Speaking of subscriptions, what we are seeing is the last of the free Internet services evaporating. I think that the recent MN idea about taxing VoIP will be the foot in the door to tax other protocols. You are right, everything will be subscription-based, but once you add all those little $9.99/month services, they will be too expensive to be worth it anymore. The current email virus state will cause ISPs to invest heavily in secure solutions (or be forced to by law) and make email more expensive than being wrapped up in your ISP subscription or free as in Yahoo.
I didn't realize other countries were entitled to the money I give the US government in taxes. How about these other countries pull themselves up by their bootstraps like many other countries have done and they can stop the bullshit of killing each other as their national pasttime. From the state of the world these days, you would think "act like it's the middle-fucking-ages" has become an acceptable job. They sure have great little military parades, though. I bet their people think "it's great that we have The Bomb now, I wonder if it tastes good".
Patience. They'll build on the GPL, not release it, join some future trade organization, and end up forced to cooperate with licenses some time in the future. Could be quite a boon once the code is forced to be released.
And don't forget that all that information will want to be free. Someone somewhere would leak it anyway.
but refusing to do so hardly amounts to "fucking over" the non-MS clients
Sure it does. Up until they've been "Oh look us we're so nice while AOL is so mean" concerning access to their infrastructure. Now, that they're in a stronger position they're trying to shed those IM clients for very specious reasons which cast them in the same light as AOL.
If you can't beat them, join them. It's obvious nothing has moved for some time in the case of allowing IM clients to share networks and nothing ever will, so why bother to pretend anymore? They take care the unlicensed IM clients that charge (Trillian Pro for example) and the non-MS platform users at the same time, all the while excersizing that right legally. They do not owe anything free to anyone, folks. In fact, what you've been watching is the implosion of the last free internet services. At some point soon I expect AOL to finally only allow AOL/AIM users and solely AOL/AIM clients as they have attempted in the past.
It's called an EULA. If you OK it the next time you sign on then you are agreeing to their new terms for their service. If you don't then that's the end of your relationship with MSN Messenger.
I hate what they are doing, but your argument is silly. You are not entitled to anything for free other than the air you are sucking in right now. I don't understand how you figure they owe you their charity.
It's not just about blocking *ix/*bsd. I use Trillian Pro through Win2K/XP systems because it rolls all the clients up into one, so I would suffer as well. I hate having a plethora of IM clients open. Don't treat it as another Win vs Lin crusade. You'll have more people on your side if you see it as the cross-platform problem issue that it is.
This is about blocking alternative clients that do not offer links into their web shops and do not offer an ad banner pointing to their ads. I imagine that if Trillian (Pro or free version) offered an ad banner than all IM services could submit into, then they wouldn't make such a stink about that access into their networks. I for one would still not want to see that, so my solution is going to have to be to wait and see what Trillian developers do or just drop contact with my MSN messenger pals.
Re:I Think They Forgot One Thing
on
Dotcom Era Fads
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That was the whole point of the dot-bomb! Companies were paying employees to work on a project that merited neither a stock listing or even more than five employees! The value of these companies did not exist so they went under, and took the jobs with them. They should never have existed in the first place and it will be a long time coming before they show their face again.
PC manufacturers are guilty of perpetuating monopoly abuse by M$ until they also include a partition with Linux/Unix pre
What a ridiculous idea. You expect everything in life to follow political equal-time laws? You'd better start including every other OS ever written on the planet, because otherwise you'd be leaving them out of the picture and possibly stifling their overnight success. I would never saddle Joe sixpack with something like Linux...he wants to get online quickly and get to his email and chat with family members, not pull his hair out over which conf file he needs to edit. Funny how you people rail against corporate welfare and here you are expecting every company out there to subsidize your pet web browser or operating system. What crap.
Sysadmin resources are scare these days in many companies. The most critical events that need to be taken care of are back in the back end. If companies have trimmed down to where staffing is short-handed, the cubicle farms are where low priority items are going to fall through the cracks. Disturbing only because we are forced to do it these days. It was not always that way.
So, the systems admins are forced to cover their valuable back ends. =)
Cute comment, but you started injecting your agenda right into the "Writers..." paragraph, so I'll ignore from there on. I've worked in plenty of successful engineering companies using Windows both as desktop systems and back-end number crunchers. I know plenty of artists using Windows...the Wacom tablet moves the cursor no differently on a Mac than on Windows. More likely they are using the mandatory in-house apps and systems than their own preferences. Sometimes it is more a function of license costs, but there's your examples.
I suspect you are so steeped in your own anti-Windows world that it has colored your glasses...try not to eat any of that pap while you are drowning in it.
Beware! VoIP is just a series of protocols. If this passes, it opens a precedence for taxation of email, IM, etc. Your ISP fees in total would become absurdly high and discourage casual use. While this could get rid of the eternal September, that would spell doom for digital commerce.
The schools should not be doing the students the disservice of getting them involved with Linux and OpenOffice etc. when that is not what they will be using in the real world. Let's try and help these guys out with their education rather than leading them down the path to techie-socialist dreamland.
Despite your wettest dreams, not everyone is going to be comfortable with computers no matter how important a tool it is, just like not everyone is comfortable dealing with every aspect of tax law or psychophysiology. CS is not the only branch of learning, you know.
EULAs like this can be incorporated into a web page like those used in airport WiFi networks that sell you connection time on their access points. This scripted VLAN solution sounds pretty nice. Does this use 802.1x?
As the systems admin who will test those patches in a test lab before rolling them out to people, you will make sure that will not happen if you valuie that paycheck. Blindly checking off security updates for addition to the network is studipity no matter what the platform, wther you use up2date or MS AutoUpdate. For MS systems, having a SUS server helps centralize this process since you check off what you authorize to get pushed to the network. Active Directory policies can enforce this. Those that don't want to play in the domain can piss off. If you want to keep them off the network, there is always 802.1x.
Right. Let's see how many people are patching against those vulnerabilities. That "Linux is invulnerable" attitude is preventing many from even thinking about security holes in Linux. I see a major wake-up call coming...
Let's see, spend lots of $$$ to deal with patching MS security holes (lots of centralized and automated Software Install packages out there for Win32), or deal with user-unfriendly Linux suites that do not scale or integrate with others no matter how well patchable the platform is. Personally, I never trust third-party RPMs and they're never compiled the way I want them anyway.
I believe in MS on the front-end, linux on the back-end, running a virus gateway at the mailservers, antivirus software at the desktop, and centralized patching to fire off new patches on all desktops at once. That said, I would only put MS on the back-end at gunpoint. Linux may not need any of that protection at the desktop, but the lack of apps keeps it from being as usable; the apps that are available are not very compatible with what everyone else is using. In these days of limited sysadmin resources, I would rather the users have a very intuitive package in front of them to minimize calls like "how do I start using this? I have to source what and do what to my environment?" The sysadmin resources should be left to take care of the valuable back end.
Linux is far from 100% secure...take a look at various security bulletins each week and you'll see all sorts of apps that are being patched. Have we forgotten past Linux worms? How many recently patched phpBB2 or Nuke for recent problems according to those advisories? Where is the mantra of "the hole shouldn't be there in the first place?" that is constantly fire off at MS when those holes are found in open source software? Is it because many Linux apps are like that and the blame is distributed across a multitude of developers rather than a single monolithic software company that simple minds can more easily divert their attention to? Sorry, but "they patched it within 8 hours" is not an excuse. For both platforms, "the hole should not have been there! where is the code auditing that should have prevented that problem from being there in the first place?" As complex as software is becoming, I do not think that this is going to go away without radically altering current coding practices.
What we need is a very large corporation to adopt 100% Linux (reference Guinea Pig in wikipedia) so that apps become more compatible and patches are more easily recognized. We've seen smaller companies like Ernie Ball do this, but we need bigger testbeds. Then, we can complain in 10 years about the Linux juggernaut and how Putrix is better.
I went through the trouble of setting up a Microsoft Project Central server so that we could centralize and coordinate our projects. Instead of getting a close-to-positive remark, I got slapped with so much extra work my head was spinning for weeks. The alternative in this economy is to hold a sign that says "Will do anything for Food". So instead, I'm juggling as fast as I can, watching projects fall through the cracks, and hoping I don't drown.
My advise: don't get too proactive with this. KISS and keep a simple log or single MSProject file.
You are right, the fire will only destroy the left side of everything in the house, so if I keep one side of the mirror on the left and the other side on the right, everything will be OK. Tell us you are not in charge of disaster recovery?
I certainly don't want to go to the lengths of making an active "hot site" to replace my home computer room, but home fires are not out of the ordinary.
Because the Linux distributors honestly have no original thoughts. Where is the next killer Unix/Linux-only app that will turn eyes this way? Virus/worm security, uptime, and stability are obviously not enough, and those old standbys is slipping into the competition's product every day.
Hopefully in all these distros there will be some innovation and advancement of the desktop concept, instead of a million distros that do exactly the same thing, use exactly the same apps, and never take us anywhere. Well, that would be great for compatibility, but leaves us in the dust. I don't see anything in Sun's distro that differentiates them from any other. Nothing there to sway me from wearing the old familiar Red Hat.
It's as stupid as Macintosh limiting their iTunes outlet to Mac-only customers. What exactly is Microsoft presenting in the Messenger client that cannot be done in other IM clients? Are they planning on bashing us over the heads with advertisement, or do they actually believe non-MS users will switch over to the MS side in order to do IM on MSN?
Similarly, is anyone going to drop their Win/Lin-tel box and plunge into the world of Mac just to buy music that they can get elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of subscriptions, what we are seeing is the last of the free Internet services evaporating. I think that the recent MN idea about taxing VoIP will be the foot in the door to tax other protocols. You are right, everything will be subscription-based, but once you add all those little $9.99/month services, they will be too expensive to be worth it anymore. The current email virus state will cause ISPs to invest heavily in secure solutions (or be forced to by law) and make email more expensive than being wrapped up in your ISP subscription or free as in Yahoo.
I.e., work-related "injuries" will be more mental than physical.
I didn't realize other countries were entitled to the money I give the US government in taxes. How about these other countries pull themselves up by their bootstraps like many other countries have done and they can stop the bullshit of killing each other as their national pasttime. From the state of the world these days, you would think "act like it's the middle-fucking-ages" has become an acceptable job. They sure have great little military parades, though. I bet their people think "it's great that we have The Bomb now, I wonder if it tastes good".
Get Your War On
We'll have riots because no one will have money for bread or rent after they blew their wad on plasma TVs. What a wonderful idea.
Patience. They'll build on the GPL, not release it, join some future trade organization, and end up forced to cooperate with licenses some time in the future. Could be quite a boon once the code is forced to be released.
And don't forget that all that information will want to be free. Someone somewhere would leak it anyway.
but refusing to do so hardly amounts to "fucking over" the non-MS clients
Sure it does. Up until they've been "Oh look us we're so nice while AOL is so mean" concerning access to their infrastructure. Now, that they're in a stronger position they're trying to shed those IM clients for very specious reasons which cast them in the same light as AOL.
If you can't beat them, join them. It's obvious nothing has moved for some time in the case of allowing IM clients to share networks and nothing ever will, so why bother to pretend anymore? They take care the unlicensed IM clients that charge (Trillian Pro for example) and the non-MS platform users at the same time, all the while excersizing that right legally. They do not owe anything free to anyone, folks. In fact, what you've been watching is the implosion of the last free internet services. At some point soon I expect AOL to finally only allow AOL/AIM users and solely AOL/AIM clients as they have attempted in the past.
It's called an EULA. If you OK it the next time you sign on then you are agreeing to their new terms for their service. If you don't then that's the end of your relationship with MSN Messenger.
I hate what they are doing, but your argument is silly. You are not entitled to anything for free other than the air you are sucking in right now. I don't understand how you figure they owe you their charity.
It's not just about blocking *ix/*bsd. I use Trillian Pro through Win2K/XP systems because it rolls all the clients up into one, so I would suffer as well. I hate having a plethora of IM clients open. Don't treat it as another Win vs Lin crusade. You'll have more people on your side if you see it as the cross-platform problem issue that it is.
This is about blocking alternative clients that do not offer links into their web shops and do not offer an ad banner pointing to their ads. I imagine that if Trillian (Pro or free version) offered an ad banner than all IM services could submit into, then they wouldn't make such a stink about that access into their networks. I for one would still not want to see that, so my solution is going to have to be to wait and see what Trillian developers do or just drop contact with my MSN messenger pals.
That was the whole point of the dot-bomb! Companies were paying employees to work on a project that merited neither a stock listing or even more than five employees! The value of these companies did not exist so they went under, and took the jobs with them. They should never have existed in the first place and it will be a long time coming before they show their face again.
PC manufacturers are guilty of perpetuating monopoly abuse by M$ until they also include a partition with Linux/Unix pre
What a ridiculous idea. You expect everything in life to follow political equal-time laws? You'd better start including every other OS ever written on the planet, because otherwise you'd be leaving them out of the picture and possibly stifling their overnight success. I would never saddle Joe sixpack with something like Linux...he wants to get online quickly and get to his email and chat with family members, not pull his hair out over which conf file he needs to edit. Funny how you people rail against corporate welfare and here you are expecting every company out there to subsidize your pet web browser or operating system. What crap.
That or they are familiar with what a crappy solution software RAID can be. Nah, couldn't be that...you didn't think of it! They must be morons.
Sysadmin resources are scare these days in many companies. The most critical events that need to be taken care of are back in the back end. If companies have trimmed down to where staffing is short-handed, the cubicle farms are where low priority items are going to fall through the cracks. Disturbing only because we are forced to do it these days. It was not always that way.
So, the systems admins are forced to cover their valuable back ends. =)
Cute comment, but you started injecting your agenda right into the "Writers..." paragraph, so I'll ignore from there on. I've worked in plenty of successful engineering companies using Windows both as desktop systems and back-end number crunchers. I know plenty of artists using Windows...the Wacom tablet moves the cursor no differently on a Mac than on Windows. More likely they are using the mandatory in-house apps and systems than their own preferences. Sometimes it is more a function of license costs, but there's your examples.
I suspect you are so steeped in your own anti-Windows world that it has colored your glasses...try not to eat any of that pap while you are drowning in it.
Beware! VoIP is just a series of protocols. If this passes, it opens a precedence for taxation of email, IM, etc. Your ISP fees in total would become absurdly high and discourage casual use. While this could get rid of the eternal September, that would spell doom for digital commerce.
The schools should not be doing the students the disservice of getting them involved with Linux and OpenOffice etc. when that is not what they will be using in the real world. Let's try and help these guys out with their education rather than leading them down the path to techie-socialist dreamland.
Despite your wettest dreams, not everyone is going to be comfortable with computers no matter how important a tool it is, just like not everyone is comfortable dealing with every aspect of tax law or psychophysiology. CS is not the only branch of learning, you know.
EULAs like this can be incorporated into a web page like those used in airport WiFi networks that sell you connection time on their access points. This scripted VLAN solution sounds pretty nice. Does this use 802.1x?
As the systems admin who will test those patches in a test lab before rolling them out to people, you will make sure that will not happen if you valuie that paycheck. Blindly checking off security updates for addition to the network is studipity no matter what the platform, wther you use up2date or MS AutoUpdate. For MS systems, having a SUS server helps centralize this process since you check off what you authorize to get pushed to the network. Active Directory policies can enforce this. Those that don't want to play in the domain can piss off. If you want to keep them off the network, there is always 802.1x.
Right. Let's see how many people are patching against those vulnerabilities. That "Linux is invulnerable" attitude is preventing many from even thinking about security holes in Linux. I see a major wake-up call coming...
Upgrading for the sake of upgrading? How about I just keep using what I have since it works and I am getting what I need out of it.
Let's see, spend lots of $$$ to deal with patching MS security holes (lots of centralized and automated Software Install packages out there for Win32), or deal with user-unfriendly Linux suites that do not scale or integrate with others no matter how well patchable the platform is. Personally, I never trust third-party RPMs and they're never compiled the way I want them anyway.
I believe in MS on the front-end, linux on the back-end, running a virus gateway at the mailservers, antivirus software at the desktop, and centralized patching to fire off new patches on all desktops at once. That said, I would only put MS on the back-end at gunpoint. Linux may not need any of that protection at the desktop, but the lack of apps keeps it from being as usable; the apps that are available are not very compatible with what everyone else is using. In these days of limited sysadmin resources, I would rather the users have a very intuitive package in front of them to minimize calls like "how do I start using this? I have to source what and do what to my environment?" The sysadmin resources should be left to take care of the valuable back end.
Linux is far from 100% secure...take a look at various security bulletins each week and you'll see all sorts of apps that are being patched. Have we forgotten past Linux worms? How many recently patched phpBB2 or Nuke for recent problems according to those advisories? Where is the mantra of "the hole shouldn't be there in the first place?" that is constantly fire off at MS when those holes are found in open source software? Is it because many Linux apps are like that and the blame is distributed across a multitude of developers rather than a single monolithic software company that simple minds can more easily divert their attention to? Sorry, but "they patched it within 8 hours" is not an excuse. For both platforms, "the hole should not have been there! where is the code auditing that should have prevented that problem from being there in the first place?" As complex as software is becoming, I do not think that this is going to go away without radically altering current coding practices.
What we need is a very large corporation to adopt 100% Linux (reference Guinea Pig in wikipedia) so that apps become more compatible and patches are more easily recognized. We've seen smaller companies like Ernie Ball do this, but we need bigger testbeds. Then, we can complain in 10 years about the Linux juggernaut and how Putrix is better.
I went through the trouble of setting up a Microsoft Project Central server so that we could centralize and coordinate our projects. Instead of getting a close-to-positive remark, I got slapped with so much extra work my head was spinning for weeks. The alternative in this economy is to hold a sign that says "Will do anything for Food". So instead, I'm juggling as fast as I can, watching projects fall through the cracks, and hoping I don't drown.
My advise: don't get too proactive with this. KISS and keep a simple log or single MSProject file.
You are right, the fire will only destroy the left side of everything in the house, so if I keep one side of the mirror on the left and the other side on the right, everything will be OK. Tell us you are not in charge of disaster recovery?
I certainly don't want to go to the lengths of making an active "hot site" to replace my home computer room, but home fires are not out of the ordinary.
Because the Linux distributors honestly have no original thoughts. Where is the next killer Unix/Linux-only app that will turn eyes this way? Virus/worm security, uptime, and stability are obviously not enough, and those old standbys is slipping into the competition's product every day.
Hopefully in all these distros there will be some innovation and advancement of the desktop concept, instead of a million distros that do exactly the same thing, use exactly the same apps, and never take us anywhere. Well, that would be great for compatibility, but leaves us in the dust. I don't see anything in Sun's distro that differentiates them from any other. Nothing there to sway me from wearing the old familiar Red Hat.
It's as stupid as Macintosh limiting their iTunes outlet to Mac-only customers. What exactly is Microsoft presenting in the Messenger client that cannot be done in other IM clients? Are they planning on bashing us over the heads with advertisement, or do they actually believe non-MS users will switch over to the MS side in order to do IM on MSN?
Similarly, is anyone going to drop their Win/Lin-tel box and plunge into the world of Mac just to buy music that they can get elsewhere?