They targetted the apps, and there was an outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
They targetted the companies/people producing the apps, and there was outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
Now, they're targetting the users who misuse it - and yet still there is outcry here. How is this a YRO issue? You have no right to distribute copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. That's partly why the GPL exists, to grant you those rights.
Don't like it? Work to change it. But don't admonish the RIAA for upholding their rights, while cheering on others when they go after GPL violators.
The honest people stayed honest, but were inconvenienced.
Inconvenienced how? I own a copy of XP Pro, and activation required clicking a couple of buttons and going online; the entire process took maybe 30 seconds. I also had to reactivate it once, after I'd swapped around a little too much hardware. Again, go online, click a couple of buttons, done.
Perhaps if you don't have an internet connection and have to register by 'phone or even by post then it could be a bit more of a hassle, but I think that for the vast majority of PC users today there's no inconvenience involved at all.
Im not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing that Microsoft is starting to officially recognize and acknowledge its competition.
As of at least version 1.0, the various ASP.NET controls all produce HTML that works in Netscape/Mozilla as well as IE. Some of them (such as tree-structured menus) are nicer in IE, using more dynamic elements, but they all work in every browser I've tried them in.
Microsoft, like any company, would much rather you use their products, but like any company, they're not going to alienate potential customers unnecessarily.
If by that you mean "doesn't a particular copy of the software only accept a particular key", then no, that's not generally how it works. That would require that every single copy of the software that was shipped was different, which would hugely increase duplication costs (as you now can't just press them all based on a single master).
They way it works is that there's an algorithm that accepts an input string and checks some property of it - eg number of letters and numbers, add up the numbers and check their total (possibly modulo some other number), etc. Essentially, there is an algorithm that takes a string and says "yes, this is a valid key" or "no, that's garbage". That means that you can use any (valid) key with any copy of the software. It also means, if you can work out the algorithm, that you can *generate* valid keys. For example, if you know that the key has to be "letter letter letter number number number" then you know that AAA111, AAA112, AAA113, etc will all work, whether they've been issued by the software manufacturer or not.
I think the XP key checker is a little more sophistacted than that - I *think* that Home and Pro use different types of key, for example, and that the corporate site licence versions (which don't require product activation) use a third type of key. There may also be differences between full retail and OEM keys. (That's ok though, as Pro and Home are already different, and so require different duplication runs anyway, so there's no extra cost. OEM and full retail CDs are also different, at least as far as the writing on the CD goes.) That said though, at worst any retail XP Pro key will work with any retail XP Pro copy, and so on.
At any rate, it makes me sort of pity all those poor windows users who are going to get screwed over
Screwed over in what way? By having the copy of Windows they have no right to use shutdown on them? Wold you feel such pity for someone in a similar situation for violating the GPL? (Yes, I know the GPL is a redistribution licence not a user licence, but you get my point)
If they bought a copy of Windows in good faith and the retailer ripped them off, then go after the retailer. If they're knowingly using a pirated coy, then frankly, they deserve to get screwed over. If you want people to respect the GPL, etc, then you in turn must respect other licences, if only by not violating them and not using the software they cover.
If this was RedHat, encouraging people to report GPL violations with the promise of a similar amount of free stuff, would it still be evil? All they're doing is trying to enforce their licence; or is that not allowed, as "they already have plenty of money"?
I paid for my copy of Windows, as in ordered it and paid cash, not as in got it with my PC. If it isn't legit, then I've been ripped off at least as much as they have, and I'd really like to know, so I can take appropriate action against the people I bought it from (warn them they have counterfeit software, stop doing business with them, whatever).
How about if they promise it's anonymous?
Honestly, why would I care either way? They already have my name, address, email address, etc from when I ordered some trial CDs and downloaded some trial software. So far, the only thing I've had from them that I haven't specifically requested is a trial copy of a new version of one of the apps I trialled. Apart from that, nothing - no news letters, no surveys, no "you might also like this tenuously related software", nothing.
You people really have to stop being so paranoid. MS may be big enough to do to its competitors what most businesses can only dream of doing, but they treat their customers pretty well in my experience.
the one thing that Libre software can't help you do is squander money
Of course it can. On a bespoke software project, the licencing for off the shelf stuff (the OS, server app(s), etc) is generally a fraction of the overall cost. A week of my time will buy you the server hardware and a Windows Server licence - that's not going to change just because we switch to Apache on RedHat (which is in fact what we generally use).
The money will still be spent, it'll just go to a different cost line on the invoice.
It doesn't let me do focus follows mouse... It doesn't (to my knowledge) let me push current window to the background so I can type in it while it's covered by something else.
Both of these are provided by a power toy downloadable from microsoft. While you can't explicitly push the window to the back, with focus follows mouse you can bring a window to the front, then focus the window behind it, which is equivalent.
It doesn't let me split the panel into several parts so I can separate the taskbar from the application launch buttons.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that - the quick launch toolbar, while always alongside the taskbar, is seperate in terms of size - one cannot squash the other. Further, while not what you want I suspect, I just dragged mine off onto the desktop - it's now a separate window, and can be set to be always on top.
For example, if I minimise a program, there are THREE different places it can go.
That's not entirely true - by default, all minimized windows go to the task bar. For something different to happen, the application programmer has to expend some effort. You can hardly blame MS for not making this impossible...
it can go to the system tray
That's essentially a hack, invloving something along the lines of closing the window and creating an icon in the system tray. It's by no means default behaviour, and I only have a very few apps that do it. Two of these (firewall and virus scanner) are the sort of thing you have running almost all the time, and so you don't *want* them cluttering up your taskbar.
or it can be minimised to one of the application launch buttons on the panels
I don't even know exactly what you mean by this, but I can only assume that this is another clever programmer hack, almost certainly involving closing the window instead of minimizing it. I've certainly not seen anything behave in the manner you describe.
Use KDE for a while and when you get used to it, you will see that it's a much more usable environment.
Well, I did - I used KDE exclusively for about 18 months at work, at the end of about 5 years of using Linux. In the end, I switched back to Windows. Don't get me wrong, KDE is very good, but it wasn't quite right for me. With XP, pretty-much everything I hated about Windows had been fixed, and while there's nothing I can't do in Windows that I can in Linux, the reverse (for me) is not true.
Every time you add features you add potential exploits. All you can do is make it as secure as you are able to, and be pro-active with regard to looking for and fixing exploits.
Not if you do it right. There's absolutely no reason at all to ever have an ATM machine connected to anything other than a private network purpose-built for it.
In particular, the network has other MS systems on it.
Then the network needs to be changed. What are those systems doing on the same network as the ATMs?
If somebody brings in a MS laptop and plugs in to the network, it can then transfer.
And then you fire them for gross incompetence.
It really is that simple. At work, we have access to a secure government hosting network. There are two (2) machines in the building that can access it. They are locked in a room with swipe card and PIN access, and they are not connected to the LAN. You need to transfer files onto the secure network, you burn them to CD. (You also need security clearance to even enter the room, but that's another story) Even these machines have access only by remote desktoping to a gateway machine, and then from there to the machine you need to access (or ssh in the case of Linux boxes, of course).
I imagine that anyone who managed to get any data of any kind on any of those machines that wasn't supposed to be there would at the very least never set foot in that room again, and would quite possibly be fired.
This isn't even particularly sensitive data, or a particularly sensitive network - it hosts extranet web apps for government/local government employees. If your bank is any less thorough with its financial networks, it's time to change banks. There really is no excuse for it.
Sure they do, you just need to use the HTML entity, in this case <
Besides, my reaction on reading your original post was "Well, seems to fit right in these days...". I don't know if the rabid anti-MS bias is getting worse, or if I'm just getting more pragmatic in my old age, but I'm sure this place used to be a little more objective.
What if a company or organization wants to do business with people in more countires? Do you suggest Microsoft should register 100+ domains? Oh I see they have a lot of money so yes they should, so what about Wikipedia? Sourceforge?
Why would I (living in the UK) not be able to browse sourceforge.us or wikipedia.us? Why would I not be able to buy stuff from microsoft.us or ibm.us, selecting a delivery/billing address in the UK?
On the other hand, if you bought one table like that, and whined, but then continued to buy similar tables, and continued to whine, I'd certainly start thinking that perhpas you ought to have noticed the pattern, and stopped buying the damn tables.
I just got "access denied" from my office and home machines in the UK. Looks like it's down to the quality of the geo-location software, as another poster suggested.
To be fair, the OP didn't say that her past behaviour was redeemed by the article either, just that it demonstrated that there's more to her character than one would think from reading past articles and comments here. That's not exactly hard though; taking the highly-rated comments as being the "opinion of slashdot", it would be hard to find a less one-dimensional picture on most topics; things here tend to be very, very polarised, at least to my eyes.
That's hardly unique to slashdot though; wherever you have debates about emotive topics, you'll find polarisation of opinion and a complete unwillingness to accept or even listen to opposing viewpoints. It does seem to be taken to quite an extreme here at times, though.
they're selling a $2000 computer of which WinXP is only say 10% of the cost
Rubbish. I (as an end user) can buy Windows XP Pro cheaper than that (it cost me £116 for an OEM copy). There's simply no way in hell that any of the major PC OEMs are paying anything like that, especially given that most PCs ship with Home, not Pro. Do you have any sources to back up that claim?
Wow - you've clearly never used any commercial/niche software. JBuilder X Enterprise costs around £2000 iirc, with MSDN Universal about the same price (thus making it much, much better value...). Some software runs into the tens of thousands of pounds (a floating licence for JProbe, a Java profiling tool, for example, iirc) or even hundreds of thousands (such as Verity K2 Enterprise, a search engine and document classification framework, depending on exactly which components you buy). As for bespoke software development, the sky's the limit.
So yeah, $100 is a lot for a private citizen to be paying for software, but it's nothing compared to how much some costs, and nothing compared to how much it costs to develop any non-trivial piece of software.
Unfortunately, I don't use Firefox myself and my browser doesn't have Find As You Type
Well, I do use Firefox, and find as you type doesn't seem to work (assuming you don't have to switch it on); there's always ctrl-f though. Besides, you *can* navigate between links in a page without find as you type - tab/shift-tab navigates between objects in a page. Considerate website designers/builders can even set the tabindex of the various objects, to give priority to more important objects (eg a search input field, or the main navigational links, etc) Sadly, far too few people actually do so...
Slashdot Mirror
They targetted the apps, and there was an outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
They targetted the companies/people producing the apps, and there was outcry here - "The tool has legitimate uses! Go after the users who misuse it!".
Now, they're targetting the users who misuse it - and yet still there is outcry here. How is this a YRO issue? You have no right to distribute copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission. That's partly why the GPL exists, to grant you those rights.
Don't like it? Work to change it. But don't admonish the RIAA for upholding their rights, while cheering on others when they go after GPL violators.
The honest people stayed honest, but were inconvenienced.
Inconvenienced how? I own a copy of XP Pro, and activation required clicking a couple of buttons and going online; the entire process took maybe 30 seconds. I also had to reactivate it once, after I'd swapped around a little too much hardware. Again, go online, click a couple of buttons, done.
Perhaps if you don't have an internet connection and have to register by 'phone or even by post then it could be a bit more of a hassle, but I think that for the vast majority of PC users today there's no inconvenience involved at all.
Im not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing that Microsoft is starting to officially recognize and acknowledge its competition.
As of at least version 1.0, the various ASP.NET controls all produce HTML that works in Netscape/Mozilla as well as IE. Some of them (such as tree-structured menus) are nicer in IE, using more dynamic elements, but they all work in every browser I've tried them in.
Microsoft, like any company, would much rather you use their products, but like any company, they're not going to alienate potential customers unnecessarily.
If they're going to run it, they're going to run it whether it take two clicks or five.
If by that you mean "doesn't a particular copy of the software only accept a particular key", then no, that's not generally how it works. That would require that every single copy of the software that was shipped was different, which would hugely increase duplication costs (as you now can't just press them all based on a single master).
They way it works is that there's an algorithm that accepts an input string and checks some property of it - eg number of letters and numbers, add up the numbers and check their total (possibly modulo some other number), etc. Essentially, there is an algorithm that takes a string and says "yes, this is a valid key" or "no, that's garbage". That means that you can use any (valid) key with any copy of the software. It also means, if you can work out the algorithm, that you can *generate* valid keys. For example, if you know that the key has to be "letter letter letter number number number" then you know that AAA111, AAA112, AAA113, etc will all work, whether they've been issued by the software manufacturer or not.
I think the XP key checker is a little more sophistacted than that - I *think* that Home and Pro use different types of key, for example, and that the corporate site licence versions (which don't require product activation) use a third type of key. There may also be differences between full retail and OEM keys. (That's ok though, as Pro and Home are already different, and so require different duplication runs anyway, so there's no extra cost. OEM and full retail CDs are also different, at least as far as the writing on the CD goes.) That said though, at worst any retail XP Pro key will work with any retail XP Pro copy, and so on.
At any rate, it makes me sort of pity all those poor windows users who are going to get screwed over
Screwed over in what way? By having the copy of Windows they have no right to use shutdown on them? Wold you feel such pity for someone in a similar situation for violating the GPL? (Yes, I know the GPL is a redistribution licence not a user licence, but you get my point)
If they bought a copy of Windows in good faith and the retailer ripped them off, then go after the retailer. If they're knowingly using a pirated coy, then frankly, they deserve to get screwed over. If you want people to respect the GPL, etc, then you in turn must respect other licences, if only by not violating them and not using the software they cover.
If this was RedHat, encouraging people to report GPL violations with the promise of a similar amount of free stuff, would it still be evil? All they're doing is trying to enforce their licence; or is that not allowed, as "they already have plenty of money"?
I paid for my copy of Windows, as in ordered it and paid cash, not as in got it with my PC. If it isn't legit, then I've been ripped off at least as much as they have, and I'd really like to know, so I can take appropriate action against the people I bought it from (warn them they have counterfeit software, stop doing business with them, whatever).
How about if they promise it's anonymous?
Honestly, why would I care either way? They already have my name, address, email address, etc from when I ordered some trial CDs and downloaded some trial software. So far, the only thing I've had from them that I haven't specifically requested is a trial copy of a new version of one of the apps I trialled. Apart from that, nothing - no news letters, no surveys, no "you might also like this tenuously related software", nothing.
You people really have to stop being so paranoid. MS may be big enough to do to its competitors what most businesses can only dream of doing, but they treat their customers pretty well in my experience.
the one thing that Libre software can't help you do is squander money
Of course it can. On a bespoke software project, the licencing for off the shelf stuff (the OS, server app(s), etc) is generally a fraction of the overall cost. A week of my time will buy you the server hardware and a Windows Server licence - that's not going to change just because we switch to Apache on RedHat (which is in fact what we generally use).
The money will still be spent, it'll just go to a different cost line on the invoice.
It doesn't let me do focus follows mouse... It doesn't (to my knowledge) let me push current window to the background so I can type in it while it's covered by something else.
Both of these are provided by a power toy downloadable from microsoft. While you can't explicitly push the window to the back, with focus follows mouse you can bring a window to the front, then focus the window behind it, which is equivalent.
It doesn't let me split the panel into several parts so I can separate the taskbar from the application launch buttons.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that - the quick launch toolbar, while always alongside the taskbar, is seperate in terms of size - one cannot squash the other. Further, while not what you want I suspect, I just dragged mine off onto the desktop - it's now a separate window, and can be set to be always on top.
For example, if I minimise a program, there are THREE different places it can go.
That's not entirely true - by default, all minimized windows go to the task bar. For something different to happen, the application programmer has to expend some effort. You can hardly blame MS for not making this impossible...
it can go to the system tray
That's essentially a hack, invloving something along the lines of closing the window and creating an icon in the system tray. It's by no means default behaviour, and I only have a very few apps that do it. Two of these (firewall and virus scanner) are the sort of thing you have running almost all the time, and so you don't *want* them cluttering up your taskbar.
or it can be minimised to one of the application launch buttons on the panels
I don't even know exactly what you mean by this, but I can only assume that this is another clever programmer hack, almost certainly involving closing the window instead of minimizing it. I've certainly not seen anything behave in the manner you describe.
Use KDE for a while and when you get used to it, you will see that it's a much more usable environment.
Well, I did - I used KDE exclusively for about 18 months at work, at the end of about 5 years of using Linux. In the end, I switched back to Windows. Don't get me wrong, KDE is very good, but it wasn't quite right for me. With XP, pretty-much everything I hated about Windows had been fixed, and while there's nothing I can't do in Windows that I can in Linux, the reverse (for me) is not true.
And that's a very biased opinion from someone who obviously doesn't use Windows very much.
(See how easy that is? How is this "Insightful"?)
Every time you add features you add potential exploits. All you can do is make it as secure as you are able to, and be pro-active with regard to looking for and fixing exploits.
Worms can come in any time a machine is swapped.
Not if you do it right. There's absolutely no reason at all to ever have an ATM machine connected to anything other than a private network purpose-built for it.
Worms can't get across air gaps...
In particular, the network has other MS systems on it.
Then the network needs to be changed. What are those systems doing on the same network as the ATMs?
If somebody brings in a MS laptop and plugs in to the network, it can then transfer.
And then you fire them for gross incompetence.
It really is that simple. At work, we have access to a secure government hosting network. There are two (2) machines in the building that can access it. They are locked in a room with swipe card and PIN access, and they are not connected to the LAN. You need to transfer files onto the secure network, you burn them to CD. (You also need security clearance to even enter the room, but that's another story) Even these machines have access only by remote desktoping to a gateway machine, and then from there to the machine you need to access (or ssh in the case of Linux boxes, of course).
I imagine that anyone who managed to get any data of any kind on any of those machines that wasn't supposed to be there would at the very least never set foot in that room again, and would quite possibly be fired.
This isn't even particularly sensitive data, or a particularly sensitive network - it hosts extranet web apps for government/local government employees. If your bank is any less thorough with its financial networks, it's time to change banks. There really is no excuse for it.
Sure they do, you just need to use the HTML entity, in this case <
Besides, my reaction on reading your original post was "Well, seems to fit right in these days...". I don't know if the rabid anti-MS bias is getting worse, or if I'm just getting more pragmatic in my old age, but I'm sure this place used to be a little more objective.
What if a company or organization wants to do business with people in more countires? Do you suggest Microsoft should register 100+ domains? Oh I see they have a lot of money so yes they should, so what about Wikipedia? Sourceforge?
Why would I (living in the UK) not be able to browse sourceforge.us or wikipedia.us? Why would I not be able to buy stuff from microsoft.us or ibm.us, selecting a delivery/billing address in the UK?
Does this sound reasonable?
No, not really.
Would it hold up in court?
I've no idea; IANAL, etc.
On the other hand, if you bought one table like that, and whined, but then continued to buy similar tables, and continued to whine, I'd certainly start thinking that perhpas you ought to have noticed the pattern, and stopped buying the damn tables.
I just got "access denied" from my office and home machines in the UK. Looks like it's down to the quality of the geo-location software, as another poster suggested.
To be fair, the OP didn't say that her past behaviour was redeemed by the article either, just that it demonstrated that there's more to her character than one would think from reading past articles and comments here. That's not exactly hard though; taking the highly-rated comments as being the "opinion of slashdot", it would be hard to find a less one-dimensional picture on most topics; things here tend to be very, very polarised, at least to my eyes.
That's hardly unique to slashdot though; wherever you have debates about emotive topics, you'll find polarisation of opinion and a complete unwillingness to accept or even listen to opposing viewpoints. It does seem to be taken to quite an extreme here at times, though.
The screenshot looks like an explosion in a window factory to me...
they're selling a $2000 computer of which WinXP is only say 10% of the cost
Rubbish. I (as an end user) can buy Windows XP Pro cheaper than that (it cost me £116 for an OEM copy). There's simply no way in hell that any of the major PC OEMs are paying anything like that, especially given that most PCs ship with Home, not Pro. Do you have any sources to back up that claim?
$100-200 for a piece of software is rather pricey
Wow - you've clearly never used any commercial/niche software. JBuilder X Enterprise costs around £2000 iirc, with MSDN Universal about the same price (thus making it much, much better value...). Some software runs into the tens of thousands of pounds (a floating licence for JProbe, a Java profiling tool, for example, iirc) or even hundreds of thousands (such as Verity K2 Enterprise, a search engine and document classification framework, depending on exactly which components you buy). As for bespoke software development, the sky's the limit.
So yeah, $100 is a lot for a private citizen to be paying for software, but it's nothing compared to how much some costs, and nothing compared to how much it costs to develop any non-trivial piece of software.
The short form hides one of the most important conclusions of relativity theory: that mass is a function of speed.
Only to those who weren't paying attention in special relativity lectures...
Unfortunately, I don't use Firefox myself and my browser doesn't have Find As You Type
Well, I do use Firefox, and find as you type doesn't seem to work (assuming you don't have to switch it on); there's always ctrl-f though. Besides, you *can* navigate between links in a page without find as you type - tab/shift-tab navigates between objects in a page. Considerate website designers/builders can even set the tabindex of the various objects, to give priority to more important objects (eg a search input field, or the main navigational links, etc) Sadly, far too few people actually do so...
But until multi-CPU/multi-core machines are more common-place, there's no incentive for developers to make their apps multi-threaded.