Yes, but unless I'm mistaken, the BSD copyright requires acknowledgement. And to my knowledge, they have not done so. I personally don't really care which license you 'prefer', and indeed Microsoft is completely permitted to use any or all of the code that's under the BSD-style licenses, however credit should be given if for no other reason than the morality of using someone else's code and claiming it's entirely yours. Either way, I don't see UC going after Microsoft for such a trivial matter, and the version of FTP that they used is quite ancient and could've probably have been reimplemented from scratch quite easily given it's limited feature set.
Note that Canadian immigration is easier for those with certain occupational experience -- computer background scores very high on Occupational Factor and Educational and Training Factor.
Well, considering Canadian immigration has no problem with letting known terrorists "immigrate" here with false identification, and the fact that lots of U.S. companies like snatching up anyone with talent in either IT or medicine, you should have no problems getting in.
Don't forget the wonders of floresent lights that usually also flicker at 60Hz, however almost never in sync with the monitor's refresh rate flicker, worsening the effect. Then there's different issues with the phosphors on the monitor themselves, which, depending on the manufacturer, hold their charge for different lengths of time. There's enough varience in manufacturing of the CRTs that can cause one monitor at 70-75Hz still have noticable flicker, but others at that same refresh rate will not. There's a tradeoff with it, of course. The longer the phosphors hold the charge, the more likely you are to get motion blur effects, however you have less flicker at lower refresh rates. With phosphors that lose their charge more quickly, you have a very responsive display, that shows extreme flicker at lower refresh rates.
I would have to disagree with that. Although the Genesis technically had a faster CPU in it, the graphical and sound capabilities were vastly inferrior. Except for this and their marketing lingo "Blast Processing", which they admitted later had no real meaning, the SNES outdid them in nearly every way.
Graphics: Not only did the SNES have 256-colours as opposed to the Genesis's 64, but the graphics processor included a wonderful feature called H-DMA, that let you program memory/graphic register changed triggered by the scanline approaching a certain H/V position. Mode 7 got all the press, but H-DMA did all the work. Using H-DMA, they were able to change "Mode 7", which was just simple scaling and rotation, into something that looked three dimentional by varying the scaling each and every scanline. It also allowed them to easily change portions of the colour palette between scanlines, creating OVER 256 colours on screen at once.
Sound: For sound effects, the genesis used a yamaha chip that wasn't capable of much more than FM music and sounds. The SNES, on the other hand, used a chip designed by Sony that produced digital sound based on a wavetable that was uploaded by the host program (game). The chip was entirely self-contained and could be programmed in such a way that it could continue playing sound with no intrevention from the CPU, with events sent to it periodically through the four I/O ports accessable from the main SNES 65816 CPU.
These two differences in the SNES alone meant that the CPU had to do very little work to maintain the game, whereas the Genesis, with it's less powerful video/sound subsystem, had to spend more of it's cycles on maintaining them to maintain a similar output, and in some cases, it wasn't even possible.
Even that wouldn't exactly be fair. First generation games typically have vastly differing quality, with some consoles shipping with strong first gen games, and others with poor first gen games. I'd wait for the second or third generation comparisons before making any conclusions about any of these consoles. Hell, look at the original playstation. Most of the release titles are just plain sad, whereas some of these end-of-life games being released now are exploiting the machines true capability and producing graphics that almost compare to these new machines.
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon -- I just honestly don't understand the appeal to these boxes in this day and age... I'd suggest saving that $200 and applying it to a high-end video card. Then every time you buy a game for your computer (if you actually pay for it, that is) put the $30 or $50 that you're saving over the cost of a console title toward future upgrades.
It seems that hardcore PC gamers never understand the appeal of them... Lets put it this way. With a console you pay around $100-$300 for a console that has a lifespan of 2-5 YEARS, instead of a videocard that will be severely dated and possibly unusable for some games in just 6 months. The games themselves cost about the same with the average being $39-$49. Then there's the fact that the console just works -- there's no OS to mess up, no drivers to update, no insallers to choke on. A PC, on the other hand, costs at least $800 to get the lowest consumer model possible. Then there's game selection. On the PC, FPS and RTS games are king, whereas on the consoles you're more likely to find platformers, sports games, etc. So, in essence you're dealing with two different types of gamers, and there has been little indication that there's a whole lot of cross-over, except for the PC gaming enthusiasts continually claiming that the console will die becuase of faster and better personal computers.
I would have to disagree. A lot of companies have tried to make monolithic do-everything machines and they have historically done extremely poorly with the specialized componentized systems selling much better. While it's true that consoles will probably evolve to do something more than just games, I have my doubts that any future console will replace DVD players or PCs.
No one knows how to deal with our collective broken society, and to most educators, puttings kids on drugs that make them easier to control seems like the right thing to do. I personally find it completely disgusting that the reaction to dealing with troublemakers and children that are having problems is to medicate them to a stupor. I just fear that this overmedication syndrome schools are suffering from will just compound the problem in the future as these individuals don't learn to deal with adversity and instead just replay the lessons they learned in school -- medicate their problems away.
Personally, I try to avoid taking any type of drugs. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't use any illicit drugs. If I have a headache, I wait it out. If I'm ill, I rest. I see no benefit to me to be popping pills all the time, and I prefer to be in complete control of myself and my body at all times. It's a choice I made, and I expect others to respect it. Just as I'll respect other's choice to use illicit drugs. However, since I live in Canada, I have a real problem dealing with having to pay for health care for those who are stupid enough to get fucked up by their drugs of choice -- whether that is lung cancer caused cigarette smoking or a stomach pump because of overdosing on something else, I think you should forfeit your rights to health care for illnesses that are known to be caused by this use.
This is almost certainly already the case. It's just a matter of what and where. Bug fixes and exploits on the BSD TCP/IP stack revealed that NT essentially used BSD's TCP/IP logic (if not the code). But I haven't seen many dialogs in Windows saying "portions of this product are owned by the Regents of UC Berkeley".
How about this. The following text appears in the program code for Windows 9x FTP.EXE:
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
There's no way to generate this string from running the executable itself, it's only viewable in a hexeditor.
The numbers the previous poster had for Netware seem more like retail numbers than educational numbers.
Nothing is more stable, nothing is faster(on similiar hardware), nothing is more SECURE, nothing is as easy to administer.
If you're talking about averaging all those factors together, then I'd have to agree with you. But individually, UNIX servers are often more stable. Faster is subjective to what you're doing. For security, Netware isn't nearly as exposed and tested than the other operating systems out there, but for what Netware servers are most often used for, it's more than adequate. It generally keeps users out who shouldn't be accessing the system, and for schools, it keeps nosy kids from messing with what they shouldn't. And as for easy to administer, I have to agree, although unlike NT, not any fool can do it, you do need to have some idea of what you're doing.
I think the biggest reason why you find them in schools so much is they just work. They sit in a back room somewhere, and do their job, day in and day out, needing little or no maintainance. And that's probably the biggest reason -- Netware servers pretty much manage themselves. You leave them alone, they keep working. However, I can't count the number of times I've seen an abend and have had to reboot the server to recover.
Re:Novell ain't dead, but on the back burner
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
NDS is much more than simply the protocol it runs under. NDS is powerful because of the management features it brings to a Netware server, and is something that not Active Directory nor OpenLDAP can match at this time. If you've never used NDS, it's hard to see it's worth, but the basic ideal is that just about ever feature of the server can be administered from a single heirachy-based interface. It's not something that you can just jump into, since it's a drastic change of how you handle the server from how Microsoft's Windows NT and UNIX-style servers operate, with a single tool/file serving a single purpose. Even with OpenLDAP and Active Directory, they still fall short of what NDS is now.
I personally don't see Novell dying any time soon. Shops that use Novell are often Novell loyal for the simple reason that it works, and when it doesn't there's a clear reason for it. The problem as I see it is Novell seems to have problems attracting new customers because they don't advertise as well as Microsoft and don't have the hype that Linux has. Novell is far from dead right now, they still ship a large number of licenses and product throughout the world. And don't forget that there are a large number of companies that have tried to migrate to Windows NT because company policy-makers have mandated it because "Windows NT is the future", only to find out it didn't work as well, cost more to maintain and eventually went back to their original network. Novell just needs to get more copies of Netware promotional versions out to those would will be building networks in the future. That, and an effective advertising campaign is the only thing I think will help them regain their stature they once had.
Re:Novell ain't dead, but on the back burner
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, that's part of their problem. Installed base for Netware is huge, and people who try to migrate from it often don't stay away from it for long before the costs involved with the added complexity of NT/2000 or Unix management start ganging up on the IT staff.
The problem with Novell, as I see it, is they aren't recruiting new companys as fast or as efficiently as Microsoft has been. For all the advances NT and Linux have made in the past years, nothing yet compares to the wonders of NDS. Novell did directory services right the first time, and neither MS's Active Directory, or LDAP on Linux can compare. Novell has a reputation as being honest and truthful about their products, and up until recently, they never advertised. When competing against a company like Microsoft, this is a definate weakness, especially since MS likes to point out flaws, either real or imagined, regardless of if their products have the same weaknesses.
Migrating from one NOS to another is not an easy task, and not one that should be done needlessly. I'm willing to bet that ten years from now, Novell will still be out there, and there'll still be a surprising number of people running Netware 3.12...
It's not a matter of the judges "buying it" unless they are a corrupt judge. It's a matter of assumed innocence until proof otherwise can be established. Proving that somebody read something is not neccasarily all that easy.
The problem is that copyright and patent infringement are usually civil trials, not criminal ones, and there, the presumption of innocent until proven guilty isn't true.
Actually, yes, I have seen a console crash. It wasn't accompanied by any fancy "something has gone wrong" screens, the game simply ceased working until the console was reset. I doubt the PS2 will BSOD, then again, I doubt the X-Box will either. Both will more than likely just halt upon a critical error. Many games have bugs in them that cause the console to crash... Final Fantasy III on the SNES comes to mind with the invisible sketch bug that would either give you large quantities of rare items or crash the game entirely.
My prediction is that the X-Box will mostly harm PC and PC game sales more than the traditional console game sales. Rabid console gamers and rabid PC gamers tend to be very different in their game tastes, at least partially due to the fact the game genres available on each of them are traditionally very different. PC game markets have been saturated with first person shooter games and multi-user internet games, whereas consoles tend to have more platform games, 1-4 player games, and sports games. Plus the definition of RPG on PC versus console is extremely different. People who like console RPGs seem to rarely cross over to PC RPGs, and vice versa.
If they sue, then they can never get the documents out of the public's view, since a court trial from a big bad corporation against a poor little customer is bound to attract a lot of unwanted journalists' attention. It's usually just easier and less damaging for the company to issue idle threats against their enemy and whoever is supporting them.
Besides, in civil trials, you are not innocent until proven guilty, and intellectual property violations are almost always civil suits instead of criminal. In fact, some of them place the burden of proof on the defendant, to prove you did nothing wrong.
Did you read that carefully... "Working on Xbox game concepts". That doesn't indicate that any of them have commited to generating a single game, only that they've stated interest. Besides, Capcom, and Konami have a long history of supporting any console that comes out, no matter who makes it. How much support they give it depends on how much they believe it'll sell. I'll wait until it's closer to release and those companies have made announcements about the types of names of games they're intending to release near it's launch. I'm betting most of the names on that list won't have anything ready, and many may never release an X-Box title.
On the other hand, Sony has been marketing successfully for a large number of years already. They know what sells a console, they know what doesn't. Microsoft doesn't have this kind of experience yet -- most of their advertising is geared at 20-30 year old middle class consumers, not the 12-16 year olds the consoles go after for the most part. It's hard to tell how well this'll all do. Microsoft has the money to buy talent, but tradition dictates that Microsoft can't get things right until version 3.0.
The real coders will, in fact be figuring out how to write DIRECTLY to the new chip nVidia is developing for the system, thus they WILL have to learn a new "goofy graphics chip" in order to produce good games.
Then Microsoft will have the same problem Sony had where developers were bypassing their published SDK, writing directly to hardware and creating games that were incompatible with certain model PSX's. Not a pretty site, and could be a PR disaster. Sony cracked down on it hard and fast, telling developers in no uncertain terms that they were to use the SDK at all times. When programmers write to the so-called "bare metal", you lose the ability to correct errors and flaws in the underlying hardware and software.
In a war of FUD, don't you think Nintendo could trump even MS and the X-box?
FUD? FUD doesn't apply to a world where sales are predominantly decided by children. In that world, whatever has the best graphics, games and commercials (and to a lesser extent, price) is the one that will sell, and the others will vanish into the woodwork. Probably the most important factor will be the fact that console games and PC games have been traditionally vastly different in varieties, and gameplay. There has been some crossover, notably Quake, Final Fantasy and a few others, but for the most part the crossover versions paled in comparison to the native versions. I have a feeling that the X-Box will be more of a threat to the traditional PC gaming markets than the console markets. Remember that Microsoft also doesn't have the Japanese game designers that have made most of the games you'd commonly associate with console machines, but rather has US-based developers who are more often than not more familiar with PC games. I can see it cutting heavily into the PC markets and making a lot of Microsoft's OEM partners very angry.
The betamax also screwed up technology licensing to other companies. Whereas VHS was manufactured by nearly every company under the sun, Sony was pretty much the only manufacturer of betamax. License fees were too high and restrictive. On the other hand, with the Playstation, Sony gave development licenses to practically anyone who had the money and asked for it. They even created a "learning" machine, that they sold to anyone for $750
Man can own multiple console machines at the same time.
Yes, but can man afford to buy multiple console machines at the same time. And does man have enough self-disipline to not waste money on too many games on all those consoles at the same time.
And on the other hand, you have a CPU and system archetecture that's carrying baggage from twenty years ago, running Windows, that's going to piss off all of MS's OEMs that are trying to sell sub-$1000 machines to consumers with less money than the average PC owner.
I don't know if you've noticed, but console games are traditionally a lot different from PC games. Although it might be an easy port from PC to X-Box, the opposite will almost definately not be true. The so-called "openness" of a console is a rather silly arguement. No console up until this point has had an open design that anyone could develop for, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. The fees for licensing the development kits and for manufacturing it on licensed media has tended to prevent entry for those who aren't qualified to work on it. I personally don't subscribe to the notion that "Open Source" or free software works for all forms of programs, and games are one I believe only work well from commercial companies that employ artists and designers instead of enthusiasts.
Speaking as a user:
The main gripe I have against IT people is that they think the point of computers and networks is to serve their interests. No! The point of IT is to enable employees to best get their work done, not to provide the most elegant and tractable system for the admins to preside over.
Ironcially, your own arguement can be used against you on this point. If by allowing near unlimited flexability to the users of a network, the entire network infrastructure becomes too unreliable, you often end up with a whole lot more lost productivity. Often the same things that make the IT people happy are the same things that keep employees productive, although perhaps not as happy as they could be. Most of this is just risk management.
For example, my employer recently changed from using Win9x on workstations to using Windows NT 4 on workstations, and although the number of complaints about being unable to install software on their workstation has increased, the number of messed up workstations has severely decreased. Now people have to rationalize their reasons for installing a program on their workstation to me, rather than just blindly installing anything they please whenever they please. While it's true this can be interpreted as "barring employees from using tools that would make them more productive", it's also managing downtime which is particularily expensive since productivity often goes to near zero for these employees. In general, however, it's easier to make exceptions to a rule than to never state the rule at all.
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Yes, but unless I'm mistaken, the BSD copyright requires acknowledgement. And to my knowledge, they have not done so. I personally don't really care which license you 'prefer', and indeed Microsoft is completely permitted to use any or all of the code that's under the BSD-style licenses, however credit should be given if for no other reason than the morality of using someone else's code and claiming it's entirely yours. Either way, I don't see UC going after Microsoft for such a trivial matter, and the version of FTP that they used is quite ancient and could've probably have been reimplemented from scratch quite easily given it's limited feature set.
Don't forget the wonders of floresent lights that usually also flicker at 60Hz, however almost never in sync with the monitor's refresh rate flicker, worsening the effect. Then there's different issues with the phosphors on the monitor themselves, which, depending on the manufacturer, hold their charge for different lengths of time. There's enough varience in manufacturing of the CRTs that can cause one monitor at 70-75Hz still have noticable flicker, but others at that same refresh rate will not. There's a tradeoff with it, of course. The longer the phosphors hold the charge, the more likely you are to get motion blur effects, however you have less flicker at lower refresh rates. With phosphors that lose their charge more quickly, you have a very responsive display, that shows extreme flicker at lower refresh rates.
Graphics: Not only did the SNES have 256-colours as opposed to the Genesis's 64, but the graphics processor included a wonderful feature called H-DMA, that let you program memory/graphic register changed triggered by the scanline approaching a certain H/V position. Mode 7 got all the press, but H-DMA did all the work. Using H-DMA, they were able to change "Mode 7", which was just simple scaling and rotation, into something that looked three dimentional by varying the scaling each and every scanline. It also allowed them to easily change portions of the colour palette between scanlines, creating OVER 256 colours on screen at once.
Sound: For sound effects, the genesis used a yamaha chip that wasn't capable of much more than FM music and sounds. The SNES, on the other hand, used a chip designed by Sony that produced digital sound based on a wavetable that was uploaded by the host program (game). The chip was entirely self-contained and could be programmed in such a way that it could continue playing sound with no intrevention from the CPU, with events sent to it periodically through the four I/O ports accessable from the main SNES 65816 CPU.
These two differences in the SNES alone meant that the CPU had to do very little work to maintain the game, whereas the Genesis, with it's less powerful video/sound subsystem, had to spend more of it's cycles on maintaining them to maintain a similar output, and in some cases, it wasn't even possible.
Even that wouldn't exactly be fair. First generation games typically have vastly differing quality, with some consoles shipping with strong first gen games, and others with poor first gen games. I'd wait for the second or third generation comparisons before making any conclusions about any of these consoles. Hell, look at the original playstation. Most of the release titles are just plain sad, whereas some of these end-of-life games being released now are exploiting the machines true capability and producing graphics that almost compare to these new machines.
Personally, I try to avoid taking any type of drugs. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't use any illicit drugs. If I have a headache, I wait it out. If I'm ill, I rest. I see no benefit to me to be popping pills all the time, and I prefer to be in complete control of myself and my body at all times. It's a choice I made, and I expect others to respect it. Just as I'll respect other's choice to use illicit drugs. However, since I live in Canada, I have a real problem dealing with having to pay for health care for those who are stupid enough to get fucked up by their drugs of choice -- whether that is lung cancer caused cigarette smoking or a stomach pump because of overdosing on something else, I think you should forfeit your rights to health care for illnesses that are known to be caused by this use.
Just watch the next meeting push back the date you can sit on the board.
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.
There's no way to generate this string from running the executable itself, it's only viewable in a hexeditor.
Don't forget Jurassic Park with it's "UNIX" system with magical Virtual Reality files.
I think the biggest reason why you find them in schools so much is they just work. They sit in a back room somewhere, and do their job, day in and day out, needing little or no maintainance. And that's probably the biggest reason -- Netware servers pretty much manage themselves. You leave them alone, they keep working. However, I can't count the number of times I've seen an abend and have had to reboot the server to recover.
I personally don't see Novell dying any time soon. Shops that use Novell are often Novell loyal for the simple reason that it works, and when it doesn't there's a clear reason for it. The problem as I see it is Novell seems to have problems attracting new customers because they don't advertise as well as Microsoft and don't have the hype that Linux has. Novell is far from dead right now, they still ship a large number of licenses and product throughout the world. And don't forget that there are a large number of companies that have tried to migrate to Windows NT because company policy-makers have mandated it because "Windows NT is the future", only to find out it didn't work as well, cost more to maintain and eventually went back to their original network. Novell just needs to get more copies of Netware promotional versions out to those would will be building networks in the future. That, and an effective advertising campaign is the only thing I think will help them regain their stature they once had.
The problem with Novell, as I see it, is they aren't recruiting new companys as fast or as efficiently as Microsoft has been. For all the advances NT and Linux have made in the past years, nothing yet compares to the wonders of NDS. Novell did directory services right the first time, and neither MS's Active Directory, or LDAP on Linux can compare. Novell has a reputation as being honest and truthful about their products, and up until recently, they never advertised. When competing against a company like Microsoft, this is a definate weakness, especially since MS likes to point out flaws, either real or imagined, regardless of if their products have the same weaknesses.
Migrating from one NOS to another is not an easy task, and not one that should be done needlessly. I'm willing to bet that ten years from now, Novell will still be out there, and there'll still be a surprising number of people running Netware 3.12...
Hey, it's the american way. Screw everyone you possibly can! It's a pity that the legal system isn't tempered with some common sense these days.
My prediction is that the X-Box will mostly harm PC and PC game sales more than the traditional console game sales. Rabid console gamers and rabid PC gamers tend to be very different in their game tastes, at least partially due to the fact the game genres available on each of them are traditionally very different. PC game markets have been saturated with first person shooter games and multi-user internet games, whereas consoles tend to have more platform games, 1-4 player games, and sports games. Plus the definition of RPG on PC versus console is extremely different. People who like console RPGs seem to rarely cross over to PC RPGs, and vice versa.
If they sue, then they can never get the documents out of the public's view, since a court trial from a big bad corporation against a poor little customer is bound to attract a lot of unwanted journalists' attention. It's usually just easier and less damaging for the company to issue idle threats against their enemy and whoever is supporting them. Besides, in civil trials, you are not innocent until proven guilty, and intellectual property violations are almost always civil suits instead of criminal. In fact, some of them place the burden of proof on the defendant, to prove you did nothing wrong.
Did you read that carefully... "Working on Xbox game concepts". That doesn't indicate that any of them have commited to generating a single game, only that they've stated interest. Besides, Capcom, and Konami have a long history of supporting any console that comes out, no matter who makes it. How much support they give it depends on how much they believe it'll sell. I'll wait until it's closer to release and those companies have made announcements about the types of names of games they're intending to release near it's launch. I'm betting most of the names on that list won't have anything ready, and many may never release an X-Box title.
On the other hand, Sony has been marketing successfully for a large number of years already. They know what sells a console, they know what doesn't. Microsoft doesn't have this kind of experience yet -- most of their advertising is geared at 20-30 year old middle class consumers, not the 12-16 year olds the consoles go after for the most part. It's hard to tell how well this'll all do. Microsoft has the money to buy talent, but tradition dictates that Microsoft can't get things right until version 3.0.
Then Microsoft will have the same problem Sony had where developers were bypassing their published SDK, writing directly to hardware and creating games that were incompatible with certain model PSX's. Not a pretty site, and could be a PR disaster. Sony cracked down on it hard and fast, telling developers in no uncertain terms that they were to use the SDK at all times. When programmers write to the so-called "bare metal", you lose the ability to correct errors and flaws in the underlying hardware and software.
In a war of FUD, don't you think Nintendo could trump even MS and the X-box?
FUD? FUD doesn't apply to a world where sales are predominantly decided by children. In that world, whatever has the best graphics, games and commercials (and to a lesser extent, price) is the one that will sell, and the others will vanish into the woodwork. Probably the most important factor will be the fact that console games and PC games have been traditionally vastly different in varieties, and gameplay. There has been some crossover, notably Quake, Final Fantasy and a few others, but for the most part the crossover versions paled in comparison to the native versions. I have a feeling that the X-Box will be more of a threat to the traditional PC gaming markets than the console markets. Remember that Microsoft also doesn't have the Japanese game designers that have made most of the games you'd commonly associate with console machines, but rather has US-based developers who are more often than not more familiar with PC games. I can see it cutting heavily into the PC markets and making a lot of Microsoft's OEM partners very angry.
The betamax also screwed up technology licensing to other companies. Whereas VHS was manufactured by nearly every company under the sun, Sony was pretty much the only manufacturer of betamax. License fees were too high and restrictive. On the other hand, with the Playstation, Sony gave development licenses to practically anyone who had the money and asked for it. They even created a "learning" machine, that they sold to anyone for $750
Yes, but can man afford to buy multiple console machines at the same time. And does man have enough self-disipline to not waste money on too many games on all those consoles at the same time.
I don't know if you've noticed, but console games are traditionally a lot different from PC games. Although it might be an easy port from PC to X-Box, the opposite will almost definately not be true. The so-called "openness" of a console is a rather silly arguement. No console up until this point has had an open design that anyone could develop for, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. The fees for licensing the development kits and for manufacturing it on licensed media has tended to prevent entry for those who aren't qualified to work on it. I personally don't subscribe to the notion that "Open Source" or free software works for all forms of programs, and games are one I believe only work well from commercial companies that employ artists and designers instead of enthusiasts.
For example, my employer recently changed from using Win9x on workstations to using Windows NT 4 on workstations, and although the number of complaints about being unable to install software on their workstation has increased, the number of messed up workstations has severely decreased. Now people have to rationalize their reasons for installing a program on their workstation to me, rather than just blindly installing anything they please whenever they please. While it's true this can be interpreted as "barring employees from using tools that would make them more productive", it's also managing downtime which is particularily expensive since productivity often goes to near zero for these employees. In general, however, it's easier to make exceptions to a rule than to never state the rule at all.