About two years ago, I did an extnesive analysis of photo printing: test prints of a digital SLR photo I took of a Dave Chihuly glass sculpture (among other scenes) on the latest and greatest from Canon, Epson, and HP, as well as two area drug stores with printing kiosks and two online services.
The printers blew away the printing kiosks, which blew away the online services in quality. Seriously, ofoto.com was absolutely terrible. It looked like they resampled my picture to 640x480 before printing it, and then applied some punch-it-up color filtering to make it look "better" to the untrained eye. The picture was washed out and disgusting. The in-store printouts (CVS and Walgreen's) both fared only slightly better - it looked like someone used an LCD to expose the paper or something; definitely not anywhere close to the full potential of the source image. To be fair, the store printouts had better color reproduction than the online sites.
That left the printers - which produced results miles better than the online or in-store results. Yeah, they cost more - but the HP and Canon printouts both were gorgeous, with the Canon ending up slightly more vivid but the HP ending up slightly more accurate. I ended up deciding based on the superior UI of the HP on-printer interface, but it was a close call.
Do I pay more per print? Yep. Did I find an online service or in-store service that could come anywhere in the same ballpark of quality as printing it myself? Heck no.
The absolute last thing Microsoft wants to do is shut down the mono project. There is nothing MS would love more than for every Linux application compatible with GTK to install and run natively on Windows with no changes. Sure, some of those apps compete with Windows apps - but let's face it, open source GUI applications rarely have enough HCI attention paid to them so that they would be a serious competittor to Microsoft. The sheer propaganda value would be overwhelming.
MS is still struggling to legitimize.net. Look at the Rotor project - MS themselves commissioned the development of a runtime for FreeBSD and MacOS X. The more platforms.net code runs on, the more success Microsoft will gain. A big part of.net strategy is web services (translation: SOAP. We're not talking big-brother Passport authentication here, just your standard old SOAP remote instantiation.) If Apache/UNIX servers adopt C# and SOAP, the net win for Microsoft would be much bigger because they could provide an instant migration path away from Linux for those fed up with the high maintenance costs.
Besides, the bad PR would be overwhelming if they did otherwise. And as we've seen recently with Eolas, MS doesn't want to "start any @&*#" as far as patents are concerned - they'll just open themselves to legitimizing more lawsuits from tiny companies that want their share of MS cash in return. Honestly, who would they even sue, Novell? Yeah, that would be profitable.....
I firmly believe that the.net patents Microsoft recently obtained are there to keep some other loser from claiming them. They don't want to get locked out of their own invention! Sure, you'll see the.net API branch out to include Office with a huge proprietary class library, but that won't affect Mono even a little bit.
(Yes, I know I'll get a load of replies whining that I give Linux less credit than it deserves in this article. Actually, I give it more. If Linux wasn't a legitimate competitor, support wouldn't help legitimize.net in return, MS would care much less. So stop whining.)
((Yes, I know my karma is headed down the tubes. Don't hate me because I'm right.))
He's standing on the sidewalk between McBryde and Holden Hall, in the road towards the handicapped access lot in front of Randolph. The camera's pointed at Durham Hall (New Engineering Building, if you knew it in the early years after it was built in 1995.) The new building is going to go where Durham Lot 11 is currently, and will be multiphased with lots of research space for the College of Engineering and (rumored) a small dining hall to replace Shultz for lunchtime food operated by HDS (Housing and Dining Services, for those of you who don't know Virginia Tech consistently has the highest ranked dining halls in the nation, and we run it all in house instead of contracting to scum like Aramark.), and targeted at the engineering students (perhaps themed in some way). This explains why they're getting projects like the Randolph wind tunnel air-abatement out of the way early.
The project was approved by Virginia voters last year in the bond referendum. (Thanks, if you voted for it in that referendum. You had good company, Virginia supported it by a huge margin.) The building is described as "VTRI Phase I" on this page: Bond Referendum It will cost $31 million, slightly less (but not much) than Torgersen Hall. They're definitely going all out and doing it right.
For those of you not from Tech, the building is sited behind McBryde in square L3: Map This land was hotly contested for some time - a local developer owned it and wanted to put apartments there, and I think Tech finally gained the land via either eminent domain and a lawsuit. (It was definitely sticky.) That explains why it's one of the few chunks of land left on core campus undeveloped.
This test is definitely better than the tom's hardware one. But the other review mentioned in the original post, despite only covering five power supplies, was an excellent model for reviews of this type: http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q3/psus/index.x? pg=1 It's not perfect - I agree with one of the other posters in this discussion that multiple samples should be tested, for sure - but it does show you more of what is occurring. Measurements were taken with an oscilloscope - which I assume was in current calibration, although it would have been nice to be assured of that - and most importantly, it shows the ripple voltage as a measure of how clean the power is.
You mention that you'd like to see stability testing, but that assumes the motherboard is perfect. How are we to know if the mainboard's circuitry is properly designed? The best solution is to find a power supply that nails 3.3V exactly, nails 12V exactly, etc. as close as possible, then use that power supply to stability test mainboards. One variable at a time, folks.
As for the stability testing performed in Anandtech's review, I would submit that bits are more likely to be twiddled by noisy input power than by "interference" that can be protected from by "more shielding and heavy construction" (although errors can be caused by any number of factors). A bit of memory is just a latch constructed of tiny switches. This latch stays latched as long as power is flowing through it, in a best case scenario. I would expect that the more stable the input power is, the more likely system components are to function properly. I am not against testing with tools like MemTest, but I'd like to see noise analysis like the TechReport review alongisde it to help evaluate exactly what is going on. (This ideal review would follow sound statistical procedures, though, and not create three significant digits of results from three integer trials that vary significantly (ranging from 2 to 6 on the same power supply? Come on, people...). It would also tell us which addresses in memory were flipped so we could see if it was a certain location on the DIMM or completely random.)
You say "That is also better than the test of ars-technica: put a scope on the powerline and show the ripple. This looks horrible, but if the power stays in spec there is nothing to worry about." Exactly! If the power stays in spec, there is nothing to worry about. So let's focus on making sure the power stays in spec in a review.
And a major benefit for the State of Virginia. We've suffered under a string of subpar governors for goodness-knows-how-long, both republican and democrat.
Great, there are more power supplies, but where are the oscilloscopes? Where is the detailed methodology for testing the cleanliness of the resultant power? They used some "stuff we found in our local university basement" to satisfy "you EE types". Oh, great. LIKE WHAT?
I'll take a smaller review with decent scientific methodologies, thank you very much. There's more to stability of a power supply than "interference testing" which reports an integer number of errors that could be caused by anything... What about the thermal testing... where was it measured? by what, the onboard mainboard thermistor, which is notably unreliable? Which "industry standard Chenming case" was it?
I really, really, really wish that these hardware sites would hire people with a decent understanding of the discipline of science - let alone engineering! - to write reviews. I could make MUCH more informed decisions.
No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.
Oh well. Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.
Every ID we own already has a picture. This is just adding a level of electronic security to the picture. I'm totally 100% OK with this. I'm totally NOT OK with the European versions with fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.
Push this proposal through. Maybe it will satisfy the unwashed masses and we can avoid something far more dangerous.
He says the company never backs down. Yeah, why can't I get MS Bob XP?
Ah, but you can, but you can. On any system with Windows XP, open up the Search for Files or Folders tool. The little dog at the bottom is Rover from Microsoft Bob. He even still has the yellow circular nametag on, a tribute to Bob (in Bob, that nametag was the smiley-face-with-glasses logo, although that logo is illegible in XP).
There's nothing magical about online education. If the school is good in real life, the school will be good online. My institution, Virginia Tech, offers online courses that are taught by the same professors that teach classroom courses. They use the same materials; the only difference is that lectures are distributed via electronic mail, audio or online conferencing. The neatest courses, like our innovative Engineering Cultures class, are delivered through a tool called CentraOne that offers voiceconferencing that is surprisingly effective.
This actually improved some of my classes. For one technical writing course, my professor was blind and conducted the course through e-mail via a screen reader. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken, and I had no clue he was blind until after the course was over and I talked to a friend (I always wondered why he was so particular about what the subject lines of our e-mails were...)
The key is that all of these professors had prior classroom experience. There is no Free Lunch (tm). If the institution has a good reputation IRL, they will offer good online classes. Online only universities without real life backing are sadly not ready for prime time yet. Maybe initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare, and less prestigous initiatives like the VT CS department's online courseware publishing (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/ - great lecture slides on C++ there) will change that someday by providing a basis in quality courseware... until then, though, you're better off at your local brick and mortar educational institution.
OK guys... this is coming from someone who has actually signed a Microsoft School Agreement, so I sort of know what I'm talking about here.
You might find it helpful to open this page while reading this message, as it gives you a very clear overview of the different licensing options MS has.
This is School Agreement 3.0 that the article is referring to. Way before SA 3.0, there was SA 1.0. The 1.0 agreement was designed to give schools a fixed-price-per-year subscription for everything they could possibly want software-wise. There are plenty of other academic licensing options available.. this one was incredibly cheap (roughly $50 per seat per year max, decreases dramatically in volume) and makes sure you've got everything covered. Education is a unique market to sell software (assuming they are going to purchase software and not use open source) because money comes through an annual budgeting process. If a school can say that they have (x) computers and each one costs (x) in each budget cycle to keep in software, that's something that can be planned for. Buying software (er, anything) when needed is darn near impossible in many schools. The other advantage is that when a new machine is purchased, Microsoft includes it on the license until the next yearly cycle. Therefore, if you have 100 machines, you can buy 500 more without any software and be immediately licensed without any charge until the next year, when you pay Microsoft for 600 seats. Because of the free-software-for-new-boxen clause (which is VERY helpful... software acquisiton budgets and hardware acquisition budgets often do not coincide) Microsoft requires that every box in the school be included. This is only one of many options!
The reason Macs were included was dualfold - the agreement covers BackOffice Client Access Licenses, for one - for consistency, Microsoft doesn't want you dealing with having some computers covered for BackOffice and others not, thereby allowing you to 'fudge' on your servers - and the inclusion of various Mac-based software (office:mac, etc.)
Would this be a bad license if it was intended for everyone or the only option? Yes. Did it save my school in budget crunches becasue current software we needed (While open source is nice, let's be honest - it's neither designed for nor up to the usability needed for an educational deployment) could be billed as a required expense instead of an optional upgrade was available? Yes.
Now the confusion came up when Microsoft redid the license as School Agreement 3.0. Now, instead of receiving a package (which included Windows, Visual Studio, Office, BackOffice CAL, etc.), institutions can pick and choose products. The old option is still available for roughly the same price as a "desktop/client bundle" plus a few upgrades (Visual Studio is $2 a seat, for instance). There are a few minor differences which are detailed on the Microsoft licensing website... and a few changes for the better, like allowing schools to buy Microsoft software and simply give it to their students. (This is a great development for Visual Studio, for instance... Pay $2 per student in a CS course and they get development tools. Is it a GNU tool? Nope, but it does create young coders who will discover open source later.)
Because the basic premise of the agreement is the same, and options can be added and subtracted, they apparently didn't change the counting restrictions since 1.0. The difference now is that because you can order only certain products, people who don't fully buy into the plan and *only* purchase PC products wind up buying more licenses than they otherwise should. If this happens, school agreement should be avoided at all costs. IMHO you should only buy into this arrangement if you as a school want a large percentages of the stuff; simply licensing Windows is not productive here.
To be fair to Microsoft, pricing on these licenses takes into account the fact that the software will probably not be used on every box. Think about it... a single license for Visual Studio.NET Pro Academic runs $99, while the per seat cost here is $2. They're obviously recognizing that secretaries and many teachers' desk machines won't be running Visual Studio. In the case of Windows, the license cost is $18. That is far less than a volume license of an NT-based professional OS has ever cost in 100-300 unit quantities - so the acknoweldgement is made that not every machine will be running Windows that is counted. (If it does, then you get an even better deal. That's why this only makes sense for some schools.) This "subpricing" strategy is not something I made up - they do detail it on their licensing site.
If interested, these are the prices:
Office Standard, Pro and Macintosh Editions $24.00
Windows Desktop Operating System Upgrades $18.00
Core Client Access Licenses (CALs) $15.00
SQL ServerTM CALs $5.00
Visio® Professional Edition $5.00
FrontPage $5.00
Visual Studio $2.00
Project $5.00
Publisher $2.00
Encarta Class Server CALs $5.00
Encarta® Reference Suite and Online Deluxe $5.00
Magic School Bus $2.00
Windows 2000 Professional Step by Step Interactive by Microsoft Press $2.00
Web Publishing Step by Step Interactive by Microsoft Press $2.00
Please mod this message up - the discussions so far haven't been acknowledging what the license is really about. For a task that is already very difficult (especially for those of us who'd rather not buy the stuff to begin wtih), School Agreement makes school IT admins who are forced to work wtih MS products' jobs much easier and (when signed properly) can save money.
Well, it isn't perfect, but set up mail rules in your client. (There are plenty of really good mail clients out there that support rules - I'll leave that part as an exercise to the reader.) Just add a domain each time you receive UCE. Then, when you have a free saturday, send them polite e-mails (through the comments field of the web site, or to admin@ and postmaster@ the domain) asking them politely to stop. Until the mail system is reformed (which may be a while:), that seems like the only real option...
AragornCG
---
Hmm. I need to come up with a witty sig, don't I?
Slashdot Mirror
About two years ago, I did an extnesive analysis of photo printing: test prints of a digital SLR photo I took of a Dave Chihuly glass sculpture (among other scenes) on the latest and greatest from Canon, Epson, and HP, as well as two area drug stores with printing kiosks and two online services.
The printers blew away the printing kiosks, which blew away the online services in quality. Seriously, ofoto.com was absolutely terrible. It looked like they resampled my picture to 640x480 before printing it, and then applied some punch-it-up color filtering to make it look "better" to the untrained eye. The picture was washed out and disgusting. The in-store printouts (CVS and Walgreen's) both fared only slightly better - it looked like someone used an LCD to expose the paper or something; definitely not anywhere close to the full potential of the source image. To be fair, the store printouts had better color reproduction than the online sites.
That left the printers - which produced results miles better than the online or in-store results. Yeah, they cost more - but the HP and Canon printouts both were gorgeous, with the Canon ending up slightly more vivid but the HP ending up slightly more accurate. I ended up deciding based on the superior UI of the HP on-printer interface, but it was a close call.
Do I pay more per print? Yep. Did I find an online service or in-store service that could come anywhere in the same ballpark of quality as printing it myself? Heck no.
The absolute last thing Microsoft wants to do is shut down the mono project. There is nothing MS would love more than for every Linux application compatible with GTK to install and run natively on Windows with no changes. Sure, some of those apps compete with Windows apps - but let's face it, open source GUI applications rarely have enough HCI attention paid to them so that they would be a serious competittor to Microsoft. The sheer propaganda value would be overwhelming.
.net. Look at the Rotor project - MS themselves commissioned the development of a runtime for FreeBSD and MacOS X. The more platforms .net code runs on, the more success Microsoft will gain. A big part of .net strategy is web services (translation: SOAP. We're not talking big-brother Passport authentication here, just your standard old SOAP remote instantiation.) If Apache/UNIX servers adopt C# and SOAP, the net win for Microsoft would be much bigger because they could provide an instant migration path away from Linux for those fed up with the high maintenance costs.
.net patents Microsoft recently obtained are there to keep some other loser from claiming them. They don't want to get locked out of their own invention! Sure, you'll see the .net API branch out to include Office with a huge proprietary class library, but that won't affect Mono even a little bit.
.net in return, MS would care much less. So stop whining.)
MS is still struggling to legitimize
Besides, the bad PR would be overwhelming if they did otherwise. And as we've seen recently with Eolas, MS doesn't want to "start any @&*#" as far as patents are concerned - they'll just open themselves to legitimizing more lawsuits from tiny companies that want their share of MS cash in return. Honestly, who would they even sue, Novell? Yeah, that would be profitable.....
I firmly believe that the
(Yes, I know I'll get a load of replies whining that I give Linux less credit than it deserves in this article. Actually, I give it more. If Linux wasn't a legitimate competitor, support wouldn't help legitimize
((Yes, I know my karma is headed down the tubes. Don't hate me because I'm right.))
He's standing on the sidewalk between McBryde and Holden Hall, in the road towards the handicapped access lot in front of Randolph. The camera's pointed at Durham Hall (New Engineering Building, if you knew it in the early years after it was built in 1995.) The new building is going to go where Durham Lot 11 is currently, and will be multiphased with lots of research space for the College of Engineering and (rumored) a small dining hall to replace Shultz for lunchtime food operated by HDS (Housing and Dining Services, for those of you who don't know Virginia Tech consistently has the highest ranked dining halls in the nation, and we run it all in house instead of contracting to scum like Aramark.), and targeted at the engineering students (perhaps themed in some way). This explains why they're getting projects like the Randolph wind tunnel air-abatement out of the way early.
The project was approved by Virginia voters last year in the bond referendum. (Thanks, if you voted for it in that referendum. You had good company, Virginia supported it by a huge margin.) The building is described as "VTRI Phase I" on this page: Bond Referendum It will cost $31 million, slightly less (but not much) than Torgersen Hall. They're definitely going all out and doing it right.
For those of you not from Tech, the building is sited behind McBryde in square L3: Map This land was hotly contested for some time - a local developer owned it and wanted to put apartments there, and I think Tech finally gained the land via either eminent domain and a lawsuit. (It was definitely sticky.) That explains why it's one of the few chunks of land left on core campus undeveloped.
This test is definitely better than the tom's hardware one. But the other review mentioned in the original post, despite only covering five power supplies, was an excellent model for reviews of this type: http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q3/psus/index.x? pg=1 It's not perfect - I agree with one of the other posters in this discussion that multiple samples should be tested, for sure - but it does show you more of what is occurring. Measurements were taken with an oscilloscope - which I assume was in current calibration, although it would have been nice to be assured of that - and most importantly, it shows the ripple voltage as a measure of how clean the power is.
You mention that you'd like to see stability testing, but that assumes the motherboard is perfect. How are we to know if the mainboard's circuitry is properly designed? The best solution is to find a power supply that nails 3.3V exactly, nails 12V exactly, etc. as close as possible, then use that power supply to stability test mainboards. One variable at a time, folks.
As for the stability testing performed in Anandtech's review, I would submit that bits are more likely to be twiddled by noisy input power than by "interference" that can be protected from by "more shielding and heavy construction" (although errors can be caused by any number of factors). A bit of memory is just a latch constructed of tiny switches. This latch stays latched as long as power is flowing through it, in a best case scenario. I would expect that the more stable the input power is, the more likely system components are to function properly. I am not against testing with tools like MemTest, but I'd like to see noise analysis like the TechReport review alongisde it to help evaluate exactly what is going on. (This ideal review would follow sound statistical procedures, though, and not create three significant digits of results from three integer trials that vary significantly (ranging from 2 to 6 on the same power supply? Come on, people...). It would also tell us which addresses in memory were flipped so we could see if it was a certain location on the DIMM or completely random.)
You say "That is also better than the test of ars-technica: put a scope on the powerline and show the ripple. This looks horrible, but if the power stays in spec there is nothing to worry about." Exactly! If the power stays in spec, there is nothing to worry about. So let's focus on making sure the power stays in spec in a review.
We're in agreement.
And a major benefit for the State of Virginia. We've suffered under a string of subpar governors for goodness-knows-how-long, both republican and democrat.
Great, there are more power supplies, but where are the oscilloscopes? Where is the detailed methodology for testing the cleanliness of the resultant power? They used some "stuff we found in our local university basement" to satisfy "you EE types". Oh, great. LIKE WHAT?
I'll take a smaller review with decent scientific methodologies, thank you very much. There's more to stability of a power supply than "interference testing" which reports an integer number of errors that could be caused by anything... What about the thermal testing... where was it measured? by what, the onboard mainboard thermistor, which is notably unreliable? Which "industry standard Chenming case" was it?
I really, really, really wish that these hardware sites would hire people with a decent understanding of the discipline of science - let alone engineering! - to write reviews. I could make MUCH more informed decisions.
-Ben
There will be a sweet spot very, very soon now. In fact, it already exists.
:)
Time to rent a warehouse and stock up before mass production of good CRTs is discontinued...
No, LCDs do NOT run at anything less than their native resolution. They rely on (usually poor) scaling circuitry, which blurs, antialiases, and generally destroys any picture quality benefit the LCD would have gained you. And it sitll doesn't solve the conundrum of applications where high-resolution imagery is needed with reasonably sized widgets.
Oh well. Go ahead and buy your overpriced, useless LCD monitors and run them at suboptimal resolutions, as long as I don't have to look at them. It makes my next Trinitron cheaper.
Every ID we own already has a picture. This is just adding a level of electronic security to the picture. I'm totally 100% OK with this. I'm totally NOT OK with the European versions with fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.
Push this proposal through. Maybe it will satisfy the unwashed masses and we can avoid something far more dangerous.
-A
Ah, but you can, but you can. On any system with Windows XP, open up the Search for Files or Folders tool. The little dog at the bottom is Rover from Microsoft Bob. He even still has the yellow circular nametag on, a tribute to Bob (in Bob, that nametag was the smiley-face-with-glasses logo, although that logo is illegible in XP).
So yes, the company never backs down...
There's nothing magical about online education. If the school is good in real life, the school will be good online. My institution, Virginia Tech, offers online courses that are taught by the same professors that teach classroom courses. They use the same materials; the only difference is that lectures are distributed via electronic mail, audio or online conferencing. The neatest courses, like our innovative Engineering Cultures class, are delivered through a tool called CentraOne that offers voiceconferencing that is surprisingly effective.
This actually improved some of my classes. For one technical writing course, my professor was blind and conducted the course through e-mail via a screen reader. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken, and I had no clue he was blind until after the course was over and I talked to a friend (I always wondered why he was so particular about what the subject lines of our e-mails were...)
The key is that all of these professors had prior classroom experience. There is no Free Lunch (tm). If the institution has a good reputation IRL, they will offer good online classes. Online only universities without real life backing are sadly not ready for prime time yet. Maybe initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare, and less prestigous initiatives like the VT CS department's online courseware publishing (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/ - great lecture slides on C++ there) will change that someday by providing a basis in quality courseware... until then, though, you're better off at your local brick and mortar educational institution.
You might find it helpful to open this page while reading this message, as it gives you a very clear overview of the different licensing options MS has.
This is School Agreement 3.0 that the article is referring to. Way before SA 3.0, there was SA 1.0. The 1.0 agreement was designed to give schools a fixed-price-per-year subscription for everything they could possibly want software-wise. There are plenty of other academic licensing options available.. this one was incredibly cheap (roughly $50 per seat per year max, decreases dramatically in volume) and makes sure you've got everything covered. Education is a unique market to sell software (assuming they are going to purchase software and not use open source) because money comes through an annual budgeting process. If a school can say that they have (x) computers and each one costs (x) in each budget cycle to keep in software, that's something that can be planned for. Buying software (er, anything) when needed is darn near impossible in many schools. The other advantage is that when a new machine is purchased, Microsoft includes it on the license until the next yearly cycle. Therefore, if you have 100 machines, you can buy 500 more without any software and be immediately licensed without any charge until the next year, when you pay Microsoft for 600 seats. Because of the free-software-for-new-boxen clause (which is VERY helpful... software acquisiton budgets and hardware acquisition budgets often do not coincide) Microsoft requires that every box in the school be included. This is only one of many options!
The reason Macs were included was dualfold - the agreement covers BackOffice Client Access Licenses, for one - for consistency, Microsoft doesn't want you dealing with having some computers covered for BackOffice and others not, thereby allowing you to 'fudge' on your servers - and the inclusion of various Mac-based software (office:mac, etc.)
Would this be a bad license if it was intended for everyone or the only option? Yes. Did it save my school in budget crunches becasue current software we needed (While open source is nice, let's be honest - it's neither designed for nor up to the usability needed for an educational deployment) could be billed as a required expense instead of an optional upgrade was available? Yes.
Now the confusion came up when Microsoft redid the license as School Agreement 3.0. Now, instead of receiving a package (which included Windows, Visual Studio, Office, BackOffice CAL, etc.), institutions can pick and choose products. The old option is still available for roughly the same price as a "desktop/client bundle" plus a few upgrades (Visual Studio is $2 a seat, for instance). There are a few minor differences which are detailed on the Microsoft licensing website... and a few changes for the better, like allowing schools to buy Microsoft software and simply give it to their students. (This is a great development for Visual Studio, for instance... Pay $2 per student in a CS course and they get development tools. Is it a GNU tool? Nope, but it does create young coders who will discover open source later.)
Because the basic premise of the agreement is the same, and options can be added and subtracted, they apparently didn't change the counting restrictions since 1.0. The difference now is that because you can order only certain products, people who don't fully buy into the plan and *only* purchase PC products wind up buying more licenses than they otherwise should. If this happens, school agreement should be avoided at all costs. IMHO you should only buy into this arrangement if you as a school want a large percentages of the stuff; simply licensing Windows is not productive here.
To be fair to Microsoft, pricing on these licenses takes into account the fact that the software will probably not be used on every box. Think about it... a single license for Visual Studio.NET Pro Academic runs $99, while the per seat cost here is $2. They're obviously recognizing that secretaries and many teachers' desk machines won't be running Visual Studio. In the case of Windows, the license cost is $18. That is far less than a volume license of an NT-based professional OS has ever cost in 100-300 unit quantities - so the acknoweldgement is made that not every machine will be running Windows that is counted. (If it does, then you get an even better deal. That's why this only makes sense for some schools.) This "subpricing" strategy is not something I made up - they do detail it on their licensing site.
If interested, these are the prices:
Please mod this message up - the discussions so far haven't been acknowledging what the license is really about. For a task that is already very difficult (especially for those of us who'd rather not buy the stuff to begin wtih), School Agreement makes school IT admins who are forced to work wtih MS products' jobs much easier and (when signed properly) can save money.
Ben
Well, it isn't perfect, but set up mail rules in your client. (There are plenty of really good mail clients out there that support rules - I'll leave that part as an exercise to the reader.) Just add a domain each time you receive UCE. Then, when you have a free saturday, send them polite e-mails (through the comments field of the web site, or to admin@ and postmaster@ the domain) asking them politely to stop. Until the mail system is reformed (which may be a while :), that seems like the only real option...
AragornCG
---
Hmm. I need to come up with a witty sig, don't I?