Activation is a huge pain in the ass in an enterprise environment. You've either got to use MAK keys or set up a Microsoft KMS (key management server) to hand out activations - that requires a minimum of 25 computers (actual, not virtual) requesting activations before it'll bring itself online. And if you have users who leave for any length of time, better have a MAK key for them. You can't expose your KMS to the internet, since there's NO security on it. Why they couldn't have implemented a mode where it required a valid domain credential to really authorize the copy, I don't know.
If Microsoft improves the activation situation for businesses, they're going to get much more rapid Win7 adoption. If it's the same scheme, it'll take longer.
OEMs will make a difference as well. If they feel they can push Win7 without losing business (unlike Vista), they're going to stop supporting XP on new business-class hardware a bit more rapidly.
Actually, Microsoft Office (especially Powerpoint, but also Excel and Word) are "better" than Open Office. There are readily available training materials. In fact, if you've got certain classes of Microsoft licensing, you can get the on-demand online training for your entire organization for next to nothing. And the integrations with 3rd party applications are a key feature. It doesn't matter if Open Office does 95% of what Microsoft Office does, if those key connectors that important departments or divisions need aren't available for it. And if you're the IT department, and you're still going to have a sizable portion of your organization using the Microsoft suite due to those issues (anything more than 5% to 10%, if they're key customers), why would you want to take the time to train your internal support staff to support both? There are probably 30 other applications that don't duplicate Office's functionality that they need to support.
If you're starting from scratch, and you're not tying together different pieces of software, or relying on add-ons, it's easier. But the typical Slashdot reader seems to be completely unaware that that's a problem.
And I still maintain that the rapid adoption of Sharepoint is going to keep MS Office entrenched. Sorry, but the current version of Sharepoint is really, really well done.
Yeah, and I can tell you about cases of people buying boxes, and then trying different antennas, and not being able to get reliable service. They live 20-30 miles from the transmitter. Analog's fine. There are a bunch of densely populated communities in the Northeast that fall into this category. It's not just people who didn't pay attention, it's also people who have tried multiple types of antennas trying to get any stable signal, and can't. And they live places where they can't use roof antennas for one reason or another.
If you're under 20 miles from the transmitter, it's great. But over that, and depending on the terrain, it gets crappy very quickly. So they're asking "what's the point?" and yelling and their Congressional delegation. And if Congress decides to delay it, oh well.
I'd love to see a PSA that actually mentioned that you might need to spend a good amount of time, effort and money working out an antenna solution, by the way. But that might have scared people off, I guess.
Yeah, and for people who get OK reception with an inside antenna on analog, aren't permitted to put up an outdoor one, and can't get a reliable signal at all after trying four or five antennas? Oh, too bad. I just went through this helping someone else with it. If you live in an area that is or could be designated a historical district, they can prevent you from putting up an antenna, as long as they shaft everyone in the area equally.
There are densely populated areas in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York that are in the 20-40 mile band that work pretty well with analog that have a lot of problems with digital. Even if someone has a roof antenna, you often need a much more directional antenna with digital. So you either need a rotating antenna or you need to pick which subset of stations you're going to get.
In terms of the government paying for it? It's the public's airwaves. And the government was going to pull in cash auctioning off the spectrum, and forcing a TV change that a lot of consumers didn't give a damn about. So part of that money would be put towards converter boxes? Seems fine to me.
The government's been running that whole "get a converter box and it'll just work" campaign. Bull. The reception / antenna problem is NOT well documented from "official" sources. I have yet to see a Public Service Announcement that says "Hey, get a free box and drop $500+ on a roof antenna with installation".
Bull. If you think SQL Server, Exchange and Sharepoint aren't huge for them, you're nuts, and they're positioned to grow. Sharepoint is growing quickly, and within a couple of years will be really, really hard to dislodge. The number of new installations in corporate and education would make the Open Office folks giddy. Everyone here focuses on Windows and Office, trust me, Sharepoint and Exchange are a huge, huge deal. Because here's a little secret - a lot of organizations won't give their internal data to Google, or anyone else for that matter. And these are huge money makers for Microsoft.
And by the way, if you've got corporate desktop licensing, you get Client Access Licenses for various applications as part of that. Makes it cheaper to run the server products.
By the way, Sharepoint is going to help them hold onto the Productivity software market as well, due to the integrations. And there's a huge ISV market building around Sharepoint add-ons and products that integrate with it.
I don't really care if Microsoft does well or not, but they're in the game a lot more than you think they are. They didn't hire Ray Ozzie for no reason. And given the usual delay in people noticing, when the "conventional wisdom" on Microsoft catches up to what they're likely actually doing, it's going to seem like they turned on a dime, even though they've been working on this stuff for years.
They make a huge amount of money, and have a lot of cash, and they're a lot healthier than Sun, Novell and Red Hat. They've got a lot of revenue streams. Hell, I suspect their fundamentals might actually be better than Google, even though Google gets better press.
It's going to be a race to the bottom in terms of quality. There are good reporters. And few, if any of them, will be able to make a dime. You can't sell subscriptions on the web, since we're all a bunch of cheap freeloaders, so that leaves ads. The ad revenue situation on the web is just pathetic. There's essentially no competition since Google was allowed to be doubleclick, and it's hard to bring in enough to run a decent web site at a profit. We're likely to (for now) see TV news organizations step into the gap as newspapers fold. But that won't least either.
And now that Google is apparently going to eschew pagerank for weighting results (and if you think they're not going to weigh some results above the weights you assign, best of luck to you), plus their attempts to cut deals with ISPs, screwing over the net neutrality movement, Google's going to get to pick the winners and losers. When newspapers have allowed business/ads to get into the news side to kill stories, it causes problems. Google's going to end up doing the same thing. Business partners, etc will get better treatment. I don't think they have the maturity (or deeply held ethics) to resist doing it.
On the up side, as this all collapses and we're left with really crappy "free" "news" content, it's likely that subscription sites will make something of a comeback, since some people, at least, will pay for new services that come along. Of course, on the downside, the connection to it may suck if companies like Google get preferential treatment from ISPs.
Enjoy it, folks. The masses have spoken, picked their information sources, and the internet of tomorrow is going to look more like an on-demand version of the crappy cable TV of today, except that even fewer companies will be making the money. Why wouldn't it? That's what the masses want. The interesting thing is that Google is kind of a parasite. They help themselves more than anyone, and unlike a successful parasite, I don't think they've figured out how not to kill off their hosts yet. At some point, if they don't start parting with a greater share of the ad revenue, they're going to have to start paying to produce content. And eventually, they're going to get in trouble as an anti-competitive monopoly, due to the ad situation.
Eventually you'll hate Google more than you hate Microsoft.
Whoops, I screwed up - on the public records thing, I meant to type "I wouldn't be surprised if they are, as long as they don't identify the student individually". It sounds like ownership doesn't actually transfer to the student until they buy out the computer, so it's a district computer. Depending on your local sunshine laws, you may need to worry about it.
They can't use them for Facebook or MySpace - why? They still belong to the district. Any student who mouths off online using equipment that technically belongs to the district or is under the district's control is likely subject to disciplinary action, just as if they were using a school computer lab to do it. Don't even put them in that position - tell them that up front, even if you don't block it. Because the second one of them starts a "my school sucks" blog using that computer, you're going to have a problem. And you'd better hope none of them get caught swapping porn online using those machines. Your local media will do a number on you.
And what happens if they do a ton of stupid crap and make the computer unusable? Are the kids still responsible for whatever assignments need to be done while its getting it fixed? They should be. Make it clear.
What happens if parents or siblings not attending the school use the computer and cause problems? This all has to be spelled out ahead of time. Do you have open public records laws you have to follow? Are the web logs for those computers public records or student information? I wouldn't be surprised if they don't identify the student individually.
Good luck. It can be hard supporting a standardized notebook in a higher education environment. I don't envy you trying to do it K-12. I haven't seen it outside a private school environment at that level. My wife's a middle school teacher in a public school - if her students use the computers in her room when a substitute teacher is there, they can't be trusted not to screw things up or do things they aren't supposed to. And the substitute teacher won't know how to keep an eye on things. So if she's out, they do book work and alternate assignments.
Yeah, I have a two node file server cluster, attached to a fibre channel-based SAN, running on current server hardware and a recent Netware release. I don't even have to spend minutes per month making sure it works correctly. We're planning on moving it to OES Linux, but it's a bit hard to get excited about that when Netware's providing the entire organization's file/print services with almost no downtime. And if we have a hardware failure, well, the services just fail over to the other server. A lot of users don't even notice.
We use Linux and Windows for a bunch of other stuff, obviously, so we'll move eventually, but it's all about putting resources where it makes sense. If it's even slightly less stable, we're going to get a ton of complaints. When we want to take advantage of new features, or we have some other business case, we'll move. Or, if we have a window of opportunity in terms of staff time we'll take it. Might as well avoid being stuck for significantly longer due to staffing constraints and other projects.
I think you'd be surprised how much Netware is still out there. The typical Slashdot point of view isn't at all reflective of corporate, higher ed, k-12 or healthcare IT.
I use drives, DVD-R (I don't use dual-layer) and things flash drives. Then, on top of that, I use Mozy's unlimited backup service. One reason? If I get multiple media failure, Mozy's a good extra option. On top of that, if I have a problem with a single file, it's just a hell of a lot easier to grab it back that way. I'm using my own encryption key for Mozy. Backing that up? Well, I've got it on a couple of different storage media, including two in a safe deposit box. And if Mozy goes away? Oh well, I've got my other copies, and I'll just switch to a different online backup service.
I'm currently scanning in my old film and slides. It's 1 to 2 GB per roll of film, and there are hundreds. So for me, this is a long-term issue. And for any pictures I really care about that were taken with digital cameras, I eventually want to get high-quality prints for each of the kids as well. Paper has a way of lasting. After all, I know how my digital backups are set up, and my wife does, but it's hard to imagine that someone else might in 20 years. It's really easy for a relative cleaning up your house after you're gone to just think "oh, hey, some old hard drive" and ditch it. Besides, there's something about just being able to pick them up and look at it. I notice that on a computer, my kids want to flip between pictures quickly, but an actual print they'll examine in detail. There's just something different about how people look at it.
about that substitute teacher in Connecticut who was charged with a crime because of malware the classroom which she was told not to turn off, and the computer was lacking up-to-date security software. I'd be paranoid about what the kids were doing, and what it would mean for me, too. A full-time teacher in a a state where there's no union to speak of would be just as vulnerable as that substitute was.
The same person who thought the Clipper chip and the government escrow of encryption keys was just okie-dokie and that we should trust experts like her to say the security was good enough is uncomfortable with anonymous speech. I'm shocked.
Ok, so she found a kid handing out software in class, she had no idea what it was, assumed the kid was lying (since a lot of them do), etc. Assuming there were computers in the room that belonged to the school, she also almost certainly had visions of having to deal with her district's IT staff of there was now a problem, which is often far from pleasant. She just didn't want to deal with some kid handing out crap in her classroom. Writing the letter was dumb, but the reply wasn't much better. And, by the way, with what a lot of school districts pay for IT people? You're not going to get linux in there any time soon. Oh, and also, they have a need for specific software that runs on Windows, and you're not going to get them to use virtualization, dual-booting or WINE. The first two would require maintaining additional configs or VMs, and the last just isn't going to fly.
I'd agree. And you can't prove a negative. However, our legal system isn't supposed to require you to prove a negative, even in a civil case. The problem is tons of lawsuits brought by individuals gets expensive. Eventually, these cases will cause Congress to give pharma blanket immunity on vaccination lawsuits, which is a lousy idea. And not for a good reason. There's no valid, statistical evidence of a causative link between the MMR and Ausitm, and all the wishing in the world doesn't make it so. There are heartbreaking anecdotes, but that's not a reasonable standard when you are basing a court case on a scientific claim. And that's what these folks are doing. Thimerosal? Since it started to come out of the vaccines, has the rate of new cases dropped? Nope. So what else is going on? Beats me.
I've got three kids. They've all received vaccines. Why? Diphtheria, mumps, measles, pertussis, tetanus, etc. can all be pretty damn serious or fatal, and it wasn't that long ago that a lot of people in the United States died from them. My parents were born years before Penicillin was used in treatments. And well before things like the measles vaccine were available. They, their parents, siblings, friends and other relatives had some of these diseases when younger and were very sick, some died from them. A lot of the parents making the "no vaccine" decision now need to go talk to the 80+ year old group while they're still around and realize that the only reason they have the luxury of wondering if they need vaccines is the damn things worked. And if enough people stop, the population immunity drops enough to have epidemics occurring among the unvaccinated. A history of the the 1918 flu pandemic ought to be required reading for folks to understand what can happen.
The other big problem today? Lack of proper funding for hospitals and nurses. There aren't enough beds to deal with a major epidemic or pandemic, and not enough trained medical staff to deal with it.
Well, doesn't this bring up some philosophical questions. We're getting awfully close to figuring out how to really fool the brain, aren't we? Even if the input is a little "off", the brain seems willing to adapt to the new "normal". That's the interesting thing - it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. That trait, combined with technological improvements, will likely lead to some amazingly appalling applications and some horrific consequences within a couple of decades.
You're right, I didn't make the point as clearly as I might've - I was initially trying using it to point out relative scale, and how much cash was flowing through the companies (which does give you an idea of the size of their customer base). I could have just used the gross revenue numbers for that. In terms if the flexibility, you're right, it's net that matters. Microsoft does have a massive amount of cash, though, and they seem to be in a pretty stable position.
OK, Microsoft makes a bit more than a billion dollars a week in gross revenue, and more than $930 million per week in profit. Apple, on $32 Billion in revenue, makes a bit more than $11 billion in profit. Microsoft makes almost as much in a week as Apple does in a month.
Novell plus Red Hat? The two major Linux companies spend a year generating the revenue that Microsoft generates in a week and a half or so.
Google generates less than a third of Microsoft's revenue, and their gross profits are under $10 billion, less than Apple's.
Anyone who thinks that Microsoft doesn't have the resources to hire who it needs to in order to deal with changing market conditions is nuts. A few years ago, Intel was supposedly on the ropes. They changed direction, killed a few processors, and fairly quickly released the Core Duo processors and turned the company around. AMD was left flat-footed, and are only now even coming close to regaining their footing. I don't really care much whether Microsoft does, but I don't think people realize the difference in scale and the difference in resources that can be brought to bear. If Windows 7 works and gains acceptance, it won't matter that Vista had huge problems. And they're spending a ton on stuff like Sharepoint, which is a relatively unique product - and good enough to get a ton of organizations to tolerate vendor "lock in" to get the feature set.
Don't underestimate how much money they have and how many talented people they do have in much of the company. You can certainly compete with them and make money, but it's unlikely that even Google will be able to dislodge them any time soon.
Via other legislation, it looks like colleges and universities in the US are going to be expected to take active steps - training and education, and likely technical as well - to curb piracy or else risk losing federal funding. It's part of the "Higher Education Opportunity Act". They're now in the "rulemaking" phase, but I find it hard to believe that the Department of Education is going to be particularly accommodating, and I'm not confident that the new administration will be substantially better than the old on this issue. I think this case is going to give the RIAA/MPAA and their allies in congress something to point at to say "See! We need more protection".
If we're required to do blocking and monitoring, the BU defense won't hold, because we'll have the data. At this point, the biggest factor is the delay. If you're a university buying service through a provider, and the letter goes to them first, it takes at least a week, often more, to get to you. By that point, there's usually not even any reason to look for the torrent they're complaining about.
It's not clear that there's an open source community (or ever will be) for every type of product. Linux would not be what it is if some really big companies weren't funding either development or developers. And the reason? They think the technology and the business model creates an ecosystem independent from Microsoft, so it was worth doing. OpenOffice, same thing. Firefox, too. And it was cheaper for them than trying to maintain their own Unix variant, including trying to get commercial 3rd parties to write software for their particular platform. And the old players back in the day (Sun, IBM, HP, Digital, SGI, etc.) and their current corporate incarnations were essentially hardware companies. So switching to Linux to participate in an ecosystem made sense.
At the same time, take a look at some of the small projects, "community" stuff. How many overlapping projects are there? Not even forks. Just a different implementation, with variations in quality and design of the same basic idea. There's clearly a desire to do your own project, not work on someone else's in many cases. This arguably dilutes talent, since it's pretty obvious that there isn't an endless supply of talented, motivated developers. Sort of like adding too many major league baseball teams can be a problem because there aren't enough top-quality pitchers. And frankly, there are a lot more developers who think they're able to design something than actually can.
And then there's that "motivation" problem. Take a commercial package like SPSS. Where's the supported, open-source alternative? That's been thoroughly tested and demonstrated to work within a certain degree of accuracy on a given platform? And has a good user interface. If you're relying on volunteers, they work on the code they want to work on. And there's a subset of developers who would actually be able to work on a package like this. And let's not forget coding for multiple operating systems, including Windows. It's not what a lot of people consider "fun". And there's no incentive for companies like IBM or Novell to pay programmers to compete with a package like this (since money is the other motivator), so there's no real competition. You might have someone releasing a tool that covers some of the same ground, but it's unlikely to be as comprehensive.
Look at GIMP. No real corporate backing at all. It hasn't been considered strategic the way other apps (OpenOffice, Firefox) have been over the years. It's a wonder it's made it. They're gradually addressing the limitations. But it's harder for an entirely volunteer project vs. something with people on a payroll. And with Photoshop Elements dirt cheap, and professionals using Photoshop (because that's the standard tool, and a lot of them are generating revenue with it, making it merely a deductible cost of doing business), it's had trouble getting traction outside of the Linux community
Educational institutions provide an example of putting resources behind open source when it makes sense to them. Moodle and Sakai are both alternatives to Blackboard/WebCT. And attractive ones, given how lousy and expensive it is to do business with Blackboard. Moodle is pretty usable out of the box, has an active community and works. Sakai CAN work, but it's not really a Learning Management System out of the box. It's a framework, so you need to have developers or hire someone to implement it for you. But the point is that these apps are central to the business of schools, and the commercial packages are expensive, and that expense is annual. You need developers anyway, if you want to integrate a commercial project with your existing systems. So there's an incentive.
But for something really specialized, like a statistics tool that can cover everything from intro to stats to high-level research with huge data sets? Not so much. I'd put ArcGIS in the same category. It's just difficult to imagine an open-source project mustering the resources to dislodge large, complex specialty tools that don't have mass appeal and are affordable. They're too big to just take on the project, and they're not central enough to the mission of the organization to put resources behind replacing.
Sorry, no. Just find the idea of a "community" or some sort of common ground based on buying the same crap obnoxious and sad. It's a sign that you're a tool, that you've bought into the marketing message. Actually having something in common (interests, activities, line of work, beliefs, local "real" community, family, ideology, etc) actually matters more, and there are plenty of people to socialize with based on that. And I'm sorry, "I use a Macbook" isn't actually any more of an activity than "I buy coca-cola instead of pepsi".
Trust me, affording it isn't a problem. I just find Apple products uninteresting and many of the fanboyish customers irritating. Actually having a Macbook somewhere in public and running the risk of some Apple-loving jackass try to talk to me about it isn't worth it. As if that establishes some common ground or the basis for a conversation. The fact that two people buy the same crap does not actually make them part of a "community" that has any value. Perhaps if people didn't actually build their sense of self-worth by buying crap, the economy wouldn't actually be in the toilet at this point.
Because they've convinced many their customers - through marketing and cost - that somehow they're "better" or "superior" as people by buying an Apple product. Because, you know, we all should build our self-image around the consumption of mass-market products. Anyway, if you're self-image is tied up in identifying with an image, and a particular line of products are part of that, you tend to defend it, or at least not criticize it. It's actually kind of pathetic - "hey, I'm a better person because I bought something", but it's hardly unique to Apple consumers. Remember, the party in any relationship who has the least emotional commitment tends to have the most power. Many of their customers have a substantial emotional investment in Apple, and Apple has little in return. It's an ideal situation for them. They can reverse direction, shaft customers, raise prices, and everyone continues to believe.
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Activation is a huge pain in the ass in an enterprise environment. You've either got to use MAK keys or set up a Microsoft KMS (key management server) to hand out activations - that requires a minimum of 25 computers (actual, not virtual) requesting activations before it'll bring itself online. And if you have users who leave for any length of time, better have a MAK key for them. You can't expose your KMS to the internet, since there's NO security on it. Why they couldn't have implemented a mode where it required a valid domain credential to really authorize the copy, I don't know.
If Microsoft improves the activation situation for businesses, they're going to get much more rapid Win7 adoption. If it's the same scheme, it'll take longer.
OEMs will make a difference as well. If they feel they can push Win7 without losing business (unlike Vista), they're going to stop supporting XP on new business-class hardware a bit more rapidly.
Actually, Microsoft Office (especially Powerpoint, but also Excel and Word) are "better" than Open Office. There are readily available training materials. In fact, if you've got certain classes of Microsoft licensing, you can get the on-demand online training for your entire organization for next to nothing. And the integrations with 3rd party applications are a key feature. It doesn't matter if Open Office does 95% of what Microsoft Office does, if those key connectors that important departments or divisions need aren't available for it. And if you're the IT department, and you're still going to have a sizable portion of your organization using the Microsoft suite due to those issues (anything more than 5% to 10%, if they're key customers), why would you want to take the time to train your internal support staff to support both? There are probably 30 other applications that don't duplicate Office's functionality that they need to support.
If you're starting from scratch, and you're not tying together different pieces of software, or relying on add-ons, it's easier. But the typical Slashdot reader seems to be completely unaware that that's a problem.
And I still maintain that the rapid adoption of Sharepoint is going to keep MS Office entrenched. Sorry, but the current version of Sharepoint is really, really well done.
Yeah, and I can tell you about cases of people buying boxes, and then trying different antennas, and not being able to get reliable service. They live 20-30 miles from the transmitter. Analog's fine. There are a bunch of densely populated communities in the Northeast that fall into this category. It's not just people who didn't pay attention, it's also people who have tried multiple types of antennas trying to get any stable signal, and can't. And they live places where they can't use roof antennas for one reason or another.
If you're under 20 miles from the transmitter, it's great. But over that, and depending on the terrain, it gets crappy very quickly. So they're asking "what's the point?" and yelling and their Congressional delegation. And if Congress decides to delay it, oh well.
I'd love to see a PSA that actually mentioned that you might need to spend a good amount of time, effort and money working out an antenna solution, by the way. But that might have scared people off, I guess.
Yeah, and for people who get OK reception with an inside antenna on analog, aren't permitted to put up an outdoor one, and can't get a reliable signal at all after trying four or five antennas? Oh, too bad. I just went through this helping someone else with it. If you live in an area that is or could be designated a historical district, they can prevent you from putting up an antenna, as long as they shaft everyone in the area equally.
There are densely populated areas in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York that are in the 20-40 mile band that work pretty well with analog that have a lot of problems with digital. Even if someone has a roof antenna, you often need a much more directional antenna with digital. So you either need a rotating antenna or you need to pick which subset of stations you're going to get.
In terms of the government paying for it? It's the public's airwaves. And the government was going to pull in cash auctioning off the spectrum, and forcing a TV change that a lot of consumers didn't give a damn about. So part of that money would be put towards converter boxes? Seems fine to me.
The government's been running that whole "get a converter box and it'll just work" campaign. Bull. The reception / antenna problem is NOT well documented from "official" sources. I have yet to see a Public Service Announcement that says "Hey, get a free box and drop $500+ on a roof antenna with installation".
"The abortion was successful" was another one.
Bull. If you think SQL Server, Exchange and Sharepoint aren't huge for them, you're nuts, and they're positioned to grow. Sharepoint is growing quickly, and within a couple of years will be really, really hard to dislodge. The number of new installations in corporate and education would make the Open Office folks giddy. Everyone here focuses on Windows and Office, trust me, Sharepoint and Exchange are a huge, huge deal. Because here's a little secret - a lot of organizations won't give their internal data to Google, or anyone else for that matter. And these are huge money makers for Microsoft.
And by the way, if you've got corporate desktop licensing, you get Client Access Licenses for various applications as part of that. Makes it cheaper to run the server products.
By the way, Sharepoint is going to help them hold onto the Productivity software market as well, due to the integrations. And there's a huge ISV market building around Sharepoint add-ons and products that integrate with it.
I don't really care if Microsoft does well or not, but they're in the game a lot more than you think they are. They didn't hire Ray Ozzie for no reason. And given the usual delay in people noticing, when the "conventional wisdom" on Microsoft catches up to what they're likely actually doing, it's going to seem like they turned on a dime, even though they've been working on this stuff for years.
They make a huge amount of money, and have a lot of cash, and they're a lot healthier than Sun, Novell and Red Hat. They've got a lot of revenue streams. Hell, I suspect their fundamentals might actually be better than Google, even though Google gets better press.
It's going to be a race to the bottom in terms of quality. There are good reporters. And few, if any of them, will be able to make a dime. You can't sell subscriptions on the web, since we're all a bunch of cheap freeloaders, so that leaves ads. The ad revenue situation on the web is just pathetic. There's essentially no competition since Google was allowed to be doubleclick, and it's hard to bring in enough to run a decent web site at a profit. We're likely to (for now) see TV news organizations step into the gap as newspapers fold. But that won't least either.
And now that Google is apparently going to eschew pagerank for weighting results (and if you think they're not going to weigh some results above the weights you assign, best of luck to you), plus their attempts to cut deals with ISPs, screwing over the net neutrality movement, Google's going to get to pick the winners and losers. When newspapers have allowed business/ads to get into the news side to kill stories, it causes problems. Google's going to end up doing the same thing. Business partners, etc will get better treatment. I don't think they have the maturity (or deeply held ethics) to resist doing it.
On the up side, as this all collapses and we're left with really crappy "free" "news" content, it's likely that subscription sites will make something of a comeback, since some people, at least, will pay for new services that come along. Of course, on the downside, the connection to it may suck if companies like Google get preferential treatment from ISPs.
Enjoy it, folks. The masses have spoken, picked their information sources, and the internet of tomorrow is going to look more like an on-demand version of the crappy cable TV of today, except that even fewer companies will be making the money. Why wouldn't it? That's what the masses want. The interesting thing is that Google is kind of a parasite. They help themselves more than anyone, and unlike a successful parasite, I don't think they've figured out how not to kill off their hosts yet. At some point, if they don't start parting with a greater share of the ad revenue, they're going to have to start paying to produce content. And eventually, they're going to get in trouble as an anti-competitive monopoly, due to the ad situation.
Eventually you'll hate Google more than you hate Microsoft.
Whoops, I screwed up - on the public records thing, I meant to type "I wouldn't be surprised if they are, as long as they don't identify the student individually". It sounds like ownership doesn't actually transfer to the student until they buy out the computer, so it's a district computer. Depending on your local sunshine laws, you may need to worry about it.
They can't use them for Facebook or MySpace - why? They still belong to the district. Any student who mouths off online using equipment that technically belongs to the district or is under the district's control is likely subject to disciplinary action, just as if they were using a school computer lab to do it. Don't even put them in that position - tell them that up front, even if you don't block it. Because the second one of them starts a "my school sucks" blog using that computer, you're going to have a problem. And you'd better hope none of them get caught swapping porn online using those machines. Your local media will do a number on you.
And what happens if they do a ton of stupid crap and make the computer unusable? Are the kids still responsible for whatever assignments need to be done while its getting it fixed? They should be. Make it clear.
What happens if parents or siblings not attending the school use the computer and cause problems? This all has to be spelled out ahead of time. Do you have open public records laws you have to follow? Are the web logs for those computers public records or student information? I wouldn't be surprised if they don't identify the student individually.
Good luck. It can be hard supporting a standardized notebook in a higher education environment. I don't envy you trying to do it K-12. I haven't seen it outside a private school environment at that level. My wife's a middle school teacher in a public school - if her students use the computers in her room when a substitute teacher is there, they can't be trusted not to screw things up or do things they aren't supposed to. And the substitute teacher won't know how to keep an eye on things. So if she's out, they do book work and alternate assignments.
Yeah, I have a two node file server cluster, attached to a fibre channel-based SAN, running on current server hardware and a recent Netware release. I don't even have to spend minutes per month making sure it works correctly. We're planning on moving it to OES Linux, but it's a bit hard to get excited about that when Netware's providing the entire organization's file/print services with almost no downtime. And if we have a hardware failure, well, the services just fail over to the other server. A lot of users don't even notice.
We use Linux and Windows for a bunch of other stuff, obviously, so we'll move eventually, but it's all about putting resources where it makes sense. If it's even slightly less stable, we're going to get a ton of complaints. When we want to take advantage of new features, or we have some other business case, we'll move. Or, if we have a window of opportunity in terms of staff time we'll take it. Might as well avoid being stuck for significantly longer due to staffing constraints and other projects.
I think you'd be surprised how much Netware is still out there. The typical Slashdot point of view isn't at all reflective of corporate, higher ed, k-12 or healthcare IT.
I use drives, DVD-R (I don't use dual-layer) and things flash drives. Then, on top of that, I use Mozy's unlimited backup service. One reason? If I get multiple media failure, Mozy's a good extra option. On top of that, if I have a problem with a single file, it's just a hell of a lot easier to grab it back that way. I'm using my own encryption key for Mozy. Backing that up? Well, I've got it on a couple of different storage media, including two in a safe deposit box. And if Mozy goes away? Oh well, I've got my other copies, and I'll just switch to a different online backup service.
I'm currently scanning in my old film and slides. It's 1 to 2 GB per roll of film, and there are hundreds. So for me, this is a long-term issue. And for any pictures I really care about that were taken with digital cameras, I eventually want to get high-quality prints for each of the kids as well. Paper has a way of lasting. After all, I know how my digital backups are set up, and my wife does, but it's hard to imagine that someone else might in 20 years. It's really easy for a relative cleaning up your house after you're gone to just think "oh, hey, some old hard drive" and ditch it. Besides, there's something about just being able to pick them up and look at it. I notice that on a computer, my kids want to flip between pictures quickly, but an actual print they'll examine in detail. There's just something different about how people look at it.
about that substitute teacher in Connecticut who was charged with a crime because of malware the classroom which she was told not to turn off, and the computer was lacking up-to-date security software. I'd be paranoid about what the kids were doing, and what it would mean for me, too. A full-time teacher in a a state where there's no union to speak of would be just as vulnerable as that substitute was.
The same person who thought the Clipper chip and the government escrow of encryption keys was just okie-dokie and that we should trust experts like her to say the security was good enough is uncomfortable with anonymous speech. I'm shocked.
Ok, so she found a kid handing out software in class, she had no idea what it was, assumed the kid was lying (since a lot of them do), etc. Assuming there were computers in the room that belonged to the school, she also almost certainly had visions of having to deal with her district's IT staff of there was now a problem, which is often far from pleasant. She just didn't want to deal with some kid handing out crap in her classroom. Writing the letter was dumb, but the reply wasn't much better. And, by the way, with what a lot of school districts pay for IT people? You're not going to get linux in there any time soon. Oh, and also, they have a need for specific software that runs on Windows, and you're not going to get them to use virtualization, dual-booting or WINE. The first two would require maintaining additional configs or VMs, and the last just isn't going to fly.
I'd agree. And you can't prove a negative. However, our legal system isn't supposed to require you to prove a negative, even in a civil case. The problem is tons of lawsuits brought by individuals gets expensive. Eventually, these cases will cause Congress to give pharma blanket immunity on vaccination lawsuits, which is a lousy idea. And not for a good reason. There's no valid, statistical evidence of a causative link between the MMR and Ausitm, and all the wishing in the world doesn't make it so. There are heartbreaking anecdotes, but that's not a reasonable standard when you are basing a court case on a scientific claim. And that's what these folks are doing. Thimerosal? Since it started to come out of the vaccines, has the rate of new cases dropped? Nope. So what else is going on? Beats me.
I've got three kids. They've all received vaccines. Why? Diphtheria, mumps, measles, pertussis, tetanus, etc. can all be pretty damn serious or fatal, and it wasn't that long ago that a lot of people in the United States died from them. My parents were born years before Penicillin was used in treatments. And well before things like the measles vaccine were available. They, their parents, siblings, friends and other relatives had some of these diseases when younger and were very sick, some died from them. A lot of the parents making the "no vaccine" decision now need to go talk to the 80+ year old group while they're still around and realize that the only reason they have the luxury of wondering if they need vaccines is the damn things worked. And if enough people stop, the population immunity drops enough to have epidemics occurring among the unvaccinated. A history of the the 1918 flu pandemic ought to be required reading for folks to understand what can happen.
The other big problem today? Lack of proper funding for hospitals and nurses. There aren't enough beds to deal with a major epidemic or pandemic, and not enough trained medical staff to deal with it.
I'm not really sure. Did Nixon give up the title when he resigned the Presidency, or only on his death? Not sure what the rules are on this one.
Well, doesn't this bring up some philosophical questions. We're getting awfully close to figuring out how to really fool the brain, aren't we? Even if the input is a little "off", the brain seems willing to adapt to the new "normal". That's the interesting thing - it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. That trait, combined with technological improvements, will likely lead to some amazingly appalling applications and some horrific consequences within a couple of decades.
You're right, I didn't make the point as clearly as I might've - I was initially trying using it to point out relative scale, and how much cash was flowing through the companies (which does give you an idea of the size of their customer base). I could have just used the gross revenue numbers for that. In terms if the flexibility, you're right, it's net that matters. Microsoft does have a massive amount of cash, though, and they seem to be in a pretty stable position.
OK, Microsoft makes a bit more than a billion dollars a week in gross revenue, and more than $930 million per week in profit.
Apple, on $32 Billion in revenue, makes a bit more than $11 billion in profit. Microsoft makes almost as much in a week as Apple does in a month.
Novell plus Red Hat? The two major Linux companies spend a year generating the revenue that Microsoft generates in a week and a half or so.
Google generates less than a third of Microsoft's revenue, and their gross profits are under $10 billion, less than Apple's.
Anyone who thinks that Microsoft doesn't have the resources to hire who it needs to in order to deal with changing market conditions is nuts. A few years ago, Intel was supposedly on the ropes. They changed direction, killed a few processors, and fairly quickly released the Core Duo processors and turned the company around. AMD was left flat-footed, and are only now even coming close to regaining their footing. I don't really care much whether Microsoft does, but I don't think people realize the difference in scale and the difference in resources that can be brought to bear. If Windows 7 works and gains acceptance, it won't matter that Vista had huge problems. And they're spending a ton on stuff like Sharepoint, which is a relatively unique product - and good enough to get a ton of organizations to tolerate vendor "lock in" to get the feature set.
Don't underestimate how much money they have and how many talented people they do have in much of the company. You can certainly compete with them and make money, but it's unlikely that even Google will be able to dislodge them any time soon.
Via other legislation, it looks like colleges and universities in the US are going to be expected to take active steps - training and education, and likely technical as well - to curb piracy or else risk losing federal funding. It's part of the "Higher Education Opportunity Act". They're now in the "rulemaking" phase, but I find it hard to believe that the Department of Education is going to be particularly accommodating, and I'm not confident that the new administration will be substantially better than the old on this issue. I think this case is going to give the RIAA/MPAA and their allies in congress something to point at to say "See! We need more protection".
If we're required to do blocking and monitoring, the BU defense won't hold, because we'll have the data. At this point, the biggest factor is the delay. If you're a university buying service through a provider, and the letter goes to them first, it takes at least a week, often more, to get to you. By that point, there's usually not even any reason to look for the torrent they're complaining about.
It's not clear that there's an open source community (or ever will be) for every type of product. Linux would not be what it is if some really big companies weren't funding either development or developers. And the reason? They think the technology and the business model creates an ecosystem independent from Microsoft, so it was worth doing. OpenOffice, same thing. Firefox, too. And it was cheaper for them than trying to maintain their own Unix variant, including trying to get commercial 3rd parties to write software for their particular platform. And the old players back in the day (Sun, IBM, HP, Digital, SGI, etc.) and their current corporate incarnations were essentially hardware companies. So switching to Linux to participate in an ecosystem made sense.
At the same time, take a look at some of the small projects, "community" stuff. How many overlapping projects are there? Not even forks. Just a different implementation, with variations in quality and design of the same basic idea. There's clearly a desire to do your own project, not work on someone else's in many cases. This arguably dilutes talent, since it's pretty obvious that there isn't an endless supply of talented, motivated developers. Sort of like adding too many major league baseball teams can be a problem because there aren't enough top-quality pitchers. And frankly, there are a lot more developers who think they're able to design something than actually can.
And then there's that "motivation" problem. Take a commercial package like SPSS. Where's the supported, open-source alternative? That's been thoroughly tested and demonstrated to work within a certain degree of accuracy on a given platform? And has a good user interface. If you're relying on volunteers, they work on the code they want to work on. And there's a subset of developers who would actually be able to work on a package like this. And let's not forget coding for multiple operating systems, including Windows. It's not what a lot of people consider "fun". And there's no incentive for companies like IBM or Novell to pay programmers to compete with a package like this (since money is the other motivator), so there's no real competition. You might have someone releasing a tool that covers some of the same ground, but it's unlikely to be as comprehensive.
Look at GIMP. No real corporate backing at all. It hasn't been considered strategic the way other apps (OpenOffice, Firefox) have been over the years. It's a wonder it's made it. They're gradually addressing the limitations. But it's harder for an entirely volunteer project vs. something with people on a payroll. And with Photoshop Elements dirt cheap, and professionals using Photoshop (because that's the standard tool, and a lot of them are generating revenue with it, making it merely a deductible cost of doing business), it's had trouble getting traction outside of the Linux community
Educational institutions provide an example of putting resources behind open source when it makes sense to them. Moodle and Sakai are both alternatives to Blackboard/WebCT. And attractive ones, given how lousy and expensive it is to do business with Blackboard. Moodle is pretty usable out of the box, has an active community and works. Sakai CAN work, but it's not really a Learning Management System out of the box. It's a framework, so you need to have developers or hire someone to implement it for you. But the point is that these apps are central to the business of schools, and the commercial packages are expensive, and that expense is annual. You need developers anyway, if you want to integrate a commercial project with your existing systems. So there's an incentive.
But for something really specialized, like a statistics tool that can cover everything from intro to stats to high-level research with huge data sets? Not so much. I'd put ArcGIS in the same category. It's just difficult to imagine an open-source project mustering the resources to dislodge large, complex specialty tools that don't have mass appeal and are affordable. They're too big to just take on the project, and they're not central enough to the mission of the organization to put resources behind replacing.
Sorry, no. Just find the idea of a "community" or some sort of common ground based on buying the same crap obnoxious and sad. It's a sign that you're a tool, that you've bought into the marketing message. Actually having something in common (interests, activities, line of work, beliefs, local "real" community, family, ideology, etc) actually matters more, and there are plenty of people to socialize with based on that. And I'm sorry, "I use a Macbook" isn't actually any more of an activity than "I buy coca-cola instead of pepsi".
Trust me, affording it isn't a problem. I just find Apple products uninteresting and many of the fanboyish customers irritating. Actually having a Macbook somewhere in public and running the risk of some Apple-loving jackass try to talk to me about it isn't worth it. As if that establishes some common ground or the basis for a conversation. The fact that two people buy the same crap does not actually make them part of a "community" that has any value. Perhaps if people didn't actually build their sense of self-worth by buying crap, the economy wouldn't actually be in the toilet at this point.
Because they've convinced many their customers - through marketing and cost - that somehow they're "better" or "superior" as people by buying an Apple product. Because, you know, we all should build our self-image around the consumption of mass-market products. Anyway, if you're self-image is tied up in identifying with an image, and a particular line of products are part of that, you tend to defend it, or at least not criticize it. It's actually kind of pathetic - "hey, I'm a better person because I bought something", but it's hardly unique to Apple consumers. Remember, the party in any relationship who has the least emotional commitment tends to have the most power. Many of their customers have a substantial emotional investment in Apple, and Apple has little in return. It's an ideal situation for them. They can reverse direction, shaft customers, raise prices, and everyone continues to believe.
Nah, Australia is way out in front. In fact, I think they're lapping the rest of us.