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Andrew Thomas has some comments to make about IT support. Judging from his comments he might even know a little bit about IT support but he clearly hasn't done much phone support and only has a vague idea of how the IT market works.
Years ago, Intel offered a range of upgrade processors, enabling users to move from a 25MHz 486 to a mighty 75MHz. They came with simple installation instructions and everything you needed was in the box. Intel killed off the Overdrive product line for a simple reason -- no one was buying them. The great unwashed public simply wasn't -- and still isn't -- interested in opening a PC.
PC shops offered an upgrade service where you brought your box into the shop, they refitted it with whatever and you took you box home again. Most shops still offer this service, for PCI cards, graphics cards, more memory, and anything else you care to name. Same deal with laptops, you take your laptop in, tell them what you want upgraded and pick it up in the afternoon. In Sydney, they might charge an extra $10 for the service over and above the cost of the new parts -- compare that to your typical mechanic.
The "Overdrive" product was indeed very popular for a short time, even new PCs were selling with it in (hav to shift old motherboards stock somehow) but it had limitations... the peripherals and main RAM didn't get any faster, cache was limited. Pentium motherboards outperformed it by such a large margin that technology just moved on (as it always does).
The shiny new machine will not come with Linux and OpenOrifice.
I remember people used to call the Linux advocates juvenile, "if you have to make up silly names to call the other guy then you have lost the argument." Interesting how the tide turns around...
It will come with Vista and Office 2003 pre-installed. It will activate itself automatically as soon as it's connected to the Web. It will continue to run, unopened and unupgraded until a few years down the track, it breaks and is replaced with another one.
For a typical home desktop machine running a Microsoft operating system, it gets hacked into before the product activation is even complete, then runs for years as a spam zombie leaching on an Internet connection that the unsuspecting home user pays for.
I sincerely hope that Microsoft can lift their game with Vista security (because I'm just as sick of getting spammed as everyone else is) but I'll believe it when I see it (and no sooner).
As an experiment, I identified one particular type of spam which has a very recognisable SMTP header and I figured that I would firewall out every IP address that sends me one of those particular spam messages. Some people might think I'm going to rapidly block off all the major email servers by doing a thing like that but these spams seem to come directly from user's home PCs (thanks to virus or Trojan-horse takeover). What I found was that this particular type of spam (just a subset of the total spam thrown at me) still gets to my machine and I have nearly 2000 IP addresses blocked. I only started doing this two months ago so that's approximately 1000 new IP addresses per month that are being used for spam delivery (just one particular flavour of spam at that).
Whoever is behind these mail-outs has access to a very large army of slave machines. Now, I can't prove they are Microsoft machines but I'd be willing to make a substantial bet that they are. This is the fate of those "continue to run, unopened and unupgraded" machines.
While for businesses, prepared to fund a basement full of geeks to keep their IT running, Linux is an option.
The "basement full of geeks" is complete FUD. Novell offer support contracts, RedHat offer support contracts, Ubuntu will introduce you to a hoard of semi-independent support companies and there's others. I keep a list of Linux related organisations (just in Sydney) where you can look for support.
I can assure you that trying to talk an ordinary person through an impenetrable command line interface over the phone isn't something I'm prepared to even contemplate.
Seems highly likely that Andrew hasn't actually tried it or does not know enough to be able to try it... but command lines are excellent for phone support:
By comparison, giving telephone advice to someone running Windows is a piece of cake -- it requires zero technical aptitude at the far end.
This is completely untrue, talking someone through a GUI environment over the phone is much more difficult:
SUPPORT: Click on Internet Explorer.CLIENT: I can't find any Explorer.
SUPPORT: It's a globe thing, look for a round icon.
CLIENT: There's a thing called "The Internet", that's round.
SUPPORT: I think that would be the right one (but I'm taking a guess here and after you start the program you will end up in some random screen and we might be talking at cross purposes for the next five minutes).
The jobs I most often do when supporting Microsoft desktops are figuring out what the IP address of the desktop machine is (or even if it has an IP address) and loading proxy settings into Microsoft's IE.
For the first job, I always get the user to bring up a command line interface (yes every single version of Microsoft Windows has an "impenetrable" command line interface, just like Linux does, and MacOS-X too for that matter) and type "ipconfig". Every other person in IT support that I have ever met does the same. For the second job, it's a multi-stage process navigating to the bottom of options trees behind special buttons and tabs. No two versions of IE are exactly the same either.
I heard of one case (this is really true) where the user (an elderly man) had managed to shrink the window and also moved the window so that the maximise button was offscreen. The person trying on phone support kept telling them to click the maximize button (which has no name, so she kept trying to describe "the button with the little square" in different ways, thinking that the user did not understand). The person at the computer was saying that there was no button with a little square, it had gone away. Sad, but people with "zero technical aptitude" can really get themselves messed up in ways that also stump a tech support person who cannot see the screen directly.
Then there's the situation where you want to connect to the desktop machine and change some settings yourself. On Linux you have ssh and a command shell. You go in there, check what is going on and fix what needs fixing. You can easily write a script to run ssh on multiple machines in sequence and change some setting on all of those machines. Too easy.
On Microsoft Windows you need some sort of remote-desktop utility (like VNC, Norton PC-Anywhere, etc) which is inevitably less secure than ssh and slower and more tedious to work with. Come back when you have changed a setting on 50 different machines using PC-Anywhere and see how much fun you are having.
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