When and if the non-expiring key is required, issue a new.dll or patch that will accept a non-expiring key, issued with the key.
The problem with this is that small software houses that are going under are usually more worried about making payroll than creating a patch to their copy protection routines.
Of course, they never had the insight that they would go out of business in the first place, so this patch wouldn't have been ready ahead of time.
Someone else mentioned a third party "Software Licence Bureau", that could issue keys after companies had gone away. However, that's a single point of hacking, so it's unlikely that would be a solution either.
Back when I did more camping, I did see a couple black helicopters flying around while in National Forest areas in Arizona and New Mexico (fast-looking news copter-type things).
Probably standard military ops (lots of military bases in those parts), and not a UN invasion force, but it's always bugged me to see "Black Helicopter" used as a synonym for crazy..
This from a twat who diddles himself publicly with lame Monty Pythonesque retreds and affirmations of his own anal fixation. Your pocket protector is showing, cunt.
Most motherboards use Intel chipsets. If Intel includes USB 2.0 support in the standard chipset, it will be a feature that people pay for if they like it or not.
PCs shipped with USB ports for 2 years before there was any software support. Obviously, they would have cut that cost if they could have.
I'm not usually a troll-biter, but there is a valid point there. There's a long tradition in the US for the Ku Klux Klan to use "K" spelling as a code-word for something they endorse. (Posters for "Kalvin Kooledge" used to be fairly common, for example. Check eBay for more.).
However, since the KDE folks are european, I wouldn't expect them to know this.
I don't think it's that important, but there should be some sensitivty there. Just as with folks who insist on using the word "cracker", which is a very common racial slur in parts of the US.
Someone needs to define a standard schema for wordprocessing docs (Should be XHTML + CSS1/2/3, actually), spreadsheets, and presentation software. Then everyone needs to implement it.
Frankly, with 39 office app alternatives on the market for Unix, having an "open" format (XML or no) just doesn't cut it.
Oh, to be certain, Apple and Microsoft have been slapping each others backs (or kicking each other in the ass) since the 1970s.
However, I don't think MS is doing any favors to Apple here -- more like trying to eat their lunch. WinXP will ship with video-editing tools (just like Macs do today) and without DVCam (1394) support, that would be sort of pointless.
You apparently forgot about North shoving shredded paper into his secretary's bra to get it out of the building. I suspect Clinton got lucky only because the White House switched from IBM PROFS to something like MS Exchange.
Anway, as soon as I pressed submit, I knew I'd be a mark for the dittoheads.
I'm thinking of more concrete examples such as WinXP or VisualStudio.NET, neither of which much vapor was spread about until functional betas were in people's hands.
Remember that the Cairo talk started before either Windows 95 or NT 4.0 shipped. Perhaps "Hailstorm" fits this model, but I have a feeling that it doesn't.
Unfortunately we won't have any more Ollie Norths, who entered all thier evil plans into the e-mail system and felt that pressing Delete was good enough protection. Oh wait, Microsoft executives did the same thing...
The idea of dictating all of your evil plans into a tape recorder has also been pretty much discredited.
So, you take a specific problem domain (health care), and figure that if someone hasn't generalized that out to every problem domain, you conclude that you might as well be using flat text files. XML is supposed to be the infrastructure to make this possible, BTW -- if MS and Oracle can't agree on their dataset format, that's not really a problem with the underlying technology.
I can't tell you how many interfaces I have built in my life
And how many bugs have you created in low-level parsing and message passing code? Don't get me wrong - I know there's programmers out there that have spent their entire professional life maintaining fragile interface code, and sure it puts food on the table, but there's also got to be a better way.
Data Integration has always been the #1 problem in IT, and always will be. Nobody thinks they've got the magic bullet -- but putting new tools in the toolbox can't be a bad thing, assuming they work.
Netscape's original business plan was never to charge for the browser. The place I worked at the time wanted to roll Navigator 1.0 out to 5000 desktops, but woudn't do so unless Netscape took their money for a support contract. Our Netscape 'rep' had no idea what to do with this offer. By v1.1N, they figured out that having money waved in your face wasn't such a bad idea.
The entire idea of Netscape's psuedo-free browser was supposed to be free advertising for their server products. You can blame Netscape's death on Apache/IIS and free SMTP/IMAP servers to a much greater degree than you can blame IE.
The browser was never "their business", and the sad fact that a whole bunch of homepages pointed to the default setting of http://www.netscape.com/ was the only real asset picked up by AOL just shows that their gamble at being an enterprise server vendor failed mightily.
Sorry, most regular users and businesses do not use cracks or lurk in IRC to find FTP sites. They do pass around a single CD, etc. Microsoft isn't interested in the hardcore pirate market, they are interested in making casual piracy less attractive.
Microsoft's operating system timetable made some very interesting changes from "Cairo" (originally slated to ship in 1996) to "Windows 2000". One thing I remember about this period is that this release was 9-12 months away for virtually the whole time.
Trying to find any information on the web about previous product plans is nearly impossible. My suggestion is to head down to the local library and see if they have old copies/microfitch of "PC Week" or "Infoworld". ZDNet pubs are especially good because they tended to be more sycophantic to Microsoft. The more consumer oriented mags like PC Magazine might have some good info too.
Of course, none of this information will be officially from Microsoft. But I think it's clear who is whispering into journalist's ears. In MS's defense, nowdays they don't quite blow the vapor like they used to.
And the difference between that situation and the situation today is only the cost of writing a middleware piece that transforms the format and data between these systems.
Nobody said that integration is easy. It is in fact the most expensive and problematic part of information technology. On one hand, anything that makes it easier is a good thing. On the other, tech like XML formats are just another thing that you have to integrate everything with in 2^n fashion.
Don't make IT PHBs out to be that stupid. These problems are old as the hills and nobody expects an easy or cheap answer.
I should have mentioned that I agree with the jist of your post. Of course it could be done better now, except for the problem that most modern IT is too vendor-identified to get the universal coverage of something like NNTP.
I always thought NNTP was cool because it was a distributed, replicated, client-server collaberation system for the masses 20 years before arguably inferior commercial implementations (ahem,Exchange Public Folders) existed.
Yeah, it's sort of a hack, but not as much of one as (say) SMTP mail...
The one thing they will never do is reduce the amount of money they think they can get from you.
Right now the cost of Office for a large portion of users is $0 because it's warezed. By increasing copy protection and lowering the entry cost (through rental), MS is betting that they can get more money by getting all the deadbeats to pay up.
As the guy said, if it only cost (say) $20/year to use Word for the couple times you needed it, that might be more attractive than having $600 of pirated software, just in case.
Features (that I use) that are in Word 2000 and not in Word 6.0:
+ Red underline marks for misspelled words.
+ Word 2000 file format compatibility
+ Improved stability with documents with very large embedded pictures and objects.
Word 6.0 was essentially a feature complete program, and there just hasn't been that much that even all the geniuses at Microsoft could think of adding. If you have any doubts about this, ask Mr Clippy "What's New in Word?" (Ooo, new table border styles!)
Most users are currently on Office 97, and will be for a year or more past the upcoming Office XP release. If it weren't for the interoperability issues, most users would still be on Word 6 or Word 95.
Maybe tabular data meets all of your needs, but obviously someone is having some problem with it, or they wouldn't be inventing alternatives.
For one, converting from a tabular or CDF stream to (say) a HTML table or a GUI grid control is fairly problematic and fragile, not to mention boring because every programmers has had to do it 10 million times.
Tranforming XML to another structured format (or even to your precious tabstopped text) is a pretty trival activity with the tools available.
My understanding is the main scalability bottleneck at Slashdot is the database server, and that's primarily due to the fact that it's running mySQL, and it's still running mySQL due to the fact that the core slashcode is not database independant.
But anyway, saying SOAP or any sort of message passing is the magic bullet without knowing the app foolhardy PHB talk. Since Slashdot is running is such a controlled environment, you could do distributed processing with far lower-level rolled-your-own socket code, for example.
Although, it would be cool to get Slashdot as an XML document that you could format client-side using a XSLT or CSS stylesheet. Or insert a middle tier that does the XML to HTML formatting seperate from the content generation.
Slashdot Mirror
When and if the non-expiring key is required, issue a new .dll or patch that will accept a non-expiring key, issued with the key.
The problem with this is that small software houses that are going under are usually more worried about making payroll than creating a patch to their copy protection routines.
Of course, they never had the insight that they would go out of business in the first place, so this patch wouldn't have been ready ahead of time.
Someone else mentioned a third party "Software Licence Bureau", that could issue keys after companies had gone away. However, that's a single point of hacking, so it's unlikely that would be a solution either.
Back when I did more camping, I did see a couple black helicopters flying around while in National Forest areas in Arizona and New Mexico (fast-looking news copter-type things).
Probably standard military ops (lots of military bases in those parts), and not a UN invasion force, but it's always bugged me to see "Black Helicopter" used as a synonym for crazy..
This from a twat who diddles himself publicly with lame Monty Pythonesque retreds and affirmations of his own anal fixation. Your pocket protector is showing, cunt.
Most motherboards use Intel chipsets. If Intel includes USB 2.0 support in the standard chipset, it will be a feature that people pay for if they like it or not.
PCs shipped with USB ports for 2 years before there was any software support. Obviously, they would have cut that cost if they could have.
I'm not usually a troll-biter, but there is a valid point there. There's a long tradition in the US for the Ku Klux Klan to use "K" spelling as a code-word for something they endorse. (Posters for "Kalvin Kooledge" used to be fairly common, for example. Check eBay for more.).
However, since the KDE folks are european, I wouldn't expect them to know this.
I don't think it's that important, but there should be some sensitivty there. Just as with folks who insist on using the word "cracker", which is a very common racial slur in parts of the US.
XML is only an opportunity for a solution.
Someone needs to define a standard schema for wordprocessing docs (Should be XHTML + CSS1/2/3, actually), spreadsheets, and presentation software. Then everyone needs to implement it.
Frankly, with 39 office app alternatives on the market for Unix, having an "open" format (XML or no) just doesn't cut it.
Oh, to be certain, Apple and Microsoft have been slapping each others backs (or kicking each other in the ass) since the 1970s.
However, I don't think MS is doing any favors to Apple here -- more like trying to eat their lunch. WinXP will ship with video-editing tools (just like Macs do today) and without DVCam (1394) support, that would be sort of pointless.
You apparently forgot about North shoving shredded paper into his secretary's bra to get it out of the building. I suspect Clinton got lucky only because the White House switched from IBM PROFS to something like MS Exchange.
Anway, as soon as I pressed submit, I knew I'd be a mark for the dittoheads.
That you are a hair-splitting shit?
I'm thinking of more concrete examples such as WinXP or VisualStudio.NET, neither of which much vapor was spread about until functional betas were in people's hands.
Remember that the Cairo talk started before either Windows 95 or NT 4.0 shipped. Perhaps "Hailstorm" fits this model, but I have a feeling that it doesn't.
Unfortunately we won't have any more Ollie Norths, who entered all thier evil plans into the e-mail system and felt that pressing Delete was good enough protection. Oh wait, Microsoft executives did the same thing...
The idea of dictating all of your evil plans into a tape recorder has also been pretty much discredited.
So, you take a specific problem domain (health care), and figure that if someone hasn't generalized that out to every problem domain, you conclude that you might as well be using flat text files. XML is supposed to be the infrastructure to make this possible, BTW -- if MS and Oracle can't agree on their dataset format, that's not really a problem with the underlying technology.
I can't tell you how many interfaces I have built in my life
And how many bugs have you created in low-level parsing and message passing code? Don't get me wrong - I know there's programmers out there that have spent their entire professional life maintaining fragile interface code, and sure it puts food on the table, but there's also got to be a better way.
Data Integration has always been the #1 problem in IT, and always will be. Nobody thinks they've got the magic bullet -- but putting new tools in the toolbox can't be a bad thing, assuming they work.
1. Microsoft is interested in rental pricing for their software (something that IBM and other have been doing for 30 years!)
.NET.
.NET and .NET software won't necessarily be rented.
2. Microsoft is obsoleting their COM/DCOM technology platform in favor of a new platform called
3. Points 1 and 2 aren't necessarily related -- rental software will exist without
Netscape's original business plan was never to charge for the browser. The place I worked at the time wanted to roll Navigator 1.0 out to 5000 desktops, but woudn't do so unless Netscape took their money for a support contract. Our Netscape 'rep' had no idea what to do with this offer. By v1.1N, they figured out that having money waved in your face wasn't such a bad idea.
The entire idea of Netscape's psuedo-free browser was supposed to be free advertising for their server products. You can blame Netscape's death on Apache/IIS and free SMTP/IMAP servers to a much greater degree than you can blame IE.
The browser was never "their business", and the sad fact that a whole bunch of homepages pointed to the default setting of http://www.netscape.com/ was the only real asset picked up by AOL just shows that their gamble at being an enterprise server vendor failed mightily.
Sorry, most regular users and businesses do not use cracks or lurk in IRC to find FTP sites. They do pass around a single CD, etc. Microsoft isn't interested in the hardcore pirate market, they are interested in making casual piracy less attractive.
Microsoft's operating system timetable made some very interesting changes from "Cairo" (originally slated to ship in 1996) to "Windows 2000". One thing I remember about this period is that this release was 9-12 months away for virtually the whole time.
Trying to find any information on the web about previous product plans is nearly impossible. My suggestion is to head down to the local library and see if they have old copies/microfitch of "PC Week" or "Infoworld". ZDNet pubs are especially good because they tended to be more sycophantic to Microsoft. The more consumer oriented mags like PC Magazine might have some good info too.
Of course, none of this information will be officially from Microsoft. But I think it's clear who is whispering into journalist's ears. In MS's defense, nowdays they don't quite blow the vapor like they used to.
And the difference between that situation and the situation today is only the cost of writing a middleware piece that transforms the format and data between these systems.
Nobody said that integration is easy. It is in fact the most expensive and problematic part of information technology. On one hand, anything that makes it easier is a good thing. On the other, tech like XML formats are just another thing that you have to integrate everything with in 2^n fashion.
Don't make IT PHBs out to be that stupid. These problems are old as the hills and nobody expects an easy or cheap answer.
FYI, is a W3C recommendation which Microsoft refuses to support.
Considering it says "Stingray" or "Sting Ray" right on the back of the things, and that my use of "inbred" was correct, fuck you.
I should have mentioned that I agree with the jist of your post. Of course it could be done better now, except for the problem that most modern IT is too vendor-identified to get the universal coverage of something like NNTP.
I always thought NNTP was cool because it was a distributed, replicated, client-server collaberation system for the masses 20 years before arguably inferior commercial implementations (ahem,Exchange Public Folders) existed.
Yeah, it's sort of a hack, but not as much of one as (say) SMTP mail...
The one thing they will never do is reduce the amount of money they think they can get from you.
Right now the cost of Office for a large portion of users is $0 because it's warezed. By increasing copy protection and lowering the entry cost (through rental), MS is betting that they can get more money by getting all the deadbeats to pay up.
As the guy said, if it only cost (say) $20/year to use Word for the couple times you needed it, that might be more attractive than having $600 of pirated software, just in case.
Features (that I use) that are in Word 2000 and not in Word 6.0:
+ Red underline marks for misspelled words.
+ Word 2000 file format compatibility
+ Improved stability with documents with very large embedded pictures and objects.
Word 6.0 was essentially a feature complete program, and there just hasn't been that much that even all the geniuses at Microsoft could think of adding. If you have any doubts about this, ask Mr Clippy "What's New in Word?" (Ooo, new table border styles!)
Most users are currently on Office 97, and will be for a year or more past the upcoming Office XP release. If it weren't for the interoperability issues, most users would still be on Word 6 or Word 95.
Maybe tabular data meets all of your needs, but obviously someone is having some problem with it, or they wouldn't be inventing alternatives.
For one, converting from a tabular or CDF stream to (say) a HTML table or a GUI grid control is fairly problematic and fragile, not to mention boring because every programmers has had to do it 10 million times.
Tranforming XML to another structured format (or even to your precious tabstopped text) is a pretty trival activity with the tools available.
My understanding is the main scalability bottleneck at Slashdot is the database server, and that's primarily due to the fact that it's running mySQL, and it's still running mySQL due to the fact that the core slashcode is not database independant.
But anyway, saying SOAP or any sort of message passing is the magic bullet without knowing the app foolhardy PHB talk. Since Slashdot is running is such a controlled environment, you could do distributed processing with far lower-level rolled-your-own socket code, for example.
Although, it would be cool to get Slashdot as an XML document that you could format client-side using a XSLT or CSS stylesheet. Or insert a middle tier that does the XML to HTML formatting seperate from the content generation.