windows 7 just in case. At this point, there seems to be only one thing left for which I require Windows access, but it's a real nuisance. Our Watchguard firewall (which runs a form of Linux internally) only can be configured and controlled from a Windows environment, XP or later. You have to use their provided configuration package, which runs only on Microsloth environments. Seems incredibly bone-headed to me.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

It's the same agreement that Dell has in the UK as well. The same kind of practice I'd outlaw if I had the power to change laws.

[altivo]

As I interpret case law, it's already illegal here in the US, but no one has challenged this particular situation. A few years ago I bought a desktop machine for home use from Dell. There was no problem getting one with no OS at all. It was almost $200 less than the same machine with Windows XP pre-installed. They did include a CD for FreeDOS in the box, but it was literally free. They offered to pre-install Linux but that was RedHat and I feel much the same about them as about Microsoft, so no thanks.

Now it looks as if you cannot buy a machine without a preinstalled OS from Dell (or anyone else.) In fact, the only way to get the bare hardware is to build your own from parts. I can do that, but it's not really cost-effective in terms of time and warranty support.

This is precisely the kind of constraint of trade for which Microsoft was challenged in a huge and expensive court case that started under the Clinton administration. Microsoft lost that case and was ordered to reform its marketing practices, but then the Bush administration took over and the whole thing was reduced to little more than an admonition that Microsoft has now ignored. They tell OEM vendors that if they want to sell machines with Windows pre-loaded, then they can't sell the machines without an OS for a lower price. Otherwise, no OEM deal. So Dell can sell the machine with Linux, or with FreeDOS, or even with MacOS as long is it isn't any cheaper than it is with Windows. But even if they sell it with a blank HD, they have to charge the same price.

IBM lost a major lawsuit over this many years ago. The federal government told them that they had to sell hardware and software independently and could not require the customer to buy both together. Apparently Microsoft believes that their contractual demands on OEMs do not violate this stricture, but I think otherwise.

For the moment though, the only way around it is to buy the hardware with the stupid OS preinstalled and then erase the dumb thing. It's infuriating.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

There are always some dinosaurs of companies who assume that platform independence isn't something they should be concerned with. Just like sysadmins (such as most of the ones where I work) who only support Windows, they stand to find themselves in a world of hurt sooner or later. Our new CIO has already expressed his vision that the backend be switched to UNIX. Being a Windows shop in the past, they're all terrified. I'm really liking this guy so far, he's not afraid to ruffle feathers or do what makes us a better IT department, and it will save money in the long run.

[moonhare]

Our Dell GX270's had fan problems. They had USB problems, too, I'm discovering, as my 500 GB portable drive coughs and wheezes along on transfers...

[altivo]

Actually I think many of them don't even know there is such a thing as platform independence. To them, the world is Windows, and there is nothing else, so why bother trying to support anything else. Even the ones who trumpet the fact that they "support Linux" often support only RedHat, because they don't understand that RedHat may be a kind of Linux but Linux is not necessarily RedHat. And RedHat is weird in fact and not at all standard as Linux goes.

I'm in a smaller place but have similar problems. At least 80% of our equipment is now running Linux, but converting the last few machines is like moving a mountain. Not because it can't be done software wise but because of entrenched staff members who just "know" that Linux is no good or that they can't use it.

In fact recently one of them needed to borrow time on a machine and sat down at mine. I said she was welcome to use it but it had Linux, not Windows. She backed away as if it were a poisonous snake and went to another machine, one that she uses regularly. I kept my mouth shut, but that one has had Linux and not Windows for three years now. *head shake*

They're forever telling me that "Linux just doesn't work the same" but can never show me a single example of anything they do where in fact it is different. It's not that they're addicted to Microsoft software particularly (though a couple of them cling to Publisher as if it were a lifeline, and one is an Adobe addict) but just plain prejudice. All our public workstations run Linux and most users can't tell the difference.

[altivo]

These are GX280s, close enough. No USB issues that I have noticed, but the fans or else the temperature sensors are flaky. We have some GX120s (or are they GX115s?) and those definitely have USB issues. They were built during the period when everyone was putting USB ports on their machines but Windows 95 didn't really support them yet so it was a guess as to whether they would work when the software support finally came along. In some cases, (Dell) they didn't, while in others (Compaq) they did.

[deffox]

I wanted to like Windows 7. I upgraded my desktop to 7, but at the moment reverted to XP. Personally I don't like the alternatives like Linux or OS X.

I can see improvements in some areas, but I also see steps backwards. The negatives are along the line of what you mention. They hide menus and make it harder for computer literate people to get certain tasks done.

Windows Explorer was ruined in the new version. There is less information available; such as only being able to see free drive space from one point. I organize my data in deep hierarchies of folders on multiple partitions, and I find navigating slower than in XP.

I reverted when I found options weren't available in my copy. I purchased a copy of Home Premium, while features I use require group policies. They are enabled in only the Professional and higher versions. I mistakenly thought Home Premium had the same features except for XP mode, domain join, and network backups. Group policies aren't mentioned in the version comparison charts so I didn't think of it.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I often wish I had lots of money to take these corporations on.

[altivo]

Money isn't the answer, I suspect. It would take far too much to get at them that way.

Public reaction though, can be effective. It's difficult to plant the right seeds and steer it, but the power of the viral meme is ever stronger. Note the "low-fat" demands of ten years ago and the "low carb" craze of more recent years. The current one in the US that is influencing far too many things is "gluten free" as if large numbers of people had celiac disease (actually quite a rare syndrome.)

The same kind of market forces can change all sorts of things. High oil prices helped power the collapse of the US auto industry over the last couple of years because they were not responsive enough to the growing demand for more efficient designs.

Dell will rethink its strategies if enough people start asking them WHY they won't sell a machine without a pre-installed OS, and WHY it costs just as much as if a $200 copy of Windoze were installed.

[altivo]

I thought group policies were domain based and required a domain server to enforce them. (But I now avoid Windows as much as possible so I suppose I may have misunderstood. I only know that the network consultants who were running the library network when I arrived here were pushing toward complete group policy enforcement over the whole. It caused more pain than I could ever have imagined and I've been dismantling their constructs piece by piece for five years now.)

I found Windows just tolerable when you could still easily get to a command prompt and bypass all the GUI nonsense. Now they've buried that ever more deeply in each subsequent version, and the constant flurry of security patches that don't really secure just isn't worthwhile for me. These Windows 7 machines were preloaded with a supposedly up to date copy of the system on May 19. Upon waking them up, they already need no less than 18 security fixes from Microsoft.