Makes me wonder how many programmers SSH.com employs and how they perform relative to the OpenSSH "team."
Assuming this is a useful metric in the first place.
The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. is still in print, after nearly 40 years. Wonder if it's relevent here:)
Despite the slant, I actually came away impressed at the demonstration of efficiency: 2 developers are doing the work of perhaps thousands if the tools weren't open source.
With OSS it's fairly easy to find out things like the number of developers. With proprietary software finding this out is likely to be considerably more difficult. It's very unlikely that much software which has thousands of developers. Possibly thousands of "gatekeepers", "hangers on", etc.
Windowx XP is not a "12 year old operating system"
It's 4 years old, 6 years at best. It was still being sold by Microsoft up until June 30 2008. It was still being sold preinstalled on machines up until October 2010.
What of those people who have 3 1/2 year old PC's? You can't tell them its a 12 year old operating system. It was still brand new in 2010.
Even the 4-6 years estimate may not be accurate. Since it was still being officially maintained until 8th April 2014 its age might be better stated in days. With the IE patch recenly released it could even be described as "less than 100 hours old"!
My Dad needs complete Outlook support and my Mom and siblings need their documents to look exactly as they do on the school computers.
Which version of Outlook might that be? As far as the documents are concerned then PDF is the only option here. In which case it's irrelevent what OS or program is used anyway.
They'll also need perfect read/write support for a couple NTFS drives.
Do you mean "perfect" or do you mean "bug for bug" matching some arbitratry version of Windows?
A few years ago Ubuntu seemed too be on that path, sadly they've abandoned it. Functional progress has slowed considerably in the OSS community due to all the rewrites and redesigns going on. No one seems to care about quality software. Instead of working to fix existing issues, they want to rewrite it all which creates even more issues. None of the popular software has stability releases. Instead releases are about changing UIs and new features (ignoring if people were asking for those features or not). Sure those release has bug fixes, but they're handled more as a side effect.
How is this different from proprietary software? Especially Microsoft, when you consider Windows and Office. Which have radical changes in UIs and "features" few people would want. (Even some such as "cloud integration" which would be activly unwanted in many environments.)
It is the point. Average Joe may run Corel CD creater or some ancient greeting card maker that came bundled with their 2005 era printer from office depot.
If the software is so poorly written it can't run even on Windows 7 without major hacks it probably can't run on wine either.
The situation WRT Windows 7 actually tells you virtually nothing about the situation WRT WINE. Especially considering that "backwards compatibility" is important to the WINE developers and it is possible to have multiple WINE configurations each optimised to specific applications.
The claim is as much a logical fallacy as claims that everyone would find using "Linux" much harder than "Windows" or that a migration from WIndows XP to Windows 7/8 will always be easier than one from Windows XP to non Windows.
Please where I work we have 25 GPOs attached to each OU just to make our supposedly compatible Windows 7 apps run without breaking. Mostly IE garbage.
You think I can port them to wine?!!
Unless someone actually tried the question is unanswerable. It is certainly not impossible for old Windows applications to be more compatible with WINE than with Win 7 (or 8). IME application compatiblity between different versions of Windows can be very hit and miss. A program from 2008 can be virtually impossible to get working under Windows 7 whereas one from 1998 can run perfectly. I've even encountered cases where the Windows 95/98/ME version of program is a better option to try in Windows 7 than a Windows XP (or Vista)
The auto repair guy down the street can just run Quickbooks 2009 and his proprietary MS access database add-on which orders parts from some vendor who went out of business in 2008 can run Ubuntu and get it work flawless in wine?
So far an application is concerned WINE is simply another version of Windows. How well it suits the application depends very much on exactly what that application is trying to do. How well (or otherwise) that program works with Windows 7 (along with the level of "tweaking" required) tells you nothing about running it under WINE.
Uh...Windows 7 can easily run on a machine that's over 5 years old.
By itself Windows 7 won't do much though. The issue is more likely to be "Will the applications needed run under Win 7 EXACTLY as they do under Win XP?" To add to the complications there is no direct upgrade path from Win XP to Win 7. (Though there is from Win 2003 to Win 2008. The "server versions" of these...) Microsoft has also messed around with the "user profile" mechanism.
The leak came from General Motors Corporation. Now Microsoft can either punish General Motors Corporation or shut up.
A worst case senario would be in the "leak" came from The IRS. The last thing any large transnational corporation wants is their taxes being looked at too closely...
People are not entitled to their noncontracted expectations.
Contracts always operate within the "law of the land". Laws can effectivly rewrite contracts, even long after the contract was originally drafted. Contracts CANNOT alter laws. If there is applicable statute or case law saying that someone is entitled to X then it dosn't matter if a contract (including an EULA) says something else. To complicate the issue proprietary software is often sold as a "widget" whilst at the same time claiming it is neither a "good" or a "service". Which tends to make the likes of "car analogies" difficult to apply to such software since vehicles are clearly "goods".
They should support it as long as they hold copyright on it. When the support ends, it should be put in the public domain.
About the only way this could work would be if Microsoft lobbied (and got) sane copyright terms into law. The obvious related issues are that some parts of Win XP may exist in other Microsoft products. Microsoft may not actually be the copyright holder for all of XP. Some bits they may have licenced, other bits they may have "pirated". (Piracy within proprietary software, even of OSS, dosn't appear to be that uncommon.)
Artificial intelligence, while seemingly tasty on the surface, tends to be underwhelmed by insufficient fish, with regard to warrantless searches.
AI is HARD. Plenty of tasks which people can do easily are difficult to get machines to do, even throwing lots of processing resources at the problem. Natural Language Processing is one of these difficult problems. With "grading essays" also being nowhere near beginner level NLP. Quite possibly actual NLP experts would not attempt to write such software, because they understand exactly how difficult a task it is. (Similar issues apply to "Internet filtering software".)
I'm reminded of a quote from a comic I read when someone expressed shock and incredulity that another character had not seen Star Wars. Her response was simply, "Your life experiences are different from my own." What you are basically saying here is that you don't really like meat all that much and it was no big sacrifice to give it up. That's not the case for everyone.
Similar you can find some people desperately searching for a "low carb" or "gluten free" kind of "bread". Whereas other people can just stop eating bread without making much fuss about it.
More base load power generation is needed even if solar and wind are added - those aren't reliable sources of energy.
Think is that in order to compensate for this you need something which can vary it's output just as rapidly as the wind and solar. Simpler and more efficient to not bother with the wind and solar in the first place.
As electric vehicle technology improves, even gasoline usage could be replaced with clean power.
Electric vehicles have been around about as long as those with internal combustion engines. Claims that the former will replace the latter have been around for at least the last 50 years... A probably more practical approach would be nuclear power plants with some kind of Air/Water Fuel Syntheis which would use any power not required by the power grid. Since these are claimed to be usable with wild and solar they presumably don't need a constant power source.
Solar and wind cannot do the job by themselves due to their unpredictability on time scales shorter than months.
The time scale of the variations tend to be of the order of seconds, effectivly at random, which makes both of these poor sources of electrical power. Also both of these power sources have been around for a long time. (Several thousand years.) Frequently being superceded by newer technologies, especially in the case of wind.
Nuclear fission is feasible but the waste and operational safety concerns make it too much of a political and economic hot potato.
Wonder how easy it would be to address these problems were all the money currently being used to subsidise wind and solar used for this purpose? Nuclear fission is the only current technology which is truely "renewable" as well as having the lowest "carbon footprint" (if you think that is meaningful).
This would be a massive win in terms of animal welfare, sustainability, nutrition and maybe even cost to consumers.
Why do you assume that fake meat would be better nutritionally? Especially if intended to be as cheap as possible. Possible issues would be "incomplete" proteins, lack of B12, lack of fats, excess sugars. If the fake meat were HCLF it would be more of the same misguided "healthy eating" which has been pushed for the last 30 odd years with all the associated health problems.
I suspect that a lot of people would prefer vegetables that have most of the taste, texture and protein of meat, rather than food that is grown in horrific conditions but technically meets the definition of meat despite being quite different nutritionally.
Without GM you simply won't get plants producing animal proteins. They'll produce the plant proteins required for plant metabolism. There's also the issue of plant fats and steroids in the diet being incorporated into cells. Phospholipids containing highly unsaturated fatty acids don't tend to belong in mammalian cell membranes. You certainly don't want Î-sitosterol or campesterol there either. But both of these can potentially be subsituted for choleterol. Herbivores are most likely adapted to be able to handle "alien lipds" in the diet. This is far less likely to be the case with humans who are omnivores more towards the carnivore end of the spectrum.
This is assuming that France is correct, and not just shaking down a rich company for some extra cash.
Just about all large transnational companies have complex schemes to avoid paying taxes. It's quite possible that a small mistake would leave them with a huge tax liability.
A belly landing on the tarmac would likely be scary and newsworthy, but there's a good chance that relatively few people would be hurt/killed.
The only casualty of LOT 16 was SP-LPC herself. The major risk to passengers and crew with a landing gear malfunction tends to be if there is an evacuation.
Brewers can continue to sell this as animal feed. They just have to follow the same rules as everybody else who sells animal feed, like Purina Chows and Cargill.
Wonder if it was these companies who lobbied for the regulation change.
If you live in an area of where temperatures drop a fair bit below freezing for a fair chunk of the year, you would end up adding ethanol as a fuel anti-freeze.
The freezing point of hydrocarbon fuels is considerably below that of water. Even diesel (and ATF) will rarely actually freeze.
It is also a weak solvent for compounds that are not soluble in gasoline, absorbs moisture, reduces the likelihood of engine knocking and a handful of other benefits.
There are real physical historical reasons why telephone numbers were not portable until recently and why its a beaurocratic nightmare why its a hassle for everyone involved to this day.
Note that "recently" in this context probably means several decades ago. SPC exchanges having been around since the 1960s.
If you happen to already own the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 console, how much energy does it take to manufacture and ship an Apple TV box and an automatic HDMI switch box?
Since in such a situation you are likely to end up using both devices this has also increased the ongoing power consumption. With energy, as with software, TCO figures can be "cherry picked". With the T rarely actually equating to "Total" for all the senarios.
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Makes me wonder how many programmers SSH.com employs and how they perform relative to the OpenSSH "team."
:)
Assuming this is a useful metric in the first place. The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. is still in print, after nearly 40 years. Wonder if it's relevent here
Despite the slant, I actually came away impressed at the demonstration of efficiency: 2 developers are doing the work of perhaps thousands if the tools weren't open source.
With OSS it's fairly easy to find out things like the number of developers. With proprietary software finding this out is likely to be considerably more difficult.
It's very unlikely that much software which has thousands of developers. Possibly thousands of "gatekeepers", "hangers on", etc.
This is why you should never use consumer grade hardware/software for mission critical tasks.
Typically it's the supplier making this kind of decision. With the customer not having much input, or choice, in the matter.
Windowx XP is not a "12 year old operating system"
It's 4 years old, 6 years at best. It was still being sold by Microsoft up until June 30 2008. It was still being sold preinstalled on machines up until October 2010.
What of those people who have 3 1/2 year old PC's? You can't tell them its a 12 year old operating system. It was still brand new in 2010.
Even the 4-6 years estimate may not be accurate. Since it was still being officially maintained until 8th April 2014 its age might be better stated in days. With the IE patch recenly released it could even be described as "less than 100 hours old"!
My Dad needs complete Outlook support and my Mom and siblings need their documents to look exactly as they do on the school computers.
Which version of Outlook might that be? As far as the documents are concerned then PDF is the only option here. In which case it's irrelevent what OS or program is used anyway.
They'll also need perfect read/write support for a couple NTFS drives.
Do you mean "perfect" or do you mean "bug for bug" matching some arbitratry version of Windows?
A few years ago Ubuntu seemed too be on that path, sadly they've abandoned it. Functional progress has slowed considerably in the OSS community due to all the rewrites and redesigns going on. No one seems to care about quality software. Instead of working to fix existing issues, they want to rewrite it all which creates even more issues. None of the popular software has stability releases. Instead releases are about changing UIs and new features (ignoring if people were asking for those features or not). Sure those release has bug fixes, but they're handled more as a side effect.
How is this different from proprietary software? Especially Microsoft, when you consider Windows and Office. Which have radical changes in UIs and "features" few people would want. (Even some such as "cloud integration" which would be activly unwanted in many environments.)
It is the point. Average Joe may run Corel CD creater or some ancient greeting card maker that came bundled with their 2005 era printer from office depot.
If the software is so poorly written it can't run even on Windows 7 without major hacks it probably can't run on wine either.
The situation WRT Windows 7 actually tells you virtually nothing about the situation WRT WINE.
Especially considering that "backwards compatibility" is important to the WINE developers and it is possible to have multiple WINE configurations each optimised to specific applications.
The claim is as much a logical fallacy as claims that everyone would find using "Linux" much harder than "Windows" or that a migration from WIndows XP to Windows 7/8 will always be easier than one from Windows XP to non Windows.
Please where I work we have 25 GPOs attached to each OU just to make our supposedly compatible Windows 7 apps run without breaking. Mostly IE garbage.
You think I can port them to wine?!!
Unless someone actually tried the question is unanswerable.
It is certainly not impossible for old Windows applications to be more compatible with WINE than with Win 7 (or 8).
IME application compatiblity between different versions of Windows can be very hit and miss. A program from 2008 can be virtually impossible to get working under Windows 7 whereas one from 1998 can run perfectly. I've even encountered cases where the Windows 95/98/ME version of program is a better option to try in Windows 7 than a Windows XP (or Vista)
The auto repair guy down the street can just run Quickbooks 2009 and his proprietary MS access database add-on which orders parts from some vendor who went out of business in 2008 can run Ubuntu and get it work flawless in wine?
So far an application is concerned WINE is simply another version of Windows. How well it suits the application depends very much on exactly what that application is trying to do.
How well (or otherwise) that program works with Windows 7 (along with the level of "tweaking" required) tells you nothing about running it under WINE.
Uh...Windows 7 can easily run on a machine that's over 5 years old.
By itself Windows 7 won't do much though.
The issue is more likely to be "Will the applications needed run under Win 7 EXACTLY as they do under Win XP?"
To add to the complications there is no direct upgrade path from Win XP to Win 7. (Though there is from Win 2003 to Win 2008. The "server versions" of these...) Microsoft has also messed around with the "user profile" mechanism.
The leak came from General Motors Corporation. Now Microsoft can either punish General Motors Corporation or shut up.
A worst case senario would be in the "leak" came from The IRS. The last thing any large transnational corporation wants is their taxes being looked at too closely...
People are not entitled to their noncontracted expectations.
Contracts always operate within the "law of the land". Laws can effectivly rewrite contracts, even long after the contract was originally drafted. Contracts CANNOT alter laws.
If there is applicable statute or case law saying that someone is entitled to X then it dosn't matter if a contract (including an EULA) says something else.
To complicate the issue proprietary software is often sold as a "widget" whilst at the same time claiming it is neither a "good" or a "service". Which tends to make the likes of "car analogies" difficult to apply to such software since vehicles are clearly "goods".
They should support it as long as they hold copyright on it. When the support ends, it should be put in the public domain.
About the only way this could work would be if Microsoft lobbied (and got) sane copyright terms into law.
The obvious related issues are that some parts of Win XP may exist in other Microsoft products. Microsoft may not actually be the copyright holder for all of XP. Some bits they may have licenced, other bits they may have "pirated". (Piracy within proprietary software, even of OSS, dosn't appear to be that uncommon.)
Artificial intelligence, while seemingly tasty on the surface, tends to be underwhelmed by insufficient fish, with regard to warrantless searches.
AI is HARD. Plenty of tasks which people can do easily are difficult to get machines to do, even throwing lots of processing resources at the problem.
Natural Language Processing is one of these difficult problems. With "grading essays" also being nowhere near beginner level NLP.
Quite possibly actual NLP experts would not attempt to write such software, because they understand exactly how difficult a task it is. (Similar issues apply to "Internet filtering software".)
I'm reminded of a quote from a comic I read when someone expressed shock and incredulity that another character had not seen Star Wars. Her response was simply, "Your life experiences are different from my own." What you are basically saying here is that you don't really like meat all that much and it was no big sacrifice to give it up. That's not the case for everyone.
Similar you can find some people desperately searching for a "low carb" or "gluten free" kind of "bread". Whereas other people can just stop eating bread without making much fuss about it.
More base load power generation is needed even if solar and wind are added - those aren't reliable sources of energy.
Think is that in order to compensate for this you need something which can vary it's output just as rapidly as the wind and solar. Simpler and more efficient to not bother with the wind and solar in the first place.
As electric vehicle technology improves, even gasoline usage could be replaced with clean power.
Electric vehicles have been around about as long as those with internal combustion engines. Claims that the former will replace the latter have been around for at least the last 50 years...
A probably more practical approach would be nuclear power plants with some kind of Air/Water Fuel Syntheis which would use any power not required by the power grid. Since these are claimed to be usable with wild and solar they presumably don't need a constant power source.
Solar and wind cannot do the job by themselves due to their unpredictability on time scales shorter than months.
The time scale of the variations tend to be of the order of seconds, effectivly at random, which makes both of these poor sources of electrical power. Also both of these power sources have been around for a long time. (Several thousand years.) Frequently being superceded by newer technologies, especially in the case of wind.
Nuclear fission is feasible but the waste and operational safety concerns make it too much of a political and economic hot potato.
Wonder how easy it would be to address these problems were all the money currently being used to subsidise wind and solar used for this purpose? Nuclear fission is the only current technology which is truely "renewable" as well as having the lowest "carbon footprint" (if you think that is meaningful).
This would be a massive win in terms of animal welfare, sustainability, nutrition and maybe even cost to consumers.
Why do you assume that fake meat would be better nutritionally? Especially if intended to be as cheap as possible.
Possible issues would be "incomplete" proteins, lack of B12, lack of fats, excess sugars.
If the fake meat were HCLF it would be more of the same misguided "healthy eating" which has been pushed for the last 30 odd years with all the associated health problems.
I suspect that a lot of people would prefer vegetables that have most of the taste, texture and protein of meat, rather than food that is grown in horrific conditions but technically meets the definition of meat despite being quite different nutritionally.
Without GM you simply won't get plants producing animal proteins. They'll produce the plant proteins required for plant metabolism.
There's also the issue of plant fats and steroids in the diet being incorporated into cells. Phospholipids containing highly unsaturated fatty acids don't tend to belong in mammalian cell membranes. You certainly don't want Î-sitosterol or campesterol there either. But both of these can potentially be subsituted for choleterol.
Herbivores are most likely adapted to be able to handle "alien lipds" in the diet. This is far less likely to be the case with humans who are omnivores more towards the carnivore end of the spectrum.
If everyone in the world switched from eating meat to eating vegan substitutes (which is more environmentally friendly),
Considering previous "own goals" it might be very premature to describe such fake meat as "better" for ether the environmenmt or human health.
What is an "American" company? MS Europe is incorporated in Ireland, has a datacentre in Ireland, and pays taxes in Ireland.
:)
It's most likely the tax bit which is most important to Microsoft here. With them being more worried about the IRS than any US court
This is assuming that France is correct, and not just shaking down a rich company for some extra cash.
Just about all large transnational companies have complex schemes to avoid paying taxes. It's quite possible that a small mistake would leave them with a huge tax liability.
Generally, these "agency certifications" are entirely pointless. They only prove you have followed the letters of some irrelevant process.
Whilst they can be technically useless they can be politcially vital.
A belly landing on the tarmac would likely be scary and newsworthy, but there's a good chance that relatively few people would be hurt/killed.
The only casualty of LOT 16 was SP-LPC herself. The major risk to passengers and crew with a landing gear malfunction tends to be if there is an evacuation.
Brewers can continue to sell this as animal feed. They just have to follow the same rules as everybody else who sells animal feed, like Purina Chows and Cargill.
Wonder if it was these companies who lobbied for the regulation change.
If you live in an area of where temperatures drop a fair bit below freezing for a fair chunk of the year, you would end up adding ethanol as a fuel anti-freeze.
The freezing point of hydrocarbon fuels is considerably below that of water. Even diesel (and ATF) will rarely actually freeze.
It is also a weak solvent for compounds that are not soluble in gasoline, absorbs moisture, reduces the likelihood of engine knocking and a handful of other benefits.
This diosn't need anything like 10% ethanol.
There are real physical historical reasons why telephone numbers were not portable until recently and why its a beaurocratic nightmare why its a hassle for everyone involved to this day.
Note that "recently" in this context probably means several decades ago. SPC exchanges having been around since the 1960s.
If you happen to already own the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 console, how much energy does it take to manufacture and ship an Apple TV box and an automatic HDMI switch box?
Since in such a situation you are likely to end up using both devices this has also increased the ongoing power consumption.
With energy, as with software, TCO figures can be "cherry picked". With the T rarely actually equating to "Total" for all the senarios.