For a time, there were two separate lines of OS going on. These were:
DOS -> Windows 3.x -> Windows '95 (first version of Windows which didn't require you to purchase DOS separately) -> Windows '98 -> Windows ME -> end of life
OS/2 (IBM) -> Windows NT 3.xx -> Windows NT 4 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista
You've also got a fork on the OS/2 -> Windows line somewhere after NT 4 where more significant differences started to separate the server versions from the desktop versions.
You jest (I assume), but it is actually quite possible to code like that. In fact, in a previous job of mine part of the internal coding guidelines said "Don't use malloc".
There is a major difference though - the problem they were trying to solve didn't involve a user interface and didn't deal with data of undefined size - it was basically a large database app.
Of course, under the hood the compiler has to allocate memory at some point for more or less everything - but it's something the compiler can worry about, not the developer.
But it might stimulate competition in OSs, forcing Microsoft to take a long hard look at Vista performance rather than have the luxury of knowing they could package up a dog turd and sell it as their latest OS upgrade and STILL make a shedload of cash.
* Won't break Excel's 256-column limit
But it might cause more people to look more closely at OpenOffice, thus forcing Microsoft to take a look at such limits. (BTW, have you noticed that the cheap "Student" Office license has now become "Home and Student", and doesn't seem to require proof of student status any more? I wonder why that could be)
* Won't integrate Word and Excel into one seamless package
Again, it might stimulate office packages other than Microsoft's, thus adding competition to the market and forcing them to start innovating. Look how quickly Excel moved when people were still using Lotus 1-2-3.
* Won't revolutionize the filesystem, e.g. with tags (breaking the strict hierarchy) or replacing it with relational database
* Won't add RTOS capabilities to an OS that also runs the most popular business applications
* Won't give us a standardized, robust, open standard platform for rich Internet applications.
Why is it we care about unbundling again?
See previous comments. By forcing OEMs to offer alternatives, you'd introduce competition to the market. Which would mean that Microsoft would be forced to compete on price and features - whereas right now all they have to do is release a new version of their core products every few years with features which offer the user dubious benefit and market the hell out of it to persuade people to upgrade.
The idea is that every OEM would be forced to offer a choice of operating systems - even if that choice is only "Windows or nothing". Rather than the current situation today when the overwhelming majority of OEMs offer little or no choice - Windows Vista Basic or Windows Vista Premium.
No problem. Make it illegal to have dirty license plates - as soon as the system detects a license plate it can't read, an officer is dispatched to stop the vehicle.
I've been trying to get the techies at my school to consider linux and open source for a while now. They are not interested, distrust things that are free and find it easier just to follow the commercial software peddled to them or recommended by the UK government's BECTA organisation.
I've worked as the techie in a school myself before. Most of my experience is a few years old but I understand very little has changed.
The Microsoft licensing for schools questionaire to work out how many licenses you need (certainly the version I filled out, though it may since have changed) demands you list and pay for EVERY PC-compatible system. (Or at least every PC compatible that's not so elderly that there's no way in hell it's running anything recent). So if you want the heavy educational discount, you've got to license Microsoft software for everything. Suddenly "save a bit of money on open source" doesn't sound so promising.
Are you supplied by RM? RM have a "fantastic" support policy [cough] which a lot of schools buy into because the theory is that it gives their techies someone to fall back on - but the support is conditional upon you not installing a single thing which isn't on the "RM approved" list. As soon as one thing that's not on the list goes on the network, RM have it written into the support contract that they can and will throw their hands up at any problem that's thrown at them and say "Not our problem because you plugged in that unauthorised device" (regardless of how relevant that device is).
Teachers. Their job is to teach. As part of that job, they expect to be able to pick up software to help them do it - announcing "Oh, by the way, you'll need to find a Linux version from now on" will go down like a lead balloon.
Control. Your average school PC is locked down tighter than a nun's knickers, controlled through the various network-wide policy tools that Microsoft provides - and there simply isn't such a tool available in Linux. (Well, OK, there is if you count the likes of cfengine. But cfengine is a very complex tool to setup which doesn't come preconfigured on any major distribution and lacks a sensible GUI of any description). Whether you like it or not such control is necessary because there's bound to be some smartypants who will cause a teacher to panic out of all proportion when his custom.xsession file loads afterstep rather than gnome.
The upshot is that Linux is going to be an uphill struggle in any school without a push from above. It may be found in embedded or turnkey systems where the OS is of little consequence, such as NAS devices, but that's as far as it's likely to go.
Been on the catnip a bit too heavily? Software DVDs aren't CSS-protected. In fact, most enterprise software tends to follow the "activate as part of installation either using a license key, a separate piece of software to manage licenses or by phoning home" model rather than the "make the installation media hard to copy" model.
So I guess it's the OEMs who are FORCED TO OFFER XP and XP-compatible hardware, drivers and support to their biggest customers.
XP-compatible hardware: Yes.
XP licenses on the boxes: No. Read the license terms of any site license agreement for Windows, it allows you to upgrade/downgrade any OEM or full-retail version of windows to any other version of Windows (within some limits).
There's an official mechanism in most phones. Generally, the carrier provides you with a code number which you type into your phone and presto! it's no longer locked. There are lots of shops who will connect a serial cable to the phone and do it through a PC for something like £10 regardless of whether or not your contract's over.
I have no doubt Apple have something similar in mind to unlock the phone, so only the little unlocking shop is screwed because AFAIK nobody's devised a way to do it yet which doesn't involve a screwdriver and a soldering iron.
Microsoft cares so little about Britain that they can't even be bothered to take five minutes to change "color" to "colour".
I don't know if it's true for foreign-language versions of Windows, but I can tell you from experience that any Windows PC running an English language version - regardless of localisation - is just waiting for you to turn your back for one brief second. As soon as you do, it's back to treating currency as $, printing things in color rather than colour, using a 12-hour clock and treating shift-3 as "#".
So income tax + NI for an average earner is below 25%
I'm guessing you're either not UK based or you are but you haven't looked at your payslip lately.
It usually winds up being closer to a third lost in various expenses. The 10% tax band is being abolished, and very soon (if it hasn't happened already) everyone shall be legally obliged to pay into a pension scheme.
Right now, the main problem with supporting XP is making sure you can actually get it on new OEM hardware.
Not really. Any significantly sized business will have a company-wide license which allows up/downgrades from any version of Windows to any other version of Windows. And no company of significant size will even use the PC as it arrived from the factory unless "from the factory" means "From the Dell factory using the custom software build we provided". There's likely to be shedloads of crapware on them that you don't want, and it'll be missing the software that you do want.
The main problem with supporting XP will be when drivers for common hardware are no longer available.
Quite right. But it makes for excellent news copy, particularly if she's innocent and the RIAA have hit the wrong person with their scattergun approach to lawsuits.
Anything that loads and saves ODF already has reveal codes. Just rename the.odt to.zip, edit the XML files inside, and rename it back to.odt.
While you're technically correct, this is exactly the sort of "you've already got that feature, just do (insert obscure thing here)" approach that keeps Open Source user interfaces about 10 years behind everything else.
I am reminded of a Dilbert strip which said "I'll make the command easy to remember, like 'CTRL-ALT-F4-DEL.' And if they forget that, they can just edit the source code in 'COMMAND.COM.' Perfect."
How about "Why would you sign a long contract on an expensive Apple product if the first thing you plan on doing is ripping out the software and running your own?"
Neither is Microsoft office, but I guarantee that within a few hours you'll be buried in comments saying that so let me pre-empt them slightly.
Microsoft Office is not 100% cross-version compatible and does sometimes get some formatting wrong. However, it would be reasonable to say it's 99% cross-version formatting compatible. In other words, yes there are issues but unless you're doing some very fancy work in a part of Office which was never really designed for it (like doing a database with many tables, relationships and queries in Excel or putting together a full-screen advertisement with lots of pretty graphics to go in next weeks' New York Times in Word), the chances are you'll never hit one.
The same cannot, alas, be said of OO.o. Office being what it is, I suspect that shall be the case for the rest of time or until the EU succeeds in forcing Microsoft to release specifications for the file format (whichever happens first).
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them).
And, not to put too fine a point on it, represents the largest jump made by Office since Office '97. Outlook changed a fair bit in UI terms over that time, but everything else was just relatively minor stuff like "Let's change the colour of this icon, add a few minor features there, change the colourscheme from grey to a sort of blue gradient".
I wonder if that and the announcements by various large organisations to trial Linux on the desktop (complete with Open/Star Office) could somehow be related. I think we should be told.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you understand it completely wrong.
For a time, there were two separate lines of OS going on. These were:
DOS -> Windows 3.x -> Windows '95 (first version of Windows which didn't require you to purchase DOS separately) -> Windows '98 -> Windows ME -> end of life
OS/2 (IBM) -> Windows NT 3.xx -> Windows NT 4 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista
You've also got a fork on the OS/2 -> Windows line somewhere after NT 4 where more significant differences started to separate the server versions from the desktop versions.
You jest (I assume), but it is actually quite possible to code like that. In fact, in a previous job of mine part of the internal coding guidelines said "Don't use malloc".
There is a major difference though - the problem they were trying to solve didn't involve a user interface and didn't deal with data of undefined size - it was basically a large database app.
Of course, under the hood the compiler has to allocate memory at some point for more or less everything - but it's something the compiler can worry about, not the developer.
Unbundling:
* Won't make Vista any less dog-slow than it is.
But it might stimulate competition in OSs, forcing Microsoft to take a long hard look at Vista performance rather than have the luxury of knowing they could package up a dog turd and sell it as their latest OS upgrade and STILL make a shedload of cash.
* Won't break Excel's 256-column limit
But it might cause more people to look more closely at OpenOffice, thus forcing Microsoft to take a look at such limits. (BTW, have you noticed that the cheap "Student" Office license has now become "Home and Student", and doesn't seem to require proof of student status any more? I wonder why that could be)
* Won't integrate Word and Excel into one seamless package
Again, it might stimulate office packages other than Microsoft's, thus adding competition to the market and forcing them to start innovating. Look how quickly Excel moved when people were still using Lotus 1-2-3.
* Won't revolutionize the filesystem, e.g. with tags (breaking the strict hierarchy) or replacing it with relational database
* Won't add RTOS capabilities to an OS that also runs the most popular business applications
* Won't give us a standardized, robust, open standard platform for rich Internet applications.
Why is it we care about unbundling again?
See previous comments. By forcing OEMs to offer alternatives, you'd introduce competition to the market. Which would mean that Microsoft would be forced to compete on price and features - whereas right now all they have to do is release a new version of their core products every few years with features which offer the user dubious benefit and market the hell out of it to persuade people to upgrade.
I think you misunderstand it.
The idea is that every OEM would be forced to offer a choice of operating systems - even if that choice is only "Windows or nothing". Rather than the current situation today when the overwhelming majority of OEMs offer little or no choice - Windows Vista Basic or Windows Vista Premium.
No problem. Make it illegal to have dirty license plates - as soon as the system detects a license plate it can't read, an officer is dispatched to stop the vehicle.
I think the GP's point was "what is to stop the RIAA continuing to sent out nastygrams demanding money or we'll sue?"
Unless the recipient seeks independent legal advice from someone who's actually aware of these cases before settling, the short answer is "Not a lot".
I've worked as the techie in a school myself before. Most of my experience is a few years old but I understand very little has changed.
The upshot is that Linux is going to be an uphill struggle in any school without a push from above. It may be found in embedded or turnkey systems where the OS is of little consequence, such as NAS devices, but that's as far as it's likely to go.
Been on the catnip a bit too heavily? Software DVDs aren't CSS-protected. In fact, most enterprise software tends to follow the "activate as part of installation either using a license key, a separate piece of software to manage licenses or by phoning home" model rather than the "make the installation media hard to copy" model.
So I guess it's the OEMs who are FORCED TO OFFER XP and XP-compatible hardware, drivers and support to their biggest customers.
XP-compatible hardware: Yes.
XP licenses on the boxes: No. Read the license terms of any site license agreement for Windows, it allows you to upgrade/downgrade any OEM or full-retail version of windows to any other version of Windows (within some limits).
He then goes on to mention RockBox which is also illegal.
How is RockBox illegal?
I don't think it breaks any DMCA/EUCD-style rules because I'm pretty sure it won't play encrypted/DRM'd AAC files. So it's not a circumvention device.
There's an official mechanism in most phones. Generally, the carrier provides you with a code number which you type into your phone and presto! it's no longer locked. There are lots of shops who will connect a serial cable to the phone and do it through a PC for something like £10 regardless of whether or not your contract's over.
I have no doubt Apple have something similar in mind to unlock the phone, so only the little unlocking shop is screwed because AFAIK nobody's devised a way to do it yet which doesn't involve a screwdriver and a soldering iron.
Microsoft cares so little about Britain that they can't even be bothered to take five minutes to change "color" to "colour".
I don't know if it's true for foreign-language versions of Windows, but I can tell you from experience that any Windows PC running an English language version - regardless of localisation - is just waiting for you to turn your back for one brief second. As soon as you do, it's back to treating currency as $, printing things in color rather than colour, using a 12-hour clock and treating shift-3 as "#".
So income tax + NI for an average earner is below 25%
I'm guessing you're either not UK based or you are but you haven't looked at your payslip lately.
It usually winds up being closer to a third lost in various expenses. The 10% tax band is being abolished, and very soon (if it hasn't happened already) everyone shall be legally obliged to pay into a pension scheme.
None of which are in the EU, or the United Kingdom.
Not true. All are in the UK, follow UK law and use UK currency.
However, there are (for historical reasons I don't pretend to understand) different tax regulations on these islands.
Right now, the main problem with supporting XP is making sure you can actually get it on new OEM hardware.
Not really. Any significantly sized business will have a company-wide license which allows up/downgrades from any version of Windows to any other version of Windows. And no company of significant size will even use the PC as it arrived from the factory unless "from the factory" means "From the Dell factory using the custom software build we provided". There's likely to be shedloads of crapware on them that you don't want, and it'll be missing the software that you do want.
The main problem with supporting XP will be when drivers for common hardware are no longer available.
So has every other commercial vendor. Oracle are a particularly good (bad?) example but SunOS was famously insecure, as was Irix.
Quite right. But it makes for excellent news copy, particularly if she's innocent and the RIAA have hit the wrong person with their scattergun approach to lawsuits.
Is there something I missed? Is open source a problem or something? I don't understand the point here.
Gartner's company line for years was "Avoid open source, it's risky".
That's changed slightly. Reading the article, it looks like they're now saying "It's still risky but you can't avoid it".
So did they managed to crack the codes or did they spy on the US and somehow obtain the codes? I read TFA and still can't figure out which.
My guess is they tried the same code as they had on their luggage and by an amazing coincidence it worked.
Anything that loads and saves ODF already has reveal codes. Just rename the .odt to .zip, edit the XML files inside, and rename it back to .odt.
While you're technically correct, this is exactly the sort of "you've already got that feature, just do (insert obscure thing here)" approach that keeps Open Source user interfaces about 10 years behind everything else.
I am reminded of a Dilbert strip which said "I'll make the command easy to remember, like 'CTRL-ALT-F4-DEL.' And if they forget that, they can just edit the source code in 'COMMAND.COM.' Perfect."
I'm pretty ignorant of finance and law, but is there any reason whatsoever for the stockholders not to sue the board into destitution at this point?
No idea, but wasn't Mr. Tibbitts the name of one of the Bond villains' cats?
What more is there to say :)
How about "Why would you sign a long contract on an expensive Apple product if the first thing you plan on doing is ripping out the software and running your own?"
Neither is Microsoft office, but I guarantee that within a few hours you'll be buried in comments saying that so let me pre-empt them slightly.
Microsoft Office is not 100% cross-version compatible and does sometimes get some formatting wrong. However, it would be reasonable to say it's 99% cross-version formatting compatible. In other words, yes there are issues but unless you're doing some very fancy work in a part of Office which was never really designed for it (like doing a database with many tables, relationships and queries in Excel or putting together a full-screen advertisement with lots of pretty graphics to go in next weeks' New York Times in Word), the chances are you'll never hit one.
The same cannot, alas, be said of OO.o. Office being what it is, I suspect that shall be the case for the rest of time or until the EU succeeds in forcing Microsoft to release specifications for the file format (whichever happens first).
While I know some people may dislike the new Office 2007, after using it for a while now, I can say honestly that it's the best version yet. The usability and UI are greatly improved (once you get used to them).
And, not to put too fine a point on it, represents the largest jump made by Office since Office '97. Outlook changed a fair bit in UI terms over that time, but everything else was just relatively minor stuff like "Let's change the colour of this icon, add a few minor features there, change the colourscheme from grey to a sort of blue gradient".
I wonder if that and the announcements by various large organisations to trial Linux on the desktop (complete with Open/Star Office) could somehow be related. I think we should be told.
Nobody is going to believe you were playing Star Wars naked when you sat on the wiimote, so don't even bother pretending.