They would be better off *not* using ms products for the majority of their learning... When I attended school, the school computers came with wordperfect and that's what we had to learn... Who uses wordperfect now? And this was wordperfect for dos we learnt, the current wordperfect versions as well as not being widely used, are completely different to the dos version anyway. What schoolkids will find in schools today will not necessarily be what's widely used when they leave school.
So what you need to do, is teach the kids multiple programs, and teach them to think for themselves... Don't teach them where to find a button to do X, teach them why they want to do X, and what such a function is likely to be called and have them work out for themselves how to do the same thing in multiple different programs. Teach them properly like this, and they will be prepared for whatever they encounter when they leave school and not tied to specific applications that have long since been forgotten.
The whole purpose of a school is to teach, if the result of the school's teaching means they get stumped when a button moves then the school has done a piss poor job... Buttons move around all the time, not just in computer programs... My TV has buttons on the side or the remote control for controlling it, my older TV had no remote control and had buttons on the front. In my car you need to twist one of the storks attached to the steering column to activate the headlamps, on the car i had before there was a knob you had to turn embedded into the dashboard.
Personally i'd be far more pissed if my kids were being taught in such a half assed manner that made them dependent on what's available today from a single supplier, which in no way prepares them for what might be available tomorrow.
I want my kids to learn how to think for themselves, not be indoctrinated by microsoft...
The problem is that people are resistant to change, and don't like learning new things, even if doing so would benefit them... So they will complain about anything different, and then try to use it as if it was the same (ie not taking advantage of any advanced features)...
This is a new school, one that was not previously locked in to any proprietary setup... They were able to start with a clean slate and do things properly.
Incidentally, how big or inefficient is the average school in new zealand if they require 48 servers? Just what exactly would all those servers do?
In the UK at least, you can only claim for travel to somewhere other than your normal place of work, where your normal place of work is detailed in your employment contract and must be where you spend more "working" time than any other single location.
Generally if you travel to other places for work purposes, the company will reimburse your travel costs anyway, and you are not liable for tax based on things you bought solely for work purposes (train tickets etc).
And of those 2 million who have errors, how many will have errors which are large enough to be worth bothering with? Put more simply, how much is your time worth? If it takes you an hour to fill out the form and it saves you $5, is $5/hour a wage you would be happy working for?
Give the form a quick once over the bottom line to make sure it's roughly where you'd expect it to be and accept it. Only look more closely if it seems grossly wrong.
If the government makes an error, then they will make the same error when reviewing whatever tax returns you file under the current system... Then you will be faced with an audit, and having to prove them wrong.
Anyone who wants to argue with the government is still free to do so, and audits could still be performed at random or based on suspicious filings. Most people have relatively simple affairs, and the government should get their taxes just right saving everyone a lot of hassle.
Intuit is just looking to protect their revenue stream at the expense of both taxpayers and the government.
There are no other desktop or server os platforms which provide compatibility with microsoft's (largely by design)... The migration path would be extremely painful. Contrast that with a migration from RedHat to SuSE which would be relatively easy.
Migrating the OS would also in many cases require you to change applications, as a lot of proprietary applications are in the same boat. On the other hand, most applications which run on RedHat would also run on other Linux distributions.
Plenty of companies make money or appear to be making money, and yet due to various factors go under, or take their products in directions which are unfavourable to their customers.
The idea of guaranteeing multiple sources for anything you depend on is extremely basic, and yet MS seem to be granted an exception.
USB, PCI, AGP etc are hardware standards, you may have to license them to create hardware which supports them but you certainly don't need to pay anything if you just want to create software that drives such devices.
Hardware cannot be made for free anyway, therefore the licensing cost merely goes in with all the other manufacturing and raw materials costs... Software on the other hand can be made for free unless you start introducing artificial restrictions like having to license a media format.
Something like this is great for MS because it basically makes it impossible to have a free web browser.
All the time if you try to install something not supported on the current version..
I tried to install nagios 3.x on ubuntu 8.04 (lts), i ended up having to roll my own packages because the only binary packages available required a newer version of ubuntu.
Had it happen a few years ago with debian stable and tetex 3.0 too
Only they usually screw this up through incompetence or ignorance...
One of the most important factors of having a safety net is to make sure everything you depend on has multiple sources....
Linux - RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu - check Servers - Dell, HP, Sun, IBM - check Routers - Cisco, Juniper - check Windows - Microsoft ??? - FAIL
And the same for most other proprietary software... no second source, no fallback if the single supplier has problems.
If RedHat go bust, i'm sure Novell, Oracle, Canonical or anyone else will be more than happy to support your current RH installations while you gradually migrate to their distro... And seeing as how their distro will be very similar, based on the same kernel and same basic libs that migration will be fairly painless.
Interesting thought... RedHat might not always be there, the recent economic troubles should have taught us that ANY company can go bust... Relying on a single supplier is extremely dangerous. That said, RedHat are easily replaceable if they go under, there are plenty of other companies who will take up the slack.
The biggest problem is MS, if they go bust there is noone else who can support their software because noone else has the source code (or at least, don't have the rights to modify and distribute it). Relying on MS is just as dangerous as your single resident geek.
At least with Linux, there are already multiple companies supporting it and anyone can pick up the source and continue development if they see a market for doing so.
You don't have to use RedHat... All your FOSS code is still available, as is lots of code RedHat wrote and released under open licenses and you are free to download that source and compile it on another distro.
RedHat is offered as a choice, and large corporations take that choice because they prefer to buy from another large company. They made the choice to spend rather than save, they could have got the exact same software for free with no support or from other sources with varying support terms. Better that they gave their money to RH than MS.
I see RH as more of a robin hood figure, highly beneficial to the OSS community... They provide legitimacy to those corporates who think that software needs to be paid for and should come with complicated licensing terms, and invest a lot of money in OSS development. Those of us who aren't blinkered by the aforementioned corporate mentality get to benefit from all of their development work for free.
And no, your not paying, the company you work for is paying... Seeing as you're a developer i'd assume you are technically competent enough that you wouldn't need any of RH's services on your own.
You forgot to recompile anything that depends on what you just upgraded, rookie mistake.
Binary packages are a huge pain when you try to upgrade something on an otherwise stable system, and the only binary packages of the new app you want also require you to upgrade a whole stack of libs... Source lets me compile a new app onto an old system, and from a distro standpoint its a lot easier to maintain a port/ebuild than it is to rebuild packages for every distro release on every architecture.
Yeah... Redhat is thriving in a recession SELLING something that ANYONE can get for FREE.
That's not really RedHat's business model, it's more Microsoft's business model...
RedHat sell support services (as the article states), which you certainly can't get for free. Software is trivially copied, but a trained engineer's time isn't.
Software and services are entirely different beasts, software can be reduced to zero cost quite easily whereas services still require someone to physically provide them, even if you employ people in an asian call centre to provide that support you still have to pay them, train them, and provide equipment for them to use and somewhere to use it.
Long term as the market matures, economies of scale and competition will kick in resulting in both software and services being pushed downwards in price. I'm sure you've seen how the same has happened to hardware, but again unlike software hardware can't be forced down to zero cost.
The "entitlement document" is free anyway, just sign up via the sun download center and register how many machines will be running solaris.
And note that this only covers "perpetual commercial use"... Non commercial use, and temporary commercial use (ie testing/eval) does not even require this.
Yes... Microsoft have done a huge amount of damage to their customers and the industry as a whole...
They have stifled innovation for years (for an example see IE6 - allowed to totally stagnate once it had a dominant marketshare, only updated again once its share was threatened several years later). They have locked thousands of individuals and businesses into their products, removing those peoples freedom to choose the best product for the job. Even worse is that the lockin extends to those who aren't their customers, it's common to send proprietary microsoft format files around and people are expected to open them.
In many markets we are unable to judge products in their merits precisely because of microsoft. A competing product may be cheaper (or free), do everything you need better, but lacks compatibility with some proprietary microsoft technology therefore ruling it out.
To regain any level of respect, they need to undo all of the underhanded anti-consumer actions they have taken, and start competing purely based on the merits of their products in all the markets they operate in.
As it stands, although they may be trying to compete on merit right now, history has shown that once they gain sufficient market share they revert to their usual underhanded practices of locking people in and allowing the product to stagnate and/or using one product to forcibly push another. Don't forget all the "embrace, extend, extinguish" stuff from a few years back...
To give an example, the vast majority of MS products are tied to windows (forcibly pushing).. By contrast, google simply promote their products, if you use their sites from some non-chrome browsers you will see advertisements for chrome, but the sites will not refuse to work in other browsers and aren't tied to chrome-os etc... This is promotion as opposed to forcibly pushing.
So that's what MS can do, give us the ability to judge all their products on merit and we will be more likely to judge them all that way.
As much as i want to see competition in the search market i simply don't trust MS at all and that keeps me using Google... I would much rather see competition in the general desktop market than in search. Past history has suggested that although they're playing nice right now, using flash etc... If they were to become dominant in this market, you would soon see silverlight and modifications to the search site forcing people to use IE etc...
64bit code uses more memory, which can in some cases result in decreased performance.. Also, i believe on some intel cpus some performance features are not available in 64bit mode (i forget the exact details)...
Linux will download not just drivers, but updates for all of it's packages (not just the core system) and additional third party packages on demand...
What does windows 7 do when it can't find a driver for your network device?
The ability for windows to download drivers is an extremely recent addition which was severely lacking from older versions. Incidentally, windows 7 seems to have dropped support for a lot of older hardware entirely.
Drivers are variable in quality, on both windows and linux and sometimes have conflicts with each other.
Getting drivers installed is only part of the "installation" process, you also want to get applications installed to a point that the machine is usable...
And yes, the frequent release cycle is pretty much essential with hardware being updated so fast, you don't want your software to be a year old and unable to support your brand new hardware out of the box. Windows 7 might support most hardware out of the box right now, but give it a few months and it will start lagging behind like xp and vista did and there's unlikely to be a new version for several years.
The problem with suspend has to do with MS corrupting the ACPI spec... Find a machine where the ACPI support actually complies with the ACPI specs, and the DSDT has been compiled by Intel's compiler etc, and suspend will work perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu (i have several such machines). On a machine where ACPI is in some way broken, and the DSDT is compiled by the MS compiler (grep for MSFT in your dmesg) then it's pot luck wether linux has implemented the necessary workarounds to handle the intentionally broken ACPI...
This seems to be part of MS's embrace and extend (of ACPI) attempts to stifle competition.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people have no idea how to install an OS (windows is often much harder to install than linux anyway) and rely on whatever comes preinstalled on the system when they buy it. If it breaks, they either buy a new machine or find someone else to reinstall it for them.
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They would be better off *not* using ms products for the majority of their learning...
When I attended school, the school computers came with wordperfect and that's what we had to learn... Who uses wordperfect now? And this was wordperfect for dos we learnt, the current wordperfect versions as well as not being widely used, are completely different to the dos version anyway.
What schoolkids will find in schools today will not necessarily be what's widely used when they leave school.
So what you need to do, is teach the kids multiple programs, and teach them to think for themselves...
Don't teach them where to find a button to do X, teach them why they want to do X, and what such a function is likely to be called and have them work out for themselves how to do the same thing in multiple different programs. Teach them properly like this, and they will be prepared for whatever they encounter when they leave school and not tied to specific applications that have long since been forgotten.
The whole purpose of a school is to teach, if the result of the school's teaching means they get stumped when a button moves then the school has done a piss poor job... Buttons move around all the time, not just in computer programs... My TV has buttons on the side or the remote control for controlling it, my older TV had no remote control and had buttons on the front. In my car you need to twist one of the storks attached to the steering column to activate the headlamps, on the car i had before there was a knob you had to turn embedded into the dashboard.
Personally i'd be far more pissed if my kids were being taught in such a half assed manner that made them dependent on what's available today from a single supplier, which in no way prepares them for what might be available tomorrow.
I want my kids to learn how to think for themselves, not be indoctrinated by microsoft...
The problem is that people are resistant to change, and don't like learning new things, even if doing so would benefit them...
So they will complain about anything different, and then try to use it as if it was the same (ie not taking advantage of any advanced features)...
Our college (in 2000), with several thousand students and 500 workstations had a total of 6 servers...
This is a new school, one that was not previously locked in to any proprietary setup... They were able to start with a clean slate and do things properly.
Incidentally, how big or inefficient is the average school in new zealand if they require 48 servers? Just what exactly would all those servers do?
In the UK at least, you can only claim for travel to somewhere other than your normal place of work, where your normal place of work is detailed in your employment contract and must be where you spend more "working" time than any other single location.
Generally if you travel to other places for work purposes, the company will reimburse your travel costs anyway, and you are not liable for tax based on things you bought solely for work purposes (train tickets etc).
And of those 2 million who have errors, how many will have errors which are large enough to be worth bothering with?
Put more simply, how much is your time worth? If it takes you an hour to fill out the form and it saves you $5, is $5/hour a wage you would be happy working for?
Give the form a quick once over the bottom line to make sure it's roughly where you'd expect it to be and accept it. Only look more closely if it seems grossly wrong.
If the government makes an error, then they will make the same error when reviewing whatever tax returns you file under the current system...
Then you will be faced with an audit, and having to prove them wrong.
Anyone who wants to argue with the government is still free to do so, and audits could still be performed at random or based on suspicious filings. Most people have relatively simple affairs, and the government should get their taxes just right saving everyone a lot of hassle.
Intuit is just looking to protect their revenue stream at the expense of both taxpayers and the government.
I believe it was Finland where you get speeding fines relative to your earnings...
The guy who founded Nokia got stung very badly a few years back.
There are no other desktop or server os platforms which provide compatibility with microsoft's (largely by design)... The migration path would be extremely painful. Contrast that with a migration from RedHat to SuSE which would be relatively easy.
Migrating the OS would also in many cases require you to change applications, as a lot of proprietary applications are in the same boat. On the other hand, most applications which run on RedHat would also run on other Linux distributions.
Plenty of companies make money or appear to be making money, and yet due to various factors go under, or take their products in directions which are unfavourable to their customers.
The idea of guaranteeing multiple sources for anything you depend on is extremely basic, and yet MS seem to be granted an exception.
USB, PCI, AGP etc are hardware standards, you may have to license them to create hardware which supports them but you certainly don't need to pay anything if you just want to create software that drives such devices.
Hardware cannot be made for free anyway, therefore the licensing cost merely goes in with all the other manufacturing and raw materials costs...
Software on the other hand can be made for free unless you start introducing artificial restrictions like having to license a media format.
Something like this is great for MS because it basically makes it impossible to have a free web browser.
All the time if you try to install something not supported on the current version..
I tried to install nagios 3.x on ubuntu 8.04 (lts), i ended up having to roll my own packages because the only binary packages available required a newer version of ubuntu.
Had it happen a few years ago with debian stable and tetex 3.0 too
Only they usually screw this up through incompetence or ignorance...
One of the most important factors of having a safety net is to make sure everything you depend on has multiple sources....
Linux - RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu - check
Servers - Dell, HP, Sun, IBM - check
Routers - Cisco, Juniper - check
Windows - Microsoft ??? - FAIL
And the same for most other proprietary software... no second source, no fallback if the single supplier has problems.
If RedHat go bust, i'm sure Novell, Oracle, Canonical or anyone else will be more than happy to support your current RH installations while you gradually migrate to their distro... And seeing as how their distro will be very similar, based on the same kernel and same basic libs that migration will be fairly painless.
Interesting thought...
RedHat might not always be there, the recent economic troubles should have taught us that ANY company can go bust... Relying on a single supplier is extremely dangerous.
That said, RedHat are easily replaceable if they go under, there are plenty of other companies who will take up the slack.
The biggest problem is MS, if they go bust there is noone else who can support their software because noone else has the source code (or at least, don't have the rights to modify and distribute it). Relying on MS is just as dangerous as your single resident geek.
At least with Linux, there are already multiple companies supporting it and anyone can pick up the source and continue development if they see a market for doing so.
You don't have to use RedHat... All your FOSS code is still available, as is lots of code RedHat wrote and released under open licenses and you are free to download that source and compile it on another distro.
RedHat is offered as a choice, and large corporations take that choice because they prefer to buy from another large company. They made the choice to spend rather than save, they could have got the exact same software for free with no support or from other sources with varying support terms. Better that they gave their money to RH than MS.
I see RH as more of a robin hood figure, highly beneficial to the OSS community... They provide legitimacy to those corporates who think that software needs to be paid for and should come with complicated licensing terms, and invest a lot of money in OSS development. Those of us who aren't blinkered by the aforementioned corporate mentality get to benefit from all of their development work for free.
And no, your not paying, the company you work for is paying... Seeing as you're a developer i'd assume you are technically competent enough that you wouldn't need any of RH's services on your own.
You forgot to recompile anything that depends on what you just upgraded, rookie mistake.
Binary packages are a huge pain when you try to upgrade something on an otherwise stable system, and the only binary packages of the new app you want also require you to upgrade a whole stack of libs... Source lets me compile a new app onto an old system, and from a distro standpoint its a lot easier to maintain a port/ebuild than it is to rebuild packages for every distro release on every architecture.
Yeah... Redhat is thriving in a recession SELLING something that ANYONE can get for FREE.
That's not really RedHat's business model, it's more Microsoft's business model...
RedHat sell support services (as the article states), which you certainly can't get for free. Software is trivially copied, but a trained engineer's time isn't.
Software and services are entirely different beasts, software can be reduced to zero cost quite easily whereas services still require someone to physically provide them, even if you employ people in an asian call centre to provide that support you still have to pay them, train them, and provide equipment for them to use and somewhere to use it.
Long term as the market matures, economies of scale and competition will kick in resulting in both software and services being pushed downwards in price.
I'm sure you've seen how the same has happened to hardware, but again unlike software hardware can't be forced down to zero cost.
The "entitlement document" is free anyway, just sign up via the sun download center and register how many machines will be running solaris.
And note that this only covers "perpetual commercial use"... Non commercial use, and temporary commercial use (ie testing/eval) does not even require this.
Better would be for Firefox to utilise a native video decoding library provided by the underlying OS...
Windows has Directshow...
OSX has Quicktime...
Linux could use Gstreamer, mplayer, ffmpeg or several others...
Then the browser wouldn't technically be supporting any codec, and could use whatever codecs the underlying OS had support for.
Or they could insert the ads into the video file itself on the fly..
Yes...
Microsoft have done a huge amount of damage to their customers and the industry as a whole...
They have stifled innovation for years (for an example see IE6 - allowed to totally stagnate once it had a dominant marketshare, only updated again once its share was threatened several years later).
They have locked thousands of individuals and businesses into their products, removing those peoples freedom to choose the best product for the job. Even worse is that the lockin extends to those who aren't their customers, it's common to send proprietary microsoft format files around and people are expected to open them.
In many markets we are unable to judge products in their merits precisely because of microsoft. A competing product may be cheaper (or free), do everything you need better, but lacks compatibility with some proprietary microsoft technology therefore ruling it out.
To regain any level of respect, they need to undo all of the underhanded anti-consumer actions they have taken, and start competing purely based on the merits of their products in all the markets they operate in.
As it stands, although they may be trying to compete on merit right now, history has shown that once they gain sufficient market share they revert to their usual underhanded practices of locking people in and allowing the product to stagnate and/or using one product to forcibly push another. Don't forget all the "embrace, extend, extinguish" stuff from a few years back...
To give an example, the vast majority of MS products are tied to windows (forcibly pushing)..
By contrast, google simply promote their products, if you use their sites from some non-chrome browsers you will see advertisements for chrome, but the sites will not refuse to work in other browsers and aren't tied to chrome-os etc... This is promotion as opposed to forcibly pushing.
So that's what MS can do, give us the ability to judge all their products on merit and we will be more likely to judge them all that way.
As much as i want to see competition in the search market i simply don't trust MS at all and that keeps me using Google... I would much rather see competition in the general desktop market than in search.
Past history has suggested that although they're playing nice right now, using flash etc... If they were to become dominant in this market, you would soon see silverlight and modifications to the search site forcing people to use IE etc...
64bit code uses more memory, which can in some cases result in decreased performance..
Also, i believe on some intel cpus some performance features are not available in 64bit mode (i forget the exact details)...
Linux will download not just drivers, but updates for all of it's packages (not just the core system) and additional third party packages on demand...
What does windows 7 do when it can't find a driver for your network device?
The ability for windows to download drivers is an extremely recent addition which was severely lacking from older versions. Incidentally, windows 7 seems to have dropped support for a lot of older hardware entirely.
Drivers are variable in quality, on both windows and linux and sometimes have conflicts with each other.
Getting drivers installed is only part of the "installation" process, you also want to get applications installed to a point that the machine is usable...
And yes, the frequent release cycle is pretty much essential with hardware being updated so fast, you don't want your software to be a year old and unable to support your brand new hardware out of the box. Windows 7 might support most hardware out of the box right now, but give it a few months and it will start lagging behind like xp and vista did and there's unlikely to be a new version for several years.
The problem with suspend has to do with MS corrupting the ACPI spec...
Find a machine where the ACPI support actually complies with the ACPI specs, and the DSDT has been compiled by Intel's compiler etc, and suspend will work perfectly out of the box on Ubuntu (i have several such machines).
On a machine where ACPI is in some way broken, and the DSDT is compiled by the MS compiler (grep for MSFT in your dmesg) then it's pot luck wether linux has implemented the necessary workarounds to handle the intentionally broken ACPI...
This seems to be part of MS's embrace and extend (of ACPI) attempts to stifle competition.
Unfortunately the vast majority of people have no idea how to install an OS (windows is often much harder to install than linux anyway) and rely on whatever comes preinstalled on the system when they buy it.
If it breaks, they either buy a new machine or find someone else to reinstall it for them.