Windows + Apps -> Windows + OSS Apps -> ReactOS + OSS Apps then then off to a Linux or *BSD varient if you want.
The first "step" isn't really a step at all, it's migrating your current PC from Windows-only, proprietary software to cross-platform Open Source Software. Then when you're tired of dealing with "the Man" (or when windows activation refuses your legal code, again) you can just switch to free React OS that will be able to run the few Windows-only things you have left.
As a side note, Windows 2000 compatible is more than enough. There are still very few XP only applications out there on the store shelves. Getting ReactOS up to speed may be just the push OSS needs. Now developers can QA against something relatively similar to windows, and OSS benifits because they share the code with WINE. I think the very best course of action would be to start building distros that can virtualize Linux and ReactOS without dual booting. Then you'd have an even better version of what OSX has in Parallels....But FREE !!
This is very much needed as an update to emergency notification systems. The current state of emergency notification in general is horrible. I've sat thru severe storms with the "air raid" sirens going and not been able to quickly get info about what was going on... with internet, cell phones, TV (OTA and cable/dish) and radio all going at the same time!!! It's seriously time to take the new tech into account. After all, if your listing to you ipod while streaming video from the web like most slashdotters are now, you are totally disconnected to what's happening down the street!!!
With the internet, I think an emergency management communication protocol would be really cool as well. Something that all web browsers or other devices could monitor for emergency alerts. Even if it just told you where go for more info.
The practical parts that other people bring up are true... hopefully we won't get alerts every time the "terror alert color" changes from pink to striped. It could be used for political purposes.. or worse in a "Fahrenheit 451" type "go to your door" but the basic technology is very important to have for everybody's sake. Even in a case like 9/11 just telling everybody to go home and be safe would have done a lot. Or in a case like New Orleans where we needed to get people out... a way to broadcast where to go for disaster relief would have reduced the number of stranded people or we could have found them faster.
Actually this is exactly what SOX is supposed to catch... i.e. your CEO is supposed to be following the rules and SOX will tell them they're not. Most of this stuff is pre-SOX anyway, but with SOX in place the management can't hide the accounting adjustment in "creative accounting" like they used to.. As far as back dated stock options, this is typical of how slow govt. works. There was a WSJ article a week or so about the stock option issue. The players that benefited most, M$ and other now-rich tech companies were "nicely asked" years ago to stop this practice all nice an polite-like so they didn't get hit. That's how most of the big tech companies posted such great numbers in the 90's and minted so many millionaires with out breaking payroll or "profits". The players getting "caught" now are just the copycats that followed along because that type of accounting was "industry standard" for so very long. In some ways its a tempest in a teapot, because the company funds are just fine and they are now accounting correctly. In other ways it's "Great Depression" level stuff because investors allowed companies to basically lie about employee compensation for so long that if it all had to be cleaned up at all the companies, at once, the market would crash because so many books are "cooked". Of course the REAL damage is not so much those companies investors, but those who played FAIR when nobody cared and investors overlooked for the big investments because their books were being compared to companies with "cooked" books.
Actually, the MA Open Document Format push was accompanied by several other formats as well...PDF as in there. What the actual statement was is that in 2007, the State archivist and IT department will require all documents available to the public in one or more formats from a list... I believe it was HTML, PDF, ODF and maybe something else. The heads of departments got together and looked for things they could support for years to come. That meant commercial support, as well as openness of the file format to be reverse engineered/maintained by the state archivist when it wasn't profitable/nobody cared about it anymore. Gee, sounds really familiar!!! That "decree" did not preclude the use of MS Office in any way whatsoever!!! After all, MS Office can be made to generate PDFs freely all day. BUT it is a boon to the OSS advocates that believe all government communication should be free to everybody. MS makes a killing from said government offices "mandating" the use of MS Word.doc files for every thing from Grant applications, to homework assignments for kids in school. The whole thing is a great lesson in doublespeak and speaking around the actual truth.. which is there are 100's of govt. departments all little fiefs "requiring" MS Office formats with no official oversight whatsoever... It creates a hostile environment for smaller businesses and poor people all over, but nobody complains about THAT while Billy G rolls in the dough.
My experience is when a company reveals their margins, the "Street" just beats them up until they don't have any profit anymore. If Apple can make a product every body wants at a price people are willing to pay, then more power to them if they make extra profit.. that's what business is all about. It's right back to the "pen" game in Junior Achivement class. Apple is doing exactly what the makers of that game suggest... you get peanilized for all sorts of things, not enough R&D, too many units, too few, etc.. Apple is riding the supply & demand curve almost exactly. What really saves them is that they NEVER have sales! They move product down the food chain, but they maintain their price points and add features... not lower the price and sell more units like Sony, Dell, etc... It's an enviable place to be in... and a mark of REALLY good business.
Back to the shoplifting analogy... The judge has made IBM "strip search" for the court and SCO is still saying they took "something precious" without actually pointing to something that came from IBM's "pockets". Remember, SCO's had 2 years with IBM's source code opened to their lawyers to find something that IBM "stole". By this point the judge is expecting SCO to have "pages" in hand that they accuse IBM of stealing... they still REFUSE to pick something out that the judge can rule on.
That's when you start bringing up Open Source and Free Software. Point to how many times people get stood up for breaking licenses like this... For a good portion of companies, putting half their budget as donations to OSS projects would be a better benifit/risk than buying licenses. Once 100 or 1000 companies get the idea to "contract" somebody like Canocial (ubuntu)for special features the really want instead of throwing more cash at big nasty MegaSoftware Corp for an almost-product the quicker things will start to pick up.
not really, some of the Samba guys are on those independent committees for the EU, so they know EXACTLY what they are needing as far as documentation. It's a running joke that the interface for windows printer and file sharing is so messed up the current MICROSOFT devs occasionally need to dig out the documentation from the open source [and reverse-engineered] Samba project to figure out how to do their jobs... on the REAL source code. One clarification too, the EU did NOT demand MS to open up their source code.. that would mean giving up IP... they only required an Open, freely available, no-strings-attached, documentation of how window file and print sharing [plus authentication and a few other things] work.. had it had to be usable.. both technically and legally. MS instead dumped millions of lines of source, under NDA, and a steep licensing fee.... somebody's deliberately not hearing the question.. and it's not the EU.
The idea of traceable ammo and secure guns has been around a while.. the whole "only criminals need guns" thing. OF Course if you ARE exercising your "4th box" rights, being labeled criminal has already happened. I think if these are so great, let's see a law to have all civilan cops [local, state, fbi, cia, nsa, etc] use these first.. and lets throw in a public database of registered keyholders. I'm sure if this is so great, Law enforcement will jump first. after all, what officer wants to be shot with is own gun.. it still happens often you know...gotta think of the officer's kids and all. After all, the last school shooting was done by a kid of a cop carrying his granparents weapon.. so law enforcement is a logical place to start.
ACID2 isn't really as important as properly rendering in the first place.. All ACID2 test for is proper handling of improper or edgy code... It doesn't show what good code written to spec is supposed to look like. What's really needed are testing pages that implement one feature at a time for all the browsers to test against. Then add complex pages that include lots of "Real world" interactions to test what it should actually look like.
The other thing I'd suggest would be Micro-specs... I caught that in another post and I've had a similar idea. Why don't they work with browser makers to "chop up" the specs into point releases that focus on just a few features at a time? The idea of massive specs was cute in theory, but they are just too complex to implement all at once. For instance to get more people up to CSS 2.1, why not create CSS 1.5 that has all the commonly implemented things in it.. then we could at least use that and know everybody had it. The granddaddy of all messed up specs is SVG. That spec needs to be chopped down terribly. It includes tons of stuff nobody really needs and everybody who implements it is at different stages on different features.... Using any 1 implementation is cool.. but for cross-browser work it's terrible. Chop it down to a smaller spec, like opera is going for the mobile implementation because it's so much smaller. then add the extra features like sockets and video and such back in later.
but people are spacial creatures... the flat, 1-D world of bits doesn't work very well for most people. A real desk holds a lot of information just by "being" a desk that a desktop computer doesn't hold. People remember that that stack in the corner was from last thursday, that the extra thick document with two staples is the TPS report the boss required after-hours, that they hate the bottom drawer because it sticks.. so they remember perfectly what's in it. Most of the greatest minds of the 20th century were incredibely disorganized...yet they could find important work from 3 years ago, blindfolded in messy offices filled with books and papers. Our brains are wired to work in 3 dimension and time, computers will always be far too "flat" for ordinary people without some kind of "crutch"
The flip side to that is that we work hard to get something good passed by bundling it with something a little friviolous... then the Prez vetos the good part we all told our critters to vote for.. Line item veto cuts both ways.
Line item veto works for states because it is fairly limited.. in my state it only covers spending bills, it's not a broad thing... of course we have a state constitutional amendment that the Governor MUST pass a balanced budget every year. It usually means every year somebody get's pissed off because they don't get what they planned on...
The "internet" didn't get big until the 1990's because that's how long it took for just modems to get out from under Ma Bell's monopoly thumb. There's very many articles here on/. about how the telcos tried to sabotage regular 56k dial up... like we never get that because they won't clean up the lines! Every Net Neutrality argument misses this point. It's like now that stuff is faster we forgot what life was like when we "rented" phones, and paid $$$ per minute charges. What's even more disheartening is that there's a good share of Reps and Senators that were in Congress when we Made THAT rule... and when we broke up Ma Bell... and they STILL don't get it!!!
but call centers won't work in China... the Indians do everything possible to bring their people up to speed.. so you don't know they're NOT in the USA. They bring them magazines and books, watch american TV as homework so when you call they can banter with you about American Idol just like a person in the US. China would NEVER go for that... they're too controlling. China only stays in business because they have a thin layer of "salesmen" and a thick layer of bureaucracy between them and the workers. China has 1984 down to a science to control all the outward facing workers and keep them in line.
India is a REAL free market (outside the social Castes, but they're not legal anymore, kinda like discrimination isn't legal in the US anynmore) and they are starting to catch up with the US standard.. the joys of schooling in the USA then going home to being dirt poor don't last long. The only reason China is still cheap is the govt controlled labor market over there. (Work or be shot! and forget about Unions, funny hun) There was a front page article in the Wall Street Journal last week about how housing prices in some big chineese cities (not Hong Kong!) are outstripping the pay of even the people with masters and Phd degrees! And the Local govts are complicit with developers to sell off the public housing driving the costs higher. In "communist" China!!! Doesn't sound very communist to me..
It doesn't make sense for AMD to do this. nVidia has been their premier partner for years, why would they go ATI now after ATI just signed on to the VIIV deal with WinTel? nVidia would be better for the future. Both companies are mavericks in the industry, both have been bitten heavily by WinTel holding them back. AMD + nVidia could make the next Apple... or better! end-to-end PCs completely outside the WinTel homogeny... ATI is just a lackey to whatever agenda MS & Intel are peddling.
The Biggest thing I'd hate to see is the Alt OS support.. AMD banks real money on Alt OSes, where ATI views them as trouble... in that respect nVidia would be a better match because AMD would provide Fab allowing costs to be lower. Lower costs mean better support for OSS, combine with AMD chips it could provide a complete solution off the shelf.. just add OSS.
The only thing I see is that ATI has the inside contracts already... AMD desperately wants into the "big leagues" of the computer world. Customers that already use ATI video and like ATI's business (remember, OEMS don't care about performance or drivers as much as bottom line and buzzword compliance) would be heavily leaned upon to try out AMD chips with a good discount. ATI also has some interesting patent agreements with Intel and Microsoft that AMD & nVidia got cut out of in the last 5 years or so... but that means AMD would be planning to "roll over" or "sell out" to the Wintel homogney rather than keep fighting... very sad.
The goal of management is to show the ship is sinking and hold out the "carrot" of a good severance package. By announcing the layoff months in advance and re purposing employees jobs from programming to training they (employees) make the choice "at will" to "accept" the new arrangement, no matter how demeaning it is, they're refusing to "fire" you, they want to make you leave. Most big companies have long standing layoff/reduction severance policies in place.. they are trying to play both sides because we wouldn't want to change the rules when sales get laid off for the "quarterly" profits... they don't want to scare ALL the employees, just the department they want rid of.
If you're using Firefox look at this very page and you'll see why HTML/CSS is divided the way it is. Start by turning off the CSS and you'll see that all the links and text show up neatly and cleanyly formated. It's not PRETTY, but all of the information on the page is there and fairly readable too. What you're looking at is the RAW HTML. The Div tags keep groups of meaningful items together rather than just using P tags as fillers.
The other effect of proper Divs are AJAX related. That's what allows scripts like Greasemonkey and all the Google Maps mods to work... A page written by somebody else can cherry pick interesting data by Div tags rather than formating. Also, look at print preview for a different CSS applied to the same HTML to make a neatly printed page rather than the usual chopped up junk you get when trying to print Table/Frame based pages that waste paper for headers, or chop off the meaningful parts of the page because the decorations make a mess.
It's not like Acrobat is a cash cow for Adobe or anything! Most people in my workplace only know about Acrobat for making PDFs and snub their noses at anything "free software" because they equate it with shareware. By including PDF support in office Microsoft wipes a good 10%++ easily from Adobe's sales.
Apple has PDF because they are co-owners of postscript with adobe.. so much of the early work for photoshop and such was done between Adobe and Apple that Apple has a cross-license for the techonology. OpenOffice.org and all the free PDF makers only use the open parts of the specs. There's quite a bit of the DRM stuff that they can't use because it's not all open and that pesky DMCA. Also, many of the projects are not US based so their rules are slightly different. Now that Adobe is abandoning Apple for windows, they're getting really scared Microsoft will finish cutting them off!!
That's in KittenAuth V2.0!!!
seriously, that's the point of the thing. Even a child can choose from an array of images cats from dogs.. no typing involved. You do need to cover the amount of images, but it looks like kittenauth uses some cropping and scaling to vary the repeated pics.
realize that people going to best buy to replace a hard drive probably don't know that a hard drive can be SECURELY erased... they probably don't even know which part it is before the guy behind the counter shows them the box. This is pure slop on Best Buy's part and they should be getting serious flack for this.... that's WHY people use them to "repair" computers!!!
When your business is at stake, you call a lawyer, that's why most companies of any size keep one on retainer all the time. "counting licenses" is ALWAYS a problem. Look at the Earnie Ball situation as a example. The people "tried" to be license compliant, but got nailed for $50k + because they didn't "properly" remove the software from computers moved around in the office.
My own company has a PC tech dedicated to maintaining the licenses on all our PCs. He keeps spreadsheets with all the numbers and wipes every machine that comes in and puts fresh, license compliant installs on each and every one. Still, with a minimum of $100k at stake, if we got one of those calls, the lawyer would be the next phone call.
Consider it the equivelant of a policeman "just asking" you to put on handcuffs and get in the car... These people are cocky suckups with a multi-billion dollar corp behind them.. such "threats" are entirely out of line unless they are serious.
but one of the loopholes in "betamax" if you will, is that when the decision was made fine grained control wasn't really possible. You published Records or Video tape, or broadcast... there wasn't this vast middle ground of Tivo, Cassette, iPod, etc. One of the key parts of the ruling was that the *IAA couldn't possibly control all those different ways of customers using the product... they are trying to establish that now they CAN have that control so eventually they'll be in court asking to get "fair rights" removed because now they can make money off "instant access" where they couldn't before.
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As a side note, Windows 2000 compatible is more than enough. There are still very few XP only applications out there on the store shelves. Getting ReactOS up to speed may be just the push OSS needs. Now developers can QA against something relatively similar to windows, and OSS benifits because they share the code with WINE. I think the very best course of action would be to start building distros that can virtualize Linux and ReactOS without dual booting. Then you'd have an even better version of what OSX has in Parallels. ...But FREE !!
With the internet, I think an emergency management communication protocol would be really cool as well. Something that all web browsers or other devices could monitor for emergency alerts. Even if it just told you where go for more info.
The practical parts that other people bring up are true... hopefully we won't get alerts every time the "terror alert color" changes from pink to striped. It could be used for political purposes.. or worse in a "Fahrenheit 451" type "go to your door" but the basic technology is very important to have for everybody's sake. Even in a case like 9/11 just telling everybody to go home and be safe would have done a lot. Or in a case like New Orleans where we needed to get people out... a way to broadcast where to go for disaster relief would have reduced the number of stranded people or we could have found them faster.
Actually this is exactly what SOX is supposed to catch... i.e. your CEO is supposed to be following the rules and SOX will tell them they're not. Most of this stuff is pre-SOX anyway, but with SOX in place the management can't hide the accounting adjustment in "creative accounting" like they used to.. As far as back dated stock options, this is typical of how slow govt. works. There was a WSJ article a week or so about the stock option issue. The players that benefited most, M$ and other now-rich tech companies were "nicely asked" years ago to stop this practice all nice an polite-like so they didn't get hit. That's how most of the big tech companies posted such great numbers in the 90's and minted so many millionaires with out breaking payroll or "profits". The players getting "caught" now are just the copycats that followed along because that type of accounting was "industry standard" for so very long. In some ways its a tempest in a teapot, because the company funds are just fine and they are now accounting correctly. In other ways it's "Great Depression" level stuff because investors allowed companies to basically lie about employee compensation for so long that if it all had to be cleaned up at all the companies, at once, the market would crash because so many books are "cooked". Of course the REAL damage is not so much those companies investors, but those who played FAIR when nobody cared and investors overlooked for the big investments because their books were being compared to companies with "cooked" books.
Actually, the MA Open Document Format push was accompanied by several other formats as well...PDF as in there. What the actual statement was is that in 2007, the State archivist and IT department will require all documents available to the public in one or more formats from a list... I believe it was HTML, PDF, ODF and maybe something else. The heads of departments got together and looked for things they could support for years to come. That meant commercial support, as well as openness of the file format to be reverse engineered/maintained by the state archivist when it wasn't profitable/nobody cared about it anymore. Gee, sounds really familiar!!! That "decree" did not preclude the use of MS Office in any way whatsoever!!! After all, MS Office can be made to generate PDFs freely all day. BUT it is a boon to the OSS advocates that believe all government communication should be free to everybody. MS makes a killing from said government offices "mandating" the use of MS Word .doc files for every thing from Grant applications, to homework assignments for kids in school. The whole thing is a great lesson in doublespeak and speaking around the actual truth.. which is there are 100's of govt. departments all little fiefs "requiring" MS Office formats with no official oversight whatsoever... It creates a hostile environment for smaller businesses and poor people all over, but nobody complains about THAT while Billy G rolls in the dough.
My experience is when a company reveals their margins, the "Street" just beats them up until they don't have any profit anymore. If Apple can make a product every body wants at a price people are willing to pay, then more power to them if they make extra profit.. that's what business is all about. It's right back to the "pen" game in Junior Achivement class. Apple is doing exactly what the makers of that game suggest... you get peanilized for all sorts of things, not enough R&D, too many units, too few, etc.. Apple is riding the supply & demand curve almost exactly. What really saves them is that they NEVER have sales! They move product down the food chain, but they maintain their price points and add features... not lower the price and sell more units like Sony, Dell, etc... It's an enviable place to be in... and a mark of REALLY good business.
Back to the shoplifting analogy... The judge has made IBM "strip search" for the court and SCO is still saying they took "something precious" without actually pointing to something that came from IBM's "pockets". Remember, SCO's had 2 years with IBM's source code opened to their lawyers to find something that IBM "stole". By this point the judge is expecting SCO to have "pages" in hand that they accuse IBM of stealing... they still REFUSE to pick something out that the judge can rule on.
That's when you start bringing up Open Source and Free Software. Point to how many times people get stood up for breaking licenses like this... For a good portion of companies, putting half their budget as donations to OSS projects would be a better benifit/risk than buying licenses. Once 100 or 1000 companies get the idea to "contract" somebody like Canocial (ubuntu)for special features the really want instead of throwing more cash at big nasty MegaSoftware Corp for an almost-product the quicker things will start to pick up.
not really, some of the Samba guys are on those independent committees for the EU, so they know EXACTLY what they are needing as far as documentation. It's a running joke that the interface for windows printer and file sharing is so messed up the current MICROSOFT devs occasionally need to dig out the documentation from the open source [and reverse-engineered] Samba project to figure out how to do their jobs... on the REAL source code. One clarification too, the EU did NOT demand MS to open up their source code.. that would mean giving up IP... they only required an Open, freely available, no-strings-attached, documentation of how window file and print sharing [plus authentication and a few other things] work.. had it had to be usable.. both technically and legally. MS instead dumped millions of lines of source, under NDA, and a steep licensing fee.... somebody's deliberately not hearing the question.. and it's not the EU.
The idea of traceable ammo and secure guns has been around a while.. the whole "only criminals need guns" thing. OF Course if you ARE exercising your "4th box" rights, being labeled criminal has already happened. I think if these are so great, let's see a law to have all civilan cops [local, state, fbi, cia, nsa, etc] use these first.. and lets throw in a public database of registered keyholders. I'm sure if this is so great, Law enforcement will jump first. after all, what officer wants to be shot with is own gun.. it still happens often you know.. .gotta think of the officer's kids and all. After all, the last school shooting was done by a kid of a cop carrying his granparents weapon.. so law enforcement is a logical place to start.
The other thing I'd suggest would be Micro-specs... I caught that in another post and I've had a similar idea. Why don't they work with browser makers to "chop up" the specs into point releases that focus on just a few features at a time? The idea of massive specs was cute in theory, but they are just too complex to implement all at once. For instance to get more people up to CSS 2.1, why not create CSS 1.5 that has all the commonly implemented things in it.. then we could at least use that and know everybody had it. The granddaddy of all messed up specs is SVG. That spec needs to be chopped down terribly. It includes tons of stuff nobody really needs and everybody who implements it is at different stages on different features.... Using any 1 implementation is cool.. but for cross-browser work it's terrible. Chop it down to a smaller spec, like opera is going for the mobile implementation because it's so much smaller. then add the extra features like sockets and video and such back in later.
but people are spacial creatures... the flat, 1-D world of bits doesn't work very well for most people. A real desk holds a lot of information just by "being" a desk that a desktop computer doesn't hold. People remember that that stack in the corner was from last thursday, that the extra thick document with two staples is the TPS report the boss required after-hours, that they hate the bottom drawer because it sticks.. so they remember perfectly what's in it. Most of the greatest minds of the 20th century were incredibely disorganized...yet they could find important work from 3 years ago, blindfolded in messy offices filled with books and papers. Our brains are wired to work in 3 dimension and time, computers will always be far too "flat" for ordinary people without some kind of "crutch"
Line item veto works for states because it is fairly limited.. in my state it only covers spending bills, it's not a broad thing... of course we have a state constitutional amendment that the Governor MUST pass a balanced budget every year. It usually means every year somebody get's pissed off because they don't get what they planned on...
The "internet" didn't get big until the 1990's because that's how long it took for just modems to get out from under Ma Bell's monopoly thumb. There's very many articles here on /. about how the telcos tried to sabotage regular 56k dial up... like we never get that because they won't clean up the lines! Every Net Neutrality argument misses this point. It's like now that stuff is faster we forgot what life was like when we "rented" phones, and paid $$$ per minute charges. What's even more disheartening is that there's a good share of Reps and Senators that were in Congress when we Made THAT rule... and when we broke up Ma Bell... and they STILL don't get it!!!
but call centers won't work in China... the Indians do everything possible to bring their people up to speed.. so you don't know they're NOT in the USA. They bring them magazines and books, watch american TV as homework so when you call they can banter with you about American Idol just like a person in the US. China would NEVER go for that... they're too controlling. China only stays in business because they have a thin layer of "salesmen" and a thick layer of bureaucracy between them and the workers. China has 1984 down to a science to control all the outward facing workers and keep them in line.
India is a REAL free market (outside the social Castes, but they're not legal anymore, kinda like discrimination isn't legal in the US anynmore) and they are starting to catch up with the US standard.. the joys of schooling in the USA then going home to being dirt poor don't last long. The only reason China is still cheap is the govt controlled labor market over there. (Work or be shot! and forget about Unions, funny hun) There was a front page article in the Wall Street Journal last week about how housing prices in some big chineese cities (not Hong Kong!) are outstripping the pay of even the people with masters and Phd degrees! And the Local govts are complicit with developers to sell off the public housing driving the costs higher. In "communist" China!!! Doesn't sound very communist to me..
The Biggest thing I'd hate to see is the Alt OS support.. AMD banks real money on Alt OSes, where ATI views them as trouble... in that respect nVidia would be a better match because AMD would provide Fab allowing costs to be lower. Lower costs mean better support for OSS, combine with AMD chips it could provide a complete solution off the shelf.. just add OSS.
The only thing I see is that ATI has the inside contracts already... AMD desperately wants into the "big leagues" of the computer world. Customers that already use ATI video and like ATI's business (remember, OEMS don't care about performance or drivers as much as bottom line and buzzword compliance) would be heavily leaned upon to try out AMD chips with a good discount. ATI also has some interesting patent agreements with Intel and Microsoft that AMD & nVidia got cut out of in the last 5 years or so... but that means AMD would be planning to "roll over" or "sell out" to the Wintel homogney rather than keep fighting... very sad.
The goal of management is to show the ship is sinking and hold out the "carrot" of a good severance package. By announcing the layoff months in advance and re purposing employees jobs from programming to training they (employees) make the choice "at will" to "accept" the new arrangement, no matter how demeaning it is, they're refusing to "fire" you, they want to make you leave. Most big companies have long standing layoff/reduction severance policies in place.. they are trying to play both sides because we wouldn't want to change the rules when sales get laid off for the "quarterly" profits... they don't want to scare ALL the employees, just the department they want rid of.
The other effect of proper Divs are AJAX related. That's what allows scripts like Greasemonkey and all the Google Maps mods to work... A page written by somebody else can cherry pick interesting data by Div tags rather than formating. Also, look at print preview for a different CSS applied to the same HTML to make a neatly printed page rather than the usual chopped up junk you get when trying to print Table/Frame based pages that waste paper for headers, or chop off the meaningful parts of the page because the decorations make a mess.
It's not like Acrobat is a cash cow for Adobe or anything! Most people in my workplace only know about Acrobat for making PDFs and snub their noses at anything "free software" because they equate it with shareware. By including PDF support in office Microsoft wipes a good 10%++ easily from Adobe's sales. Apple has PDF because they are co-owners of postscript with adobe.. so much of the early work for photoshop and such was done between Adobe and Apple that Apple has a cross-license for the techonology. OpenOffice.org and all the free PDF makers only use the open parts of the specs. There's quite a bit of the DRM stuff that they can't use because it's not all open and that pesky DMCA. Also, many of the projects are not US based so their rules are slightly different. Now that Adobe is abandoning Apple for windows, they're getting really scared Microsoft will finish cutting them off!!
That's in KittenAuth V2.0!!! seriously, that's the point of the thing. Even a child can choose from an array of images cats from dogs.. no typing involved. You do need to cover the amount of images, but it looks like kittenauth uses some cropping and scaling to vary the repeated pics.
Your a looser for even sugesting such a thing! next up: lose, loose, ,loosed, & lost; your and you're!!!
realize that people going to best buy to replace a hard drive probably don't know that a hard drive can be SECURELY erased... they probably don't even know which part it is before the guy behind the counter shows them the box. This is pure slop on Best Buy's part and they should be getting serious flack for this.... that's WHY people use them to "repair" computers!!!
When your business is at stake, you call a lawyer, that's why most companies of any size keep one on retainer all the time. "counting licenses" is ALWAYS a problem. Look at the Earnie Ball situation as a example. The people "tried" to be license compliant, but got nailed for $50k + because they didn't "properly" remove the software from computers moved around in the office.
My own company has a PC tech dedicated to maintaining the licenses on all our PCs. He keeps spreadsheets with all the numbers and wipes every machine that comes in and puts fresh, license compliant installs on each and every one. Still, with a minimum of $100k at stake, if we got one of those calls, the lawyer would be the next phone call. Consider it the equivelant of a policeman "just asking" you to put on handcuffs and get in the car... These people are cocky suckups with a multi-billion dollar corp behind them.. such "threats" are entirely out of line unless they are serious.
The first rule of posting in bunny slippers is not to talk about bunny slippers!
but one of the loopholes in "betamax" if you will, is that when the decision was made fine grained control wasn't really possible. You published Records or Video tape, or broadcast... there wasn't this vast middle ground of Tivo, Cassette, iPod, etc. One of the key parts of the ruling was that the *IAA couldn't possibly control all those different ways of customers using the product... they are trying to establish that now they CAN have that control so eventually they'll be in court asking to get "fair rights" removed because now they can make money off "instant access" where they couldn't before.