Let me get this straight. Are you suggesting it is more useful to teach children to be mindless automatons in a specific piece of software than it is to teach them ideas so they can figure out any reasonably sensible word processor or spreadsheet?
Have you read the Microsoft licensing for educational institutions?
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it's not "How many PCs will you be running our software on?". It's "How many PCs do you have?". Now, I cannot imagine that demanding an organisation buy a Windows license for every system they own regardless of what OS they plan to run on it would stand up for long in a court of law - but many schools would sooner err on the side of caution than spend a few hundred £ consulting a lawyer. Even if it does mean spending a few thousand £ more on licensing than is necessary.
I've never tried it in great detail, but I do know that.doc didn't change much between Word '97 and 2003, so I'm prepared to take your word for it there.
The compatability issue is a combination of three things:
1. Memories from older versions where compatability issues were far greater. 2. The occasional issue (heavy emphasis on "occasional" - 99.9% of the time it will work, but people focus on the.1% of the time it doesn't). 3. Microsoft's own FUD. They're their own biggest comptetor (with older versions of the same software), and have been for some time. It's amazing how much they're prepared to imply that their older products are complete crap - I've heard of "new and improved", but never "Improved so much only a dinosaur would use the old one!"
If they are going to get $3 per copy of Windows+Office Microsoft would be lucky to break even on the raw materials, packaging, and shipping.
You do realise that when you volume-license 100,000 copies of Windows you do not get shipped 100,000 boxes each containing a CD, a "Getting Started" guide and a Certificate of Authenticity?
I am a professional. Part of my job is to ensure security on our systems.
I appreciate having a nice easily installed package because if I'm looking to test a particular aspect of the network for security, I'm not looking to spend 15 hours getting the tool working in the first place. Alternatively you could provide the nice easily installed package commercially - for a fee - but then you're assuming that those with criminal intent have neither money nor means of pirating. Both of which are patently untrue.
This does not exactly require an IQ in excess of 150 to figure out.
Therefore, I can only assume that you, Sir, are either an idiot or a troll. Which is it?
in particular the fact that other than to prevent loss in the case of a fire, I cant see one legitimate reason for the tapes even leaving the site.
Yes. That's the whole point of taking a tape offsite - in the case of fire. (Or, indeed, any one of a number of disasters which would render the entire building room out of use - like flooding, for instance).
What's amazing is that they weren't paying someone like Iron Mountain to take the tapes away to a secure location, or looking for a secure location in another building where the tapes could be kept.
You should perhaps read the corporate license. It's an "upgrade only" license - you can upgrade PCs to the version of Windows you're licensed for but you still need an OEM license on them in the first place.
Of course, this is a blatant lie in order to prop up Microsoft's sales figures. I present as evidence:
1. The contract states that should you choose to buy this corporate license, you must license enough seats for every PC you own, not just the ones which shipped from the factory with some older version of Windows.
2. The CD you get (or CD image if you download it) makes no effort to check you have a legitimate older version of Windows to upgrade from, or indeed any version of Windows whatsoever.
There's a reason they didn't choose windows. A blue screen of death on a plasma TV you left on standby while you're away from home for a while could cause serious burn-in by the time you get back.
I took a quick look at Blackle. The whole idea seems to stem from a paper published in 2002.
Now, thinking back, CRTs were still reasonably common back then. Assuming the research that led up to the paper being produced and the waiting around between "paper being written" and "paper being published" took a certain amount of time, it's perfectly reasonable to assume the paper concentrated on CRTs.
IOW, back of the envelope calculations from someone who clearly doesn't understand a thing about the paper they've cited.
TBH, I've never seen the attraction of Cisco kit - certainly not at anything much lower than the "We're a telco, we have thousands of switches and routers" level.
Overpriced, awkward stuff. Mind you, I have called their technical support and that was pretty damn good.
10 years ago, there were lots of such small businesses - but they can't compete with Dell on price and never really could. The thing is, when most of your customers aren't terribly Internet savvy and/or don't feel comfortable with mail order, that doesn't much matter. You're only competing with other, similar stores with similar overheads in your area.
TBH, I'd welcome a return to there being a number of small high-street computer retailers in almost any town - granted, many were appalling, but there were always one or two which were actually pretty good. And mail order doesn't help when you need the item NOW, or it's so small that it will cost more to ship than it's worth.
Microsoft needs to just understand that OSS will sooner or later out develop them.
It hasn't yet. 99 times out of 100, there already exists a closed-source equivalent to an open-source product, be it Microsoft or someone elses. Whether or not the closed-source equivalents are any good, however, is another issue altogether.
Well, I don't think it is very future proof at all.
I agree with you on this. But I'm not sure how one could go about working around it.
On the one hand, as soon as the language in a document like the GPL gets too specific, it's likely to become obsolete much more quickly.
On the other hand, the rather broader terms used in GPLv2 (which, lest we forget, is something like 16 years old) have resulted in a number of companies following the letter but by no means the spirit of the license, by inventing all sorts of legal tricks to work around it. The Microsoft/Novell issue is only the best known example.
So where do you draw the line? I don't see GPLv3 lasting 16 years - Open Source software is too important in todays marketplace for the lawyers and developers with families to feed to be allowed to throw their hands up and say "We can't work around this". That certainly wasn't true in 1991.
One thing I think will be beneficial - it serves as a reminder to those who would invent legal perversions to ignore the license that the FSF is quite prepared to update their license to take account of such perversions, and the code you use may move to a newer version of the license leaving you having to choose between honouring it as was intended or privately maintaining an older version.
Not sure about that. The Google appliance is nothing more than a Dell 2950 painted yellow and branded with Google's branding. I have no idea if they go to any effort to stop you from reloading the OS on it, but even if they do, what good would it do you? You'd be changing a functional, useful box which is designed to be an efficient plug-in-and-forget-about-it device into a system which sort of works, doesn't quite do what it did when you bought it and cost you more to buy than the server hardware it's based on is worth in the first place.
I'm pretty sure most, if not all of the software that isn't GPL'd on there will be userland stuff, so there's no significant GPL issues.
Well, I can only speculate, but hardware companies frequently are lousy at software. There's a strong chance that some of the driver was outsourced, and they don't have the rights to open source it.
But that doesn't explain keeping the specifications closed. IME, that's a sign that the hardware is actually pretty sucky and it's only through minor miracles in the software that it works at all.
Was it really likely that someone was going to make a tivo-like device and lock it down, requiring the user to only use the SugarCRM that was provided? I can't even imagine what the appliance would be for.
CRM, I'd imagine.
There is a market for Linux-based devices which are essentially black boxes as far as the end user is concerned - Google's own search device proves that. Whether or not a CRM product could sell that way - I really don't know.
Quite a few of them are moving towards SATA drives.
Seagate should know their market. If a tiny fraction of their sales consist of PATA drives, sooner or later it's going to be just as cheap/easy to drop the PATA drives from the product line altogether and retool that part of the factory to make SATA drives. With any luck they can then produce them slightly cheaper.
Look to Continental Europe to back you up on that one.
Olive oil, cheese, sausages with huge white hunks of fat in, bread, pasta - all the kinds of things which are apparently "bad". Yet look at the Spanish or Italians - sure, there are fat people, but they're substantially fewer. I don't think they eat anything like the amount of processed food that the US or UK does - and both the US and to a lesser extent the UK has a much greater obesity problem.
First, ARM was a separate company long before Acorn died. IIRC, it was started as a joint venture between Acorn and someone fruity - it was either Apple or Apricot, I forget which.
But while the processor was a joy, even then there were a lot of people who had no intention of going near assembler if they could help it, and the excellent BASIC interpreter made that possible. There were quite a number of commercial applications written which were partly or fully written in BASIC. Combine that with a user interface which was years ahead of its time, and you wind up with a pretty darn nice bit of kit.
I'd be very happy with a RISC-OS style user interface today - and plenty of people have written window managers in Unix to do exactly this. But the problem is that window managers can't do much for the look and feel of the applications themselves, which pretty much destroys the dream.
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Let me get this straight. Are you suggesting it is more useful to teach children to be mindless automatons in a specific piece of software than it is to teach them ideas so they can figure out any reasonably sensible word processor or spreadsheet?
Have you read the Microsoft licensing for educational institutions?
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK it's not "How many PCs will you be running our software on?". It's "How many PCs do you have?". Now, I cannot imagine that demanding an organisation buy a Windows license for every system they own regardless of what OS they plan to run on it would stand up for long in a court of law - but many schools would sooner err on the side of caution than spend a few hundred £ consulting a lawyer. Even if it does mean spending a few thousand £ more on licensing than is necessary.
I've never tried it in great detail, but I do know that .doc didn't change much between Word '97 and 2003, so I'm prepared to take your word for it there.
.1% of the time it doesn't).
The compatability issue is a combination of three things:
1. Memories from older versions where compatability issues were far greater.
2. The occasional issue (heavy emphasis on "occasional" - 99.9% of the time it will work, but people focus on the
3. Microsoft's own FUD. They're their own biggest comptetor (with older versions of the same software), and have been for some time. It's amazing how much they're prepared to imply that their older products are complete crap - I've heard of "new and improved", but never "Improved so much only a dinosaur would use the old one!"
If they are going to get $3 per copy of Windows+Office Microsoft would be lucky to break even on the raw materials, packaging, and shipping.
You do realise that when you volume-license 100,000 copies of Windows you do not get shipped 100,000 boxes each containing a CD, a "Getting Started" guide and a Certificate of Authenticity?
I am a professional. Part of my job is to ensure security on our systems.
I appreciate having a nice easily installed package because if I'm looking to test a particular aspect of the network for security, I'm not looking to spend 15 hours getting the tool working in the first place. Alternatively you could provide the nice easily installed package commercially - for a fee - but then you're assuming that those with criminal intent have neither money nor means of pirating. Both of which are patently untrue.
This does not exactly require an IQ in excess of 150 to figure out.
Therefore, I can only assume that you, Sir, are either an idiot or a troll. Which is it?
I particularly like this bit from the article:
"The overall amount May spent on his guitar was £17.50."
Just shows you don't need an expensive instrument to become a legend.
You don't even need Office. How do you think a web browser gets your details across to a shopping site in a secure manner - magic fairy dust?
It seems to work for Michael Jackson.
What on Earth is "ID Theft Protection" anyway?
It's not like it's easy to recover from the repercussions if your identity is stolen in such a case.
in particular the fact that other than to prevent loss in the case of a fire, I cant see one legitimate reason for the tapes even leaving the site.
Yes. That's the whole point of taking a tape offsite - in the case of fire. (Or, indeed, any one of a number of disasters which would render the entire building room out of use - like flooding, for instance).
What's amazing is that they weren't paying someone like Iron Mountain to take the tapes away to a secure location, or looking for a secure location in another building where the tapes could be kept.
You should perhaps read the corporate license. It's an "upgrade only" license - you can upgrade PCs to the version of Windows you're licensed for but you still need an OEM license on them in the first place.
Of course, this is a blatant lie in order to prop up Microsoft's sales figures. I present as evidence:
1. The contract states that should you choose to buy this corporate license, you must license enough seats for every PC you own, not just the ones which shipped from the factory with some older version of Windows.
2. The CD you get (or CD image if you download it) makes no effort to check you have a legitimate older version of Windows to upgrade from, or indeed any version of Windows whatsoever.
There's a reason they didn't choose windows. A blue screen of death on a plasma TV you left on standby while you're away from home for a while could cause serious burn-in by the time you get back.
I took a quick look at Blackle. The whole idea seems to stem from a paper published in 2002.
Now, thinking back, CRTs were still reasonably common back then. Assuming the research that led up to the paper being produced and the waiting around between "paper being written" and "paper being published" took a certain amount of time, it's perfectly reasonable to assume the paper concentrated on CRTs.
IOW, back of the envelope calculations from someone who clearly doesn't understand a thing about the paper they've cited.
TBH, I've never seen the attraction of Cisco kit - certainly not at anything much lower than the "We're a telco, we have thousands of switches and routers" level.
Overpriced, awkward stuff. Mind you, I have called their technical support and that was pretty damn good.
I very much doubt that.
10 years ago, there were lots of such small businesses - but they can't compete with Dell on price and never really could. The thing is, when most of your customers aren't terribly Internet savvy and/or don't feel comfortable with mail order, that doesn't much matter. You're only competing with other, similar stores with similar overheads in your area.
TBH, I'd welcome a return to there being a number of small high-street computer retailers in almost any town - granted, many were appalling, but there were always one or two which were actually pretty good. And mail order doesn't help when you need the item NOW, or it's so small that it will cost more to ship than it's worth.
Microsoft needs to just understand that OSS will sooner or later out develop them.
It hasn't yet. 99 times out of 100, there already exists a closed-source equivalent to an open-source product, be it Microsoft or someone elses. Whether or not the closed-source equivalents are any good, however, is another issue altogether.
Well, I don't think it is very future proof at all.
I agree with you on this. But I'm not sure how one could go about working around it.
On the one hand, as soon as the language in a document like the GPL gets too specific, it's likely to become obsolete much more quickly.
On the other hand, the rather broader terms used in GPLv2 (which, lest we forget, is something like 16 years old) have resulted in a number of companies following the letter but by no means the spirit of the license, by inventing all sorts of legal tricks to work around it. The Microsoft/Novell issue is only the best known example.
So where do you draw the line? I don't see GPLv3 lasting 16 years - Open Source software is too important in todays marketplace for the lawyers and developers with families to feed to be allowed to throw their hands up and say "We can't work around this". That certainly wasn't true in 1991.
One thing I think will be beneficial - it serves as a reminder to those who would invent legal perversions to ignore the license that the FSF is quite prepared to update their license to take account of such perversions, and the code you use may move to a newer version of the license leaving you having to choose between honouring it as was intended or privately maintaining an older version.
Not sure about that. The Google appliance is nothing more than a Dell 2950 painted yellow and branded with Google's branding. I have no idea if they go to any effort to stop you from reloading the OS on it, but even if they do, what good would it do you? You'd be changing a functional, useful box which is designed to be an efficient plug-in-and-forget-about-it device into a system which sort of works, doesn't quite do what it did when you bought it and cost you more to buy than the server hardware it's based on is worth in the first place.
I'm pretty sure most, if not all of the software that isn't GPL'd on there will be userland stuff, so there's no significant GPL issues.
Well, I can only speculate, but hardware companies frequently are lousy at software. There's a strong chance that some of the driver was outsourced, and they don't have the rights to open source it.
But that doesn't explain keeping the specifications closed. IME, that's a sign that the hardware is actually pretty sucky and it's only through minor miracles in the software that it works at all.
Was it really likely that someone was going to make a tivo-like device and lock it down, requiring the user to only use the SugarCRM that was provided? I can't even imagine what the appliance would be for.
CRM, I'd imagine.
There is a market for Linux-based devices which are essentially black boxes as far as the end user is concerned - Google's own search device proves that. Whether or not a CRM product could sell that way - I really don't know.
Quite a few of them are moving towards SATA drives.
Seagate should know their market. If a tiny fraction of their sales consist of PATA drives, sooner or later it's going to be just as cheap/easy to drop the PATA drives from the product line altogether and retool that part of the factory to make SATA drives. With any luck they can then produce them slightly cheaper.
DVD/CDROM drives are readily available in SATA variants:
a t/DVD-RW-SATA-Drives
http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/cat/CD---DVD-Drives/subc
Look to Continental Europe to back you up on that one.
Olive oil, cheese, sausages with huge white hunks of fat in, bread, pasta - all the kinds of things which are apparently "bad". Yet look at the Spanish or Italians - sure, there are fat people, but they're substantially fewer. I don't think they eat anything like the amount of processed food that the US or UK does - and both the US and to a lesser extent the UK has a much greater obesity problem.
Texas Association for School Nutrition
What on earth makes them think they're qualified to know anything about nutrition if they're all over 200 pounds?
I disagree.
First, ARM was a separate company long before Acorn died. IIRC, it was started as a joint venture between Acorn and someone fruity - it was either Apple or Apricot, I forget which.
But while the processor was a joy, even then there were a lot of people who had no intention of going near assembler if they could help it, and the excellent BASIC interpreter made that possible. There were quite a number of commercial applications written which were partly or fully written in BASIC. Combine that with a user interface which was years ahead of its time, and you wind up with a pretty darn nice bit of kit.
I'd be very happy with a RISC-OS style user interface today - and plenty of people have written window managers in Unix to do exactly this. But the problem is that window managers can't do much for the look and feel of the applications themselves, which pretty much destroys the dream.