While your statement is true, it's less rude to request someone to install an ODF compatible client (most of which are free) than to demand for someone to install a proprietary application. I find it incredibly rude when someone demands i send to them, or receive from them, a file in a proprietary microsoft format when there are far superior open standard formats available.
In the UK, speeding tickets are accompanied with points on your licence (typically 3, unless you were driving more than 30mph over the limit in which case your licence usually gets revoked)... Once you get 12 points you lose your licence, but the points expire after a few years. However if you drive in another country, they can only fine you and not impose points. If you can afford a supercar, you can probably afford a few speeding fines. As for income based fines, if your in a foreign country the police cannot really find out your income so you'd get a standard fine. Also the cops need to catch you, some countries have slow police cars and very few bikes or helicopters.
In a word, yes. Proprietary lock-in only benefits one vendor, at the expense of everyone else. Microsoft being more powerful only harms other companies and end users, and it is in everyone else's interest for there to be competition and openness. The only people who have any reason to defend MS, are those who are being paid by them.
If having your car is crushed, people will simply drive wrecks... Especially if the punishment is the same for driving an un-roadworthy vehicle. You can pick up cheap trashy cars for less than $50 that will just about drive, most of them are easily capable of speeding and some will physically shake themselves apart if you do. You'd lose more money due to the gas in your tank than the destruction of such a car.
Multiple workspaces, very useful... The lack of multiple workspaces by default (buggy third party kludges aside) is the biggest issue i have with osx. Aside from that, i see no reason that would make me want to install leopard.
That goes against economy too, instead of letting the car mostly coast down the hill, you end up having to apply the brakes to keep within the limit. Wearing out your pads, and spreading very fine brake dust everywhere.
It is speed difference, inexperience, lack of attention etc which causes more accidents... If your driving along a highway doing 70mph (thats the legal limit here) in the outside lane, and some idiot doing 50mph pulls out right infront of you you wont be expecting it... If someone is driving within the speed limit, but is concentrating on their mobile phone or some other non-driving activity they could fail to slow down/stop, swerve into oncoming traffic etc... If someone is driving while intoxicated, they could do all kinds of erratic things causing harm to other road users... If someone is driving a poorly maintained car it could stop/stall, or as has happened recently something could go wrong causing the car to accelerate to its top speed against the will of the driver, not to mention that bits could drop off, the car could generate large distracting clouds of smoke or even catch fire.
While speeding can be wreckless, i would feel much safer sharing the roads with michael schumacher doing 150mph in a high end well maintained sports car, then some drunk guy driving along at 50mph in a rusty wreck of a car with a beer in one hand and a phone in the other.
Of all the accidents i have been involved in or witnessed...
I was rear-ended once at a set of traffic lights, the other driver was too busy with his phone to notice that the cars infront of him had stopped at the red lights. I had left a sensible amount of distance between myself and the car in front, so the impact didn't shunt my car into the one in front.
I saw a car driving along the highway with a water leak causing the cabin to steam up really badly, i gave him a wide berth and he managed to crash off the road a couple of miles later.
The difference is that GNU publishes their work, so while they extend other people's work it's usually to make improvements, and the improvements are always out in the open for other people to adopt. If your compiler won't compile something but gcc will, you can easily work out what the gcc-specific extensions do either from documentation or source code, and implement them yourself. By contrast, microsoft often keep as much detail about their extensions private as they can, to make it difficult for anyone else to implement. Aside from that, gcc places far less other restrictions on you than microsoft products, you can run gcc on almost any platform, you can install it on as many systems as you want for no cost, you can modify it to suit your needs, you can redistribute it with very few restrictions.
Well, considering that MS developed the "ultimate" version of vista first, and then intentionally degraded it to make the lesser versions... The fact that the cheaper versions cost more to develop, potentially slightly more to distribute (multiple inventory items to keep track of instead of one) and yet cost less just shows how much the customer is being gouged. I would feel terribly insulted to pay more for something that costs less to produce. Aside from the fact that all the various versions only help to confuse customers. They really should make one version at one price tag, keep it simple as it were. (car analogy) It's not like a car where it actually costs more to install a more powerful engine, aircon, alloy wheels and all the usual extras you can get (thus justifying the higher price tag).
But if you make it expensive for microsoft, you push it out of the reach of most other organizations. What you really need is a fair and balanced approach (As if this would ever happen!) where....
Anyone voting has to justify their vote regardless of which way they vote and demonstrate a sufficient level of competence in the field to which the standard applies when doing so. If they vote yes, they should address any negative points which were raised during pre-vote meetings and justify why they are insufficient to warrant a no vote. There are clear rules about new standards, ie the published standard must fully document them, they must not duplicate other standards (reuse and extend if necessary, but be required to justify the extension)... And standards shouldn't be proposed by a single company and fed through the process, they should be developed jointly between any party who has a valid interest in the area and who wishes to join the process. Any proposed standards developed via a closed process should be immediately rejected, as they are usually designed for the sole benefit of one party, contrary to the purpose of standards.
Unfortunately, the amount microsoft stand to gain by subverting the standards process (and thus maintaining their market share for longer) is massively more than virtually any other single company would ever be willing to invest in the standards process.
I had a Thinkpad 600E (neomagic video), hibernate worked perfectly under linux (using apm not acpi) I had a Thinkpad T23 (s3 video i think), hibernate worked perfectly under linux using both apm and later acpi I had a Thinkpad T42 (ati video, but old radeon not supported by their binary drivers), hibernate worked well with acpi so long as you switched out of X before you hibernated (the hibernation scripts i used did this automatically anyway)
The new chip gives you choice... You can either have massively improved performance (2 cores, more than twice the clockrate, more memory bandwidth and more instructions per clock so more than 4x faster) or you can downclock the more modern cpu and/or disable one of the cores, meaning it will still be faster than the older chip and still use less power (but obviously not perform as well as it could).
A "server" OS that comes with... A full set of DirectX libraries that arent easily removed (3d graphics, directplay, audio support etc) A web browser that's not easily removed.. A graphical mail client A mandatory GUI that cannot be shut down or removed with kernel mode video drivers (and no facility to use serial console) A media player complete with codecs etc
And i'm sure there's some other crap that has no place on a server too. Any unix server i set up would be text only, with serial consoles and a completely minimal install. Even my gaming server (runs dedicated quake servers and the like) doesn't have any gui at all, tho it does need a couple of image libraries installed for some of the games. I only install something if it is absolutely required to support the primary purpose of the server.
Interestingly, older versions of IIS allowed you to hide the web server banner (for security reasons, no sense to tell people exactly what webserver and os your running) whereas 6.0 doesnt.. Apache doesn't let you hide the fact it's apache by default, but it lets you hide the version the OS type (IIS on the other hand, doesn't let you hide the version and an IIS/6.0 version banner also tells you exactly what OS is running too). There really is no reason to remove the ability to hide the banner, other than to try and inflate the netcraft stats. They also now recommend that you don`t change the banner, despite previously recommending that you do for security reasons and providing a tool to do so easily (search for urlscan). Apache has never let you remove the apache string short of modifying it and recompiling.
Some of the volume/site licence agreements actually state that all your machines must be licenced for a version of windows, and your site licence allows you to install the same latest version on every machine regardless of what it originally came with. Thus, it's quite possible to be in violation of your licence terms if you buy the machines with no os. I've been at several companies who buy all their workstation with oem xp home, and then upgrade it on their site licence.
The overall market is growing... I also assume this only counts Dell servers which are bought with Linux preinstalled... I would be interested to see how many systems are bought with nothing installed, as a lot of these will probably end up with linux distributions installed on them that dell doesn't offer preinstalled (debian etc)
It's the integration with all these other features that keeps people using outlook... If your just talking about email, then outlook is actually one of the crappiest mail clients out there.
If your worried about that, then you really should send your documents as PDF... MSoffice has a poor record too when it comes to how documents will look on different versions and different configurations. It often works well enough inside a company when everyone has the same version because all the workstations are set up in exactly the same way, but as soon as you try doing anything remotely complex and opening it on a different version things start breaking... Even something as simple as having a different default printer can completely screw the layout. Also when it comes to opening older files, openoffice often does a better job than current msoffice versions.
But in the case of OO other people can and will fix the mistakes IBM make... Aside from that, IBM adds credibility and a marketing budget to the project.
Most people don't use exchange for the email component, if all they wanted was email then exchange is one of the worst choices. It's not even the calendar or the group directory that's any good, they just want everything bundled together into a single package that works together.
There has been a spate of malware recently that uses msoffice to spread, most of it exploiting vulnerabilities in the parsing of their poorly kludged together binary format... One of the MS advisories actually advises you not to open any word files unless you absolutely trust the source. So your statement about no viruses lately is completely wrong.
The ISP i use de-prioritises p2p traffic, so that anything else takes priority over it. This results in p2p running very slowly or not at all during the working day (most of their customers are business users) but very quickly over night. I just leave a p2p client running overnight and its usually finished by the morning.
It is much the same in most other countries too... You have a selection of small ISPs offering a varying range of services, some cheap, some with value-add extras, different quality of support etc. But most people stick to the large "one size fits all" isps who advertise day in day out on tv, their services are usually fairly cheap and cater to the average user (runs windows, downloads less than 2gb per month, doesnt use voip, doesnt play online games, doesnt know what a static ip is and certainly has no need for more than 1, and wont connect more than 1 system to the isp at once).. So if you are the average user, and everything works properly your fine... If your requirements are different, or something doesnt work first time and you have to call support, these isps quickly become a hassle.
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While your statement is true, it's less rude to request someone to install an ODF compatible client (most of which are free) than to demand for someone to install a proprietary application.
I find it incredibly rude when someone demands i send to them, or receive from them, a file in a proprietary microsoft format when there are far superior open standard formats available.
In the UK, speeding tickets are accompanied with points on your licence (typically 3, unless you were driving more than 30mph over the limit in which case your licence usually gets revoked)... Once you get 12 points you lose your licence, but the points expire after a few years.
However if you drive in another country, they can only fine you and not impose points. If you can afford a supercar, you can probably afford a few speeding fines.
As for income based fines, if your in a foreign country the police cannot really find out your income so you'd get a standard fine.
Also the cops need to catch you, some countries have slow police cars and very few bikes or helicopters.
In a word, yes.
Proprietary lock-in only benefits one vendor, at the expense of everyone else. Microsoft being more powerful only harms other companies and end users, and it is in everyone else's interest for there to be competition and openness.
The only people who have any reason to defend MS, are those who are being paid by them.
If having your car is crushed, people will simply drive wrecks...
Especially if the punishment is the same for driving an un-roadworthy vehicle. You can pick up cheap trashy cars for less than $50 that will just about drive, most of them are easily capable of speeding and some will physically shake themselves apart if you do. You'd lose more money due to the gas in your tank than the destruction of such a car.
Multiple workspaces, very useful...
The lack of multiple workspaces by default (buggy third party kludges aside) is the biggest issue i have with osx. Aside from that, i see no reason that would make me want to install leopard.
That goes against economy too, instead of letting the car mostly coast down the hill, you end up having to apply the brakes to keep within the limit. Wearing out your pads, and spreading very fine brake dust everywhere.
It is speed difference, inexperience, lack of attention etc which causes more accidents...
If your driving along a highway doing 70mph (thats the legal limit here) in the outside lane, and some idiot doing 50mph pulls out right infront of you you wont be expecting it...
If someone is driving within the speed limit, but is concentrating on their mobile phone or some other non-driving activity they could fail to slow down/stop, swerve into oncoming traffic etc...
If someone is driving while intoxicated, they could do all kinds of erratic things causing harm to other road users...
If someone is driving a poorly maintained car it could stop/stall, or as has happened recently something could go wrong causing the car to accelerate to its top speed against the will of the driver, not to mention that bits could drop off, the car could generate large distracting clouds of smoke or even catch fire.
While speeding can be wreckless, i would feel much safer sharing the roads with michael schumacher doing 150mph in a high end well maintained sports car, then some drunk guy driving along at 50mph in a rusty wreck of a car with a beer in one hand and a phone in the other.
Of all the accidents i have been involved in or witnessed...
I was rear-ended once at a set of traffic lights, the other driver was too busy with his phone to notice that the cars infront of him had stopped at the red lights. I had left a sensible amount of distance between myself and the car in front, so the impact didn't shunt my car into the one in front.
I saw a car driving along the highway with a water leak causing the cabin to steam up really badly, i gave him a wide berth and he managed to crash off the road a couple of miles later.
The difference is that GNU publishes their work, so while they extend other people's work it's usually to make improvements, and the improvements are always out in the open for other people to adopt.
If your compiler won't compile something but gcc will, you can easily work out what the gcc-specific extensions do either from documentation or source code, and implement them yourself.
By contrast, microsoft often keep as much detail about their extensions private as they can, to make it difficult for anyone else to implement.
Aside from that, gcc places far less other restrictions on you than microsoft products, you can run gcc on almost any platform, you can install it on as many systems as you want for no cost, you can modify it to suit your needs, you can redistribute it with very few restrictions.
Well, considering that MS developed the "ultimate" version of vista first, and then intentionally degraded it to make the lesser versions... The fact that the cheaper versions cost more to develop, potentially slightly more to distribute (multiple inventory items to keep track of instead of one) and yet cost less just shows how much the customer is being gouged. I would feel terribly insulted to pay more for something that costs less to produce.
Aside from the fact that all the various versions only help to confuse customers.
They really should make one version at one price tag, keep it simple as it were.
(car analogy)
It's not like a car where it actually costs more to install a more powerful engine, aircon, alloy wheels and all the usual extras you can get (thus justifying the higher price tag).
But if you make it expensive for microsoft, you push it out of the reach of most other organizations.
What you really need is a fair and balanced approach (As if this would ever happen!) where....
Anyone voting has to justify their vote regardless of which way they vote and demonstrate a sufficient level of competence in the field to which the standard applies when doing so. If they vote yes, they should address any negative points which were raised during pre-vote meetings and justify why they are insufficient to warrant a no vote.
There are clear rules about new standards, ie the published standard must fully document them, they must not duplicate other standards (reuse and extend if necessary, but be required to justify the extension)...
And standards shouldn't be proposed by a single company and fed through the process, they should be developed jointly between any party who has a valid interest in the area and who wishes to join the process. Any proposed standards developed via a closed process should be immediately rejected, as they are usually designed for the sole benefit of one party, contrary to the purpose of standards.
Unfortunately, the amount microsoft stand to gain by subverting the standards process (and thus maintaining their market share for longer) is massively more than virtually any other single company would ever be willing to invest in the standards process.
I had a Thinkpad 600E (neomagic video), hibernate worked perfectly under linux (using apm not acpi)
I had a Thinkpad T23 (s3 video i think), hibernate worked perfectly under linux using both apm and later acpi
I had a Thinkpad T42 (ati video, but old radeon not supported by their binary drivers), hibernate worked well with acpi so long as you switched out of X before you hibernated (the hibernation scripts i used did this automatically anyway)
Not electrical, but i'm sure they suck more processing power to do similar tasks.
The new chip gives you choice...
You can either have massively improved performance (2 cores, more than twice the clockrate, more memory bandwidth and more instructions per clock so more than 4x faster) or you can downclock the more modern cpu and/or disable one of the cores, meaning it will still be faster than the older chip and still use less power (but obviously not perform as well as it could).
A "server" OS that comes with...
A full set of DirectX libraries that arent easily removed (3d graphics, directplay, audio support etc)
A web browser that's not easily removed..
A graphical mail client
A mandatory GUI that cannot be shut down or removed with kernel mode video drivers (and no facility to use serial console)
A media player complete with codecs etc
And i'm sure there's some other crap that has no place on a server too.
Any unix server i set up would be text only, with serial consoles and a completely minimal install. Even my gaming server (runs dedicated quake servers and the like) doesn't have any gui at all, tho it does need a couple of image libraries installed for some of the games. I only install something if it is absolutely required to support the primary purpose of the server.
Interestingly, older versions of IIS allowed you to hide the web server banner (for security reasons, no sense to tell people exactly what webserver and os your running) whereas 6.0 doesnt..
Apache doesn't let you hide the fact it's apache by default, but it lets you hide the version the OS type (IIS on the other hand, doesn't let you hide the version and an IIS/6.0 version banner also tells you exactly what OS is running too). There really is no reason to remove the ability to hide the banner, other than to try and inflate the netcraft stats. They also now recommend that you don`t change the banner, despite previously recommending that you do for security reasons and providing a tool to do so easily (search for urlscan).
Apache has never let you remove the apache string short of modifying it and recompiling.
Some of the volume/site licence agreements actually state that all your machines must be licenced for a version of windows, and your site licence allows you to install the same latest version on every machine regardless of what it originally came with. Thus, it's quite possible to be in violation of your licence terms if you buy the machines with no os.
I've been at several companies who buy all their workstation with oem xp home, and then upgrade it on their site licence.
The overall market is growing...
I also assume this only counts Dell servers which are bought with Linux preinstalled... I would be interested to see how many systems are bought with nothing installed, as a lot of these will probably end up with linux distributions installed on them that dell doesn't offer preinstalled (debian etc)
It's the integration with all these other features that keeps people using outlook...
If your just talking about email, then outlook is actually one of the crappiest mail clients out there.
If your worried about that, then you really should send your documents as PDF...
MSoffice has a poor record too when it comes to how documents will look on different versions and different configurations. It often works well enough inside a company when everyone has the same version because all the workstations are set up in exactly the same way, but as soon as you try doing anything remotely complex and opening it on a different version things start breaking...
Even something as simple as having a different default printer can completely screw the layout.
Also when it comes to opening older files, openoffice often does a better job than current msoffice versions.
But in the case of OO other people can and will fix the mistakes IBM make...
Aside from that, IBM adds credibility and a marketing budget to the project.
Most people don't use exchange for the email component, if all they wanted was email then exchange is one of the worst choices.
It's not even the calendar or the group directory that's any good, they just want everything bundled together into a single package that works together.
There has been a spate of malware recently that uses msoffice to spread, most of it exploiting vulnerabilities in the parsing of their poorly kludged together binary format... One of the MS advisories actually advises you not to open any word files unless you absolutely trust the source. So your statement about no viruses lately is completely wrong.
The ISP i use de-prioritises p2p traffic, so that anything else takes priority over it. This results in p2p running very slowly or not at all during the working day (most of their customers are business users) but very quickly over night. I just leave a p2p client running overnight and its usually finished by the morning.
It is much the same in most other countries too...
You have a selection of small ISPs offering a varying range of services, some cheap, some with value-add extras, different quality of support etc.
But most people stick to the large "one size fits all" isps who advertise day in day out on tv, their services are usually fairly cheap and cater to the average user (runs windows, downloads less than 2gb per month, doesnt use voip, doesnt play online games, doesnt know what a static ip is and certainly has no need for more than 1, and wont connect more than 1 system to the isp at once).. So if you are the average user, and everything works properly your fine...
If your requirements are different, or something doesnt work first time and you have to call support, these isps quickly become a hassle.