My suggestion to the FOSS community: If you don't like Silverlight, don't support it! Simple as that.
If it is a 100% open spec and doesn't have that "open except for binaries we don't want open" approach that Microsoft's ODF "competitor" has, then I am quite confident that it will be implemented quite quickly. Microsoft won't even have to lift a finger to do it. I won't hold my breath on that one though. Microsoft is infamous for their "open except for" approaches.
Have a mobile data card handy just in case. Problem solved. "Officer, I'm using my mobile data card. I pulled over since driving while surfing isn't a great idea."
If no one is consulting these patent records for how to solve a problem, we're not achieving a lot of the intended goal.
If this is truly a goal, it is largely irrelevant in the technology and software world especially given the broad and ambiguous wording some of these "modern" patents have. It wouldn't be terribly difficult as others have posted here for a hardware or software engineer to violate any number of patents in a single day of development to solve some common problem. Does it really make any kind of practical sense to spend weeks and weeks combing a patent database to solve what you could in a day's worth of work?
It isn't like you can type "I want to create a VoIP company" in a patent search engine and up pops a list of patents you are assured you will run into along the way. I just don't think this is what was envisioned when patents were first created anyway. It is my understanding that the purpose was to enrich an inventor for their hard work and creativity. Patents are now being used as weapons against competitors. If ever there was a clear case of this kind of anticompetitive behavior, this is it. If Verizon were suing a maker of VoIP hardware that isn't a direct competitor, it would be different.
If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.
What a can of worms this opens. If someone is disturbed enough and really wants to kill lots of people in a school, they will find a way.
Putting more guns in more hands won't stop someone determined enough. It just changes their game plan. I'll leave it up to your imagination on how you stop gun violence lest I open another can of worms altogether.
Hardware makers are losing hundreds of dollars on every console sold
Since the Wii allegedly only costs about $158 to make and is sold for $200, I don't find a compelling reason to take the rest of the article seriously.
I'm doing testing right now on migrating our email to it. Our email is currently outsourced with mostly POP clients and only two exchange users, so our migration will be very easy for the most part. The testing I have done has been very positive and the latest versions support everything we need. This is, of course, with their paid version.
If you are seriously considering it, I would suggest coming up with what features you absolutely need. Call Zimbra and ask them about those features. They'll tell you straight up if they support it and if they have plans to in future versions. My experience has been they won't blow smoke, but as always YMMV.
As funny as that is, it is actually quite simple. Paralegals pursue facts. Lawyers pursue victory. Facts sometimes get in the way of victory which means that if a lawyer really wants victory, that often means avoiding, distorting and conjuring up facts.
At the very least, it didn't HURT anything - so why bitch about it so much?
I guess some of us value our time differently than others. Staying late and patching systems because some politician had a stupid idea isn't a way I value spending my time.
We should pick one time and stick with it. Period. Anything else is a worthless exercise in futility that does little besides mess with people's sleep schedules.
I suggest you read what the Federal Trade Commission says on this subject. While IANAL, it doesn't sound like simple hand waving is going to make this go away:
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package.
No, this is like buying "ready to bake" cookies only to find you have to add eggs in order to bake them. Well, you didn't buy eggs while you were at the store because you thought they are ready to bake as the bag advertises. Sure you could try to bake them without the eggs, but you aren't getting the full cookie experience you expected.
but I think that about 15 minutes of research would have let someone know that they couldn't use the Aero interface
It isn't the job of the consumer to research whether an advertisement means what it says. That's why there are consumer protection laws in the first place. Not everyone is capable of figuring out how to do such research. Now if you want to the computer that runs Aero the best, then sure that is the job of the consumer to do their homework.
If the stickers say "Vista Capable" then they should be Vista capable and not some smaller subset which provides minimal functionality. If you can't see why that's deceptive, then you don't fully understand what the word means.
I don't see this at all running 13 VMs. But then again, I've got 6 Gigabit NICS load balanced on a Gigabit backplane with the VMs all running on an independent SAS array on a quad processor hyperthreaded box with 32 GB of RAM. But perhaps your box has equally as good specs, I don't know.
No, CompUSA is forcing themselves out. They aren't merely being underpriced, but they also _overprice_ stuff quite badly in my experience. I wish I could recall specifics, but there was an item they carried in store that they sold higher than the manufacturer sold through their own web store. Manufacturers don't usually under cut their retailers. They usually sell for the MSRP and let retailers offer discounts. But in this instance, buying the item from the manufacturer plus shipping was cheaper than getting it from CompUSA by about $5. And that is leaving the cost of the gas to drive to the nearest CompUSA out of it.
Also, and this is just a pet peeve of mine and may not be an experience shared by others, but it can be stupidly hard to find something in their store. I once looked for a wireless bridge their website and workers insisted was in stock. I gave up and let one of their workers look and messed around on some computer. I decided I was going to stay until they found it. Thirty minutes later, they found it stuck on a top shelf behind a graphics card. Now that makes sense.
I installed Herd 5 a couple of days ago (figures they would release the beta a couple of days after I install) and this tool rocks. I can't even describe how great it was to see it pop up a list of packages that would enable playback of a video I was trying to open. I didn't even know the tool was in there.
Coal trucks are, on the average, infinitely more dirty than logging trucks. Guess what that does to break lights, reflectors and headlights? Add in bit of fog and you can literally run into the back of a coal truck and not know it was there until you hear the metal crunch.
Not that logging trucks aren't a problem because they often run on many of the same roads that coal truck drivers do, but based on what I've seen up close, coal trucks pose a much greater road hazard due to the dust on lights and reflectors.
If you are going to focus on people not caring about fighting starvation, let's start with pretty much everyone in general. If we, as human beings, REALLY cared about fighting starvation, we would cease all development in fertile farmlands and move the populations there out to areas where farming is less of an option. Then, raze every single building and return all of that land to farming.
Pretending that GM food are our salvation misses the underlying problem entirely. We don't use our natural resources even remotely efficiently. And I'm not talking about energy resources obviously, but rather land usage. Turning fertile farmland into suburbs is, agriculturally speaking, completely dumb. Of course, the vast majority of our food production falls into the completely dumb category. Looking to screwing with what millions and millions of years of evolution determined superior is only one part of it. Although I have to admit it is one spectacularly arrogant mistake.
You've obviously never seen the devastation caused by slurry "dams" breaking and flooding valleys with the muck. Or never had to deal with the dust generated by the mining or the pollution to the groundwater. I can guess you've never had to meet a coal truck on small country road at night in a blind curve. And we haven't even gotten to mud runoff from bare mountains yet. Forget Google Earth. If you've never seen the ugliness left behind by mountain top removal up close and personal, then you can't truly understand how bad it really is.
The problem that most people don't get is that many of the people who stand to feel the negative effects from this type of mining are those that actually live there. On the average, they don't have any clout or power to do anything about it. Even worse--they often make their living from it so that it is needed as much as it is hated.
Want to extract energy from Appalachia? Heck, if you're willing to turn the beautiful mountain views into a wasteland, just stick lots and lots of windmills on top of the mountains. 50 to 100 feet off the tops of the mountains, the wind blows quite strongly virtually all the time. At least that way the people in the valleys can still drink their well water.
For some reason, I'm reminded of an old Dot-Com era commercial where two guys are sitting in front of a screen showing the number of orders made in real time. The number starts growing out of control and one of the guys says "Lock the door!"
How can they possibly troubleshoot a PC is it has god-knows-what software on it?
I dunno--by creating their own bootable Linux CD that runs through a series of tests and prints out diagnostics to the screen that any literate person can read back to a tech? Even better--for computers that are hard wired to the internet provide an easy method to setup a VNC session so the tech can actually see what's happening.
While we aren't a huge environment (50 - 75 PCs), Samba is working great for us. Running Samba 3.0.22 on Ubuntu. I've integrated authentication into our Active Directory environment (native 2003) complete with ACLs. Although it is worth pointing out that there is a very distinct difference in ACLs on Samba (POSIX ACLs) vs Windows ACLs if you are used to Windows 2000 and beyond permissions. I won't tell the whole story here, but make sure to read Samba documentation on the subject if you don't already know. The short short version is that POSIX ACLs offer a much simpler set of permissions of rwx where Windows breaks out several others. This usually isn't a big deal.
Configuring all of the proper settings on shares can be cumbersome if you have quite a few. If you require some quick and easy GUI to do everything, Swat is a favorite. Centeris also makes a product that looks promising.
Keep your eye on Samba 4. It will allow you to replace your Windows Active Directory servers. All in all, I'd have to say your VIP calling Samba amateur software shows either ignorance of reality or negative bias towards Samba.
I'm managing VI3 and we use it for almost everything. Ran into some trouble with one antiquated EDI application that just HAD to have a serial port. That is a long discussion, but for reasons I'm quite sure you could guess, I offloaded it to an independent box. We run our ERP software on it and the vendor has tried (unsuccessfully) several times to blame VMWare for issues.
You don't mention it, but consolidated backup just rocks. I have some external Linux based NAS machines that use rsync to keep local copies of both our nightly backups and occasional image backups at both sites.
Thanks to VMWare, it's like I've told management--"Our main facility could burn to the ground and I could have our infrastructure back up and running at our remote site before the remains stop smoldering much less get a check from the insurance company."
I guess it depends on what you use it for. RHEL4 was in no way acceptable as an enterprise file server in an Active Directory environment IMO. The reference package in the base install is many revisions behind the most current stable (3.0.24). There are bugs present that makes configuring AD authentication support a very rough ride. Not only that, but the behavior is not one I found reliable.
I am sure version 5 will have much newer packages, but will be woefully outdated in a very short amount of time. With the majority of the packages used in RHEL, this isn't an issue. But with a project such as Samba, they are overcoming two obstacles which makes older packages very quickly undesirable--1) Reverse engineering Microsoft's SMB implementation and 2) Chasing a moving target due to Microsoft updates.
With Samba 4 on the horizon and Vista patches being developed now, I can't help but feel that RHEL 5 as a Samba platform isn't going to be exceptionally viable very soon after being released. Do not underestimate the importance of a Linux distro being the best as an AD integrated file server and "soon" (with Samba 4) an Windows AD server replacement. I wager that for many enterprise customers, this is going to be a very big deal over the next two or three years.
It is no small deal when a government agency specifically bans products internally for very specific reasons. Case in point is that we do a lot of business with the US Government. There are websites we MUST use for business purposes. IE7 specifically doesn't work with how they have been designed. This means that as IT Manager, I have instituted the same policy (IE7 ban) here.
The point is that there is a trickle down effect. Why do you think MS has fought the ODF issue in Mass. so hard?
Slashdot Mirror
My suggestion to the FOSS community: If you don't like Silverlight, don't support it! Simple as that.
If it is a 100% open spec and doesn't have that "open except for binaries we don't want open" approach that Microsoft's ODF "competitor" has, then I am quite confident that it will be implemented quite quickly. Microsoft won't even have to lift a finger to do it. I won't hold my breath on that one though. Microsoft is infamous for their "open except for" approaches.
Linux users do not have to pay for software
There, I fixed your purposeful omission it for you.
take responsibility for your own needs and write the software you want.
Isn't free software up to the challenge?
Where have you been for the past twenty years?
Have a mobile data card handy just in case. Problem solved. "Officer, I'm using my mobile data card. I pulled over since driving while surfing isn't a great idea."
If no one is consulting these patent records for how to solve a problem, we're not achieving a lot of the intended goal.
If this is truly a goal, it is largely irrelevant in the technology and software world especially given the broad and ambiguous wording some of these "modern" patents have. It wouldn't be terribly difficult as others have posted here for a hardware or software engineer to violate any number of patents in a single day of development to solve some common problem. Does it really make any kind of practical sense to spend weeks and weeks combing a patent database to solve what you could in a day's worth of work?
It isn't like you can type "I want to create a VoIP company" in a patent search engine and up pops a list of patents you are assured you will run into along the way. I just don't think this is what was envisioned when patents were first created anyway. It is my understanding that the purpose was to enrich an inventor for their hard work and creativity. Patents are now being used as weapons against competitors. If ever there was a clear case of this kind of anticompetitive behavior, this is it. If Verizon were suing a maker of VoIP hardware that isn't a direct competitor, it would be different.
If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.
What a can of worms this opens. If someone is disturbed enough and really wants to kill lots of people in a school, they will find a way.
Putting more guns in more hands won't stop someone determined enough. It just changes their game plan. I'll leave it up to your imagination on how you stop gun violence lest I open another can of worms altogether.
Hardware makers are losing hundreds of dollars on every console sold
Since the Wii allegedly only costs about $158 to make and is sold for $200, I don't find a compelling reason to take the rest of the article seriously.
I'm doing testing right now on migrating our email to it. Our email is currently outsourced with mostly POP clients and only two exchange users, so our migration will be very easy for the most part. The testing I have done has been very positive and the latest versions support everything we need. This is, of course, with their paid version.
If you are seriously considering it, I would suggest coming up with what features you absolutely need. Call Zimbra and ask them about those features. They'll tell you straight up if they support it and if they have plans to in future versions. My experience has been they won't blow smoke, but as always YMMV.
People tend to talk louder on cell phones than regular phones. There is no feedback of their own voice.
As funny as that is, it is actually quite simple. Paralegals pursue facts. Lawyers pursue victory. Facts sometimes get in the way of victory which means that if a lawyer really wants victory, that often means avoiding, distorting and conjuring up facts.
At the very least, it didn't HURT anything - so why bitch about it so much?
I guess some of us value our time differently than others. Staying late and patching systems because some politician had a stupid idea isn't a way I value spending my time.
We should pick one time and stick with it. Period. Anything else is a worthless exercise in futility that does little besides mess with people's sleep schedules.
I suggest you read what the Federal Trade Commission says on this subject. While IANAL, it doesn't sound like simple hand waving is going to make this go away:
o ad.htm
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruler
To me, this is a little bit like suing because even after buying a bag of chocolate chips, you couldn't make cookies that look as nice as the ones on the package.
No, this is like buying "ready to bake" cookies only to find you have to add eggs in order to bake them. Well, you didn't buy eggs while you were at the store because you thought they are ready to bake as the bag advertises. Sure you could try to bake them without the eggs, but you aren't getting the full cookie experience you expected.
but I think that about 15 minutes of research would have let someone know that they couldn't use the Aero interface
It isn't the job of the consumer to research whether an advertisement means what it says. That's why there are consumer protection laws in the first place. Not everyone is capable of figuring out how to do such research. Now if you want to the computer that runs Aero the best, then sure that is the job of the consumer to do their homework.
If the stickers say "Vista Capable" then they should be Vista capable and not some smaller subset which provides minimal functionality. If you can't see why that's deceptive, then you don't fully understand what the word means.
I don't see this at all running 13 VMs. But then again, I've got 6 Gigabit NICS load balanced on a Gigabit backplane with the VMs all running on an independent SAS array on a quad processor hyperthreaded box with 32 GB of RAM. But perhaps your box has equally as good specs, I don't know.
No, CompUSA is forcing themselves out. They aren't merely being underpriced, but they also _overprice_ stuff quite badly in my experience. I wish I could recall specifics, but there was an item they carried in store that they sold higher than the manufacturer sold through their own web store. Manufacturers don't usually under cut their retailers. They usually sell for the MSRP and let retailers offer discounts. But in this instance, buying the item from the manufacturer plus shipping was cheaper than getting it from CompUSA by about $5. And that is leaving the cost of the gas to drive to the nearest CompUSA out of it.
Also, and this is just a pet peeve of mine and may not be an experience shared by others, but it can be stupidly hard to find something in their store. I once looked for a wireless bridge their website and workers insisted was in stock. I gave up and let one of their workers look and messed around on some computer. I decided I was going to stay until they found it. Thirty minutes later, they found it stuck on a top shelf behind a graphics card. Now that makes sense.
I installed Herd 5 a couple of days ago (figures they would release the beta a couple of days after I install) and this tool rocks. I can't even describe how great it was to see it pop up a list of packages that would enable playback of a video I was trying to open. I didn't even know the tool was in there.
Coal trucks are, on the average, infinitely more dirty than logging trucks. Guess what that does to break lights, reflectors and headlights? Add in bit of fog and you can literally run into the back of a coal truck and not know it was there until you hear the metal crunch.
Not that logging trucks aren't a problem because they often run on many of the same roads that coal truck drivers do, but based on what I've seen up close, coal trucks pose a much greater road hazard due to the dust on lights and reflectors.
If you are going to focus on people not caring about fighting starvation, let's start with pretty much everyone in general. If we, as human beings, REALLY cared about fighting starvation, we would cease all development in fertile farmlands and move the populations there out to areas where farming is less of an option. Then, raze every single building and return all of that land to farming.
Pretending that GM food are our salvation misses the underlying problem entirely. We don't use our natural resources even remotely efficiently. And I'm not talking about energy resources obviously, but rather land usage. Turning fertile farmland into suburbs is, agriculturally speaking, completely dumb. Of course, the vast majority of our food production falls into the completely dumb category. Looking to screwing with what millions and millions of years of evolution determined superior is only one part of it. Although I have to admit it is one spectacularly arrogant mistake.
You've obviously never seen the devastation caused by slurry "dams" breaking and flooding valleys with the muck. Or never had to deal with the dust generated by the mining or the pollution to the groundwater. I can guess you've never had to meet a coal truck on small country road at night in a blind curve. And we haven't even gotten to mud runoff from bare mountains yet. Forget Google Earth. If you've never seen the ugliness left behind by mountain top removal up close and personal, then you can't truly understand how bad it really is.
The problem that most people don't get is that many of the people who stand to feel the negative effects from this type of mining are those that actually live there. On the average, they don't have any clout or power to do anything about it. Even worse--they often make their living from it so that it is needed as much as it is hated.
Want to extract energy from Appalachia? Heck, if you're willing to turn the beautiful mountain views into a wasteland, just stick lots and lots of windmills on top of the mountains. 50 to 100 feet off the tops of the mountains, the wind blows quite strongly virtually all the time. At least that way the people in the valleys can still drink their well water.
For some reason, I'm reminded of an old Dot-Com era commercial where two guys are sitting in front of a screen showing the number of orders made in real time. The number starts growing out of control and one of the guys says "Lock the door!"
How can they possibly troubleshoot a PC is it has god-knows-what software on it?
I dunno--by creating their own bootable Linux CD that runs through a series of tests and prints out diagnostics to the screen that any literate person can read back to a tech? Even better--for computers that are hard wired to the internet provide an easy method to setup a VNC session so the tech can actually see what's happening.
Of course this is only for hardware issues.
While we aren't a huge environment (50 - 75 PCs), Samba is working great for us. Running Samba 3.0.22 on Ubuntu. I've integrated authentication into our Active Directory environment (native 2003) complete with ACLs. Although it is worth pointing out that there is a very distinct difference in ACLs on Samba (POSIX ACLs) vs Windows ACLs if you are used to Windows 2000 and beyond permissions. I won't tell the whole story here, but make sure to read Samba documentation on the subject if you don't already know. The short short version is that POSIX ACLs offer a much simpler set of permissions of rwx where Windows breaks out several others. This usually isn't a big deal.
Configuring all of the proper settings on shares can be cumbersome if you have quite a few. If you require some quick and easy GUI to do everything, Swat is a favorite. Centeris also makes a product that looks promising.
Keep your eye on Samba 4. It will allow you to replace your Windows Active Directory servers. All in all, I'd have to say your VIP calling Samba amateur software shows either ignorance of reality or negative bias towards Samba.
I'm managing VI3 and we use it for almost everything. Ran into some trouble with one antiquated EDI application that just HAD to have a serial port. That is a long discussion, but for reasons I'm quite sure you could guess, I offloaded it to an independent box. We run our ERP software on it and the vendor has tried (unsuccessfully) several times to blame VMWare for issues.
You don't mention it, but consolidated backup just rocks. I have some external Linux based NAS machines that use rsync to keep local copies of both our nightly backups and occasional image backups at both sites.
Thanks to VMWare, it's like I've told management--"Our main facility could burn to the ground and I could have our infrastructure back up and running at our remote site before the remains stop smoldering much less get a check from the insurance company."
>>> You can always package your own Samba
And lose support for Samba on that system. Then you must ask--what are you paying for?
I guess it depends on what you use it for. RHEL4 was in no way acceptable as an enterprise file server in an Active Directory environment IMO. The reference package in the base install is many revisions behind the most current stable (3.0.24). There are bugs present that makes configuring AD authentication support a very rough ride. Not only that, but the behavior is not one I found reliable.
I am sure version 5 will have much newer packages, but will be woefully outdated in a very short amount of time. With the majority of the packages used in RHEL, this isn't an issue. But with a project such as Samba, they are overcoming two obstacles which makes older packages very quickly undesirable--1) Reverse engineering Microsoft's SMB implementation and 2) Chasing a moving target due to Microsoft updates.
With Samba 4 on the horizon and Vista patches being developed now, I can't help but feel that RHEL 5 as a Samba platform isn't going to be exceptionally viable very soon after being released. Do not underestimate the importance of a Linux distro being the best as an AD integrated file server and "soon" (with Samba 4) an Windows AD server replacement. I wager that for many enterprise customers, this is going to be a very big deal over the next two or three years.
It is no small deal when a government agency specifically bans products internally for very specific reasons. Case in point is that we do a lot of business with the US Government. There are websites we MUST use for business purposes. IE7 specifically doesn't work with how they have been designed. This means that as IT Manager, I have instituted the same policy (IE7 ban) here.
The point is that there is a trickle down effect. Why do you think MS has fought the ODF issue in Mass. so hard?