That'd be an application then. And I call bullshit purely on the basis of the accuracy of your previous statements and the fact that most financial institutions are Unix-based or were at one point. There are entire franchises that run on Unix-based systems (which are therefore easily ported to Linux by a simple recompile 99.999% of the time). The applications exist, you just might not know them or be willing to pay for them. But we're back into the Windows *application* arena again - the applications, even if they don't exist, have nothing to do with the operating system.
Name them.
Specifically, seeing as the OP was talking about small businesses and mentioned Intuit, name the Linux accounts application(s) that are available at a similar price point and offer a similar level of functionality at that price point.
I think the largest concern I have about Microsoft's dominance of the market is that most people seem to assume that.doc is a standard format, and think that it supports any kind of interoperability. Of course it really doesn't and isn't.
Which is well and good, but 20 years or more of conditioning from Microsoft has trained a lot of people to believe any cross-version incompatibilities are natural and to be expected.
Personal experience suggests that this isn't far from the truth. Once you leave the realm of simple, well-understood formats that solve simple, well-understood problems, this is precisely what you get. (See also HTML and the various differences in rendering engines)
I tend to agree with the GP. IBM are an absolutely typical conservative company. IMO, if they're dictating everything change within 10 days this has probably been brewing internally for the better part of a year or more.
Microsoft are working on a self-throwing chair to save Steve Ballmer the trouble. Prototypes are promising, but have a tendency to crash through windows.
We need a metric that doesn't involve a court trying to determine if some fuzzy thing is true. Part of the damage from patents now is the extreme cost of patent litigation.
Therein lies the problem with any legislation.
You either write it so tightly that as soon as the remotest change in society occurs your law becomes useless and you have to rewrite it or you word it fairly loosely to account for such things - which inevitably means leaving bits up to interpretation.
There are various things you can set up on Cisco switches to automagically disconnect someone whose computer doesn't follow particular predefined specs - and being as Ethernet support has been rock solid for years on Linux, I'd imagine they're doing something on top of Ethernet such as this.
Even that's wrong. Quite a number of fortune 500 companies rely on Linux heavily. Almost every investment bank certainly, but I'd wager a number of others too. Maybe not on the desktops of the employees, but still, Linux is certainly a viable and well-used platform in fortune 500s.
Yes, but the only people who are expected to know and understand that are the software developers and the sysadmins. Unless the OPs daughter intends to enter either of these professions, there's not a great deal to be gained by labouring this point.
In addition, my typing class I took in high school also taught how to properly format letters, signature blocks, punctuation, addresses, etc.
I'm really glad I took that class, as typing is a huge part of my life as a sysadmin/programmer/writer.
That's a fantastically good point.
I've seen some letters that were so badly written I would be inclined to believe that some kid who'd got hold of official letterhead was trying to have some sort of practical joke.
OTOH, I've written some letters when calling and emailing weren't getting me anywhere and IME many companies respond much more efficiently to a hard-copy letter than any other medium. I can knock out a half-decent letter in 5 or 10 minutes flat and I only live a hundred yards from my nearest letter box so it doesn't take very long listening to hold music before it's more efficient to do this.
You'd be surprised. Touch-typing doesn't just teach "how to type fast and accurately", it also teaches "how to type with minimum strain on your hands/wrists".
If this hasn't affected you, you're lucky. If this has, you know exactly what I mean.
Sounds like the person who wrote the article didn't understand what they were talking about.
Yes, little plastic weapons for the lego men to hold are nothing new. But the closest to actual violence in Lego sets was the pirates sets - there's never been a set, for instance, where you build a replica assault rifle that fires real projectiles.
You'll make a lot more money writing a decent book. His books were godawful.
The number of aspiring authors vs. the number who get published vs. the number who get published with anything worth reading is testament to the fact that writing a decent book is much harder than you might imagine.
Hubbard, OTOH, had success beyond his wildest dreams with his first attempt at setting up a religion. Either he was born to be a religious leader or it's a heck of a lot easier to set up a religion than write a book.
The only way to get rid of stupid cults like Scientology, Christianity and the like is to expose them freely and put them against real knowledge and science. Religion has no place in a modern society.
Indeed.
While we're at it, we should do the same thing with people who prefer emacs over vi, Windows fanboys and anyone with a particular liking for certain shades of purple.
Shatter proof glass does not mean it won't break. In fact, shatter-proof is probably the worst description of it because the one thing it will do is shatter. Only unlike most glass, it will shatter into pieces which aren't very sharp.
Obviously there are various glass windows you can get which are more resistant to someone hitting them with a baseball bat but with guys like this, they'd just have reversed a van into the window.
Mod parent up. If you're going to commit a felony that will result in significant jail time, at least rob a bank or a high end jewelery store.
I guess it depends where you are, but certainly in the UK most bank robberies don't net that kind of money. Largely because the cashiers only have a certain amount of cash immediately on hand - most of it's in a safe which you have to punch in a code and then wait some time before it will open.
This is why you often have to give the bank some notice before you withdraw a large amount of cash.
Most jewellers aren't much easier - and the value of most jewellery is actually pretty terrible. The main reason it costs so much from the jeweller is DeBeer's marketing.
I don't think any sort of armed robbery is a particularly useful thing to do professionally. You either target places with very valuable things to steal - in which case security will be tight and in order to make a decent living at it you'll have to rob so much that you'll draw attention to yourself sooner rather than later - or you target places with less valuable things with lower security. In which case you'll never earn any real money of any sort.
Even making XP useable is to turn off themes, classic start menu, classic folder view, unhide system folders and put it on detalied view, turn off simple file sharing, security center, firewall, redonkulous services for idiots (uPNP, system restore, firewall service, zero config wireless, web publishing, etc). Install tweakUI and disable animated doggy idiot search, change the IE cache to something less than 100gb, etc.Then the real hacking starts, turn off the 'zip for dummies', image shell extensions, etc. Then after several update reboot cycles, remove the crapware they install in Firefox without your consent.
Purely out of curiosity, when your OS abuses you like this (and it is abuse, there's no other word for it. It gets in the way for no good reason when the whole freakin' point of an OS is to get the hell out of the way so you can get on with doing something useful), why do you put up with it?
Would a reading as "copyrights have the term that they had when the work was first published" have been too activist?
Probably, given that most copyright extension laws have been drafted and bought by companies that want to extend copyright to their existing catalogue.
The DHS has always held the belief (with the Supreme Court's backing) that people and their belongings at customs checkpoints at the airport (or at a border crossing) aren't within the country (yet), consequently, the constitution doesn't apply to "inspections" within those checkpoints. That gives the DHS and their goons all the leeway they want in "confiscating" or "inspecting" all the stuff they want for as long as they want.
By that logic, no US law applies at the checkpoint. In fact, in all likelihood no law of any description applies at the checkpoint.
In which case, their right to take your laptop, detain you or otherwise inconvenience you doesn't stem from a formal legal system with the checks and balances that implies, it's because they've got a large number of armed goons at their disposal and you have nothing.
It was apparently good enough to fool everyone for quite a while.
How many people did it need to fool? For most people, I daresay the story of how it was presented is probably proof enough of what it is. My guess is someone switched it at some point.
By that token, we've only been observing these things for a fantastically short time in astronomical terms.
IANAA, but why could it not be the case that the natural state of affairs for any planet orbiting a star is to orbit in ever decreasing circles until such time as it burns up?
Nobody actively likes vendor lock-in, but at the same time you have to be pragmatic about these things.
A good CIO is going to be looking at the whole picture, and operating systems form only a tiny part of that. How about your business applications? Buy something off the shelf? But then your business is locked to that product!
Write it yourself? But then you need to hire a team of developers, it'll take months rather than weeks and it'll be expensive because you've got to pay lots of peoples' salaries. If you buy off the shelf, those costs are spread amongst all the other customers and will be much less.
Hire an outside company to develop it? But then you're likely to be tied to them for ongoing support and if you're their only customer for this product, you're still paying lots of peoples' salaries, albeit indirectly.
This is before you even consider the details like "what platform should the software run on? Java? Should it stick purely to things in relatively early versions of the JDK so the risk of incompatibilities between different JVMs is minimised and in so doing miss out on features? What backend database should we use? Migrating data from one database to another is always a PITA, and that's before we even consider if the application you're using will actually work with more than just one or two different databases....."
There really is very little software out there (even in the F/OSS world) that doesn't make some assumptions about other things they interact with like database engines or operating systems, and in those assumptions ties the user to a whole stack of products. The FSF, however, seems only too happy to cut off its own nose to spite its face.
In order for it to work well, you'd need to cut the money off suddenly and more-or-less entirely. In other words, almost everyone on the planet starts a boycott simultaneously while loudly explaining exactly what they are doing and why. This would force them to re-think their business pretty well.
Unfortunately, what's happening is a few people here and there are starting a boycott and the industry doesn't know what's happening - all they know is they're making fewer sales. They've been blaming this on piracy for years, what makes you think they'll stop now?
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So what you basically mean is that after over 25 years of piling dross on top of dross, Microsoft are finally producing a mature product?
Well done, chaps. Knew you could get there in the end.
That'd be an application then. And I call bullshit purely on the basis of the accuracy of your previous statements and the fact that most financial institutions are Unix-based or were at one point. There are entire franchises that run on Unix-based systems (which are therefore easily ported to Linux by a simple recompile 99.999% of the time). The applications exist, you just might not know them or be willing to pay for them. But we're back into the Windows *application* arena again - the applications, even if they don't exist, have nothing to do with the operating system.
Name them.
Specifically, seeing as the OP was talking about small businesses and mentioned Intuit, name the Linux accounts application(s) that are available at a similar price point and offer a similar level of functionality at that price point.
It probably doesn't help that Microsoft change the default location for a number of files and settings every couple of versions for the sake of it.
Google's android will win out. MS locks you into crap expensive software, while Mac locks you into crappy expensive networks.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!!!
No, seriously, that's a joke, right?
You could equally say "Linux will win out. MS locks you into crap expensive software while Mac [sic] locks you into crappy expensive hardware."
The statements about MS and Apple would be equally true, and if past experience is anything to go by equally irrelevant to market share.
I think the largest concern I have about Microsoft's dominance of the market is that most people seem to assume that .doc is a standard format, and think that it supports any kind of interoperability. Of course it really doesn't and isn't.
Which is well and good, but 20 years or more of conditioning from Microsoft has trained a lot of people to believe any cross-version incompatibilities are natural and to be expected.
Personal experience suggests that this isn't far from the truth. Once you leave the realm of simple, well-understood formats that solve simple, well-understood problems, this is precisely what you get. (See also HTML and the various differences in rendering engines)
This is a variation on the old idea that you can train away social engineering security issues.
And, for exactly the same reasons, it's bullshit.
If that was possible, it would have happened years ago.
I tend to agree with the GP. IBM are an absolutely typical conservative company. IMO, if they're dictating everything change within 10 days this has probably been brewing internally for the better part of a year or more.
Microsoft are working on a self-throwing chair to save Steve Ballmer the trouble. Prototypes are promising, but have a tendency to crash through windows.
We need a metric that doesn't involve a court trying to determine if some fuzzy thing is true. Part of the damage from patents now is the extreme cost of patent litigation.
Therein lies the problem with any legislation.
You either write it so tightly that as soon as the remotest change in society occurs your law becomes useless and you have to rewrite it or you word it fairly loosely to account for such things - which inevitably means leaving bits up to interpretation.
There are various things you can set up on Cisco switches to automagically disconnect someone whose computer doesn't follow particular predefined specs - and being as Ethernet support has been rock solid for years on Linux, I'd imagine they're doing something on top of Ethernet such as this.
Even that's wrong. Quite a number of fortune 500 companies rely on Linux heavily. Almost every investment bank certainly, but I'd wager a number of others too. Maybe not on the desktops of the employees, but still, Linux is certainly a viable and well-used platform in fortune 500s.
Yes, but the only people who are expected to know and understand that are the software developers and the sysadmins. Unless the OPs daughter intends to enter either of these professions, there's not a great deal to be gained by labouring this point.
In addition, my typing class I took in high school also taught how to properly format letters, signature blocks, punctuation, addresses, etc.
I'm really glad I took that class, as typing is a huge part of my life as a sysadmin/programmer/writer.
That's a fantastically good point.
I've seen some letters that were so badly written I would be inclined to believe that some kid who'd got hold of official letterhead was trying to have some sort of practical joke.
OTOH, I've written some letters when calling and emailing weren't getting me anywhere and IME many companies respond much more efficiently to a hard-copy letter than any other medium. I can knock out a half-decent letter in 5 or 10 minutes flat and I only live a hundred yards from my nearest letter box so it doesn't take very long listening to hold music before it's more efficient to do this.
You'd be surprised. Touch-typing doesn't just teach "how to type fast and accurately", it also teaches "how to type with minimum strain on your hands/wrists".
If this hasn't affected you, you're lucky. If this has, you know exactly what I mean.
Sounds like the person who wrote the article didn't understand what they were talking about.
Yes, little plastic weapons for the lego men to hold are nothing new. But the closest to actual violence in Lego sets was the pirates sets - there's never been a set, for instance, where you build a replica assault rifle that fires real projectiles.
You'll make a lot more money writing a decent book. His books were godawful.
The number of aspiring authors vs. the number who get published vs. the number who get published with anything worth reading is testament to the fact that writing a decent book is much harder than you might imagine.
Hubbard, OTOH, had success beyond his wildest dreams with his first attempt at setting up a religion. Either he was born to be a religious leader or it's a heck of a lot easier to set up a religion than write a book.
The only way to get rid of stupid cults like Scientology, Christianity and the like is to expose them freely and put them against real knowledge and science. Religion has no place in a modern society.
Indeed.
While we're at it, we should do the same thing with people who prefer emacs over vi, Windows fanboys and anyone with a particular liking for certain shades of purple.
Apple should have specced shatter proof glass.
Shatter proof glass does not mean it won't break. In fact, shatter-proof is probably the worst description of it because the one thing it will do is shatter. Only unlike most glass, it will shatter into pieces which aren't very sharp.
Obviously there are various glass windows you can get which are more resistant to someone hitting them with a baseball bat but with guys like this, they'd just have reversed a van into the window.
Mod parent up. If you're going to commit a felony that will result in significant jail time, at least rob a bank or a high end jewelery store.
I guess it depends where you are, but certainly in the UK most bank robberies don't net that kind of money. Largely because the cashiers only have a certain amount of cash immediately on hand - most of it's in a safe which you have to punch in a code and then wait some time before it will open.
This is why you often have to give the bank some notice before you withdraw a large amount of cash.
Most jewellers aren't much easier - and the value of most jewellery is actually pretty terrible. The main reason it costs so much from the jeweller is DeBeer's marketing.
I don't think any sort of armed robbery is a particularly useful thing to do professionally. You either target places with very valuable things to steal - in which case security will be tight and in order to make a decent living at it you'll have to rob so much that you'll draw attention to yourself sooner rather than later - or you target places with less valuable things with lower security. In which case you'll never earn any real money of any sort.
Even making XP useable is to turn off themes, classic start menu, classic folder view, unhide system folders and put it on detalied view, turn off simple file sharing, security center, firewall, redonkulous services for idiots (uPNP, system restore, firewall service, zero config wireless, web publishing, etc). Install tweakUI and disable animated doggy idiot search, change the IE cache to something less than 100gb, etc.Then the real hacking starts, turn off the 'zip for dummies', image shell extensions, etc. Then after several update reboot cycles, remove the crapware they install in Firefox without your consent.
Purely out of curiosity, when your OS abuses you like this (and it is abuse, there's no other word for it. It gets in the way for no good reason when the whole freakin' point of an OS is to get the hell out of the way so you can get on with doing something useful), why do you put up with it?
Would a reading as "copyrights have the term that they had when the work was first published" have been too activist?
Probably, given that most copyright extension laws have been drafted and bought by companies that want to extend copyright to their existing catalogue.
The DHS has always held the belief (with the Supreme Court's backing) that people and their belongings at customs checkpoints at the airport (or at a border crossing) aren't within the country (yet), consequently, the constitution doesn't apply to "inspections" within those checkpoints. That gives the DHS and their goons all the leeway they want in "confiscating" or "inspecting" all the stuff they want for as long as they want.
By that logic, no US law applies at the checkpoint. In fact, in all likelihood no law of any description applies at the checkpoint.
In which case, their right to take your laptop, detain you or otherwise inconvenience you doesn't stem from a formal legal system with the checks and balances that implies, it's because they've got a large number of armed goons at their disposal and you have nothing.
It was apparently good enough to fool everyone for quite a while.
How many people did it need to fool? For most people, I daresay the story of how it was presented is probably proof enough of what it is. My guess is someone switched it at some point.
By that token, we've only been observing these things for a fantastically short time in astronomical terms.
IANAA, but why could it not be the case that the natural state of affairs for any planet orbiting a star is to orbit in ever decreasing circles until such time as it burns up?
Nobody actively likes vendor lock-in, but at the same time you have to be pragmatic about these things.
A good CIO is going to be looking at the whole picture, and operating systems form only a tiny part of that. How about your business applications? Buy something off the shelf? But then your business is locked to that product!
Write it yourself? But then you need to hire a team of developers, it'll take months rather than weeks and it'll be expensive because you've got to pay lots of peoples' salaries. If you buy off the shelf, those costs are spread amongst all the other customers and will be much less.
Hire an outside company to develop it? But then you're likely to be tied to them for ongoing support and if you're their only customer for this product, you're still paying lots of peoples' salaries, albeit indirectly.
This is before you even consider the details like "what platform should the software run on? Java? Should it stick purely to things in relatively early versions of the JDK so the risk of incompatibilities between different JVMs is minimised and in so doing miss out on features? What backend database should we use? Migrating data from one database to another is always a PITA, and that's before we even consider if the application you're using will actually work with more than just one or two different databases....."
There really is very little software out there (even in the F/OSS world) that doesn't make some assumptions about other things they interact with like database engines or operating systems, and in those assumptions ties the user to a whole stack of products. The FSF, however, seems only too happy to cut off its own nose to spite its face.
Even that doesn't work very well.
In order for it to work well, you'd need to cut the money off suddenly and more-or-less entirely. In other words, almost everyone on the planet starts a boycott simultaneously while loudly explaining exactly what they are doing and why. This would force them to re-think their business pretty well.
Unfortunately, what's happening is a few people here and there are starting a boycott and the industry doesn't know what's happening - all they know is they're making fewer sales. They've been blaming this on piracy for years, what makes you think they'll stop now?