Microsoft are trying to rationalise how their licensing works. Historically, they've had a myriad of different websites you had to use depending on if you have an Open Subscription License, an Open Value License, an MSDN license or a license that you made up yourself with a box of magic markers and a sheet of paper.
They're certainly trying to merge Subscription and Open Value right now - I recently purchased a few licenses on the OVS plan (the website for which is being shut down) and I'm having trouble accessing them on the "new" system.
This isn't another "gosh how fragile everything is" story. This is a bog standard "some f*ckwit decided to go live with the new system without testing it properly" story. The only eyebrow-raising part is that you would expect Microsoft to have a whole brace of plan Bs in place at the drop of a hat for just such an occurrence.
Every error message that Microsoft has ever written is like this.
Sometimes they think to include a way of getting the full error in proper technical language across - maybe by writing to the event log or having a "click for technical details" option but more often than not they don't. As a Unix admin, it's immensely frustrating dealing with software which goes so far out of its way to be opaque.
That's what happens when you hand the keys to your kingdom over to someone whose best interests don't align with your own.
Saying you should avoid that is all very well but it's practically impossible in any business.
Want to take out a loan? The moment the bank thinks you may be in trouble they can and will send you a rude letter saying "Repay the whole lot. Now."
Want someone to do your accounts? Paying an outside company will be a sight cheaper than paying a wage to someone who you only need for a few weeks of the year, but the accounts they prepare will be full of disclaimers to the effect of "We have prepared these using information supplied by our client...." and it's you the tax man will come after if he smells a rat. Too bad if the office junior did your accounts and the senior person who signed them off was in a hurry to get home that day - they'll never admit it in a million years.
Want an email, calendaring and contacts platform? Free clue: The F/OSS exchange alternatives are generally just as complicated as Exchange itself, with the added bonus that finding someone who knows them can be a hell of a lot harder.
It's not just my private pictures I'm concerned about.
10 years ago the most anyone could do with an embarrassing photo of me was to show it to my friends. Today they can show it to the entire world and because of Facebook's tagging system, the entire world can find it very easily indeed.
Once that happens, it is very convenient for access to the relevant table to continue while the old column is dropped and all its data is reclaimed. Oracle and PostgreSQL can both do this, although reclaiming the previously used space is a second step in the latter.
Okay, so far you have one feature which has a better implementation in Oracle than in any F/OSS database (though by your own admission Postgres has already solved half of that problem, and since 8.3 autovacuum has been enabled by default, which at least partially takes care of the second half of the problem.)
A fork of MySQL could provide all the necessary competition, to say nothing of PostgreSQL.
It's not quite as bad as it was 5 years ago, but there are still a hell of a lot of F/OSS applications which only support MySQL and users who have neither the need nor the desire to tweak them to support PostgreSQL.
(Though FWIW, I stopped taking MySQL seriously when I figured out the product was designed with a downright cavalier attitude to data integrity)
The problem is that Oracle is at least twenty years ahead of all of their competitors in database technology. Oracle 7, ca 1991, has a better overall implementation than the latest and greatest from IBM, Microsoft, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and so on.
That's a hell of a strong choice of words, particularly when you're on a site full of raging zealots like/. Could you explain exactly what features Oracle has that place it a full 20 years ahead of its nearest competitor?
It's not just that. You also need something that comes with a sane migration plan (ie. doesn't require you to get 2,000 people to change simultaneously).
Most F/OSS Exchange "alternatives" were put together by people who have heard about Exchange but never appear to have actually used it.
What I want is something Microsoft doesn't want me to have: an ARM netbook with a high res screen and a 20 GB SSD.
Both of these would whack the price up substantially - you'd have to pay laptop prices.
So far the screen res is too low on all the netbooks I can find, and for some reason they all have spinning disks. Load it with a distro that doesn't suck, and which effectively supports the gfx chip and wireless network, and I'm there.
The closest you'll find is an ultra-compact laptop - something like a Dell Latitude E4200.
Of course, this means you'll have to part with a lot more money.
I would say it's the expected cost of violating the law that matters. In other words, it is probability of getting caught x the cost of the fine. If you raise the fine so high that it will bankrupt you ($1 million) then people probably won't risk it. People still park illegally even though the chances of getting caught is pretty high relative to other violations but since in most places the cost/fine is so low, the expected cost makes it worth the violation.
What they don't mention is that the punishment is not just a fine - it's also three points on your driving licence.
Accumulate 12 points, and it's an automatic ban. Though most people tend to be fairly blase about these things until they've clocked up at least a few points.
Of course, nobody is bothering to track how many of those Linux installs get wiped and replaced with a pirated copy of Windows five minutes after the boxes are opened.
With the ARM-based laptops, I'll stick my neck out and guess it's "zero".
Well to person who wants the driver to plays games and is not willing to or able to trace an issue and contribute a fix -- what the difference?
With any luck, in time it will become more stable and more reliable - you won't upgrade your Linux distribution to the latest and greatest only to find that your 3d graphics has magically stopped working. Not because you traced issues, but because other people did.
Purely out of morbid curiosity, what was the acceleration like? The last fiesta I had you needed to boot the damn thing to get to motorway speed before you ran out of slip road to merge into the motorway traffic - and that was a vanilla 4-stroke petrol engine (albeit the 1.25l model)
It also applies to Microsoft partners. The multi-media product manufacturers (including cameras, media players etc. etc.) will be the long term target. Right now their functionality is being extended with the aim of Microsoft getting lock in. Microsoft is already one of them (with it's Windows Mobile phones
That's true, but outside the operating systems market Microsoft have found it very hard to achieve anything like the same amount of influence. Windows Mobile, for instance, just seems to get weaker and lose market share every year.
This is Facebook. A site which has had privacy problems more or less since its inception - mainly because the idea that sure, there might be things you want to share - just not with the whole world, okay? - was never (and indeed AFAICT is still not) part of the original design philosophy.
Anyone who has actually attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings for more than about 5 minutes should have already figured that out. Treat it (and indeed any similar site) like a dodgy pub with incredible acoustics full of big hairy neanderthals you don't like and gossips who can't keep their mouth shut and you won't go too far wrong.
Treat it like a private room in which you can share your innermost thoughts with your closest friends in complete safety and you are going to come unstuck sooner rather than later.
I think the sheer amount of shite in the form of worms, spam and DoS attacks continuing to flood the Internet kind of kills off that utopian vision, wouldn't you say?
You are assuming that all the systems are hosted at reputable hosting companies that pro-actively monitor all their systems.
There are millions of systems worldwide that are exposed to the public internet (even though they probably shouldn't be) that are sitting in the corner somewhere waiting for someone to "get around to decommissioning them" - and in the meantime they're pumping out spam and taking part in DDoS attacks.
I'm from the UK, not the US, so take this with as much salt as you think it needs. Note: I'm not a developer, I'm a sysadmin, and sysadmin salaries are generally lower in the UK.
There are two ways of looking at this: first, you look very seriously at moving on. Let's face it, if you can refuse this job your days at this place are likely numbered.
Second, you see it as an opportunity. I don't know about where you are but in the UK there is a very definite ceiling to how much you can earn without going into management. If you are already at or near this ceiling (and if money is important to you), this basically gives you a job with "manager" on your CV without all the hassle of looking for a new job and interviewing - at a time when the economy's not exactly doing that well.
Is the barcode scanned at the same time ID is checked?
Mine wasn't. At Atlanta, New York, or Vegas. The first two there are two of the busiest airports in the US.
When I went through, you handed them a randomly printed piece of paper that says whatever you want it to say, and they check that your ID matches what you want it to say. (Sometimes they inexplicably check this again.)
Now that you mention it, it isn't. But I'm not sure how it matters - you can't give them a randomly printed piece of paper because the barcode is an index to the list of people who are flying today. If it doesn't come up on their database, back you go. This has actually happened to me on a couple of occasions.
Regarding how busy the airport is - in the last 5 years I've flown through some large airports- Heathrow, Dubai, Singapore, San Francisco and some much smaller airports - Bristol, Avalon, Dublin. In almost all cases, the airports which I felt were the more intrusive and awkward security-wise were the smaller ones.
Its not illegal to copy/forge a signature either, unless the purpose is to impersonate or defraud. Its called intent. It will llikely be more diffucult to prove intent than to prove the act itself, however. It is like the difference between copying someone's signature on a blank sheet of paper versus doing so on a check.
IANAL but I would have thought it pretty hard to come up with a convincing alternative to the explanation a prosecutor may use: "the accused had their fingerprints surgically swapped around to avoid detection".
On the other hand, a single killer application can keep a very niche platform alive in some industries for years after it's all but died out elsewhere. Sibelius (a music notation program which makes Rosegarden look like it was written by a chimp on acid), for instance, originated on the Acorn and in the UK lots of school music departments kept Acorn computers around long after everyone else had migrated to Windows.
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Microsoft are trying to rationalise how their licensing works. Historically, they've had a myriad of different websites you had to use depending on if you have an Open Subscription License, an Open Value License, an MSDN license or a license that you made up yourself with a box of magic markers and a sheet of paper.
They're certainly trying to merge Subscription and Open Value right now - I recently purchased a few licenses on the OVS plan (the website for which is being shut down) and I'm having trouble accessing them on the "new" system.
This isn't another "gosh how fragile everything is" story. This is a bog standard "some f*ckwit decided to go live with the new system without testing it properly" story. The only eyebrow-raising part is that you would expect Microsoft to have a whole brace of plan Bs in place at the drop of a hat for just such an occurrence.
Every error message that Microsoft has ever written is like this.
Sometimes they think to include a way of getting the full error in proper technical language across - maybe by writing to the event log or having a "click for technical details" option but more often than not they don't. As a Unix admin, it's immensely frustrating dealing with software which goes so far out of its way to be opaque.
That's what happens when you hand the keys to your kingdom over to someone whose best interests don't align with your own.
Saying you should avoid that is all very well but it's practically impossible in any business.
Want to take out a loan? The moment the bank thinks you may be in trouble they can and will send you a rude letter saying "Repay the whole lot. Now."
Want someone to do your accounts? Paying an outside company will be a sight cheaper than paying a wage to someone who you only need for a few weeks of the year, but the accounts they prepare will be full of disclaimers to the effect of "We have prepared these using information supplied by our client...." and it's you the tax man will come after if he smells a rat. Too bad if the office junior did your accounts and the senior person who signed them off was in a hurry to get home that day - they'll never admit it in a million years.
Want an email, calendaring and contacts platform? Free clue: The F/OSS exchange alternatives are generally just as complicated as Exchange itself, with the added bonus that finding someone who knows them can be a hell of a lot harder.
It's not just my private pictures I'm concerned about.
10 years ago the most anyone could do with an embarrassing photo of me was to show it to my friends. Today they can show it to the entire world and because of Facebook's tagging system, the entire world can find it very easily indeed.
Once that happens, it is very convenient for access to the relevant table to continue while the old column is dropped and all its data is reclaimed. Oracle and PostgreSQL can both do this, although reclaiming the previously used space is a second step in the latter.
Okay, so far you have one feature which has a better implementation in Oracle than in any F/OSS database (though by your own admission Postgres has already solved half of that problem, and since 8.3 autovacuum has been enabled by default, which at least partially takes care of the second half of the problem.)
If it can't directly, OCR to a plain text file and grep for http:///
There are various things which claim to replace Exchange and they claim varying degrees of "drop-in-ness".
I've never yet met one which didn't simultaneously suck and blow.
PostgreSQL added this about a year ago - I'm not sure how solid it is yet
Not too bad, I understand. But then PostgreSQL doesn't tend to declare a feature as being done until such time as it is fairly solid.
A fork of MySQL could provide all the necessary competition, to say nothing of PostgreSQL.
It's not quite as bad as it was 5 years ago, but there are still a hell of a lot of F/OSS applications which only support MySQL and users who have neither the need nor the desire to tweak them to support PostgreSQL.
(Though FWIW, I stopped taking MySQL seriously when I figured out the product was designed with a downright cavalier attitude to data integrity)
The problem is that Oracle is at least twenty years ahead of all of their competitors in database technology. Oracle 7, ca 1991, has a better overall implementation than the latest and greatest from IBM, Microsoft, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and so on.
That's a hell of a strong choice of words, particularly when you're on a site full of raging zealots like /. Could you explain exactly what features Oracle has that place it a full 20 years ahead of its nearest competitor?
It's not just that. You also need something that comes with a sane migration plan (ie. doesn't require you to get 2,000 people to change simultaneously).
Most F/OSS Exchange "alternatives" were put together by people who have heard about Exchange but never appear to have actually used it.
What I want is something Microsoft doesn't want me to have: an ARM netbook with a high res screen and a 20 GB SSD.
Both of these would whack the price up substantially - you'd have to pay laptop prices.
So far the screen res is too low on all the netbooks I can find, and for some reason they all have spinning disks. Load it with a distro that doesn't suck, and which effectively supports the gfx chip and wireless network, and I'm there.
The closest you'll find is an ultra-compact laptop - something like a Dell Latitude E4200.
Of course, this means you'll have to part with a lot more money.
I would say it's the expected cost of violating the law that matters. In other words, it is probability of getting caught x the cost of the fine. If you raise the fine so high that it will bankrupt you ($1 million) then people probably won't risk it. People still park illegally even though the chances of getting caught is pretty high relative to other violations but since in most places the cost/fine is so low, the expected cost makes it worth the violation.
What they don't mention is that the punishment is not just a fine - it's also three points on your driving licence.
Accumulate 12 points, and it's an automatic ban. Though most people tend to be fairly blase about these things until they've clocked up at least a few points.
Convicted multiple times of driving while intoxicated?!
Here in the UK you'd be very lucky to still have a driving licence after that. I believe the typical punishment for being caught once is a year's ban.
Of course, nobody is bothering to track how many of those Linux installs get wiped and replaced with a pirated copy of Windows five minutes after the boxes are opened.
With the ARM-based laptops, I'll stick my neck out and guess it's "zero".
Well to person who wants the driver to plays games and is not willing to or able to trace an issue and contribute a fix -- what the difference?
With any luck, in time it will become more stable and more reliable - you won't upgrade your Linux distribution to the latest and greatest only to find that your 3d graphics has magically stopped working. Not because you traced issues, but because other people did.
Purely out of morbid curiosity, what was the acceleration like? The last fiesta I had you needed to boot the damn thing to get to motorway speed before you ran out of slip road to merge into the motorway traffic - and that was a vanilla 4-stroke petrol engine (albeit the 1.25l model)
It also applies to Microsoft partners. The multi-media product manufacturers (including cameras, media players etc. etc.) will be the long term target. Right now their functionality is being extended with the aim of Microsoft getting lock in. Microsoft is already one of them (with it's Windows Mobile phones
That's true, but outside the operating systems market Microsoft have found it very hard to achieve anything like the same amount of influence. Windows Mobile, for instance, just seems to get weaker and lose market share every year.
This is Facebook. A site which has had privacy problems more or less since its inception - mainly because the idea that sure, there might be things you want to share - just not with the whole world, okay? - was never (and indeed AFAICT is still not) part of the original design philosophy.
Anyone who has actually attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings for more than about 5 minutes should have already figured that out. Treat it (and indeed any similar site) like a dodgy pub with incredible acoustics full of big hairy neanderthals you don't like and gossips who can't keep their mouth shut and you won't go too far wrong.
Treat it like a private room in which you can share your innermost thoughts with your closest friends in complete safety and you are going to come unstuck sooner rather than later.
I think the sheer amount of shite in the form of worms, spam and DoS attacks continuing to flood the Internet kind of kills off that utopian vision, wouldn't you say?
You are assuming that all the systems are hosted at reputable hosting companies that pro-actively monitor all their systems.
There are millions of systems worldwide that are exposed to the public internet (even though they probably shouldn't be) that are sitting in the corner somewhere waiting for someone to "get around to decommissioning them" - and in the meantime they're pumping out spam and taking part in DDoS attacks.
I'm from the UK, not the US, so take this with as much salt as you think it needs. Note: I'm not a developer, I'm a sysadmin, and sysadmin salaries are generally lower in the UK.
There are two ways of looking at this: first, you look very seriously at moving on. Let's face it, if you can refuse this job your days at this place are likely numbered.
Second, you see it as an opportunity. I don't know about where you are but in the UK there is a very definite ceiling to how much you can earn without going into management. If you are already at or near this ceiling (and if money is important to you), this basically gives you a job with "manager" on your CV without all the hassle of looking for a new job and interviewing - at a time when the economy's not exactly doing that well.
Is the barcode scanned at the same time ID is checked?
Mine wasn't. At Atlanta, New York, or Vegas. The first two there are two of the busiest airports in the US.
When I went through, you handed them a randomly printed piece of paper that says whatever you want it to say, and they check that your ID matches what you want it to say. (Sometimes they inexplicably check this again.)
Now that you mention it, it isn't. But I'm not sure how it matters - you can't give them a randomly printed piece of paper because the barcode is an index to the list of people who are flying today. If it doesn't come up on their database, back you go. This has actually happened to me on a couple of occasions.
Regarding how busy the airport is - in the last 5 years I've flown through some large airports- Heathrow, Dubai, Singapore, San Francisco and some much smaller airports - Bristol, Avalon, Dublin. In almost all cases, the airports which I felt were the more intrusive and awkward security-wise were the smaller ones.
Its not illegal to copy/forge a signature either, unless the purpose is to impersonate or defraud. Its called intent. It will llikely be more diffucult to prove intent than to prove the act itself, however. It is like the difference between copying someone's signature on a blank sheet of paper versus doing so on a check.
IANAL but I would have thought it pretty hard to come up with a convincing alternative to the explanation a prosecutor may use: "the accused had their fingerprints surgically swapped around to avoid detection".
On the other hand, a single killer application can keep a very niche platform alive in some industries for years after it's all but died out elsewhere. Sibelius (a music notation program which makes Rosegarden look like it was written by a chimp on acid), for instance, originated on the Acorn and in the UK lots of school music departments kept Acorn computers around long after everyone else had migrated to Windows.