1. doesn't work as the Volume Licensing scheme only gets you "upgrades" and specifically states "you must pay for a full license at full price somewhere along the line.
2. That's my plan B if this doesn't work out. But Ghost isn't free, it's coming to the end of the financial year and budgets are stretched.
Actually, Dell are one of the better vendors. While their reinstall CD isn't 100% clean, it's pretty damn close. Shame that only applies to their "business" laptops - the Latitude series, for instance.
Certain others I won't name are substantially worse.
My current employer has been going about 5-6 years. Virtually every PC in the place shipped with an XP license. Yet I find myself having to pay for another XP license for every PC through the volume licensing scheme.
Part of the reason for this is because I don't want to upgrade to Vista within 18 months, which I'll pretty much have to if I don't have an easy way to downgrade. However, even without Vista on the horizon I'd be doing this. The reason is that even buying PC's aimed squarely at businesses through business suppliers, I wind up with OEM builds which have all sorts of odd things on them. For instance:
A few years ago, a major system builder included an "easy screen resolution changer" which has an awkward tendency to automatically bump the screen down to 800x600. Bit of a problem for the person with a 21" trinitron screen.
Another major system builder's laptop build consists of 7 CDs. One for the operating system, goodness alone knows what takes up the space on the other 6. The rebuild process using those CDs takes about 3 hours with innumerable reboots, and after that I still need to get Office on there.
Every laptop ships with some sort of "configuration" software which is obviously meant to make wireless configuration easier. Yet it makes configuration harder, as all of a sudden I need to either account for every possible piece of wireless config software in my "This is how you set up wireless" document or I need to publicly announce that you must use Windows' already perfectly good wireless config tools.
Because of Microsoft's leaning on these vendors, I can't get a straight, simple Windows install CD with these PCs. Instead, I get an automatic "system restore" CD which includes all this extra rubbish. And the product key on the PC only works with CDs supplied by the vendor.
So what I'm working on now is my own automatic-building CD which installs a plain, boring Windows setup, handles drivers and installs basic stuff like office. I've spent the last 3 days on this solid, and it's soul destroying. You wind up spending half the day watching Windows install, getting to the end and finding that you made some simple mistake and now it's back to fix that, recreate the CD and try again. Ghost isn't really an option, as I've got more different hardware configurations than I know what to do with and I don't have the budget to replace every single desktop and laptop in one go.
Calling some call center employee names or wishing physical harm on them won't help you get your money out of the account any faster than insulting the kid in the drive through window at McDonald's will help your hamburger taste better.
Very true. In fact, insulting the kid in the drive through window at McDonald's can unaccountably cause your burger to taste of snot. Nobody is quite sure why this is.
Support for extremely new hardware is always going to be an issue for non-microsoft software as long as the the device manufacturers ignore or even actively try to prevent support for it, but Linux simply has more mind-share, more developers, and more companies working with it than other free OSes, and as a result has overall better support for new hardware. In general the coverage is quite good.
TBH, I don't see too much of an issue with core hardware - graphics cards, network cards etc. Support may be a little shakey for very new hardware, but it's not new for long. Though wireless can be a bit of a pain.
Where I do see an issue is with specialised software (think accounting, payroll - "write your own or pay someone to" doesn't tend to sit very well with an FD who knows damn well he's going to have to retain someone for maintenance and support anyway, and he'd much rather go with a known evil than face something totally unknown) and peripheral devices - scanners, printers, graphics tablets, that sort of stuff. A particular model of scanner is frequently much less common than a particular model of graphics card - and if it's less common, there are fewer people prepared to work on a Free driver and there's less incentive for the manufacturer to sponsor one. Printers are becoming less of an issue these days, and no sane business is buying the cheap nasty £50 jobbies which cost less than their own toner cartridge and are tied to Windows, but the same can't be said for a lot of other stuff.
Why do they have to carry two phones? A number of people in my company have a smartphone as their only phone - and they typically have installed absolutely nothing on it since they bought it. Windows smartphones already come with a mobile version of Outlook, which is basically all they use it for.
But does Linux support more devices marketed to home users that are still being sold?
THANK YOU. I've been saying this for ages - "supports more devices" doesn't count for much when "more devices" is MFM hard disks, ISA network cards and other assorted stuff which simply hasn't been seen in the wild by most people for years.
If the tech industry in the valley started to seriously decline there wouldn't be much left in the valley...... Just a bunch of expensive houses that nobody could afford.
I don't know much about how the property market in the US works, but generally speaking if there are no jobs in an area, property prices tend to drop in fairly short order.
While it is possible to build a 100% guaranteed nobody-will-ever-beat-this-and-I-don't-care-how-de termined-they-are system in theory, nobody in the whole of history has built one in practise.
Or at least, not without some undesirable side effects. For instance, I can make my car 100% guaranteed impossible for a potential thief, no matter how determined, to drive away, but it's a mite inconvenient for me because I'd have to have it crushed.
What instead you have to do is make the system secure enough. In this case, "secure enough" is achieved as soon as it's cheaper to eat the cost of any fraud than it is to design & implement systems to make the fraud harder.
Tell you what. Why don't you go away and build me a 100% tamper proof Chip & PIN which cannot be easily replicated (eg. with casting resin and alginate), doesn't cost a small fortune to produce and provides some easy, immediately visible means of differentiating it from any possible fakes? Then persuade Tescos (and anyone else with similar systems) to use that rather than their existing system (which is "all cards, regardless of type, are swiped through the card reader on the checkout"), because if you don't, people won't be at all fazed by having to hand their card to the person at the counter.
Bear in mind that Tesco is large enough that if they say "No", you're a bit stuck. It's estimated that £1 in every £4 earned in the UK is spent there.
Similar rules exist in the commercial world as well, y'know. Only it's a lot harder to spot breaches of them when all you have available is pre-compiled code.
"Don't click if someone offers you something too good to be true. It is." worries me that people may be wary of certain open source projects but in the end...
True, but to your average home user, there's no difference between Free (speech) and Free (beer). Getting the message across that it's perfectly possible for free software to be good is very difficult, particularly when so many people have been burned by spyware. Realistically, you're going to be helping your friends and relations whatever OS they use - be it to clear away spyware or to try and figure out how to get some cheap £20 digital camera they bought off a friend to work.
It doesn't help that most free software cannot exactly count "a familiar, consistent user interface" as one of its strengths.
While you can script the windows FTP client, you'd need to get a script up onto the machine in the first place.
I can, however, think of a whole bunch of other bad things this enables. In general terms, there are two types of security hole - "local" exploits (which require someone to be sitting at a PC and actually run something in order to exploit - think most spyware which starts with a banner ad saying "Your computer is slow! Click here!") and "remote" exploits (which requires soemone to take advantage of the fact you haven't set up a firewall, and the first you know about it is when your ISP cuts you off for sending 13,000 spam emails in 24 hours).
In general terms, local exploits are often easier to find, easier to take advantage of and slower to be patched. What Acer have done could easily turn a number of hitherto unimportant local exploits into remote exploits with almost no extra work required on the part of a cracker.
I'd have thought they companies would want to know who really doesn't want to receive their junk.
You think this because you are a normal, intelligent person. Marketing people do not think this because they are neither normal nor intelligent.
All marketing people know is that N% of the junk mail they send results in sales. Therefore, in order to increase sales, all you have to do is send more junk mail. Dividing customers into groups like "Might buy from us" and "Won't buy from us" is simply too complicated, even when the customer is practically doing it for you by asking you to stop hassling them.
The thing I find particularly amusing is that they're a dating site. If their service is any good at all, the whole point of it is that sooner or later you will WANT to cancel it. And hey, if things don't work out, maybe you'll take it up again later - but I can't see many people doing that with such offensive conditions.
Depends how heavily you're monitoring traffic coming into/leaving the country. DNS isn't encrypted, so it would be fairly straightforward for an application-layer firewall to block all DNS requests for youtube.com leaving the country.
Of course, there is the minor issue that the further up you go the OSI stack, the more computationally complicated it is to block (and hence the more expensive it is to firewall every line coming into the country). But this is a government - it's not like they have a shortage of money.
Balls. Even if the service is heavily customised to the end user, all the customisation amounts to is "a limited number of options which the user can have on their account".
Seeing as this information will be stored on a computer, it's not too difficult for a scrtpt to drag up the list of options and erase each one as appropriate. If you're doing this by hand in anything other than a tiny business with customer numbers measured in tens, the problem is yours, not your customers.
I imagine you'd need to use a copy of Windows which had the patch pre-installed - either slipstreamed on (does slipstreaming patches like that cause them to work at install time?) or a post-SP2 copy of the XP install CD.
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Besides, I though Vista was uncrashable, just like Win95, Win98, ... WinXP. What gives?
"Uncrashable" and "Cannot be made to suck" are two different things.
1. doesn't work as the Volume Licensing scheme only gets you "upgrades" and specifically states "you must pay for a full license at full price somewhere along the line.
2. That's my plan B if this doesn't work out. But Ghost isn't free, it's coming to the end of the financial year and budgets are stretched.
Isn't ulimit only applied to programs running from the current shell; ie. it's useless if something's run through X?
Actually, Dell are one of the better vendors. While their reinstall CD isn't 100% clean, it's pretty damn close. Shame that only applies to their "business" laptops - the Latitude series, for instance.
Certain others I won't name are substantially worse.
Part of the reason for this is because I don't want to upgrade to Vista within 18 months, which I'll pretty much have to if I don't have an easy way to downgrade. However, even without Vista on the horizon I'd be doing this. The reason is that even buying PC's aimed squarely at businesses through business suppliers, I wind up with OEM builds which have all sorts of odd things on them. For instance:
Because of Microsoft's leaning on these vendors, I can't get a straight, simple Windows install CD with these PCs. Instead, I get an automatic "system restore" CD which includes all this extra rubbish. And the product key on the PC only works with CDs supplied by the vendor.
So what I'm working on now is my own automatic-building CD which installs a plain, boring Windows setup, handles drivers and installs basic stuff like office. I've spent the last 3 days on this solid, and it's soul destroying. You wind up spending half the day watching Windows install, getting to the end and finding that you made some simple mistake and now it's back to fix that, recreate the CD and try again. Ghost isn't really an option, as I've got more different hardware configurations than I know what to do with and I don't have the budget to replace every single desktop and laptop in one go.
Calling some call center employee names or wishing physical harm on them won't help you get your money out of the account any faster than insulting the kid in the drive through window at McDonald's will help your hamburger taste better.
Very true. In fact, insulting the kid in the drive through window at McDonald's can unaccountably cause your burger to taste of snot. Nobody is quite sure why this is.
Support for extremely new hardware is always going to be an issue for non-microsoft software as long as the the device manufacturers ignore or even actively try to prevent support for it, but Linux simply has more mind-share, more developers, and more companies working with it than other free OSes, and as a result has overall better support for new hardware. In general the coverage is quite good.
TBH, I don't see too much of an issue with core hardware - graphics cards, network cards etc. Support may be a little shakey for very new hardware, but it's not new for long. Though wireless can be a bit of a pain.
Where I do see an issue is with specialised software (think accounting, payroll - "write your own or pay someone to" doesn't tend to sit very well with an FD who knows damn well he's going to have to retain someone for maintenance and support anyway, and he'd much rather go with a known evil than face something totally unknown) and peripheral devices - scanners, printers, graphics tablets, that sort of stuff. A particular model of scanner is frequently much less common than a particular model of graphics card - and if it's less common, there are fewer people prepared to work on a Free driver and there's less incentive for the manufacturer to sponsor one. Printers are becoming less of an issue these days, and no sane business is buying the cheap nasty £50 jobbies which cost less than their own toner cartridge and are tied to Windows, but the same can't be said for a lot of other stuff.
Why do they have to carry two phones? A number of people in my company have a smartphone as their only phone - and they typically have installed absolutely nothing on it since they bought it. Windows smartphones already come with a mobile version of Outlook, which is basically all they use it for.
Yes, that first one's a little difficult when you're working on a major new product in conjunction with a number of other business partners.
But does Linux support more devices marketed to home users that are still being sold?
THANK YOU. I've been saying this for ages - "supports more devices" doesn't count for much when "more devices" is MFM hard disks, ISA network cards and other assorted stuff which simply hasn't been seen in the wild by most people for years.
It was certainly the case for educational licenses in 2000/2001.
I do hope you got the sales reps to put it in writing that you were OK to buy bare PCs.
If the tech industry in the valley started to seriously decline there wouldn't be much left in the valley...... Just a bunch of expensive houses that nobody could afford.
I don't know much about how the property market in the US works, but generally speaking if there are no jobs in an area, property prices tend to drop in fairly short order.
There's only one minor flaw to all of this.
e termined-they-are system in theory, nobody in the whole of history has built one in practise.
While it is possible to build a 100% guaranteed nobody-will-ever-beat-this-and-I-don't-care-how-d
Or at least, not without some undesirable side effects. For instance, I can make my car 100% guaranteed impossible for a potential thief, no matter how determined, to drive away, but it's a mite inconvenient for me because I'd have to have it crushed.
What instead you have to do is make the system secure enough. In this case, "secure enough" is achieved as soon as it's cheaper to eat the cost of any fraud than it is to design & implement systems to make the fraud harder.
Tell you what. Why don't you go away and build me a 100% tamper proof Chip & PIN which cannot be easily replicated (eg. with casting resin and alginate), doesn't cost a small fortune to produce and provides some easy, immediately visible means of differentiating it from any possible fakes? Then persuade Tescos (and anyone else with similar systems) to use that rather than their existing system (which is "all cards, regardless of type, are swiped through the card reader on the checkout"), because if you don't, people won't be at all fazed by having to hand their card to the person at the counter.
Bear in mind that Tesco is large enough that if they say "No", you're a bit stuck. It's estimated that £1 in every £4 earned in the UK is spent there.
Except for Firefox. And OpenOffice.
Similar rules exist in the commercial world as well, y'know. Only it's a lot harder to spot breaches of them when all you have available is pre-compiled code.
True, but to your average home user, there's no difference between Free (speech) and Free (beer). Getting the message across that it's perfectly possible for free software to be good is very difficult, particularly when so many people have been burned by spyware. Realistically, you're going to be helping your friends and relations whatever OS they use - be it to clear away spyware or to try and figure out how to get some cheap £20 digital camera they bought off a friend to work.
It doesn't help that most free software cannot exactly count "a familiar, consistent user interface" as one of its strengths.
Agreed. You're in trouble the first time you try selling the water bag to someone whose car you repaired a few weeks previously.
While you can script the windows FTP client, you'd need to get a script up onto the machine in the first place.
I can, however, think of a whole bunch of other bad things this enables. In general terms, there are two types of security hole - "local" exploits (which require someone to be sitting at a PC and actually run something in order to exploit - think most spyware which starts with a banner ad saying "Your computer is slow! Click here!") and "remote" exploits (which requires soemone to take advantage of the fact you haven't set up a firewall, and the first you know about it is when your ISP cuts you off for sending 13,000 spam emails in 24 hours).
In general terms, local exploits are often easier to find, easier to take advantage of and slower to be patched. What Acer have done could easily turn a number of hitherto unimportant local exploits into remote exploits with almost no extra work required on the part of a cracker.
Does your license ID work with any install CD, so you can borrow your friend's
No, it's generally tied to a limited number of install CDs (usually those provided by the manufacturer as "emergency recovery" disks).
I'd have thought they companies would want to know who really doesn't want to receive their junk.
You think this because you are a normal, intelligent person. Marketing people do not think this because they are neither normal nor intelligent.
All marketing people know is that N% of the junk mail they send results in sales. Therefore, in order to increase sales, all you have to do is send more junk mail. Dividing customers into groups like "Might buy from us" and "Won't buy from us" is simply too complicated, even when the customer is practically doing it for you by asking you to stop hassling them.
The thing I find particularly amusing is that they're a dating site. If their service is any good at all, the whole point of it is that sooner or later you will WANT to cancel it. And hey, if things don't work out, maybe you'll take it up again later - but I can't see many people doing that with such offensive conditions.
Depends how heavily you're monitoring traffic coming into/leaving the country. DNS isn't encrypted, so it would be fairly straightforward for an application-layer firewall to block all DNS requests for youtube.com leaving the country.
Of course, there is the minor issue that the further up you go the OSI stack, the more computationally complicated it is to block (and hence the more expensive it is to firewall every line coming into the country). But this is a government - it's not like they have a shortage of money.
Balls. Even if the service is heavily customised to the end user, all the customisation amounts to is "a limited number of options which the user can have on their account".
Seeing as this information will be stored on a computer, it's not too difficult for a scrtpt to drag up the list of options and erase each one as appropriate. If you're doing this by hand in anything other than a tiny business with customer numbers measured in tens, the problem is yours, not your customers.
I imagine you'd need to use a copy of Windows which had the patch pre-installed - either slipstreamed on (does slipstreaming patches like that cause them to work at install time?) or a post-SP2 copy of the XP install CD.