1, I pay you nothing and don't use your app at all. 2, I pay you nothing and download your app for free, and if it's any good i may recommend it to others, some of whom may pay for it.
Number 2 isn't theft of your time any more than 1 is, because you have spent that time regardless. Similarly, you don't get any time back because more people choose to pay for your app.
MS have certainly preferred option 2 for many years, because it increases their market share/inertia, provides free marketing and ultimately gets users locked in.
Most console servers have a significant number of ports, so there's no need for one per server... Serial hasn't changed in years so the servers would likely have been replaced while keeping the same serial console devices. Also most servers have built in lights out management cards these days anyway.
Well then perhaps companies should donate old but still fully functional computers to those kids, rather than insisting on having them scrapped. A retired business desktop from a few years ago will make a perfectly good system for browsing the internet, especially once freed from the constraints of bloated corporate images.
Many IP KVMs require either a proprietary application (often x86/windows only) or a java applet to use, this cuts out most tablets. Serial console over ssh is obviously much better, and can be accessed from virtually any device. That said, a textual based interface is about as poorly suited to a tablet input method as you can get. A small, cheap (because it WILL get dropped) laptop with ethernet, preferably serial (although usb to serial dongles aren't a huge issue) and a keyboard is actually very useful in a server room for quick diagnostics and testing when you're installing hardware. Being fast or having a long battery life aren't terribly important.
If setup properly, you only ever need to physically enter the server room to perform hardware upgrades/replacement... Day to day maintenance should always be done from outside, wether via IP KVM or much better via serial console. All the servers i manage are a good distance away from me ranging from 30 to 3000 miles. Server rooms are designed for servers, and they make very unpleasant working environments for humans.
Those that can run windows are x86 based, and tend to be hugely more expensive, heavier and with inferior battery life to the ARM based tablets...
ARM based windows cannot really be called "full windows" because it cannot run 99% of the applications generally associated with windows, whereas ARM based linux can run 99% of linux applications without issues.
That said, most existing linux/windows apps are not designed for touchscreen input, so while they might work they won't be terribly usable.
I'm sure people will start trying to hack it, once those who bought them originally get sick of them and offload them cheaply on ebay... I only know one person who has bought a surface, and she hates it and regrets not buying an ipad instead.
Linux was having ACPI issues because ACPI has an internal configuration table called the DSDT, and both Intel and MS publish tools to compile the DSDT table... While the Intel one complies with the published ACPI specs, the MS one tolerates a lot of things which violate the spec and thus cause the Intel compiler (and thus any ACPI implementation which complies with the Intel spec) to fail. MS meanwhile implement ACPI to take into account their own compiler... The reason others can't comply with the MS spec is because it is not documented, and requires reverse engineering and crude workarounds.
Just for fun, on any Linux box you have handy, try dmesg | grep DSDT... you will see what compiler was used:
You should see either INTL or MSFT. All the boxes i have to hand show INTL, and i have had no ACPI related problems on them.
As for SecureBoot, MS know that many hardware manufacturers will only test windows compatibility, so that slowly but surely they can choke out users of other software.
Closed drivers have many disadvantages, and many of us are unwilling to accept those disadvantages... Off the top of my head:
Only supports the architecture it was built for (eg lots of older hardware wouldn't be usable on 64bit systems, and would be unusable on ARM, MIPS or whatever other architectures may exist in the future). Open drivers can be recompiled for other architectures, which allows me to use all manner of USB devices on a Linux/ARM system for instance. Maintaining a stable driver ABI means making choices, which in the future will turn to limitations and impede progress... MS have been forced to change the driver ABI several times, and it resulted in older hardware which no longer worked at all, and all manner of other problems (see vista). Binary drivers for Linux only help Linux, they don't help any other OS while permissively licensed open drivers can easily be ported or studied. You cannot easily debug or modify binary drivers, windows has long been plagued with crashes caused by faulty drivers, and there are plenty of enthusiasts who like to tweak things to improve performance - doing so would be much easier with source code. The paranoid among us may even want to review what the drivers are doing, rather than rely on a black box supplied by someone else.
Besides, why shouldn't manufacturers open up specs and/or release open drivers? They are selling hardware, not software, and the more people who are able to use their hardware the more they will sell.
The top and bottom of it is that many of us simply wouldn't want to put up with the problems windows experiences as a result of closed drivers, and thus make an active conscious decision to choose hardware which has open drivers and avoid anything that relies on closed ones.
I wonder how many sales companies have lost to this, not only do i only ever buy hardware which has open drivers but anyone who asks my opinion is also steered towards such hardware.
Why not? Noone thought Wordperfect would disappear, noone thought there would ever be a time when IBM didn't dominate computing as a whole, noone thought that Commodore with their hugely successful C64 would ever fail, noone thought that tablets would ever catch on.
The problem with examples, is that they only teach one example and don't teach it *as* an example... People subsequently get confused if a menu option appears in a slightly different place in the menu or an icon moves and often aren't even aware at all that anything else exists. Teaching by example is undoubtedly a good idea, but you need to provide multiple examples so that users understand the concepts and are easily able to adjust to different applications which perform the same general function. Being tied to a single tool is extremely damaging, it makes it difficult to cope with changes in versions or to switch to different tools, and means users will choose the tool they're used to rather than being able to objectively pick the best tool for the job.
Haha wow i used to use an irc channel called #!/bin/sh
I have a working AMIX system, a genuine Amiga 3000UX although it don't keep it powered up all the time... It comes with an old version of GCC (1.4.x if i remember) so it may be possible (albeit time consuming) to compile mksh on it. I will give it a try once i finish moving house.
Not wanting your data locked into proprietary formats is not a politicised view, it's about business continuity and you'd be very foolish not to overlook such risks to your business.
We learned wordperfect for dos in school because "thats what people use at work"... When i left school, wordperfect for dos had disappeared.
You need to teach concepts not specific applications, because those specific applications either won't be around or will be significantly different by the time you leave school.
Would be more interesting to get it to run AMIX tho... Linux/m68k can already run under emulation on qemu (generic 68k, not amiga specific), and there is very little (if anything) available for linux/68k that doesn't run on linux/x86. I never understood why so many hardware emulators only seem able to run linux (which the emulator itself generally runs on anyway), and cannot run whatever was the native os of the time for these hardware types.
Well for that you have to look at the short term thinking of potential employers, and the financial system which encourages pure selfishness.
Outsource to china or india because it makes *your* business more profitable, everyone else in a position to do so does the same too... Before too long there are simply not enough jobs left in the UK which causes high unemployment, and cause the government to increase taxes to pay for all the unemployment benefits while also compensating for the lower number of taxpayers.
So now the vast majority of people are either unemployed or extremely heavily taxed, virtually noone has any spare cash. Who's going to buy your products now?
The story is about the UK, where having previously worked is not a requirement to receive unemployment benefit. If only that were the case, there would be a lot less people abusing the system.
And this story was about the UK, where it doesn't work like that.
Unemployment benefits are handed out by the government and have nothing to do with any insurance the individual has paid. It's not uncommon for people to be claiming unemployment benefits who have never worked a day in their life, which means the free money they receive is being paid for by everyone that is actually working.
Well, the system should really treat claimants differently depending on their past experience, ie someone who has never worked a day in their life is given the harshest treatment while someone who has been working and paying taxes for years and is suddenly made redundant is given a bit of slack.
Fair enough if you don't want to be a street cleaner or janitor... But why then should the government (ie the rest of us taxpayers) give you free money?
If you don't want to do an unpleasant job, then you should find yourself a better one, you should have no right to simply sit on your ass at the expense of everyone else until the perfect job comes along. Instead work hard at your unpleasant job and perhaps study part time so you can learn something better.
People in other countries have it far worse, in many places the government won't do anything for you at all if you haven't got a job, so your choice is between picking up trash from the street or having to sleep among that trash.
Incidentally, picking up trash isn't that bad of a job... You get gloves, a stick with a grabbing claw on the end, brushes etc so it's not like you actually have to get covered in filth. You just walk around pushing a trashcan on wheels, and any trash you see you pick up with your claw and put in the trashcan. You even get a sense of satisfaction because the streets look a lot better when they aren't covered in trash.
There are many things which local councils don't do due to lack of budget, while they might clean parks they generally don't collect dropped litter from the streets in general (and dropped litter gets everywhere due to the wind)...
And if a private company is doing such a contract using labour provided as part of the benefits system, then they should either be paying minimum wage to those people instead of benefits, or else the private company should be receiving a significantly reduced fee just for managing the workers rather than doing the actual work.
But something has to be done about the benefits system, there are far too many people getting a free ride and know exactly how to play the system, while those in genuine need lose out.
A nuclear physicist is not over qualified to be an auto mechanic tho, he will probably know very little about cars and need to be trained. Cars are generally not nuclear powered so his existing skills would be pretty much useless.
On the other hand there are plenty of completely unskilled jobs which anyone could do with little or no training and putting over qualified people in those jobs is bad for the reason you state...
The problem is when there are a surplus of people qualified in a particular field, since you can't get a job doing what your qualified to do, and can't get a generic unskilled job either.
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Well the options are:
1, I pay you nothing and don't use your app at all.
2, I pay you nothing and download your app for free, and if it's any good i may recommend it to others, some of whom may pay for it.
Number 2 isn't theft of your time any more than 1 is, because you have spent that time regardless. Similarly, you don't get any time back because more people choose to pay for your app.
MS have certainly preferred option 2 for many years, because it increases their market share/inertia, provides free marketing and ultimately gets users locked in.
Most console servers have a significant number of ports, so there's no need for one per server... Serial hasn't changed in years so the servers would likely have been replaced while keeping the same serial console devices. Also most servers have built in lights out management cards these days anyway.
Well then perhaps companies should donate old but still fully functional computers to those kids, rather than insisting on having them scrapped. A retired business desktop from a few years ago will make a perfectly good system for browsing the internet, especially once freed from the constraints of bloated corporate images.
Many IP KVMs require either a proprietary application (often x86/windows only) or a java applet to use, this cuts out most tablets.
Serial console over ssh is obviously much better, and can be accessed from virtually any device. That said, a textual based interface is about as poorly suited to a tablet input method as you can get.
A small, cheap (because it WILL get dropped) laptop with ethernet, preferably serial (although usb to serial dongles aren't a huge issue) and a keyboard is actually very useful in a server room for quick diagnostics and testing when you're installing hardware. Being fast or having a long battery life aren't terribly important.
If setup properly, you only ever need to physically enter the server room to perform hardware upgrades/replacement... Day to day maintenance should always be done from outside, wether via IP KVM or much better via serial console.
All the servers i manage are a good distance away from me ranging from 30 to 3000 miles. Server rooms are designed for servers, and they make very unpleasant working environments for humans.
Those that can run windows are x86 based, and tend to be hugely more expensive, heavier and with inferior battery life to the ARM based tablets...
ARM based windows cannot really be called "full windows" because it cannot run 99% of the applications generally associated with windows, whereas ARM based linux can run 99% of linux applications without issues.
That said, most existing linux/windows apps are not designed for touchscreen input, so while they might work they won't be terribly usable.
The current model chromebook from samsung appears to be sold out everywhere, i've been trying to buy one and had immense trouble doing so.
I'm sure people will start trying to hack it, once those who bought them originally get sick of them and offload them cheaply on ebay...
I only know one person who has bought a surface, and she hates it and regrets not buying an ipad instead.
Calling it "secure" is weaselly, as it will do very little to improve security for the users and their data.
"Outside of the server"? You mean "on the desktop"... Linux is huge in embedded too...
Linux was having ACPI issues because ACPI has an internal configuration table called the DSDT, and both Intel and MS publish tools to compile the DSDT table... While the Intel one complies with the published ACPI specs, the MS one tolerates a lot of things which violate the spec and thus cause the Intel compiler (and thus any ACPI implementation which complies with the Intel spec) to fail.
MS meanwhile implement ACPI to take into account their own compiler...
The reason others can't comply with the MS spec is because it is not documented, and requires reverse engineering and crude workarounds.
Just for fun, on any Linux box you have handy, try dmesg | grep DSDT... you will see what compiler was used:
ACPI: DSDT 00000000cffb0440 064DE (v01 P0004 P0004000 00000000 INTL 20051117)
You should see either INTL or MSFT. All the boxes i have to hand show INTL, and i have had no ACPI related problems on them.
As for SecureBoot, MS know that many hardware manufacturers will only test windows compatibility, so that slowly but surely they can choke out users of other software.
Closed drivers have many disadvantages, and many of us are unwilling to accept those disadvantages...
Off the top of my head:
Only supports the architecture it was built for (eg lots of older hardware wouldn't be usable on 64bit systems, and would be unusable on ARM, MIPS or whatever other architectures may exist in the future). Open drivers can be recompiled for other architectures, which allows me to use all manner of USB devices on a Linux/ARM system for instance.
Maintaining a stable driver ABI means making choices, which in the future will turn to limitations and impede progress... MS have been forced to change the driver ABI several times, and it resulted in older hardware which no longer worked at all, and all manner of other problems (see vista).
Binary drivers for Linux only help Linux, they don't help any other OS while permissively licensed open drivers can easily be ported or studied.
You cannot easily debug or modify binary drivers, windows has long been plagued with crashes caused by faulty drivers, and there are plenty of enthusiasts who like to tweak things to improve performance - doing so would be much easier with source code.
The paranoid among us may even want to review what the drivers are doing, rather than rely on a black box supplied by someone else.
Besides, why shouldn't manufacturers open up specs and/or release open drivers? They are selling hardware, not software, and the more people who are able to use their hardware the more they will sell.
The top and bottom of it is that many of us simply wouldn't want to put up with the problems windows experiences as a result of closed drivers, and thus make an active conscious decision to choose hardware which has open drivers and avoid anything that relies on closed ones.
I wonder how many sales companies have lost to this, not only do i only ever buy hardware which has open drivers but anyone who asks my opinion is also steered towards such hardware.
Why not? Noone thought Wordperfect would disappear, noone thought there would ever be a time when IBM didn't dominate computing as a whole, noone thought that Commodore with their hugely successful C64 would ever fail, noone thought that tablets would ever catch on.
The problem with examples, is that they only teach one example and don't teach it *as* an example... People subsequently get confused if a menu option appears in a slightly different place in the menu or an icon moves and often aren't even aware at all that anything else exists. Teaching by example is undoubtedly a good idea, but you need to provide multiple examples so that users understand the concepts and are easily able to adjust to different applications which perform the same general function. Being tied to a single tool is extremely damaging, it makes it difficult to cope with changes in versions or to switch to different tools, and means users will choose the tool they're used to rather than being able to objectively pick the best tool for the job.
Haha wow i used to use an irc channel called #!/bin/sh
I have a working AMIX system, a genuine Amiga 3000UX although it don't keep it powered up all the time... It comes with an old version of GCC (1.4.x if i remember) so it may be possible (albeit time consuming) to compile mksh on it. I will give it a try once i finish moving house.
Not wanting your data locked into proprietary formats is not a politicised view, it's about business continuity and you'd be very foolish not to overlook such risks to your business.
We learned wordperfect for dos in school because "thats what people use at work"...
When i left school, wordperfect for dos had disappeared.
You need to teach concepts not specific applications, because those specific applications either won't be around or will be significantly different by the time you leave school.
Would be more interesting to get it to run AMIX tho...
Linux/m68k can already run under emulation on qemu (generic 68k, not amiga specific), and there is very little (if anything) available for linux/68k that doesn't run on linux/x86. I never understood why so many hardware emulators only seem able to run linux (which the emulator itself generally runs on anyway), and cannot run whatever was the native os of the time for these hardware types.
Well for that you have to look at the short term thinking of potential employers, and the financial system which encourages pure selfishness.
Outsource to china or india because it makes *your* business more profitable, everyone else in a position to do so does the same too... Before too long there are simply not enough jobs left in the UK which causes high unemployment, and cause the government to increase taxes to pay for all the unemployment benefits while also compensating for the lower number of taxpayers.
So now the vast majority of people are either unemployed or extremely heavily taxed, virtually noone has any spare cash. Who's going to buy your products now?
The story is about the UK, where having previously worked is not a requirement to receive unemployment benefit. If only that were the case, there would be a lot less people abusing the system.
And this story was about the UK, where it doesn't work like that.
Unemployment benefits are handed out by the government and have nothing to do with any insurance the individual has paid. It's not uncommon for people to be claiming unemployment benefits who have never worked a day in their life, which means the free money they receive is being paid for by everyone that is actually working.
Well, the system should really treat claimants differently depending on their past experience, ie someone who has never worked a day in their life is given the harshest treatment while someone who has been working and paying taxes for years and is suddenly made redundant is given a bit of slack.
Fair enough if you don't want to be a street cleaner or janitor... But why then should the government (ie the rest of us taxpayers) give you free money?
If you don't want to do an unpleasant job, then you should find yourself a better one, you should have no right to simply sit on your ass at the expense of everyone else until the perfect job comes along. Instead work hard at your unpleasant job and perhaps study part time so you can learn something better.
People in other countries have it far worse, in many places the government won't do anything for you at all if you haven't got a job, so your choice is between picking up trash from the street or having to sleep among that trash.
Incidentally, picking up trash isn't that bad of a job... You get gloves, a stick with a grabbing claw on the end, brushes etc so it's not like you actually have to get covered in filth. You just walk around pushing a trashcan on wheels, and any trash you see you pick up with your claw and put in the trashcan. You even get a sense of satisfaction because the streets look a lot better when they aren't covered in trash.
There are many things which local councils don't do due to lack of budget, while they might clean parks they generally don't collect dropped litter from the streets in general (and dropped litter gets everywhere due to the wind)...
And if a private company is doing such a contract using labour provided as part of the benefits system, then they should either be paying minimum wage to those people instead of benefits, or else the private company should be receiving a significantly reduced fee just for managing the workers rather than doing the actual work.
But something has to be done about the benefits system, there are far too many people getting a free ride and know exactly how to play the system, while those in genuine need lose out.
A nuclear physicist is not over qualified to be an auto mechanic tho, he will probably know very little about cars and need to be trained. Cars are generally not nuclear powered so his existing skills would be pretty much useless.
On the other hand there are plenty of completely unskilled jobs which anyone could do with little or no training and putting over qualified people in those jobs is bad for the reason you state...
The problem is when there are a surplus of people qualified in a particular field, since you can't get a job doing what your qualified to do, and can't get a generic unskilled job either.
Hibernate but don't sleep, and only if you are sure that your hibernation file will be stored encrypted.