>Downloading a product, installing said product, and getting it to work, are not the easiest things for most to do. This is what you are missing.
He is also missing the integration into the desktop environment.
Xandros also includes Crossover Office and Plug-in with their distribution. Codeweavers produced a specific version for them, one that is totally integrated with Xandros' desktop. This allows, for example, autorun to work: pop in a MS Office CD and up comes the installer. No fuss or muss. After installing, the various Office apps are appropriately integrated into the Start menu.
One would presume that SuSE would also be licensing a version of Crossover specific to their distribution with the equally good integration into the system.
Lawyers might be the ones making money here but what is the chance that MS takes Dell to court over this? MS is a convicted illegal monopolist, afterall, and their contract with Dell is definitely anti-competitive.
It would seem to me that there is a significant chance that a judge might rule that clause to be invalid and unenforceable because of MS' status as an illegal monopolist. That would be a nightmare for MS.
Also, did anyone else pick up on the fact that you won't get a price break for buying a Dell machine without Windows? The machine will cost the same whether it comes with a Windows licence or not. Is this, I wonder, another contract clause (i.e. that MS gets a license fee for every CPU Dell ships) or just Dell trying to rip off the customer?
> Now, every once in a while I get asked this question: how is it that a VCR can record a TV show when the TV isn't turned on? Yeah, I can hear the snickers. But I get this from a lot of basically intelligent people. And the frustrating thing is, I've never found an explanation that makes sense to the asker.
How about: Because the VCR is a TV without a picture tube. Instead of a picture tube, it has a tape recorder.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?
on
Ten Technology Disasters
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology"
Tennessee is just about to do something similar with a nuclear power plant. This plant has been mothballed since 1985 but they want to bring it back online. Oh yeah, they also want to overclock it by 30%; it was originally designed for 1000 megawatts production but they are going to crank it up to 1300 megawatts.
The plant had caught fire in 1975, causing a series of problems leading to the shutdown in 1985. Now they want to extend it's orginal 40 year design for another 20 years. A nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists figures that a new plant would be safer and cheaper. From an engineering point of view, "It's like trying to dust off an eight-track tape player rather than buying a DVD system..."
First Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?
"...you can expect to hear from the BSA before too long offering an amnesty if you buy the latest versions of the software. If you don't, of course, they'll take you to court..."
Unless you've negotiated a site license from Microsoft, by what right does the BSA have to perform an attack audit?
It is the site license, I believe, that has the clause that permits license auditing, not the regular EULA. Surely the BSA can't just show up with a US marshall at any home or office and conduct an audit willy-nilly.
"when it fails to "work" (where "work" equates to running all his/her existing MS Windows-based programs; wine or other emulation packages aren't going to be enough to appease a novice end-user"
Exactly. And this is the challenge that Lindows is setting itself up to meet. I'm in favour of the underdog as much as anyone else but I'm hoping that Lindows doesn't even make it to market. I think that they will actively hurt Linux and leave a damaged perspective towards Linux in the eyes of the run of the mill Windows users.
As I recall, Lindows pretty much requires the user to run as root all the time and actively discourages having a root password. Let's see, in one swell foop, they've bypassed Linux security and made the machine extremely vulnerable to root cracks from the net.
And they expect Wine to be the magic bullet for compatibility with the users software. While Wine is amazing technology and certainly praiseworthy, it's hardly a universal solution. What Transgaming and Codeweavers have done with Wine is excellent in their relevant niches. But to build up expectations that Linux will be able to run pretty much whatever Windows software you throw at it? Not a chance. There's still some Win 3.1 apps that won't run (Distant Suns: First Light is the only one I care about.:-)
No, Lindows takes the weaknesses of both OS's in Windows lack of security and Linux's lack of wide commercial software support and emphasizes them.
I've heard of uncapping your cable modem and have seen some tools around for doing so. However, I figured that it was a pretty dumb thing to do; if you actually used the resulting higher bandwidth, you would only call attention to yourself and have the cable company disconnect you.
If more people start uncapping their cable modems (which, in reality, are ethernet bridges not modems) then I can foresee the cable companies devoting more resources to stopping such activity. Given that the cable modem is in the path before any firewall, they could simply remote detect and disable an uncapped mdoem. Afterall, like the Night of Long Knives at Internet Direct a few years back (wherein users who left their dial-up connections up for 24/7 suddenly had their "unlimited" usage accounts terminated), it's in their interest to weed out the high volume (ab)users and cherrypick for the users who won't use the system to its potential. The more people they can get on a switch (i.e. a smaller netmask) the less costly it is for them to provide the service.
And if uncapping your cable modem seems attractive, consider this; would you want to be on a subnet with a neighbour who uncapped his/her modem and was sucking up the bandwidth such that your DivX and mp3 downloads were slowed to a crawl? You'd be on the phone to the cable company PDQ to get your speed back, wouldn't you? And what do you think the cable co. would do to the bandwidth bandit once they found out what the problem was?
In Canada, Shaw/Rogers has capped their cable modems at 1.5 mbps down and 640 kbps up and charge CDN$40/month (US$25)for this service without extra charge (so far) for high volume usage. Personally, I think that's a bargain especially when I read about what (lack of) service our neighbours in the Excited States receive.
Irrespective of the validity or not of their claims (clams?:-) Scientology claims to be a legitimate religion. And I'm wondering what might be (or should be) the implications of that. As far as I'm aware, churchs in the US, Canada and Britain enjoy a tax exempt status. Scientology also claims copyright over their beliefs and writings and uses copyright as a weapon to silence their critics and apostates.
What I'm wondering is if official religous writings should even be entitled to copyright protection. Society is providing a benefit to the churches in making them tax-exempt. Thus I think that their beliefs and official exegesis of those beliefs should automatically be in the public domain, open to scrutiny, discussion, publication and criticism.
Spirituality seems to be a fundamental need for many, if not most, people and liberal democratic societies have set up strong constitutional protections and freedoms for the expressions of spirituality. But those protections and freedoms must go in both directions by organised religions or we wind up with abuses such as Scientology.
The early version of NuSphere was clearly in violation of the GPL and thus _de facto_ renounced their rights to redistribute that version of MySQL. However, it seems that they've cleaned up their act for the next version of NuSphere.
What I'm wondering is if that revocation is permanent, absent forgiveness by the licensor of the MySQL code? It will obviously be so for that particular version of MySQL. But what about later versions of MySQL? New code, new license. Does their initial unrepentent infringment of the GPL mean that they are forever barred from redistributing newer versions of MySQL whose license they haven't violated?
Aside from anything else, two things stand out like the two towers of Minas Tiras and Minas Morgul: (1) it defaults to having a password-less root login and (2) it is running a telnet server.
Uh oh, things are going to be taking a turn for the worse regarding both spam and DOS attacks. This will be even greater incentive to firewall off the netblock assigned to China.
I refer you to SCID (http://scid.sourceforge.net). I just played through the posted game using SCID. Man, Fritz has no concept of the value of space. What a crush!
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>Downloading a product, installing said product, and getting it to work, are not the easiest things for most to do. This is what you are missing.
He is also missing the integration into the desktop environment.
Xandros also includes Crossover Office and Plug-in with their distribution. Codeweavers produced a specific version for them, one that is totally integrated with Xandros' desktop. This allows, for example, autorun to work: pop in a MS Office CD and up comes the installer. No fuss or muss. After installing, the various Office apps are appropriately integrated into the Start menu.
One would presume that SuSE would also be licensing a version of Crossover specific to their distribution with the equally good integration into the system.
Step Four: Profit!
Lawyers might be the ones making money here but what is the chance that MS takes Dell to court over this? MS is a convicted illegal monopolist, afterall, and their contract with Dell is definitely anti-competitive.
It would seem to me that there is a significant chance that a judge might rule that clause to be invalid and unenforceable because of MS' status as an illegal monopolist. That would be a nightmare for MS.
Also, did anyone else pick up on the fact that you won't get a price break for buying a Dell machine without Windows? The machine will cost the same whether it comes with a Windows licence or not. Is this, I wonder, another contract clause (i.e. that MS gets a license fee for every CPU Dell ships) or just Dell trying to rip off the customer?
> Now, every once in a while I get asked this question: how is it that a VCR can record a TV show when the TV isn't turned on? Yeah, I can hear the snickers. But I get this from a lot of basically intelligent people. And the frustrating thing is, I've never found an explanation that makes sense to the asker.
How about: Because the VCR is a TV without a picture tube. Instead of a picture tube, it has a tape recorder.
"There's also some stuff like "Watch when retrofitting parts of an old system with new technology"
Tennessee is just about to do something similar with a
nuclear power plant. This plant has been mothballed since 1985 but they want to bring it back online. Oh yeah, they also want to overclock it by 30%; it was originally designed for 1000 megawatts production but they are going to crank it up to 1300 megawatts.
The plant had caught fire in 1975, causing a series of problems leading to the shutdown in 1985. Now they want to extend it's orginal 40 year design for another 20 years. A nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists figures that a new plant would be safer and cheaper. From an engineering point of view, "It's like trying to dust off an eight-track tape player rather than buying a DVD system..."
First Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Is Tennessee next?
"...you can expect to hear from the BSA before too long offering an amnesty if you buy the latest versions of the software. If you don't, of course, they'll take you to court..."
Unless you've negotiated a site license from Microsoft, by what right does the BSA have to perform an attack audit?
It is the site license, I believe, that has the clause that permits license auditing, not the regular EULA. Surely the BSA can't just show up with a US marshall at any home or office and conduct an audit willy-nilly.
"when it fails to "work" (where "work" equates to running all his/her existing MS Windows-based programs; wine or other emulation packages aren't going to be enough to appease a novice end-user"
:-)
Exactly. And this is the challenge that Lindows is setting itself up to meet. I'm in favour of the underdog as much as anyone else but I'm hoping that Lindows doesn't even make it to market. I think that they will actively hurt Linux and leave a damaged perspective towards Linux in the eyes of the run of the mill Windows users.
As I recall, Lindows pretty much requires the user to run as root all the time and actively discourages having a root password. Let's see, in one swell foop, they've bypassed Linux security and made the machine extremely vulnerable to root cracks from the net.
And they expect Wine to be the magic bullet for compatibility with the users software. While Wine is amazing technology and certainly praiseworthy, it's hardly a universal solution. What Transgaming and Codeweavers have done with Wine is excellent in their relevant niches. But to build up expectations that Linux will be able to run pretty much whatever Windows software you throw at it? Not a chance. There's still some Win 3.1 apps that won't run (Distant Suns: First Light is the only one I care about.
No, Lindows takes the weaknesses of both OS's in Windows lack of security and Linux's lack of wide commercial software support and emphasizes them.
And this will harm the Linux movement.
I've heard of uncapping your cable modem and have seen some tools around for doing so. However, I figured that it was a pretty dumb thing to do; if you actually used the resulting higher bandwidth, you would only call attention to yourself and have the cable company disconnect you.
If more people start uncapping their cable modems (which, in reality, are ethernet bridges not modems) then I can foresee the cable companies devoting more resources to stopping such activity. Given that the cable modem is in the path before any firewall, they could simply remote detect and disable an
uncapped mdoem. Afterall, like the Night of Long Knives at Internet Direct a few years back (wherein users who left their dial-up connections up for 24/7 suddenly had their "unlimited" usage accounts terminated), it's in their interest to weed out the high volume (ab)users and cherrypick for the users who won't use the system to its potential. The more people they can get on a switch (i.e. a smaller netmask) the less costly it is for them to provide the service.
And if uncapping your cable modem seems attractive, consider this; would you want to be on a subnet with a neighbour who uncapped his/her modem and was sucking up the bandwidth such that your DivX and mp3 downloads were slowed to a crawl? You'd be on the phone to the cable company PDQ to get your speed
back, wouldn't you? And what do you think the cable co. would do to the bandwidth bandit once they found out what the problem was?
In Canada, Shaw/Rogers has capped their cable modems at 1.5 mbps down and 640 kbps up and charge CDN$40/month (US$25)for this service without extra charge (so far) for high volume usage. Personally, I think that's a bargain especially when I read about what (lack of) service our neighbours in the Excited States receive.
Irrespective of the validity or not of their claims (clams? :-) Scientology claims to be a legitimate religion. And I'm wondering what might be (or should be) the implications of that. As far as I'm aware, churchs in the US, Canada and Britain enjoy a tax exempt status. Scientology also claims copyright over their beliefs and writings and uses copyright as a weapon to silence their critics and apostates.
What I'm wondering is if official religous writings should even be entitled to copyright protection. Society is providing a benefit to the churches in making them tax-exempt. Thus I think that their beliefs and official exegesis of those beliefs should automatically be in the public domain, open to scrutiny, discussion, publication and criticism.
Spirituality seems to be a fundamental need for many, if not most, people and liberal democratic societies have set up strong constitutional protections and freedoms for the expressions of spirituality. But those protections and freedoms must go in both directions by organised religions or we wind up with abuses such as Scientology.
The early version of NuSphere was clearly in violation of the GPL and thus _de facto_ renounced their rights to redistribute that version of MySQL. However, it seems that they've cleaned up their act for the next version of NuSphere.
What I'm wondering is if that revocation is permanent, absent forgiveness by the licensor of the MySQL code? It will obviously be so for that particular version of MySQL. But what about later versions of MySQL? New code, new license. Does their initial unrepentent infringment of the GPL mean that they are forever barred from redistributing newer versions of MySQL whose license they haven't violated?
Aside from anything else, two things stand out like the two towers of Minas Tiras and Minas Morgul: (1) it defaults to having a password-less root login and (2) it is running a telnet server.
Uh oh, things are going to be taking a turn for the worse regarding both spam and DOS attacks. This will be even greater incentive to firewall off the netblock assigned to China.
I refer you to SCID (http://scid.sourceforge.net). I just played through the posted game using SCID. Man, Fritz has no concept of the value of space. What a crush!