First of all, it's not my son (luckily!) The problem arises not because there's no alternative software to what OneNote does, but no alternative software that can open OneNote files - they distribute classroom materials in this format and there's nothing else I can find that will open them...
Oh, don't worry, it's being fought - he's currently walking around with a MacBook Pro that does 95% of what the school claim he needs (and quite a lot of stuff that they said simply couldn't be done)
It's just the OneNote that's the main sticking point with their argument now - I can't find any alternative...
And before any of you think that the PowerPoint presentation is in jest - I've got a client who's son is in grade 7 this year. He has to purchase the school "blessed" laptop and in return must run Microsoft Office 2010 (they heavily use OneNote, which has no alternative, free or otherwise), as well as the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection.
Now, this suite of Adobe software retails for over $4k here (sure, there's a massive edu discount) but I can't believe they're being taught this when in school I learned BASIC and LOGO.
Whilst the Internet can route around damage or disruption and your packets aren't guaranteed to take the same path every time, in practice they will take a more efficient or shorter route over a longer one.
If I'm in Australia and I'm checking my gmail which is hosted somewhere in the USA, there is an undersea fibre cable between Australia and the US. My packets aren't going to suddenly start going via Finland and Japan just because they feel like it. I can be quite well assured that my data will travel from Australia directly to the US and not enter any other foreign countries.
Consider this: if they had just let Twitter move somewhere else, lots of jobs would be terminated.
So don't let it move. Leash the damn corporations already and stop this race to the bottom. The existence of a corporation is supposed to be contingent on the public good.
Sorry, but just how can you stop a corporation (or anyone for that matter) from getting up and moving somewhere else?
There's a catch, but it's not burdensome. Twitter will have to set up shop, a few blocks away from its current quarters, in a depressed neighborhood that the city wants to revive. Other firms can get the same tax advantage if they move to the same area.
Sure, Twitter were big enough to make this happen, but other companies can now take advantage of this tax break as well. What is likely to cost SF more - the $22M over 6 years (which, on a budget the size of SF's is around the level of a rounding error) or having a derelict neighbourhood in the middle of the city?
I'd argue that SF stands to gain more than $22M over 6 years if their urban revitalisation plan comes to fruition and they can get other companies to move in and raise the image of the affected neighbourhoods.
I don't know about your internet, but mine involves alternative routes to a particular physical location. Not just because that's how the Internet works, but because there are competing providers. And there are all sorts of things which delay, from WiFi to pipe congestion to intentional prioritisation to the OS having something more interesting to do.
Whilst your data can take any one of a number of paths as it travels across the Internet, in practice (particularly over short timescales) it will tend to take the same path each time. The routing tables will pretty much ensure that unless there's been a big change to the backbones, there is usually one efficient route to take. For instance, I ran traceroute to slashdot.org three times, each a few minutes apart and in each case my packets took exactly the same route. On the timescales that they're talking about in the article (over a handful of seconds at most) the data will tend to take the same path to geographically similar locations.
Although I should have stopped reading at "time it takes to send a data packet to the target" - really? How does one measure precisely this?
Adobe offer massive discounts for educational use. Educational institutions can purchase blanket site licenses for the software.
As an example, I'll use the Master Collection (one with the lot) The RRP (in AUD) is $4,345.00 for the whole suite as a retail boxed copy. The student and teacher version is $605.00 for a single copy. The educational site license (for up to 500 seats) is $24,750.00 - this is less than $50 per seat.
What's more, not only does piracy on the personal level help Adobe with becoming, or staying as, the industry standard, but they are pretty flexible with personal use of the software too.
If, for example, your workplace has purchased site licensing for Adobe software, and you have a copy installed on your workstation - you are allowed to (legally) install the same suite of software on your personal computer at home (for as long as you are employed there and have the suite on your work computer).
You're not their target market and, frankly, are incredibly unlikely to be pursued in a piracy crackdown. You are doing what Adobe want though - getting familiar with their tools so they become the standard. Once you know Photoshop, and you end up in a job where you need graphics editing software, the company will have to purchase it for you. A company stands to lose a lot more than an individual in a piracy case, so they need to be legal. They're not going to get you, say, the Corel suite as it's not what you know how to use.
Seriously, how hard can it be to not upgrade. If you're working on a huge project in-house, don't upgrade your software half-way through, unless you're prepared to update all copies of it.
InDesign, the software mentioned in the article, will automatically upgrade the format of the document when opened in a new version with no warning. This can be a problem. It also does allow you to downsave by one version (CS5 can save as InDesign Interchange format, which will open in CS4. CS4 to INX for CS3).
If you have the Creative Suite, you really should be on volume licensing - even if it's just one copy. It's not a well known fact, but individuals can purchase volume licensing and there is no minimum buy-in to their TLP licensing program. Licensing copies are cheaper than retail box copies, you can re-download your installers if you lose them, Adobe keep a record of your serial number/proof of purchase if you loose it or are audited and you can purchase maintenance if you want to keep your copies up-to-date for less than the regular upgrade cost.
Also, with licensing, if you purchase a copy of, say, CS5, but you're running all CS4 licenses in your studio, you can install a copy of CS4 instead using your CS4 volume license serial number.
There's no arguing that the Creative Suite is expensive, but if you're smart about it, you can keep the costs down a bit.
It's only fraud if you're doing it illegally. GE are operating completely within the letter of the law (laws I'm sure they helped to draft in the first place) and any other entity in their situation would be crazy to behave any differently.
The problem is not GE, it's the US Government.
Imagine this scenario: You earn $50k and through various pre-existing tax rules you are eligible to pay $10k in tax. If tomorrow a law was drafted that allowed you to, say, receive a tax rebate for every post here on/. and say for instance, you were eligible for $10k of rebates, would you turn this rebate down?
No, of course not. GE are playing it smart. The US Government needs to take a good look at it's own laws and tighten things up to prevent this happening again.
For what it's also worth, this $0 tax burden is most likely a one-off with rebates and other concessions that they're taking advantage of this year and they most likely won't be able to do it again next year. Look at how much tax they paid last year for instance...
Your post is one of the most informative comments I think I've ever read here on/. in many years. Thank you.
I'm hoping you may be able to answer a question that's been bothering me for years regarding ACLs and permissions. That is, why is it necessary to run a Repair Permissions on HFS+ volumes?
On no other operating system or file system I've used in the past 20-odd years of my computing life has it had the problem that file permissions can get randomly lost or otherwise screwed up without you having to actually do something that causes this to happen?
I've had clean installs of Mac OS X (mind you, this was generally older versions) where running a diskutil Repair Permissions would find permissions that weren't correctly set and fix them.
I've had cases where (and this was more in PPC days booting between OS X and OS 9) where simply booting into OS 9 would seemingly destroy all the permissions on every file in the fs, and somehow it could do this pretty much instantly whereas it would take minutes to repair them all...
Things seem to be a lot more stable in current releases of OS X, but it always had me scratching my head as to how this could actually happen in the first place...
I'm pretty sure that as part of negotiating their purchase with Sony, they also have the necessary keys to sign their own code, thereby negating the need to run OtherOS (with limited hardware access) or be at the whim of Sony to keep features like OtherOS.
What if, as part of your purchasing agreement with Sony (what, you think they walked in to JB Hi Fi and purchased 1500 PS3s?) you signed the relevant NDAs and negotiated a developer key for your own private internal use, allowing you to create signed code that runs on a bog-standard PS3?
OtherOS, even when it existed, didn't have full access to all the PS3 hardware, the hypervisor blocked access to the fancy graphics hardware.
If you're running properly signed code, you have full access to the hardware.
I doubt the US military would have purchased well over 1000 units without having full access to the machine through being able to run signed code.
It's even easier than that. Double-click the sparse bundle image (on a Mac) and enter your password when prompted and it will mount on the desktop like another disk.
PC has aways been on the frontier. they were the first a allow online play, the first to allow chating while playing, and first to allow comparing achievements with others online.
I skimmed your post and initially read it as "...the first to allow cheating while playing..."
The original console should come in three versions, the low cost, medium cost, and high performance version.
This has been tried, and failed. For the same reason that having differing performance and/or user upgradable parts doesn't work.
Look at the Xbox 360. How many games take full advantage of a hard drive? Now look at the PS3. How many games take full advantage of a hard drive?
Because the HDD wasn't included in the base SKU for the 360, games makers couldn't rely on it as they'd lose sales to people who didn't have a HDD. Each and every PS3 has a hard drive, so games developers can do things assuming there will be a hard drive there and the experience is better for it.
I actually had to check in my mail client to see if the Reply and Reply All buttons are next to each other. They are, and I didn't even know it.
Who (at least of the Slashdot posing crowd) doesn't do the equivalent of Command+R for reply or Command+Shift+R for Reply All and leaves the toolbar buttons alone?
H.264 is royalty free for Internet video that is free to end users (Internet Broadcast AVC) until at least December 31, 2016. You need to pay a small licensing fee to use an encoder which Google would have to do with all the videos they encode on YouTube, but as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
Now is not the time to be pushing a private agenda, now is the time to get on board with established industry standards and get something more open into the next round.
Slashdot Mirror
The private RSA key is also in the perl source he's posted to his blog
You'd have a hard time with pen and paper working with something that read:
0000000 23 21 2f 62 69 6e 2f 73 68 0a 23 0a 23 20 24 49
0000010 64 3a 20 75 74 69 6c 69 74 79 2d 6c 61 75 6e 63
0000020 68 65 72 20 32 36 36 31 32 20 32 30 30 38 2d 31
0000030 30 2d 32 38 20 32 31 3a 35 33 3a 33 39 5a 20 73
0000040 74 69 67 20 24 0a 23 0a 23 20 57 69 72 65 73 68
0000050 61 72 6b 20 43 4c 49 20 75 74 69 6c 69 74 79 20
0000060 6c 61 75 6e 63 68 65 72 0a 0a 69 66 20 5b 20 2d
0000070 7a 20 22 24 57 49 52 45 53 48 41 52 4b 5f 41 50
0000080 50 5f 44 49 52 22 20 5d 20 3b 20 74 68 65 6e 0a
0000090 09 57 49 52 45 53 48 41 52 4b 5f 41 50 50 5f 44
00000a0 49 52 3d 22 2f 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 69 6f 6e
00000b0 73 2f 57 69 72 65 73 68 61 72 6b 2e 61 70 70 22
00000c0 0a 66 69 0a 0a 69 66 20 5b 20 21 20 2d 64 20 22
Their classroom materials are distributed with OneNote...
First of all, it's not my son (luckily!)
The problem arises not because there's no alternative software to what OneNote does, but no alternative software that can open OneNote files - they distribute classroom materials in this format and there's nothing else I can find that will open them...
Oh, don't worry, it's being fought - he's currently walking around with a MacBook Pro that does 95% of what the school claim he needs (and quite a lot of stuff that they said simply couldn't be done)
It's just the OneNote that's the main sticking point with their argument now - I can't find any alternative...
And before any of you think that the PowerPoint presentation is in jest - I've got a client who's son is in grade 7 this year. He has to purchase the school "blessed" laptop and in return must run Microsoft Office 2010 (they heavily use OneNote, which has no alternative, free or otherwise), as well as the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection.
Now, this suite of Adobe software retails for over $4k here (sure, there's a massive edu discount) but I can't believe they're being taught this when in school I learned BASIC and LOGO.
Whilst the Internet can route around damage or disruption and your packets aren't guaranteed to take the same path every time, in practice they will take a more efficient or shorter route over a longer one.
If I'm in Australia and I'm checking my gmail which is hosted somewhere in the USA, there is an undersea fibre cable between Australia and the US. My packets aren't going to suddenly start going via Finland and Japan just because they feel like it. I can be quite well assured that my data will travel from Australia directly to the US and not enter any other foreign countries.
So don't let it move. Leash the damn corporations already and stop this race to the bottom. The existence of a corporation is supposed to be contingent on the public good.
Sorry, but just how can you stop a corporation (or anyone for that matter) from getting up and moving somewhere else?
What's more, for those that didn't RTFA
Sure, Twitter were big enough to make this happen, but other companies can now take advantage of this tax break as well.
What is likely to cost SF more - the $22M over 6 years (which, on a budget the size of SF's is around the level of a rounding error) or having a derelict neighbourhood in the middle of the city?
I'd argue that SF stands to gain more than $22M over 6 years if their urban revitalisation plan comes to fruition and they can get other companies to move in and raise the image of the affected neighbourhoods.
I don't know about your internet, but mine involves alternative routes to a particular physical location. Not just because that's how the Internet works, but because there are competing providers. And there are all sorts of things which delay, from WiFi to pipe congestion to intentional prioritisation to the OS having something more interesting to do.
Whilst your data can take any one of a number of paths as it travels across the Internet, in practice (particularly over short timescales) it will tend to take the same path each time. The routing tables will pretty much ensure that unless there's been a big change to the backbones, there is usually one efficient route to take. For instance, I ran traceroute to slashdot.org three times, each a few minutes apart and in each case my packets took exactly the same route. On the timescales that they're talking about in the article (over a handful of seconds at most) the data will tend to take the same path to geographically similar locations.
Although I should have stopped reading at "time it takes to send a data packet to the target" - really? How does one measure precisely this?
Have you ever used ping or traceroute
Freedom Fries then?
Adobe offer massive discounts for educational use.
Educational institutions can purchase blanket site licenses for the software.
As an example, I'll use the Master Collection (one with the lot)
The RRP (in AUD) is $4,345.00 for the whole suite as a retail boxed copy.
The student and teacher version is $605.00 for a single copy.
The educational site license (for up to 500 seats) is $24,750.00 - this is less than $50 per seat.
What's more, not only does piracy on the personal level help Adobe with becoming, or staying as, the industry standard, but they are pretty flexible with personal use of the software too.
If, for example, your workplace has purchased site licensing for Adobe software, and you have a copy installed on your workstation - you are allowed to (legally) install the same suite of software on your personal computer at home (for as long as you are employed there and have the suite on your work computer).
You're not their target market and, frankly, are incredibly unlikely to be pursued in a piracy crackdown.
You are doing what Adobe want though - getting familiar with their tools so they become the standard. Once you know Photoshop, and you end up in a job where you need graphics editing software, the company will have to purchase it for you. A company stands to lose a lot more than an individual in a piracy case, so they need to be legal. They're not going to get you, say, the Corel suite as it's not what you know how to use.
Seriously, how hard can it be to not upgrade. If you're working on a huge project in-house, don't upgrade your software half-way through, unless you're prepared to update all copies of it.
InDesign, the software mentioned in the article, will automatically upgrade the format of the document when opened in a new version with no warning. This can be a problem. It also does allow you to downsave by one version (CS5 can save as InDesign Interchange format, which will open in CS4. CS4 to INX for CS3).
If you have the Creative Suite, you really should be on volume licensing - even if it's just one copy. It's not a well known fact, but individuals can purchase volume licensing and there is no minimum buy-in to their TLP licensing program. Licensing copies are cheaper than retail box copies, you can re-download your installers if you lose them, Adobe keep a record of your serial number/proof of purchase if you loose it or are audited and you can purchase maintenance if you want to keep your copies up-to-date for less than the regular upgrade cost.
Also, with licensing, if you purchase a copy of, say, CS5, but you're running all CS4 licenses in your studio, you can install a copy of CS4 instead using your CS4 volume license serial number.
There's no arguing that the Creative Suite is expensive, but if you're smart about it, you can keep the costs down a bit.
I'm just going to sit back and watch this one develop in 3... 2... 1...
It's only fraud if you're doing it illegally.
GE are operating completely within the letter of the law (laws I'm sure they helped to draft in the first place) and any other entity in their situation would be crazy to behave any differently.
The problem is not GE, it's the US Government.
Imagine this scenario: You earn $50k and through various pre-existing tax rules you are eligible to pay $10k in tax. If tomorrow a law was drafted that allowed you to, say, receive a tax rebate for every post here on /. and say for instance, you were eligible for $10k of rebates, would you turn this rebate down?
No, of course not. GE are playing it smart. The US Government needs to take a good look at it's own laws and tighten things up to prevent this happening again.
For what it's also worth, this $0 tax burden is most likely a one-off with rebates and other concessions that they're taking advantage of this year and they most likely won't be able to do it again next year. Look at how much tax they paid last year for instance...
Hi Terry,
Your post is one of the most informative comments I think I've ever read here on /. in many years. Thank you.
I'm hoping you may be able to answer a question that's been bothering me for years regarding ACLs and permissions. That is, why is it necessary to run a Repair Permissions on HFS+ volumes?
On no other operating system or file system I've used in the past 20-odd years of my computing life has it had the problem that file permissions can get randomly lost or otherwise screwed up without you having to actually do something that causes this to happen?
I've had clean installs of Mac OS X (mind you, this was generally older versions) where running a diskutil Repair Permissions would find permissions that weren't correctly set and fix them.
I've had cases where (and this was more in PPC days booting between OS X and OS 9) where simply booting into OS 9 would seemingly destroy all the permissions on every file in the fs, and somehow it could do this pretty much instantly whereas it would take minutes to repair them all...
Things seem to be a lot more stable in current releases of OS X, but it always had me scratching my head as to how this could actually happen in the first place...
Cheers,
Kai
I'm pretty sure that as part of negotiating their purchase with Sony, they also have the necessary keys to sign their own code, thereby negating the need to run OtherOS (with limited hardware access) or be at the whim of Sony to keep features like OtherOS.
What if, as part of your purchasing agreement with Sony (what, you think they walked in to JB Hi Fi and purchased 1500 PS3s?) you signed the relevant NDAs and negotiated a developer key for your own private internal use, allowing you to create signed code that runs on a bog-standard PS3?
OtherOS, even when it existed, didn't have full access to all the PS3 hardware, the hypervisor blocked access to the fancy graphics hardware.
If you're running properly signed code, you have full access to the hardware.
I doubt the US military would have purchased well over 1000 units without having full access to the machine through being able to run signed code.
It's even easier than that. Double-click the sparse bundle image (on a Mac) and enter your password when prompted and it will mount on the desktop like another disk.
PC has aways been on the frontier. they were the first a allow online play, the first to allow chating while playing, and first to allow comparing achievements with others online.
I skimmed your post and initially read it as "...the first to allow cheating while playing..."
The original console should come in three versions, the low cost, medium cost, and high performance version.
This has been tried, and failed. For the same reason that having differing performance and/or user upgradable parts doesn't work.
Look at the Xbox 360. How many games take full advantage of a hard drive? Now look at the PS3. How many games take full advantage of a hard drive?
Because the HDD wasn't included in the base SKU for the 360, games makers couldn't rely on it as they'd lose sales to people who didn't have a HDD. Each and every PS3 has a hard drive, so games developers can do things assuming there will be a hard drive there and the experience is better for it.
Charlie Sheen, is that you?
I actually had to check in my mail client to see if the Reply and Reply All buttons are next to each other. They are, and I didn't even know it.
Who (at least of the Slashdot posing crowd) doesn't do the equivalent of Command+R for reply or Command+Shift+R for Reply All and leaves the toolbar buttons alone?
H.264 is royalty free for Internet video that is free to end users (Internet Broadcast AVC) until at least December 31, 2016.
You need to pay a small licensing fee to use an encoder which Google would have to do with all the videos they encode on YouTube, but as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
Now is not the time to be pushing a private agenda, now is the time to get on board with established industry standards and get something more open into the next round.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf