Not necessarily... They don't own all the code, much of it is licensed from third parties under various terms.. Some of these terms specify royalties per unit sold, they are free to sell on to serenity, but then serenity still have to pay these royalties as well as any additional royalties IBM demand... If you were to open source the code, you could potentially be forced to pay royalties for everyone who downloads it, not a position anyone wants to be in. The license on code could also specify that it cannot be sold to end users except as binaries. Selling it on to another company who intends to continue distributing it under the same terms is different however.
Their agreement with serenity could also prohibit open sourcing, otherwise they could completely shaft serenity... After paying all this money for OS/2, IBM goes and gives it away to everyone else... Serenity's lawyers would never have let them enter an agreement with potential to be so damaging.
AIX they can't open source, or else they might give SCO a leg to stand on... The open source community wouldn't have much use for the sourcecode to z/OS... DB2 already has open source alternatives. Websphere already has open source alternatives, and already consists of some open source components...
Also, who knows what other code is in these products that doesn't belong to IBM? Auditing the source, and stripping out anything that isn't IBM's is a long and expensive process, especially for a large product... Look how long it took Sun with Solaris, Java and StarOffice. And in IBM's case, the end result would be considerably less useful.
The internet uses electrical power yes, but chances are the servers hosting the files will be up anyway.. I doubt they will use much more than all the machines and raw materials required to produce DVDs... Your computer will need to be on to read from a DVD, and chances are these days it would be connected to the internet in any case. And spinning the DVD will consume a little extra power. Also, how many of these discs will never be used (theres one stuck to every newspaper, not every reader will use the DVD so a lot will just end up in landfill. Only people who want the content will download it.
But once you open a tray loading drive, there is a much bigger hole to put stuff in to... People who want to vandalise equipment will always find a way to do so.
Surely it's not the zone transfer in itself that's illegal, but rather actually executing that illegal "purpose"... Owning a car isn't illegal, but performing a ram raid is.
Yes, you have to buy, install and maintain the blackberry software and hardware to run it on, in addition to your existing email server. The iphone will work with virtually any existing mail server that supports imap, preferably with SSL.
As to putting smtp directly on the net, everyone does that, that's how you receive mail from the outside. Putting imap directly on the net perhaps not, but as i said in the original post you can vpn... Even so, imap over ssl is no less secure than an https based webmail system which are fairly common.
But to clarify the original posting, assuming you've not already invested time money and effort in something else, supporting an iphone is easier.
It's also worth considering, how long can blackberry last? They are pretty much dependent on microsoft (they primarily target exchange, with some supports for notes/groupwise, the server still requires a windows system to run on), and yet microsoft are directly competing with them... If you're already buying microsoft, you can bet their sales guys will already be trying to sell you on windows mobile instead of a blackberry or iphone... Apple may be able to target non microsoft shops, or encourage places to migrate to apple servers for their mail, blackberry can't really do that since their offering depends on their competitor's products.
Actually, most of the gui layer was stored in workbench.library, which was usually stored in ROM (they removed it on the A4000T to make space for the SCSI drivers i believe)... But you did need to run a small program called loadwb to make it initialize the workbench.library and run workbench... They could have put the loadwb command in ROM i guess, and given you the option to load a minimal workbench without booting from any media. They could have modified the early startup screen to make it use the minimal workbench instead...
Older Amigas could boot that quick too, most of the time was spent waiting for the drive to spin up. My A1200 with an IDE drive (the A1200 IDE controller was quite shit) used to boot in 6 seconds, and that was with quite a lot of third party apps loaded at startup, 6 seconds from pressing the power button to having a usable workbench screen and all background disk activity has finished. I still have an A4000 with SCSI, but that takes slightly longer because it's probing for SCSI devices. The biggest slowdown i had on my Amiga, was mounting CD0 - since it would take a few secs to detect the drive, then a couple more to spin it up, read volume information and load the icon associated with the inserted disc. Making the mount process run in the background sped things up a lot. I could also get the Amiga to boot to a minimal workbench a fair bit quicker, it literally only had to read about 50k from the drive once it had spun up. Isn't the Amiga One PPC based, and thus running OS3.9 under emulation or something?
Other way round actually... Microsoft worked hard on making the boot process *appear* faster, because people have to reboot windows so often... Unix systems were typically left running, so people didn't really care that once every few years the machine took 10 minutes to boot. I used to make changes to my unix boxes, but forget to change the startup scripts... I ended up with machines that didn't behave as expected if they ever rebooted, only time it became a problem was when i moved house and had to turn everything off.
To support it? An iphone is a lot less hassle to support from a corporate perspective than other types of device such as blackberry... It uses standard IMAP, with support for SSL.. Standard SMTP with support for TLS... It can even VPN, using standard l2tp/ipsec. You don't need any additional software, assuming you're running systems that support the appropriate standards. Yes, the iphone does have some shortcomings but being a hassle to support is not one of them. It's just a case of people being scared of what they don't know.
However, firefox is themeable... Hopefully whatever new UI they come up with can be replaced with the standard theme if the new one is too horrendous...
This is how microsoft force upgrades... Get people to send files in a new format, you can't open it without upgrading. Why don't you try sending files back to them as ODF? It's actually a more reasonable thing to do on a number of levels (you're only complying with an iso standard, the "upgrade" is free etc)
There isn't just the cost of acquiring licenses, there is also the cost of keeping track of how many you have, where they are and that you have enough etc, not to mention recovering licenses from retired machines, which can also soon add up. With OOo, the license only places terms on distribution, it has no restrictions on how you can use it inside your company, so it doesn't matter how many systems you install it on, you can install it on every machine you have without worrying. Also if you have any non windows systems, you can still install OOo so that all users will have the same suite.. Same for macs, msoffice for mac is a very different beast to the windows version, openoffice is just the same as the windows/linux versions.
But if a lot of companies move to OOo now while there's a compelling argument, 4 years down the line there will be a supply of OOo experienced staff and demand for more, causing people to learn it on their own time prior to applying for work...
What was that about MS claiming their OOXML format is meant to preserve compatibility... What about all those documents out there that use VBA? And is this now the 2nd or 3rd time they've completely dropped their scripting language to replace it with something else?
One of the most often cited reasons for not switching to OpenOffice is that it won't run VBA macros, but it seems MS won't either before long... If the VBA support in openoffice gets up to a usable state, or sun's converter works well, this could actually into a reason to migrate to OOo..
Aside from that, OOo already supports 4 languages for writing macros in, including starbasic which i imagine is kept to retain compatibility with old versions of staroffice... It also supports javascript, which seems a logical choice. If you invest the time to learn VBA your effort will soon be useless, if you learn whatever they replace it with you face the same fate at an indeterminate point in the future, and all your effort is tied to one app. If you learn javascript, you gain a useful skill that can be used for a variety of purposes in a selection of different apps... Not only will you be able to write openoffice macros, but you will also be able to write ajax apps, a very in-demand skill these days.
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Only people simply won't bother, they will just write the same crappy nonstandard HTML they have for IE6 because it still works.
Not necessarily...
They don't own all the code, much of it is licensed from third parties under various terms.. Some of these terms specify royalties per unit sold, they are free to sell on to serenity, but then serenity still have to pay these royalties as well as any additional royalties IBM demand...
If you were to open source the code, you could potentially be forced to pay royalties for everyone who downloads it, not a position anyone wants to be in.
The license on code could also specify that it cannot be sold to end users except as binaries. Selling it on to another company who intends to continue distributing it under the same terms is different however.
Their agreement with serenity could also prohibit open sourcing, otherwise they could completely shaft serenity... After paying all this money for OS/2, IBM goes and gives it away to everyone else... Serenity's lawyers would never have let them enter an agreement with potential to be so damaging.
AIX they can't open source, or else they might give SCO a leg to stand on...
The open source community wouldn't have much use for the sourcecode to z/OS...
DB2 already has open source alternatives.
Websphere already has open source alternatives, and already consists of some open source components...
Also, who knows what other code is in these products that doesn't belong to IBM? Auditing the source, and stripping out anything that isn't IBM's is a long and expensive process, especially for a large product... Look how long it took Sun with Solaris, Java and StarOffice. And in IBM's case, the end result would be considerably less useful.
Some machines have a hard coded emergency bios, which is only useful for loading a firmware update to restore the proper full bios...
Potentially it is, it's vigilante justice and legally should be left to the police (not that they will actually be capable of doing so).
The internet uses electrical power yes, but chances are the servers hosting the files will be up anyway.. I doubt they will use much more than all the machines and raw materials required to produce DVDs...
Your computer will need to be on to read from a DVD, and chances are these days it would be connected to the internet in any case. And spinning the DVD will consume a little extra power.
Also, how many of these discs will never be used (theres one stuck to every newspaper, not every reader will use the DVD so a lot will just end up in landfill. Only people who want the content will download it.
But once you open a tray loading drive, there is a much bigger hole to put stuff in to...
People who want to vandalise equipment will always find a way to do so.
Surely it's not the zone transfer in itself that's illegal, but rather actually executing that illegal "purpose"...
Owning a car isn't illegal, but performing a ram raid is.
Is it theft if someone points a camera through your open windows or doors and takes a picture of something inside your house?
Yes, can i see your written permission to access the computers comprising slashdot.org please?
Yes, you have to buy, install and maintain the blackberry software and hardware to run it on, in addition to your existing email server.
The iphone will work with virtually any existing mail server that supports imap, preferably with SSL.
As to putting smtp directly on the net, everyone does that, that's how you receive mail from the outside.
Putting imap directly on the net perhaps not, but as i said in the original post you can vpn... Even so, imap over ssl is no less secure than an https based webmail system which are fairly common.
But to clarify the original posting, assuming you've not already invested time money and effort in something else, supporting an iphone is easier.
It's also worth considering, how long can blackberry last? They are pretty much dependent on microsoft (they primarily target exchange, with some supports for notes/groupwise, the server still requires a windows system to run on), and yet microsoft are directly competing with them... If you're already buying microsoft, you can bet their sales guys will already be trying to sell you on windows mobile instead of a blackberry or iphone... Apple may be able to target non microsoft shops, or encourage places to migrate to apple servers for their mail, blackberry can't really do that since their offering depends on their competitor's products.
Actually, most of the gui layer was stored in workbench.library, which was usually stored in ROM (they removed it on the A4000T to make space for the SCSI drivers i believe)...
But you did need to run a small program called loadwb to make it initialize the workbench.library and run workbench... They could have put the loadwb command in ROM i guess, and given you the option to load a minimal workbench without booting from any media. They could have modified the early startup screen to make it use the minimal workbench instead...
Windows 3.1 would load (no not boot, its just a dos application) almost instantly on a p200 with 64mb ram...
Older Amigas could boot that quick too, most of the time was spent waiting for the drive to spin up. My A1200 with an IDE drive (the A1200 IDE controller was quite shit) used to boot in 6 seconds, and that was with quite a lot of third party apps loaded at startup, 6 seconds from pressing the power button to having a usable workbench screen and all background disk activity has finished. I still have an A4000 with SCSI, but that takes slightly longer because it's probing for SCSI devices.
The biggest slowdown i had on my Amiga, was mounting CD0 - since it would take a few secs to detect the drive, then a couple more to spin it up, read volume information and load the icon associated with the inserted disc. Making the mount process run in the background sped things up a lot. I could also get the Amiga to boot to a minimal workbench a fair bit quicker, it literally only had to read about 50k from the drive once it had spun up.
Isn't the Amiga One PPC based, and thus running OS3.9 under emulation or something?
Updated iTunes on my mac today, didn't need to reboot...
It did want to reboot to update quicktime, but i didn't bother updating quicktime today.
Other way round actually...
Microsoft worked hard on making the boot process *appear* faster, because people have to reboot windows so often...
Unix systems were typically left running, so people didn't really care that once every few years the machine took 10 minutes to boot.
I used to make changes to my unix boxes, but forget to change the startup scripts... I ended up with machines that didn't behave as expected if they ever rebooted, only time it became a problem was when i moved house and had to turn everything off.
To support it? An iphone is a lot less hassle to support from a corporate perspective than other types of device such as blackberry...
It uses standard IMAP, with support for SSL.. Standard SMTP with support for TLS...
It can even VPN, using standard l2tp/ipsec.
You don't need any additional software, assuming you're running systems that support the appropriate standards. Yes, the iphone does have some shortcomings but being a hassle to support is not one of them. It's just a case of people being scared of what they don't know.
It's like vi, if you're used to the interface you won't want to use anything else, but if you're not used to it, then it can drive you insane.
However, firefox is themeable... Hopefully whatever new UI they come up with can be replaced with the standard theme if the new one is too horrendous...
This is how microsoft force upgrades... Get people to send files in a new format, you can't open it without upgrading.
Why don't you try sending files back to them as ODF? It's actually a more reasonable thing to do on a number of levels (you're only complying with an iso standard, the "upgrade" is free etc)
There isn't just the cost of acquiring licenses, there is also the cost of keeping track of how many you have, where they are and that you have enough etc, not to mention recovering licenses from retired machines, which can also soon add up.
With OOo, the license only places terms on distribution, it has no restrictions on how you can use it inside your company, so it doesn't matter how many systems you install it on, you can install it on every machine you have without worrying.
Also if you have any non windows systems, you can still install OOo so that all users will have the same suite..
Same for macs, msoffice for mac is a very different beast to the windows version, openoffice is just the same as the windows/linux versions.
But if a lot of companies move to OOo now while there's a compelling argument, 4 years down the line there will be a supply of OOo experienced staff and demand for more, causing people to learn it on their own time prior to applying for work...
Oh yes, i blocked 500 email addresses yesterday, got 350 more today... I'l get them all tho, these spammers will run out of email addresses soon!
Just buy a more expensive car...
What was that about MS claiming their OOXML format is meant to preserve compatibility... What about all those documents out there that use VBA?
And is this now the 2nd or 3rd time they've completely dropped their scripting language to replace it with something else?
One of the most often cited reasons for not switching to OpenOffice is that it won't run VBA macros, but it seems MS won't either before long... If the VBA support in openoffice gets up to a usable state, or sun's converter works well, this could actually into a reason to migrate to OOo..
Aside from that, OOo already supports 4 languages for writing macros in, including starbasic which i imagine is kept to retain compatibility with old versions of staroffice... It also supports javascript, which seems a logical choice. If you invest the time to learn VBA your effort will soon be useless, if you learn whatever they replace it with you face the same fate at an indeterminate point in the future, and all your effort is tied to one app.
If you learn javascript, you gain a useful skill that can be used for a variety of purposes in a selection of different apps... Not only will you be able to write openoffice macros, but you will also be able to write ajax apps, a very in-demand skill these days.