"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.
The thing that's going on is market segmentation. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version. It's the exact same principle as is used for pricing some commercial databases according to "number of CPUs in the system which is going to be running it" - anyone who's got the money to buy and the need to run a 16-processor system can probably afford to spend more on the database, regardless of whether there's any technical difference between the 16 processor version and the 8 processor version of the software.
You jest, but sooner or later it's inevitable that the RIAA will take a reasonably competent lawyer (or someone who's directly related to one) to court - if they haven't already done so.
But the RIAA have this habit of dropping cases very quickly once they discover it's not going to be an easy win.
The whole point of antitrust legislation is that a company has abused a monopoly position - maybe to gouge prices (hard to prove), maybe to gain another monopoly in a related field (rather easier to prove).
Having a monopoly in and of itself isn't illegal, what's illegal is using it to gain another.
The whole point of what I was saying is that it's difficult to know where to draw the line for a company in Microsoft's position. Their business rests on them continuing to develop one of their core products, yet because they have an effective monopoly on products of that type it's very difficult to put a particular line in the proverbial sand and say "Right, you're not allowed to add any enhancements beyond that". Antitrust legislation isn't intended to put the company out of business, simply to curb monopoly abuse. A judgement saying "You can't add any features" would be patently unjustifiable with a software company.
Microsoft release an OS. There's nothing particularly secret or magical about that; it's fundamental to their business. An OS provides a platform on which to run software, and offers a number of features - because Microsoft's OS is aimed squarely at desktop PCs, it follows the features it provides are aimed squarely at desktop PCs.
Now, what generally happens is that Microsoft release an OS, and over the course of time some companies within the software industry spots what things are missing from the OS and writes utilities to make them available - a half-decent search facility, for instance. Same thing's true with more or less any OS - there have been third party volume managers for Solaris long before ZFS came about.
But it doesn't stop there. Sooner or later, Microsoft have to produce an updated version of their OS - if only because if they don't, it sill start to look dated in comparison with the competition. And the updated version offers more features - it's inevitable that some of these features happen to coincide with what a pre-existing tool did.
The difficult question is "where do you draw the line in deciding what's an acceptable new feature?". Technically, as Microsoft has been found guilty of antitrust violations, the line should be pretty close to what existing functionality is there. But Microsoft aren't particularly concerned about that, and never have been. If the processes involved from the point of "them breaking the law" through to "some court somewhere issuing a judgement against them" are sufficiently slow (which is true almost all the time), then by the time they're ordered to cease whatever it was they were doing so other businesses can have a chance, it's all rather academic - those other businesses have already gone to the wall and the next release of their product is just around the corner.
Do you use a Windows-managed domain for user login? How do you minimise the risk of losing Active Directory with only one server? My understanding was that any version of Exchange after 2000 requires it.
The DHS could guarantee that all computer-based attacks would be fruitless overnight. They'd just have to get rid of all their computers and resort to pocket calculators, slide rules and abacuses.
Unfortunately, that's about the only way to provide a 100% cast-iron guarantee that there's no way in hell the computer systems will be hacked.
Even if you did take such an extreme measure, the result would be that anyone that interested in getting information about what the DHS is doing would plant a few individuals in there.
Let's be honest, that's about all governments ever do. When was the last time you heard of a government organisation made more effective by simplifying things?
Further, the people who are likely to be seriously interested in infiltrating the DHS are quite able to find and finance someone with the capability to do so.
If you want to make Dell pay, buy a normal Windows-ified PC and claim the money back as per the EULA.
Tell me, how are you getting on with that? I've heard of isolated cases, but never a company openly stating that their policy is to honour such refund requests.
The only difficult bit there is proving more things are getting done. Certainly the amount of time required to make such an assertion and back it up with real proof is rather longer than Windows Vista has been available.
Kolab only switches the problem around: instead of having an integrated calendar/email system which works really nicely on Windows but only half-assed clones which sort-of work on Unix, you now have an integrated calendar/email system which works really nicely on Unix and only half-assed plugins which sort-of work on Windows.
There are two possible groups of people here. Possibly three:
1. Those who already have a PC, are reasonably knowledgeable about it and are quite happy with how it's all running. What's in it for them? Re-learn how to do a bunch of tasks only to wind up with exactly the same as what they've already got but with a few extra bells and whistles. 2. Businesses. What's the benefit? Microsoft likes to peddle things like "increased productivity", mainly because it's impossible to measure and hence impossible to argue with. I would, however, point out that "the IT department having to make sure that everything runs on Vista, scripts don't break and users don't get confused with an interface change" doesn't increase anyone's productivity. 3. Those who either don't have a PC, or do but are unhappy with it (probably because it's dog slow under the weight of all the spyware, but they don't know that). This is the only group which may go with Vista - but they'll go with whatever the PFY in the store tells them to go with. If Apple started offering sufficiently generous kickbacks to retail partners, you can bet that their market share would go up quite a bit.
Who said you had to stop using Exchange? Where things get difficult is if you want the integrated calendars and everything on any platform other than Windows.
In the UK, I do not want companies invading my privacy and it is made difficult for them to do so.
I must have missed something. Yeah, it's difficult for the man at the local newsagents to demand your name, DOB, NI number and inside leg measurement then sell it to the highest bidder when you go in to buy your daily paper, but it's a different story for banks, building societies and property rental agencies - most of whom I'd be dubious about trusting with too much information.
The EU laws protect a person's privacy, requiring their permission to disclose personal information (among other things).
AFAIK, however, they don't prevent a business from making "you granting them permission to disclose information however they please" from being a condition of doing business with them.
All you wind up with is that the organisations who you really don't want being cavalier with such information (like banks) hiding a clause in the small print which broadly says "We may ship your data to third parties outside the EU with rather more lax privacy laws for some obscure reason". Airlines have recently been doing similar things when you buy a ticket online - presumably so they can give all the information that the US wants without breaking EU privacy law.
A solution already exists for this. It's existed for years - it certainly predates Exchange's current popularity.
It's called IMAP. Over SSL (or a VPN tunnel for outside access). You can even set up Exchange to support IMAP, and bingo - basic email access works for more or less everyone. Of course, you lose the integrated calendars stuff, but that's a sacrifice you may have to make.
I don't think MS are in it for the licence fees, they are trying to create FUD and scare people out of switching away from Microsoft based systems.
Nothing new there, then.
It wasn't that long ago that Microsoft were touting Windows NT as a cheap alternative OS to (then mostly commercial) Unix - port your apps to NT and bingo! away go a lot of costs. But since then, CALs are no longer included as part of the cost of the client OS (they were in the days of NT4). Seems ironic that the exact same argument is being used today to justify migrations away from Windows.
What's so terrible about booting from a different drive / file system?
Nothing per se, but AIUI ZFS allows you to specify how much (if any) redundancy you want, which with other filesystems requires setting up RAID separately which in turn adds complexity.
I suspect that most people that would run ZFS are the type of people that leave their machines up for months at a time. In that case, why the panic attacks over booting issues?
Generally speaking, the kind of system that you want to have up for months at a time is also the kind of system you want to come back up as quickly and painlessly as possible should something happen which causes/necessitates a reboot. That's one of the main reasons journalling was invented.
I'm excited about ZFS (in concept and theory) and I would love to give it a go. Finally a system that's up with the times.
Not sure about "up with the times". I have yet to see any convincing explanation of what amazing features ZFS offers which hasn't been in AIX's logical volume management system for years.
Alright then, how about "The de-facto understanding is..."?
The existence of the LGPL goes some way to suggesting that this indeed is the generally accepted understanding. It's not been codified in any legal judgement that I'm aware of, but that's only becaue there have been relatively few legal judgements worldwide on this particular aspect of the GPL. Most breaches seem to be far more flagrant.
Very easy. However, they have said that they won't disclose which patents are being violated because: 1. The Free software community would be able to discredit the patents (e.g. provide evidence of prior art, show the code isn't infringing, etc). 2. The Free software developers would be able to remove the offending code.
Taking these points in order (and I recognise they're Microsoft's arguments, not necessarily yours):
1. Absurd argument. The possibility of proving a patent invalid is a very good means to get off a patent lawsuit, so if Microsoft find this prospect so concerning, what's to say that whoever they sue won't be able to discredit the patents? Only makes sense if such a lawsuit is fought entirely in private, with no possibility of a leak on slashdot or groklaw saying "Here's a Microsoft patent, how valid is it?"
2. Almost as absurd. If the code is fundamental to a piece of software and can't easily be removed, then either that software and all deployments of it must cease to exist (possible if that software is produced by a few parties who can contact all their customers, not really practical for Linux) or it's not so fundamental, in which case it's doubtful how innovative the patent is in the first place. In the first case, Microsoft can then start suing anyone who uses the software and be sure that they'll find someone who can't easily stop using it. In the second case, the information would leak as soon as Microsoft actually sued anyone, in which case they've effectively got a patent which they cannot enforce. What's the use of a patent you cannot enforce?
If someone's so mentally unstable that they might conceivably go out and kill someone after playing a violent video game, perhaps the problem is with their mental stability than the videogame.
They are possibly the WORST corporation I have ever had to deal with. How they got so big with such crappy service I cannot understand. They make Verizon look competent, and that's saying a lot.
A number of possibilities occur:
1. They didn't. The crappy service is a result of recent cost cutting, prior to that it was OK. 2. Relatively few people include "customer service" in their list of things to consider when choosing a provider. 3. A monopoly in some areas.
As I'm not an American, and I know zero about the US market for cable/TV/internet, I've probably missed out a few.
Slashdot Mirror
"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.
The thing that's going on is market segmentation. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version. It's the exact same principle as is used for pricing some commercial databases according to "number of CPUs in the system which is going to be running it" - anyone who's got the money to buy and the need to run a 16-processor system can probably afford to spend more on the database, regardless of whether there's any technical difference between the 16 processor version and the 8 processor version of the software.
You jest, but sooner or later it's inevitable that the RIAA will take a reasonably competent lawyer (or someone who's directly related to one) to court - if they haven't already done so.
But the RIAA have this habit of dropping cases very quickly once they discover it's not going to be an easy win.
Remember I'm just speaking in theory here.
The whole point of antitrust legislation is that a company has abused a monopoly position - maybe to gouge prices (hard to prove), maybe to gain another monopoly in a related field (rather easier to prove).
Having a monopoly in and of itself isn't illegal, what's illegal is using it to gain another.
The whole point of what I was saying is that it's difficult to know where to draw the line for a company in Microsoft's position. Their business rests on them continuing to develop one of their core products, yet because they have an effective monopoly on products of that type it's very difficult to put a particular line in the proverbial sand and say "Right, you're not allowed to add any enhancements beyond that". Antitrust legislation isn't intended to put the company out of business, simply to curb monopoly abuse. A judgement saying "You can't add any features" would be patently unjustifiable with a software company.
Define "The Right Thing".
Microsoft release an OS. There's nothing particularly secret or magical about that; it's fundamental to their business. An OS provides a platform on which to run software, and offers a number of features - because Microsoft's OS is aimed squarely at desktop PCs, it follows the features it provides are aimed squarely at desktop PCs.
Now, what generally happens is that Microsoft release an OS, and over the course of time some companies within the software industry spots what things are missing from the OS and writes utilities to make them available - a half-decent search facility, for instance. Same thing's true with more or less any OS - there have been third party volume managers for Solaris long before ZFS came about.
But it doesn't stop there. Sooner or later, Microsoft have to produce an updated version of their OS - if only because if they don't, it sill start to look dated in comparison with the competition. And the updated version offers more features - it's inevitable that some of these features happen to coincide with what a pre-existing tool did.
The difficult question is "where do you draw the line in deciding what's an acceptable new feature?". Technically, as Microsoft has been found guilty of antitrust violations, the line should be pretty close to what existing functionality is there. But Microsoft aren't particularly concerned about that, and never have been. If the processes involved from the point of "them breaking the law" through to "some court somewhere issuing a judgement against them" are sufficiently slow (which is true almost all the time), then by the time they're ordered to cease whatever it was they were doing so other businesses can have a chance, it's all rather academic - those other businesses have already gone to the wall and the next release of their product is just around the corner.
Do you use a Windows-managed domain for user login? How do you minimise the risk of losing Active Directory with only one server? My understanding was that any version of Exchange after 2000 requires it.
I think you've made a very good point there.
The DHS could guarantee that all computer-based attacks would be fruitless overnight. They'd just have to get rid of all their computers and resort to pocket calculators, slide rules and abacuses.
Unfortunately, that's about the only way to provide a 100% cast-iron guarantee that there's no way in hell the computer systems will be hacked.
Even if you did take such an extreme measure, the result would be that anyone that interested in getting information about what the DHS is doing would plant a few individuals in there.
Let's be honest, that's about all governments ever do. When was the last time you heard of a government organisation made more effective by simplifying things?
Further, the people who are likely to be seriously interested in infiltrating the DHS are quite able to find and finance someone with the capability to do so.
If you want to make Dell pay, buy a normal Windows-ified PC and claim the money back as per the EULA.
Tell me, how are you getting on with that? I've heard of isolated cases, but never a company openly stating that their policy is to honour such refund requests.
You ever spoken to Dell's Tech Support on the desktop teams? They don't want to support anything.
The only difficult bit there is proving more things are getting done. Certainly the amount of time required to make such an assertion and back it up with real proof is rather longer than Windows Vista has been available.
Kolab only switches the problem around: instead of having an integrated calendar/email system which works really nicely on Windows but only half-assed clones which sort-of work on Unix, you now have an integrated calendar/email system which works really nicely on Unix and only half-assed plugins which sort-of work on Windows.
There are two possible groups of people here. Possibly three:
1. Those who already have a PC, are reasonably knowledgeable about it and are quite happy with how it's all running. What's in it for them? Re-learn how to do a bunch of tasks only to wind up with exactly the same as what they've already got but with a few extra bells and whistles.
2. Businesses. What's the benefit? Microsoft likes to peddle things like "increased productivity", mainly because it's impossible to measure and hence impossible to argue with. I would, however, point out that "the IT department having to make sure that everything runs on Vista, scripts don't break and users don't get confused with an interface change" doesn't increase anyone's productivity.
3. Those who either don't have a PC, or do but are unhappy with it (probably because it's dog slow under the weight of all the spyware, but they don't know that). This is the only group which may go with Vista - but they'll go with whatever the PFY in the store tells them to go with. If Apple started offering sufficiently generous kickbacks to retail partners, you can bet that their market share would go up quite a bit.
Ahem:
You can even set up Exchange to support IMAP,
Who said you had to stop using Exchange? Where things get difficult is if you want the integrated calendars and everything on any platform other than Windows.
In the UK, I do not want companies invading my privacy and it is made difficult for them to do so.
I must have missed something. Yeah, it's difficult for the man at the local newsagents to demand your name, DOB, NI number and inside leg measurement then sell it to the highest bidder when you go in to buy your daily paper, but it's a different story for banks, building societies and property rental agencies - most of whom I'd be dubious about trusting with too much information.
Generally in the UK they don't sell it to the highest bidder anyway - they just print it out and throw it in the street.
The EU laws protect a person's privacy, requiring their permission to disclose personal information (among other things).
AFAIK, however, they don't prevent a business from making "you granting them permission to disclose information however they please" from being a condition of doing business with them.
All you wind up with is that the organisations who you really don't want being cavalier with such information (like banks) hiding a clause in the small print which broadly says "We may ship your data to third parties outside the EU with rather more lax privacy laws for some obscure reason". Airlines have recently been doing similar things when you buy a ticket online - presumably so they can give all the information that the US wants without breaking EU privacy law.
A solution already exists for this. It's existed for years - it certainly predates Exchange's current popularity.
It's called IMAP. Over SSL (or a VPN tunnel for outside access). You can even set up Exchange to support IMAP, and bingo - basic email access works for more or less everyone. Of course, you lose the integrated calendars stuff, but that's a sacrifice you may have to make.
I don't think MS are in it for the licence fees, they are trying to create FUD and scare people out of switching away from Microsoft based systems.
Nothing new there, then.
It wasn't that long ago that Microsoft were touting Windows NT as a cheap alternative OS to (then mostly commercial) Unix - port your apps to NT and bingo! away go a lot of costs. But since then, CALs are no longer included as part of the cost of the client OS (they were in the days of NT4). Seems ironic that the exact same argument is being used today to justify migrations away from Windows.
What's so terrible about booting from a different drive / file system?
Nothing per se, but AIUI ZFS allows you to specify how much (if any) redundancy you want, which with other filesystems requires setting up RAID separately which in turn adds complexity.
I suspect that most people that would run ZFS are the type of people that leave their machines up for months at a time. In that case, why the panic attacks over booting issues?
Generally speaking, the kind of system that you want to have up for months at a time is also the kind of system you want to come back up as quickly and painlessly as possible should something happen which causes/necessitates a reboot. That's one of the main reasons journalling was invented.
I'm excited about ZFS (in concept and theory) and I would love to give it a go. Finally a system that's up with the times.
Not sure about "up with the times". I have yet to see any convincing explanation of what amazing features ZFS offers which hasn't been in AIX's logical volume management system for years.
Alright then, how about "The de-facto understanding is..."?
The existence of the LGPL goes some way to suggesting that this indeed is the generally accepted understanding. It's not been codified in any legal judgement that I'm aware of, but that's only becaue there have been relatively few legal judgements worldwide on this particular aspect of the GPL. Most breaches seem to be far more flagrant.
Very easy. However, they have said that they won't disclose which patents are being violated because:
1. The Free software community would be able to discredit the patents (e.g. provide evidence of prior art, show the code isn't infringing, etc).
2. The Free software developers would be able to remove the offending code.
Taking these points in order (and I recognise they're Microsoft's arguments, not necessarily yours):
1. Absurd argument. The possibility of proving a patent invalid is a very good means to get off a patent lawsuit, so if Microsoft find this prospect so concerning, what's to say that whoever they sue won't be able to discredit the patents? Only makes sense if such a lawsuit is fought entirely in private, with no possibility of a leak on slashdot or groklaw saying "Here's a Microsoft patent, how valid is it?"
2. Almost as absurd. If the code is fundamental to a piece of software and can't easily be removed, then either that software and all deployments of it must cease to exist (possible if that software is produced by a few parties who can contact all their customers, not really practical for Linux) or it's not so fundamental, in which case it's doubtful how innovative the patent is in the first place. In the first case, Microsoft can then start suing anyone who uses the software and be sure that they'll find someone who can't easily stop using it. In the second case, the information would leak as soon as Microsoft actually sued anyone, in which case they've effectively got a patent which they cannot enforce. What's the use of a patent you cannot enforce?
If someone's so mentally unstable that they might conceivably go out and kill someone after playing a violent video game, perhaps the problem is with their mental stability than the videogame.
Why would you want to cause a chain reaction which causes the universe to explode?
They are possibly the WORST corporation I have ever had to deal with. How they got so big with such crappy service I cannot understand. They make Verizon look competent, and that's saying a lot.
A number of possibilities occur:
1. They didn't. The crappy service is a result of recent cost cutting, prior to that it was OK.
2. Relatively few people include "customer service" in their list of things to consider when choosing a provider.
3. A monopoly in some areas.
As I'm not an American, and I know zero about the US market for cable/TV/internet, I've probably missed out a few.
Which of Nintendo's, Sony's, or Microsoft's video game consoles doesn't have terms like these attached to it?
All of them, I think.
When was the last time someone was sued for playing XBox games on a Wii?