Posted on 05/31/2010 7:32:31 PM PDT by Gomez
We first heard rumors of this policy change a couple of months ago, but now it's made the papers: the Financial Times is reporting that Google is phasing out the use of Windows internally, as employees are migrated to either Linux or Mac OS X on machine turnovers or new hires. The policy change was precipitated in large part by the security breach attributed to Chinese hackers; Google's IT leaders apparently feel that Microsoft's OS represents too great a risk across the enterprise to leave it in place.
The story says that in January, subsequent to the security breaches, Windows installations on desktop computers were no longer allowed, although laptops were still eligible for Windows at the employee's discretion. Many Google staffers, however, were already heading for the Mac as a security measure, and at this point things have been pretty well laid down in stone: "Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval," according to one anonymous Googler quoted by the FT.
Google has long offered employees a choice of OS for their primary workstation, and some dissatisfaction with the new rules has been registered; however, the sentiment is apparently not that negative, considering the alternative possibilities. "It would have made more people upset if they banned Macs rather than Windows," says an unnamed employee. No doubt.
Business Insider suggests that Google's infrastructure represents about 20,000 Windows licenses that now will not be renewed or upgraded. Of course, the existing Wintel hardware will run Ubuntu Linux or the company's upcoming Chrome OS, but adding Mac OS X to the mix will mean purchasing Mac hardware. Maybe that's what the Steve-Eric Coffee Summit was about: truckloads of MacBook Pros heading for the Googleplex.
(As one commenter suggests below, this also means that malware developers may have new reason to focus their efforts on Mac OS X. Every silver lining has a cloud.)
ping
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Interesting, but the last line is absolutely right.
So Google is finally following my lead (^_^).
I’ve had Mac OS at home and Linux at the office for years. Finally dropped MS Office when it gave me licensing crap after I cloned my old Mac’s file structure onto my new Mac: I use Open Office instead.
Like Linus Torvald said: “I don’t object to Bill Gates being rich. I object to Bill Gates having a lousy operating system.”
Employees need to start saying “F that, Google.”
I said: “I object to Linus Torvald having spawned many lousy operating systems.”
I hate Unix, and Linux, and their derivatives... and Ritchie & Kerrigan for their programming language, also.
pretty big deal, talk about a shot across the bow at MS.
>>Would not have anything to do with Google and Microsoft becoming fierce competitors in several markets...?
>
>Google is also competing with Apple.
But they’ve both got the “Linus Power!” circle-jerk mentality going on.
Why is that a cloud? Those of us with Unix/BSD background have been waiting a long time for an actual Mac OS-X virus -- a successful self-replicating virus would be real news! PARTY TIME!!
Still waiting, though....
Why? No flame... just curious.
Now what they need to do is to develop killer apps and features that only run on Linux or Mac. If you build it, they will come.
20,000 desktops out of close to 400 million Windows desktops sold per year is a big deal?
Since when?
” talk about a shot across the bow at MS”
Naaaah.
Android is the big one. Google Linux desktop is irrelevant.
Pales into insignificance as compared to Microsoft versus Google. Microsoft is actually going after Google’s bread and butter search business, where over 98% of their profits come from. Apple isn't even in search.
Kind of interesting. The company I now work for, there is no love lost towards M$ but yet, we use M$ Windows on our systems. I would love to have a Mac instead or a Linux system for my work machine at the office and work at home laptop.
Funny thing, my work at home laptop is only used for work and nothing else. When I am done with wok at the end of the day, it is turned off !
>> I hate Unix, and Linux, and their derivatives... and Ritchie & Kerrigan for their programming language, also.
>
>Why? No flame... just curious.
Not a problem. (Even if it WAS a flame I’m perfectly capable of defending my positions with reasonably sound logic... while half-drunk.) [;)]
My reasons start at Unix’s design-philosophy, and in order to get at that we MUST understand and illustrate some of the shortcomings of C [remember that C & Unix “came up together” pretty much].
In C there are certain things that are not met by design: notably index-checking for array accesses, which is an extremely common programmer’s error comes to mind. The reason that C CANNOT check the index of an array is that it’s notion of array is “a pointer to memory” and an index into that pointer is the addition of an integer multiple of the size of that array’s elements added to that array. So, the concept of an array “having bounds” is foreign to C and “the responsibility of the programmer.”
This is also the root of why some APIs are, in a word, tedious & hideous. OpenGL, for example, has functions like:
glLightf — The glLightf function returns light source parameter values.
glLighti — The glLighti function returns light source parameter values.
glLightfv — The glLightfv function returns light source parameter values.
glLightiv — The glLightiv function returns light source parameter values.
All of the above have the same ‘base’ idea: returning light source parameter values.
Because C cannot distinguish between arrays by their sizes, as shown above, these cannot be all overloaded into an glLight function with ONLY the parameters being different types because ANY of them that takes a “vector format” (array) of integers or floating-point values cannot be distinguished at run-time because all that is being passed is an address... even if you had arrays of both different element-types and lengths, which can be farly easily spotted by the programmer, the compiler cannot be bothered with such differentiations.
C also doesn’t really have user-defined ‘types’... even the enumeration is an alias to “the smallest word-size that will hold all such values”... in other-words you can have a boolean type with True = 1 & False = 0... and it still takes up a byte. Worse yet you can assign another number, say 42, to the ‘boolean’ type.
The C-programming design worked around that [boolean] shortcoming by saying: “Well, no... Zero = False... and True = NOT Zero” then, magically “if (42){}” becomes acceptable syntax... this in itself might be managable, but it combines with another design choice to produce a frustrating and completely unnecessary error:
“= vs ==”
Bucking the trend of hundreds of years of math, where = is an evaluator they chose = to be the assignment. {Languages like BASIC, and [IIRC] Fortran, had the LET keyword to distinguish an = as assignment from = as an evaluation, Pascal & Agol used := as the assignment operator.} For the evaluation operation they chose ==. The = operator returns a value, namely that assigned to the variable. In this way the C/C++ programmer can say a = b = c = d = 3... and a, b, c, and d all become 3 thanks to that magic property.
Now comes the part where things start colliding in “bad ways...” “if (x == 3)” is a test for x having the value of three, whereas “if (x=3)” is the _assignment_ of three to x, followed by three being evaluated by the if-statement. {Because 3 is not Zero that test will ALWAYS execute the ‘true’ portion of the if-statement.}
Again, in C/Unix-design mindset, it is not the compiler’s responsibility to catch the error... and it is not the language-designer’s responsibility to prevent such possible ‘misunderstandings’; it is the responsibility of the programmer.
Tangent: the == and != evaluators actually break consistency with the rest of the language. +=, -=, /=, *=, %= are all the shorthand for “apply the operation to the value of the variable on the left side and the value on the right side and assign it to the variable on the left side.”
Notice that there is missing !=, which should/would be “apply a bitwise NOT to the value on the left and assign it to the right value.”
Now, keep that “the responsibility of the programmer” attitude; we come to how this impacts the general user: in Unix-land it’s always the user’s fault for ‘not understanding the minutia.’
Apple Corporation however had a different start [with its Macintosh], they were all about making their computer USABLE to the general user. And that is indeed the correct way to design: you make your program, your ‘idea’, into not something that the user CAN use, bu something the user can use EFFECTIVELY.
As a programming-language C (and C++) fail, utterly, at that. They assume that the programmer LIKES debugging and writing lines and lines of statements that could have been avoided with something as simple as array bounds-checking. As a counter-example I’ll show some Ada:
For Index in Some_Array’Range loop
Some_Array(Index):= Some_Array’First; — Assign the first possible value
End Loop;
The above loop will NEVER go out of the array’s bounds, it is using the information of the bounds of the array itself as its control mechanism. The above loop will work FOR ALL arrays containing: Integers, Floating-Point numbers, Characters, Boolean, and User-defined enumerations and all subtypes thereof (though True..True and False..False aren’t helpful as subtypes of Boolean).
The mismash of the C/Unix design-philosophy and the classic Macintosh-philosophy will almost assuredly result in an inferior product. Micosoft, on the other hand, seems to be really pushing C# and the DotNET platform and while C# does have a lot of C++’s syntactic shortcomings it is far more programmer-centric {the ‘end user’ of the language} than C/C++; as evidence of this I submit both memory-management and the C# forall loop.
In short:
I HATE the Unix design-philosophy; it would be better to put some thought into stopping problems with the design of the system than offer something that “works” and constantly throws the responsibility on the user/programmer. {In this manner it is very much like our government is now: if only it weren’t for those “scary tea-bag people” we could have a health-care paradise... oh, and the taxpayer is responsible for the deficit.}
Does that sufficiently address your question?
{I could go on, drawing into the more Unix/Linux specifics/idiosyncrasies but I think I’ve explained the general-concept enough that you should understand the thrust.}
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