IIRC M$ developed Xenix in 1980 or thereabouts. It was a singularly useless Unix variant, with lots of bugs, deliberate incompatabilities (familiar story?) and fairly useless memory management and protection. It was extremely unpolular with people who had used real Unix due to its lack of stability. I think it was derived from a badly hacked version of AT&T code, around Version 7 vintage. Don't know why they bothered, as Bill was known, even then, to hate Unix.
This 1989 deal was the M$ way of quietly getting rid of the embarassment.
I remember that when Windoze was first announced, discussing it with my colleagues at the time, and wondering why they were so utterly stupid as to base it upon MessyDOS instead of Unix/Xenix. That was when I used real Unix every day but had yet to see Xenix, otherwise I might have known why.....
If M$ were not so stupid and incompetent, we could have had a stable, secure OS many years ago, no doubt called Xenix, or maybe Windows for Xenix. But, as usual, they messed up every technical decision along the way. Yet the masses were, and mostly still are, deceived by the Convicted Monopolist.
The Convicted Monopolist can not even comply consistently with their own half-baked pretence at standards. Also, there are formal ways of making web standards, M$ have not done so. An undocumented and uncontrolled standard is not a standard at all.
The only standard M$ have is one of insatiable greed, coupled with an utter disregard of the gullible users of their vile, bug-ridden, insecure and perverse products.
Interesting. I never knew of mozpoint, but have an immediate use for something very similar. You may have saved me many hours of work, Thank you very much.
Hopefully give them a bit more than a day or two. Try configuring printers, firewall, scanner, compiling a kernel, downloading updates.....
After a few months it will be a fairer comparison, if you can spare the time of course. You may find that most are good, none are perfect, and it depends which imperfections you want to tolerate. But, I'm sure you will find one that you like, and it will be of more use, in the long term, than the badly broken "competitive" products of the Convicted Monopolist, or the abominal violation of the GPL known as SCO Unix.
For a start, the service is blatantly illegal and will be closed down when the FCC wake up to the massisve interference being caused. Also, you will not get high bandwidth in the reverse direction, it would need a ridiculously high (and unsafe!) RF power in your modem to propagate the signal to all and sundry, as well as the equipment in the substation. You need to drive the entire local circuit, not just the direct path.
This whole thing is disgraceful, and it is up to all legitimate users of the spectrum concerned to oppose it. Anyone who wastes money on this is as stupid as someone who invests in SCO, and for very similar reasons.
But you could not easily screen domestic installations, for example, without ripping the buildings apart (partially at least) to get at the old wiring, and put in the new. There are completely impossible problems with light fittings, some appliances, etc, and the cable screens would need to be continuous everywhere, including at switchgear, transformers, etc.
As someone who has to design things to meet various EMC regulations, including FCC, I know that this is impossible, and this service is in fact illegal.
The thing that is hysterically funny is that evolution on the scale commonly imagined is statistically impossible, no evedence for it has ever been found, Darwin changed his mind in the end because even he saw it was stupid, and it seriously contradicts certain aspects of genetics that can easily be demonstrated in the lab. Yet these sad people who want to believe that there is no God mock and revile creation, while their theory is totally untenable.
That is the problem. Sir Bill presumes to tell us how to format our documents, sadly he appears to be only semi-literate.
Like all forms of automation from the Convicted Monopolist, Word is simply dreadful, I only tolerate it because it is used at work. Word Perfect is way ahead, always has been, and no doubt always will be. As to Reveal Codes, it is precisely the sort of thing that you need, but haven't got, when Sir Bill's trash ruins your formatting. What takes a few seconds in Word Perfect is well-nigh impossible in Word.
Of course OpenOffice.org and Star Office are very good, Koffice is developing nicely, and there are other competent packages around, maybe too many. However, it seems that most are aiming for full compatibility with each other as far as XML is concerned, which must be a good thing. People may buy WP simply because it does not lock them in permanently, unlike the pathetic piece of bloatware from M$.
To amplify one point they bought a bogus licence from someone who quite clearly has no right to sell it. That is the whole point, what SCO did was fraudulent because their licence to use any GPL code has terminated, because they attempted to place restrictions on others, the only thing that the GPL prohibits. Every copy of SCO Unix they sell is also illegal, same reason. Anything sold or licensed by SCO to anyone, anywhere, is a straightforward case of copyright violation, because all of their products contain GPL code, and they have no valid licence to distribute it.
Basically it has sunk to the level of a protection racket, and this coward has fallen for it. Protection rackets happen because the victims are too spineless to report the matter to the proper authorities.
Is it illegal to buy something which violates copyright, or just to sell? It may be that this guy is in fact breaking the law.
Other sources have said that this was the biggest non-nuclear explosion ever. I thought Slashdotters might be interested to know that, as stated in the article, it was the biggest seen from space. When the biggest ever happened, during WW2, at Hanbury in the UK http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=418255&y=3 27780&z=4&sv=418500,327500&st=4&ar=Y&mapp=newmap.s rf&searchp=newsearch.srf&dn=815. The crater is still very impressive. Follow the arrow on the link! Of course there was no-one in space to see it.
BTW, I don't give these stories much credence, there was a simpler explanation for the pipeline explosion.
Just try. I live in the UK. You will be prosecuted for barratry, conspiracy. libel, slander, possible offences under the Computer Misuse Act, and a whole lot more. Oh I forgot, the Data Protection Act, if you have any personal data which identifies me.
Yes, and the burn pattern relates to the pattern of standing waves in the oven. It would only take one second (actually a lot less, but we are dealing with oven timers here) to fry an RFID chip. It looks as if he gave them a lot longer.
They don't know who is actually spending the money, only where it is going, if indeed they have a tracking device, and in any case they will only be able to track within a very short distance (inches) so they can't tell where you have been, only that maybe you pass a sensor occasionally. That tells them very little, conventional surveillance would give them a million times more.
Of course if it helps catch drug dealers, who then get a life sentence, I am all for it, although I doubt that the technology is that useful somehow.
Yes, AFAIK most computer users are running with expired antivirus subscriptions. Isn't it sad that people behave the way they do?
Your other suggestions are sound, as far as they go, but unfortunately most people will deliberately run with administrator privilege if they can, and there is still the fundamental problem that the OS does not run if system files are write protected. OK they can be protected from regular users, and it helps, but is not sufficient. But, I think you are saying that it should default to the most secure settings out of the box, instead of the opposite. People like us have been saying that for years, to no effect. It will only change if the Monopoly gets new and technically competent management, which up till now they have never had.
Would you really trust an anti-virus feature from the Convicted Monopolist, with their solid, well-proved track record of lies, deception and failure?
In any case it will surely result in them being back in court, because it would be a monopoly, like IE or Media Player.
BTW, I agree that Zone Alarm is good, no defence at all against viruses, because that is not what it does, but definitely the best of the Windoze firewalls, and I use it on my Windoze machine, not the useless firewall built into XP. F-Prot is free for Linux home users, can't remember if they also to Windoze, IIRC they do BSD as well.
To make the OS tolerably secure, M$ would have to rewrite it from scratch, as it would have to run with no write access to any program files or dlls, for a start. Their present pitiful excuse for an OS will forever remain that, ther is no way that it can be secured. Longhorn may be the answer, but by cutting the API set down to less than a quarter of its bloated predecessor, it will break compatibility with everything that went before. Another way of extracting more money from the gullible, only this time it will not work.
I do wonder how they ever managed to get such an over-bloated API set in the first place, clearly the Chief Software Architect was utterly lacking in competence in proper software design.
Don't judge their performance against Symantec. The latter did not do very well when the attacks on SCO and the Monopoly were propagated, and their products fail to protect against some quite old virii.
I am yet to be convinced that there is any integrity or sense of morality in the anti-virus industry. The big boys such as Symantec and McAFraud have lost the plot, they are led by marketing men, and their products are distinctly third-rate. Their support departments also lie. As for Panda, well if you want to completely trash your PC, with unremovable entries in the registry, and everything slowed to a complete crawl, well go right ahead and try.
The fundamental problem with Panda, and others, is due to the very basic design error in Windoze. Instead of relying on the file system to protect.exe and.dll files from corruption, by making them all write-protected, Windoze, a fine piece of incompetently designed trash, only works if writing to critical files is allowed (self-modifying code, maybe?), so Panda hooks each.exe in the registry so it grabs it first and scans it, before it is run, every time. The performance loss is enormous and unacceptable. The Incompetent Convicted Monopolist's System File Checker again is checking critical files in the background to see, too late, if they have been changed. A decent OS, not designed by an over-hyped imbecile, write-protects all system files, in the file system, and does not have this problem.
I have not observed this behaviour with either Symantec of McAfraud, but have found that they simply do not work in certain conditions.
It is also noticeable that Access can not do many things that once were possible in prehistoric databases like dBase. It is a rather pathetic package, when all is said and done.
There are plenty of alternatives, from free up to very expensive, depending on how much you need, what you want to pay, and how much work you can do yourself. Probably Oracle and its competitors will remain at the top, but at the bottom, MYSQL continues to do very well.
Interestingly, while Oracle and others (can't remember all the names right now) embraced open source, one serious competitor, IBI, did not. Oracle etc are thriving, but where is IBI? They had massive redundancies a while back......
Open standards are the key to everything, otherwise we have a Tower of Babel again. Access is closed source, deliberately incompatible with everything else, and of limited functionality. In short, it is a toy database which, sadly, people try to do serious things with.
Good comments, but I doubt that most of the users in Munich are using either the Gimp or Photoshop. There is a very steep learning curve with either of these, and IMHO only people who use them virtually full time ever become really good.
However, with the type of thing the majority of office staff will use, there is no discernible difference in ease of use between OOo and M$. A while ago, in Leeds IIRC, certainly somewhere in the UK, a large organisation, probably the local council, switched their staff from Convicted Monopoly Office to OOo, and apparently the secretaries adapted very quickly, without any need for training.
At a more professional level, I give my colleagues, mostly hardware design engineers, copies of OOo, and other useful things like Mozilla, from time to time, and none of them ever report any significant difficulties.
It is a bit like the educational argument, that kids must use in school what they will find in the workplace, ie. Monopoly Office. The argument is utterly irrelevant, what kids learn at school will have moved on several generations before they start work, and the education system is supposed to teach them to think, not to follow slavishly. They need to learn the principles of using word processors, spreadsheets, databases etc, those principles will stay with them forever, long after Gates and Ballmer have retired or gone to jail.
I only use graphics packages like the Gimp or Photoshop occasionally, and find them a real pain, even Paintshop Pro is in that category, and it is simply because these packages can do so many things, compared to a word processor, that no-one but a serious user will ever become proficient. But, I use Word Perfect, Quattro Pro etc at home, Bugware Office at work, and OOo in both places, and don't find any difficulty adapting. In fact Billware Office is the worst, it tries to do things that you don't want, and in every version up to the very latest, crashes more than the others.
The thing that will convince many people about the usefulness of OOo is if Bloatware Office corrupts a.doc or.xls, and will not open it, a fairly frequent occurrence. Best thing is to make a copy of the file, for safety, and then try to open it in OOo. It usually works. You can then re-save it in a Monopoly format, and so recover your work. Says a lot for the relative quality of the products!
Most people seem to be suggesting going this route. I would throw in a few extra benefits.
1. Better diagnostics of any problems, with a nice, meaningful array of LEDs, which you get on most excternal modems.
2. Lower risk of destruction of the PC due to lightning-induced transients. The high-current pulses are likely to remain outside the PC casing and not be coupled to signal tracks on the motherboard. An internal modem invariably lets a lot of energy loose inside the case, it has to go somewhere (as well as frying the modem, but that is more expendable than the motherboard), and in fact it is radiated and picked up on every signal track. If it gets substantially above your logic supply (3.3V for example) or below ground, bang goes a large chipset, and the cost of repair will be higher than a new motherboard. It might well take out your disk drive, graphics card, etc as well. Many unexplained hardware failures are in fact due to induced lightning transients.
3. You will definitely not get a Winmoden, which are useless even in Windows. Your external modem will really be a full modem, with its own DSP etc, so it will not bog down your processor, cause instability, or simply not work.
4. Much easier to attach another PC temporarily for whatever reason, everything has a serial port and supports drivers for standard modems. You can also run any OS, even MessyDOS, and still use the modem.
5. Less heat in the small case, the modem's several watts will be dissipated externally, which will help keep temperatures down and so get longer life.
I do not advise USB modems, they cause excessive CPU overhead, a simple serial port is the best option.
The US realluy needs some good consumer protection laws, if what you say is true, which I have no reason to doubt. In the UK, and AFAIK most of Europe, products need to show the country of origin on the package or label. You also need a Data Protection Act to stop your personal details being swapped, sold, and sistributed to all and sundry without your permission. What you don't need is DMCA, or software patents.
You really do need to lobby your congressmen, or whatever you do over there, to get decent consumer protection, and in the case of product labelling, decent protection for your local industries.
Well said, and there should be immediate action against M$ for dumping, in those places where Ballmer managed to undercut Linux. If you think about it, a typical business may make 10% profit, any discounting of more than 10%, plus a small adjustment for economy of scale, would be dumping.
I don't know why they were not prosecuted for dumping IE originally, it was illegal to do that in the UK and probably most of Europe. I seem to remember that not so many years ago, RAM manufacturers were in serious trouble for dumping. They were of course out to destroy the UK semiconductor industry, but they need not have bothered, because the vile and incompetent Mrs.Thatcher did quite a good job without their help.
I don't see why this matters as far as the Chinese are concerned, because they seem to be moving very much towards Linux anyway, and will certainly be manufacturing locally. Maybe it is just belt and braces, in case Ballmer manages to do some more dodgy deals? However I would be very happy if international trade agreements broke down, and Mr.B Liar imposed a requirement that 70% of all UK software was produced locally. The biggest damage would of course be to an already Convicted Monopolist. Oh I forgot, it was Mr. B Liar's chancellor, Mr. Brown, who recommended the scumbag of Redmond for a knighthood.
I would like the insecure, bug-infested trash banned for other reasons also, such as the constant attacks on my systems via Windoze users who have been trojaned, and are violating, or assisting in the violation of, the Computer Misuse Act, but that is another story.
Some people in the UK believe that the buttons here are just dummies, however they tend to have a very long wait to get across the road, because most lights for pedestrian crossings, as opposed to junctions, really have working buttons, and will never stop the traffic until someone presses a button. I have even been told by some of them that I don't need to press the button, they had been waiting ages and the lights changed immediately for me, yet they still could not be convinced.
Having some real buttons and some dummies will cause annoyance and wasted time, people used to dummies will go somewhere else, where the buttons work, and waste precious minutes, even tens of minutes, waiting, until they finally figure it out.
However we have some very bad configurations here also. Not too far from home, a set of lights controlling the exit from a very minor road always defaults to red for the main road, and needs several cars arriving to actuate it, so in the middle of the night, in a residential area, vehicles are held for several minutes, emitting noise and pollution, wasting time. On the other hand, in the Netherlands, I have noticed that when there is no traffic the lights do not cycle at all, but remain in their default state, so on a major road at night, with no crossing traffic, you get greens for many miles, as you should.
Consistency nationally, if not internationally, would be a very good thing.
Is this not illegal in the US, i.e. using their monopoly in one area to obtain one in another?
It also seems to be directly related to the media player issue for which Europe is in the process of setting the fine.
The legislators must stop this at all costs, or the Illegal Monopoly will continue to grow and they will never be able to stop it.
Of course the relevant software will be trash, but the ignorant masses will neither know nor care that they are the victims of yet another con trick by an organisation whose only expertise is in flouting the law worldwide.
I think they have done that. They have commingled their code with GPL code, most probably in the Linux Personality Module, but in other places as well, and if proven, their Unix code will in fact now be under GPL. If that is proved in court, McFraud and his empire is history. I wonder if they became aware of that problem, and are trying to get rid of the GPL before they themselves are found out.
If they have illegally commingled code, the proper remedy is for the base code of Unix (not the legitimate extensions put in by licencees such as Sun, HP or IBM) to be GPL'd. End of problem. End of SCO. End of McFraud. Of course, if he had the merest glimmer of intelligence, he would have seen that it was essential to licence only the lines of SCO code for $699 or whatever he was asking, he failed to do that and demanded payment for the whole package, GPL code and all (and likely some BSD code, but that is OK legally, the BSD licence is very weak.)
But, coming back to the present issue, if they have attempted to restrict anyone's rights to use nmap under any of the conditions of the GPL, they have violated the GPL and can no longer distribute nmap. That is automatic, and can be enforced by the copyright holder very easily indeed. If the copyright holder can not afford a team of schysters, he can transfer his copyright to someone who can. That is his legal right. He can even sell the copyright for a nominal dollar, or cent, just to help make the transaction valid. But no-one, not even the author, can take the code out of GPL, so there is no way known, even if McFraud paid millions, that he could ever again legally use nmap or any other GPL software in his Linux distribution. Every copy of SCO from now on breaks the law. He has dug himself into a deep hole, with no escape possible. SCO can no longer distribute any GPL code. Bye, bye, Darl.
It is utterly pointless of McFraud and his schysters waiting 18 months for the trial, they are in deep trouble now. In many countries distributing GPL software in non-compliance with the licence, a clearly demonstrable breach of simple copyright law in every country signatory to the relevant conventions, is a criminal offence, punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. (The fact that SCO is sold for profit, not given away, makes it a matter for criminal law in the UK, for example). This is no longer a matter for the civil courts, it is a matter for the law enforcement authorities in every civilised country. Added to which, I will be very surprised if, when he goes after someone in the UK for licence fees, the UK part of SCO is not immediately charged with barratry. These guys are committing serious criminal offences right,left and centre. I know they will get away with it in the US, after all the DOJ did not even deal with the vile scumbags in Redmond properly, but SCO have already been fined in Germany. If McFraud wants to keep out of jail, he needs to start making some grovelling apologies to all the relevant copyright holders, just maybe, if they are feeling generous, they might not testify against him in court.
Whatever happens now should be up to the police or other appropriate law enforcement agency in every country where SCO Unix is sold. It is not a matter for the civil courts. It is in fact racketeering, others have frequently commented on stock manipulation and the other probable things taht are going on. AFAIK, if the scumbag of Redmond is, as we mostly suspect, the paymaster in all this, it makes the whole thing a criminal conspiracy in most civilised countries.
He did not need to pick this one problem, there are countless others which would lead to the same conclusion, that configuration tools need to be much better, because that is the main thing that holds back FOSS from greater acceptance. The quality of the underlying code is excellent in most cases, it is only the user or administrator interface that has not been thought out properly, and that is all he is saying.
He could have picked XFree86 configuration in a typical distro, or Samba, or a hundred other things, and come to very similar conclusions, and for the same basic reason.
I am very pleased that someone of ESR's status has now become involved, it means that the issues will be exposed, and in a reasonable space of time, fixed. That is what matters. Now he may seem to have been unfair to Fedora, but my experience is that the configuration tools in Fedora are about the worst of any recent distro, as I may have said more than once on Slashdot. Fedora quite possibly appeals to hackers, I don't find the time for fiddling with config files in vi any more, although I have many years of experience in doing so. It should not be necessary. The Convicted Monopolist is unable to create good, stable, secure software, but as ESR suggests, their configuration utilities are better than what FOSS has managed so far. However I would point out that there are still many stupid and inexcusable features in the M$ config tools, in particular the network printing setup in XP is badly deranged. I have 2 JetDirect printers, they in effect are their own server, and each has its own web page as well, yet they have to be installed to local ports! Very, very wrong, and it wasted hours at the first attempt. So FOSS has not got it right yet, but we are not so far behind Sir Bill that with a bit of effort from top developers, we, the community, can not leap ahead, if we get moving.
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This 1989 deal was the M$ way of quietly getting rid of the embarassment.
I remember that when Windoze was first announced, discussing it with my colleagues at the time, and wondering why they were so utterly stupid as to base it upon MessyDOS instead of Unix/Xenix. That was when I used real Unix every day but had yet to see Xenix, otherwise I might have known why.....
If M$ were not so stupid and incompetent, we could have had a stable, secure OS many years ago, no doubt called Xenix, or maybe Windows for Xenix. But, as usual, they messed up every technical decision along the way. Yet the masses were, and mostly still are, deceived by the Convicted Monopolist.
The Convicted Monopolist can not even comply consistently with their own half-baked pretence at standards. Also, there are formal ways of making web standards, M$ have not done so. An undocumented and uncontrolled standard is not a standard at all.
The only standard M$ have is one of insatiable greed, coupled with an utter disregard of the gullible users of their vile, bug-ridden, insecure and perverse products.
Interesting. I never knew of mozpoint, but have an immediate use for something very similar. You may have saved me many hours of work, Thank you very much.
After a few months it will be a fairer comparison, if you can spare the time of course. You may find that most are good, none are perfect, and it depends which imperfections you want to tolerate. But, I'm sure you will find one that you like, and it will be of more use, in the long term, than the badly broken "competitive" products of the Convicted Monopolist, or the abominal violation of the GPL known as SCO Unix.
This whole thing is disgraceful, and it is up to all legitimate users of the spectrum concerned to oppose it. Anyone who wastes money on this is as stupid as someone who invests in SCO, and for very similar reasons.
As someone who has to design things to meet various EMC regulations, including FCC, I know that this is impossible, and this service is in fact illegal.
The thing that is hysterically funny is that evolution on the scale commonly imagined is statistically impossible, no evedence for it has ever been found, Darwin changed his mind in the end because even he saw it was stupid, and it seriously contradicts certain aspects of genetics that can easily be demonstrated in the lab. Yet these sad people who want to believe that there is no God mock and revile creation, while their theory is totally untenable.
Like all forms of automation from the Convicted Monopolist, Word is simply dreadful, I only tolerate it because it is used at work. Word Perfect is way ahead, always has been, and no doubt always will be. As to Reveal Codes, it is precisely the sort of thing that you need, but haven't got, when Sir Bill's trash ruins your formatting. What takes a few seconds in Word Perfect is well-nigh impossible in Word.
Of course OpenOffice.org and Star Office are very good, Koffice is developing nicely, and there are other competent packages around, maybe too many. However, it seems that most are aiming for full compatibility with each other as far as XML is concerned, which must be a good thing. People may buy WP simply because it does not lock them in permanently, unlike the pathetic piece of bloatware from M$.
Basically it has sunk to the level of a protection racket, and this coward has fallen for it. Protection rackets happen because the victims are too spineless to report the matter to the proper authorities.
Is it illegal to buy something which violates copyright, or just to sell? It may be that this guy is in fact breaking the law.
BTW, I don't give these stories much credence, there was a simpler explanation for the pipeline explosion.
Come on, you cowardly wimp, do it!
They don't know who is actually spending the money, only where it is going, if indeed they have a tracking device, and in any case they will only be able to track within a very short distance (inches) so they can't tell where you have been, only that maybe you pass a sensor occasionally. That tells them very little, conventional surveillance would give them a million times more.
Of course if it helps catch drug dealers, who then get a life sentence, I am all for it, although I doubt that the technology is that useful somehow.
Your other suggestions are sound, as far as they go, but unfortunately most people will deliberately run with administrator privilege if they can, and there is still the fundamental problem that the OS does not run if system files are write protected. OK they can be protected from regular users, and it helps, but is not sufficient. But, I think you are saying that it should default to the most secure settings out of the box, instead of the opposite. People like us have been saying that for years, to no effect. It will only change if the Monopoly gets new and technically competent management, which up till now they have never had.
In any case it will surely result in them being back in court, because it would be a monopoly, like IE or Media Player.
BTW, I agree that Zone Alarm is good, no defence at all against viruses, because that is not what it does, but definitely the best of the Windoze firewalls, and I use it on my Windoze machine, not the useless firewall built into XP. F-Prot is free for Linux home users, can't remember if they also to Windoze, IIRC they do BSD as well.
To make the OS tolerably secure, M$ would have to rewrite it from scratch, as it would have to run with no write access to any program files or dlls, for a start. Their present pitiful excuse for an OS will forever remain that, ther is no way that it can be secured. Longhorn may be the answer, but by cutting the API set down to less than a quarter of its bloated predecessor, it will break compatibility with everything that went before. Another way of extracting more money from the gullible, only this time it will not work.
I do wonder how they ever managed to get such an over-bloated API set in the first place, clearly the Chief Software Architect was utterly lacking in competence in proper software design.
The same allegation was made against McAfraud some time ago, and I don't remember then taking anyone to court over it, which may suggest something.
I am yet to be convinced that there is any integrity or sense of morality in the anti-virus industry. The big boys such as Symantec and McAFraud have lost the plot, they are led by marketing men, and their products are distinctly third-rate. Their support departments also lie. As for Panda, well if you want to completely trash your PC, with unremovable entries in the registry, and everything slowed to a complete crawl, well go right ahead and try.
The fundamental problem with Panda, and others, is due to the very basic design error in Windoze. Instead of relying on the file system to protect .exe and .dll files from corruption, by making them all write-protected, Windoze, a fine piece of incompetently designed trash, only works if writing to critical files is allowed (self-modifying code, maybe?), so Panda hooks each .exe in the registry so it grabs it first and scans it, before it is run, every time. The performance loss is enormous and unacceptable. The Incompetent Convicted Monopolist's System File Checker again is checking critical files in the background to see, too late, if they have been changed. A decent OS, not designed by an over-hyped imbecile, write-protects all system files, in the file system, and does not have this problem.
I have not observed this behaviour with either Symantec of McAfraud, but have found that they simply do not work in certain conditions.
There are plenty of alternatives, from free up to very expensive, depending on how much you need, what you want to pay, and how much work you can do yourself. Probably Oracle and its competitors will remain at the top, but at the bottom, MYSQL continues to do very well.
Interestingly, while Oracle and others (can't remember all the names right now) embraced open source, one serious competitor, IBI, did not. Oracle etc are thriving, but where is IBI? They had massive redundancies a while back......
Open standards are the key to everything, otherwise we have a Tower of Babel again. Access is closed source, deliberately incompatible with everything else, and of limited functionality. In short, it is a toy database which, sadly, people try to do serious things with.
However, with the type of thing the majority of office staff will use, there is no discernible difference in ease of use between OOo and M$. A while ago, in Leeds IIRC, certainly somewhere in the UK, a large organisation, probably the local council, switched their staff from Convicted Monopoly Office to OOo, and apparently the secretaries adapted very quickly, without any need for training.
At a more professional level, I give my colleagues, mostly hardware design engineers, copies of OOo, and other useful things like Mozilla, from time to time, and none of them ever report any significant difficulties.
It is a bit like the educational argument, that kids must use in school what they will find in the workplace, ie. Monopoly Office. The argument is utterly irrelevant, what kids learn at school will have moved on several generations before they start work, and the education system is supposed to teach them to think, not to follow slavishly. They need to learn the principles of using word processors, spreadsheets, databases etc, those principles will stay with them forever, long after Gates and Ballmer have retired or gone to jail.
I only use graphics packages like the Gimp or Photoshop occasionally, and find them a real pain, even Paintshop Pro is in that category, and it is simply because these packages can do so many things, compared to a word processor, that no-one but a serious user will ever become proficient. But, I use Word Perfect, Quattro Pro etc at home, Bugware Office at work, and OOo in both places, and don't find any difficulty adapting. In fact Billware Office is the worst, it tries to do things that you don't want, and in every version up to the very latest, crashes more than the others.
The thing that will convince many people about the usefulness of OOo is if Bloatware Office corrupts a .doc or .xls, and will not open it, a fairly frequent occurrence. Best thing is to make a copy of the file, for safety, and then try to open it in OOo. It usually works. You can then re-save it in a Monopoly format, and so recover your work. Says a lot for the relative quality of the products!
1. Better diagnostics of any problems, with a nice, meaningful array of LEDs, which you get on most excternal modems.
2. Lower risk of destruction of the PC due to lightning-induced transients. The high-current pulses are likely to remain outside the PC casing and not be coupled to signal tracks on the motherboard. An internal modem invariably lets a lot of energy loose inside the case, it has to go somewhere (as well as frying the modem, but that is more expendable than the motherboard), and in fact it is radiated and picked up on every signal track. If it gets substantially above your logic supply (3.3V for example) or below ground, bang goes a large chipset, and the cost of repair will be higher than a new motherboard. It might well take out your disk drive, graphics card, etc as well. Many unexplained hardware failures are in fact due to induced lightning transients.
3. You will definitely not get a Winmoden, which are useless even in Windows. Your external modem will really be a full modem, with its own DSP etc, so it will not bog down your processor, cause instability, or simply not work.
4. Much easier to attach another PC temporarily for whatever reason, everything has a serial port and supports drivers for standard modems. You can also run any OS, even MessyDOS, and still use the modem.
5. Less heat in the small case, the modem's several watts will be dissipated externally, which will help keep temperatures down and so get longer life.
I do not advise USB modems, they cause excessive CPU overhead, a simple serial port is the best option.
You really do need to lobby your congressmen, or whatever you do over there, to get decent consumer protection, and in the case of product labelling, decent protection for your local industries.
I don't know why they were not prosecuted for dumping IE originally, it was illegal to do that in the UK and probably most of Europe. I seem to remember that not so many years ago, RAM manufacturers were in serious trouble for dumping. They were of course out to destroy the UK semiconductor industry, but they need not have bothered, because the vile and incompetent Mrs.Thatcher did quite a good job without their help.
I don't see why this matters as far as the Chinese are concerned, because they seem to be moving very much towards Linux anyway, and will certainly be manufacturing locally. Maybe it is just belt and braces, in case Ballmer manages to do some more dodgy deals? However I would be very happy if international trade agreements broke down, and Mr.B Liar imposed a requirement that 70% of all UK software was produced locally. The biggest damage would of course be to an already Convicted Monopolist. Oh I forgot, it was Mr. B Liar's chancellor, Mr. Brown, who recommended the scumbag of Redmond for a knighthood.
I would like the insecure, bug-infested trash banned for other reasons also, such as the constant attacks on my systems via Windoze users who have been trojaned, and are violating, or assisting in the violation of, the Computer Misuse Act, but that is another story.
Having some real buttons and some dummies will cause annoyance and wasted time, people used to dummies will go somewhere else, where the buttons work, and waste precious minutes, even tens of minutes, waiting, until they finally figure it out.
However we have some very bad configurations here also. Not too far from home, a set of lights controlling the exit from a very minor road always defaults to red for the main road, and needs several cars arriving to actuate it, so in the middle of the night, in a residential area, vehicles are held for several minutes, emitting noise and pollution, wasting time. On the other hand, in the Netherlands, I have noticed that when there is no traffic the lights do not cycle at all, but remain in their default state, so on a major road at night, with no crossing traffic, you get greens for many miles, as you should.
Consistency nationally, if not internationally, would be a very good thing.
It also seems to be directly related to the media player issue for which Europe is in the process of setting the fine.
The legislators must stop this at all costs, or the Illegal Monopoly will continue to grow and they will never be able to stop it.
Of course the relevant software will be trash, but the ignorant masses will neither know nor care that they are the victims of yet another con trick by an organisation whose only expertise is in flouting the law worldwide.
If they have illegally commingled code, the proper remedy is for the base code of Unix (not the legitimate extensions put in by licencees such as Sun, HP or IBM) to be GPL'd. End of problem. End of SCO. End of McFraud. Of course, if he had the merest glimmer of intelligence, he would have seen that it was essential to licence only the lines of SCO code for $699 or whatever he was asking, he failed to do that and demanded payment for the whole package, GPL code and all (and likely some BSD code, but that is OK legally, the BSD licence is very weak.)
But, coming back to the present issue, if they have attempted to restrict anyone's rights to use nmap under any of the conditions of the GPL, they have violated the GPL and can no longer distribute nmap. That is automatic, and can be enforced by the copyright holder very easily indeed. If the copyright holder can not afford a team of schysters, he can transfer his copyright to someone who can. That is his legal right. He can even sell the copyright for a nominal dollar, or cent, just to help make the transaction valid. But no-one, not even the author, can take the code out of GPL, so there is no way known, even if McFraud paid millions, that he could ever again legally use nmap or any other GPL software in his Linux distribution. Every copy of SCO from now on breaks the law. He has dug himself into a deep hole, with no escape possible. SCO can no longer distribute any GPL code. Bye, bye, Darl.
It is utterly pointless of McFraud and his schysters waiting 18 months for the trial, they are in deep trouble now. In many countries distributing GPL software in non-compliance with the licence, a clearly demonstrable breach of simple copyright law in every country signatory to the relevant conventions, is a criminal offence, punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. (The fact that SCO is sold for profit, not given away, makes it a matter for criminal law in the UK, for example). This is no longer a matter for the civil courts, it is a matter for the law enforcement authorities in every civilised country. Added to which, I will be very surprised if, when he goes after someone in the UK for licence fees, the UK part of SCO is not immediately charged with barratry. These guys are committing serious criminal offences right,left and centre. I know they will get away with it in the US, after all the DOJ did not even deal with the vile scumbags in Redmond properly, but SCO have already been fined in Germany. If McFraud wants to keep out of jail, he needs to start making some grovelling apologies to all the relevant copyright holders, just maybe, if they are feeling generous, they might not testify against him in court.
Whatever happens now should be up to the police or other appropriate law enforcement agency in every country where SCO Unix is sold. It is not a matter for the civil courts. It is in fact racketeering, others have frequently commented on stock manipulation and the other probable things taht are going on. AFAIK, if the scumbag of Redmond is, as we mostly suspect, the paymaster in all this, it makes the whole thing a criminal conspiracy in most civilised countries.
He could have picked XFree86 configuration in a typical distro, or Samba, or a hundred other things, and come to very similar conclusions, and for the same basic reason.
I am very pleased that someone of ESR's status has now become involved, it means that the issues will be exposed, and in a reasonable space of time, fixed. That is what matters. Now he may seem to have been unfair to Fedora, but my experience is that the configuration tools in Fedora are about the worst of any recent distro, as I may have said more than once on Slashdot. Fedora quite possibly appeals to hackers, I don't find the time for fiddling with config files in vi any more, although I have many years of experience in doing so. It should not be necessary. The Convicted Monopolist is unable to create good, stable, secure software, but as ESR suggests, their configuration utilities are better than what FOSS has managed so far. However I would point out that there are still many stupid and inexcusable features in the M$ config tools, in particular the network printing setup in XP is badly deranged. I have 2 JetDirect printers, they in effect are their own server, and each has its own web page as well, yet they have to be installed to local ports! Very, very wrong, and it wasted hours at the first attempt. So FOSS has not got it right yet, but we are not so far behind Sir Bill that with a bit of effort from top developers, we, the community, can not leap ahead, if we get moving.