thats rare for a company with such an incredible lead.
Well, according to the article (which you did read : )) it said that Google grabbed 36% of the web searches, Yahoo! had 29% and AskJeeves (which includes Teoma, Excite and iWon combined) only had 6%. 36% to 29% is not such and "incredible lead" to me. So Google better keep working hard to stay at the front.
That only helps if someone what to actaully copy-n-past the source code. What if a competitor only wants to learn from it to save from reverse engineering? Say someone wants 100% MS Office doc compatitibliy or MS Exchange protocols or any of the other stuff MS keeps locked up? No watermarking is going to stop that. I don't think most legit companies of good size putting out products would risk a copy-n-paste job of source code from any competitor. It would be far too easy to find and put a stop to.
But that is assuming that the person who gets your source code just wants to copy-n-paste it into thier own project. Not very smart IMO. The real benefit would be to see how someting is done. That could cut out tons of reverse engineering. Maybe a competitor wants 100% MS Office compatibility or specs for different MS proprietary protocols. Just learn from the source and write your own. There would be no way to track that. No plain text watermarking would work.
The only thing that "watermarkign" source would do is as you pointed out. Say if MS gives their source to 30 different governments. They could have different versions that just change trivial things like #include orders, local variable names, etc. Then if there is a code leak, it would be easier for MS to find out what government did the leak.
P.S. How do you get spaces to stay in code examples on/.? <ECODE> removes all that when I try.
they do have a point, they are doing a paradigm shift, marketing something original and new.
They didn't make anything original or new. Millions of users are manually filtering billions of emails every day (by clicking delete or junk buttons). All they are doing is trying to slap a label on it and sell it. So they might be original and new as far as selling it, but there are millions of prior art examples happening every day!
Most people wouldn't take the source code and use it. They would take it to _learn_ about the different protocols, specs and document formats that MS keeps locked up. Then you can do a "clean" implementaion on your own. Though it technically wouldn't be "clean" since you looked at the other code, but who would know right : )
That is exactly what I was thinking. MS gets tons of government programmers to do the job for MS in finding security problems. Then MS keeps all that _tax payer_ work and gets to turn around and sell that back to the governement. What a great business model!
This still doesn't fix the problem of governements putting out documents in a closed format that limits who can use/view those documents. Sure there is the free MS Word Viewer, though that only says it supports MS Word 2000 and doesn't mention WinXP. So it may or may not work. Also, MS realeases these viewers a long time after the most recent version comes out, so the most recent viewer is usually a version or two behind the most recent MS Office Suite. I think all governments should stick with an open doc format like PDF. Any government can use an suite like OOo.org that will let them convert documents to PDF or even Flash.
Your still not comparing apples to apples. Red Hat AS is meant for heavy iron. It supports 16 CPUs and 64GB of main memory. MS Windows 2000 Advanced Server only supports up to 8-way and 32 GB of main memory. So to be fair you would need to compare Red Hat AS to Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition which only gives you 5 CAL's. Want to run terminal services? Well, you need to add $7,999 to the price. Then $2,979 for every 20 clients. MS doesn't even list the price of data center edition. You need an OEM for that. You can do all that stuff on Red Hat for no extra cost. Also, as I said before, if you think Red Hat is too much money, go with SuSE which is much less money. Orcale supports both versions. If you don't like the price of MS software, you have no choice.
If you run Linux just to save on TCO and lower productivity, what good does that do?
Huh? Now you sound like an MS FUD master. Just how will you lower "productivity" from running Linux as a server over running MS Windows as a server? From my experience at 3 fortune 500 companies, Linux increased productivity for the admins with less work. Our oracle DBA just won't do Oracle on MS Windows, it is either Linux or Solaris for them (especially after Oracle recommends Linux for all new installs). And from this recent/. story, it looks like corporations that use WinXP as the corporate desktop will average a 12% failure rate, talk about productivity loss!
Choice? You can buy Exchange, and you can use free Linux (Postfix, Exim, qmail, sendmail, etc.). That IS choice - everyone has that choice.
That is not choice. Exchange is locked down with proprietary "embrace and extend" extensions the locks other clients/servers out from full functionality.
For example, do you think that enterprises are stupid and use Exchange because they haven't heard of sendmail? Or they keep using it because 100-200K in licenses they paid for Exchange makes their employees more productive and pays back in 2-3 months?
Sendmail is not meant for corporate communication with calendar, etc. There are plenty of products to replace MS Exchange like ones from Novell/SuSE and IBM. The reason many big corps use it is because the way they license software from MS. They pay for most of their software from MS as one big package to "save" money. If they want to take advantage of their MS Windows licenses, they they will use MS Outlook which needs MS Exchange to be any good since it sucks as a regular MUA with its poor standards support. Why do you think MS doesn't allow corps to by just parts of MS Office? Most companies would be fine with just MS Word and MS Excel and ditch MS Outlook and MS Exchange.
Why do you assume Microsoft should give people a choice to either pay up for the software or to screw Microsoft up and install their software for free?
Where did I say people "screw Microsoft up and install their software for free"? Nothing like making up points when you don't have a vailid argument.
Or what exactly would "choice" that Microsoft should offer their customers?
How about MS supporting open protocols and specs? That would be MS giving choice to their customers. It would let customers use heterogenous environments more easily instead of MS trying to lock customers into MS-only solutions. How about MS opening up the MS doc formats so customers can use MS Office or other office suites? I am not talking about MS putting undocumented binary blobs into XML and calling that "open". How about MS opening up _all_ of their networking/security protocols so other
You are a techie. The average-granny is not. They use crappy IE, and get hit by tons of spyware, adware, pr0n dialers, viruses, and other crap. Once you leave the non-techie alone with IE and Outlook Express, it is only a matter of _weeks_ until their system has crap on it, yes, even with the over-hyped XP SP 2. If you look at this post on/. yesterday, you would see that Win XP fails 12% of the time by MS numbers, which means probably more then that. But if we take 12%, then _at least_ 1-in-10 logins from granny would end in a problem.
I do agree with you that Win2K seems better overall then WinXP. Tonight I just installed WinXP for a friend from Church and put spybot, spyblaster, AVG Antivirus Pro, XP SP2 and the XP SP2 "firewall" on their box. I installed Firefox 1.0pre and thunderbird 0.8 for them and showed them how to use them and not IE/Outlook Express. I showed them how to copy-n-paste the URL from firefox if a site "needs" IE just-in-case. I hope their box will stay spyware, adware, pr0n dialers, viruses, and other crap free longer this time, though only time will tell.
I have worked for 3 fortune 500 companies (still at the current one). I have to say that for most big comanies (not my current one : )), the higher up you go, the less knowlege you need. Look at this statement from the article
But Microsoft said the program is a first step in trying to for customers using legitimate copies of Windows.
Huh? How in the H-e-double-hockey-sticks could some corporate monkey say this? Just exactly how is MS making it "better" for end-users? I am sure every Joe-Average-Home-User wants to play 50-questions with MS. I am sure that every Joe-Average-Home-User wants to be treated like they are a criminal unless they can prove to MS they are not.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think MS should allow updates for "pirates (arrrgh)", but this is just bunk. I would like to know just
exactly _how_ this would "provide a better experience" for me as a legit customer?
This is a tough call, I wouldn't expect _any_ commercial company to support "pirates (arrrgh)" stealing their software. However, MS WinXP is not the most secure platform for the Joe-Average-Home-User. If Joe-Average-Home-User gets a "pirated (arrrgh)" copy, that just adds one more exploit for spammers, one more spyware, adware, virus infected PeeCeee out their hurting the net.
Red Hat AS is _not_ $1,500 per year. For _all_ of our AS servers, we paid the $1,500 (no need for clustering). Then to renew each year for the updates costs $96 per server (I just updated our subscription for one of our J2EE dev boxes). I work at a fortune 500, however we do not have many Red Hat Linux servers to warrant a big discount.
Add the clustering add-on of $500/year, that's $2K a year.
Why would you add the clustering add-on to the price if you do not need it? If that is the case, then we should be comparing to MS Windows server 2000 Data Center, which costs mucho-denero.
Second, who says Windows 2003 Standard customers must use Windows clients
Huh? What are you talking about? Those CAL's are for connections, such as for a file server. With 5 CAL's, you can _legally_ have 5 connections at a time.
If you really want to look at the situation, you can buy Red Hat ES for $349 and have all the Linux you need. There are no limits to the number of users or CALs. Do what you want with it. Run as much software as you want, have as many users as you want, it is not the same as with MS and their servers (they nickle-n-dime you for each user).
If you think Red Hat is too much money, fine, go take a look at SuSE. They have SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 for up to 2-way for $349/year * 4 years = $1,396. If you need more procs, you can do up to 16-way for $899/year * 4 years = $3,596, still less them MS for 16-way *nix goodness. The majority will want 2-way, so for 4 years you can have a 24/7 server from SuSE (and supported by biggies like IBM) for only $1,396 for unlimited use. Nothing from MS is close to that price. Still think it is too much and don't want to pay for support? Fine, With Red Hat and SuSE, you can buy it and never pay for support again and keep using it. So you could have either one for about $350 and never pay again. Or you can use other Linux versions, or roll-your-own, or etc, etc. With MS, you don't have those options. Pay them or don't do anything. A small company _may_ be able to get away with stealing a few CALs here or there, however the 3 fortune 500 companies I have worked for would never do such a thing since it would only cost more in the long run. Believe or spread all the MS FUD you want. However, MS server software can _never_ have a lower TCO then Linux. If you really want to save money, a company can hire one or two Linux geeks and run tons of Linux software at not cost. Or they could buy the "big two" "enterprise" servers (Red Hat, SuSE) and then not pay for support. All this is called "CHOICE", which is a strange word to those in the MS Windows world.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS
$1,499 for standard edition or $2,499 for premium edition which has the 24/7 1 hour response support while the standard edition has 12/7 4 hour response support.
Windows 2000 Advanced Server
(With 25 Client Access Licenses) costs $3,999 and _only_ has 25 CAL's.
You can get Windows 2000 Advanced Server cheaper with certain licenese deals, though you can do the same with Red Hat. The standard edition should be fine for most companies that don't need 24/7 and will save a boat load of cash per server. Even the premium is $1,500 less per server then Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
MS Windows Server 2003 std with _only_ 5 CAL's is $999, while the comparable version for Red Hat is Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and costs $349. Even though Red Hat may be the most expensive Enterprise Linux offering, they are still close to 25% - 50% less (depending on support hours) then the MS Server offerings.
NT and Win2k are being run by people with more of a clue than those running XP
...
but it would appear to me that the reason that XP crashes more is that the people who are running it could be partly at fault
How is this Insightful? Did you even read the/. topic? It say right here:
The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand
companies over a period of one month in seven different countries.
These numbers are for companies and not home users! If the average Joe home user numbers were included, I bet winXP numbers would be at least 50%. As for using WinXP as a corporate desktop, I think 12% is pretty bad. To think that 1-in-10 times I log in, I will need to reboot.
Oh and I wonder how much these numbers were "softened" since MS had a part in this study? I also wonder why MS would even let these numbers be published. They push WinXP Pro as the best corporate desktop. I don't think a 12% failure rate is anything to be proud of, especially in a corporate environment where desktops are locked down much more then at home, have good AV software, firewalls and other technology to help protect them.
I dumped flash click-to-view for adblock. Adblock will block all the annoying ads and let in the flash you want. If you don't want any flash, then just ad *.swf to the adblock list or don't install the flash plug-in. I like flash, just not flash ads, so by blocking most of the ad sources out there, I only see the flash content I like.
Huh? Firefox has always been faster then IE for me, I an recall reading a lot of similar/. post. Firefox is Heavier? Not really. Look at this screenshot of IE and Firefox 1.0pre both open to/.. About 1MB of difference.
I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM
I call BS. I had two family members that I upgraded to MS Win XP and they both only had 128MB. WinXP was dog slow. It took ages for windows to popup and move around. Even trying to bring up the explorer.exe file manager was a pain. Once both systems were upgraded to 256MB, it was much more usable. This is the same for a modern Linux distro. A little sluggish with 128MB for KDE/Gnome, but very usable with 256MB. I do agree with OOo.org. It is still a little slow and a bit of a memory hog. Though it does run on many platforms wich MS never needed to worry about with MS Office. My brother-in-law has an older laptop with a slow hard drive, 256 MB and Fedor Core 1. He has no problems with running Firefox, Thunderbird/Evolution, Photoshop (Cross-over office), Azureus (Java bitttorrent client) and a music app open all at the same time. Linux has a much better VM systems then WinXP for systems with low memory. Once WinXP starts to swap, your dead.
Otherwise we'd have the speed advantage, and Linux's flagship products wouldn't be heavier and slower than Microsoft's.
Oh, stop trolling. Where are your benchmarks? For every MS benchmark out there showing MS Widnows to be "faster" then Linux, there is a Linux benchmark showing Linux to be "faster" then MS Windows. From my experience Linux is faster for many server tasks then MS Windows, however the MS WinXP desktop overall is a little faster then an average full-featured Linux desktop because MS tied many thing down into the kernel.
With WinXP, you are limited to one crappy desktop (explorer.exe) that locks just about every file it touches (requiring you to kill and restart it in task manager) and crashes on me about 5 times a week (WinXP does not crash on me, but explorer.exe certainly does). With Linux, I can use full-featured desktops like KDE/Gnome or a ligher desktop like XFCE4 which still has greate features. For a system with 128MB or less memory, there are desktops like fluxbox, blackbox, wiamea and others.
Relax! You'd think I set your dog on fire or something...
Sorry for jumping down your throat : )
You don't happen to work for Real, do you?
Nope.
message center is turned off, but I still get the occasional ad served up to me from Real
Are you saying that if you have Real closed and Message Ceneter is not running, you are still getting "messages" from Real? Are you sure you don't have some Real process running? I have real installed, I turned off message center and turned off the auto-check for updates and there are no processes running for Real unless I run the app. I only use the free version to listen to my music, so I don't have it open for hours on end. I will leave it open for a day and see if I get any ads.
Maybe that should be why would you want to use Quicktime or iTunes under MS windows? Quicktime and iTunes both suck up tons of memory just sitting there. I just fired up the latest iTunes and it is using 50MB of memory and 50MB of VM. Firing up the latest RealPlayer, it is using 1.2MB of memory and 12MB of VM. A huge difference, especially as I sit here programming with a bunch of windows open. The last thing I want is a media player wasting memory and causing excess swap activity just to hear some tunes.
Also, if Apple did not support Quicktime or iTunes under MS Windows, they would have pretty much zero market share. Apple _had_ to support Quicktime and iTunes under MS Windows, they didn't do it out of kindness.
Further, he didn't address the adware portions of Real that can only be disabled with some registry surgery and vigilance under windows. MS isn't serving me ads, so on that point Real is far more inrtusive.
Huh? Did you even try the latest Real Player? I have in installed now. You go under preferences and turn off Message Center and guess what? No more messages! You can also turn of "check for updates" and not have the realsched process start when MS Windows starts. Just what is this "registry surgery and vigilance under windows" that you are FUDDING about?
For instance, he says Harmony is perfectly legal, but when asked whether it would be alright for Apple to create software that deals with Real's DRM without a license, he says that they'd be happy to discuss licensing with Apple.
Umm, that is because Real _tried_ to work with Apple and Stevie-Boy said no. So Real used a perfectly legal approach and got interoperability. I say well done to Real.
Why not sell music in.ogg and.mp3 then?
Do you _really_ need an answer to that? OK, Real does not own the content they are selling. They have to sell by the terms of the content owners, and right now they all are blined and mandate DRM crap. There is nothing Real can do. If you think there is, then please, start up a music store in the USA and sell music in ogg or mp3 and see how long your service lasts.
I might have to take a second look at Real, even though I swore several years ago to never install another copy of the Real player.
I just gave it another shot, and have to say RealPlayer 10 is pretty nice. I went into the preferences like Rob said in his response, and what do you know, nothing starts up any more. Just check the registry and that annoying realsched process is gone from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Run. I also like some of the CD ripping features. You can rip to MP3, AAC, Real, Real Lossless, Wave and Windows Media audio all at variable bitrates. Windows Media Player only lets you rip to WMA. I just made RealPlayer 10 my new default player and so far so good.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I also mess that up. I don't know what I was thinking : )
Linux is my primary desktop. I was just trying to make a point that the free viewer is not very useful and with your additions, even less so.
See my other post. But I agree that it would work pretty well to find out _who_ leaked the code.
That only helps if someone what to actaully copy-n-past the source code. What if a competitor only wants to learn from it to save from reverse engineering? Say someone wants 100% MS Office doc compatitibliy or MS Exchange protocols or any of the other stuff MS keeps locked up? No watermarking is going to stop that. I don't think most legit companies of good size putting out products would risk a copy-n-paste job of source code from any competitor. It would be far too easy to find and put a stop to.
The only thing that "watermarkign" source would do is as you pointed out. Say if MS gives their source to 30 different governments. They could have different versions that just change trivial things like #include orders, local variable names, etc. Then if there is a code leak, it would be easier for MS to find out what government did the leak.
P.S. How do you get spaces to stay in code examples on /.? <ECODE> removes all that when I try.
Most people wouldn't take the source code and use it. They would take it to _learn_ about the different protocols, specs and document formats that MS keeps locked up. Then you can do a "clean" implementaion on your own. Though it technically wouldn't be "clean" since you looked at the other code, but who would know right : )
There is already a great one for Firefox called SpellBound
This still doesn't fix the problem of governements putting out documents in a closed format that limits who can use/view those documents. Sure there is the free MS Word Viewer, though that only says it supports MS Word 2000 and doesn't mention WinXP. So it may or may not work. Also, MS realeases these viewers a long time after the most recent version comes out, so the most recent viewer is usually a version or two behind the most recent MS Office Suite. I think all governments should stick with an open doc format like PDF. Any government can use an suite like OOo.org that will let them convert documents to PDF or even Flash.
Huh? Now you sound like an MS FUD master. Just how will you lower "productivity" from running Linux as a server over running MS Windows as a server? From my experience at 3 fortune 500 companies, Linux increased productivity for the admins with less work. Our oracle DBA just won't do Oracle on MS Windows, it is either Linux or Solaris for them (especially after Oracle recommends Linux for all new installs). And from this recent /. story, it looks like corporations that use WinXP as the corporate desktop will average a 12% failure rate, talk about productivity loss!
That is not choice. Exchange is locked down with proprietary "embrace and extend" extensions the locks other clients/servers out from full functionality.
Sendmail is not meant for corporate communication with calendar, etc. There are plenty of products to replace MS Exchange like ones from Novell/SuSE and IBM. The reason many big corps use it is because the way they license software from MS. They pay for most of their software from MS as one big package to "save" money. If they want to take advantage of their MS Windows licenses, they they will use MS Outlook which needs MS Exchange to be any good since it sucks as a regular MUA with its poor standards support. Why do you think MS doesn't allow corps to by just parts of MS Office? Most companies would be fine with just MS Word and MS Excel and ditch MS Outlook and MS Exchange.
Where did I say people "screw Microsoft up and install their software for free"? Nothing like making up points when you don't have a vailid argument.
How about MS supporting open protocols and specs? That would be MS giving choice to their customers. It would let customers use heterogenous environments more easily instead of MS trying to lock customers into MS-only solutions. How about MS opening up the MS doc formats so customers can use MS Office or other office suites? I am not talking about MS putting undocumented binary blobs into XML and calling that "open". How about MS opening up _all_ of their networking/security protocols so other
I do agree with you that Win2K seems better overall then WinXP. Tonight I just installed WinXP for a friend from Church and put spybot, spyblaster, AVG Antivirus Pro, XP SP2 and the XP SP2 "firewall" on their box. I installed Firefox 1.0pre and thunderbird 0.8 for them and showed them how to use them and not IE/Outlook Express. I showed them how to copy-n-paste the URL from firefox if a site "needs" IE just-in-case. I hope their box will stay spyware, adware, pr0n dialers, viruses, and other crap free longer this time, though only time will tell.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think MS should allow updates for "pirates (arrrgh)", but this is just bunk. I would like to know just exactly _how_ this would "provide a better experience" for me as a legit customer?
This is a tough call, I wouldn't expect _any_ commercial company to support "pirates (arrrgh)" stealing their software. However, MS WinXP is not the most secure platform for the Joe-Average-Home-User. If Joe-Average-Home-User gets a "pirated (arrrgh)" copy, that just adds one more exploit for spammers, one more spyware, adware, virus infected PeeCeee out their hurting the net.
Red Hat AS is _not_ $1,500 per year. For _all_ of our AS servers, we paid the $1,500 (no need for clustering). Then to renew each year for the updates costs $96 per server (I just updated our subscription for one of our J2EE dev boxes). I work at a fortune 500, however we do not have many Red Hat Linux servers to warrant a big discount.
Why would you add the clustering add-on to the price if you do not need it? If that is the case, then we should be comparing to MS Windows server 2000 Data Center, which costs mucho-denero.Huh? What are you talking about? Those CAL's are for connections, such as for a file server. With 5 CAL's, you can _legally_ have 5 connections at a time.If you really want to look at the situation, you can buy Red Hat ES for $349 and have all the Linux you need. There are no limits to the number of users or CALs. Do what you want with it. Run as much software as you want, have as many users as you want, it is not the same as with MS and their servers (they nickle-n-dime you for each user).
If you think Red Hat is too much money, fine, go take a look at SuSE. They have SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 for up to 2-way for $349/year * 4 years = $1,396. If you need more procs, you can do up to 16-way for $899/year * 4 years = $3,596, still less them MS for 16-way *nix goodness. The majority will want 2-way, so for 4 years you can have a 24/7 server from SuSE (and supported by biggies like IBM) for only $1,396 for unlimited use. Nothing from MS is close to that price. Still think it is too much and don't want to pay for support? Fine, With Red Hat and SuSE, you can buy it and never pay for support again and keep using it. So you could have either one for about $350 and never pay again. Or you can use other Linux versions, or roll-your-own, or etc, etc. With MS, you don't have those options. Pay them or don't do anything. A small company _may_ be able to get away with stealing a few CALs here or there, however the 3 fortune 500 companies I have worked for would never do such a thing since it would only cost more in the long run. Believe or spread all the MS FUD you want. However, MS server software can _never_ have a lower TCO then Linux. If you really want to save money, a company can hire one or two Linux geeks and run tons of Linux software at not cost. Or they could buy the "big two" "enterprise" servers (Red Hat, SuSE) and then not pay for support. All this is called "CHOICE", which is a strange word to those in the MS Windows world.
According to Red Hat
According to Microsoft You can get Windows 2000 Advanced Server cheaper with certain licenese deals, though you can do the same with Red Hat. The standard edition should be fine for most companies that don't need 24/7 and will save a boat load of cash per server. Even the premium is $1,500 less per server then Windows 2000 Advanced Server.MS Windows Server 2003 std with _only_ 5 CAL's is $999, while the comparable version for Red Hat is Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and costs $349. Even though Red Hat may be the most expensive Enterprise Linux offering, they are still close to 25% - 50% less (depending on support hours) then the MS Server offerings.
Oh and I wonder how much these numbers were "softened" since MS had a part in this study? I also wonder why MS would even let these numbers be published. They push WinXP Pro as the best corporate desktop. I don't think a 12% failure rate is anything to be proud of, especially in a corporate environment where desktops are locked down much more then at home, have good AV software, firewalls and other technology to help protect them.
I dumped flash click-to-view for adblock. Adblock will block all the annoying ads and let in the flash you want. If you don't want any flash, then just ad *.swf to the adblock list or don't install the flash plug-in. I like flash, just not flash ads, so by blocking most of the ad sources out there, I only see the flash content I like.
With WinXP, you are limited to one crappy desktop (explorer.exe) that locks just about every file it touches (requiring you to kill and restart it in task manager) and crashes on me about 5 times a week (WinXP does not crash on me, but explorer.exe certainly does). With Linux, I can use full-featured desktops like KDE/Gnome or a ligher desktop like XFCE4 which still has greate features. For a system with 128MB or less memory, there are desktops like fluxbox, blackbox, wiamea and others.
Also, if Apple did not support Quicktime or iTunes under MS Windows, they would have pretty much zero market share. Apple _had_ to support Quicktime and iTunes under MS Windows, they didn't do it out of kindness.