Seriously though, this person knowingly broke the law. While the company is responsible for that, he is responsible to the company. You should, in no uncertain terms, sue the weasel for all costs incurred in the audit, license purchases, legal fees and damages. Make a precedent out of him, he deserves it.
OK, as of this writing, it has been ~12 hours since the technology announcement, so it is more than safe to assume that the technology has been utterly and totally cracked in a way that make it trivial to copy. Now comes the hard part, and my plea to the crackers.
Dear Mr/Ms Evildoer,
While I am sure that you want to release the crack of this scheme now to get points in the warez community, and beat the other 12 teams of obviously less-smart anti-social geniuses, please, please, please do not. If you do release the crack, MS will reverse engineer it, and fix the holes.
This v1.01 version will be a complete reworking of the system from the ground up, and will fall in 16 hours as opposed to the 12 that v1.0 took. By the time they get to v1.06 or 1.07, they might have a workable scheme, and we all lose. We all know that if it takes more than a week to crack, it will be forgotten about, and all the releases will be nuked. Pleas don't fall into this trap.
You need patience and willpower. There needs to be 100 million disks and 1 million players out there supporting the v1.0 scheme, at the very least, before you release the crack. At this point, it will be impossible to release a v1.01 without pissing off the entire sheep-minded consumer public, and making them equate DRM/Designed for Windows/Copy Protection with pain, annoyance, and general papercut-level anguish.
When this happens, MS DRM will fail. If you crack it now, it actually has a better chance of suceeding. Remember, closed source is an advantage when it comes to MS, but the advantage is yours. Use it wisely, and sit on your crack for a few weeks.
This one is easy. The sceptics state that the radiation shielding is inadequate, but they don't offer any proof. They don't even list a refrence. Along comes person #2 who takes the sceptic's word as gospel, and voila, a conspiracy is born. I could go to NASA and ask them why rabid chipmunks burrowing through the capsule after being launched by Red-Soviet catapults did not kill the astronauts. Bet they won't have a scientific answer, even though it _DID_ happen, honest. Can't find anything on the web about it either. See, google is covering it up! The CIA bribed/threatened them into submission. Woe be we, freedom is doomed.
Getting back to the point, apply the same rigorous standards of proof to the accuser BEFORE you do so to the defendants answer, it is only fair. If you don't, you look like a crackpot and a moron. Remember, deep breaths.....
If NASA wants to refute these twits without giving credence to thier theories, there are ways. First, you make a web page/materials that debunk the common myths and arguements. Then, whenever someone comes up with a 'new' article 'proving' that it was faked, you simply link to the appropriate parts of the page, adding as little necessary to debunk the people.
'Duh' I hear you say, it probably exists allready, the point was not to give these people exposure, and by extension, legitemacy. Well, you don't have to mention them, what they stand for, thier organizations, thier pets, or the brain tumor that they should have removed. Every time one of these crackpots surfaces with an epic theorem, simply restate it, with NO refrence to the origional, and shoot it down. After the first 10 or so, you could almost automate it with a perl script. Think auto-flame generator.
This way, you get your information out, without helping them. It cuts the legs out from under moronic attention-getters. I used to use similar tactics on street preachers who hung out in my favorite places and tried to 'convert' me. If you actively attack to de-legitimize them, they win. Go around, and you win.
-Charlie
P.S. My personal opinion is to wait them out till they go away, and have the CIA kill them, it will make the world a better place. We really should be getting some return on all those 'black' dollars we are spending!:)
Formatting problems aside, this will fail for 2 reasons, both are money. The first is obvious, if you do a search of the press release, the word 'price' is never mentioned. You would think they would have something like 'each track can be downloaded for a reasonable price'. Nope. Wanna bet it will be $2.49 a song, restricted also, because people 'demand' secure formats because they don't want to be 'ripped off'. Sure, this will fly. That is the short term deathblow.
The longer one is more insidious. Say you have the songs you purchased on your hard drive, and one day, you turn your machine on and hear a grinding noise followed by clicks. Disk failure. You then call up the nice people who sold you the music and ask for new copies, because your legally purchased music is gone, and you are well within your rights to request another copy. Remember, they give you the honor of using a license, not owning the track. If your HD dies, you still have the rights to the license. So, you ask the nice person on the phone if you can have free downloads of the entire 98Sync degrees to men collection that you just spent $800 on. Then you wait. You can just barely hear the riotous laughter through the phone that has dropeed to the floor on the other end. Then they tell you to fuck off. Luckily, in the fine print that they changed since you agreed to it, legally of course, they want the money they spent on senators put to good use, says 'we can tell you to fuck off at any time for any reason'. So you fuck off. And then you never patronise them, or any other similar service again. This will really end the industry, and they are way way to greedy to do anything else.
Lastly, a personal note. The music industry, chiefly in the guise of the RIAA has done more in the last year or two to erode our civil rights than anything else that I can think of. They killed several good, legal services, and they are not stopping. They are forcing changes to the technology that I use and love to make them more money. They have no qualms about buying power and abusing it on a whim. If you doubt it, read the legislation that they are trying to get passed (there is to much of it to link here, start at www.theregister.co.uk with a search for RIAA). By using services like this, you are only enriching the very people who are targeting you and the things you love. Don't give them more money, it will only hurt you in the long run. When they went after napster, I said that I would not buy a CD until it played out, and if napster won, I would go back to buying CDs. If they lost, I would never buy a CD again. I have not bought a CD since. My 300+ collection collects dust. I have stopped consuming music. NPR is better radio anyway. Don't buy the 'new, friendlier' record company BS, they are sharks, and you are bleeding.
Everyone out there is arguing the poin that 'MS designed windows badly'. They didn't. In fact, they didn't design it at all. Design implies a high level organization that is beyond lacking in the MS development process. If you look at any of thier initiatives, be it the next version of windows, or something more nebulous like.NET, there is no design. Someone comes up with an idea, and 50 teams go to work. Each team makes a bullet point on a list, and then it is all hastily put together in a big wrapper.
This may be fast, may work well for some things, but slapping features into a GUI is not design. To compound the problem V2 of the project will take the same code base and slap 20 more checkbox items onto it. Again, not design. Infact, it probably gets away from what little design there was in the beginning
Overall, the arguement should not be 'was it designed right', but 'was it designed', and the answer to that is no.
"Just like with the Palm OS. The "Palm OS" doesn't actually run the PDA. It runs on top of a small RTOS kernel that handles interrupts, hardware drivers, and other real-time things that have little to do with the UI. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the same Palm OS runs on different RTOS kernels. In fact, I can almost guarantee you that the Qualcomm Palm thingy they had a few years ago likely did not use the same RTOS kernel as my Palm Vx."
Actuallly, it usually does run on the same RTOS. The Qualcomm, and the later palm/phone combo's, including the latest samsung (drool) one have a seperate chipset for the phone and the OS functions. The integration between the 2 is strictly software. The more time and effort ou put into it, the more integrated they look. Qualcomm's integration absolutely sucked, Samsung's is quite good. Either way, it is faked.
All this said, it is Intel's wet dream to get into this market, and a major strategic push that they just announced was to make a single chip (note: not a single core) that would do both by 2005 if I remember the announcement right. Either way, we are a long way off from a RTOS running both halves.
If you read my post, you might have noticed the 'across various organizations' bit. Most of my clients have 10 or so machines, and do not run MS servers, for both security and stability reasons. It is beyond stupid to run an SUS server for 10 people, the setup time alone would cover a year or 2's worth of patches. Add in license costs, not to mention hardware, and you have a problem. Being an idiot, I must have chosen the wrong path not to blindly shovel thousands of dollars of my clients money at MS. Must go off and do some of that book learnin' stuff soon.
Also, an SUS server does NOTHING for testing in a production enviornment. You will still blow up your machines, you will just be there to click the distribute button and be physically beaten by pissed off people. Again, not good. Idiot means 'one who avoids pain and financial loss' in Babylonian, right?
Guess I should learn to program again in those swell new lanugages and frameworks, they will solve all the problems. Trust in MS, they are the solution to your problem. Ever notice how much implementing an SUS server will cost? Ever notice that when they started pushing that tech, they made it real real hard to download and save patches so I could distribute them on a CD? This is for our convenince, not a plan to get more money out of a consumer and butter them up for future power grabs, right?
Lastly, let me give you an example of one of my clients. They have about 40 machines over 2 offices and 28 remote sites. The 'main' sites are connected via DSL, and the big one has a novell 4.2 server, the smaller one is peer to peer. The remote sites are all dialup, using AOL of all things (NOT MY CHOICE, it was done before I got there!!!!). Now, please enlighten me as to how an SUS server would benefit these people. Not being an MCxx, I just can't see it. Must be an idiot. Must do more book learnin'. Oh yeah, before you say 'get servers and dsl for all sites, and a VPN and... and...', let me mention that they are a charity, run on a shoestring, and use mostly donated hardware and software. I donate lots of time there, but do bill some. Yout budget for this exercise is $100 if you can prove the ROI.
I turn off automatic updates on all machine I admin (about 250 across various organizations), not out of greed, but out of fear and responsibility. The fear part comes in when you get a call at 6 am, followed by 10 more in the next hour saying 'all our computers are dead'. Not a happy day. Automatic updates can do this, and have done it to me. I like to get a patch, test it, THEN install it.
If your computers are protected properly, (firewall, virus scanners w/ heuristics etc), you can get away with not patching for a day or 2. Use this time wisely, large corporations do, you should also. That is the fear part.
The resopnsibility comes in when you test the stuff for your clients so the BSOD scenario does not happen. I charge a lot, but thing like this make me worth it to clients.
I sent this contact to Magee a while ago after a dinner conversation that floored me. The person was dropping hints at me for MONTHS about something happening, and one day, he told me that Avaya outright dumped NT/2K for linux on everything. Windows will be supported for basically as long as existing clients want it (years and years and years), but from now on, everything is linux.
I asked for a press release, and was pointed to an utterly forgetable announcement that never mentioned linux, or that MS was on the shitlist, it was sad. When I went back to the source, he told me that 1) yes it was the correct release, and 2) it was indead a total shift from one to the other. Like the Inq aricle says, it was not a snap decision, or a vapor release, it was developed, tested, and debugged for 18 months before it was... err.. not announced with no fanfare.
Overall, the products are quite real, you can buy them, they run linux, and have displaced MS. Yay. Next niche to conquer is......?
No one seems to mention the complete loss of bladder control for 3 days afterward, and hair falling out in clumps. I guess these will mostly be worked out by v.8 of the hardware, with very few cases happening by v1.0.:)
This will hurt Intel proportionalely more than AMD. The CPU game is all about Average Selling Price (ASP) across the whole line. AMD has always had thier CPUs clustered in the low range $50-$150, and has an ASP of around $80-90. Intel on the other hand, excluding the effects of $3700 large cache xeon's, has always had significalntly higher ASPs.
For every $600 P4/(latest speed grade) they sell, it can subsidise 50 $100 celerons by $10 each, bumping the ASP up a ton. They use this as a club to abuse AMD in the market, and still make good money. Since AMD can (no longer) control the high end, they can't do this, so thier ASPs suffer. The club gets even bigger when you add those xeons into the mix.
Getting back to the point, high end sales allow intel to weather competition, and down markets more than AMD. AMD's sales are clustered much more, so the bottom and the top end chips cost about the same, or at least don't have as many times the cost differential as intel's do. When top end sales go down, intel hurts a lot. AMD hurts, but much less. Losing $50/chip is much easier than $500/chip. Look for this to hit intel in the following quarters, while AMD can roll with it.
Looking ahead, when the Hammers come out, they are targeted against the Xeons. This will gut intel's margins much much more than the athlon did. Intel can sell all thier P4s at cost, and make the profit up on the xeons, they have no competition there. It will get interesting in January.
One question that pops immediatly to mind is why this, and why now? Is a large part of the German government going to have to re-up thier MS contract soon? Is there some impending financial outlay that caused someone to do the math, and realize that funding this is really the cheap way out? What is the impetus here? Anyone know?
Aha! You missed the innovative features that outlook has. When you create a user, you need to buy a CAL, which of course sends more money to MS. See, it is quite an innovative revenue generator! Who would have thought they could make that much money from a confrence room! (I never said it would be to your benefit, did I?). Now, if they remove that feature, or fix the problem, they make less money. Tell me why they should fix it? I wouldn't in thier situation:).
This isn't a problem. Why? Look at it from a financial standpoint. You can pay for an exchange server, CALs, the associated NT server and CALs, Office and a few other misc. costs, or you can pay some code monkey $5000 to whip up a connector for you. It may cost more, it may cost less, but when you put that one time cost up against 5 years of MS licensing, you quickly get a dose of perspective.
In addition, if you are smart, you can do things like go to the forums of the company that makes the product that you need connected. A simple message like 'we are thinking of developing a connector for the flatulator 5K, anyone want in?'. If you get 10 people, you can sell it to them for $500 each, or have them chip in and open source the whole thing. The more expensive the product, the more people will most likely want to chip in.
In addition, you can also ask the company itself to write a connector for you. If you are a large, loyal client, they probably will. Offer to help with development and alpha/beta testing.
Overall, if you sit there and whine about it, you will be a slave to microsoft's licensing forever. Thier stuff obviously works for you, and you can afford it, so don't bother, sit back and be happy. When you decide to change, there will probably be what you want in a prepackaged form. In the mean time, there are options for those who want to be creative, and they don't have to cost much.
There is a simple solution to this, or maybe not so simple. When you submit anything to the kernel that might be patented/copyrighted/whatever, you must also submit a workaround, or a functional equvalent that is not copyrighted. It doesn't have to be very good, complete, or as fast, but it needs to work. That way, if a large corporate entity decides to sue, or get an injunction against you, there is a quick way out. Imagine if a fundamental part of the kernel needed to be removed in, oh, say, an hour. How pissed would you be if linux no longer worked, or could be downloaded for the 2 weeks it took for a team to valiantly push out a fix? I would be livid. Worse yet, if I was a CIO, I wouldn't touch linux with a 10 foot (~3.3m) pole ever again.
If there was a nearly complete workaround that could be put into place quickly, then the 'we'll ignore it until we get a piece of paper with lots of lawyers names at the top' strategy might work. I could live with a 'patch this for a 25% speed reduction coupled with a 100% lawyer reduction a lot more than a 'stop it now' for a month, and then only a 5% speed reduction. The key is to keep things working while corrections are being made.
For the trolls out there, I know you can keep using the binaries you allready have, and there will probably be MORE mirrors after a lawsuit, but I really want to keep things legal, as I am sure most readers here do. Corporations HAVE to. A good backup plan is worth more than a little grey area now and again.
Most people seem to think that a DVD is strictly a movie format like a VHS tape or an MPEG file. It is MUCH more than that, there is a full, albeit limited, language there, and you can do some interesting tricks with it. Warner tested a system where the dvd would load a program, check whatever region system it needed, and crash if it didn't get the response it wanted. It never checked the region in the official way, but it had the same effect. The program went something like this:
I am supposed to be region x Try a region other than x If it works, crash/display screen other than movie
Simple and effective. It didn't make it very far, so I guess there were compatibility issues. but if the system collapses, look for this, or worse schemes to resurface. Just because it makes you buy a new player every month to keep up isn't the studio's problem now is it? *You* are the 'thief' here.
That would be quite illegal under almost any interpretation of the law, morally wrong and offensive to freedom loving people everywhere. If you wanted to be an upstanding champion of morality and goodness, you would use your programming skills for a good cause. For example, write a program that keeps you informed of the situation so that you may better understand the issues. When someone posts a RIAA story, have the client go and check the RIAA site, and D/L it in the background for your perusal. Have it check the site every 5 minutes for 24 hours so you won't miss any breaking news due to the interesting choices the RIAA made to protect your intrests. Remember to turn local caching off. If you are extrememly interested in the news, have it check every minute or so, that way you are sure not to miss anything.
Remember, DDOSing a site is illegal. Reading it often is not. Do the right thing.
MS has not allowed OEMs to give out OS cds for about a year. It was precisely because people were selling them on E-ebay (Piracy in MS speak). The closest you can get now is a system restore disk that will bring the HD back to the 'as new' state. They thought of this one allready.
"Of course, there's also the theory, proposed by the cynics among us, that the movie companies are using this sort of release pattern to entice movie fans to buy both the basic package to watch now and the more complete special edition a few months later."
It isn't going to fly for one reason, who the hell would buy a 4 disk set of 'super troopers' after you bought the first one? How about 'hey arnold: the movie', or even 'haloween: resurrection'? I didn't think so. As soon as the greedy start filling the shelves with the 9th edition of 'master of disguise', the landfill owners will be licking thier lips and fighting over who gets to bury the millions of unsold copies. Enough money will be lost to stop the practice almost for good.
The movies that do come out with multiple editions will be the ones that actually benefit from the additions. The industry is still feeling out what it can and can't do, and the only way to do that is to fall flat on it's face a few times, and they are doing it. Unlike the moribund record industry, I think the movie people can and do learn, and have been making an honest effort to produce stuff we want at fairly reasonable prices. DeCSS aside, they learn quick.
I still have a little faith in the capatilistic system. Whatever happens, we won't know for a year or 2, it will take that long for trends to become clear.
Slashdot Mirror
And the reason the company is not suing him is?
Seriously though, this person knowingly broke the law. While the company is responsible for that, he is responsible to the company. You should, in no uncertain terms, sue the weasel for all costs incurred in the audit, license purchases, legal fees and damages. Make a precedent out of him, he deserves it.
-Charlie
OK, as of this writing, it has been ~12 hours since the technology announcement, so it is more than safe to assume that the technology has been utterly and totally cracked in a way that make it trivial to copy. Now comes the hard part, and my plea to the crackers.
Dear Mr/Ms Evildoer,
While I am sure that you want to release the crack of this scheme now to get points in the warez community, and beat the other 12 teams of obviously less-smart anti-social geniuses, please, please, please do not. If you do release the crack, MS will reverse engineer it, and fix the holes.
This v1.01 version will be a complete reworking of the system from the ground up, and will fall in 16 hours as opposed to the 12 that v1.0 took. By the time they get to v1.06 or 1.07, they might have a workable scheme, and we all lose. We all know that if it takes more than a week to crack, it will be forgotten about, and all the releases will be nuked. Pleas don't fall into this trap.
You need patience and willpower. There needs to be 100 million disks and 1 million players out there supporting the v1.0 scheme, at the very least, before you release the crack. At this point, it will be impossible to release a v1.01 without pissing off the entire sheep-minded consumer public, and making them equate DRM/Designed for Windows/Copy Protection with pain, annoyance, and general papercut-level anguish.
When this happens, MS DRM will fail. If you crack it now, it actually has a better chance of suceeding. Remember, closed source is an advantage when it comes to MS, but the advantage is yours. Use it wisely, and sit on your crack for a few weeks.
-Charlie
This one is easy. The sceptics state that the radiation shielding is inadequate, but they don't offer any proof. They don't even list a refrence. Along comes person #2 who takes the sceptic's word as gospel, and voila, a conspiracy is born. I could go to NASA and ask them why rabid chipmunks burrowing through the capsule after being launched by Red-Soviet catapults did not kill the astronauts. Bet they won't have a scientific answer, even though it _DID_ happen, honest. Can't find anything on the web about it either. See, google is covering it up! The CIA bribed/threatened them into submission. Woe be we, freedom is doomed.
Getting back to the point, apply the same rigorous standards of proof to the accuser BEFORE you do so to the defendants answer, it is only fair. If you don't, you look like a crackpot and a moron. Remember, deep breaths.....
-Charlie
If NASA wants to refute these twits without giving credence to thier theories, there are ways. First, you make a web page/materials that debunk the common myths and arguements. Then, whenever someone comes up with a 'new' article 'proving' that it was faked, you simply link to the appropriate parts of the page, adding as little necessary to debunk the people.
:)
'Duh' I hear you say, it probably exists allready, the point was not to give these people exposure, and by extension, legitemacy. Well, you don't have to mention them, what they stand for, thier organizations, thier pets, or the brain tumor that they should have removed. Every time one of these crackpots surfaces with an epic theorem, simply restate it, with NO refrence to the origional, and shoot it down. After the first 10 or so, you could almost automate it with a perl script. Think auto-flame generator.
This way, you get your information out, without helping them. It cuts the legs out from under moronic attention-getters. I used to use similar tactics on street preachers who hung out in my favorite places and tried to 'convert' me. If you actively attack to de-legitimize them, they win. Go around, and you win.
-Charlie
P.S. My personal opinion is to wait them out till they go away, and have the CIA kill them, it will make the world a better place. We really should be getting some return on all those 'black' dollars we are spending!
Formatting problems aside, this will fail for 2 reasons, both are money. The first is obvious, if you do a search of the press release, the word 'price' is never mentioned. You would think they would have something like 'each track can be downloaded for a reasonable price'. Nope. Wanna bet it will be $2.49 a song, restricted also, because people 'demand' secure formats because they don't want to be 'ripped off'. Sure, this will fly. That is the short term deathblow.
The longer one is more insidious. Say you have the songs you purchased on your hard drive, and one day, you turn your machine on and hear a grinding noise followed by clicks. Disk failure. You then call up the nice people who sold you the music and ask for new copies, because your legally purchased music is gone, and you are well within your rights to request another copy. Remember, they give you the honor of using a license, not owning the track. If your HD dies, you still have the rights to the license. So, you ask the nice person on the phone if you can have free downloads of the entire 98Sync degrees to men collection that you just spent $800 on. Then you wait. You can just barely hear the riotous laughter through the phone that has dropeed to the floor on the other end. Then they tell you to fuck off. Luckily, in the fine print that they changed since you agreed to it, legally of course, they want the money they spent on senators put to good use, says 'we can tell you to fuck off at any time for any reason'. So you fuck off. And then you never patronise them, or any other similar service again. This will really end the industry, and they are way way to greedy to do anything else.
Lastly, a personal note. The music industry, chiefly in the guise of the RIAA has done more in the last year or two to erode our civil rights than anything else that I can think of. They killed several good, legal services, and they are not stopping. They are forcing changes to the technology that I use and love to make them more money. They have no qualms about buying power and abusing it on a whim. If you doubt it, read the legislation that they are trying to get passed (there is to much of it to link here, start at www.theregister.co.uk with a search for RIAA). By using services like this, you are only enriching the very people who are targeting you and the things you love. Don't give them more money, it will only hurt you in the long run. When they went after napster, I said that I would not buy a CD until it played out, and if napster won, I would go back to buying CDs. If they lost, I would never buy a CD again. I have not bought a CD since. My 300+ collection collects dust. I have stopped consuming music. NPR is better radio anyway. Don't buy the 'new, friendlier' record company BS, they are sharks, and you are bleeding.
-Charlie
Everyone out there is arguing the poin that 'MS designed windows badly'. They didn't. In fact, they didn't design it at all. Design implies a high level organization that is beyond lacking in the MS development process. If you look at any of thier initiatives, be it the next version of windows, or something more nebulous like .NET, there is no design. Someone comes up with an idea, and 50 teams go to work. Each team makes a bullet point on a list, and then it is all hastily put together in a big wrapper.
This may be fast, may work well for some things, but slapping features into a GUI is not design. To compound the problem V2 of the project will take the same code base and slap 20 more checkbox items onto it. Again, not design. Infact, it probably gets away from what little design there was in the beginning
Overall, the arguement should not be 'was it designed right', but 'was it designed', and the answer to that is no.
-Charlie
If you run at a lower rez you could probably shave 6-8ms off that time.
-Charlie
"Just like with the Palm OS. The "Palm OS" doesn't actually run the PDA. It runs on top of a small RTOS kernel that handles interrupts, hardware drivers, and other real-time things that have little to do with the UI. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the same Palm OS runs on different RTOS kernels. In fact, I can almost guarantee you that the Qualcomm Palm thingy they had a few years ago likely did not use the same RTOS kernel as my Palm Vx."
Actuallly, it usually does run on the same RTOS. The Qualcomm, and the later palm/phone combo's, including the latest samsung (drool) one have a seperate chipset for the phone and the OS functions. The integration between the 2 is strictly software. The more time and effort ou put into it, the more integrated they look. Qualcomm's integration absolutely sucked, Samsung's is quite good. Either way, it is faked.
All this said, it is Intel's wet dream to get into this market, and a major strategic push that they just announced was to make a single chip (note: not a single core) that would do both by 2005 if I remember the announcement right. Either way, we are a long way off from a RTOS running both halves.
-Charlie
If you read my post, you might have noticed the 'across various organizations' bit. Most of my clients have 10 or so machines, and do not run MS servers, for both security and stability reasons. It is beyond stupid to run an SUS server for 10 people, the setup time alone would cover a year or 2's worth of patches. Add in license costs, not to mention hardware, and you have a problem. Being an idiot, I must have chosen the wrong path not to blindly shovel thousands of dollars of my clients money at MS. Must go off and do some of that book learnin' stuff soon.
Also, an SUS server does NOTHING for testing in a production enviornment. You will still blow up your machines, you will just be there to click the distribute button and be physically beaten by pissed off people. Again, not good. Idiot means 'one who avoids pain and financial loss' in Babylonian, right?
Guess I should learn to program again in those swell new lanugages and frameworks, they will solve all the problems. Trust in MS, they are the solution to your problem. Ever notice how much implementing an SUS server will cost? Ever notice that when they started pushing that tech, they made it real real hard to download and save patches so I could distribute them on a CD? This is for our convenince, not a plan to get more money out of a consumer and butter them up for future power grabs, right?
Lastly, let me give you an example of one of my clients. They have about 40 machines over 2 offices and 28 remote sites. The 'main' sites are connected via DSL, and the big one has a novell 4.2 server, the smaller one is peer to peer. The remote sites are all dialup, using AOL of all things (NOT MY CHOICE, it was done before I got there!!!!). Now, please enlighten me as to how an SUS server would benefit these people. Not being an MCxx, I just can't see it. Must be an idiot. Must do more book learnin'. Oh yeah, before you say 'get servers and dsl for all sites, and a VPN and... and...', let me mention that they are a charity, run on a shoestring, and use mostly donated hardware and software. I donate lots of time there, but do bill some. Yout budget for this exercise is $100 if you can prove the ROI.
Eagerly awaiting your response,
-Charlie
Women scare me.
I turn off automatic updates on all machine I admin (about 250 across various organizations), not out of greed, but out of fear and responsibility. The fear part comes in when you get a call at 6 am, followed by 10 more in the next hour saying 'all our computers are dead'. Not a happy day. Automatic updates can do this, and have done it to me. I like to get a patch, test it, THEN install it.
If your computers are protected properly, (firewall, virus scanners w/ heuristics etc), you can get away with not patching for a day or 2. Use this time wisely, large corporations do, you should also. That is the fear part.
The resopnsibility comes in when you test the stuff for your clients so the BSOD scenario does not happen. I charge a lot, but thing like this make me worth it to clients.
-Charlie
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=3041
I sent this contact to Magee a while ago after a dinner conversation that floored me. The person was dropping hints at me for MONTHS about something happening, and one day, he told me that Avaya outright dumped NT/2K for linux on everything. Windows will be supported for basically as long as existing clients want it (years and years and years), but from now on, everything is linux.
I asked for a press release, and was pointed to an utterly forgetable announcement that never mentioned linux, or that MS was on the shitlist, it was sad. When I went back to the source, he told me that 1) yes it was the correct release, and 2) it was indead a total shift from one to the other. Like the Inq aricle says, it was not a snap decision, or a vapor release, it was developed, tested, and debugged for 18 months before it was... err.. not announced with no fanfare.
Overall, the products are quite real, you can buy them, they run linux, and have displaced MS. Yay. Next niche to conquer is......?
-Charlie
No one seems to mention the complete loss of bladder control for 3 days afterward, and hair falling out in clumps. I guess these will mostly be worked out by v.8 of the hardware, with very few cases happening by v1.0. :)
-Charlie
This will hurt Intel proportionalely more than AMD. The CPU game is all about Average Selling Price (ASP) across the whole line. AMD has always had thier CPUs clustered in the low range $50-$150, and has an ASP of around $80-90. Intel on the other hand, excluding the effects of $3700 large cache xeon's, has always had significalntly higher ASPs.
For every $600 P4/(latest speed grade) they sell, it can subsidise 50 $100 celerons by $10 each, bumping the ASP up a ton. They use this as a club to abuse AMD in the market, and still make good money. Since AMD can (no longer) control the high end, they can't do this, so thier ASPs suffer. The club gets even bigger when you add those xeons into the mix.
Getting back to the point, high end sales allow intel to weather competition, and down markets more than AMD. AMD's sales are clustered much more, so the bottom and the top end chips cost about the same, or at least don't have as many times the cost differential as intel's do. When top end sales go down, intel hurts a lot. AMD hurts, but much less. Losing $50/chip is much easier than $500/chip. Look for this to hit intel in the following quarters, while AMD can roll with it.
Looking ahead, when the Hammers come out, they are targeted against the Xeons. This will gut intel's margins much much more than the athlon did. Intel can sell all thier P4s at cost, and make the profit up on the xeons, they have no competition there. It will get interesting in January.
-Charlie
One question that pops immediatly to mind is why this, and why now? Is a large part of the German government going to have to re-up thier MS contract soon? Is there some impending financial outlay that caused someone to do the math, and realize that funding this is really the cheap way out? What is the impetus here? Anyone know?
-Charlie
Aha! You missed the innovative features that outlook has. When you create a user, you need to buy a CAL, which of course sends more money to MS. See, it is quite an innovative revenue generator! Who would have thought they could make that much money from a confrence room! (I never said it would be to your benefit, did I?). Now, if they remove that feature, or fix the problem, they make less money. Tell me why they should fix it? I wouldn't in thier situation :).
-Charlie
This isn't a problem. Why? Look at it from a financial standpoint. You can pay for an exchange server, CALs, the associated NT server and CALs, Office and a few other misc. costs, or you can pay some code monkey $5000 to whip up a connector for you. It may cost more, it may cost less, but when you put that one time cost up against 5 years of MS licensing, you quickly get a dose of perspective.
In addition, if you are smart, you can do things like go to the forums of the company that makes the product that you need connected. A simple message like 'we are thinking of developing a connector for the flatulator 5K, anyone want in?'. If you get 10 people, you can sell it to them for $500 each, or have them chip in and open source the whole thing. The more expensive the product, the more people will most likely want to chip in.
In addition, you can also ask the company itself to write a connector for you. If you are a large, loyal client, they probably will. Offer to help with development and alpha/beta testing.
Overall, if you sit there and whine about it, you will be a slave to microsoft's licensing forever. Thier stuff obviously works for you, and you can afford it, so don't bother, sit back and be happy. When you decide to change, there will probably be what you want in a prepackaged form. In the mean time, there are options for those who want to be creative, and they don't have to cost much.
-Charlie
There is a simple solution to this, or maybe not so simple. When you submit anything to the kernel that might be patented/copyrighted/whatever, you must also submit a workaround, or a functional equvalent that is not copyrighted. It doesn't have to be very good, complete, or as fast, but it needs to work. That way, if a large corporate entity decides to sue, or get an injunction against you, there is a quick way out. Imagine if a fundamental part of the kernel needed to be removed in, oh, say, an hour. How pissed would you be if linux no longer worked, or could be downloaded for the 2 weeks it took for a team to valiantly push out a fix? I would be livid. Worse yet, if I was a CIO, I wouldn't touch linux with a 10 foot (~3.3m) pole ever again.
If there was a nearly complete workaround that could be put into place quickly, then the 'we'll ignore it until we get a piece of paper with lots of lawyers names at the top' strategy might work. I could live with a 'patch this for a 25% speed reduction coupled with a 100% lawyer reduction a lot more than a 'stop it now' for a month, and then only a 5% speed reduction. The key is to keep things working while corrections are being made.
For the trolls out there, I know you can keep using the binaries you allready have, and there will probably be MORE mirrors after a lawsuit, but I really want to keep things legal, as I am sure most readers here do. Corporations HAVE to. A good backup plan is worth more than a little grey area now and again.
-Charlie
Most people seem to think that a DVD is strictly a movie format like a VHS tape or an MPEG file. It is MUCH more than that, there is a full, albeit limited, language there, and you can do some interesting tricks with it. Warner tested a system where the dvd would load a program, check whatever region system it needed, and crash if it didn't get the response it wanted. It never checked the region in the official way, but it had the same effect. The program went something like this:
I am supposed to be region x
Try a region other than x
If it works, crash/display screen other than movie
Simple and effective. It didn't make it very far, so I guess there were compatibility issues. but if the system collapses, look for this, or worse schemes to resurface. Just because it makes you buy a new player every month to keep up isn't the studio's problem now is it? *You* are the 'thief' here.
-Charlie
That would be quite illegal under almost any interpretation of the law, morally wrong and offensive to freedom loving people everywhere. If you wanted to be an upstanding champion of morality and goodness, you would use your programming skills for a good cause. For example, write a program that keeps you informed of the situation so that you may better understand the issues. When someone posts a RIAA story, have the client go and check the RIAA site, and D/L it in the background for your perusal. Have it check the site every 5 minutes for 24 hours so you won't miss any breaking news due to the interesting choices the RIAA made to protect your intrests. Remember to turn local caching off. If you are extrememly interested in the news, have it check every minute or so, that way you are sure not to miss anything.
Remember, DDOSing a site is illegal. Reading it often is not. Do the right thing.
-Charlie
>1) Screw customers
:)
>2) Screw now former-customers
>3) Censor the internet
>4) ???
>5) Profit!
4) is Buy Congress. Also, the way they are going, it will soon be only a 4 step plan
-Charlie
>Seriously, if the RIAA goes through with this, you can kiss your ISP's fiscial stability good-bye.
While I wanted this to be sarcstic, thinking it over before I typed this I realized it really isn't. So, sadly, take this with out sarcasm.
There is a financially stable ISP?!?
-Charlie
MS has not allowed OEMs to give out OS cds for about a year. It was precisely because people were selling them on E-ebay (Piracy in MS speak). The closest you can get now is a system restore disk that will bring the HD back to the 'as new' state. They thought of this one allready.
-Charlie
I think it would be cheaper to re-ghost the machine than to sell it at a loss. Don't expect any sales from this one.
-Charlie
The main conspiracy theory in the paper is:
"Of course, there's also the theory, proposed by the cynics among us, that the movie companies are using this sort of release pattern to entice movie fans to buy both the basic package to watch now and the more complete special edition a few months later."
It isn't going to fly for one reason, who the hell would buy a 4 disk set of 'super troopers' after you bought the first one? How about 'hey arnold: the movie', or even 'haloween: resurrection'? I didn't think so. As soon as the greedy start filling the shelves with the 9th edition of 'master of disguise', the landfill owners will be licking thier lips and fighting over who gets to bury the millions of unsold copies. Enough money will be lost to stop the practice almost for good.
The movies that do come out with multiple editions will be the ones that actually benefit from the additions. The industry is still feeling out what it can and can't do, and the only way to do that is to fall flat on it's face a few times, and they are doing it. Unlike the moribund record industry, I think the movie people can and do learn, and have been making an honest effort to produce stuff we want at fairly reasonable prices. DeCSS aside, they learn quick.
I still have a little faith in the capatilistic system. Whatever happens, we won't know for a year or 2, it will take that long for trends to become clear.
-Charlie