I would hypothesize that MS having Employees demonstrate the consoles instead of having visitors play them made the difference. Employees playing the games is the same as making a presentation.
If that's the case, MS COULD have been in the right. "Well, if people are busy playing games, they're not paying attention to the exhibitors" -- that could be why that rule would be there in the first place.
Talk about bad sportsmanship though. Even if MS had good intentions (ha!) there's no way anybody's going to say 'Go MS!'
BTW, just because I'm playing Devil's Advocate here doesn't mean you have the right to come in, misinterpret me, and then tell me I'm an idiot. I've had enough of that over the last week. I don't support what MS did so don't twist what I said into saying I do.
Heh Thank you, I think you basically got what I was thinking. (and you expressed it better than I did too...)
It's probably a slap in the face to Microsoft that I can buy a cheap copy of Win2K and put Apache on it to serve as a site. (At least I'm reasonably sure you can do that... not sure if it has a limit to how many connections are supported.) For all we know, this license addition is probably to combat that. Suddenly the value of MS's different OS's are in jeopardy.
They're shooting themselves in the foot, though. My company has a product that would probably violate this license if we were using XP. We have a PocketPC running 802.11 to remotely control a computer. We're not using VNC anymore (finally got our own code), but we were for a while. Their license says we'd have needed XP for the PocketPC (no chance of that.) That would have used Linux instead if it had come to that.
I can't read the review right now, I guess Slashdot killed the server heh. I just wanted to mention that the effects aren't done yet. If Ep1 was any indication, they'll be working on effects up until 3 weeks before the launch of the movie. If that's the case, then the reviewer likely saw an 'animatic version' of the movie, without everything in place. Normally this would be a good sign, except Lucas is the kind of guy to keep tweaking the movie in post production.
I'll give you an example, long after the principal photography was done, Lucas decided to add a line for C3PO. They had an artist digitally recreate the left side of the picture so it could scroll over to the right, because 3PO wasn't originally in the shot. Then they had to composite C3PO in via bluescreen. All so he could say this very important, plot pivotal line "You'll never get me onto one of those starships."
In other words, Lucas still has time to change it. A tweak here and a tweak there could potentially damage the movie. On the other hand, though, this technique could be used to improve the movie too. Who knows... In any case, as long as the movie has time to evolve, I wouldn't back any reviews of it right now.
I talked to my boss one day about how the engineers where I work are measured. Basically, it's along the lines of 'does the work get done?'. The project is defined with milestones set over a period of time, and if a deadline is missed the milestones are moved around a bit.
We have engineers that may spend a day or two writing out a document to assist their coding the next day. That isn't considered a ding in their productivity. If anything, providing an insight into their code before they write it (psuedocode, not commenting) has been very helpful, particularly when the other engineers need to code parts that talk to each other.
I honestly have no idea how this would scale to a >50 employee company. If it's really that important to make sure you're squeezing every ounce of productivity from your employee, I'd be concerned about where exactly that company is heading. Seems like investing more time into pre-planning would be more fruitful than lighting a fire under an employee to attain 'measurable goals'.
In some ways, I'm glad I didn't choose programming. It's quite frustrating to predict when you'll have code you've never written before.
I'm not so sure that it's a matter of people acting like fanboys of the movie, but most of us at Slashdot probably have something riding on Star Wars success. I'm willing to bet most of the people frequenting here have some interest in Sci-Fi. Star Wars has a way of expanding Sci-Fi to a greater audience, provided it doesn't suck. A greater appeal for sci-fi would certainly make a lot of our lives easier. If Star Wars ep 4 hadn't opened the doors to sci-fi, we'd all have to hide in shadows just to watch Doctor Who;). If Episode II stinks, we won't be able to take our significant others to see the next one, or possibly any other sci-fi movie.
As for the computer industry, Ep2 could give it a serious boost. Digital artists would be more in demand and we may start to see more movies done entirely digital. If this happens, we could see a serious upgrade to theaters aka digital projectors. My hope is that one day movie theaters upgrade to the new projectors, it might mean an increase of frame rate (smoother motion...) is possible, and for viewing on a big screen that'd really be nice. Ep2 could help usher that in, but not if it sucks.
You don't have to be a Star Wars fan to feel the benefit of a good Star Wars movie. I have virtually no interest in seeing this movie, but I do hope for its succees anyway. It could mean a rather lucrative career for me.
Anti-VNC would be XP intentionally disabling ports that are commonly used by VNC. Having a license that reads "Under these vague terms, you need a license of XP on the client machine" doesn't say to me 'We hate VNC', it says to me "We want more money if you're using our OS to do things on two computers."
Is it evil, yes. Is it 'anti-VNC', I'm not convinced of that.
Heh, no that's not quite equal to what I was saying. It's not to prevent somebody from hacking a computer, (I'm amused that you'd actually think that was what I was saying...), its to prevent MS from being liable to damage from a hacker. If a hacker does damage to somebody, MS doesn't want responsibility. I'm saying MS doesn't want to be responsible if their system was compromised because one of the 'features' of Outlook lets somebody insert a trojan.
Does it sound absurd? Yep. I know it does. I honestly think MS would try that. Would it work? Well, I certainly hope not, but I doubt it'd be too hard to get a lawyer to use that point. It's not like they're ethical or anything.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending MS. The global point that I'm making is that I don't think MS is trying to cut off the remote computing business, I think there may be other reasons they added that clause here. I personally think that if it's not to obsolve themselves of responsibility, then maybe it's to force somebody to buy a license of XP in order to do certain things with it. *Shrug*
Heh talk about Karma roller coaster. Somebody actually tried to get my post modded down. I guess it worked because somebody modded me down as a troll. Can you believe that? I provide an alternative point of view, and I'm a troll?
I'd like to thank Drunken_Jackass for bringing nothing to this discussion. I never said it wasn't possible to do so (although I don't think Terminal Services quite works that way, but that's a seperate discussion...) today. I said that MS doesn't want people to use one license of their OS with 25 people using it. That's what 2000 Enterprise Edition 25-licenses is for. I would like to thank Drunken Jackass for oversimplifying my point and getting me modded down.
My point still stands, and my feelings aren't hurt by being modded down. If my point is overrated or irrelevant, that's fine. It'd be nice if I were being modded appropriately, though.
"Is this possible? With XP can multiple users run multiple programs at the same time in a usable manner? Sure you can start up office; start typing a letter, leave office running and log in as a different user without shutting down office, but can two users log in and run it at the same time without interfering with each other. When I run PC Anywhere on my win98 box; i can't connect more than once; the two users would interfere with each other. Does XP resolve this??? excuse my ignorance; but I haven't seen XP yet (nor do I intend to)"
XP doesn't resolve this without the client/host software being modified. However, the ability to run seperate programs as seperate users means that the hard part is already done. We're not talking about multiple instances of the same program, we're talking about multiple instances with different users. Office thrives on different users.
So the answer is "no, not yet. But it woudln't be that hard."
True enough. But if you read the license, it says that the client computer needs XP also. So anybody using XP to talk to XP should be safe. That very well could be a 'use XP or use nothing' license, but I seriously doubt they'd use remote computing to try to leverage that. That's such an uncommon practice. I mean seriously, who would they bust on it?
"Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop features described below, you may not use the Product to permit any Device to use, access, display, or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer, nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display, or run the Product or Product's user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product."
This is taken out of context, but I'm assuming 'Product' is referring to XP. It doesn't say you can't run VNC, it says that there needs to be a seperate license of XP for the client. That is bogus for VNC users, but if you look a little closer at the wording, I'm not sure they exactly intended to wipe out VNC. It sounds like they're saying 'you have to be using XP to control XP', but that's only true if this agreement is for the home edition of XP. Again, this was taken out of context, but I can't help but wonder if this was taken from the Corporate version of XP's agreement.
If that's the case, suddenly it makes more sense. What MS is trying to do is get companies to buy the XP Enterprise Edition (at least I assume there's a version like that...) that has 25 client licenses. In which case, using PC Anywhere to connect to that product would require an extra license. This sounds shitty unless you think about it some more. Computers are getting more powerful, right? So it gets to a point where you could have one computer powerful enough to perform a number of people's needs, all you'd need is a terminal to connect to it.
Let me tell you about an interesting feature that XP has that the rest of the Windows line doesn't: It can have multiple users running programs at the same time. Unix has done this for ages, but XP finally supports this. You can log in as yourself, run a program, then log in as somebody else and run a program there too. In effect, both your programs are still running. A company looking to save a few bucks could make a central computer running XP and hack a version of VNC to divvy up incoming connections into different users. Then they build a bunch of Linux machines using VNC that connect to this server and make it look like a Windows desktop. They could buy exactly one copy of Office and support a whole office with that license. This would be harder to do with Win2K, but it seems like it'd be fairly easy with XP. I think MS's license is saying that you can't do this.
As a side effect, VNC and PC Anywhere are technically unable to be used legitimately, unless MS specificially says it's ok. They probably have done that with PCAnywhere (there's hints to that effect on Symantec's site), but VNC probably won't be since it's open source.
Alot of people are interpreting this line of text as an attempt to maintain a monopoly, or to wipe out VNC or something like that, but that really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If MS really didn't like remote computing, then by default all they'd have to do is disable the common ports used for it. I think it's more likely they're trying to prevent people from doing something that hasn't been attempted yet.
I'm not convinced they're trying to slay VNC or anybody else. I think they're covering their own butts. With all these backdoor viruses floating around, I think MS is trying to prevent themselves from being taken to court if somebody is hacked. It sure saves them from having to write code to fix Outlook Express.
I don't think MS is trying to control people's use of VNC or other products. There's just no evidence of that. Let me put it this way, what kind of competition is MS really getting from that? They have PC Anywhere and VNC. The problem with both of these programs is that they leave an OS available to be controlled, if proper steps are not taken. I saw the Discovery channel about how a net-security company tested a company's network (they were hired to do this...) and found ways in using both PC Anywhere and VNC. The network admin wasn't taking apprproiate steps to protect access to those machines.
I think what is going on there is that people tried to blame MS when they got their computer broken into by Back Orifice or a similar program and this is MS's way of saying "we're not responsible for your loss of data unless it was a vulnerability in our own software." Although that license does appear to prohibit use of these products, I doubt MS'll audit a company and punish them for it. If you go to Symantec's site, they have an 'XP Compatibility' blurb showing off how they worked with MS to launch AntiVirus with XP. If you stroll on over to the PC Anywhere section of their site, it very specifically mentions XP as one of the OS's it supports. I seriously doubt that they'd be selling that product if it'd hurt their relationship with MS.
I wouldn't jump to the conlcusion that MS is trying to maintain a monopoly every step it takes , particulary with the Gov't breathing down their necks. It's cool to hate Microsoft, but assuming everything they do is evil doesn't help anybody.
No forgiveness needed, you were basically right the first time. I realized that I wasn't quite clear on what I meant. When I said the trivia bit, I was also thinking about other posts at/. I've had nitpicked. It was a poor organization of my post in the first place that I later band-aided with the 'don't get me wrong...' line. I really should have moved that line up to where I mentioned the trivia, so that the reader wouldn't sit there for like 4 setences thinking I was passing Hitler off as trivia. Heh. I should take more time to write my posts.
I appreciate you taking the time to read and understand my post. I have a lot of respect for you right now.:)
When I was in 1st or 2nd grade (1985 I think?) McDonald's had a contest where they gave out flexible records in the Sunday paper with some people trying to sing all of the items on McDonald's menu. Almost all the records had the people screwing up the song. If you got the one where they completed it, you won a bunch of money. A bunch of people were buying up tons of Sunday Papers and listening to the records inside.
The amusing side-effect of this was that most of my classmates could sing the McDonald's menu. This is as far as I got:
"Big Mac, McDLT, a Quarter Pounder with some cheese, Filet of Fish, a Hamburger, A Cheeseburger, a Happy Meal, Crispy Golden Fries, large or regular size..."
It bugs me that an ad campaign that many years ago has me retaining that much information from it.
They aren't selling to you, they're selling to companies like Pepsi and PC Gamer. Who cares if you are interested or not the big $$ comes from Pepsi saying 'I want to have a contest where I give away 100,000 CD's so somebody can see if they win.'
I see what you're saying, but what I've read so far says that they're not so interested in putting out flexible CDR's.
If you'd like a list of how these things would be useful to you, I can provide that:
- When you buy a PC Gamer, the chances of having a broken disk are a lot smaller
- You can put many more flexible CD's in a binder than you could with regular CD's. In theory, they'd be safer.
- It'd be easier to take your music collection on Vactation. I'm travelling overseas soon, and my solution was to buy an MP3-CD Player to listen to all my music. Flexible CD's would have meant I could have fit a lot more music CD's in my bag.
As for what's wrong with regular CD's, they're too big and they're somewhat easy to break. Though I cannot say I've actually broken one on accident, I do treat them more carefully than I'd like.
I agree about Maxtor. I have a couple of Maxtor drives, and they're both so quiet I cannot hear them. Nobody ever gives them credit for that.
Hmm.. I wonder if they'll make a new device like this with the new chipset in a year or two. Poppin a terrabyte drive in it some day would be totally cool. But man... that'd be a hell of a lot of MP3's.
I can't believe the RIAA is trying to put a stop to MP3s, they're the only way we have to be able to listen to all the new music out there! It'd be a pain in the ass, without MP3's, to buy 10 CD's at the store and try to listen to particular songs on each of them.
I tried to find the thread and I can't. I think the title is 'DMCA = Communism or something like that.'
I don't think the metaphor I made was that bad. I explained what I meant. It was along the lines of "We own everything we sell after we've sold it, and we'll destroy people that don't follow our way." I described the RIAA as being like Hitler for trying to sue places like Napster out of existence. One kind person pointed out that Fascism instead of Communism would have made more sense with the Hitler reference, but he got what I meant. Everybody else basically said I was stupid, even though my metaphor still held. One little detail and I'm an idiot for it. I love that about Slashdot. Heh.
It's funny how people measure intelligence by trivia. "Man, that guy knows the names of the entire cast of Green Acres, he must be smart!" My area of expertise is Animation/Visual Effects. People commonly mistake Special Effects for Visual Effects. Visual Effects is when you have an effect made off-camera, like using a computer generated character in a scene. A Special Effect is an effect generated on-camera, like a squib that explodes a blood pack when somebody gets 'shot'. People mix these terms up all the time, but I don't go on a 'holier than thou' rant about how people are stupid and get the terms wrong. Why dont I do this? Because I understand what somebody says when they say 'special effect'. That's what the world taught them it means. In order for somebody to know the difference between Special and Visual effects, they'd have to study it like I have! That doesn't mean I'm smarter than them. There are people here on Slashdot that I'd like to learn that lesson. Now history really is something I should have known better about, don't get me wrong there. I'm not saying Hitler is trivia, but I have had a number of people call me an idiot over similar (non-history) things.
In any case, there should be more flexibility on calling somebody an idiot if you know what they're talking about.
Out of curiosity, didn't the IDE standard have a limitation a few years ago that didn't support higher than a certain # of megabytes? Wasn't the standard modified?
In any case, I see and agree with your point, I am just curious about how the IDE standard works.
Why was his post considered off topic? The value of this device is being able to add new storage to it over time. You could keep this machine going for like 10 years! But we don't know that the Mp3 format will be around forever. Being able to support other audio formats such as OGG would ensure that this is a worthwhile purchase.
Could somebody please mod the parent post up? It's a valid point, and certainly not off topic.
Since when is a product review considered a product placement?
The whole point of subscribing to Slashdot is to keep the service open, not to have it kiss your ass. "Man, for $5 for 1000 pages, I better send my news telepathically. They owe me big!"
"Incorrect. You can, in fact, be bound to verbal contracts. It's just harder to prove."
First, he said that. But a judge has to make a decision based on whether or not he believes the conversation took place. In other words, the winner is the person who makes the most believable story.
Second, you're nitpicking a detail instead of listening to his point. It's really frustrating when somebody puts some thought into what he's saying, only to have somebody nitpick a detail. The funny thing is, he basically said what you pointed out, the whole point he was making was that email has more value than a verbal contract. If you had said 'verbal would stand on higher gruond than email because...' then you might have had an interesting piece there, but instead ya came off trying to sound smarter than him.
If you're going to respond to somebody, try to put a little more thought and explanation into it.
I like the idea of 'build your own MP3 player with standard parts.' This product is the start of that market. It would have value long after 100 gigs seems too small.
I bet in a year or two, they'll have a variety of different screens and interfaces you can put on these doohickeys, and you can totally customize your player. I'd like to design my own interface for it, for example, to look like Apple's Aqua interface.
Hmm... how long before these evolve into laptops? Heh
Slashdot Mirror
I would hypothesize that MS having Employees demonstrate the consoles instead of having visitors play them made the difference. Employees playing the games is the same as making a presentation.
If that's the case, MS COULD have been in the right. "Well, if people are busy playing games, they're not paying attention to the exhibitors" -- that could be why that rule would be there in the first place.
Talk about bad sportsmanship though. Even if MS had good intentions (ha!) there's no way anybody's going to say 'Go MS!'
BTW, just because I'm playing Devil's Advocate here doesn't mean you have the right to come in, misinterpret me, and then tell me I'm an idiot. I've had enough of that over the last week. I don't support what MS did so don't twist what I said into saying I do.
Heh Thank you, I think you basically got what I was thinking. (and you expressed it better than I did too...)
It's probably a slap in the face to Microsoft that I can buy a cheap copy of Win2K and put Apache on it to serve as a site. (At least I'm reasonably sure you can do that... not sure if it has a limit to how many connections are supported.) For all we know, this license addition is probably to combat that. Suddenly the value of MS's different OS's are in jeopardy.
They're shooting themselves in the foot, though. My company has a product that would probably violate this license if we were using XP. We have a PocketPC running 802.11 to remotely control a computer. We're not using VNC anymore (finally got our own code), but we were for a while. Their license says we'd have needed XP for the PocketPC (no chance of that.) That would have used Linux instead if it had come to that.
Yeah, I agree with you there. Some of these sites have no concept of breaking up an article. After a while, it looks like a big blob of text.
With my short attention span, it's surprising I got through it.
In retrospect, I wish I hadn't been as harsh as I was. Sorry about that.
I can't read the review right now, I guess Slashdot killed the server heh. I just wanted to mention that the effects aren't done yet. If Ep1 was any indication, they'll be working on effects up until 3 weeks before the launch of the movie. If that's the case, then the reviewer likely saw an 'animatic version' of the movie, without everything in place. Normally this would be a good sign, except Lucas is the kind of guy to keep tweaking the movie in post production.
I'll give you an example, long after the principal photography was done, Lucas decided to add a line for C3PO. They had an artist digitally recreate the left side of the picture so it could scroll over to the right, because 3PO wasn't originally in the shot. Then they had to composite C3PO in via bluescreen. All so he could say this very important, plot pivotal line "You'll never get me onto one of those starships."
In other words, Lucas still has time to change it. A tweak here and a tweak there could potentially damage the movie. On the other hand, though, this technique could be used to improve the movie too. Who knows... In any case, as long as the movie has time to evolve, I wouldn't back any reviews of it right now.
I talked to my boss one day about how the engineers where I work are measured. Basically, it's along the lines of 'does the work get done?'. The project is defined with milestones set over a period of time, and if a deadline is missed the milestones are moved around a bit.
We have engineers that may spend a day or two writing out a document to assist their coding the next day. That isn't considered a ding in their productivity. If anything, providing an insight into their code before they write it (psuedocode, not commenting) has been very helpful, particularly when the other engineers need to code parts that talk to each other.
I honestly have no idea how this would scale to a >50 employee company. If it's really that important to make sure you're squeezing every ounce of productivity from your employee, I'd be concerned about where exactly that company is heading. Seems like investing more time into pre-planning would be more fruitful than lighting a fire under an employee to attain 'measurable goals'.
In some ways, I'm glad I didn't choose programming. It's quite frustrating to predict when you'll have code you've never written before.
I'm not so sure that it's a matter of people acting like fanboys of the movie, but most of us at Slashdot probably have something riding on Star Wars success. I'm willing to bet most of the people frequenting here have some interest in Sci-Fi. Star Wars has a way of expanding Sci-Fi to a greater audience, provided it doesn't suck. A greater appeal for sci-fi would certainly make a lot of our lives easier. If Star Wars ep 4 hadn't opened the doors to sci-fi, we'd all have to hide in shadows just to watch Doctor Who ;). If Episode II stinks, we won't be able to take our significant others to see the next one, or possibly any other sci-fi movie.
As for the computer industry, Ep2 could give it a serious boost. Digital artists would be more in demand and we may start to see more movies done entirely digital. If this happens, we could see a serious upgrade to theaters aka digital projectors. My hope is that one day movie theaters upgrade to the new projectors, it might mean an increase of frame rate (smoother motion...) is possible, and for viewing on a big screen that'd really be nice. Ep2 could help usher that in, but not if it sucks.
You don't have to be a Star Wars fan to feel the benefit of a good Star Wars movie. I have virtually no interest in seeing this movie, but I do hope for its succees anyway. It could mean a rather lucrative career for me.
Anti-VNC would be XP intentionally disabling ports that are commonly used by VNC. Having a license that reads "Under these vague terms, you need a license of XP on the client machine" doesn't say to me 'We hate VNC', it says to me "We want more money if you're using our OS to do things on two computers."
Is it evil, yes. Is it 'anti-VNC', I'm not convinced of that.
Heh, no that's not quite equal to what I was saying. It's not to prevent somebody from hacking a computer, (I'm amused that you'd actually think that was what I was saying...), its to prevent MS from being liable to damage from a hacker. If a hacker does damage to somebody, MS doesn't want responsibility. I'm saying MS doesn't want to be responsible if their system was compromised because one of the 'features' of Outlook lets somebody insert a trojan.
Does it sound absurd? Yep. I know it does. I honestly think MS would try that. Would it work? Well, I certainly hope not, but I doubt it'd be too hard to get a lawyer to use that point. It's not like they're ethical or anything.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending MS. The global point that I'm making is that I don't think MS is trying to cut off the remote computing business, I think there may be other reasons they added that clause here. I personally think that if it's not to obsolve themselves of responsibility, then maybe it's to force somebody to buy a license of XP in order to do certain things with it. *Shrug*
Just an idea.
Heh talk about Karma roller coaster. Somebody actually tried to get my post modded down. I guess it worked because somebody modded me down as a troll. Can you believe that? I provide an alternative point of view, and I'm a troll?
I'd like to thank Drunken_Jackass for bringing nothing to this discussion. I never said it wasn't possible to do so (although I don't think Terminal Services quite works that way, but that's a seperate discussion...) today. I said that MS doesn't want people to use one license of their OS with 25 people using it. That's what 2000 Enterprise Edition 25-licenses is for. I would like to thank Drunken Jackass for oversimplifying my point and getting me modded down.
My point still stands, and my feelings aren't hurt by being modded down. If my point is overrated or irrelevant, that's fine. It'd be nice if I were being modded appropriately, though.
"Is this possible? With XP can multiple users run multiple programs at the same time in a usable manner? Sure you can start up office; start typing a letter, leave office running and log in as a different user without shutting down office, but can two users log in and run it at the same time without interfering with each other. When I run PC Anywhere on my win98 box; i can't connect more than once; the two users would interfere with each other. Does XP resolve this??? excuse my ignorance; but I haven't seen XP yet (nor do I intend to)"
XP doesn't resolve this without the client/host software being modified. However, the ability to run seperate programs as seperate users means that the hard part is already done. We're not talking about multiple instances of the same program, we're talking about multiple instances with different users. Office thrives on different users.
So the answer is "no, not yet. But it woudln't be that hard."
Ooookay. So it's more likely that MS is trying to cut off use of VNC than it is trying to prevent people using Windoes XP like they intended?
I don't see why you want me modded down, doesn't sound like you read my post at all.
True enough. But if you read the license, it says that the client computer needs XP also. So anybody using XP to talk to XP should be safe. That very well could be a 'use XP or use nothing' license, but I seriously doubt they'd use remote computing to try to leverage that. That's such an uncommon practice. I mean seriously, who would they bust on it?
"Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop features described below, you may not use the Product to permit any Device to use, access, display, or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer, nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display, or run the Product or Product's user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product."
This is taken out of context, but I'm assuming 'Product' is referring to XP. It doesn't say you can't run VNC, it says that there needs to be a seperate license of XP for the client. That is bogus for VNC users, but if you look a little closer at the wording, I'm not sure they exactly intended to wipe out VNC. It sounds like they're saying 'you have to be using XP to control XP', but that's only true if this agreement is for the home edition of XP. Again, this was taken out of context, but I can't help but wonder if this was taken from the Corporate version of XP's agreement.
If that's the case, suddenly it makes more sense. What MS is trying to do is get companies to buy the XP Enterprise Edition (at least I assume there's a version like that...) that has 25 client licenses. In which case, using PC Anywhere to connect to that product would require an extra license. This sounds shitty unless you think about it some more. Computers are getting more powerful, right? So it gets to a point where you could have one computer powerful enough to perform a number of people's needs, all you'd need is a terminal to connect to it.
Let me tell you about an interesting feature that XP has that the rest of the Windows line doesn't: It can have multiple users running programs at the same time. Unix has done this for ages, but XP finally supports this. You can log in as yourself, run a program, then log in as somebody else and run a program there too. In effect, both your programs are still running. A company looking to save a few bucks could make a central computer running XP and hack a version of VNC to divvy up incoming connections into different users. Then they build a bunch of Linux machines using VNC that connect to this server and make it look like a Windows desktop. They could buy exactly one copy of Office and support a whole office with that license. This would be harder to do with Win2K, but it seems like it'd be fairly easy with XP. I think MS's license is saying that you can't do this.
As a side effect, VNC and PC Anywhere are technically unable to be used legitimately, unless MS specificially says it's ok. They probably have done that with PCAnywhere (there's hints to that effect on Symantec's site), but VNC probably won't be since it's open source.
Alot of people are interpreting this line of text as an attempt to maintain a monopoly, or to wipe out VNC or something like that, but that really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If MS really didn't like remote computing, then by default all they'd have to do is disable the common ports used for it. I think it's more likely they're trying to prevent people from doing something that hasn't been attempted yet.
I'm not convinced they're trying to slay VNC or anybody else. I think they're covering their own butts. With all these backdoor viruses floating around, I think MS is trying to prevent themselves from being taken to court if somebody is hacked. It sure saves them from having to write code to fix Outlook Express.
I don't think MS is trying to control people's use of VNC or other products. There's just no evidence of that. Let me put it this way, what kind of competition is MS really getting from that? They have PC Anywhere and VNC. The problem with both of these programs is that they leave an OS available to be controlled, if proper steps are not taken. I saw the Discovery channel about how a net-security company tested a company's network (they were hired to do this...) and found ways in using both PC Anywhere and VNC. The network admin wasn't taking apprproiate steps to protect access to those machines.
I think what is going on there is that people tried to blame MS when they got their computer broken into by Back Orifice or a similar program and this is MS's way of saying "we're not responsible for your loss of data unless it was a vulnerability in our own software." Although that license does appear to prohibit use of these products, I doubt MS'll audit a company and punish them for it. If you go to Symantec's site, they have an 'XP Compatibility' blurb showing off how they worked with MS to launch AntiVirus with XP. If you stroll on over to the PC Anywhere section of their site, it very specifically mentions XP as one of the OS's it supports. I seriously doubt that they'd be selling that product if it'd hurt their relationship with MS.
I wouldn't jump to the conlcusion that MS is trying to maintain a monopoly every step it takes , particulary with the Gov't breathing down their necks. It's cool to hate Microsoft, but assuming everything they do is evil doesn't help anybody.
No forgiveness needed, you were basically right the first time. I realized that I wasn't quite clear on what I meant. When I said the trivia bit, I was also thinking about other posts at /. I've had nitpicked. It was a poor organization of my post in the first place that I later band-aided with the 'don't get me wrong...' line. I really should have moved that line up to where I mentioned the trivia, so that the reader wouldn't sit there for like 4 setences thinking I was passing Hitler off as trivia. Heh. I should take more time to write my posts.
:)
I appreciate you taking the time to read and understand my post. I have a lot of respect for you right now.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAA!!!!!
I had a feeling if I brought that up somebody'd tell me the whole song. I guess clever marketing works!!
Too bad we're the victims...
When I was in 1st or 2nd grade (1985 I think?) McDonald's had a contest where they gave out flexible records in the Sunday paper with some people trying to sing all of the items on McDonald's menu. Almost all the records had the people screwing up the song. If you got the one where they completed it, you won a bunch of money. A bunch of people were buying up tons of Sunday Papers and listening to the records inside.
The amusing side-effect of this was that most of my classmates could sing the McDonald's menu. This is as far as I got:
"Big Mac, McDLT, a Quarter Pounder with some cheese, Filet of Fish, a Hamburger, A Cheeseburger, a Happy Meal, Crispy Golden Fries, large or regular size..."
It bugs me that an ad campaign that many years ago has me retaining that much information from it.
They aren't selling to you, they're selling to companies like Pepsi and PC Gamer. Who cares if you are interested or not the big $$ comes from Pepsi saying 'I want to have a contest where I give away 100,000 CD's so somebody can see if they win.'
I see what you're saying, but what I've read so far says that they're not so interested in putting out flexible CDR's.
If you'd like a list of how these things would be useful to you, I can provide that:
- When you buy a PC Gamer, the chances of having a broken disk are a lot smaller
- You can put many more flexible CD's in a binder than you could with regular CD's. In theory, they'd be safer.
- It'd be easier to take your music collection on Vactation. I'm travelling overseas soon, and my solution was to buy an MP3-CD Player to listen to all my music. Flexible CD's would have meant I could have fit a lot more music CD's in my bag.
As for what's wrong with regular CD's, they're too big and they're somewhat easy to break. Though I cannot say I've actually broken one on accident, I do treat them more carefully than I'd like.
Thanks, that was very interesting. :)
I agree about Maxtor. I have a couple of Maxtor drives, and they're both so quiet I cannot hear them. Nobody ever gives them credit for that.
Hmm.. I wonder if they'll make a new device like this with the new chipset in a year or two. Poppin a terrabyte drive in it some day would be totally cool. But man... that'd be a hell of a lot of MP3's.
I can't believe the RIAA is trying to put a stop to MP3s, they're the only way we have to be able to listen to all the new music out there! It'd be a pain in the ass, without MP3's, to buy 10 CD's at the store and try to listen to particular songs on each of them.
I tried to find the thread and I can't. I think the title is 'DMCA = Communism or something like that.'
I don't think the metaphor I made was that bad. I explained what I meant. It was along the lines of "We own everything we sell after we've sold it, and we'll destroy people that don't follow our way." I described the RIAA as being like Hitler for trying to sue places like Napster out of existence. One kind person pointed out that Fascism instead of Communism would have made more sense with the Hitler reference, but he got what I meant. Everybody else basically said I was stupid, even though my metaphor still held. One little detail and I'm an idiot for it. I love that about Slashdot. Heh.
It's funny how people measure intelligence by trivia. "Man, that guy knows the names of the entire cast of Green Acres, he must be smart!" My area of expertise is Animation/Visual Effects. People commonly mistake Special Effects for Visual Effects. Visual Effects is when you have an effect made off-camera, like using a computer generated character in a scene. A Special Effect is an effect generated on-camera, like a squib that explodes a blood pack when somebody gets 'shot'. People mix these terms up all the time, but I don't go on a 'holier than thou' rant about how people are stupid and get the terms wrong. Why dont I do this? Because I understand what somebody says when they say 'special effect'. That's what the world taught them it means. In order for somebody to know the difference between Special and Visual effects, they'd have to study it like I have! That doesn't mean I'm smarter than them. There are people here on Slashdot that I'd like to learn that lesson. Now history really is something I should have known better about, don't get me wrong there. I'm not saying Hitler is trivia, but I have had a number of people call me an idiot over similar (non-history) things.
In any case, there should be more flexibility on calling somebody an idiot if you know what they're talking about.
Out of curiosity, didn't the IDE standard have a limitation a few years ago that didn't support higher than a certain # of megabytes? Wasn't the standard modified?
In any case, I see and agree with your point, I am just curious about how the IDE standard works.
Why was his post considered off topic? The value of this device is being able to add new storage to it over time. You could keep this machine going for like 10 years! But we don't know that the Mp3 format will be around forever. Being able to support other audio formats such as OGG would ensure that this is a worthwhile purchase.
Could somebody please mod the parent post up? It's a valid point, and certainly not off topic.
Since when is a product review considered a product placement?
The whole point of subscribing to Slashdot is to keep the service open, not to have it kiss your ass. "Man, for $5 for 1000 pages, I better send my news telepathically. They owe me big!"
"Incorrect. You can, in fact, be bound to verbal contracts. It's just harder to prove."
First, he said that. But a judge has to make a decision based on whether or not he believes the conversation took place. In other words, the winner is the person who makes the most believable story.
Second, you're nitpicking a detail instead of listening to his point. It's really frustrating when somebody puts some thought into what he's saying, only to have somebody nitpick a detail. The funny thing is, he basically said what you pointed out, the whole point he was making was that email has more value than a verbal contract. If you had said 'verbal would stand on higher gruond than email because...' then you might have had an interesting piece there, but instead ya came off trying to sound smarter than him.
If you're going to respond to somebody, try to put a little more thought and explanation into it.
I like the idea of 'build your own MP3 player with standard parts.' This product is the start of that market. It would have value long after 100 gigs seems too small.
I bet in a year or two, they'll have a variety of different screens and interfaces you can put on these doohickeys, and you can totally customize your player. I'd like to design my own interface for it, for example, to look like Apple's Aqua interface.
Hmm... how long before these evolve into laptops? Heh