DRM laden products are slowly being rejected by the marketplace. Capitalism is a bitch isn't it?
I reject the view that their business model should continue into perpetuity, just because they feel it should be so. Don't buy from these morons. Without cash, their businesses die.
Actually, we were running a mix of Dell Optiplex machines - their "business class" machine and we replaced all of them with iMacs.
The Dell business class machines held up OK, but the iMacs have been better.
We did not run any Dell laptops for student use. We went straight to Macbooks when we decided on laptops for student use. This decision was based on the success we had with the iMacs.
I am an IT director for a small private school (public districts send us kids). We have adequate resources at our disposal, but I wouldn't call us a "rich" school.
We have finally replaced every Dell desktop with a Mac as of this year. We are still solidly Windows in the server room, but every other machine in our two locations is a Mac.
Yes, they were a bit more expensive than what we could have bought from Dell or HP, but the usefulness of Mac OS on robustly built hardware is worth the expense.
Out of 100 or so iMacs and 200 or so MacBooks, we've had about 15 keyboard failures (the keys were popped/ripped off), 2 cracked laptop screens, and 2 hard drive failures - this has been over 3 years.
Students are extremely hard on the machines, yet they keep right on working. Contrast this to the Dells we used to have. Keyboards and mice were constantly being replaced, USB ports and power switches routinely failed, many LCD screens were thrown away due to panel or backlight failure....etc.
Now here's the clincher - only two Macs in three years had to be re-imaged due to "software" issues. Our windows machines were being regularly reimaged due to numerous software problems.
Our switch to Macs has been a resounding success. I can't imagine that we are the only company in the world to realize the benefits of the Mac platform.
Adobe's problem of distributing out of date software highlights a bigger problem in the software industry - patch management.
It is an absurd situation when you must go through a patch cycle MULTIPLE times to get your software to a current state. Microsoft and Adobe are horrible at this.
Install a fresh copy of Windows, or Adobe's creative suite and count how many times you must run the updater until it reports that you are current and that there are no further updates to apply. Usually the number hovers around 3 or 4 times. Most non-technical users will assume that the machine is up to date after the first go around. This results in vulnerable machines running around the internet.
Contrast Microsoft's/Adobe's/Apple's stupid approach to my Ubuntu machine. One update run is all that is needed to bring the entire machine up to date.
The major software manufacturers must know this is an issue. I can only assume that they don't give a shit.
I've had at least one newspaper delivered to my house every day for the last few years, and I have not paid for a single one. My current free papers are the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times.
It never fails - one way or another, I get free paper offers that usually last 6 months to a year. Usually they come in the mail (both home and work), or from an offer through my credit card company. The two local papers in my area occasionally drop their papers on my doorstep for a few months hoping to "hook" me. Between the free national papers, and the local ones, there is no shortage of free newspapers at my house.
Eventually the freebie ends and the publisher wants me to pay - to which I say "no thanks".
During the dry spells of free papers, I get my news through many online sources, or radio, or TV. Local news agencies have even started publishing news via free iPhone apps.
The end result of all of this is that there are just too many damn ways to get news for free. The cat is out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and Elvis has left the building.
Ad supported "free" news is here and there is no going back.
We are a small school with about 250 desktops and 30 servers. We finally said goodbye to Symantec Corporate AV after repeated failures by the product to do anything useful.
We looked at free alternatives, but settled on Sophos AV for its Mac and PC support in one admin console.
Educational pricing was quite good, and the support (the few times we needed it) has been good also.
I haven't had as much luck getting rid of Backup Exec - everything I've tried has been worse that BE. So, for now, BE stays.
Symantec, you are losing market share not due to free alternatives, but because you SUCK.
The bugs have extended to 2008 server as well. I've had instances where I (logged in as an admin) could not modify the permissions on the root of a drive - even though UAC was disabled.
The fix is temporarily enabling UAC, setting the drive permissions, and then re-disabling UAC.
UAC is a piece of shit, and it even gets in your way when it is DISABLED.
The Germans did decide to go the "high-tech" route, knowing full well their supply/material/manufacturing capacity limitations.
With this knowledge, the Germans did, in fact, bet the war on advanced technology. They thought a technological edge would overcome the capacity limitations of their industrial machine. It's not like they had no other options.
They could have surrendered when they realized that fuel, materials, and manpower were short, but they didn't. They bet on advanced technology over capacity and it cost them the war.
Of course, the alternative scenario above assumes a logical way of self-preservation style thinking - something Hitler was hardly capable of after advanced Syphilis (and possibly Parkinson's by the look of his shaky hands on some old war footage) started to erode his mental capacity.
Technical sophistication is one advantage on the battlefield, but manufacturing capacity is also important.
The Germans choose technical complexity over quantity believing that superior machines could beat the vast numbers of inferior machines the allies built.
The Germans were wrong.
As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own". A stealth aircraft or two may have been pretty trick, but if you have thousands of targets to bomb, you better have hundreds if not thousands of aircraft (and pilots) to do the job.
yet they enjoy the Wii. They have no interest in high frame rates or high resolution gaming, but they do like Wii Fit, Wii sports, and a couple of kids games.
Would either of these two have the slightest interest in PS3 or Xbox360? I don't know about the PS3, but we had a 360 and returned it since no one (in our household) had any interest in it.
Wii opened up consoles to non-gamers, and that is a huge accomplishment. It may even drive future sales of more advanced consoles as the 3-10 year old Wii customers grow into teenagers.
Making consoles accessible to moms and kids isn't a bad strategy. Mom remembers the fun she had with the Wii, and when the future teenager asks for PS5 or Xbox720, mom might just be more open to buying it.
Paper based books are still the preferred way of reading materials, but e-books perform two very unique functions for us:
Foreign newspapers: Students get to read foreign newspapers translated to English daily. It is difficult to do this with traditional papers. Some foreign newspapers are not even offered in North America.
Text to speech: Dyslexic students love voice assisted reading. It helps them just enough to encourage them to read harder materials than they would on their own.
Yes, they are expensive, and they are not spill resistant, but this interesting bit of technology does have it's uses.
I am skeptical about an e-books ability to replace all printed texts.
OK, not if you are one of the people losing your jobs due to this clown, but think of the public policy repercussions!
Finally, our Government will have no (political) reasons to prefer Microsoft software. If Microsoft's products are imported, then our Government might actually start evaluating software based on it's merits.
Next we need the pharmaceutical, music, and movie industries to move off-shore - then our politicians may actually want to fix copyright laws.
When I managed a bank network, I hired an firm to audit and document our network, policies, and procedures.
This served two purposes:
Using a third party, you get a better perspective on the design of your network from the outside. Many networks suffer from "this is the way it has always been done" syndrome, and a third party opinion may better reflect what an outside hire will want to see if you need to be replaced.
Regulatory compliance. If you are managing a network for a regulated industry (medical, financial, public/government enterprise...etc), you may be required by law to (regularly) have an outside firm audit your network. If this is required, you may as well have these guys do your documentation for you.
Peer review is a good thing in the software business - professional network engineers should also use it.
My "lowly" shop classes in middle school opened my eyes to the world of engineering. I may not have pursued engineering/computer science if it were not for those classes.
I actually had a "guidance counselor" try to steer me away from mechanical drawing class since I was "college bound".
Guess what class ALL first year engineering students MUST take - Mechanical and Computer aided drawing.
I am amazed that we (the United States) produce as many engineers and scientists as we do. We do that in spite of our educational system, not as a result of it.
Most users of operating systems think their OS is free. It came with the computer they bought, and the additional cost of the operating system is almost completely unknown in a typical computer purchase.
As a matter of fact, I don't know any (non-technical) user that has ever actually bought an operating system without an accompanying hardware purchase. These types of users buy new computers when the old ones are two slow, or are broken. Whatever comes on the new computer is what they use.
This problem is further illustrated in the return rates of Linux based netbooks. The price difference (about $50 in most cases) is not enough to sway the average computer user to an unfamiliar operating system.
Price should matter, but in the scope of a hardware purchase, operating system cost is almost irrelevant. Linux will need to compete on features and functionality, because cost is not enough.
The entire reason we bought Kindles was the text to speech function. Our school teaches dyslexic kids and any technology that allows these kids to read ANY book, whether or not an audio book version is available, is extremely useful.
Without unlimited text to speech kindles are reduced, from a useful teaching tool, to simply a nifty gadget. Without TTS, there is very little to justify the cost of these over other e-book readers.
Good job Amazon! You've just allowed your book publishers to kill a potentially HUGE market for these things - schools.
I do care about the bandwidth that I paid for, and that you are using to deliver ads. The bandwidth and time required to download and view your ads takes away from MY bandwidth and time.
If my not viewing ads causes you to go out of business, I DON'T CARE.
I pay to support sites (and services) I care about. If you give your shit away for free, don't be surprised when people actually take it.
The internet existed before you, and will continue to exist without you.
Slashdot Mirror
DRM laden products are slowly being rejected by the marketplace. Capitalism is a bitch isn't it?
I reject the view that their business model should continue into perpetuity, just because they feel it should be so. Don't buy from these morons. Without cash, their businesses die.
-ted
Actually, we were running a mix of Dell Optiplex machines - their "business class" machine and we replaced all of them with iMacs.
The Dell business class machines held up OK, but the iMacs have been better.
We did not run any Dell laptops for student use. We went straight to Macbooks when we decided on laptops for student use. This decision was based on the success we had with the iMacs.
-ted
I am an IT director for a small private school (public districts send us kids). We have adequate resources at our disposal, but I wouldn't call us a "rich" school.
We have finally replaced every Dell desktop with a Mac as of this year. We are still solidly Windows in the server room, but every other machine in our two locations is a Mac.
Yes, they were a bit more expensive than what we could have bought from Dell or HP, but the usefulness of Mac OS on robustly built hardware is worth the expense.
Out of 100 or so iMacs and 200 or so MacBooks, we've had about 15 keyboard failures (the keys were popped/ripped off), 2 cracked laptop screens, and 2 hard drive failures - this has been over 3 years.
Students are extremely hard on the machines, yet they keep right on working. Contrast this to the Dells we used to have. Keyboards and mice were constantly being replaced, USB ports and power switches routinely failed, many LCD screens were thrown away due to panel or backlight failure....etc.
Now here's the clincher - only two Macs in three years had to be re-imaged due to "software" issues. Our windows machines were being regularly reimaged due to numerous software problems.
Our switch to Macs has been a resounding success. I can't imagine that we are the only company in the world to realize the benefits of the Mac platform.
-ted
Adobe's problem of distributing out of date software highlights a bigger problem in the software industry - patch management.
It is an absurd situation when you must go through a patch cycle MULTIPLE times to get your software to a current state. Microsoft and Adobe are horrible at this.
Install a fresh copy of Windows, or Adobe's creative suite and count how many times you must run the updater until it reports that you are current and that there are no further updates to apply. Usually the number hovers around 3 or 4 times. Most non-technical users will assume that the machine is up to date after the first go around. This results in vulnerable machines running around the internet.
Contrast Microsoft's/Adobe's/Apple's stupid approach to my Ubuntu machine. One update run is all that is needed to bring the entire machine up to date.
The major software manufacturers must know this is an issue. I can only assume that they don't give a shit.
-ted
I've had at least one newspaper delivered to my house every day for the last few years, and I have not paid for a single one. My current free papers are the Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times.
It never fails - one way or another, I get free paper offers that usually last 6 months to a year. Usually they come in the mail (both home and work), or from an offer through my credit card company. The two local papers in my area occasionally drop their papers on my doorstep for a few months hoping to "hook" me. Between the free national papers, and the local ones, there is no shortage of free newspapers at my house.
Eventually the freebie ends and the publisher wants me to pay - to which I say "no thanks".
During the dry spells of free papers, I get my news through many online sources, or radio, or TV. Local news agencies have even started publishing news via free iPhone apps.
The end result of all of this is that there are just too many damn ways to get news for free. The cat is out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube, and Elvis has left the building.
Ad supported "free" news is here and there is no going back.
-ted
We are a small school with about 250 desktops and 30 servers. We finally said goodbye to Symantec Corporate AV after repeated failures by the product to do anything useful.
We looked at free alternatives, but settled on Sophos AV for its Mac and PC support in one admin console.
Educational pricing was quite good, and the support (the few times we needed it) has been good also.
I haven't had as much luck getting rid of Backup Exec - everything I've tried has been worse that BE. So, for now, BE stays.
Symantec, you are losing market share not due to free alternatives, but because you SUCK.
-ted
The bugs have extended to 2008 server as well. I've had instances where I (logged in as an admin) could not modify the permissions on the root of a drive - even though UAC was disabled.
The fix is temporarily enabling UAC, setting the drive permissions, and then re-disabling UAC.
UAC is a piece of shit, and it even gets in your way when it is DISABLED.
That's a bug.
-ted
The Germans did decide to go the "high-tech" route, knowing full well their supply/material/manufacturing capacity limitations.
With this knowledge, the Germans did, in fact, bet the war on advanced technology. They thought a technological edge would overcome the capacity limitations of their industrial machine. It's not like they had no other options.
They could have surrendered when they realized that fuel, materials, and manpower were short, but they didn't. They bet on advanced technology over capacity and it cost them the war.
Of course, the alternative scenario above assumes a logical way of self-preservation style thinking - something Hitler was hardly capable of after advanced Syphilis (and possibly Parkinson's by the look of his shaky hands on some old war footage) started to erode his mental capacity.
-ted
Technical sophistication is one advantage on the battlefield, but manufacturing capacity is also important.
The Germans choose technical complexity over quantity believing that superior machines could beat the vast numbers of inferior machines the allies built.
The Germans were wrong.
As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own". A stealth aircraft or two may have been pretty trick, but if you have thousands of targets to bomb, you better have hundreds if not thousands of aircraft (and pilots) to do the job.
-ted
And I don't miss it. I have plenty of DVDs, DVRed material, and streaming content (iTunes, Boxee, Cable Co, and Satellite) to keep me entertained.
As a matter of fact, apart from the few Blu-Ray movies I own, I would probably never miss my player if it was never returned to me.
Alternative content sources, apart from cost, may be Blu-Ray's biggest problem.
-ted
yet they enjoy the Wii. They have no interest in high frame rates or high resolution gaming, but they do like Wii Fit, Wii sports, and a couple of kids games.
Would either of these two have the slightest interest in PS3 or Xbox360? I don't know about the PS3, but we had a 360 and returned it since no one (in our household) had any interest in it.
Wii opened up consoles to non-gamers, and that is a huge accomplishment. It may even drive future sales of more advanced consoles as the 3-10 year old Wii customers grow into teenagers.
Making consoles accessible to moms and kids isn't a bad strategy. Mom remembers the fun she had with the Wii, and when the future teenager asks for PS5 or Xbox720, mom might just be more open to buying it.
-ted
OK, so it is a bit hard to get your documents out once you put them in to this system, but man, does it tidy up a mess of documents.
-ted
Paper based books are still the preferred way of reading materials, but e-books perform two very unique functions for us:
Foreign newspapers: Students get to read foreign newspapers translated to English daily. It is difficult to do this with traditional papers. Some foreign newspapers are not even offered in North America.
Text to speech: Dyslexic students love voice assisted reading. It helps them just enough to encourage them to read harder materials than they would on their own.
Yes, they are expensive, and they are not spill resistant, but this interesting bit of technology does have it's uses.
I am skeptical about an e-books ability to replace all printed texts.
-ted
OK, not if you are one of the people losing your jobs due to this clown, but think of the public policy repercussions!
Finally, our Government will have no (political) reasons to prefer Microsoft software. If Microsoft's products are imported, then our Government might actually start evaluating software based on it's merits.
Next we need the pharmaceutical, music, and movie industries to move off-shore - then our politicians may actually want to fix copyright laws.
-ted
How could you do a credible review of Unified Security Appliances without including one from a tiny little networking company called Cisco?
It would have been nice to see how the ASA5500 series appliances stood up to the test.
-ted
When I managed a bank network, I hired an firm to audit and document our network, policies, and procedures.
This served two purposes:
Using a third party, you get a better perspective on the design of your network from the outside. Many networks suffer from "this is the way it has always been done" syndrome, and a third party opinion may better reflect what an outside hire will want to see if you need to be replaced.
Regulatory compliance. If you are managing a network for a regulated industry (medical, financial, public/government enterprise...etc), you may be required by law to (regularly) have an outside firm audit your network. If this is required, you may as well have these guys do your documentation for you.
Peer review is a good thing in the software business - professional network engineers should also use it.
-ted
My "lowly" shop classes in middle school opened my eyes to the world of engineering. I may not have pursued engineering/computer science if it were not for those classes.
I actually had a "guidance counselor" try to steer me away from mechanical drawing class since I was "college bound".
Guess what class ALL first year engineering students MUST take - Mechanical and Computer aided drawing.
I am amazed that we (the United States) produce as many engineers and scientists as we do. We do that in spite of our educational system, not as a result of it.
-ted
Most users of operating systems think their OS is free. It came with the computer they bought, and the additional cost of the operating system is almost completely unknown in a typical computer purchase.
As a matter of fact, I don't know any (non-technical) user that has ever actually bought an operating system without an accompanying hardware purchase. These types of users buy new computers when the old ones are two slow, or are broken. Whatever comes on the new computer is what they use.
This problem is further illustrated in the return rates of Linux based netbooks. The price difference (about $50 in most cases) is not enough to sway the average computer user to an unfamiliar operating system.
Price should matter, but in the scope of a hardware purchase, operating system cost is almost irrelevant. Linux will need to compete on features and functionality, because cost is not enough.
-ted
This question MUST be answered to the satisfaction of MILLIONS of end users before Linux will become popular on the desktop:
What can I do with Linux that I can not do with Mac OS or Windows?
Living in "software freedom" is not an acceptable answer.
GM, for the first time in years is producing cars of decent quality, yet they are staring death in the face. Why?
The average car buyer asked a similar question: "Why should I buy a GM over a Toyota or Honda?"
The lesson here is that users will continue to rely on the devil they know versus they devil they do not know.
Linux needs to have capabilities not found on proprietary systems; that will give end users reasons to switch. Nothing else matters.
-ted
A CFO at a local community bank once told me (I was the manager of network services for the bank):
"I don't want to know how the watch works, I just want to know what time it is."
That put my job into perspective.
-ted
Why oh why can't a company the size of Microsoft develop Office for Mac so it works like the Windows version?
At the very least, Outlook and Entourage feature parity would be nice.
-ted
for a 1963 Opel Kadett.
I told them I was planning a trip across Botswana, and I wanted to make sure the vehicle was covered.
Those bastards hung up on me.
The entire reason we bought Kindles was the text to speech function. Our school teaches dyslexic kids and any technology that allows these kids to read ANY book, whether or not an audio book version is available, is extremely useful.
Without unlimited text to speech kindles are reduced, from a useful teaching tool, to simply a nifty gadget. Without TTS, there is very little to justify the cost of these over other e-book readers.
Good job Amazon! You've just allowed your book publishers to kill a potentially HUGE market for these things - schools.
-ted
but not enough to pay for it.
If Slashdot went to a subscription only model, I would stop using it.
Capitalism can be a real bitch.
-ted
I don't care about you.
I don't care about your business model.
I do care about the bandwidth that I paid for, and that you are using to deliver ads. The bandwidth and time required to download and view your ads takes away from MY bandwidth and time.
If my not viewing ads causes you to go out of business, I DON'T CARE.
I pay to support sites (and services) I care about. If you give your shit away for free, don't be surprised when people actually take it.
The internet existed before you, and will continue to exist without you.
-ted