White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed
Right, they only had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. But we are supposed to believe it was all an accident. Also we are supposed to believe that years worth of email disappears for the White House and no one notices until congress asks for it. Most places I have worked as a sysadmin if everyone's old email disappeared in multi-month/year blocks my phone would be ringing within the hour.
Slashdot may be known as the home of "Microsoft sucks" posts but in this case I think it's justified.
Xbox Live has been having serious issues since around December 24, so right around two weeks now. Some people are worse off than others, typically by geography, which is why you hear some people say they have been able to play just fine while others can't stay connected for more than a few minutes around peak hours or can't connect at all. It seems that the bulk of the users have been effected by it.
The most common problems are things like:
you try to connect and the machine locks
you try to connect, it says you need to get an update or disconnect, you tell it to get the update, it can't get the update and disconnects
you connect but your profile is missing or incomplete
you connect but then get dropped once you try to get into a game
The pathetic part is that Microsoft doesn't even host these games on their own servers, Xbox Live is primarily a multiplayer matchmaking service, the actual games are being hosted on the consoles. So the customers have to pay on a regular basis to access Live in the first place, and are subjected to tons of advertisements while on Live, and all this just for the privledge of hosting their own game on their own machine using their own bandwidth.
It's especially bad when compared to something like World of Warcraft, which has 9 million users compared to Live's 8 million users. Yes Blizzard does maintenance briefly each week but their service has never been dysfunctional for weeks at a time and they actually host everything on their own servers.
Back in the olden days of Quake1 if you wanted to join a game all you had to do was hit ~ to bring down the console, and type "connect IP-ADDRESS" and you were connected, TCP IPX whatever. Or you could download a program like Gamespy, Kali, or All-Seeing-Eye and connect to any of the servers people were running and it just worked, and still works to this day. With many modern games from large publishers connecting directly to an ip is usually disabled now, and LAN play is sometimes disabled, forcing you to go through the publisher's own game network. So what you gain is the ability to have a friend's list (which could be done now with a program that posts alerts to your im client instead), and in exchange for that we have a single point of failure that causes problems like this, we can play multiplayer on the games we bought only so long as the publisher sees fit or can stay in business. It's not all bad but it's unfortunate we are losing features that have been available to us for over a decade.
With regard to the lawsuit, I don't think they have much chance and they probably know it but they are going to go for it anyway and hope to get lucky. If you look at the Xbox Live contract at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/legal/ it says
16. WE MAKE NO WARRANTY We provide the Service "as-is," "with all faults" and "as available." The Microsoft Parties give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions.
If you had a cable tv or phone outage/partial-outage lasting for weeks you could probably call the FCC and get them fined or at least threatened, but since this is a private service I don't know that their is any recourse.
As for why it is happening, I would bet either Microsoft had a pretty major engineering screwup causing the service to run into scaling issues that they don't know how to deal with. Or they are getting DDOS attacked and weren't prepared but don't want to admit it.
Not in the United States anyway, our "last mile problem" has a lot more to do with entrenched telecom and cable companies with regional monopolies than any sort of fiber bendiness.
Can someone explain to me why anyone should care about what Mark Cuban says? The guy lucked out during the dot-com boom when Yahoo stupidly gave him billions for a now defunct website.
He took that money and bought a bunch of toys, a basketball team, and appeared in some crappy tv. How this makes him an expert in technology is beyond me.
I use thunderbird quite a bit but I wonder if heavy email clients have much future. Of all the applications where a web client can replace a heavy desktop side client email seems like one of the easiest and google has proven that you can make a webmail client that isn't painful to use.
Lately Adobe has been labeling many of their products, especially frameworks related to web development as "open source" when in reality they open source a small part of it and leave the critical portions under an extremely restrictive proprietary license.
As I understand it they have claimed they will open source parts of the flex sdk, but the flex ide, and the flash runtime plugins will still remain under the same old proprietary license, this is not acceptable. It would be a step backwards if in a few years a significant portion of content on the internet was trapped in proprietary binaries that are difficult to index and likely impossible for many to use a few years down the road. Adobe releases some specs for flash but they are released under terms saying that if you read the specs you are forbidden from writing anything capable of working with flash files. This is almost worse than nothing because even if you create a flash plugin completely independently or with the use of clean room techniques Adobe has the option of claiming that you must have looked at their specs and take you to court in an attempt to kill your project. Also there are many restrictions on the use of the plugin itself, for example you can't use it in many commercial applications such as a flash driven kiosk without first paying Adobe again.
How many years did Linux languish with outdated and extremely buggy versions of the flash plugins? We may have a more or less up to date version of the plugin now but there is no guarantee it will stay that way, a great deal of internet content is trapped in a format that we can only view as long as Adobe feels like letting us, and the architecture support is still pathetic, how is it there is still no native x86-64 support? This should have been done two years ago, to make no mention of the lack of flash9 support on the smaller architectures such as powerpc which effectively locks ps3 users out of browsing most modern flash based websites.
Adobe seems like a big heavy software company that still operates primarily in a 1980's mentality, trying to make the transition to something more modern and web-centric , and they are trying to get some of the glow of open standards and open source to rub off on them, the problem is that they seem to be faking much of it. They talk about openness to get you interested, then you dig into it and find out that there are always critical components they are still keeping under lock and key. I am no fan of flash but it does have its uses, I keep hoping that pressure from Microsoft's silverlight will cause Adobe to really open up the flash spec and allow 3rd parties to create their own implementations of the flash ide and flash runtimes, as pressure from Microsoft's half-assed pdf alternative caused Adobe to release pdf as an iso standard. Though I see no sign of this happening as Adobe still seems to believe they can have their cake and eat it too.
Microsoft attempted a strategy of lowering prices for Windows/Office while pushing for anti-piracy action from the Chinese government. These efforts failed, repeatedly, and the end result according to this article is that Microsoft will sell Windows AND Office, combined for a price of $3.
If that if a victory I can't imagine what a defeat would look like. If they are going to get $3 per copy of Windows+Office Microsoft would be lucky to break even on the raw materials, packaging, and shipping. The thing is Microsoft can't afford to just break even, they have tens of thousands of employees, including many lawyers and accountants and sales people involved in pushing their products, plus the support staff for all of those employees. And for those that would say "well Microsoft is sitting on a huge war chest" this is correct, they aren't going to go out of business any time soon, but they also can't bleed money indefinitely and watch potential revenue streams dry up without their stock tanking.
It looks like their game plan in China is to sell their software at break even or a loss just to get people used to the idea of paying for it and hopefully maintain market share. I guess they could make a profit in 5-10 years assuming:
people in china get used to the idea of paying for their software AND they have the money to pay more in the future AND they are willing to do so AND a suitable alternative (desktop Linux) hasn't risen in popularity. Which to me sounds more like a pipe-dream than a game plan.
I wish Microsoft many more of these sorts of "victories" in the future. Though their shareholders may feel differently.
While it is a good first step that Dell is selling Ubuntu machines, and not charging you (as much) for a license that you aren't even purchasing, HP has been doing this for quite a while though they don't seem to get much press for it.
If you look at hp laptops and desktops in their "business" section many of them will list "FreeDOS" as an available os, or if they have a "Configure PC" link under the model often times it means you can choose between Windows and FreeDOS in the configuration options. One difference may be that if you get a FreeDOS pc from HP, format the drive and put Linux on it HP probably isn't going to give you any software support whereas maby Dell (or Canonical?) offers some level of support included in their price. Though if you are willing to forgo softwate technical support and just want hardware warranty coverage (for example if you are a large institution purchasing many computers is bulk) you can get a larger discount for non-windows machines from HP than Dell. The price varies but for most of their business notebooks and desktops the difference between a model with Windows XP/Vista and that same model with FreeDOS is usually $75-$150
Hopefully Dell's apparent success in selling Ubuntu desktops (and the publicity that has come with it) will push HP into doing something similar, I am a bit surprised Dell beat them to the punch on this one considering HP has:
been encouraging the use of Debian on the server end for a while
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/services/cache/442406-0- 0-0-121.html
I would expect to see more announcements like this in the near future from the OEMs. Whatever argument the OEMs still had against selling desktop Linux and thereby irritating Microsoft was recently dealt a significant blow by Microsoft's announcement that they would begin selling their own machines http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/ 28/181204
which from the OEMs perspective has changed Microsoft from an annoying element that everyone has to deal with and who gets a cut of their profit, to a company that is now moving towards being a direct competitor.
What happened to the MS/Intel alliance of old? Microsoft getting annoyed at Intel making chips for Apple?
Apple has nothing to do with this, Intel is fairly opportunistic and they see there is a significant potential for Linux growth over the next few years and having Intel hardware be the hardware of choice due to superior driver support can only help them. They have traditionally provided fairly good hardware support for Linux on the server side of things for obvious reasons, it appears that this is now being pushed out to more desktop/notebook oriented hardware. Most likely in anticipation of desktop Linux growth, especially in the corporate/government universe.
As far as a MS/Intel alliance, there has not been one to speak of for several years now. It's not that Intel is above collusion or dirty tricks, for example there was that deal they struck with Skype a while back trying to get Skype crippled on AMD processors. It's just that Intel, and many other hardware companies have felt for years that Microsoft is holding them back.
From Microsoft's perspective they have been in a position where most computer users in the world have to pay them a "Microsoft tax" if they want to or not, so the less things change the better because any radical hardware or usage changes (the internet) can only hurt Microsoft rather than help them. This clashes with the goals of most hardware companies, which are to one-up the other hardware companies and crank out new hardware revisions constantly to keep people in the habit of upgrading every year. Graphics processor capabilities have been advancing at an incredible rate the last few years, this is largely because gamers are constantly looking at upcoming games and thinking to themselves "man I'm going to need a new video card when that comes out". What would be an equivalent event for replacing the rest of the hardware in the computer? Perhaps the release of a new operating system, though this doesn't really work when it takes Microsoft 5 years and lots of delays between each version of Windows with only marginal changes, most of which have scared the corporate/government customers away from upgrading.
There has been bad blood between Intel and Microsoft for many years now, if you want further evidence here is an interview from late 2005 with Avram Miller Intel's "Vice President and Director of Corporate Business Development" from 1984-1999 http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/008.html
Avram:I think another problem was the company was, I think, intimidated by Microsoft. It's easy to be intimidated by Microsoft. Microsoft is intimidating. And I think that many times Intel would have liked to have done something, but Microsoft didn't like it and Intel was basically a little bit afraid of Microsoft.
Bob: I talked to an Intel guy who told me that they were Microsoft's bitch.
Avram: Well, that might be a way to describe it. I wouldn't describe it exactly like that. One of the issues in this was that if you're a software company, you're used to selling upgrades. There really isn't an upgrade for a micro-processor. So, you need to try to push faster and faster the applications that use the power. And in the beginning, the companies were more aligned that way, but over time, they became less aligned that way.
* McGeady testified that Microsoft feared competition from Intel's software development: At an August 2, 1995 meeting Bill Gates allegedly threatened to terminate Windows support for Intel's new microprocessors unless they were able to "get alignment" between Intel and MS on Intel's Internet and communications soft
more realistically say you pay $0.10/kwh and only run f@h when you are asleep, so 8 hours a day, less than $5 a month more than you would have paid otherwise.
In fact, just behind me and a bit to the left is a Laserjet 5550. This is a five thousand dollar printer, give or take a grand, if you load it up with RAM.
Counting the cost on unspecific addons isn't really fair, if we take the cost of the midrange 5550 model (5550dn, one that has duplexing, but only two paper trays) it is a $3,000 printer
http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.as px?id=B27816&src=PG
The cost to replace all the toner? You might be able to get it cheaper elsewhere, but buying HP carts from CDW, which is what we do, costs literally $1300 for a full set. The cost per page is something like 26 cents if you're printing an average sheet with something like 20% coverage. If you intend to use the printer for years then the cost per page is far more relevant than the cost of a set of cartridges, and if you are going to bring up the cost of a set of cartridges you might want to mention that both the laser and an ink printer will come with a set of cartridges, but you will get many times more pages out of the set that comes with the laser.
It also sounds like you are getting ripped off on your toner.
(black cartridge for 5550)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16817102185
$185.40 / 13,000 pages @ 5% coverage
$0.01426/page @ 5% coverage
$0.05704/page @ 20% coverage
(color cartridge for 5550)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16817102177
$257.70 / 12,000 pages @ 5% coverage
$0.02148/page @ 5% coverage
$0.08590/page @ 20% coverage
which is nowhere near $0.26/page @20% coverage even if if it uses all color and zero black.
The article mentions the anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who has a fairly simple (and imo fairly convincing) argument, that in the article is referred to as the "byproduct theory".
Basically it says that the ability to connect cause and effect, that is to connect things that happen to the actors in the environment that cause them, was so powerful that is became overused in humans. Giving them a natural tendency to attribute everything, including chance events or natural phenomena to these actors, or as Boyer calls them "unseen agents".
The reason for this is fairly straightforward, if you were living in the prehistoric wilderness it paid to be paranoid, consider the simple example of someone sleeping in a cave who hears a noise outside, for the paranoid early human the thought process might be:
"oh no, what was that, it had to be something, something made that noise, it must have been a tiger, I know it was a tiger, there must be a huge tiger outside"
pros: if there really is a tiger, or some other threat, you may have just saved your life, increasing the probability your genetic code will be passed on creating future paranoid generations
cons: if you are wrong and there is nothing out there, you wasted a small amount of energy and made yourself look stupid
if on the other hand you don't attribute every event to some unseen agent, you might be tempted to assume it was just the wind, or some other harmless event
pros: if you are right you save a little bit of energy
cons: if you are wrong you may be dead
To hear it explained much more elegantly by Boyer himself there is a short video interview on youtube where he discusses the subject http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etiZv_rOOgc
Which is part of a larger BBC series called "Atheism: A Brief History of Disbelief" and "The Atheism Tapes", in which Jonathan Miller interviews famous scientists and philosophers on the subject of atheism. Much of which can be found on youtube/google video http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/feature s/atheism.shtml
"The two companies agreed to jointly sell their products and also develop technologies to make it easier for businesses to use Linux alongside Windows software."
Why is that so bad?
What is bad is that it's a complete lie, it's the most plausible, positive-sounding story they could come up with to explain away what they are doing. Microsoft has described Linux and the open source movement using terms such as "a cancer", "communist", "viral", and more recently referred to open source developers as "pawns" engaged in a "one-night stand". Also immediately after the Novell-Microsoft deal was announced Balmer said publicly that he believed any non-Novell distribution was now a legitimate target for Microsoft legal attacks. They are doing everything they can to smear, stall, and frustrate open source developers while simultaneously trying to sell the "we cooperate and inter operate with everyone to make your life easier" image to the corporate types with these sort of cover stories.
What Microsoft is trying to get out of the deal is to turn Suse into the one-and-only Linux distro that is blessed by Microsoft as being "safe" from patent concerns via indemnification. Then when the indemnification period runs out Microsoft can choose to charge Novell an exorbitant amount of money for renewal, or simply pull the plug altogether. This would also have the bonus effect of making lawsuits against other Linux distros more plausible in the minds of corporate customers because the fact that one distro is seeking indemnification makes the notion that others are at risk without a similar deal seem logical. Allowing Microsoft to create yet more FUD around Linux without putting itself as much immediate risk. I personally doubt Microsoft will actually sue any distro directly because of the potential nuclear patent war that could be triggered if, for example any of the Open Invention Network members felt compelled to get involved (specifically IBM).
What Novell gets out of the deal is a big pile of quick money and potentially greater market share as a side effect of the afore mentioned FUD around competing distros. Unfortunately for Novell these are both short-term benefits that come with the cost of making them beholden to Microsoft, and alienating them from many in the developer community (see samba).
How Novell thought they could get away with this is beyond me, If I had to guess I would say either the upper management sees other Redhat taking the server support market, and Ubuntu taking the desktop Market, leaving Suse out in the cold so they decided to cash out, not caring what happens in the long term. Or their lawyers came up with their now famous gpl2 end run, thinking themselves clever for coming up with a deal that Microsoft was happy with and didn't violate the letter of the gpl, but having little understanding of what the repercussions would be from the developer community and the fsf. After reading some comments from Novell employees I suspect the latter.
In either case Novell made the decision to cut this deal, they acted with great disregard to the effect it would have on the community whose work sustains them. They have attempted to sneak through a legal loophole and if it closes around them it will be their comeuppance.
I say this as someone who has been the resident "tech guy" in many different settings. In my experience many people who have worked with computers for years find it extremely difficult to remember what it was like before they had a particular piece of knowledge, and thus cannot easily put themselves in the user's mindset. Typically when they encountered a problem that they did not understand, they struggled with it for a few minutes or a few hours, learned just enough to move onto the next thing, and over the course of months or years picked up extra knowledge about the topic as they happened across it. This is not a practical approach for the average office worker any more than it's a practical approach for everyone who uses a car to learn how to rebuild a transmission while sitting on the side of the road.
Usually when an "it-person" is presented with a relatively trivial problem such as changing an ip address or installing a printer driver, one of two things happens. They can either perform the task (or walk the user through the task) while explaining in general terms what is being done, carefully avoiding the use of jargon, acronyms, and concepts that they know most users will not be familiar with. Or they can come in with an eye-rolling "oh brother not this again" attitude, perform the task while throwing language at the user they know full well will not be understood, and then take off.
The latter approach is easier and sometimes a little faster, but leaves the user feeling embarrassed, or makes the it-person look like a condescending jerk. The former approach requires a little bit of patience and some mental energy to think about what you are about to say and rephrase it or make use of analogies. It also doesn't help that people in this profession have notoriously bad communication skills. I'm not saying you need to teach a computer class every time you touch a keyboard, but making a small effort towards understanding the user's situation, and being realistic about your own, can greatly decrease the stress involved in the interaction.
Yes there really are "stupid users" out there, as there are in any profession, but I have noticed that those who do the most complaining about user stupidity are usually the ones who are the least secure in their own abilities. As with most professions you will find that the people who know the most have the least to prove.
from the article:
Microsoft's thawing toward Linux is now easier to understand when faced with such data
The Novell/Microsoft deal is not Microsoft "thawing toward Linux", it is Microsoft attempting to exploit the patent system to spread their FUD in new ways because all other efforts have been ineffective. It is becoming tiresome to see this lie perpetuated. I know the Novell/Microsoft press release claimed it was all about interoperability between Windows and Linux but that was just a red herring for those not familiar with Microsoft's business history, and it sounds a lot better to Novell's customers than "Novell management cashes out and does long-term harm to the company in exchange for a short term financial benefit".
Here is a simple question for anyone who believes the interoperability cover story, if Microsoft actually cared about interoperability why would they be paying Novell, or anyone else for that matter, hundreds of millions of dollars? Microsoft is the only organization in the world that has access to both complete Microsoft source code and Linux source code, if they wanted interoperability they would be in a better position than anyone else. Or, without spending a dime, they could simply release the specs which already exist internally for any number of proprietary non-standard pieces of software such as active directory protocols, smb/cifs protocols, exchange server, ntfs specs, wmv, etc etc. Rather than force everyone to reverse-engineer everything.
I don't doubt that Linux will experience significant growth over the next few years, but this particular article is just more phb-oriented magazine filler.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, they only had the means, the motive, and the opportunity. But we are supposed to believe it was all an accident. Also we are supposed to believe that years worth of email disappears for the White House and no one notices until congress asks for it. Most places I have worked as a sysadmin if everyone's old email disappeared in multi-month/year blocks my phone would be ringing within the hour.
Xbox Live has been having serious issues since around December 24, so right around two weeks now. Some people are worse off than others, typically by geography, which is why you hear some people say they have been able to play just fine while others can't stay connected for more than a few minutes around peak hours or can't connect at all. It seems that the bulk of the users have been effected by it.
The most common problems are things like:
you try to connect and the machine locks
you try to connect, it says you need to get an update or disconnect, you tell it to get the update, it can't get the update and disconnects
you connect but your profile is missing or incomplete
you connect but then get dropped once you try to get into a game
The pathetic part is that Microsoft doesn't even host these games on their own servers, Xbox Live is primarily a multiplayer matchmaking service, the actual games are being hosted on the consoles. So the customers have to pay on a regular basis to access Live in the first place, and are subjected to tons of advertisements while on Live, and all this just for the privledge of hosting their own game on their own machine using their own bandwidth.
It's especially bad when compared to something like World of Warcraft, which has 9 million users compared to Live's 8 million users. Yes Blizzard does maintenance briefly each week but their service has never been dysfunctional for weeks at a time and they actually host everything on their own servers.
Back in the olden days of Quake1 if you wanted to join a game all you had to do was hit ~ to bring down the console, and type "connect IP-ADDRESS" and you were connected, TCP IPX whatever. Or you could download a program like Gamespy, Kali, or All-Seeing-Eye and connect to any of the servers people were running and it just worked, and still works to this day. With many modern games from large publishers connecting directly to an ip is usually disabled now, and LAN play is sometimes disabled, forcing you to go through the publisher's own game network. So what you gain is the ability to have a friend's list (which could be done now with a program that posts alerts to your im client instead), and in exchange for that we have a single point of failure that causes problems like this, we can play multiplayer on the games we bought only so long as the publisher sees fit or can stay in business. It's not all bad but it's unfortunate we are losing features that have been available to us for over a decade.
With regard to the lawsuit, I don't think they have much chance and they probably know it but they are going to go for it anyway and hope to get lucky. If you look at the Xbox Live contract at http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/legal/ it says 16. WE MAKE NO WARRANTY We provide the Service "as-is," "with all faults" and "as available." The Microsoft Parties give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions.
If you had a cable tv or phone outage/partial-outage lasting for weeks you could probably call the FCC and get them fined or at least threatened, but since this is a private service I don't know that their is any recourse.
As for why it is happening, I would bet either Microsoft had a pretty major engineering screwup causing the service to run into scaling issues that they don't know how to deal with. Or they are getting DDOS attacked and weren't prepared but don't want to admit it.
Not in the United States anyway, our "last mile problem" has a lot more to do with entrenched telecom and cable companies with regional monopolies than any sort of fiber bendiness.
Can someone explain to me why anyone should care about what Mark Cuban says? The guy lucked out during the dot-com boom when Yahoo stupidly gave him billions for a now defunct website.
He took that money and bought a bunch of toys, a basketball team, and appeared in some crappy tv. How this makes him an expert in technology is beyond me.
A troll trolling is by definition not news.
I use thunderbird quite a bit but I wonder if heavy email clients have much future. Of all the applications where a web client can replace a heavy desktop side client email seems like one of the easiest and google has proven that you can make a webmail client that isn't painful to use.
Lately Adobe has been labeling many of their products, especially frameworks related to web development as "open source" when in reality they open source a small part of it and leave the critical portions under an extremely restrictive proprietary license.
As I understand it they have claimed they will open source parts of the flex sdk, but the flex ide, and the flash runtime plugins will still remain under the same old proprietary license, this is not acceptable. It would be a step backwards if in a few years a significant portion of content on the internet was trapped in proprietary binaries that are difficult to index and likely impossible for many to use a few years down the road. Adobe releases some specs for flash but they are released under terms saying that if you read the specs you are forbidden from writing anything capable of working with flash files. This is almost worse than nothing because even if you create a flash plugin completely independently or with the use of clean room techniques Adobe has the option of claiming that you must have looked at their specs and take you to court in an attempt to kill your project. Also there are many restrictions on the use of the plugin itself, for example you can't use it in many commercial applications such as a flash driven kiosk without first paying Adobe again.
How many years did Linux languish with outdated and extremely buggy versions of the flash plugins? We may have a more or less up to date version of the plugin now but there is no guarantee it will stay that way, a great deal of internet content is trapped in a format that we can only view as long as Adobe feels like letting us, and the architecture support is still pathetic, how is it there is still no native x86-64 support? This should have been done two years ago, to make no mention of the lack of flash9 support on the smaller architectures such as powerpc which effectively locks ps3 users out of browsing most modern flash based websites.
Adobe seems like a big heavy software company that still operates primarily in a 1980's mentality, trying to make the transition to something more modern and web-centric , and they are trying to get some of the glow of open standards and open source to rub off on them, the problem is that they seem to be faking much of it. They talk about openness to get you interested, then you dig into it and find out that there are always critical components they are still keeping under lock and key. I am no fan of flash but it does have its uses, I keep hoping that pressure from Microsoft's silverlight will cause Adobe to really open up the flash spec and allow 3rd parties to create their own implementations of the flash ide and flash runtimes, as pressure from Microsoft's half-assed pdf alternative caused Adobe to release pdf as an iso standard. Though I see no sign of this happening as Adobe still seems to believe they can have their cake and eat it too.
Microsoft attempted a strategy of lowering prices for Windows/Office while pushing for anti-piracy action from the Chinese government. These efforts failed, repeatedly, and the end result according to this article is that Microsoft will sell Windows AND Office, combined for a price of $3.
If that if a victory I can't imagine what a defeat would look like. If they are going to get $3 per copy of Windows+Office Microsoft would be lucky to break even on the raw materials, packaging, and shipping. The thing is Microsoft can't afford to just break even, they have tens of thousands of employees, including many lawyers and accountants and sales people involved in pushing their products, plus the support staff for all of those employees. And for those that would say "well Microsoft is sitting on a huge war chest" this is correct, they aren't going to go out of business any time soon, but they also can't bleed money indefinitely and watch potential revenue streams dry up without their stock tanking.
It looks like their game plan in China is to sell their software at break even or a loss just to get people used to the idea of paying for it and hopefully maintain market share. I guess they could make a profit in 5-10 years assuming:
people in china get used to the idea of paying for their software AND they have the money to pay more in the future AND they are willing to do so AND a suitable alternative (desktop Linux) hasn't risen in popularity. Which to me sounds more like a pipe-dream than a game plan.
I wish Microsoft many more of these sorts of "victories" in the future. Though their shareholders may feel differently.
While it is a good first step that Dell is selling Ubuntu machines, and not charging you (as much) for a license that you aren't even purchasing, HP has been doing this for quite a while though they don't seem to get much press for it.
- 0-0-121.html
/ 28/181204
If you look at hp laptops and desktops in their "business" section many of them will list "FreeDOS" as an available os, or if they have a "Configure PC" link under the model often times it means you can choose between Windows and FreeDOS in the configuration options. One difference may be that if you get a FreeDOS pc from HP, format the drive and put Linux on it HP probably isn't going to give you any software support whereas maby Dell (or Canonical?) offers some level of support included in their price. Though if you are willing to forgo softwate technical support and just want hardware warranty coverage (for example if you are a large institution purchasing many computers is bulk) you can get a larger discount for non-windows machines from HP than Dell. The price varies but for most of their business notebooks and desktops the difference between a model with Windows XP/Vista and that same model with FreeDOS is usually $75-$150
Hopefully Dell's apparent success in selling Ubuntu desktops (and the publicity that has come with it) will push HP into doing something similar, I am a bit surprised Dell beat them to the punch on this one considering HP has:
been encouraging the use of Debian on the server end for a while
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/services/cache/442406-0
Already provides good driver support for Linux with regard to printers
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/
And the current "Linux CTO" is a former Debian project leader
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bdale_Garbee
I would expect to see more announcements like this in the near future from the OEMs. Whatever argument the OEMs still had against selling desktop Linux and thereby irritating Microsoft was recently dealt a significant blow by Microsoft's announcement that they would begin selling their own machines http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06
which from the OEMs perspective has changed Microsoft from an annoying element that everyone has to deal with and who gets a cut of their profit, to a company that is now moving towards being a direct competitor.
Apple has nothing to do with this, Intel is fairly opportunistic and they see there is a significant potential for Linux growth over the next few years and having Intel hardware be the hardware of choice due to superior driver support can only help them. They have traditionally provided fairly good hardware support for Linux on the server side of things for obvious reasons, it appears that this is now being pushed out to more desktop/notebook oriented hardware. Most likely in anticipation of desktop Linux growth, especially in the corporate/government universe.
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As far as a MS/Intel alliance, there has not been one to speak of for several years now. It's not that Intel is above collusion or dirty tricks, for example there was that deal they struck with Skype a while back trying to get Skype crippled on AMD processors. It's just that Intel, and many other hardware companies have felt for years that Microsoft is holding them back.
From Microsoft's perspective they have been in a position where most computer users in the world have to pay them a "Microsoft tax" if they want to or not, so the less things change the better because any radical hardware or usage changes (the internet) can only hurt Microsoft rather than help them. This clashes with the goals of most hardware companies, which are to one-up the other hardware companies and crank out new hardware revisions constantly to keep people in the habit of upgrading every year. Graphics processor capabilities have been advancing at an incredible rate the last few years, this is largely because gamers are constantly looking at upcoming games and thinking to themselves "man I'm going to need a new video card when that comes out". What would be an equivalent event for replacing the rest of the hardware in the computer? Perhaps the release of a new operating system, though this doesn't really work when it takes Microsoft 5 years and lots of delays between each version of Windows with only marginal changes, most of which have scared the corporate/government customers away from upgrading.
There has been bad blood between Intel and Microsoft for many years now, if you want further evidence here is an interview from late 2005 with Avram Miller Intel's "Vice President and Director of Corporate Business Development" from 1984-1999 http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/008
Here is an example from another former Intel executive who testified against Microsoft in the anti-trust trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_McGeady
yeah most probably wouldn't noticeh tm
e lectricity.html
/kwh, that's $14.60/month
according to this
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-356-2.
the ps3 uses about 200watts maximum
and if you look at the cost per kwh around the US http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/electricity/
and round up for the sake of argument, so say you run it for 24 hours a day, you never play any games on it, and you are paying $0.10
more realistically say you pay $0.10/kwh and only run f@h when you are asleep, so 8 hours a day, less than $5 a month more than you would have paid otherwise.
Counting the cost on unspecific addons isn't really fair, if we take the cost of the midrange 5550 model (5550dn, one that has duplexing, but only two paper trays) it is a $3,000 printer http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.a
The cost to replace all the toner? You might be able to get it cheaper elsewhere, but buying HP carts from CDW, which is what we do, costs literally $1300 for a full set. The cost per page is something like 26 cents if you're printing an average sheet with something like 20% coverage. If you intend to use the printer for years then the cost per page is far more relevant than the cost of a set of cartridges, and if you are going to bring up the cost of a set of cartridges you might want to mention that both the laser and an ink printer will come with a set of cartridges, but you will get many times more pages out of the set that comes with the laser.
It also sounds like you are getting ripped off on your toner.
(black cartridge for 5550) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N
(color cartridge for 5550) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N
which is nowhere near $0.26
The article mentions the anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who has a fairly simple (and imo fairly convincing) argument, that in the article is referred to as the "byproduct theory".
e s/atheism.shtml
Basically it says that the ability to connect cause and effect, that is to connect things that happen to the actors in the environment that cause them, was so powerful that is became overused in humans. Giving them a natural tendency to attribute everything, including chance events or natural phenomena to these actors, or as Boyer calls them "unseen agents".
The reason for this is fairly straightforward, if you were living in the prehistoric wilderness it paid to be paranoid, consider the simple example of someone sleeping in a cave who hears a noise outside, for the paranoid early human the thought process might be:
"oh no, what was that, it had to be something, something made that noise, it must have been a tiger, I know it was a tiger, there must be a huge tiger outside"
pros: if there really is a tiger, or some other threat, you may have just saved your life, increasing the probability your genetic code will be passed on creating future paranoid generations
cons: if you are wrong and there is nothing out there, you wasted a small amount of energy and made yourself look stupid
if on the other hand you don't attribute every event to some unseen agent, you might be tempted to assume it was just the wind, or some other harmless event
pros: if you are right you save a little bit of energy
cons: if you are wrong you may be dead
To hear it explained much more elegantly by Boyer himself there is a short video interview on youtube where he discusses the subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etiZv_rOOgc
Which is part of a larger BBC series called "Atheism: A Brief History of Disbelief" and "The Atheism Tapes", in which Jonathan Miller interviews famous scientists and philosophers on the subject of atheism. Much of which can be found on youtube/google video http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/featur
What is bad is that it's a complete lie, it's the most plausible, positive-sounding story they could come up with to explain away what they are doing. Microsoft has described Linux and the open source movement using terms such as "a cancer", "communist", "viral", and more recently referred to open source developers as "pawns" engaged in a "one-night stand". Also immediately after the Novell-Microsoft deal was announced Balmer said publicly that he believed any non-Novell distribution was now a legitimate target for Microsoft legal attacks. They are doing everything they can to smear, stall, and frustrate open source developers while simultaneously trying to sell the "we cooperate and inter operate with everyone to make your life easier" image to the corporate types with these sort of cover stories.
What Microsoft is trying to get out of the deal is to turn Suse into the one-and-only Linux distro that is blessed by Microsoft as being "safe" from patent concerns via indemnification. Then when the indemnification period runs out Microsoft can choose to charge Novell an exorbitant amount of money for renewal, or simply pull the plug altogether. This would also have the bonus effect of making lawsuits against other Linux distros more plausible in the minds of corporate customers because the fact that one distro is seeking indemnification makes the notion that others are at risk without a similar deal seem logical. Allowing Microsoft to create yet more FUD around Linux without putting itself as much immediate risk. I personally doubt Microsoft will actually sue any distro directly because of the potential nuclear patent war that could be triggered if, for example any of the Open Invention Network members felt compelled to get involved (specifically IBM).
What Novell gets out of the deal is a big pile of quick money and potentially greater market share as a side effect of the afore mentioned FUD around competing distros. Unfortunately for Novell these are both short-term benefits that come with the cost of making them beholden to Microsoft, and alienating them from many in the developer community (see samba).
How Novell thought they could get away with this is beyond me, If I had to guess I would say either the upper management sees other Redhat taking the server support market, and Ubuntu taking the desktop Market, leaving Suse out in the cold so they decided to cash out, not caring what happens in the long term. Or their lawyers came up with their now famous gpl2 end run, thinking themselves clever for coming up with a deal that Microsoft was happy with and didn't violate the letter of the gpl, but having little understanding of what the repercussions would be from the developer community and the fsf. After reading some comments from Novell employees I suspect the latter.
In either case Novell made the decision to cut this deal, they acted with great disregard to the effect it would have on the community whose work sustains them. They have attempted to sneak through a legal loophole and if it closes around them it will be their comeuppance.
I say this as someone who has been the resident "tech guy" in many different settings. In my experience many people who have worked with computers for years find it extremely difficult to remember what it was like before they had a particular piece of knowledge, and thus cannot easily put themselves in the user's mindset. Typically when they encountered a problem that they did not understand, they struggled with it for a few minutes or a few hours, learned just enough to move onto the next thing, and over the course of months or years picked up extra knowledge about the topic as they happened across it. This is not a practical approach for the average office worker any more than it's a practical approach for everyone who uses a car to learn how to rebuild a transmission while sitting on the side of the road.
Usually when an "it-person" is presented with a relatively trivial problem such as changing an ip address or installing a printer driver, one of two things happens. They can either perform the task (or walk the user through the task) while explaining in general terms what is being done, carefully avoiding the use of jargon, acronyms, and concepts that they know most users will not be familiar with. Or they can come in with an eye-rolling "oh brother not this again" attitude, perform the task while throwing language at the user they know full well will not be understood, and then take off.
The latter approach is easier and sometimes a little faster, but leaves the user feeling embarrassed, or makes the it-person look like a condescending jerk. The former approach requires a little bit of patience and some mental energy to think about what you are about to say and rephrase it or make use of analogies. It also doesn't help that people in this profession have notoriously bad communication skills. I'm not saying you need to teach a computer class every time you touch a keyboard, but making a small effort towards understanding the user's situation, and being realistic about your own, can greatly decrease the stress involved in the interaction.
Yes there really are "stupid users" out there, as there are in any profession, but I have noticed that those who do the most complaining about user stupidity are usually the ones who are the least secure in their own abilities. As with most professions you will find that the people who know the most have the least to prove.
The Novell/Microsoft deal is not Microsoft "thawing toward Linux", it is Microsoft attempting to exploit the patent system to spread their FUD in new ways because all other efforts have been ineffective. It is becoming tiresome to see this lie perpetuated. I know the Novell/Microsoft press release claimed it was all about interoperability between Windows and Linux but that was just a red herring for those not familiar with Microsoft's business history, and it sounds a lot better to Novell's customers than "Novell management cashes out and does long-term harm to the company in exchange for a short term financial benefit".
Here is a simple question for anyone who believes the interoperability cover story, if Microsoft actually cared about interoperability why would they be paying Novell, or anyone else for that matter, hundreds of millions of dollars? Microsoft is the only organization in the world that has access to both complete Microsoft source code and Linux source code, if they wanted interoperability they would be in a better position than anyone else. Or, without spending a dime, they could simply release the specs which already exist internally for any number of proprietary non-standard pieces of software such as active directory protocols, smb/cifs protocols, exchange server, ntfs specs, wmv, etc etc. Rather than force everyone to reverse-engineer everything.
I don't doubt that Linux will experience significant growth over the next few years, but this particular article is just more phb-oriented magazine filler.
http://anon.ifilm.speedera.net/anon.ifilm/qt/porta l/2457975_200.mov
they might change it but it's working now