Very likely, but Murdoch runs a large company and like most large companies the law is what they say it is unless and until ordered otherwise by a court.
Why not use free where you can and will in the gaps with proprietary software? If you can have a free OS on desktops then you are likely to have a lower risk of having infringing software installed and tracking a smaller number of licences should be easier.
Because it doesn't solve the problem. It reduces the scope of it, sure, but it doesn't solve it by a long way.
Recall I said that 20% of proprietary software I have no idea? Much of that 20% falls under the heading of "Software we can't easily replace with free equivalents".
Read a few EULAs. I defy you to understand them all unless you're a lawyer. There's a reason so many businesses (at least according to the BSA) are using pirated software - it's not dishonesty, it's because the entire system is geared up for you to fail. I strongly doubt the BSA has ever done an audit without coming back with at least one dodgy piece of software.
Ernie Ball Co. had no problems figuring that out after getting stung by a $90,000 BSA audit.
Firstly, that's really getting old. Is there seriously no more recent example?
Secondly, Ernie Ball did have a problem figuring it out. Right at the end of the article there's a paragraph that I think you may have missed:
The company still runs its critical business applications on a Unix server using an accounting package from The SCO Group, formerly Caldera International. A future project will involve moving that system over to Linux, Whitmore said. No mention as to whether or not they eventually migrated it, let alone what they migrated to.
Seen the average EULA lately? I read them - I have to, I'm the IT manager - and I'd estimate that about 60% of the time it's clear whether or not we're covered by purchasing a particular product and using it in a particular way, 20% of the time it's not entirely clear but we're probably OK and 20% of the time I have no freaking idea. Not every piece of software has a license as clear-cut as "One copy per PC".
Ironically, auditing software tends to have the most obscure licensing terms and is frequently next to useless anyway - either because it only goes by what's in the registry for "Add/Remove Programs" (so some dodgy copy of an application which was hacked around and no longer appears in "Add/Remove Programs" won't be caught) or it just gives you a list of every.exe on the system and expects the administrator to make sense of every single one individually. Now, the BSA might be prepared to go through that list if they think they can make some money by doing so but I can't spare the time.
It is for all practical purposes impossible to put hand-on-heart and say "I can guarantee that we're not using a single piece of pirated software" in any significantly sized business today. About the best you can do is say "I'm pretty sure we're not, however if you can provide evidence that I'm wrong I will be happy to look at resolving the issue - either by using an alternative product or buying whatever it is that we're missing".
I would gladly migrate the entire enterprise over to Free (either speech or beer) software tomorrow for every single business need - it would eliminate that worry at a stroke - but this is the real world and half-decent Free accounting and payroll applications are pretty thin on the ground.
My guess is that someone less than honest installed the application in the past with a pirated key and left the company. Their successor ran into trouble with the application and did the sensible thing - called the vendor.
Unfortunately, the PC hardware market is a fickle beast, and manufacturers change the chipset they use at the drop of a hat - sometimes without changing the model number they market the product under.
The best advice I can give you is to buy 3 or 4, then when you've found one which works reliably buy several of them immediately afterwards - with any luck you won't be timing the purchase just as the manufacturer is switching chipsets.
This works fine when you've got 20 people to buy for and you know they'll all need a working USB-Serial adapter. If it's just you, it gets fairly expensive fairly quickly.
But but... didn't Creative have this feature on their cards? I could swear they did, at least in Windows XP.
They do. From my reading of it, Daniel K's work basically re-enables all those features that Creative had disabled - and the reason for disabling was not technical, it was purely a legal/marketing decision.
Lucky sod. I had an ST506 hard disk with a capacity of 20MB. Floppies were formatted to 800K (Acorn ADFS, dont'cha know?), so that's a capacity of around 25 floppies.
No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.
Then your controller is faulty. Part of the SAS specification is that you can plug SATA drives into the controller and they work.
Note that this doesn't work the other way around.
Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.
Just get a USB->Serial adapter. They work pretty well, believe it or not.
I think what you meant to say is "They usually work pretty well, but fail to do so a non-trivial amount of the time - and there's no way of knowing if you've been lucky until such time as you've opened the packaging and tried to use it, by which time it's too late to return".
Disclaimer: My employer develops embedded software - we've got all sorts of USB-Serial adaptors.
You can't get 15Krpm drives in SATA variants, and SAS will allow you to bond up to 4 3Gbps channels together into one bit 12Gbps channel. (Not that it does you much good unless you've got a fairly hefty array as otherwise there's no way a disk subsystem will sustain 3Gbps in random access usage).
It's coming to the point where eSATA is the only realistic solution for external drives. USB2 and FireWire 400 just don't cut it any more, and I haven't seen many systems supporting FireWire 800.
This won't necessarily help much. The transfer rates quoted for SATA are either burst rates (ie. how quickly it can shift data off the cache) or they assume you'll be doing practically zero seeking - which is true if you've got one large contiguous file but on a filesystem, the order you request files in could be all over the disk. NCQ helps here but at the end of the day, spending a lot of time seeking is the quickest, most efficient way to kill performance.
I don't know this fellow, but I do note one thing from Rob Weir's blog referenced upthread - that the sudden change of heart came about after a Mr. Durusau attended a conference in Seattle.
Now, Seattle and Redmond are fairly close, geographically speaking. I wonder if Mr. Durusau received some sort of persuasion from a company based in Redmond. I think we should be told.
A user land application can still take up 100% of CPU time and can still get in a state whereby you can't talk sense to it and your only option is to remove it from memory and start again. What if you can't remove it from memory because the application in question is a driver which deals with system interaction?
On the other hand, if MS does this, then competitors can come in and offer the same components/services. Open source will do it very quickly, driving the cost to zero. If MS tries to shut out anyone else, the result is antitrust action.
Simple solution to that one: you allow anyone to write the modules, but Windows will not install them unless they're signed by Microsoft. And the signing process costs money.
This is the main issue at the moment - most laptop manufacturers in particular have abandoned XP support on newer machines.
The laptop manufacturers may have done but I bet the chipset manufacturers haven't.
The only fly in the ointment is if the laptop manufacturer uses a standard, well supported graphics chipset - then messes around with it to change the PCI ID it reports.
When Microsoft turns off the activation servers, that basically REALLY means the end of WinXP... or is there a chance, any chance, that Microsoft will release a super-secret "unlock all" patch in 2014 that will allow XP to be activated. I am pretty sure the answer is NO, but I can still hope.
A great many versions of XP don't require activation. Most pre-built OEM versions used by the big OEMs like HP and Dell don't - they're tied to the BIOS - and neither do corporate editions.
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Isn't this against EU law?
Very likely, but Murdoch runs a large company and like most large companies the law is what they say it is unless and until ordered otherwise by a court.
Why not use free where you can and will in the gaps with proprietary software? If you can have a free OS on desktops then you are likely to have a lower risk of having infringing software installed and tracking a smaller number of licences should be easier.
Because it doesn't solve the problem. It reduces the scope of it, sure, but it doesn't solve it by a long way.
Recall I said that 20% of proprietary software I have no idea? Much of that 20% falls under the heading of "Software we can't easily replace with free equivalents".
Read a few EULAs. I defy you to understand them all unless you're a lawyer. There's a reason so many businesses (at least according to the BSA) are using pirated software - it's not dishonesty, it's because the entire system is geared up for you to fail. I strongly doubt the BSA has ever done an audit without coming back with at least one dodgy piece of software.
Ernie Ball Co. had no problems figuring that out after getting stung by a $90,000 BSA audit.
Firstly, that's really getting old. Is there seriously no more recent example?
Secondly, Ernie Ball did have a problem figuring it out. Right at the end of the article there's a paragraph that I think you may have missed: The company still runs its critical business applications on a Unix server using an accounting package from The SCO Group, formerly Caldera International. A future project will involve moving that system over to Linux, Whitmore said. No mention as to whether or not they eventually migrated it, let alone what they migrated to.
Seen the average EULA lately? I read them - I have to, I'm the IT manager - and I'd estimate that about 60% of the time it's clear whether or not we're covered by purchasing a particular product and using it in a particular way, 20% of the time it's not entirely clear but we're probably OK and 20% of the time I have no freaking idea. Not every piece of software has a license as clear-cut as "One copy per PC".
.exe on the system and expects the administrator to make sense of every single one individually. Now, the BSA might be prepared to go through that list if they think they can make some money by doing so but I can't spare the time.
Ironically, auditing software tends to have the most obscure licensing terms and is frequently next to useless anyway - either because it only goes by what's in the registry for "Add/Remove Programs" (so some dodgy copy of an application which was hacked around and no longer appears in "Add/Remove Programs" won't be caught) or it just gives you a list of every
It is for all practical purposes impossible to put hand-on-heart and say "I can guarantee that we're not using a single piece of pirated software" in any significantly sized business today. About the best you can do is say "I'm pretty sure we're not, however if you can provide evidence that I'm wrong I will be happy to look at resolving the issue - either by using an alternative product or buying whatever it is that we're missing".
I would gladly migrate the entire enterprise over to Free (either speech or beer) software tomorrow for every single business need - it would eliminate that worry at a stroke - but this is the real world and half-decent Free accounting and payroll applications are pretty thin on the ground.
My guess is that someone less than honest installed the application in the past with a pirated key and left the company. Their successor ran into trouble with the application and did the sensible thing - called the vendor.
Actually, she's planning to become a management coach. Is that close enough?
Don't think my fiancee would thank me for signing her up for a "How to say what you damn well want" course.
Fortunately my wife is aware of this and doesn't expect me to pick up on subtle clues.
Does she run training courses for other women?
The study actually just found that women are unclear about communicating their intentions to men.
For the world's women to accept such a conclusion, it would require admitting responsibility rather than just blaming men. Not gonna happen.
(Yes, I have karma to burn.)
I wish I could answer you that.
Unfortunately, the PC hardware market is a fickle beast, and manufacturers change the chipset they use at the drop of a hat - sometimes without changing the model number they market the product under.
The best advice I can give you is to buy 3 or 4, then when you've found one which works reliably buy several of them immediately afterwards - with any luck you won't be timing the purchase just as the manufacturer is switching chipsets.
This works fine when you've got 20 people to buy for and you know they'll all need a working USB-Serial adapter. If it's just you, it gets fairly expensive fairly quickly.
But but... didn't Creative have this feature on their cards? I could swear they did, at least in Windows XP.
They do. From my reading of it, Daniel K's work basically re-enables all those features that Creative had disabled - and the reason for disabling was not technical, it was purely a legal/marketing decision.
IDE hard drives? Capacity of "over 100 floppies"?
Lucky sod. I had an ST506 hard disk with a capacity of 20MB. Floppies were formatted to 800K (Acorn ADFS, dont'cha know?), so that's a capacity of around 25 floppies.
(Mind you, this was before the days of Win3.x)
No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.
Then your controller is faulty. Part of the SAS specification is that you can plug SATA drives into the controller and they work.
Note that this doesn't work the other way around.
Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Features
Just get a USB->Serial adapter. They work pretty well, believe it or not.
I think what you meant to say is "They usually work pretty well, but fail to do so a non-trivial amount of the time - and there's no way of knowing if you've been lucky until such time as you've opened the packaging and tried to use it, by which time it's too late to return".
Disclaimer: My employer develops embedded software - we've got all sorts of USB-Serial adaptors.
You can't get 15Krpm drives in SATA variants, and SAS will allow you to bond up to 4 3Gbps channels together into one bit 12Gbps channel. (Not that it does you much good unless you've got a fairly hefty array as otherwise there's no way a disk subsystem will sustain 3Gbps in random access usage).
A lot of these people also feel that the criticism and "attacks" on Scientology only *validate* it. How do you argue with that?
Didn't Jesus warn his disciples that something similar was likely to happen to them?
Sounds a bit like quantum theory.
Similarly, I can use my right to drive on the highway (conferred upon me by my driver's license)
Stop right there.
As soon as some sort of licensing (and, by implication, some procedure to get that license) is required, it's not a right any more, it's a privilege.
A privilege which can and should be taken away if you demonstrate that you can't be trusted with it.
It's coming to the point where eSATA is the only realistic solution for external drives. USB2 and FireWire 400 just don't cut it any more, and I haven't seen many systems supporting FireWire 800.
This won't necessarily help much. The transfer rates quoted for SATA are either burst rates (ie. how quickly it can shift data off the cache) or they assume you'll be doing practically zero seeking - which is true if you've got one large contiguous file but on a filesystem, the order you request files in could be all over the disk. NCQ helps here but at the end of the day, spending a lot of time seeking is the quickest, most efficient way to kill performance.
I don't know this fellow, but I do note one thing from Rob Weir's blog referenced upthread - that the sudden change of heart came about after a Mr. Durusau attended a conference in Seattle.
Now, Seattle and Redmond are fairly close, geographically speaking. I wonder if Mr. Durusau received some sort of persuasion from a company based in Redmond. I think we should be told.
"Nobody develops software for charity.'"
I hear echoes of a letter written by a certain William Gates over 30 years ago:
http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html
"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? "
Wouldn't make much difference.
A user land application can still take up 100% of CPU time and can still get in a state whereby you can't talk sense to it and your only option is to remove it from memory and start again. What if you can't remove it from memory because the application in question is a driver which deals with system interaction?
On the other hand, if MS does this, then competitors can come in and offer the same components/services. Open source will do it very quickly, driving the cost to zero. If MS tries to shut out anyone else, the result is antitrust action.
Simple solution to that one: you allow anyone to write the modules, but Windows will not install them unless they're signed by Microsoft. And the signing process costs money.
the iPods, despite having some of the best margins in the industry, are consistently undercut on price-per-feature.
Provided you don't include "slick user interface" in the feature set, that's correct.
It seems, however, that the rest of the universe does.
This is the main issue at the moment - most laptop manufacturers in particular have abandoned XP support on newer machines.
The laptop manufacturers may have done but I bet the chipset manufacturers haven't.
The only fly in the ointment is if the laptop manufacturer uses a standard, well supported graphics chipset - then messes around with it to change the PCI ID it reports.
When Microsoft turns off the activation servers, that basically REALLY means the end of WinXP... or is there a chance, any chance, that Microsoft will release a super-secret "unlock all" patch in 2014 that will allow XP to be activated. I am pretty sure the answer is NO, but I can still hope.
A great many versions of XP don't require activation. Most pre-built OEM versions used by the big OEMs like HP and Dell don't - they're tied to the BIOS - and neither do corporate editions.
Hopefully you back up your data, so if your laptop does grow legs it's just a day or two to get up and running with a new lappy.
Hopefully he's not storing anything important on the local hard disk for any length of time anyway.
Things can go wrong with hard disks other than just somebody stealing them.