Then I can only assume you haven't looked at the terms of the licenses very closely.
The corporate Windows site licenses are "upgrade only" - you can't use them against PCs which don't ship with OEM Windows.
I think your confusing the licenses from the software assurance program with site licenses from open value and similar programs. In fact, the open value licenses give or come with a PUR agreement that allows the use of any of the covered products on any machine.
I had to check with a site I was dealing with today, their licensing is the way I described so I called our MS rep and he assured me that we had a site license that would include custom builds as long as we didn't go over out "limit".
I can only assume that we are in different regions and the license varies by region.
Page 54 on the Microsoft Volume Licensing Reference Guide:
"In Volume Licensing, the desktop PC operating system is an "upgrade license". You may only upgrade devices for which you have already licensed a "qualifying operating system". A list of "qualifying operating systems that qualify for an upgrade is contained in the Product List, which can be found at.... If you acquire software assurance, you have the right to use "Windows Vista Enterprise Edition" on the device instead of Windows Vista Business. This also permits you to run up to four additional copies or instances on the device".
Don't misunderstand; I'm not saying Linux is bad. I'm saying that Linux, as a platform, does not meet most people's needs. It is cool, it is fun, and I wish it well. But that isn't enough to make it a viable platform for the sectors in which it hasn't already taken root. Scoff if you will, but business owners most certainly do want "someone to blame." Hell, even on my computer, I like having someone to blame (it's all Apple's fault these days!). That's business, like it or not.
I certainly hope you never have to find a job outside of your comfort zone. Your head might just asplode.
"Someone to blame" is a bad description, because as soon as you use it you'll get the peanut gallery back in saying "Have you read any EULAs lately?".
What they really mean is "Someone to call". And businesses will decide whether they stick with a given system based on three things:
1. Value. This does not mean "free of charge", it means "We consider the charge reasonable for what we want the product to do".
2. Quality/suitability of the product (this doesn't just mean "does it churn out the right numbers?", it means "does it churn out the right numbers without leaving my staff wishing they'd chosen an alternative career path?").
3. Quality of the support (ie. the "Someone to call"; RedHat may support the core OS but they won't support the third-party application which the business depends on).
Once you get outside the Windows/Office monopoly and start looking at business software which just uses Windows as its platform, there's a fairly reasonable free market out there. Most of which runs exclusively on Windows.
The funny thing is, every company I have seen with a corporate license (especially MS) purchases Dell's or HP's that already come with the licenses.
This is a reason why you used to find OEM licenses for sale all over the place. It would seem that the 70% savings would be offset or negated quite a bit by that.
Then I can only assume you haven't looked at the terms of the licenses very closely.
The corporate Windows site licenses are "upgrade only" - you can't use them against PCs which don't ship with OEM Windows.
Similarly, the licensing terms of OEM versions of Windows explicitly forbid using one as the base of an image for mass deployment (unless, presumably, you are the OEM).
Oh yes, one thing I almost forgot. It is commonplace to find that the OEM builds aren't actually terribly good. Think "wireless drivers which supply their own GUI which remove much of the functionality of the native Windows GUI", think "network drivers which sort-of work and sort-of don't", think "just as much crapware as the consumer line". I have on my task list a bunch of now-complete issues which all stemmed from "relying on the OEM windows build". As soon as we started using our own build, 90% of these issues evaporated.
Yep... sometimes he trolls just to troll. On one post he proclaimed...
Besides, I can make my computer immune to viruses. Just watch. Pop! Did you see that? I unplugged my network cable.
The luser wretches, "Oh but that makes your computer useless!" Yeah, well so does putting Linux on it. What's your point?
This was his answer on the question about how Windows was more prone to hacking and viruses whereas Linux was more secure. He does make some goods points but then he loses his audience by being a troll like this.
You can't have it both ways. If you want an audience to respect what you have to say, you can't turn around the next second and just be emotionally illogical and say 'because I say so'.
Most modern "viruses" (read: trojans) don't do anything which requires Local Admin privileges in Windows - and hence, Linux equivalents wouldn't need root access. Linux is only one common email program which chmod 700's and executes attachments which look like they're executable away from being just as much of a malware breeding ground.
What makes Windows and OSX so popular are applications that are commercially supported. That's it. Look no further. Without applications, your OS, no matter how fancy, is useless. I rememeber when I got my first computer, I turned it on to see C:\>. It was useless to me without apps that I could use (I was also introduced to warez that day).
As soon as a post like this appears on/., it's almost guaranteed you'll have a dozen or more replies saying "But Linux has all the packages you could ever need! Just look at any package manager!!!oneoneone" so I'll chime in with what I perceive as being a bit of clarification.
As far as the end user is concerned, provided they're not a hardcore gamer this is quite correct.
But a lot of people own PCs for reasons other than just the sake of owning a computer - and these reasons are quite often business related. Be it "one PC in a business which employs 3 people", "30 PCs in a business which employs 30 people" or "1000 PCs in a business that employs 1000 people", the problem is the same.
Linux apps which do the boring stuff aren't there. The payroll, accounting and small business automation systems which may never sell more than 1000 copies don't exist. Or if they do, they're seldom well maintained examples of everything that can go right with F/OSS. Hell, virtually every single Exchange alternative out there (and today there are many) appears to either work out just as expensive as Exchange or to have completely missed the point regarding "100% full interoperability with Outlook or a client on a similar par".
Consider the business owner's perspective. They want a tool to help them do a job, not a religion. Therefore, reasons which are badly thought out at best (eg. "Anyone can support it!" - right, so who's this "anyone" and how come the Yellow Pages isn't full of such "anyones" offering their services because it sure is for Windows systems?) to downright ludicrous ("You can always pay someone to add the extra functionality!" - right, so my business which turns over just enough money to keep a couple of people employed and is much the same as 100 others in terms of IT requirements has to waste months agreeing requirements with an expensive software developer to get a single system which when all is said and done won't be any better than something off the shelf and will cost a small fortune in both time and cash for added functionality in the future, with the added bonus that if this individual developer disappears off the face of the Earth shortly before something goes wrong, I'm totally screwed?) are plain silly.
Similarly, arguments like "We can't implement 100% interoperability with Exchange because it's proprietary" won't result in a small IT consultancy saying "Ah, poor you. Never mind, I'll just tell my clients that they can't have the functionality". They'll result in the small consultancy saying "I'd like to buy a copy of Windows Small Business Server please".
It interests me when the geek argues that less information - less situational awareness is better.
I have been caught in rush hour traffic in Buffalo New York when visibility has shrunk to nothing in fog and snow and ice ---sandwiched between drivers who had their own notion of what was safe.
Depends entirely on the situation. There have been experiments in a number of European city centres where all the warning signs, traffic lights etc. were removed.
The result was that drivers suddenly found themselves forced to pay attention to the road. Vehicles started moving more slowly and there were fewer accidents. There was also a lot less of the stop-start traffic you get with traffic lights, with the result that on average vehicles were able to reach their destination much quicker.
FWIW, driving in thick fog is hard. Just because the sales rep with his wankermobile has the fancy windscreen which increases contrast so much that he hardly even knows it's foggy doesn't mean everyone else on the road does. I can easily see this kind of situation leading to accidents - and ironically they'd be caused by the person who can see better, taking risks that nobody else would.
Or the sheer fact that it is designed "...for older drivers with vision problems".
WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING DRIVING? I'm one of those people who think moving a large heavy object at relatively high speeds around other objects and PEOPLE is a potential THREAT and ought to be considered a privilege.
I agree with you, but for different reasons.
It's not just basic vision problems that are the issue. To a great extent, long/short sightedness can be corrected with glasses, cataracts can be corrected with surgery and nobody says "what if your glasses fall off when you're driving?"
Vision problems which can't easily be solved by machine (eg. peripheral vision) and other issues associated with old age (eg. reaction time) are, however, a big deal. And to be honest, I suspect that by the time we have machines which can reliably solve these problems for older drivers we'll have self-driving cars where you just punch in where you want to go on a map.
This is one major reason to buy retail and not a corporate license.
The only thing that allows them to do this is your consent to inspection.
The risk of an inspection will be considered sufficiently negligible as to be worth it to most businesses, particularly considering that the corporate licensing can easily knock 70% off the price.
Yes but if _one_ NIC can bring the entire system down what other single failures in a component could bring the entire system down? Obviously the system with the malfunctioning NIC can do any number of things that may result in a similar failure mode. Or what happens if the network switch it is attached to fails (I assume they use multiple paths... but if one nic can nuke it all, imagine if a switch went bonkers).
You don't need to bring the entire system down to cause havoc. What if there's a hitherto unknown bug in one of the CPUs which under some very specific set of circumstances causes aircraft altitude to be misreported on the operator's screen? As the GP said, most redundant systems only ensure that the components appear to be broadly working. They seldom check that all the components are doing something sensible.
So Vista, Word, and Google Desktop make truecrypt less viable? Im Shocked I tell you! Shocked.
Please..If you are serious about using truecrypt please tell me that you are savy enough to know how to get around some of these holes. Googledesktop?-aka, I spy on everyone and read your brain desktop? Its like saying my iron has a security hole if someone installs a hardware keylogger on my system. Duh!
When you've wiped the flecks of foam away from your mouth... the whole point of TrueCrypt is it makes encryption easy to use. If the first thing you have to do is go around disabling a whole bunch of things and basically getting very intimate with what applications may be saving things in plaintext, then the authors have failed.
The general thrust of the article is that without an OS (and very possibly hardware) which provides a mechanism for the application to say "I'm security-sensitive, don't let anything copy bits of this data outside" then a 100% reliable encryption application based on the idea of "encrypt a small portion of what you use" cannot exist.
And yet, Linux and BSD run great on a wide variety of hardware. If Mac OS couldn't, that just proves either a) they have some talentless hacks for programmers, or b) they're deliberately making it run badly on non-Apple hardware, which they probably couldn't do if they lost this suit.
Linux and BSD run great on a wide variety of hardware because the people with the power to make it happen want it to. They therefore write and optimise drivers for a wide range of hardware.
Apple are the only company with the power to make it happen with OSX and they have no desire to. They therefore write and optimise drivers for a much smaller range of hardware.
No drivers, and I guarantee any OS will run like a dog if it runs at all.
Archival. Once it's archived you can forget about it. For example, your local library doesn't convert all that old microfilm just because it can. It would only do it to put it onto a more stable storage medium.
At least until the technology changes so much that you can no longer buy anything that will read it, cf. the BBC's Doomsday project:
The team designing Windows needs to lose the "not invented here" mentality.
The reason I think this is that Apple and Ubuntu Linux, while a long way from taking Microsoft's lunch, are being taken more seriously as time goes on. And they have a stellar pace of development compared to Microsoft - partly because they're not afraid to integrate third-party software to achieve a particular feature, be it F/OSS or commercial.
Microsoft, OTOH, are generally much more reticent to do this - and when they do it's usually because they've just bought a company which happened to have a product which met a given need.
Another thing I don't like (though I think it's even less likely to change) is the "you must buy Windows everywhere in order to use relatively basic features" idea - plain LDAP, for instance, isn't supported as an authentication mechanism, though it is in both OS X and Ubuntu. It's Active Directory, Windows NT 4 domain or nothing. Granted, Samba provides NT4 domain capabilities, but it's a long way from a stable release that supports AD domains as a domain controller and AD has been around for coming up to 8 years now.
Similarly, it would be trivial for a company of Microsoft's size to say "Right, you can set up your PC to get all updates from an alternate FTP server in your network, and if you pay us $N/year you can even get your own user ID and password that you can use to mirror our server". But no, they've got to sell you the full WSUS and again we're back to "ah but that requires AD... which requires a Windows domain which requires at least two domain controllers and CALs for all your PCs..."
"So who do I call to confirm that this laptop is stolen?"
The owner is probably the only person that should report it stolen regardless of the software "tracking" it. And how does someone know this laptop is your laptop? Perhaps the serial number (unless it has a large scratch through it). You do file that information with your insurance company, right?
I think the OP meant that this is how s/he imagined the conversation going at the police station; viz. unless and until the software is well known and respected, the fact that you have evidence to suggest where the laptop is is neither here nor there because there's a strong chance that the authorities will refuse to follow up on your evidence because they've got no reason to pay it much heed.
"No implementation of OOXML exists. No implementation of OOXML exists. No implementation of OOXML exists."
Did you understand that? Not even Microsoft has any product which implements the standard. docx, pptx, xlsx - none are compatible with OOXML as approved by ISO.
Even Microsoft has admitted that it will implement ODF before OOXML.
Yes, I understood it. But may I posit that the following paragraph (or something much like it) will appear in sales spiels:
"Microsoft shall be implementing OOXML, an ISO standard, in Office. You'll be able to continue to read your old documents while creating new ones in an ISO standard format".
Microsoft are banking on the assumption that nobody in a government organisation who's obliged to buy something with ISO standard support and has the power to do so will have the good sense to take everything a salesman says with a pinch of salt and run it past suitably qualified experts first. Or if they do, in many cases the "suitably-qualified experts" are likely to be paper MCSEs who'll parrot the Microsoft line quite happily.
There is a whole subsection of the IT industry (and it's not limited to managers) which doesn't read slashdot, doesn't keep their ear to the ground regarding relevant developments and just swallows what the vendor tells them wholesale. You really don't want to meet these people - it's too depressing for words - but I promise you they exist.
As for most things IT, there is a body of standards, fully documented and with free, accessible and royalty-free reference implementations. I am using such an embodiment right now to write this e-mail.
You're not doing a very good job of it - that isn't an email.
That's the kind of glue I meant - an extra device-specific (probably vendor-specific) database. By using a 'commodity' OS that already-written software can be used on...
And assuming the network is closed, allowing anonymous access to query against a SKU and getting the price isn't a risk. You only need to authenticate (with the employee ID/PIN) at the POS terminal to update sales.
The same module could be used at both, assuming the price-checkers and the POS terminals are running Windows. Just code the frontends. The price-checkers have a subset of the functionality, so just disable what is unused...
I should go into the POS business.
I'm sorry, I really don't understand you.
I assume you're talking from the perspective of a PoS system designer starting from a clean slate. In which case there isn't any "already-written" software to use, it's just a matter of choosing your platform. One thing Windows certainly does gain you is a rich, reasonably coherent API for GUI-based systems which is generally reasonably backward-compatible in new versions (which don't tend to come out every 6 months). Few Linux desktop environments can offer this. This, I accept, is a perfectly valid reason to use Windows.
Everything else, however - the standard Unix libraries provide all you need for the basic logic, higher level languages this is even less of an issue, you can get ODBC for Linux, and the idea of writing an application with bits which can be disabled if necessary hardly requires any particular operating system. If the backend is running SQL Server that doesn't mean that the frontend has to be Windows.
During the meeting? No, that probably would have just resulted in that person being fired and no issues with the factory would have been solved. Behind closed doors? That's very likely. Out in the open, not directly to the management, but where they definitely heard it? Lots of people every day.
To be fair, there are more diplomatic ways of getting the same point across directly to managers than announcing it loudly in front of everyone in such a fashion.
However, in many organisations the management has a remarkable ability to not hear what they don't want to hear.
"Discussing out in the open where they can hear it" and "Explicitly telling the manager what the problem is with a followup in email" are two different things.
I can imagine that the server has a SQL table of the names/SKUs/prices/sales/etc, and the registers can run querys against it. It would be easiest to make your devices query the same database - no glue necessary.
Nope, that argument makes no sense at all.
You still need some glue - it's just that the glue isn't being used to keep databases in sync, it's being used to provide a user interface to the database. The user interface still needs to talk to the database and that doesn't happen by magic - either your user interface application needs to know how to connect to the database backend (eg. how does it authenticate?) or there needs to be some sort of abstraction layer (such as ODBC) to eliminate this requirement.
None of this happens automatically just because you're using Windows. However, Windows does provide an ODBC framework builtin.
All these suggestions (Use Linux! Install *BSD! Solaris FTW!) are all well and good, but if/when the system goes down, to whom do you go for support? Hardware caused a crash? Try and track down the kid in a basement that wrote the driver you're using. Some core functionality in the kernel caused a hard lock? Update to the latest kernel and hope for the best (Oh, and have to recompile your whole system while you're at it).
With Windows, if something goes wrong, you can contact the hardware manufacturer (If it's hardware/driver-related) or Microsoft if it's software related. And if they won't help, you can sue them.
This is an argument which is trotted out by people who:
Have never sued anyone in their lives.
Have no intention of suing anyone, least of all Microsoft.
Believe that if the worst comes to the worst, the process of suing someone is a quick and easy one which is certain to solve the original problem.
Have never read the EULA.
Get some warm feeling of security from paying someone money to solve a problem in the belief that this automatically guarantees them a high quality solution to the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your confusing the licenses from the software assurance program with site licenses from open value and similar programs. In fact, the open value licenses give or come with a PUR agreement that allows the use of any of the covered products on any machine.
I had to check with a site I was dealing with today, their licensing is the way I described so I called our MS rep and he assured me that we had a site license that would include custom builds as long as we didn't go over out "limit".
I can only assume that we are in different regions and the license varies by region.
Page 54 on the Microsoft Volume Licensing Reference Guide:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/7/0/a70853c1-a783-4d48-a7ad-f404abdb1e7d/Microsoft_Volume_Licensing_Reference_Guide.pdf
states:
"In Volume Licensing, the desktop PC operating system is an "upgrade license". You may only upgrade devices for which you have already licensed a "qualifying operating system". A list of "qualifying operating systems that qualify for an upgrade is contained in the Product List, which can be found at .... If you acquire software assurance, you have the right to use "Windows Vista Enterprise Edition" on the device instead of Windows Vista Business. This also permits you to run up to four additional copies or instances on the device".
Don't misunderstand; I'm not saying Linux is bad. I'm saying that Linux, as a platform, does not meet most people's needs. It is cool, it is fun, and I wish it well. But that isn't enough to make it a viable platform for the sectors in which it hasn't already taken root. Scoff if you will, but business owners most certainly do want "someone to blame." Hell, even on my computer, I like having someone to blame (it's all Apple's fault these days!). That's business, like it or not.
I certainly hope you never have to find a job outside of your comfort zone. Your head might just asplode.
"Someone to blame" is a bad description, because as soon as you use it you'll get the peanut gallery back in saying "Have you read any EULAs lately?".
What they really mean is "Someone to call". And businesses will decide whether they stick with a given system based on three things:
1. Value. This does not mean "free of charge", it means "We consider the charge reasonable for what we want the product to do".
2. Quality/suitability of the product (this doesn't just mean "does it churn out the right numbers?", it means "does it churn out the right numbers without leaving my staff wishing they'd chosen an alternative career path?").
3. Quality of the support (ie. the "Someone to call"; RedHat may support the core OS but they won't support the third-party application which the business depends on).
Once you get outside the Windows/Office monopoly and start looking at business software which just uses Windows as its platform, there's a fairly reasonable free market out there. Most of which runs exclusively on Windows.
The funny thing is, every company I have seen with a corporate license (especially MS) purchases Dell's or HP's that already come with the licenses.
This is a reason why you used to find OEM licenses for sale all over the place. It would seem that the 70% savings would be offset or negated quite a bit by that.
Then I can only assume you haven't looked at the terms of the licenses very closely.
The corporate Windows site licenses are "upgrade only" - you can't use them against PCs which don't ship with OEM Windows.
Similarly, the licensing terms of OEM versions of Windows explicitly forbid using one as the base of an image for mass deployment (unless, presumably, you are the OEM).
Oh yes, one thing I almost forgot. It is commonplace to find that the OEM builds aren't actually terribly good. Think "wireless drivers which supply their own GUI which remove much of the functionality of the native Windows GUI", think "network drivers which sort-of work and sort-of don't", think "just as much crapware as the consumer line". I have on my task list a bunch of now-complete issues which all stemmed from "relying on the OEM windows build". As soon as we started using our own build, 90% of these issues evaporated.
Yep... sometimes he trolls just to troll. On one post he proclaimed ...
This was his answer on the question about how Windows was more prone to hacking and viruses whereas Linux was more secure. He does make some goods points but then he loses his audience by being a troll like this.
You can't have it both ways. If you want an audience to respect what you have to say, you can't turn around the next second and just be emotionally illogical and say 'because I say so'.
Most modern "viruses" (read: trojans) don't do anything which requires Local Admin privileges in Windows - and hence, Linux equivalents wouldn't need root access. Linux is only one common email program which chmod 700's and executes attachments which look like they're executable away from being just as much of a malware breeding ground.
What makes Windows and OSX so popular are applications that are commercially supported. That's it. Look no further. Without applications, your OS, no matter how fancy, is useless. I rememeber when I got my first computer, I turned it on to see C:\>. It was useless to me without apps that I could use (I was also introduced to warez that day).
As soon as a post like this appears on /., it's almost guaranteed you'll have a dozen or more replies saying "But Linux has all the packages you could ever need! Just look at any package manager!!!oneoneone" so I'll chime in with what I perceive as being a bit of clarification.
As far as the end user is concerned, provided they're not a hardcore gamer this is quite correct.
But a lot of people own PCs for reasons other than just the sake of owning a computer - and these reasons are quite often business related. Be it "one PC in a business which employs 3 people", "30 PCs in a business which employs 30 people" or "1000 PCs in a business that employs 1000 people", the problem is the same.
Linux apps which do the boring stuff aren't there. The payroll, accounting and small business automation systems which may never sell more than 1000 copies don't exist. Or if they do, they're seldom well maintained examples of everything that can go right with F/OSS. Hell, virtually every single Exchange alternative out there (and today there are many) appears to either work out just as expensive as Exchange or to have completely missed the point regarding "100% full interoperability with Outlook or a client on a similar par".
Consider the business owner's perspective. They want a tool to help them do a job, not a religion. Therefore, reasons which are badly thought out at best (eg. "Anyone can support it!" - right, so who's this "anyone" and how come the Yellow Pages isn't full of such "anyones" offering their services because it sure is for Windows systems?) to downright ludicrous ("You can always pay someone to add the extra functionality!" - right, so my business which turns over just enough money to keep a couple of people employed and is much the same as 100 others in terms of IT requirements has to waste months agreeing requirements with an expensive software developer to get a single system which when all is said and done won't be any better than something off the shelf and will cost a small fortune in both time and cash for added functionality in the future, with the added bonus that if this individual developer disappears off the face of the Earth shortly before something goes wrong, I'm totally screwed?) are plain silly.
Similarly, arguments like "We can't implement 100% interoperability with Exchange because it's proprietary" won't result in a small IT consultancy saying "Ah, poor you. Never mind, I'll just tell my clients that they can't have the functionality". They'll result in the small consultancy saying "I'd like to buy a copy of Windows Small Business Server please".
That's true -- at least China doesn't have 5 million security cameras. Which is the free country again?
Do you need 5 million security cameras when you can rely on good old-fashioned human intelligence?
Do you wish to pay your monthly AT&T subscription in:
- American dollars
- Zimbabwean dollars
- Loaves of bread
If they do the price conversion the same way that most US companies convert between US$ and £Sterling, then I'd recommend Zimbabwean dollars.
It's not rare in the UK either. Take a very good look at those mobile contracts.
I did.
That's how I got out of an 18 month contract after only 4 months and got to keep the phone.
I think it came as a bit of a surprise to my billing provider when I effectively pointed out that the contract worked both ways.
It interests me when the geek argues that less information - less situational awareness is better.
I have been caught in rush hour traffic in Buffalo New York when visibility has shrunk to nothing in fog and snow and ice ---sandwiched between drivers who had their own notion of what was safe.
Depends entirely on the situation. There have been experiments in a number of European city centres where all the warning signs, traffic lights etc. were removed.
The result was that drivers suddenly found themselves forced to pay attention to the road. Vehicles started moving more slowly and there were fewer accidents. There was also a lot less of the stop-start traffic you get with traffic lights, with the result that on average vehicles were able to reach their destination much quicker.
FWIW, driving in thick fog is hard. Just because the sales rep with his wankermobile has the fancy windscreen which increases contrast so much that he hardly even knows it's foggy doesn't mean everyone else on the road does. I can easily see this kind of situation leading to accidents - and ironically they'd be caused by the person who can see better, taking risks that nobody else would.
Or the sheer fact that it is designed "...for older drivers with vision problems".
WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING DRIVING? I'm one of those people who think moving a large heavy object at relatively high speeds around other objects and PEOPLE is a potential THREAT and ought to be considered a privilege.
I agree with you, but for different reasons.
It's not just basic vision problems that are the issue. To a great extent, long/short sightedness can be corrected with glasses, cataracts can be corrected with surgery and nobody says "what if your glasses fall off when you're driving?"
Vision problems which can't easily be solved by machine (eg. peripheral vision) and other issues associated with old age (eg. reaction time) are, however, a big deal. And to be honest, I suspect that by the time we have machines which can reliably solve these problems for older drivers we'll have self-driving cars where you just punch in where you want to go on a map.
This is one major reason to buy retail and not a corporate license.
The only thing that allows them to do this is your consent to inspection.
The risk of an inspection will be considered sufficiently negligible as to be worth it to most businesses, particularly considering that the corporate licensing can easily knock 70% off the price.
You'd think a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would have invented the geiger counter.
Assuming, of course, that nuclear fuel exists on their home planet.
Yes but if _one_ NIC can bring the entire system down what other single failures in a component could bring the entire system down? Obviously the system with the malfunctioning NIC can do any number of things that may result in a similar failure mode. Or what happens if the network switch it is attached to fails (I assume they use multiple paths... but if one nic can nuke it all, imagine if a switch went bonkers).
You don't need to bring the entire system down to cause havoc. What if there's a hitherto unknown bug in one of the CPUs which under some very specific set of circumstances causes aircraft altitude to be misreported on the operator's screen? As the GP said, most redundant systems only ensure that the components appear to be broadly working. They seldom check that all the components are doing something sensible.
I believe there's also a portable version of TrueCrypt that can be used that leaves no traces on the OS install once you're finished.
I'm pretty sure Windows keeps records of what files you've accessed even if they're on a removeable drive.
The presence of such data means the plausible deniability is blown. This is pretty much the point of the article.
So Vista, Word, and Google Desktop make truecrypt less viable? Im Shocked I tell you! Shocked. Please..If you are serious about using truecrypt please tell me that you are savy enough to know how to get around some of these holes. Googledesktop?-aka, I spy on everyone and read your brain desktop? Its like saying my iron has a security hole if someone installs a hardware keylogger on my system. Duh!
When you've wiped the flecks of foam away from your mouth... the whole point of TrueCrypt is it makes encryption easy to use. If the first thing you have to do is go around disabling a whole bunch of things and basically getting very intimate with what applications may be saving things in plaintext, then the authors have failed.
The general thrust of the article is that without an OS (and very possibly hardware) which provides a mechanism for the application to say "I'm security-sensitive, don't let anything copy bits of this data outside" then a 100% reliable encryption application based on the idea of "encrypt a small portion of what you use" cannot exist.
And yet, Linux and BSD run great on a wide variety of hardware. If Mac OS couldn't, that just proves either a) they have some talentless hacks for programmers, or b) they're deliberately making it run badly on non-Apple hardware, which they probably couldn't do if they lost this suit.
Linux and BSD run great on a wide variety of hardware because the people with the power to make it happen want it to. They therefore write and optimise drivers for a wide range of hardware.
Apple are the only company with the power to make it happen with OSX and they have no desire to. They therefore write and optimise drivers for a much smaller range of hardware.
No drivers, and I guarantee any OS will run like a dog if it runs at all.
Archival. Once it's archived you can forget about it. For example, your local library doesn't convert all that old microfilm just because it can. It would only do it to put it onto a more stable storage medium.
At least until the technology changes so much that you can no longer buy anything that will read it, cf. the BBC's Doomsday project:
http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?newsid=937
The team designing Windows needs to lose the "not invented here" mentality.
The reason I think this is that Apple and Ubuntu Linux, while a long way from taking Microsoft's lunch, are being taken more seriously as time goes on. And they have a stellar pace of development compared to Microsoft - partly because they're not afraid to integrate third-party software to achieve a particular feature, be it F/OSS or commercial.
Microsoft, OTOH, are generally much more reticent to do this - and when they do it's usually because they've just bought a company which happened to have a product which met a given need.
Another thing I don't like (though I think it's even less likely to change) is the "you must buy Windows everywhere in order to use relatively basic features" idea - plain LDAP, for instance, isn't supported as an authentication mechanism, though it is in both OS X and Ubuntu. It's Active Directory, Windows NT 4 domain or nothing. Granted, Samba provides NT4 domain capabilities, but it's a long way from a stable release that supports AD domains as a domain controller and AD has been around for coming up to 8 years now.
Similarly, it would be trivial for a company of Microsoft's size to say "Right, you can set up your PC to get all updates from an alternate FTP server in your network, and if you pay us $N/year you can even get your own user ID and password that you can use to mirror our server". But no, they've got to sell you the full WSUS and again we're back to "ah but that requires AD... which requires a Windows domain which requires at least two domain controllers and CALs for all your PCs..."
"So who do I call to confirm that this laptop is stolen?"
The owner is probably the only person that should report it stolen regardless of the software "tracking" it. And how does someone know this laptop is your laptop? Perhaps the serial number (unless it has a large scratch through it). You do file that information with your insurance company, right?
I think the OP meant that this is how s/he imagined the conversation going at the police station; viz. unless and until the software is well known and respected, the fact that you have evidence to suggest where the laptop is is neither here nor there because there's a strong chance that the authorities will refuse to follow up on your evidence because they've got no reason to pay it much heed.
Repeat after me:
"No implementation of OOXML exists. No implementation of OOXML exists. No implementation of OOXML exists."
Did you understand that? Not even Microsoft has any product which implements the standard. docx, pptx, xlsx - none are compatible with OOXML as approved by ISO.
Even Microsoft has admitted that it will implement ODF before OOXML.
Yes, I understood it. But may I posit that the following paragraph (or something much like it) will appear in sales spiels:
"Microsoft shall be implementing OOXML, an ISO standard, in Office. You'll be able to continue to read your old documents while creating new ones in an ISO standard format".
Microsoft are banking on the assumption that nobody in a government organisation who's obliged to buy something with ISO standard support and has the power to do so will have the good sense to take everything a salesman says with a pinch of salt and run it past suitably qualified experts first. Or if they do, in many cases the "suitably-qualified experts" are likely to be paper MCSEs who'll parrot the Microsoft line quite happily.
There is a whole subsection of the IT industry (and it's not limited to managers) which doesn't read slashdot, doesn't keep their ear to the ground regarding relevant developments and just swallows what the vendor tells them wholesale. You really don't want to meet these people - it's too depressing for words - but I promise you they exist.
As for most things IT, there is a body of standards, fully documented and with free, accessible and royalty-free reference implementations. I am using such an embodiment right now to write this e-mail.
You're not doing a very good job of it - that isn't an email.
That's the kind of glue I meant - an extra device-specific (probably vendor-specific) database. By using a 'commodity' OS that already-written software can be used on...
And assuming the network is closed, allowing anonymous access to query against a SKU and getting the price isn't a risk. You only need to authenticate (with the employee ID/PIN) at the POS terminal to update sales.
The same module could be used at both, assuming the price-checkers and the POS terminals are running Windows. Just code the frontends. The price-checkers have a subset of the functionality, so just disable what is unused...
I should go into the POS business.
I'm sorry, I really don't understand you.
I assume you're talking from the perspective of a PoS system designer starting from a clean slate. In which case there isn't any "already-written" software to use, it's just a matter of choosing your platform. One thing Windows certainly does gain you is a rich, reasonably coherent API for GUI-based systems which is generally reasonably backward-compatible in new versions (which don't tend to come out every 6 months). Few Linux desktop environments can offer this. This, I accept, is a perfectly valid reason to use Windows.
Everything else, however - the standard Unix libraries provide all you need for the basic logic, higher level languages this is even less of an issue, you can get ODBC for Linux, and the idea of writing an application with bits which can be disabled if necessary hardly requires any particular operating system. If the backend is running SQL Server that doesn't mean that the frontend has to be Windows.
During the meeting? No, that probably would have just resulted in that person being fired and no issues with the factory would have been solved. Behind closed doors? That's very likely. Out in the open, not directly to the management, but where they definitely heard it? Lots of people every day.
To be fair, there are more diplomatic ways of getting the same point across directly to managers than announcing it loudly in front of everyone in such a fashion.
However, in many organisations the management has a remarkable ability to not hear what they don't want to hear.
"Discussing out in the open where they can hear it" and "Explicitly telling the manager what the problem is with a followup in email" are two different things.
I can imagine that the server has a SQL table of the names/SKUs/prices/sales/etc, and the registers can run querys against it. It would be easiest to make your devices query the same database - no glue necessary.
Nope, that argument makes no sense at all.
You still need some glue - it's just that the glue isn't being used to keep databases in sync, it's being used to provide a user interface to the database. The user interface still needs to talk to the database and that doesn't happen by magic - either your user interface application needs to know how to connect to the database backend (eg. how does it authenticate?) or there needs to be some sort of abstraction layer (such as ODBC) to eliminate this requirement.
None of this happens automatically just because you're using Windows. However, Windows does provide an ODBC framework builtin.
All these suggestions (Use Linux! Install *BSD! Solaris FTW!) are all well and good, but if/when the system goes down, to whom do you go for support? Hardware caused a crash? Try and track down the kid in a basement that wrote the driver you're using. Some core functionality in the kernel caused a hard lock? Update to the latest kernel and hope for the best (Oh, and have to recompile your whole system while you're at it).
With Windows, if something goes wrong, you can contact the hardware manufacturer (If it's hardware/driver-related) or Microsoft if it's software related. And if they won't help, you can sue them.
This is an argument which is trotted out by people who: