Yes, but 1300 x $NT_LICENSE_FEE is still a fair chunk of change. I'm sure it won't really make a huge difference to the bottom line in the long run, but saving (1300x$NT_LICENSE_FEE) is certainly a good thing, perhaps leaving a little extra money to spend elsewhere, making the actors/staff happier, or more special effects, etc.
Quote from MS's shared source FAQ
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 2
Why did Microsoft decide to highlight the Shared Source Philosophy at this time?
We have reflected on this issue over a number of years and received requests from customers and partners to clearly state our position. It is important to have a framework to examine the debate from the business or technical perspective. The Commercial Software Model is based on the following classification: Community, Standards, Business Models, Investment (R&D) and Licensing. This is a debate about the importance of intellectual property in business and about the models being employed in the market today. Ultimately, it is individuals, businesses, the market and policy makers who together will decide the role of intellectual property in the economy.
Translation: people were thinking of going with open source, so we pulled this out of our asses to convince people we were the nice guys.
Just like in HHGTTG, if you were able to get there (or in this case pay) you'd have known about it right?
Of course, how else are they going to stop the little guys like us from catching big business with their pants around their ankles for putting patents out on things like multiplayer games. Fuckers. I mean, when society is heading toward freedom of information, what more do we need than a ministry of information. I know this isn't quite to that degree yet, but it's a start. Make it less accessable to the common man, and then they start making it harder and harder to get access, until finally, this "public" office has nothing for the public to worry about..... move along, nothing to see here.
Reading on (and replying to myself) it's interesting to see how this goes totally against their "shared source" initiative. On one hand give out your source code lets anyone look at it and the evil hackers will find bugs and take down your servers. On the other hand, we are giving away more and more of our source code in the "shared source" initiative.
"Open source" means that anyone can get a copy of the source code. Developers can find security weaknesses very easily with Linux. The same is not true with Microsoft Windows.
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't this say that MS is less secure because developers can't find security weeaknesses in their software? Now I know this is true, as will most linux advocats, but is this really what MS meant to say?
Captain Kirk ran around the galaxy without adult supervision, and the messes he escaped from were of his own creation as often as not. He, McCoy, and SPock were not so much individuals, but different aspects of humanity. NOt only were the programs several minutes longer, but they didn' waste several of the remaining minutes on "character development," holo-adventures, or poker games. They just told the story.
Who wants to bet that McCoy will make a guest appearance in the first few episodes as his own grandfather or something...
There was actually a story circulated around the late 80's early 90's on the BBSs I frequented called "Trek Leap" which was a story in where the quantum leap project somehow leapt forward in time and Scott Bakula leapt into the body of Captain Picard. It was actually a really good story, with his buddy hologram (forget his name) jumping into the body of Riker at one point.
Like I said, sounds corny, but if you like star trek and Quantum leap, it was a great story. Anyone got a copy of it floating around somewhere? I wouldn't mind reading it again.
Konquerer is not all there so that leaves Opra. I don't know but it seems like a pretty sad state of affairs for the Linux camp.
Yup, I agree:( It sucks, especially for those of us who are forced to use X509 signed email.
However, there are a few projects out there, the most promising that I've dealt with is Galeon, a gnome browser based on the mozilla engine. It still requires mozilla and it's libs, but the browser itself is quite stable, has cool features (tabbed and multi window browsing, https support, cookie support, bookmark import/export... ). Lets just say that I haven't used netscape for a while now (except for flash/rm pages) and galeon is my primary browser.
Not the perfect solution, but I'm glad its around because you are absolutely right, browsers are in a sad state for linux right now. Mozilla rocks, but it's just not there (yet) for daily browsing.
I had to admit it, but IE *is* good. It used to suck, but now netscape is basically dead, it's a decent browser. I'd have liked to have seen what would have happened if NS and IE had continued along their competing paths, and if they would have just drowned in each others added useless features, or would have actually improved each other (what that whole "competition/inovation" thing is all about).
Not for the browser... no, I can easily live in my galeon-ized world quite happily without the netscape browser. Unfortunately, I still need digital signing/encrypting ability for my mail, and my company has adopted X509 (verisign) certs for this. As all inter-company mail must be encrypted, I can't get around this.
Yes, I tried to convince them to use pgp/gpg, but the lack of integration with netscape and other (windows) mail clients made that no happen:( I *really* wanted it to.
There is alread a bug about this in the bugzilla database, but it looks like they aren't going to be able to get it in by 1.0:( Yes, I'd love to help them instead of just bitching, and I would if I had any experience coding this part of the system.
Well, --nodeps works fine if it's the RPM being a PITA, but if the dependancies are actually needed...
Besides, this is the Wrong Way(tm) to do it. I remember talking to the Helix Code guys at the last LWE I went to and how they shuddered every time someone "fixed" their install problems by just doing --no-deps.
Besides, wouldn't it make more sense to make a better distrobution mechanism so that the automatic response for people who have RPM problems is something other than --no-deps? I've used --force-depandancies exactly 0 times since I started using debian, and --force-overwrite approxitely 10 (for unstable packages that I was playing with).
This is why I'm bitching about RPM:)
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
on
Mozilla 0.9 Out
·
· Score: 2
IE *really* doesn't handle memory properly. When I have moderator status I go to any/. discussion with > 100 or so comments (nested mode) and scroll a bit, and laugh as IE dies, and suddenly all my other programs start to die or give me the standard "out of memory" errors.
In a related note, when are X509 Certs for signing/encrypting mail going to be used? This is something that I feel should be in before 1.0, and is the last thing that is keeping me using "Fucking Netscape 4 point X" (as it is known to the guys at work).
A discussion went on on the trip home between me and a couple of other guys from my work about RPM vs. DEB. Basically it was put forth as such:
"Why doesn't RedHat just dump RPM and go to DEB?"
And why not? I'm not a developer of packages, so I don't know the differences between building a deb vs rpm, but what are the technical issues surrounding converting a redhat distro to RPM.
Yes, a lot of paths would have to change, and some other additions and subtractions would have to be made. Do debs support signing as RPMs do (or so I've heard)? No clue.
So from a technological, NOT a religious, view, why not?
Regarding the LSB move toward RPM (or at least indication), I think that's a very bad thing. Either put a lot of evidence and ask a lot of people which is better for linux, not for who is contributing the most $, or choose none at all.
Yes, I'm a debian user and have been for about 5 years now. I've played with redhat and mandrake) on occasion, and my experiences have been not good, not to do with the install (awsome) or the system (not what I'm used to but nothing wrong with it) but with RPM.
IE: I need to install rpm of package foo. Get package foo, try to install. unmet dependancies, get dependancies, install them, get more unmet dependancies. bitch on irc. Someone suggested using rpmfind. get rpmfind rpm, install, get unmet dependancies.... continue until hands were thrown up in the air and I gave up.
Now that's my experience, and as a debian user I don't know all the cool places to get the rpms I need, just as a redhat user when thrown in front of a debian box probably wouldn't know how to set up a sources.list from scratch or where to get xyz information. But I digress:)
Basically I think that deb, while still not 100% (signing, ssl support, plus whatever features it still needs to make it feature for feature the same as RPM), is still better than RPM as far as functionality. My vote is to either
a) make a judement based on technology
b) make no judement at all (which they've done)
c) don't lean one way or the other (which they've done)
I think that it's incrediably stupid to have to sign up to read a few (small) pages on how to make or edit a theme.
However, I'm impressed that IMBs site defaults to the option of "don't use my information for markinet or give it to anyone" instead the standard of having the "send spam to me" checkbox checked by default.
Try getting any information from shockwave.com if you are on linux. They not only filter you out via browser (mozilla/netscape6 and derivatives are denied) but they also filter by OS (they support any OS that has a name starting with "Windows"). The only way I could get in was by forging the user agent in konqeror (or is it opera?) to reflect an IE5/windows box. Funny thing is, the site worked just fine except for a couple of blank boxes where the shockwave plugin was.
It really pissed me off.... wrote a nasty latter to a bunch of @shockwave.com addresses (as I couldn't get to the 'contact us' page).
Galeon has an "allow popups" option, as well as "open popups in tab". I have it set to the latter, so I can close the tabs whenever I feel it's overloading, and because you don't have to actually view the tab to close it, I deprive them of another set of eyeballs.
Not only boost the popularity of the project itself, but boost the number of people lashing out at apple itself (ie: my email to my fellow geeks at work entitled "why apple is dumb" and referencing this).
Of course, they wouldn't get the negative PR if they didn't do such incrediably-fscking-stupid things!
Geeks are prone to lash back at things they object to, sometimese rightly, and sometimes wrongly (insert reference to the linux advocacy howto here). However, I think that in this case we are completely right to lash out at apple, or their lawyers, as they are finishing off with their own feet and turning the shotgun around to point at their own heads.
Don't forget that just because WMP8 provides the functionality doesn't mean that you have to use it. Even if the provided windows software is there and crappy, doesn't mean that people will never use MP3s again.... why can't they just use third party apps like they always have?
What about places like this, who have exactly the same content, to a far less tasteful degree (yup, less tasteful than columbine jokes) and far more of it. Don't they deserve threatening letters as well?
What if you don't have an ethernet card? I know it's silly to some of us (I have at least two home networks, plus a vpn to the office, and have been modem free for about 2+ years), but there are people that simply don't have a network card. What happens when one of these people buys XP and doesn't have a modem, much less an internet account, how is that going to work for registration?
Well yes and no. Of course they charge money for the software, but he skirted the issue of paying once for it, paying more than once? Paying multiple times for different computers, paying multiple times for differnt computer, etc etc. The issue comes back to "I upgraded my hard drive and now I have to go and re-activate my XP." Or better yet, my computer was destroyed in a fire and when I try to re-install XP (from the CD kept in the fireproof safe of course) it tells me I'm over my re-install limit and have to buy the software again".
Or something like that. I know that's not exactly the case, but you see what I'm saying (or more specifically, what he's not saying):)
I have some personal experience with this, from the other side. I work at a software development house, and about a year ago we release a firewall product, which was well recieved and well liked by our customers. In efforts to get our new product to market, which required a bit of a shift from our current way of doing things, from disks to disk-on-a-chips, we had a decision to make.
We could either hack the DOC support into our current (single firewall) product, or rewrite the entire thing from scratch, and Do It Right(tm). We decided on the latter, and after 3 months of the dev and QA team working till midnight (or later in some cases) we have a product that is 99% done. We're back to normal hours anyway, and have one version out the door. A second one is currently undergoing final QA.
But back on track.
Before all you needed was a registration key. This was created by a serial number that you got when you purchased the product combinged with your MAC address, creating a unique key. Without this you got a demo mode, but still could update to the latest and greatest software.
Well, sales had their way and decided that hey, we can make this a revenue stream, and decided to make people pay for upgrades. This involved creating a new key which was basically a support receipt. Show the receipt at the door and you get upgrades... don't want to pay? Get only the last released version, no upgrades, no security fixes, no nothing. I personally don't like it, but I'm not at the top of the food chain here, so I can't complain too much.
But you'll notice a few things here:
Nothing was taken away from current users. They get free upgrades to the software for a year IF THEY WANT. If they don't want to change anything, they dont' have to.
The nature of the software is not such that it's required to be updated all the time. If you want to use it once, get your firewall configured, and leave it forever, that's fine.
The new software has all the functionality of the original, and more.
Oh well, a little bit OT I'm sure, but it's interesting to see this from the other side. I wonder if this feature was originally put in because someone in the upper echelon said "hey, we can make more money from this thing!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but 1300 x $NT_LICENSE_FEE is still a fair chunk of change. I'm sure it won't really make a huge difference to the bottom line in the long run, but saving (1300x$NT_LICENSE_FEE) is certainly a good thing, perhaps leaving a little extra money to spend elsewhere, making the actors/staff happier, or more special effects, etc.
From the FAQ
Why did Microsoft decide to highlight the Shared Source Philosophy at this time?
We have reflected on this issue over a number of years and received requests from customers and partners to clearly state our position. It is important to have a framework to examine the debate from the business or technical perspective. The Commercial Software Model is based on the following classification: Community, Standards, Business Models, Investment (R&D) and Licensing. This is a debate about the importance of intellectual property in business and about the models being employed in the market today. Ultimately, it is individuals, businesses, the market and policy makers who together will decide the role of intellectual property in the economy.
Translation: people were thinking of going with open source, so we pulled this out of our asses to convince people we were the nice guys.
Bah.
Just like in HHGTTG, if you were able to get there (or in this case pay) you'd have known about it right?
:)
Of course, how else are they going to stop the little guys like us from catching big business with their pants around their ankles for putting patents out on things like multiplayer games. Fuckers. I mean, when society is heading toward freedom of information, what more do we need than a ministry of information. I know this isn't quite to that degree yet, but it's a start. Make it less accessable to the common man, and then they start making it harder and harder to get access, until finally, this "public" office has nothing for the public to worry about..... move along, nothing to see here.
</rant>
Sorry about that
Reading on (and replying to myself) it's interesting to see how this goes totally against their "shared source" initiative. On one hand give out your source code lets anyone look at it and the evil hackers will find bugs and take down your servers. On the other hand, we are giving away more and more of our source code in the "shared source" initiative.
Hmm....
Less Secure
"Open source" means that anyone can get a copy of the source code. Developers can find security weaknesses very easily with Linux. The same is not true with Microsoft Windows.
Maybe it's just me, but doesn't this say that MS is less secure because developers can't find security weeaknesses in their software? Now I know this is true, as will most linux advocats, but is this really what MS meant to say?
Captain Kirk ran around the galaxy without adult supervision, and the messes he escaped from were of his own creation as often as not. He, McCoy, and SPock were not so much individuals, but different aspects of humanity. NOt only were the programs several minutes longer, but they didn' waste several of the remaining minutes on "character development," holo-adventures, or poker games. They just told the story.
Who wants to bet that McCoy will make a guest appearance in the first few episodes as his own grandfather or something...
There was actually a story circulated around the late 80's early 90's on the BBSs I frequented called "Trek Leap" which was a story in where the quantum leap project somehow leapt forward in time and Scott Bakula leapt into the body of Captain Picard. It was actually a really good story, with his buddy hologram (forget his name) jumping into the body of Riker at one point.
Like I said, sounds corny, but if you like star trek and Quantum leap, it was a great story. Anyone got a copy of it floating around somewhere? I wouldn't mind reading it again.
Konquerer is not all there so that leaves Opra. I don't know but it seems like a pretty sad state of affairs for the Linux camp.
:( It sucks, especially for those of us who are forced to use X509 signed email.
Yup, I agree
However, there are a few projects out there, the most promising that I've dealt with is Galeon, a gnome browser based on the mozilla engine. It still requires mozilla and it's libs, but the browser itself is quite stable, has cool features (tabbed and multi window browsing, https support, cookie support, bookmark import/export... ). Lets just say that I haven't used netscape for a while now (except for flash/rm pages) and galeon is my primary browser.
Not the perfect solution, but I'm glad its around because you are absolutely right, browsers are in a sad state for linux right now. Mozilla rocks, but it's just not there (yet) for daily browsing.
I had to admit it, but IE *is* good. It used to suck, but now netscape is basically dead, it's a decent browser. I'd have liked to have seen what would have happened if NS and IE had continued along their competing paths, and if they would have just drowned in each others added useless features, or would have actually improved each other (what that whole "competition/inovation" thing is all about).
Not for the browser... no, I can easily live in my galeon-ized world quite happily without the netscape browser. Unfortunately, I still need digital signing/encrypting ability for my mail, and my company has adopted X509 (verisign) certs for this. As all inter-company mail must be encrypted, I can't get around this.
:( I *really* wanted it to.
:( Yes, I'd love to help them instead of just bitching, and I would if I had any experience coding this part of the system.
Yes, I tried to convince them to use pgp/gpg, but the lack of integration with netscape and other (windows) mail clients made that no happen
There is alread a bug about this in the bugzilla database, but it looks like they aren't going to be able to get it in by 1.0
Well, --nodeps works fine if it's the RPM being a PITA, but if the dependancies are actually needed...
:)
Besides, this is the Wrong Way(tm) to do it. I remember talking to the Helix Code guys at the last LWE I went to and how they shuddered every time someone "fixed" their install problems by just doing --no-deps.
Besides, wouldn't it make more sense to make a better distrobution mechanism so that the automatic response for people who have RPM problems is something other than --no-deps? I've used --force-depandancies exactly 0 times since I started using debian, and --force-overwrite approxitely 10 (for unstable packages that I was playing with).
This is why I'm bitching about RPM
IE *really* doesn't handle memory properly. When I have moderator status I go to any /. discussion with > 100 or so comments (nested mode) and scroll a bit, and laugh as IE dies, and suddenly all my other programs start to die or give me the standard "out of memory" errors.
:)
Mozilla under windows doesn't have this problem
In a related note, when are X509 Certs for signing/encrypting mail going to be used? This is something that I feel should be in before 1.0, and is the last thing that is keeping me using "Fucking Netscape 4 point X" (as it is known to the guys at work).
Offtopic, karma to burn, flame-war starter:
:)
A discussion went on on the trip home between me and a couple of other guys from my work about RPM vs. DEB. Basically it was put forth as such:
"Why doesn't RedHat just dump RPM and go to DEB?"
And why not? I'm not a developer of packages, so I don't know the differences between building a deb vs rpm, but what are the technical issues surrounding converting a redhat distro to RPM.
Yes, a lot of paths would have to change, and some other additions and subtractions would have to be made. Do debs support signing as RPMs do (or so I've heard)? No clue.
So from a technological, NOT a religious, view, why not?
Regarding the LSB move toward RPM (or at least indication), I think that's a very bad thing. Either put a lot of evidence and ask a lot of people which is better for linux, not for who is contributing the most $, or choose none at all.
Yes, I'm a debian user and have been for about 5 years now. I've played with redhat and mandrake) on occasion, and my experiences have been not good, not to do with the install (awsome) or the system (not what I'm used to but nothing wrong with it) but with RPM.
IE: I need to install rpm of package foo. Get package foo, try to install. unmet dependancies, get dependancies, install them, get more unmet dependancies. bitch on irc. Someone suggested using rpmfind. get rpmfind rpm, install, get unmet dependancies.... continue until hands were thrown up in the air and I gave up.
Now that's my experience, and as a debian user I don't know all the cool places to get the rpms I need, just as a redhat user when thrown in front of a debian box probably wouldn't know how to set up a sources.list from scratch or where to get xyz information. But I digress
Basically I think that deb, while still not 100% (signing, ssl support, plus whatever features it still needs to make it feature for feature the same as RPM), is still better than RPM as far as functionality. My vote is to either
a) make a judement based on technology
b) make no judement at all (which they've done)
c) don't lean one way or the other (which they've done)
Someone did that to a buddy of mine here at work a while back, and we had a few ideas on how to "deal" with it:
Vhat are you talkink about? I am not spyink on this wonderful country! How dare you be suggestink such lies!
Dirty Capitalist pigdog!
>:->
I think that it's incrediably stupid to have to sign up to read a few (small) pages on how to make or edit a theme.
However, I'm impressed that IMBs site defaults to the option of "don't use my information for markinet or give it to anyone" instead the standard of having the "send spam to me" checkbox checked by default.
Try getting any information from shockwave.com if you are on linux. They not only filter you out via browser (mozilla/netscape6 and derivatives are denied) but they also filter by OS (they support any OS that has a name starting with "Windows"). The only way I could get in was by forging the user agent in konqeror (or is it opera?) to reflect an IE5/windows box. Funny thing is, the site worked just fine except for a couple of blank boxes where the shockwave plugin was.
It really pissed me off.... wrote a nasty latter to a bunch of @shockwave.com addresses (as I couldn't get to the 'contact us' page).
Galeon has an "allow popups" option, as well as "open popups in tab". I have it set to the latter, so I can close the tabs whenever I feel it's overloading, and because you don't have to actually view the tab to close it, I deprive them of another set of eyeballs.
We have a geek mailing list at work, and while I wouldn't say "essay" I would say "minor rant" :)
I'm not crazy!
I'm not crazy!
Not only boost the popularity of the project itself, but boost the number of people lashing out at apple itself (ie: my email to my fellow geeks at work entitled "why apple is dumb" and referencing this).
Of course, they wouldn't get the negative PR if they didn't do such incrediably-fscking-stupid things!
Geeks are prone to lash back at things they object to, sometimese rightly, and sometimes wrongly (insert reference to the linux advocacy howto here). However, I think that in this case we are completely right to lash out at apple, or their lawyers, as they are finishing off with their own feet and turning the shotgun around to point at their own heads.
Don't forget that just because WMP8 provides the functionality doesn't mean that you have to use it. Even if the provided windows software is there and crappy, doesn't mean that people will never use MP3s again.... why can't they just use third party apps like they always have?
What about places like this, who have exactly the same content, to a far less tasteful degree (yup, less tasteful than columbine jokes) and far more of it. Don't they deserve threatening letters as well?
What if you don't have an ethernet card? I know it's silly to some of us (I have at least two home networks, plus a vpn to the office, and have been modem free for about 2+ years), but there are people that simply don't have a network card. What happens when one of these people buys XP and doesn't have a modem, much less an internet account, how is that going to work for registration?
Well yes and no. Of course they charge money for the software, but he skirted the issue of paying once for it, paying more than once? Paying multiple times for different computers, paying multiple times for differnt computer, etc etc. The issue comes back to "I upgraded my hard drive and now I have to go and re-activate my XP." Or better yet, my computer was destroyed in a fire and when I try to re-install XP (from the CD kept in the fireproof safe of course) it tells me I'm over my re-install limit and have to buy the software again".
:)
Or something like that. I know that's not exactly the case, but you see what I'm saying (or more specifically, what he's not saying)
ajb
We could either hack the DOC support into our current (single firewall) product, or rewrite the entire thing from scratch, and Do It Right(tm). We decided on the latter, and after 3 months of the dev and QA team working till midnight (or later in some cases) we have a product that is 99% done. We're back to normal hours anyway, and have one version out the door. A second one is currently undergoing final QA.
But back on track.
Before all you needed was a registration key. This was created by a serial number that you got when you purchased the product combinged with your MAC address, creating a unique key. Without this you got a demo mode, but still could update to the latest and greatest software.
Well, sales had their way and decided that hey, we can make this a revenue stream, and decided to make people pay for upgrades. This involved creating a new key which was basically a support receipt. Show the receipt at the door and you get upgrades... don't want to pay? Get only the last released version, no upgrades, no security fixes, no nothing. I personally don't like it, but I'm not at the top of the food chain here, so I can't complain too much.
But you'll notice a few things here:
Oh well, a little bit OT I'm sure, but it's interesting to see this from the other side. I wonder if this feature was originally put in because someone in the upper echelon said "hey, we can make more money from this thing!"