You are not going to get rid of virus writers, much though we'd like to...
The real solution is to give users the thinnest possible client machine. No CD drive, no floppy, minimum locked down drive. No downloads of anything except HTML pages and images off the web. Applications centrally installed.
Give users the tools they need, take off the games. In many cases, take off the web.
To me, the main problem is complacency. There is an entire generation of users and IT staff that simply accept the shortcomings of Windows, believing that this is the way computers work -- BSOD, spyware, the virus du jour, mysterious anomalies every day.
I was amazed when we first got servers into a company using Mainframes. They had to reboot the NT server about once a week, whereas our mainframe was just powered down occassionally for planned maintenance.
And no-one ever said "switch it off and on again". If something happened on the mainframe, it happened for a reason, and we knew why.
To use your example, would you use a type of screw where the only screwdrivers that were available were made by the screw manufacturer?
There's a lot of political talk about software being free, but to me it's a question of insurance. I'd rather use OSS, because some company can't dictate the direction of the software I use. I can add features I want, if I want to. I can make it work for me.
In jobs I've done, I've had to tell customers that I can't do something because the tool I'm using doesn't let me. That's not good enough.
My father once told me about a case of a judge at our local court giving a really rich land owner jail time for a drink-drive offence, because he felt that the maximum financial penalty would be pointless.
There's an argument that says that people won't invent things without patents. Well, considering that people come up with ideas, which are then copied, it kinda invalidates that.
In some areas, though (such as medicines or very high tech research), patents are valuable. People might not spend the millions on drug research if the research was then given away to competitors. Being first to market would not be enough.
These utterly obvious patents, like "donations on the web" should be removed, though.
The difference is that Ray Romano, Jennifer Aniston or Seinfeld are visual and could take their talents elsewhere and do other shows, and people would pay for them. Their person is part of the selling point. People in other networks would pay for them to be in a show.
Julie Kavner, Dan Castellaneta et al have got lucky here, quite frankly. Would Dan be able to go to the people on Kim Possible or Cow and Chicken and demand this? No. It's because he's the voice of Homer. Kinda like a monopoly really.
You might not like Fox for making the money, but they gave you the show, a show that is (or at least was) brilliantly made. They took a risk on a show that I imagine was quite hard to sell.
I'd like to see more reuse. The brewery I go to supports it. I take a jug in and they fill it with beer and save me some money on not buying another jug.
The amount of energy wasted on recycling glass bottles is maddening.
ccl are good. Dabs I wouldn't touch again as they don't have phone support, and their email support is too slow (I expect a reply within an hour or two).
Ebuyer seem to have mixed reviews.
A really great company are Crucial - they basically sell memory products (sticks/card readers/gfx cards/cf cards). Service like no company I know. You can find them at www.crucial.com/uk.
I think works by people like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones (well, the 60s stuff, anyway) should now be in the public domain. They're part of British heritage. 30 or 40 years is plenty of license IMO.
How do you like paying 20 bucks for a pill when it costs 8 cents to manufacture?
How about having a much reduced drug research programme? If you are arguing for more government research into drugs, great, but no-one much is going to fund drug research to then see their competitors just copy it.
I choose software, and often have a choice between OSS and not. This isn't a Linux environment. OSS I like. It's free.
Sometimes I like commercial. Often, the support is better, particularly if you want something mission-critical and the OSS software project is small (some OSS projects, it's one or two guys doing it in their spare time. I'd rather not have a support contract on that basis).
Sometimes I like OSS. You can see the code, so that's some insurance, you can modify it quickly yourself.
One library that we've paid for, I'm looking to replace with OSS, but I want to make sure that it's proven as reasonably stable before making the switch, and that we've done some work on the source code ourselves to ensure that we are familiar with it.
This comes from before the days of desktop publishing, remember-- it's easy to forget (especially if you weren't there) how easy Quark and Illustrator have made it for even the smallest company to produce professional looking ads.
I think the term you are looking for is overuse Comic Sans;)
"In this environment of lean budgets and concerns about Microsoft's attention to customers, noncommercial software such as Linux and OpenOffice is seen as an interesting, 'good enough' or 'free' alternative."
'good enough' is part of the point. I don't need a word processor with a bunch of features I never use, and I certainly don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for them.
Most users are happy with Word, Excel as they are. Power users have been pretty happy since about Office 97 or 2000. Basic users were probably happy with Excel 4 and Word 2. How many users have gained much productivity from Office 2003 over Office 2000?
I run Open Office at home because it's "good enough". I can write nice letters, send them as PDFs, put my monthly budget on the spreadsheet.
I imagine for business use (writing documents with tables/images, tables of contents) that it would do that too. So, I'm going to go without some grammar checker or links to clipart? Big deal.
He was talking about some new features of some MS product, and I said something to the effect of "and how long will it take you to learn it. Not just learn it, like read the manual, but learn it in terms of how to work with it in our environment, deal with the anomalies and quirks. And how long between that time and doing it again."
I don't think that these re-inventions deliver productivity gains, because by the time you've reached a mature productivity point, it starts again.
It's why in companies with COBOL on old mainframes, the productivity can be very high. Because people using the tech have 10+ years experience of the tools they are dealing with and how they work with them.
MySQL is mostly, I would imagine a cost issue, but also a performance issue.
It doesn't have some features of bigger, more expensive databases, but I bet it also needs a lot less disc/memory to use it.
I've built databases using MySQL. Partly because it's a lot cheaper than Oracle/SQL Server, but also because it's all I needed. It had very low hits, data that was low risk.
Slashdot Mirror
The real solution is to give users the thinnest possible client machine. No CD drive, no floppy, minimum locked down drive. No downloads of anything except HTML pages and images off the web. Applications centrally installed.
Give users the tools they need, take off the games. In many cases, take off the web.
I was amazed when we first got servers into a company using Mainframes. They had to reboot the NT server about once a week, whereas our mainframe was just powered down occassionally for planned maintenance.
And no-one ever said "switch it off and on again". If something happened on the mainframe, it happened for a reason, and we knew why.
The knowledge out there of how to secure a computer is woeful.
Not necessarily because it's better/worse than anything else, but that it is more prone to attack.
There's a lot of political talk about software being free, but to me it's a question of insurance. I'd rather use OSS, because some company can't dictate the direction of the software I use. I can add features I want, if I want to. I can make it work for me.
In jobs I've done, I've had to tell customers that I can't do something because the tool I'm using doesn't let me. That's not good enough.
Is Enzip OSS? I could only find downloads of the exe.
My father once told me about a case of a judge at our local court giving a really rich land owner jail time for a drink-drive offence, because he felt that the maximum financial penalty would be pointless.
I suppose one answer would be something like "government buys the rights/company" and reproduces it for free.
In some areas, though (such as medicines or very high tech research), patents are valuable. People might not spend the millions on drug research if the research was then given away to competitors. Being first to market would not be enough.
These utterly obvious patents, like "donations on the web" should be removed, though.
The best thing to do is contact a store and get a catalogue on CD or one of their monster paper catalogues.
They're not being paid this much for their talent. They're being paid this much because they are familiar. That's a huge difference.
Julie Kavner, Dan Castellaneta et al have got lucky here, quite frankly. Would Dan be able to go to the people on Kim Possible or Cow and Chicken and demand this? No. It's because he's the voice of Homer. Kinda like a monopoly really.
You might not like Fox for making the money, but they gave you the show, a show that is (or at least was) brilliantly made. They took a risk on a show that I imagine was quite hard to sell.
The amount of energy wasted on recycling glass bottles is maddening.
Ebuyer seem to have mixed reviews.
A really great company are Crucial - they basically sell memory products (sticks/card readers/gfx cards/cf cards). Service like no company I know. You can find them at www.crucial.com/uk.
Maplin are good. here
I think works by people like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones (well, the 60s stuff, anyway) should now be in the public domain. They're part of British heritage. 30 or 40 years is plenty of license IMO.
How about having a much reduced drug research programme? If you are arguing for more government research into drugs, great, but no-one much is going to fund drug research to then see their competitors just copy it.
... this isn't what they had in mind.
Sometimes I like commercial. Often, the support is better, particularly if you want something mission-critical and the OSS software project is small (some OSS projects, it's one or two guys doing it in their spare time. I'd rather not have a support contract on that basis).
Sometimes I like OSS. You can see the code, so that's some insurance, you can modify it quickly yourself.
One library that we've paid for, I'm looking to replace with OSS, but I want to make sure that it's proven as reasonably stable before making the switch, and that we've done some work on the source code ourselves to ensure that we are familiar with it.
Did they find Patrick Duffy's career whilst they were there?
I think the term you are looking for is overuse Comic Sans ;)
'good enough' is part of the point. I don't need a word processor with a bunch of features I never use, and I certainly don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for them.
Most users are happy with Word, Excel as they are. Power users have been pretty happy since about Office 97 or 2000. Basic users were probably happy with Excel 4 and Word 2. How many users have gained much productivity from Office 2003 over Office 2000?
I run Open Office at home because it's "good enough". I can write nice letters, send them as PDFs, put my monthly budget on the spreadsheet.
I imagine for business use (writing documents with tables/images, tables of contents) that it would do that too. So, I'm going to go without some grammar checker or links to clipart? Big deal.
He was talking about some new features of some MS product, and I said something to the effect of "and how long will it take you to learn it. Not just learn it, like read the manual, but learn it in terms of how to work with it in our environment, deal with the anomalies and quirks. And how long between that time and doing it again."
I don't think that these re-inventions deliver productivity gains, because by the time you've reached a mature productivity point, it starts again.
It's why in companies with COBOL on old mainframes, the productivity can be very high. Because people using the tech have 10+ years experience of the tools they are dealing with and how they work with them.
It doesn't have some features of bigger, more expensive databases, but I bet it also needs a lot less disc/memory to use it.
I've built databases using MySQL. Partly because it's a lot cheaper than Oracle/SQL Server, but also because it's all I needed. It had very low hits, data that was low risk.