While it's not nearly as cost effective, just get a removable drive. If the machines are the same (or close enough) then you basically take everything with you. Kinda like a USB keydrive except fast and large capacity, and is intended to be booted. Frankly, lugging an entire PC around (even if it is "dockable") is a pain - even if it's small.
That's all fine and good excpet for the fact that the legal definition of a monopoly for anti-trust purposes is not the same as a dictionary definition. You don't NEED 100% of the market to be a monopoly. MS is STILL a monopoly on the desktop.
So MS doesn't have to worry about being a monopoly, they have to worry [1] about abusing their monopoly power to harm competitors.
[1] Not really, since the DOJ refuses to do their job due to political reasons, and the jury is still out of the EU ("You must be more open. We really mean it. OK, well, we will give you ONE more chance. That's not enough? You need until 2045? We will see what we can do...")
Oh please. It's not all doom and gloom. It's really very simple. I will NOT buy any product or use any service that has DRM that is not easily removed. DVD's? Can easily dupe now... Itunes? There is a hack for that too (not that I would pay a buck a song though.)
If google's service is loked down so that I can't move my media around between devices and use open source software to play it, I won't use their service. Period. The market will decide the fate of this service.
If grandma can't watch her paid-for video that she downloaded (to her PC) on her TV in the living room, then granma will never use Google's service again. (Yes Johnny, grandmothers do use the internet.) You can also be assured that she will tell her friends about it.
It's obvious that google is being forced by the content providers to use DRM. The content providers are morons however - they can't see that those who would pay for content will, and those that would not pay, won't - regardless of DRM.
Most of mankinds famous persons are rule breakers. Rosa Parks... Gahndi... Jesus... Martin Luther King... Bonnie and Clyde... The Guy who shot Franz Ferdinand... Monica Lewinski...
Let's continue your list, shall we?
Charles Manson, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Reverend Jim Jones...
I think that there is a difference in "rule breakers." There are rule breakers that harm society and those around them, and those who are fighting for basic human rights. Sounds like you have a hard time distinguishing between the two for some reason.
Apparently Yaffle is one of those antisocial pinheads who is hell bent on being distructive, enjoys costing the game company money, making life difficult for the admins of the game (probably forced programmers to lose sleep cleaning up his distructive acts, and taking them off projects to improve the game), and gets a kick out of making the game less fun for other paying customers. This is not someone to idolize.
If Yaffle was fighting the game company trying to IMPROVE the game, such as getting punished for finding a flaw and reporting it to the company, then this would be a whole different story.
"Google also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you."
"The Service is made available to you for your personal use only."
"Google reserves the right to refuse service to anyone at any time without notice for any reason."
"Google may at any time and for any reason terminate the Services, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system."
You may want to run YOUR business under those conditions, but I sure as hell wouldn't. Personal account for webmail signups and such, sure. Business, nope.
Careful with the "$5 unlimited SMS" claims. Frequently, they are only cell 2 cell in the SAME network, or you pay something stupid like 25 cents each. Email to cell is an example of an out of network message.
Many plans have a limit to their plans of something like 200 messages.
Furthermore, even $5 is a LOT considering that 300 messages a months is high, and that's about 50K worth of data, MAX. Over a buck a K? That's insane.
With "In" phone calls being free, "In" SMS for $5 seems stupid to sign up for. Obviously you find people (must be the teen market) willing to pay that - I'm not willing to. If it was $5 unlimited SMS to and from any network, any gateway, you MAY tempt me.
Like the FA, you are making attempts to define a term in a different way that it is used "in the real world". People say things are "next to impossible" all the time - does that mean that they are liars or are they just exaggerating a little? Continuing down this path of deliberatly taking things to a literal extreme is imature.
You threw out three very specific examples, inviting challenge. Furthermore, since all you did was LIST them, I had no option but to "run away in the direction of my choice." Had you provided direction, I could have responded in kind. So you are welcome.:-)
I'm no fan of MS (I have a few macs, and my main OS is Linux, but do run XP with cygwin on my laptop due to driver issues) but I put the question out there: How much does it cost to develop the missing applications for Linux / Mac / Sun inhouse? Do these companies ONLY run their own OS's or do they have some Windows boxes that are in use for various applications?
So since you failed to list another large company that isn't in the OS business that is microsoft free, I assume that you don't know of one. Maybe the "next to impossible" comment holds true since so very very few companies even attempt it, and those that do are doing it for special reasons (such as the case with RedHat, Sun, and Apple.)
Um, it's not that people (home users) want WINDOWS, they want their lame-assed games to run. They want Quicken, Word, TurboTax, etc. It doesn't matter that free alternatives exist in many cases that would run on Linux. (before someone spews Wine, it's not even CLOSE to being compatible enough for casual home use, much less corp. use.)
I've setup Linux for people like my father in-law (who is non-technical) to do web / email, but my wife wanted educational software for our daughter so we had no real choice but an old windows box for her. Outside a major metro area, nobody even sells apple so that's not a choice.
Coming up with examples like RedHat, Apple, and Sun evoke a huge DUH. Name a major corporation that isn't in the OS business. While you will find that the majority of large businesses run major systems (such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc.) on Sun, HP or IBM hardware and OS's, the desktops are Windows. Why? Because the client software for these applications are Windows centric. Even in cases where they are Web applications, they want ActiveX controls and such for full functionality. They tightly integrate with Word and Excel. This is true even for the companies that write their own software. Windows gives them a single platform to support.
Is it possible to run a business without MS software? Sure, but it isn't easy. In fact, it's really fricking hard. Frankly, the small shops are much easier than the large shops due to the OS requirements on the client workstation that enterprise apps have.
Regardless of what you may believe, MS has a VERY firm monopoly grip on the business / government and home markets. Noise that some businesses / governments make about open standards and moving to opensource are nearly universally just attempts to negotiate better licensing deals from MS.
MS is abusing their monopoly power by such restrictive licensing deals. This is exactly the type of anti-competitive business practice that the DOJ and justice department should have eliminated. We all know what happened and why they didn't.
You can't have it both ways. You just said that if a manufacturer wants to remain competitive, they need to bow down to MS's restrictive terms - and somehow that's not an MS issue... How naive.
Generations are not counted in lifetimes. In fact, they are closer to 20 - 25 years. It has to do with when your kids have kids, starting a new generation... But I guess bad math is now insightful... Sigh.
This comes up everytime the subject of UPS's are mentioned.
No, you don't want car OR marine batteries (car batteries are worse, but both are inappropriate.)
In these batteries, the plates are more like lead sponges designed for high current output for short periods of time. What you want are industrial type batteries that are designed for many recharge cycles and long-term use - fork-lift batteries, or golf cart batteries are generally good choices. They have thick lead plates that hold up. Since they are not sealed, you have venting issues, and need to keep an eye on the water/acid levels.
They did use to sell LCD panels that were designed to be used on overhead projectors.
Problem is that they sucked. You couldn't get an OH projector bright enough. Even an el-cheapo $1K standard projector blows the crap out of those things.
I used to have a vial of mercury (a few ounces worth) that I used to play with as a teen (over 25 years ago now.) It was fun to roll around in your hand... My mother told me once that when she was little, the dentist used to give her a small amount in a cup to play with. Not too long ago, they shutdown a school because some old stock was spilled in a science lab. While mercury is not "good" for you, it's not anthrax or ebola. You will not die from touching it. While browsing the web, I found insane quotes like: "Let's start with a straightforward fact: Mercury is unimaginably toxic and dangerous. A single drop on a human hand can be irreversibly fatal." - and that was on Discover.com. Now if you EAT mercury, yes, it can kill you, but not touching it. Prolonged exposure to vapor can also be harful. Wacky hysteria like this is not helpful. Most of this hysteria is generated from non-scientific people pushing an agenda.
Most AV software won't protect against spyware either. That's generally a separate product. The sony code is definately malware, but it isn't considered by the AV companies to be a virus.
Considering sony's stance, IMHO the AV companies should change their position, and their customers should demand it.
Exim is Awesome as a gateway (especially if you use Exchange internally. Exchange can't be trusted to speak directly to the outside world.) Exim is also awesome as your main mail server as well. And it scales, easily handling mail for many thousands of users.
As for testing, tossing the full email feed at it and dealing with all the problems may not be the best course of action for the reasons the poster above went into. I usually setup a test sub-domain for testing.
But using a dozen components together is the unix way. I install just what I need, configure each to support exactly what I need, and it just works. Exactly the way I want it to. And it's free.
Now I have NEVER used SJESMS6, but are you telling me that Sun has a "utopian" integrated messaging server that doesn't totally suck ass like every other integrated messaging server? And I can afford it for my non-profit? And I can run it on Linux?
... And those residuals are Very Very small. In the few cases they aren't, the shows are dead - never seen again due to the cost.
We are not talking about recent shows that were wildly popular like Friends and Seinfeld here, which still have money making potential on syndication. These are ancient crappy sitcoms and such that have virtually no market value anymore. Yes, there are some people who would watch them again, but the numbers are small enough that it's not worth the airtime to broadcast them.
The shows that WB is putting out there have been paid for MANY times over. The only reason they haven't fallen into the public domain is that media companies have payed congress (several times) to extend the copyright term to an insane number of years. Don't worry, as soon as Mickey is getting close to going PD again, I'm sure Disney and friends will ensure that it doesn't happen.
That said, I have stated many times that I would pay a reasonable amount for content delivered in an acceptable format. I don't expect to get everything for free. I also don't expect that it will ever happen. What the industry considers an acceptable format will never be what I consider to be an acceptable format since my formats are open technology based with no DRM.
If it's like most classs action lawsuits, the lawyers will get $100M and affected consumers will get a $5 coupon towards more DRM enabled CD's. Drop in the bucket for Sony.
Bing bing. You win the prize. People that get physically destructive need therapy. That's not normal, and not acceptable in the business world under ANY circumstances.
If you are in IT and have people yelling at you, you need to deal with the situation. Walk away, hang up, etc. Even if it's your boss. You don't have to put up with abusive behavior. If it's your boss, you may have some legal options as well. Again, yelling at an employee or co-worker is not acceptable in the business world - ever.
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While it's not nearly as cost effective, just get a removable drive. If the machines are the same (or close enough) then you basically take everything with you. Kinda like a USB keydrive except fast and large capacity, and is intended to be booted. Frankly, lugging an entire PC around (even if it is "dockable") is a pain - even if it's small.
That's all fine and good excpet for the fact that the legal definition of a monopoly for anti-trust purposes is not the same as a dictionary definition. You don't NEED 100% of the market to be a monopoly. MS is STILL a monopoly on the desktop.
So MS doesn't have to worry about being a monopoly, they have to worry [1] about abusing their monopoly power to harm competitors.
[1] Not really, since the DOJ refuses to do their job due to political reasons, and the jury is still out of the EU ("You must be more open. We really mean it. OK, well, we will give you ONE more chance. That's not enough? You need until 2045? We will see what we can do...")
Oh please. It's not all doom and gloom. It's really very simple. I will NOT buy any product or use any service that has DRM that is not easily removed. DVD's? Can easily dupe now... Itunes? There is a hack for that too (not that I would pay a buck a song though.)
If google's service is loked down so that I can't move my media around between devices and use open source software to play it, I won't use their service. Period. The market will decide the fate of this service.
If grandma can't watch her paid-for video that she downloaded (to her PC) on her TV in the living room, then granma will never use Google's service again. (Yes Johnny, grandmothers do use the internet.) You can also be assured that she will tell her friends about it.
It's obvious that google is being forced by the content providers to use DRM. The content providers are morons however - they can't see that those who would pay for content will, and those that would not pay, won't - regardless of DRM.
Most of mankinds famous persons are rule breakers. Rosa Parks... Gahndi... Jesus... Martin Luther King... Bonnie and Clyde... The Guy who shot Franz Ferdinand... Monica Lewinski...
Let's continue your list, shall we?
Charles Manson, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Reverend Jim Jones...
I think that there is a difference in "rule breakers." There are rule breakers that harm society and those around them, and those who are fighting for basic human rights. Sounds like you have a hard time distinguishing between the two for some reason.
Apparently Yaffle is one of those antisocial pinheads who is hell bent on being distructive, enjoys costing the game company money, making life difficult for the admins of the game (probably forced programmers to lose sleep cleaning up his distructive acts, and taking them off projects to improve the game), and gets a kick out of making the game less fun for other paying customers. This is not someone to idolize.
If Yaffle was fighting the game company trying to IMPROVE the game, such as getting punished for finding a flaw and reporting it to the company, then this would be a whole different story.
From the Google Terms of Service:
"Google also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you."
"The Service is made available to you for your personal use only."
"Google reserves the right to refuse service to anyone at any time without notice for any reason."
"Google may at any time and for any reason terminate the Services, terminate this Agreement, or suspend or terminate your account. In the event of termination, your account will be disabled and you may not be granted access to your account or any files or other content contained in your account although residual copies of information may remain in our system."
You may want to run YOUR business under those conditions, but I sure as hell wouldn't. Personal account for webmail signups and such, sure. Business, nope.
Careful with the "$5 unlimited SMS" claims. Frequently, they are only cell 2 cell in the SAME network, or you pay something stupid like 25 cents each. Email to cell is an example of an out of network message.
Many plans have a limit to their plans of something like 200 messages.
Furthermore, even $5 is a LOT considering that 300 messages a months is high, and that's about 50K worth of data, MAX. Over a buck a K? That's insane.
With "In" phone calls being free, "In" SMS for $5 seems stupid to sign up for. Obviously you find people (must be the teen market) willing to pay that - I'm not willing to. If it was $5 unlimited SMS to and from any network, any gateway, you MAY tempt me.
This isn't really how it works.
Actually, it is. A friend of mine was a former negotiator of the Microsoft contracts for Dell. I got the inside story in great detail.
Like the FA, you are making attempts to define a term in a different way that it is used "in the real world". People say things are "next to impossible" all the time - does that mean that they are liars or are they just exaggerating a little? Continuing down this path of deliberatly taking things to a literal extreme is imature.
You threw out three very specific examples, inviting challenge. Furthermore, since all you did was LIST them, I had no option but to "run away in the direction of my choice." Had you provided direction, I could have responded in kind. So you are welcome. :-)
I'm no fan of MS (I have a few macs, and my main OS is Linux, but do run XP with cygwin on my laptop due to driver issues) but I put the question out there: How much does it cost to develop the missing applications for Linux / Mac / Sun inhouse? Do these companies ONLY run their own OS's or do they have some Windows boxes that are in use for various applications?
So since you failed to list another large company that isn't in the OS business that is microsoft free, I assume that you don't know of one. Maybe the "next to impossible" comment holds true since so very very few companies even attempt it, and those that do are doing it for special reasons (such as the case with RedHat, Sun, and Apple.)
Um, it's not that people (home users) want WINDOWS, they want their lame-assed games to run. They want Quicken, Word, TurboTax, etc. It doesn't matter that free alternatives exist in many cases that would run on Linux. (before someone spews Wine, it's not even CLOSE to being compatible enough for casual home use, much less corp. use.)
I've setup Linux for people like my father in-law (who is non-technical) to do web / email, but my wife wanted educational software for our daughter so we had no real choice but an old windows box for her. Outside a major metro area, nobody even sells apple so that's not a choice.
It's not the OS, it's the apps.
Coming up with examples like RedHat, Apple, and Sun evoke a huge DUH. Name a major corporation that isn't in the OS business. While you will find that the majority of large businesses run major systems (such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc.) on Sun, HP or IBM hardware and OS's, the desktops are Windows. Why? Because the client software for these applications are Windows centric. Even in cases where they are Web applications, they want ActiveX controls and such for full functionality. They tightly integrate with Word and Excel. This is true even for the companies that write their own software. Windows gives them a single platform to support.
Is it possible to run a business without MS software? Sure, but it isn't easy. In fact, it's really fricking hard. Frankly, the small shops are much easier than the large shops due to the OS requirements on the client workstation that enterprise apps have.
Regardless of what you may believe, MS has a VERY firm monopoly grip on the business / government and home markets. Noise that some businesses / governments make about open standards and moving to opensource are nearly universally just attempts to negotiate better licensing deals from MS.
MS is abusing their monopoly power by such restrictive licensing deals. This is exactly the type of anti-competitive business practice that the DOJ and justice department should have eliminated. We all know what happened and why they didn't.
You can't have it both ways. You just said that if a manufacturer wants to remain competitive, they need to bow down to MS's restrictive terms - and somehow that's not an MS issue... How naive.
Generations are not counted in lifetimes. In fact, they are closer to 20 - 25 years. It has to do with when your kids have kids, starting a new generation... But I guess bad math is now insightful... Sigh.
This comes up everytime the subject of UPS's are mentioned.
No, you don't want car OR marine batteries (car batteries are worse, but both are inappropriate.)
In these batteries, the plates are more like lead sponges designed for high current output for short periods of time. What you want are industrial type batteries that are designed for many recharge cycles and long-term use - fork-lift batteries, or golf cart batteries are generally good choices. They have thick lead plates that hold up. Since they are not sealed, you have venting issues, and need to keep an eye on the water/acid levels.
They did use to sell LCD panels that were designed to be used on overhead projectors.
Problem is that they sucked. You couldn't get an OH projector bright enough. Even an el-cheapo $1K standard projector blows the crap out of those things.
I used to have a vial of mercury (a few ounces worth) that I used to play with as a teen (over 25 years ago now.) It was fun to roll around in your hand... My mother told me once that when she was little, the dentist used to give her a small amount in a cup to play with. Not too long ago, they shutdown a school because some old stock was spilled in a science lab. While mercury is not "good" for you, it's not anthrax or ebola. You will not die from touching it. While browsing the web, I found insane quotes like: "Let's start with a straightforward fact:
Mercury is unimaginably toxic and dangerous. A single drop on a human hand can be irreversibly fatal." - and that was on Discover.com. Now if you EAT mercury, yes, it can kill you, but not touching it. Prolonged exposure to vapor can also be harful. Wacky hysteria like this is not helpful. Most of this hysteria is generated from non-scientific people pushing an agenda.
Most AV software won't protect against spyware either. That's generally a separate product. The sony code is definately malware, but it isn't considered by the AV companies to be a virus.
Considering sony's stance, IMHO the AV companies should change their position, and their customers should demand it.
Exim is Awesome as a gateway (especially if you use Exchange internally. Exchange can't be trusted to speak directly to the outside world.) Exim is also awesome as your main mail server as well. And it scales, easily handling mail for many thousands of users.
As for testing, tossing the full email feed at it and dealing with all the problems may not be the best course of action for the reasons the poster above went into. I usually setup a test sub-domain for testing.
But using a dozen components together is the unix way. I install just what I need, configure each to support exactly what I need, and it just works. Exactly the way I want it to. And it's free.
Now I have NEVER used SJESMS6, but are you telling me that Sun has a "utopian" integrated messaging server that doesn't totally suck ass like every other integrated messaging server? And I can afford it for my non-profit? And I can run it on Linux?
This is sort of ironic that when a IE has a glitch, people blame MS; but when FireFox has a bug, people blame the user ;)
Um, I think he was still blaming Microsoft.
... And those residuals are Very Very small. In the few cases they aren't, the shows are dead - never seen again due to the cost.
We are not talking about recent shows that were wildly popular like Friends and Seinfeld here, which still have money making potential on syndication. These are ancient crappy sitcoms and such that have virtually no market value anymore. Yes, there are some people who would watch them again, but the numbers are small enough that it's not worth the airtime to broadcast them.
I'll byte.
The shows that WB is putting out there have been paid for MANY times over. The only reason they haven't fallen into the public domain is that media companies have payed congress (several times) to extend the copyright term to an insane number of years. Don't worry, as soon as Mickey is getting close to going PD again, I'm sure Disney and friends will ensure that it doesn't happen.
That said, I have stated many times that I would pay a reasonable amount for content delivered in an acceptable format. I don't expect to get everything for free. I also don't expect that it will ever happen. What the industry considers an acceptable format will never be what I consider to be an acceptable format since my formats are open technology based with no DRM.
Not sure why my post got attached to yours, I was replying to a different post about how devistating the class action suit will be.
If it's like most classs action lawsuits, the lawyers will get $100M and affected consumers will get a $5 coupon towards more DRM enabled CD's. Drop in the bucket for Sony.
Bing bing. You win the prize. People that get physically destructive need therapy. That's not normal, and not acceptable in the business world under ANY circumstances.
If you are in IT and have people yelling at you, you need to deal with the situation. Walk away, hang up, etc. Even if it's your boss. You don't have to put up with abusive behavior. If it's your boss, you may have some legal options as well. Again, yelling at an employee or co-worker is not acceptable in the business world - ever.