web-- time cards, change management systems, computer-based training, employee locaterators... and it all requires MSIE. It's either ActiveX, or uses proprietary MSIE broken HTML, or what-have-you... I suspect many companies are in this boat-- the apps they run on the desktop can easily be replaced, it's the broken web stuff they're stuck with.
IBM, Novel and even free software groups have replacements for all that jazz that work better than all that broken stuff. IBM and Novel can make it work with your windoze desktops too, so you don't have to do everything at once or ever. If you want to do it on your own, just show your web monkeys KDE, it's groupware and it's awesome IDE. That alone blows most crufty junk out of the water and most of it writes to normal html so those low on the upgrade list don't feel left out.
The fact that big companies like ATT are looking into free software is a very big deal. It shows that software that M$ shills still call a "toy" is a serious contender to some of the best IT people out there. It's quite a validation, even if you think big dumb companies are slow and deliberate. All Microsoft's name calling and FUD dissapears in a flash and is replaced by the notion, "of course Linux is an alternative we should consider." It makes a difference.
Small companies always do things faster than big dumb ones. It's inertia. While big companies may have many clever people who have the time and training to learn things, they also have oversight you would not believe. That's part of what "due diligence" is. Just moving to a new version of IE is a big deal at places like that. It's pathetic, but that's how it is. At a small business, one little problem and one person can change everything. At a big dumb company a committee passes the cost off to customers. They pay people to jump through stupid hoops too. When things are so blindingly obvious the big dogs notice, a study is done and things might change.
ATT is doing a study. That means that free software is obviously good enough to replace M$.
- MS? Not enough resources? Name one program (including any distro of linux & the kernel) that they couldn't have a staff working harder on than. Its a matter of money, which MS just happens to have an unpractical surplus of. Free software is still limited to the number of people who are willing to work on free software, let alone specific projects. If MS did away with their release-dates (mgmt == evil) and hired more people, their software would be great, I'm sure. Its not like they hire monkeys(?).
The GNU debugger has more than 80 contributors and is excellent because of it. No one can pay that many people to work on any single non-free code.
KDE is a tremendous project and is excellent. There are probably more KDE programmers out there now than there are people who have looked at VB. Gnome is right up there too. Both projects have been ported to more languages than Microsoft can afford to have their core office software ported.
It's because people realize that the Microsoft way of doing things has problems that can't be solved. Sure, you can still make money with your programming skills but you won't be able to do it long the closed source way. Your company does not outsource your job but it won't matter, whatever it is you work on will be eclipsed by a free program sooner or later. The Microsoft monopoly put a lot of people, like Netscape, Word Perfect, etc. Free software is payback.
Being an actively-voiced anti-MS radical (quite obviously) like you are, I must insist that you take the following quiz:
Recognizing that free alternatives to Microsoft have a lower pain of ownership does not make a person "radical". Remembering that Microsoft has sued public school systems, paid people to lie and disrupt "competitor's" discussions, PR firms to forge letters to public officials, and routinely breaks other people's software and blames the victim takes nothing more than a brain with a memory. You might not like what I say, but I don't see much reasonable refutation.
Free software works, M$ does not, the details are less important than the big picture. Here are my answers to your little quiz and a question of my own:
1. Who most likely wrote the software?
A) Ground-breaking AI
B) People
C) Monkeys
People. They write free software that works too.
2. A user always reads and follows instructions.
A) True
B) False
The software should work anyway, like Knoppix does.
3. Windows' registry was designed for software protection.
A) True
B) False
I don't care. It breaks the system.
4. Which OS is the most compatible with today's hardware market?
A) Windows
B) Linux
C) OSX
D) Other...
Linux. Once free, a driver lasts forever. There are now more devices that run under Linux than any other kernel. Just look through any company closet for the pile of devices that made "obsolete" by an OS upgrade to know this is true. You can also look at the number of ports to different hardware. FreeBSD does that well, but it does not have the device support Linux does.
5. Name one piece of software that is perfect:
______________________
Any software that has been qualified for nuclear license evaluation. It's amazing, you can write complex software that does what it should and is verifiable.
6. In windows, you can turn off a screen saver.
A) True
B) False
Sure you can, until a service pack turns it back on. Who cares? The thing still has uptimes of less than a week and is prone to worms and full of bugs.
7. Microsoft _tries_ to make their code better.
A) True
B) False
Failure: when your best effort is not good enough. They don't have the time or resources to compete with free software. No one does.
Here's a question for you. The Bill Gate's method of software creation, stated here is:
A. Wrong.
B. Obsolete.
C. Greedy.
D. Stupid.
E. All of the above.
Long live M$ BASIC. Opps, they are pulling the plug on that one for.NET
"No really, it's a people problem, blame the user", they say. How lame can you get.
Sorry Microsoft, it's the software. When I go to the local airport and see a kiosk displaying a Windoze 2000 screen saver instead of information, something is wrong with the software running the kiosk. I'm sure that the kiosk owner followed all of the directions given and the stupid thing did not work anyway. A box that has to be restarted once a month and crashes when it's not has a software problem. Having two of them will simply multiply the problem by a factor of two.
How am I so sure that software not people are to blame? It's easy, I started using non Microsoft software and most of my problems went away. I've got the same old hardware, it just works better under Linux. It does more for me too.
Why is that? It might be that there's no nasty registry that's designed to keep me from "stealing" software. It might be that sane networking models really do eliminate most problems with worms and viruses. It might be that free software really works to make better code. Who cares?
The bottom line is obvious. No amount of blame shifting will change it.
my car has a manual alarm that I can set to go off when I reach a speed. For example if it's 25mph I set it to 25 and it'll tell me when i go over 25 with a beep which I can ignore. Your assertion that such a thing would cause accidents is ridiculous and by the sound of it. Born from ignorance.
There's a big difference between one beep you expect and many you do not. If you want your car to nag you, by all means buy the kit for yourself.
This looks like a big distraction and distractions are dangerous. I want idiot lights go go off if my car is having mechanical problems, not when I go over the speed limit or some other dumb thing like that. Suppose I am approaching a stop sign and I don't see it. I'm going to be looking at my dash for what's beeping if this stupid thing is installed. What happens to the kid running after the ball while I'm looking at my dash because the nag alarm fired at 25MPH when I thought the speed limit was 30? What happens to me when I don't see the truck ahead slowing down because I was going 57 MPH?
People will quickly learn that petty and false alarms in an automobile are a bad idea if this ever gets out of the lab. The insurance companies will demand that they be disabled and no longer installed within a week of testing.
With all of Bill Gates' money and all of Microsoft behind him, Bill Gates still needs a third party application and has to run it himself! You would expect the average CEO to have someone filtering their calls, mail and everything else. This was not enough to keep him from being hit. Nor is the combined expertise of every support tech at Microsoft's disposal. Who can expect to do better with Windows?
At the same time, poor little me has no problems using Linux. That's with my crap hardware and free software and zero staff or commercial support. The default Mepis install has built in spam filtering for Kmail and Kmail is bright enough to not load binary crap sent through the internet. The biggets and bloatiest of crap, macromedia's non free garbage and real player 8, have yet to get me owned though they work seemlessly through Konqueror and Mozilla, which are both more feature filled than IE. You would think a set up like that would be raped regularly, but there have been no problems in more than a year of use like that. While apt-get upgrading is a chore with unstable, especially with all that customization, it's worked and continues to work. It never crashes and I only have to turn it off when the electricity to the house fails. If I had 1/100th of Bill Gate's money, I could hire someone to filter my spam folder and administrate the box after hours so that what little pain there is to using it would go away.
What he's admitted is that Windoze is a pain in the ass. Can you imagine trying to do tech support for big dogs?
"Mr. President, there are some things you can't click in your email. There's a list here to help you remember...."
"Your honor, I'm afraid something from a web site you visited has infected your computer and I'll have to fix it today. It should only take an hour or so...."
"Your patented hair cut looks good today, Mr. Trump, but I'm afraid that something is wrong with the LAN..."
One thing I can't imagine telling them is that they will have to run anti-virus and anti-malware software or why their new fancy computer does not run as fast as the 468 they had ten years ago.
5MW is impressive. Still, I'd like to put than number in perspective. It takes 200 of them to be the equivalent of one normal nuclear power plant, if and only if the wind blows continuously. The wind does not blow that way, it generally blows at off peak hours so power storage is mandatory. If that gets cheap enough this will be practical.
People use FORTRAN because it works well on many platforms and people have put lots of effort into qualifying their routines. Good luck replacing MCNP, SCALE, both nuclear, NASTRAN, a NASA thing, or the core code of every engineering discipline.
People use Winblows because they don't know any better. Most people simply want email and web browsing. They would do better with any major Linux distro than they are doing with Winblows. They don't know any better because M$ has used the postion IBM foolishly gave them to screw over hardware vendors who don't play ball. That's what this anti-trust case is all about, abuse of power.
In the end, it's stupid and useless. M$ is such poor quality and the difference in user costs is so great that there's no chance Microsoft will survive another five years. The market is going to do to them what they did to SCO, and that's far worse than anything the federal government can do to them.
Still, I like this guy's angle. M$ has painted themselves into an IP corner by not selling binaries but the ability to use them as a contract. Contracts are something the government feels much more comfortable regulating than actual property. I'm glad no one thought of that, though. The more unbearable M$ acts, the faster people will be driven to free software.
There are a lot of schlock outfits, out there, that are putting together very poor Linux solutions.
Ah ha, but there are even more of these types attracted to the click and drool ease of Winblows. The difference between the two? The Linux outfit learns things when things go wrong and can avoid it in the future. They might even fix the application. With some effort, they become experts. The Winblows fraud, on the other hand, has only GUI check boxes and registry hacks to work with. These things teach them nothing and they remain frauds.
Even the best run Winblows sites are slow, buggy and crash prone. Steve Baller brags about "insane" 30 day uptimes for 2003. The insane part might be true but anyone can get a 100 day uptime with any stable Linux distro. The hotmail switch out to M$'s own "dog food" epitomizes how difficult, stupid and wastefull such a migration is. The claim to two years without downtime with Server 2003, released this year, is self evidently a lie and the whole article is nonsense.
Sun's focus on Red Hat is that commercial software for Linux is usually geared to Red Hat, not Debian.
If true, this is evidence that Sun is deranged. As the parent pointed out, it ignores Suse which is very commercial and capable. But Suse's parent, Novel, does not mind dealing with Red Hat or anything else. Hell, they even do Windoze. IBM also has a list of recommended distros. I'm sure there will be more "commercial" activity for Debian than Lindows, Caldera and other previous players have provided.
Those companies to some extent have a clue and know that closed source is a dying business model. A missundersanding of free software and the way it makes money is the only reason Sun would piss on Red Hat. Like most deranged plans, that one won't work.
Shitting on one of your perceived competitors is a poor way to build a community around Solaris. Honest and constructive criticism is always welcome. FUD is not. Microsoft has tried for years to create divisions between FOSS groups. It has not worked because most people are not the kind of hypercompetitive jerks that run M$. I hate to think of Sun lowering itself to that kind of nonsense.
It is difficult to find a totally-free but commercially-viable American distribution, but that does not affect Sun's market.
Debian? Of course, there's no such thing as national boundaries in free software. It's commercially viable the same way all free software is. IBM is demonstrating that you don't have to have software secrets to make money. Consulting and hardware sales pay manyfold what you might put into software development.
IBM realizes that the only way to keep the hardware prices high is to commoditize software. Sun has great engineers, but their business strategies do not reflect today's market.
IBM realizes that their hardware has to do useful things if they want to sell it. Bill Gates taught them a big lesson about non free software. When your software has owners, so does your hardware.
Sun, on the other hand, seems to have gone insane. Without community involvement, Solaris will continue to fall behind free tools. No one company can compete against the free software world. If they start spewing M$ FUD, the community will desert them. That will leave them with nothing.
Oh, by all means, be the good consultant will you? Which of the raft of binary cruft which must compose the system was compiled with the wrong SDK? I'm sure everyone would love you to death if you could reach into the DLL hell and pull out the offending bits. The guy who's supposed to go and reboot the thing once a month will be especially pleased with how clever you are.
It's funny how people pointing their fingers at one or another potential causes think that mitigates how nasty M$ is as a platform. How pathetic a system is it that does not have reliable system timers? How much even more pathetic that someone's goofed timer can pull the whole system down. Oh, but it's a timer, see? No, it's just a "data overload" that will give traffic control incorrect information. How about they should have automated the reboot? As if you want faulty software deciding when it should stop giving your air traffic control info or you would trust it to come back up on it's own. The boss blamed his tech who missed the once a month reboot as if that was never going to happen. It's junk and you should not use it so it's not M$'s fault is my favorite though, right behind just don't use it.
The last two hit it on the head. M$, You have to be crazy to use it. Remember that the next time you think Winblows might be a reasonable candidate for anything. When the thing goes tits up, the blame gets put everywhere but and on you. So much for vendor support.
This is quite standard microsoft practice with regards to schools. A state or country works out a deal with microsoft whereby they get essentially free access to MS software.... They can be installed at will on any machine within the school, and often on staff personal machines, depending on the details of the contracts worked out with MS and their department.
That's not how they treated Philadelphia and other school systems they sued.
It's funny how the administrative people are afraid of free software because they are afraid someone is going to have to fix it. No vendor ever back software and all will charge you to fix it. Given M$'s terrible record with visuses worm and all that which has cost everone plenty, the case for reliability is firmly on the free software side and the costs of switching will probably be lower than the cost of continued upkeep, let along upgrade.
My wife saw this the other day, but did not understand that it applied to just about all circular barrel style locks. They have various video formats including an mpeg that works with Xine. When I told her that I only bought cheapo work alike locks, she thought I was OK.
My motorbike lock uses a flat key, has a master lock style steel laminate construction and hexagonal cross section U bend. It was made in the early 1990s. They knew what made a lock hard to break but it's soooo heavy.
IMHO, putting all your servers on your firewall is just asking for trouble. For better security, you'd do best to have one of those Linksys firewall/routers separate from your mail/file/blah-blah server.
You can do this reasonably. You should have all of your stuff backed up regardless of where you put it. Email and file serving are not security problems, especially if file service is done through ssh. While it may be better to port forward to other computers to share the load and risk, the low effort and low power solution is to set up one box on your internet connection and run that but nothing else 24/7. I set up a 90MHz pentium with sarge and a 200 GB hard drive as my cable box the other day and I love it. If my ISP did not block ports, that box would be a mail server too. It was very easy.
I run about five computers 24/7 and never noticed much on my power bill. None of them are big monsters and all of them run APM or ACPI.
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IBM, Novel and even free software groups have replacements for all that jazz that work better than all that broken stuff. IBM and Novel can make it work with your windoze desktops too, so you don't have to do everything at once or ever. If you want to do it on your own, just show your web monkeys KDE, it's groupware and it's awesome IDE. That alone blows most crufty junk out of the water and most of it writes to normal html so those low on the upgrade list don't feel left out.
Considering your options is "extortion"? Call RICO down on me, I do that kind of thing every time I spend money.
ATT is doing a study. That means that free software is obviously good enough to replace M$.
The GNU debugger has more than 80 contributors and is excellent because of it. No one can pay that many people to work on any single non-free code.
KDE is a tremendous project and is excellent. There are probably more KDE programmers out there now than there are people who have looked at VB. Gnome is right up there too. Both projects have been ported to more languages than Microsoft can afford to have their core office software ported.
It's because people realize that the Microsoft way of doing things has problems that can't be solved. Sure, you can still make money with your programming skills but you won't be able to do it long the closed source way. Your company does not outsource your job but it won't matter, whatever it is you work on will be eclipsed by a free program sooner or later. The Microsoft monopoly put a lot of people, like Netscape, Word Perfect, etc. Free software is payback.
Recognizing that free alternatives to Microsoft have a lower pain of ownership does not make a person "radical". Remembering that Microsoft has sued public school systems, paid people to lie and disrupt "competitor's" discussions, PR firms to forge letters to public officials, and routinely breaks other people's software and blames the victim takes nothing more than a brain with a memory. You might not like what I say, but I don't see much reasonable refutation.
Free software works, M$ does not, the details are less important than the big picture. Here are my answers to your little quiz and a question of my own:
1. Who most likely wrote the software? A) Ground-breaking AI B) People C) Monkeys
People. They write free software that works too.
2. A user always reads and follows instructions. A) True B) False
The software should work anyway, like Knoppix does.
3. Windows' registry was designed for software protection. A) True B) False
I don't care. It breaks the system.
4. Which OS is the most compatible with today's hardware market? A) Windows B) Linux C) OSX D) Other...
Linux. Once free, a driver lasts forever. There are now more devices that run under Linux than any other kernel. Just look through any company closet for the pile of devices that made "obsolete" by an OS upgrade to know this is true. You can also look at the number of ports to different hardware. FreeBSD does that well, but it does not have the device support Linux does.
5. Name one piece of software that is perfect: ______________________
Any software that has been qualified for nuclear license evaluation. It's amazing, you can write complex software that does what it should and is verifiable.
6. In windows, you can turn off a screen saver. A) True B) False
Sure you can, until a service pack turns it back on. Who cares? The thing still has uptimes of less than a week and is prone to worms and full of bugs.
7. Microsoft _tries_ to make their code better. A) True B) False
Failure: when your best effort is not good enough. They don't have the time or resources to compete with free software. No one does.
Here's a question for you. The Bill Gate's method of software creation, stated here is:
A. Wrong.
B. Obsolete.
C. Greedy.
D. Stupid.
E. All of the above.
Long live M$ BASIC. Opps, they are pulling the plug on that one for .NET
Sorry Microsoft, it's the software. When I go to the local airport and see a kiosk displaying a Windoze 2000 screen saver instead of information, something is wrong with the software running the kiosk. I'm sure that the kiosk owner followed all of the directions given and the stupid thing did not work anyway. A box that has to be restarted once a month and crashes when it's not has a software problem. Having two of them will simply multiply the problem by a factor of two.
How am I so sure that software not people are to blame? It's easy, I started using non Microsoft software and most of my problems went away. I've got the same old hardware, it just works better under Linux. It does more for me too.
Why is that? It might be that there's no nasty registry that's designed to keep me from "stealing" software. It might be that sane networking models really do eliminate most problems with worms and viruses. It might be that free software really works to make better code. Who cares?
The bottom line is obvious. No amount of blame shifting will change it.
Using a phone booth, $0.35. When your brain works, things are easy. For everything else, there's a credit card waiting to suck the rest of your life.
XP users, they are so clever.
If you call your customers stupid, it must be true. The problem with that is that you soon run out of customers.
There's a big difference between one beep you expect and many you do not. If you want your car to nag you, by all means buy the kit for yourself.
People will quickly learn that petty and false alarms in an automobile are a bad idea if this ever gets out of the lab. The insurance companies will demand that they be disabled and no longer installed within a week of testing.
At the same time, poor little me has no problems using Linux. That's with my crap hardware and free software and zero staff or commercial support. The default Mepis install has built in spam filtering for Kmail and Kmail is bright enough to not load binary crap sent through the internet. The biggets and bloatiest of crap, macromedia's non free garbage and real player 8, have yet to get me owned though they work seemlessly through Konqueror and Mozilla, which are both more feature filled than IE. You would think a set up like that would be raped regularly, but there have been no problems in more than a year of use like that. While apt-get upgrading is a chore with unstable, especially with all that customization, it's worked and continues to work. It never crashes and I only have to turn it off when the electricity to the house fails. If I had 1/100th of Bill Gate's money, I could hire someone to filter my spam folder and administrate the box after hours so that what little pain there is to using it would go away.
What he's admitted is that Windoze is a pain in the ass. Can you imagine trying to do tech support for big dogs?
"Mr. President, there are some things you can't click in your email. There's a list here to help you remember ...."
"Your honor, I'm afraid something from a web site you visited has infected your computer and I'll have to fix it today. It should only take an hour or so ...."
"Your patented hair cut looks good today, Mr. Trump, but I'm afraid that something is wrong with the LAN ..."
One thing I can't imagine telling them is that they will have to run anti-virus and anti-malware software or why their new fancy computer does not run as fast as the 468 they had ten years ago.
People use Winblows because they don't know any better. Most people simply want email and web browsing. They would do better with any major Linux distro than they are doing with Winblows. They don't know any better because M$ has used the postion IBM foolishly gave them to screw over hardware vendors who don't play ball. That's what this anti-trust case is all about, abuse of power.
In the end, it's stupid and useless. M$ is such poor quality and the difference in user costs is so great that there's no chance Microsoft will survive another five years. The market is going to do to them what they did to SCO, and that's far worse than anything the federal government can do to them.
Still, I like this guy's angle. M$ has painted themselves into an IP corner by not selling binaries but the ability to use them as a contract. Contracts are something the government feels much more comfortable regulating than actual property. I'm glad no one thought of that, though. The more unbearable M$ acts, the faster people will be driven to free software.
Ah ha, but there are even more of these types attracted to the click and drool ease of Winblows. The difference between the two? The Linux outfit learns things when things go wrong and can avoid it in the future. They might even fix the application. With some effort, they become experts. The Winblows fraud, on the other hand, has only GUI check boxes and registry hacks to work with. These things teach them nothing and they remain frauds.
Even the best run Winblows sites are slow, buggy and crash prone. Steve Baller brags about "insane" 30 day uptimes for 2003. The insane part might be true but anyone can get a 100 day uptime with any stable Linux distro. The hotmail switch out to M$'s own "dog food" epitomizes how difficult, stupid and wastefull such a migration is. The claim to two years without downtime with Server 2003, released this year, is self evidently a lie and the whole article is nonsense.
If true, this is evidence that Sun is deranged. As the parent pointed out, it ignores Suse which is very commercial and capable. But Suse's parent, Novel, does not mind dealing with Red Hat or anything else. Hell, they even do Windoze. IBM also has a list of recommended distros. I'm sure there will be more "commercial" activity for Debian than Lindows, Caldera and other previous players have provided. Those companies to some extent have a clue and know that closed source is a dying business model. A missundersanding of free software and the way it makes money is the only reason Sun would piss on Red Hat. Like most deranged plans, that one won't work.
Shitting on one of your perceived competitors is a poor way to build a community around Solaris. Honest and constructive criticism is always welcome. FUD is not. Microsoft has tried for years to create divisions between FOSS groups. It has not worked because most people are not the kind of hypercompetitive jerks that run M$. I hate to think of Sun lowering itself to that kind of nonsense.
Debian? Of course, there's no such thing as national boundaries in free software. It's commercially viable the same way all free software is. IBM is demonstrating that you don't have to have software secrets to make money. Consulting and hardware sales pay manyfold what you might put into software development.
IBM realizes that the only way to keep the hardware prices high is to commoditize software. Sun has great engineers, but their business strategies do not reflect today's market.
IBM realizes that their hardware has to do useful things if they want to sell it. Bill Gates taught them a big lesson about non free software. When your software has owners, so does your hardware.
Sun, on the other hand, seems to have gone insane. Without community involvement, Solaris will continue to fall behind free tools. No one company can compete against the free software world. If they start spewing M$ FUD, the community will desert them. That will leave them with nothing.
Oh, by all means, be the good consultant will you? Which of the raft of binary cruft which must compose the system was compiled with the wrong SDK? I'm sure everyone would love you to death if you could reach into the DLL hell and pull out the offending bits. The guy who's supposed to go and reboot the thing once a month will be especially pleased with how clever you are.
It's funny how people pointing their fingers at one or another potential causes think that mitigates how nasty M$ is as a platform. How pathetic a system is it that does not have reliable system timers? How much even more pathetic that someone's goofed timer can pull the whole system down. Oh, but it's a timer, see? No, it's just a "data overload" that will give traffic control incorrect information. How about they should have automated the reboot? As if you want faulty software deciding when it should stop giving your air traffic control info or you would trust it to come back up on it's own. The boss blamed his tech who missed the once a month reboot as if that was never going to happen. It's junk and you should not use it so it's not M$'s fault is my favorite though, right behind just don't use it.
The last two hit it on the head. M$, You have to be crazy to use it. Remember that the next time you think Winblows might be a reasonable candidate for anything. When the thing goes tits up, the blame gets put everywhere but and on you. So much for vendor support.
That's not how they treated Philadelphia and other school systems they sued.
It's funny how the administrative people are afraid of free software because they are afraid someone is going to have to fix it. No vendor ever back software and all will charge you to fix it. Given M$'s terrible record with visuses worm and all that which has cost everone plenty, the case for reliability is firmly on the free software side and the costs of switching will probably be lower than the cost of continued upkeep, let along upgrade.
My motorbike lock uses a flat key, has a master lock style steel laminate construction and hexagonal cross section U bend. It was made in the early 1990s. They knew what made a lock hard to break but it's soooo heavy.
You can do this reasonably. You should have all of your stuff backed up regardless of where you put it. Email and file serving are not security problems, especially if file service is done through ssh. While it may be better to port forward to other computers to share the load and risk, the low effort and low power solution is to set up one box on your internet connection and run that but nothing else 24/7. I set up a 90MHz pentium with sarge and a 200 GB hard drive as my cable box the other day and I love it. If my ISP did not block ports, that box would be a mail server too. It was very easy.
I run about five computers 24/7 and never noticed much on my power bill. None of them are big monsters and all of them run APM or ACPI.
Many day jobs pay more than $45,000 a year which is what some of the most successful musicians are paid. That's what happens when there are only 4 music publishers in the world.
Your views of what M$ actually does for people are similarly detached from reality.
People who screw people never do anything good for anyone. That's what DRM is all about.
I hope so, but you can't tell from Sun's announcement.