Microsoft and Novell on Sept. 12 will open their 2500-square-foot interoperability lab in Cambridge, Mass., where technical experts from both companies will collaborate on technologies to help Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise work well together. The first priority for the team is to ensure interoperability between virtualization technologies.
2500 square feet? Are you sure? Because that’s smaller than my house, maybe as large as a large tractor-trailer…
It’s probably one floor in a Novell building.
The required machines to do the testing aren’t all that big and don’t require much space for the infrastructure, really, and if it is divided with standard cubicle partitions, that’s still quite a few offices possible, as that’s (in a square form) 50*50 feet, and if it’s that small, chances are they’re leasing in a much larger building that has a kitchen and bathroom completely separate from that space, in addition to a “conference room” they can rent as needed: it’s more than enough room for 9 cubicles in that space, and no doubt could fit more people in there than that. How much space do you *really* need?
And for most people in the US (and I expect most of the world) a 2500 square foot house is larger than average, and that’d be a trailer home longer than 100 feet, even if it were a double-wide, so no: I think you’ve got your scaling confused
You may be living in a double wide trailer…
2500 sq ft house is quite a bit larger than average in the US. In Cambridge, an 800 sq ft (depending on the neighborhood) will run you about $300,000 without parking…
Whatever a college student has his own house….
Yeah right!!!
Tell another lie!
Here is a hint, get out of the computer field go somewhere without math skills, like bathroom cleaning or janitorial services…
2500 square feet <=> 232 square meters
ONLY a fool thinks a 2,500 sq foot house is small, goes to show the lack of common sense of a ‘college student’…
Price out a 2,500 sq foot house and see what a $2000+ house payment is like.
Has anyone clicked on it? I just clicked on it, and they had a featured screencast comparing Linux’s bash to Microsoft’s brand spaking new, bash-beating PowerShell:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/videos/windowspowers…
All I can say is wtf after watching it. In trying to make Linux look bad, they expanded “killall konqueror” to:
ps xu | grep konqueror | grep -v grep | awk ‘{ print $2 }’ |xargs kill -9
in order to make bash and linux look hard to use. This is a company that is committed to interoperability when they have a video like that featured on their “Compare” homepage? Right. Lets Get the Facts.
Yeah, What the hell was that about. Its on MS’s site so I’m not surprised. PowerShell my ass they mean PowerShit cause it makes me want to take a dookie anytime I see it.
Edited 2007-09-12 23:23
That video is actually quite hilarious. I liked the second task, adding a new user to a group. First he demonstrates how to do this in Linux, a single line in Bash. Then he introduces the Windows method: “As you can see, I’ve written this PowerShell script”…
And this is in a Microsoft advert!
Of course they’d show adding a user via the command line.
I (and many others these days I suspect) would still prefer to use the GUI in linux to add users, add users to groups, etc. etc. Its just easier to know whats going on without having to remember if it was adduser or useradd and what other syntax there might have been.
Sometimes 5 more minutes is acceptable if the road is easier to walk…
People still go on about linux needing commands typed into the command line all the time but the truth is you very rarely need to use it at all nowadays. Its there if you want to but there are alternatives. I vote we should teach the newbies via the GUI, and only once they understand it all then move to how we can do it quicker etc. via the CLI.
I think you’ve got it backwards. If they only know how to do it via the point and click idiot box, they don’t really understand anything. As soon as something goes wrong and the Xserver doesn’t start, they’re helpless.
First they learn to do it via the cli, and then (if one can stand it) use the idiot box.
When I add a user, I often want to do a lot of other things. Add them as an allowed user to log in, create a samba username and password for them, add their machine to samba, create their ssh key, etc.
For that sort of thing I like to create nice scripts for adduser.
I vote the same maybe the whoel myth about linux beign only about the cli, will go away. Ofcourse we have to prepare aourselves for countless hours of screengrabbing and writing full page articles that ewual the equivalent of sudo apt-get install lame libdvdread libfaad, etc. The only reason we give cli commands to users is to save time.
That’s some l33t shell skillz. Come on, “pkill konqueror” is for sissies.
I think it’s just a bad demo possibly due to the presenter’s lack of familliarity with either shell. Even the Powershell examples weren’t the most succinct methods of accomplishing the given tasks. For example “spps -n iexplore” could’ve been used to kill all instances of IE (spps is an alias for stop-process, as is kill), and the Computer Browser service could’ve been disabled with “set-service browser -s disabled”.
In any case, he should’ve tried to ensure parity for the chosen methods, such as using “gps iexplore | spps” in comparison to the kill method he used.
Most likely the video was made by the marketing team and not the server interop team. I don’t think you can judge one by the actions of the other. A company the size of Microsoft is not a homogenous unit.
I’m sure they are well aware of the video on the homepage of one of Microsoft’s largest advertising campaigns.
Glad to see they are both holding up their promises (so far).
In regards to the powershell comments, Microsoft and Novell are still competitors and will describe each other as such. I’m not surprised MS is still pulling their same old stuff.
Let’s just hope something useful comes from this lab. Let the technology pave the way…
-m
The ink on the agreement is dry. Let the hand waving, lip service, pantomiming, and futile gesturing begin! The whole thing reminds me of all those pacts of cooperation that the proprietary Unix vendors used to sign. But no one could cooperate long enough to actually get anything done before the backstabbing began.
Somehow, I suspect that Novell’s pocket knife is not going to be a match for Microsoft’s dagger.
I’ve reserved a limited quantity of tears to shed at the appropriate time.
So I can join my Linux boxes to AD? Thanks! And no, the utilities (using Samba 3) already included in 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 Beta 3 do not work consistently enough for it to be a good solution.
The machine deciding not to authenticate a user attempting to access a cached profile on the road is not a good thing. =)
I would like to make a comment, and a few predictions:
1) SuSe and Microsoft will collaborate no doubt, but this will begin a new version of “Linux” that will eventually end up in the “bargain” bin.
Microsoft is not going to “collaborate” except perhaps in providing binary only kernel modules. Modules that will probably only run on SuSe kernels.
2) I also expect that the GPLv3 will be in the end what kills both companies. One of the primary strengths Linux uses to combat security and enhance its technical abilities beyond windows is Source Code.
I predict at least a few lawsuits over this “Collaboration” as it becomes increasingly clear to Novell what a huge mistake this “partnership” was with Microsoft. Primarily due to the fact that it is unsustainable in the new age of GPLv3 when you have a business partner that is a complete opposite to the market you are addressing.
3) You can expect the first grumblings/rumblings of this sort of thing when it becomes clear that the guys at OSDL managing the code start making architectural changes to Linux in Virtual Machine management.
A variety of these types of changes will more than likely break Microsoft’s proprietary products that attempt to manage, the now more 3 different types of virtualization processes you can use with Linux right now. (http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/TechComparison)
Which, by definition will be impossible to manage without a completely open source tool chain from end to end to make that sort of complexity work for enterprise customers.
-Hack
The first thing they could do is get Windows to assume the hardware clock is GMT, like Linux, OSX etc. In other words, better support for
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-SYSTEM-CurrentControlSet-Control-TimeZoneInformatio n-RealTimeIsUniversal=1
more info: http://blogs.sun.com/casper/entry/timezones_and_multi_boot
Edited 2007-09-13 22:23