My understanding was that windows would ship with a "browser download tool" that would let you select a browser during the OS install. Kind of how they let you choose a search engine for IE now.
Hmmm. I wonder what it will default to?
I also wonder how many steps you'll have to follow if you want to use a non-default option?
Who wants to bet they'll include some sort of "add/remove Windows components directly from the Microsoft website" (a la virtually any Linux distribution you care to name) tool which will happily install IE?
And I would not be even remotely surprised if the first thing Windows 7 EU edition does when you first boot it is run this tool and offer to download IE.
Yes it is. You use an advanced mechanism that isn't very popular these days, called "cash".
The problem with any serious quantity of cash - certainly in the UK where this fraud took place - is that people start to ask awkward questions. (In fact, at banks they're legally obliged to start asking awkward questions)
Which is not to say there aren't other ways to launder money. Buy a car, insure it then drive it into the wall and abracadabra! You don't have £30,000 in unmarked notes which raises eyebrows. You've got a cheque for £20,000 from an insurance company. Yes you've lost £10,000 but you always lose a fair bit when laundering money.
All of which is well and good, but does the local paper publish a banner headline on the front page saying "OUR APOLOGIES: THIS PERSON IS INNOCENT OF ANY WRONGDOING"?
Because I bet you anything you like they pounced on the original OMG paedophiles!!111 story.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it is very unusual - if not unheard of - for a police officer to suffer any consequences for over-zealous law enforcement as long as they themselves don't do anything too obviously illegal in the process.
Even if the "over-zealous law enforcement" is so far over the horizon into cloud cuckoo land that even the Daily Mail is reporting it in mild disbelief.
I'm going to be modded to Hell for saying this, so I just hope by some sheer fluke the OP reads it.
Everyone so far has made a few assumptions which I'm not going to. Specifically, they've assumed that the OP is getting all this grief for no good reason. I'm not. I'm going to ask a few questions which may be hard to answer honestly - but I'm asking them because I've been a sysadmin for years and I've seen colleagues make exactly these mistakes.
Be honest with yourself. Do your colleagues/customers (they're not users. Drug dealers have users) have a genuine reason to hate you?
By which I mean - do the systems you are responsible for work? Has there been downtime over the course of the last week|month|quarter? If the downtime was caused by someone doing something wrong, why is it your system reacts to this by breaking rather than failing gracefully? Can you fix it so that if the same "wrong" thing is done again, the worst that happens is an error message?
Do you make changes to live systems during the working day without first establishing that these changes will work? Do you suffer outages when you do this? Stop doing it. Set up a test network which replicates the live environment as closely as possible, make your changes there and only when you're happy do you make these changes in the live environment.
Can you write clearly and fluently in the language most of your colleagues use? Can you avoid jargon and explain things in lay terms? Do you write emails which say "We have identified an ongoing issue with the Pewlett Hackard SuperPhaser 3100 MegaTron Mk. 3 Printer which is causing a number of problems affecting reliability and throughput and are working with our supplier and partners to effect an appropriate solution" or do they say "The printer at the end of the corridor is broken, an engineer is expected within the next 24 hours"?
Do you fully understand the systems you're responsible for? Or are they a byzantine mix of hacks, counter-intuitive configuration options and other messes that require you to spend half a day trying to figure out how a given part of the system works before you can even hope to fix it? If the latter, why are you still using such a system?
Do you spend 8 hours a day fighting fires and/or doing dull things by rote? Why? The whole point of computers is to make tedious jobs quick and painless, why aren't you taking advantage of this?
As someone with real experience of working in a school, please let me say this:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
No chance.
I'm not exactly clear what Schwarzenegger is trying to achieve here. Publishers will still charge per-copy, and probably not drastically less for the electronic copy versus the dead tree copy. Even if they do, you've got to budget to buy every child a kindle (or similar device) and budget to replace a certain number of these per year as they wear out or get damaged.
Unless the plan is to eliminate the concept of books altogether and use teaching material delivered over the school network - no, what about homework?
OK, deliver the teaching material online?
You think the publisher is going to charge significantly less for the material if it's delivered online? The cost of textbooks is high largely because they take a lot of time to write, you need a certain number of skills to get a complex subject across effectively and you don't have anything like the economies of scale seen in the latest John Grisham so if you need to pay the author $X, you have fewer customers to spread that $X between.
None of these things change with using a different distribution model.
OK, how about skip textbooks altogether and have the teachers put together their own material based on what they can find online? Good luck with that. You'd be doubling the average teachers' workload overnight. Not the way to win friends and influence people, particularly heavily unionised people.
A lot of higher level DSLRs are moving towards SD and Apple have always been the kind of company that would support the upcoming standard at the expense of totally ignoring the "legacy" (even if it's a good few years from being truly legacy).
In the real world, if you want freedom to do as you please you have to pay for it yourself.
In a manner of speaking, the OP is.
But it's a mite different here.
I'd say the lesson is that "nobody cares about your problem unless you can make it theirs as well". If they set up policies which you disagree with, that's your problem.
If you can get a significant proportion of the media to investigate this and publish it, suddenly it's their problem as well.
The client page says exactly what the client will do when it's installed. Nothing about sniffing traffic, scanning your hard drives, etc. Perhaps you could voice your concern to the HelpDesk or network engineers?
I don't know about the university where the OP is, but when I went to uni every question to anyone with any real understanding - and their replies, and any subsequent questions - had to be filtered through the helpdesk. Think chinese whispers.
If you were lucky the person on the helpdesk had a clue what they were talking about and could be relied upon to write down what you said more-or-less verbatim. If you were unlucky....
Well, IANACIIAPS, but I'd just have someone in the next room trying every password you give. The time between you giving the password and it becoming evident that you are lying would be measured in seconds.
XP is a 9 year old OS. Even auto makers are only required to support the parts for their cars for 7 years. At what point isn't it an anti-trust violation to want to get rid of an aging product? 15 years? 30?
There isn't a single Linux vendor that supports a 9 year old version of Linux without paid support, and Apple certainly doesn't support 9 year old versions of MacOS either.
If a company which holds 20% of the market discontinues a product which is still responsible for 80% of their sales, the company is in trouble.
If a company which holds 94% of the market discontinues a product which is still responsible for 80% of their sales, the market is in trouble.
They should arrest/execute citizens before a crime occurs. That should be the goal.
Don't joke.
Our Beloved Leaders have already considered profiling people for possible criminal tendencies and locking them up in advance of them committing any crime.
You can bet this thing will entirely operate on the presumption that every PC runs windows.
You are assuming that Linux is some sooper sekrit thing that only you and a few others know about - and that nobody in the IT forensics business is even remotely aware that it exists, much less that it uses different filesystems.
Hint: The IT forensics trade is mostly comprised of significantly more tech-savvy people than your average police station.
Before people pounce on him like the lynchmob this website is, it's rarely the people in IT who want to stay with windows. It's almost always the PHB or CEO who has been sold on it because he went to a big conference and they had a Windows 7 booth that gave him a free light up pen. I want to move to Linux in the company I work for, but people in the various departments will always drag their feet and be resistant to it.
All of which is well and good, but have you actually analysed business needs lately? Most businesses have all sorts of boring admin needs which nobody writing free software would be even remotely likely to find interesting - and nobody writing commercial software could justify the man-hours for the return.
I can give you a few cases in hand:
I defy you to find me a payroll and accounts package suitable for the small business which runs on Linux. There exist legacy systems which only need a terminal emulator to use - but they're unusual these days unless they're something which was bought years ago.
There exist web applications which you can run on your own systems (which as often as not require SQL Server and Windows Server on the backend anyhow) but these tend to be geared up for huge businesses.
But a simple basic desktop app which deals with these things under Linux - no such thing.
OK, how about management? Yes I know Active Directory is fundamentally LDAP at its core and you can authenticate a Linux system against LDAP quite easily. But OpenLDAP is an example of the worst of open source - not only is it about 12 years behind the likes of Active Directory, anyone pointing out missing features is generally pointed to papers that someone has written which basically say "Even though every other directory product out there implements feature X with some degree of success, it's a fundamentally bad idea because of problem Y and so it won't be going into OpenLDAP". (Yes, some bugger's actually gone out and written a white paper saying exactly that when discussing multi-master replication. A similar answer is given when anyone asks about server-side sorting of results).
Even when you get over the backend issues, Active Directory can be so much more than just a user account repository. Granted, more-or-less anything you can do in AD you can somehow do in Linux but you have to reinvent the wheel because guess what? Nobody's put together a half-competent framework which deals with the management side and doesn't require you to spend a fortnight just figuring out how to get started with it.
I think this depends on the country in question's laws.
I do recall hearing about a country which decided that all future laws would be drafted in clear English in their entirety - but I can't recall what country this was and I'm having trouble finding it so I've no idea how successful this was.
It was the cancer treatment machines I was referring to. They generally produce X-rays as well, albeit at a substantially higher power than the ones used for diagnostic purposes.
Have to be pretty f*cking old radiology equipment, as the last cobalt machines probably went out of production something like 30 years ago. Today they generate X-rays electrically.
Of course you can. Rule #1: Follow the intent, not the letter, And then make the intent as clear as humanly possible.
What a good idea.
Which is exactly why any half-decent judge interprets according to the spirit of the law.
Where a problem occurs is when the spirit isn't clear but the letter is - and the most obvious interpretation of the letter is pretty bad.
Myself, I think laws should have something akin to the preamble section in the GPL - a short paragraph which explains in clear English exactly what the law hopes (and doesn't hope) to achieve - in order to aid understanding the spirit.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding was that windows would ship with a "browser download tool" that would let you select a browser during the OS install. Kind of how they let you choose a search engine for IE now.
Hmmm. I wonder what it will default to?
I also wonder how many steps you'll have to follow if you want to use a non-default option?
Who wants to bet they'll include some sort of "add/remove Windows components directly from the Microsoft website" (a la virtually any Linux distribution you care to name) tool which will happily install IE?
And I would not be even remotely surprised if the first thing Windows 7 EU edition does when you first boot it is run this tool and offer to download IE.
Yes it is. You use an advanced mechanism that isn't very popular these days, called "cash".
The problem with any serious quantity of cash - certainly in the UK where this fraud took place - is that people start to ask awkward questions. (In fact, at banks they're legally obliged to start asking awkward questions)
Which is not to say there aren't other ways to launder money. Buy a car, insure it then drive it into the wall and abracadabra! You don't have £30,000 in unmarked notes which raises eyebrows. You've got a cheque for £20,000 from an insurance company. Yes you've lost £10,000 but you always lose a fair bit when laundering money.
All of which is well and good, but does the local paper publish a banner headline on the front page saying "OUR APOLOGIES: THIS PERSON IS INNOCENT OF ANY WRONGDOING"?
Because I bet you anything you like they pounced on the original OMG paedophiles!!111 story.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it is very unusual - if not unheard of - for a police officer to suffer any consequences for over-zealous law enforcement as long as they themselves don't do anything too obviously illegal in the process.
Even if the "over-zealous law enforcement" is so far over the horizon into cloud cuckoo land that even the Daily Mail is reporting it in mild disbelief.
I'm going to be modded to Hell for saying this, so I just hope by some sheer fluke the OP reads it.
Everyone so far has made a few assumptions which I'm not going to. Specifically, they've assumed that the OP is getting all this grief for no good reason. I'm not. I'm going to ask a few questions which may be hard to answer honestly - but I'm asking them because I've been a sysadmin for years and I've seen colleagues make exactly these mistakes.
Be honest with yourself. Do your colleagues/customers (they're not users. Drug dealers have users) have a genuine reason to hate you?
By which I mean - do the systems you are responsible for work? Has there been downtime over the course of the last week|month|quarter? If the downtime was caused by someone doing something wrong, why is it your system reacts to this by breaking rather than failing gracefully? Can you fix it so that if the same "wrong" thing is done again, the worst that happens is an error message?
Do you make changes to live systems during the working day without first establishing that these changes will work? Do you suffer outages when you do this? Stop doing it. Set up a test network which replicates the live environment as closely as possible, make your changes there and only when you're happy do you make these changes in the live environment.
Can you write clearly and fluently in the language most of your colleagues use? Can you avoid jargon and explain things in lay terms? Do you write emails which say "We have identified an ongoing issue with the Pewlett Hackard SuperPhaser 3100 MegaTron Mk. 3 Printer which is causing a number of problems affecting reliability and throughput and are working with our supplier and partners to effect an appropriate solution" or do they say "The printer at the end of the corridor is broken, an engineer is expected within the next 24 hours"?
Do you fully understand the systems you're responsible for? Or are they a byzantine mix of hacks, counter-intuitive configuration options and other messes that require you to spend half a day trying to figure out how a given part of the system works before you can even hope to fix it? If the latter, why are you still using such a system?
Do you spend 8 hours a day fighting fires and/or doing dull things by rote? Why? The whole point of computers is to make tedious jobs quick and painless, why aren't you taking advantage of this?
By now you should have the idea. Good luck.
I've never seen a book crash.
I've never seen a book show a mysterious error message, or ask me to contact my administrator.
I've never seen a computer I could replace for under £20.
I've read - hell, I own - books older than the oldest personal computer in history. They still work.
I've seen plenty of books get wet, but once they're dry they're fine. Even if the pages are a little stiff.
I've never seen a book come delivered on the understanding I don't pass it on to anyone else once I'm done with it.
I've never seen a book which would stop working as soon as there was a power cut.
Nah, this is a silly idea. Technology for its' own sake is seldom the best answer.
As someone with real experience of working in a school, please let me say this:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
No chance.
I'm not exactly clear what Schwarzenegger is trying to achieve here. Publishers will still charge per-copy, and probably not drastically less for the electronic copy versus the dead tree copy. Even if they do, you've got to budget to buy every child a kindle (or similar device) and budget to replace a certain number of these per year as they wear out or get damaged.
Unless the plan is to eliminate the concept of books altogether and use teaching material delivered over the school network - no, what about homework?
OK, deliver the teaching material online?
You think the publisher is going to charge significantly less for the material if it's delivered online? The cost of textbooks is high largely because they take a lot of time to write, you need a certain number of skills to get a complex subject across effectively and you don't have anything like the economies of scale seen in the latest John Grisham so if you need to pay the author $X, you have fewer customers to spread that $X between.
None of these things change with using a different distribution model.
OK, how about skip textbooks altogether and have the teachers put together their own material based on what they can find online? Good luck with that. You'd be doubling the average teachers' workload overnight. Not the way to win friends and influence people, particularly heavily unionised people.
A lot of higher level DSLRs are moving towards SD and Apple have always been the kind of company that would support the upcoming standard at the expense of totally ignoring the "legacy" (even if it's a good few years from being truly legacy).
Yes.
http://theappleblog.com/2005/09/20/redmond-start-your-photocopiers/
Apologies, you're right, I had gone off track.
However, regarding things that aren't supposed to happen in the Free World, I refer you to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/26/mi5-new-torture-allegations
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/mi5-torture-allegations-pakistan
Then you buy the smallest, cheapest TV package they provide and don't actually use it for anything you might want to timeshift.
In the real world, if you want freedom to do as you please you have to pay for it yourself.
In a manner of speaking, the OP is.
But it's a mite different here.
I'd say the lesson is that "nobody cares about your problem unless you can make it theirs as well". If they set up policies which you disagree with, that's your problem.
If you can get a significant proportion of the media to investigate this and publish it, suddenly it's their problem as well.
All your steps are quite unnecessary. He is an "other" and he owns his intellecual property through operation of copyright law.
Plenty of universities have various legal requirements concerning IP as a condition of your studying there.
Mine was "you retain copyright but the university is automatically entitled to a royalty free license of anything you produce".
YMMV.
The client page says exactly what the client will do when it's installed. Nothing about sniffing traffic, scanning your hard drives, etc. Perhaps you could voice your concern to the HelpDesk or network engineers?
I don't know about the university where the OP is, but when I went to uni every question to anyone with any real understanding - and their replies, and any subsequent questions - had to be filtered through the helpdesk. Think chinese whispers.
If you were lucky the person on the helpdesk had a clue what they were talking about and could be relied upon to write down what you said more-or-less verbatim. If you were unlucky....
Well, IANACIIAPS, but I'd just have someone in the next room trying every password you give. The time between you giving the password and it becoming evident that you are lying would be measured in seconds.
XP is a 9 year old OS. Even auto makers are only required to support the parts for their cars for 7 years. At what point isn't it an anti-trust violation to want to get rid of an aging product? 15 years? 30?
There isn't a single Linux vendor that supports a 9 year old version of Linux without paid support, and Apple certainly doesn't support 9 year old versions of MacOS either.
If a company which holds 20% of the market discontinues a product which is still responsible for 80% of their sales, the company is in trouble.
If a company which holds 94% of the market discontinues a product which is still responsible for 80% of their sales, the market is in trouble.
They should arrest/execute citizens before a crime occurs. That should be the goal.
Don't joke.
Our Beloved Leaders have already considered profiling people for possible criminal tendencies and locking them up in advance of them committing any crime.
...as if there weren't enough already.
You can bet this thing will entirely operate on the presumption that every PC runs windows.
You are assuming that Linux is some sooper sekrit thing that only you and a few others know about - and that nobody in the IT forensics business is even remotely aware that it exists, much less that it uses different filesystems.
Hint: The IT forensics trade is mostly comprised of significantly more tech-savvy people than your average police station.
While I suspect they probably wouldn't use the wrench in the UK - yet - I still think this bears some serious consideration:
http://xkcd.com/538/
Before people pounce on him like the lynchmob this website is, it's rarely the people in IT who want to stay with windows. It's almost always the PHB or CEO who has been sold on it because he went to a big conference and they had a Windows 7 booth that gave him a free light up pen. I want to move to Linux in the company I work for, but people in the various departments will always drag their feet and be resistant to it.
All of which is well and good, but have you actually analysed business needs lately? Most businesses have all sorts of boring admin needs which nobody writing free software would be even remotely likely to find interesting - and nobody writing commercial software could justify the man-hours for the return.
I can give you a few cases in hand:
I defy you to find me a payroll and accounts package suitable for the small business which runs on Linux. There exist legacy systems which only need a terminal emulator to use - but they're unusual these days unless they're something which was bought years ago.
There exist web applications which you can run on your own systems (which as often as not require SQL Server and Windows Server on the backend anyhow) but these tend to be geared up for huge businesses.
But a simple basic desktop app which deals with these things under Linux - no such thing.
OK, how about management? Yes I know Active Directory is fundamentally LDAP at its core and you can authenticate a Linux system against LDAP quite easily. But OpenLDAP is an example of the worst of open source - not only is it about 12 years behind the likes of Active Directory, anyone pointing out missing features is generally pointed to papers that someone has written which basically say "Even though every other directory product out there implements feature X with some degree of success, it's a fundamentally bad idea because of problem Y and so it won't be going into OpenLDAP". (Yes, some bugger's actually gone out and written a white paper saying exactly that when discussing multi-master replication. A similar answer is given when anyone asks about server-side sorting of results).
Even when you get over the backend issues, Active Directory can be so much more than just a user account repository. Granted, more-or-less anything you can do in AD you can somehow do in Linux but you have to reinvent the wheel because guess what? Nobody's put together a half-competent framework which deals with the management side and doesn't require you to spend a fortnight just figuring out how to get started with it.
I think this depends on the country in question's laws.
I do recall hearing about a country which decided that all future laws would be drafted in clear English in their entirety - but I can't recall what country this was and I'm having trouble finding it so I've no idea how successful this was.
It was the cancer treatment machines I was referring to. They generally produce X-rays as well, albeit at a substantially higher power than the ones used for diagnostic purposes.
Have to be pretty f*cking old radiology equipment, as the last cobalt machines probably went out of production something like 30 years ago. Today they generate X-rays electrically.
Of course you can. Rule #1: Follow the intent, not the letter, And then make the intent as clear as humanly possible.
What a good idea.
Which is exactly why any half-decent judge interprets according to the spirit of the law.
Where a problem occurs is when the spirit isn't clear but the letter is - and the most obvious interpretation of the letter is pretty bad.
Myself, I think laws should have something akin to the preamble section in the GPL - a short paragraph which explains in clear English exactly what the law hopes (and doesn't hope) to achieve - in order to aid understanding the spirit.