No, it'd be more like shopping at JC Penny or Sears, leaving, and then the sales people calling you up at home, asking you if you wanted to buy any of the things they know you looked at. Annoying sales people is one thing, but many of these companies are just plain intrusive. I once foolishly gave my business phone number to Trend Micro to download some software they were offering for evaluation -- I think they called every other day for nearly two weeks for me, trying to ask if I wanted to buy their software. Maybe it was because I was always "out of the office" when they called, and never returned their phone calls, but....
That's funny, because Windows broke into businesses via the other route -- people used Windows on their desktop machines at home, and wanted to use the same at work. Most businesses initially resisted Windows, particularily Windows 95 when it came out.
Actually, you're wrong. It's ASCAP, BMI and one other organization (SESAC or something, I think)that you need to pay in order to have public performances of music. They are supposed to redistribute the money they collect to the artist and authors of the music, but not to the recording companies, and performers. You have to buy the original CDs, but that's your entire obligation to the RIAA. That is, of course, unless you're unfortunate to be a webcaster, then you get to pay both!
Uhg. This bothers me. Too many Americans who use socialism without really knowing what it means. If, by your defintions, Canada and many of the countries in europe are socialist, then the United State of America is also socialist. Things like unemployment insurance, old age pension, and welfare are no less socialist when implemented in the United States than when implemented elsewhere in the world. Just because other countries have things like universal, government-funded health care or other social programmes does not make them socialist countries. Canada, for instance, runs on capitalism just as much as the United States does. The only difference is there's a few more state-owned companies (so-called "Crown Corporations"), and a few more social programmes that the citizens of the country feel are important.
Microsoft has similar software for their Win2K servers. They offer MS Windows Services for Unix which can allow your Windows 2000 server to act as an NIS+ server (along with NFS, etc), and extends the Active Directory schema to support UNIX user attributes.
It's important to note that the tags of "unstable" and "testing" don't correspond with the programs being unstable or needing testing. It's the packaging and integration of the packages that tends to be unstable. Broken packages, not broken programs tends to be the prime problem with "Sid".
As I was trying to say, the fact they started this with a non-Windows machine wasn't a real issue. If they had kept using FreeBSD, that would have been fine -- they were selling webservers. However, the real problem came when they changed to the Windows platform, and large amounts of downtime. As you said, hosting these simple little pages should have been a non-issue for any OS.
Microsoft and Unisys are advertising that you can use inexperienced (read: cheap, low paid) MCSE administrators to run their machines, without directly saying it. However, the nonsense with the webserver they're trying to run is proving the exact opposite. It's proving that you need to have experienced administrators (who expect to be paid well) even if you run Windows.
Lets put it this way. If they can't use the platform they're promoting for hosting a simple set of webpages, why should I trust it with mission critical data? They promote the idea that inexspensive MSCEs can handle their machines, and what do they have after they switch the server to Windows -- downtime. If it was just the fact they were using non-Windows servers to host this, that would be one thing, but changing the platform, and then having mysterious "configuration problems", does not paint a good picture for what they're trying to sell.
Good point. I think a better idea would be a timebomb in the software that doesn't disable the program, but rather just starts spitting out warnings once you reach a certain age. I think six months to a year should be acceptable for most software. This, of course, doesn't apply to all software. I seriously doubt there'll be an exploitable security vulnerability in GNU echo any time in the near future, or any other mundane utility program. Most network daemons could likely benefit from warning the user about running outdated programs.
By your definition, a monopoly will never exist, because any competitor, no matter how small or marginal will always prevent them from reaching that status. The legal determination for being a monopoly is quite different, thankfully.
To answer your question, "Should they be penalized for succeeding?" No, they should not be penalized for succeeding. However, they should be penalized for using their success in one area to squash competitors in other markets through dubious means. Things like Microsoft tying Windows and Internet Explorer together was absurd. As of the time IE4 came out, it appeared Internet Explorer would've destroyed Netscape by itself, as Netscape got further and further behind. However, it seems MS couldn't wait for this to happen and had to resort to less appropriate measures to finalize their success. They used a similar tactic with IIS and some rewording in the NT licensing to kill Netscape's web server. Effectively, these two actions cut off all of Netscape's revenue. Who would buy Netscape's server to run on NT when IIS is free? Who would buy Netscape Navigator when IE was free? No one, it seemed.
I don't have anything against the fact that Windows or MS Office became standard products. With the exception of a small incident between DR-DOS and Windows 3.x, they all achieved their position because people wanted them. My problem is with these new areas that Microsoft insists on piggybacking their offerings on MS Windows to inflate their installed base -- things like Windows Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), Windows Media Player 7.x, MS Remote Desktop (and licensing that prevents you from using any other product), and so on. Offering these products as free downloads (competitive with the price of other vendors offerings) would be one thing, but leveraging their OS to get an inflated installed base is something completely different. Take Windows Media Player, for example. Lets assume you're someone who wants to publish digital media to the internet. Would you be more likely to use Quicktime, (which is only available on macs, and some PCs that may have installed it) RealPlayer, (which also requires the end user to download and install) or Windows Media Player, which is standard on Windows-based computers? I think you'd be stupid to choose anything other than WMP unless there was a very specific reason why you couldn't. As a competitor, how can you possibily compete against something like that?
Because part of the cost of any OS to a company, is the cost to support and maintain it. In many circumstances, the cost of licensing the OS and applications can seem a trivial cost compared to that. The often repeated line from JWZ, that "Linux is only free if your time has no value" is true in a case like this (although I realize it's taken terribly out-of-context, and wasn't what he meant). Fortunately for Linux, things like supporting the hardware it runs on is as cheap as with normal PCs, it's only the cost of supporting the OS itself that might vary from standard Microsoft OS's. Of course, this is the prime reason why Microsoft's cost of ownership claims against Linux break down, saying they would be the same as UNIX, despite the software pricetag difference.
Sorry, although Outlook will work, the MSRPC (DCE/RPC) runtime does not work and is likely mostly stubs, assuming they haven't expanded the base WINE too far in that area. DCE RPC is a complex standard that could take years to implement by itself, however there does already exist free software package that implements it. However, it's not complete enough to properly interoperate with Windows servers, and would require work to adapt for use with Wine.
If you have an interrupt handler taking 500ms, there's something seriously wrong. An interrupt handler that takes even 10ms can cause some serious problems. Interrupt handlers must always be lightweight, and return control as quickly as possible, because the longer the interrupt handler runs, the more likely that other interrupts will be missed.
ACPI is also for hardware configuration. However, it's a monster of a standard, and very few vendors have working, correct ACPI support in the BIOS. I'm not entirely sure why, but more and more boards these days are being configured by the BIOS to put any and all PCI cards on the exact same IRQ (usually 10 or 11), regardless of how many other IRQs are unused. Thankfully, PCI IRQ sharing is working better and better these days. I remember the days of Win95, where there were 5 filled PCI slots, who wanted 7 IRQs, and there were 3 IRQs free, and none of the cards particularily wanted to share IRQs with anything else. One hardware change, accidental or not, and Windows won't even boot anymore (and occasionally the SCSI BIOS would hang because of the IRQ conflict).
I belive that the "pre-boot environment" that is referred to, is also known as PXE (Preboot Execution Environment). It's really nothing more than a network boot process that many Intel NICs support. It supports authentication and such, so use of such counters isn't unreasonable.
Re:Should I send this to my congressmen?
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 1
Far worse than the fate of Intel and co, is the fact this law will effectively shut out all small and medium businesses from starting in the IT sector because it will be unlikely they'll be able to afford to license the technologies. This law would effectively mean that startups in software and computer hardware are outlawed. The SSSCA doesn't say that the technologies have to be licensed royalty free, but in fact, goes out of it's way to prevent that, granting anti-trust exemptions to the owners of the technology that is adopted.
Frankly, companies like Intel and Microsoft may have to incur large costs to implement this law. What will happen to all the small "white box" computer manufacturers if this law is passed -- will they be able to afford $1,000,000 to license the technology just to have the privledge of shipping PCs? What about the small software makers, can they afford similar licensing regimes? This will kill all but the big boys.
While everyone else has poked holes into your "faster" claim, I'd like to point out that IPX is indeed routable and can be used on a WAN as well as a LAN. That's why IPX has "Network Numbers". Of the few ethernet protocols Microsoft Windows supported, NetBEUI was one of the few that was completely non-routable. IPX in games is merely a holdover from the old days of DOS games where having a TCP/IP stack was unheard of.
Using X (or at least Xfree, the only version I've used), it's highlight, (middle) click destination; half as many steps to accomplish the same task.
Except when you're using the clipboard to replace the text you've selected. In MS Windows, you can select the text you want to copy, press the copy button (ctrl-C), switch to where you want to paste it, select what you want to replace, and press the paste button (ctrl-v). Add to the fact to accomplish all of this in MS Windows, you need not touch the mouse once. It's really frustrating when you use both X and MS Windows frequently. I get the feeling the only way to make former Windows users confortable with X would be to have two clipboards -- the selection clipboard, and the cut/copy/paste menu/keystroke clipboard.
Either you're clueless, or you're trolling. The little endianness only applies to Microsoft's proprietary PAC. Only applications that care to be compatible with Windows 2000's implementation of Kerberos need worry about the format of the PAC, especially since they'd need to worry about other Microsoftese formatted structures like user and machine SID and GUIDs. Besides which, nearly the entire PAC uses NDR encoding (Network Data Representation -- the type of data encoding that DCE/RPC does).
From my Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons GBC game:
WARNING: Copying any Nintendo game is illegal and is strictly prohibited by domestic and international copyright laws. "Back-up" or "archival" copies are not authorized and are not necessary to protect your software. Violators will be prosecuted.
And, yes, I live in Canada, too. Most countries don't allow you to prohibit all reverse engineering either, and most EULAs also contain clauses that state exactly that.
The GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 may not have been "released" on the same date, however they were announced within days of each other. They did this despite the fact they knew it wouldn't ship for months.
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No, it'd be more like shopping at JC Penny or Sears, leaving, and then the sales people calling you up at home, asking you if you wanted to buy any of the things they know you looked at. Annoying sales people is one thing, but many of these companies are just plain intrusive. I once foolishly gave my business phone number to Trend Micro to download some software they were offering for evaluation -- I think they called every other day for nearly two weeks for me, trying to ask if I wanted to buy their software. Maybe it was because I was always "out of the office" when they called, and never returned their phone calls, but....
No, but I think Wine runs okay on NetBSD.
That's funny, because Windows broke into businesses via the other route -- people used Windows on their desktop machines at home, and wanted to use the same at work. Most businesses initially resisted Windows, particularily Windows 95 when it came out.
Actually, you're wrong. It's ASCAP, BMI and one other organization (SESAC or something, I think)that you need to pay in order to have public performances of music. They are supposed to redistribute the money they collect to the artist and authors of the music, but not to the recording companies, and performers. You have to buy the original CDs, but that's your entire obligation to the RIAA. That is, of course, unless you're unfortunate to be a webcaster, then you get to pay both!
Uhg. This bothers me. Too many Americans who use socialism without really knowing what it means. If, by your defintions, Canada and many of the countries in europe are socialist, then the United State of America is also socialist. Things like unemployment insurance, old age pension, and welfare are no less socialist when implemented in the United States than when implemented elsewhere in the world. Just because other countries have things like universal, government-funded health care or other social programmes does not make them socialist countries. Canada, for instance, runs on capitalism just as much as the United States does. The only difference is there's a few more state-owned companies (so-called "Crown Corporations"), and a few more social programmes that the citizens of the country feel are important.
Microsoft has similar software for their Win2K servers. They offer MS Windows Services for Unix which can allow your Windows 2000 server to act as an NIS+ server (along with NFS, etc), and extends the Active Directory schema to support UNIX user attributes.
It's important to note that the tags of "unstable" and "testing" don't correspond with the programs being unstable or needing testing. It's the packaging and integration of the packages that tends to be unstable. Broken packages, not broken programs tends to be the prime problem with "Sid".
Microsoft and Unisys are advertising that you can use inexperienced (read: cheap, low paid) MCSE administrators to run their machines, without directly saying it. However, the nonsense with the webserver they're trying to run is proving the exact opposite. It's proving that you need to have experienced administrators (who expect to be paid well) even if you run Windows.
It is possibly subject to their patents, however, and only agreeing to their license gives you rights to use their patents on CIFS/SMB.
Lets put it this way. If they can't use the platform they're promoting for hosting a simple set of webpages, why should I trust it with mission critical data? They promote the idea that inexspensive MSCEs can handle their machines, and what do they have after they switch the server to Windows -- downtime. If it was just the fact they were using non-Windows servers to host this, that would be one thing, but changing the platform, and then having mysterious "configuration problems", does not paint a good picture for what they're trying to sell.
Good point. I think a better idea would be a timebomb in the software that doesn't disable the program, but rather just starts spitting out warnings once you reach a certain age. I think six months to a year should be acceptable for most software. This, of course, doesn't apply to all software. I seriously doubt there'll be an exploitable security vulnerability in GNU echo any time in the near future, or any other mundane utility program. Most network daemons could likely benefit from warning the user about running outdated programs.
To answer your question, "Should they be penalized for succeeding?" No, they should not be penalized for succeeding. However, they should be penalized for using their success in one area to squash competitors in other markets through dubious means. Things like Microsoft tying Windows and Internet Explorer together was absurd. As of the time IE4 came out, it appeared Internet Explorer would've destroyed Netscape by itself, as Netscape got further and further behind. However, it seems MS couldn't wait for this to happen and had to resort to less appropriate measures to finalize their success. They used a similar tactic with IIS and some rewording in the NT licensing to kill Netscape's web server. Effectively, these two actions cut off all of Netscape's revenue. Who would buy Netscape's server to run on NT when IIS is free? Who would buy Netscape Navigator when IE was free? No one, it seemed.
I don't have anything against the fact that Windows or MS Office became standard products. With the exception of a small incident between DR-DOS and Windows 3.x, they all achieved their position because people wanted them. My problem is with these new areas that Microsoft insists on piggybacking their offerings on MS Windows to inflate their installed base -- things like Windows Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger), Windows Media Player 7.x, MS Remote Desktop (and licensing that prevents you from using any other product), and so on. Offering these products as free downloads (competitive with the price of other vendors offerings) would be one thing, but leveraging their OS to get an inflated installed base is something completely different. Take Windows Media Player, for example. Lets assume you're someone who wants to publish digital media to the internet. Would you be more likely to use Quicktime, (which is only available on macs, and some PCs that may have installed it) RealPlayer, (which also requires the end user to download and install) or Windows Media Player, which is standard on Windows-based computers? I think you'd be stupid to choose anything other than WMP unless there was a very specific reason why you couldn't. As a competitor, how can you possibily compete against something like that?
Because part of the cost of any OS to a company, is the cost to support and maintain it. In many circumstances, the cost of licensing the OS and applications can seem a trivial cost compared to that. The often repeated line from JWZ, that "Linux is only free if your time has no value" is true in a case like this (although I realize it's taken terribly out-of-context, and wasn't what he meant). Fortunately for Linux, things like supporting the hardware it runs on is as cheap as with normal PCs, it's only the cost of supporting the OS itself that might vary from standard Microsoft OS's. Of course, this is the prime reason why Microsoft's cost of ownership claims against Linux break down, saying they would be the same as UNIX, despite the software pricetag difference.
Sorry, although Outlook will work, the MSRPC (DCE/RPC) runtime does not work and is likely mostly stubs, assuming they haven't expanded the base WINE too far in that area. DCE RPC is a complex standard that could take years to implement by itself, however there does already exist free software package that implements it. However, it's not complete enough to properly interoperate with Windows servers, and would require work to adapt for use with Wine.
50-pound computers are what most of us call "servers". Even most loaded desktop computers don't weigh 50 lbs.
If you have an interrupt handler taking 500ms, there's something seriously wrong. An interrupt handler that takes even 10ms can cause some serious problems. Interrupt handlers must always be lightweight, and return control as quickly as possible, because the longer the interrupt handler runs, the more likely that other interrupts will be missed.
ACPI is also for hardware configuration. However, it's a monster of a standard, and very few vendors have working, correct ACPI support in the BIOS. I'm not entirely sure why, but more and more boards these days are being configured by the BIOS to put any and all PCI cards on the exact same IRQ (usually 10 or 11), regardless of how many other IRQs are unused. Thankfully, PCI IRQ sharing is working better and better these days. I remember the days of Win95, where there were 5 filled PCI slots, who wanted 7 IRQs, and there were 3 IRQs free, and none of the cards particularily wanted to share IRQs with anything else. One hardware change, accidental or not, and Windows won't even boot anymore (and occasionally the SCSI BIOS would hang because of the IRQ conflict).
I belive that the "pre-boot environment" that is referred to, is also known as PXE (Preboot Execution Environment). It's really nothing more than a network boot process that many Intel NICs support. It supports authentication and such, so use of such counters isn't unreasonable.
Frankly, companies like Intel and Microsoft may have to incur large costs to implement this law. What will happen to all the small "white box" computer manufacturers if this law is passed -- will they be able to afford $1,000,000 to license the technology just to have the privledge of shipping PCs? What about the small software makers, can they afford similar licensing regimes? This will kill all but the big boys.
While everyone else has poked holes into your "faster" claim, I'd like to point out that IPX is indeed routable and can be used on a WAN as well as a LAN. That's why IPX has "Network Numbers". Of the few ethernet protocols Microsoft Windows supported, NetBEUI was one of the few that was completely non-routable. IPX in games is merely a holdover from the old days of DOS games where having a TCP/IP stack was unheard of.
Either you're clueless, or you're trolling. The little endianness only applies to Microsoft's proprietary PAC. Only applications that care to be compatible with Windows 2000's implementation of Kerberos need worry about the format of the PAC, especially since they'd need to worry about other Microsoftese formatted structures like user and machine SID and GUIDs. Besides which, nearly the entire PAC uses NDR encoding (Network Data Representation -- the type of data encoding that DCE/RPC does).
WARNING: Copying any Nintendo game is illegal and is strictly prohibited by domestic and international copyright laws. "Back-up" or "archival" copies are not authorized and are not necessary to protect your software. Violators will be prosecuted.
And, yes, I live in Canada, too. Most countries don't allow you to prohibit all reverse engineering either, and most EULAs also contain clauses that state exactly that.
The GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 may not have been "released" on the same date, however they were announced within days of each other. They did this despite the fact they knew it wouldn't ship for months.