If it's now your right to be able to format shift the music you bought wouldn't any technology that prevents you from doing that be illegal?
There is a difference between something being "a right" and something being "not wrong".
IANAL, but AFAICT most legal systems work on the basis that you can do anything you like as long as it's not on the big list of things which are "wrong" - but that does not prevent someone else putting barriers to stop you doing something, as long as those barriers aren't specifically on the list of things which are "wrong".
Generally speaking, laws making sure people have "a right" are fairly basic things left to constitutions, and cover simple things like "everyone has a right to a fair trial", or "everyone has a right to live peacefully, without fear of undue persecution by their neighbours or their government".
Where things start to get complicated is where one law contradicts another without specifically saying "This law replaces the older law", or where the language used is open to interpretation.
This is pretty OT, so mods do as you will, but it reminds me of a story (I can't remember the name of it or a lot of detail, so if someone else can fill in the blanks, please do). Relevant to the idea of parents trying to cover their kids in cotton-wool though.
Many years ago, there was a king. He was very rich, he lived in a nice castle and had anything he wanted. Anyhow, one of his wives fell pregnant and he consulted a soothsayer.
The soothsayer predicted that his son would see a poor man and a sick man, and on so doing would give away all his wealth.
The king was shocked at this, and went to extreme lengths to ensure that his son be brought up without ever seeing anyone poor or sick.
Many years passed. The prince grew older, and as a teenager sneaked out of the castle with some guy who worked there. He'd never been out before, and teenagers being what they are, he desperately wanted to see the world. They went into the city, and while they were walking they passed a man begging in the streets.
"What's he doing?" said the prince.
"He is poor", said the palace aide, "He has no food, he is hungry."
"No food? That's terrible!"
And so they continued. Before long they met a leper, covered in festering sores.
"What's wrong with him?" asked the prince.
"He is a leper", said the aide. "He has a terrible illness which makes him look like that."
"An illness? Terrible!"
They walked on. But as they did, the prince couldn't stop thinking of the poor man or the leper. He'd never seen anyone poor or sick in the palace, and it shocked him to think that there were those who were worse off than him. When he returned home, he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to give all his great wealth to the poor and needy, such that they might have a better lot......
When I was looking for an MP3 player, I came to roughly the same conclusion. If you want something with a half-decent screen and 20-30GB capacity, there's only a few on the market and there's not a huge price difference between any of them.
Throw in "Must work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; must be rather lighter to carry than a breeze block" and suddenly the competition collapses altogether.
I'm talking about a secondary school and student computers - think "ages 11-18".
I looked into an NT migration, and found that in theory it was possible but there was one minor glitch. My boss at the time demanded that a single specific program run or he wouldn't sanction such a migration.
This specific program was an application launcher designed to make things easier by allowing an admin to set up and group a handful of single-click icons to launch applications - desktop icons and the start menu being deemed "too difficult". And it didn't work on NT at all.
In the "old days" a passport could have had a new photo glued over the top. These could be spotted and rejected. Any new hacks that had a glued-over photo that corresponded with the pic in the RFID chip, would be far less likely to be picked-up. Guards would believe it, because the technology would convince them the passport was genuine.
Does anyone know if the data these RFID chips contain includes a digital signature? If not, what's to stop someone:
1. Read RFID from a passport 2. Change the picture in the RFID data. 3. Write this altered data to a new, fake passport with the same picture on there. (I'm sure they're easy enough to get hold of with the right contacts and enough money).
Bingo. One passport which looks genuine to both the guard and to their machinery.
I had to support 120 Win9x boxes for a year. I still have the nightmares.
Without Ghost, it was, to all intents and purposes, impossible to manage in any meaningful way. With Ghost, the only sensible way to manage it was "when in doubt, reimage first and ask questions later".
Stable? When you see 15% of the workstations have been left logged on because a program had locked them up completely, that is not stable. Hint: Half-decent pre-emptive multi-tasking is a lot harder to bring down than that.
Spaces and mixed case in the filenames? Give me a break, Unix had had that for years.
"Better than previous versions of Windows" may be true, but it's like saying "Cholera is better than bubonic plague".
Actually, we don't develop any software which speaks to an SQL server anyhow (though we have purchased some commercial software which does). I was talking theoretically.
In any case, I can see a place for a workstation database to test against initially just to make sure the code doesn't do anything too glaringly wrong. Then check into CVS and do the real tests against a QA database on a real server of the same version/patch level.
This is what you get for having systems that can be administered using a simple mouseclick by somone with only superficial knowledge of the matter!
I disagree. My take is "this is what you get for hiring people who believe that the correct way to fix a large number of systems is to click "next next next" on every one of those systems like a trained chimpanzee". What are such people doing in IT anyhow? The whole point of computers is to make repetitive tasks quick and easy, why are you giving yourself a repetitive task?
At a previous employer, we had about 800-1,000 people using a mix of NT4 and 2K on the desktop. Didn't bother us. When it was necessary to do something to a whole bunch of machines, we scripted it with a batch file and pstools (google for it - I'm too lazy to provide a link). Worked a treat. You'd be amazed (and probably faintly disturbed) at what can be done in a batch file if you're bloody minded enough. It's possible (though not much fun) to simulate grep with a for loop.
Now I'm the IT manager. One of my interview questions is "How do you install software on one desktop? OK, now how do you install software on 100 desktops?". Anyone who hasn't got the wherewithall to think that it must be scriptable is not someone I wish to hire.
Now you don't know anything about the detailed inner workings of Dell or HP's business model, their support costs, supply chain, etc. and you don't know that even if they could offer an OS-Free PC at a cost, including support costs, lower then the current PCs with Windows. You don't know
I accept that. But I am certain that the main reason has less to do with support and inventory issues that surround handling more than 1 build and more to do with Microsoft breathing down their neck.
But what you do know is that YOU want a PC without an OS AND you want to pay less then you would pay for a PC with an OS from Dell or HP. You want an HP product modified specifically for your tastes and you want the government to give it to you
Rule 1 : The government works for the will of the people. (In a modern democracy, any government which doesn't soon learns the hard way). If society feels that in some circumstances someone big and powerful has to intervene and say "Enough!", that's the government's job. That's what taxes are there for, that's why I vote, that's why I accept that sometimes the government may not do exactly what I want but if that's the will of society, I accept it.
In a truly free market, I wouldn't need the government to step in, Someone else would have already found a way to offer a PC for a slightly cheaper price without an OS. But as soon as you have a monopolist in the market, it's not truly free.
How much money are we talking about here really... $90?
As a percentage of the $350 PC you discuss above, that's almost 25%. Let's give you a 25% pay cut and see how you feel.
Maybe HP should offer a PC without an OS, set at the exact same price as the current PC w/ an OS, but bundled with a "special" install disk that preps the PC by formatting the hard disk.
This isn't that far off what I suggested upthread, except that I proposed that there be some mechanism whereby it is possible to know if the customer has taken this option and thus offer them a refund of the license.
Anyways, there really isn't any point in trying to convince you. You're set on using a government bludgeon to force others to give you what you want.
I dunno. I thought it was an interesting discussion (and rather more enlightened than most on/,). So we have differing opinions, so what? TWIAVBP.
Why the hell should we care about the compatability virtues of a workstation SQL server?
How about because if you were developing code for me, and I found you testing your code against the production database on a real server, you'd be out the door so fast your head would spin?
(Though TBH I wouldn't give you access to the production database anyhow, but that's by the by.)
Technically, you're correct. But any business with any sense will look at the applications it needs first, then go base their OS choice on the strength of that.
So, if $APPLICATION isn't compatible with $OS, it's $OS that gets changed.
You can purchase PCs without operating systems from local vendors and many computer stores.
WHAT local vendors? Most of them have been driven out of business by Dell. Of the few that remain, I'd be paying a 20% premium for the privilege of buying a PC without Windows, and none of them have the infrastructure in place to OEM laptops. "But they can offer better support" - That's nice. I've got 22 years experience in computing, I don't think I need support from some spotty little 16 year old who works in the local computer store.
If Microsoft is using its power to force vendors to install its OS on every PC and pass the cost along to the customer then go after Microsoft.
It is, but legally it's far easier to go after the vendor for "illegally bundling" a product than it is to go after Microsoft for illegally abusing their monopoly. Furthermore, there are rather fewer local vendors and stores selling laptops without Windows. In my area, I can think of about 4 computer stores. None of the independents build laptops (naturally), the only other options are department stores or a major chain, neither of which will offer a PC without an OS.
And as a normal consumer, I can't go after Microsoft because at the OEM stage, I'm not the customer. Dell or HP are. It's extremely frustrating to have such a limited choice available when the only reason the choice is limited is because Microsoft say that's how it should be.
If HP, Dell, SystemMax, Gateway, etc have found that it's much more cost effective to satisfy the vast majority of the market by pre-installing windows then that's they're decision. It's their business.
Come off it.
It's doubtful Microsoft will pay the reseller for them giving a refund on an OEM product, so the OEM doesn't offer it. Even now, you can ask for a PC without an OS and the salesman will insist that he can't do that, as part of their contract with Microsoft states that they must ship every PC with Windows. Doesn't matter how much you point out that this has been declared illegal in various countries, they'd far rather lose one customer than piss off Microsoft.
Now I think of it, if you're a big enough customer, Dell will preload your company's own PC build at the factory so your IT department doesn't even have to do that with PCs they purchase. Anyone tried giving Dell a Linux build for this?
consider purchasing the hardware from another vendor
The whole crux of my argument is that there's only a few major vendors left, and they're all as bad as each other.
This is one of the reasons that 9 times out of 10, few large companies send a PC out with the Windows build that it shipped with on there. They don't know what that was, it's probably different to what it was a couple of months ago and it would very quickly become a support nightmare.
Because the margins on PC hardware are so tight that in order to make any money in the first place, you have to be building and selling in quantities like HP, Dell or Lenovo do. (There's a reason why IBM sold their PC hardware division, y'know).
And all these major companies state that for desktop PCs, it's Windows or no PC at all.
When I have a hardware problem and call up for support, I always get the same line: "We can't support you unless you're running windows."
Clearly you have yet to master the art of dealing with technical support. Assuming you've already established what the problem is (and what are you doing on/. if you can't do that?), then getting a warranty repair is easy, regardless of OS.
"I'm not running anything, the hard disk doesn't even work for long enough to boot up".
"I'm not running anything, there's thick black smoke coming out of the power supply".
"I'm not getting much of a chance to run anything, it resets within 5 minutes of booting and I've reinstalled it twice now".
"It works fine, it just refuses to read any CD I put in there, even an audio CD." (Memorise a few plausible-sounding Windows error messages for this one)
Ahh but you are also forcing HP to provide technical support for linux - why should they have to deal with that "burden"
Purely out of curiosity, has anyone on/. ever tried calling the likes of HP or Dell for any support other than "the hard disk/motherboard/PSU has just died, can I get a warranty replacement?"
Because I'm nearly certain that's about all you'll get in the way of support these days.
If Microsoft succeed in taking on the other mainstream Linux distributions, they don't need a way to kill and eat Novell. Remember that a lot of Linux development is undertaken by the various commercial entities such as RedHat, IBM et al. If they're out of the equation, suddenly Novell are left with an operating system which is dying on the vine as nobody else is supporting it.
Of course, this is all 5-10 years in the future here and the way Microsoft are going, I think the IT landscape will be very different in 10 years.
There is also the small issue of spyware and the like, and whether or not it should be blocked in that fashion. Though if you believe nobody has thought of tunnelling spyware traffic over HTTP you're fantastically naive - I've not actually looked into it, but I'd be astonished if they haven't, and if you don't have a half-decent AV solution which also looks out for spyware, you deserve all you get.
Of course it's not. But a lot of it depends on how you run your firewall.
If it's "every packet trying to cross the firewall in either direction is blocked unless it comes from the web proxy or the mail server" then Skype will also be blocked anyhow.
If it's "any packet trying to come in is blocked, but if the connection was originally set up from inside the network, anything goes" (which seems to be the most common configuration), then Skype will work quite happily.
Rpm (the CLI tool, not the format) should be like dpkg in the Debian world -- a very low level tool for package management. If you want something user friendly to use at the command line, use yum, apt-rpm, yast, or whatever other high level tool floats your boat.
It wasn't all that long ago that this wasn't possible in RedHat. IIRC, everything before Fedora Core, "rpm -ivh <package>" was exactly what you did. If it had dependencies, it would tell you, but actually solving them was your problem. This was the exact reason I moved to Mandrake (as it was then), which had already improved matters substantially with a program called urpmi.
The Endless nights of pages way back when I was a Mikeysoft dork admin, just to reboot a computer at 3AM, EVERY night for 2 years. Some things never change.
Nothing personal, but if you didn't do something about that after the first few calls (such as some redundancy, or monitoring to automatically reboot the system), I'd say that the problem wasn't entirely Microsoft's.
Out of the box, Linux supports a wider range of hardware than Windows does.
While this may be technically true, I don't think it's much to be proud of in this day and age when the "wider range of hardware" is things like (taken from a 2.6.18 kernel "make menuconfig"):
MCA Support
CMD640 Chipset Support (it was common - about 8 years ago)
FTape, the floppy tape device driver (many years ago it was fairly common for some cheaper tape drives to connect to the floppy interface. This worked about as quickly and efficiently as you'd expect it to).
Hercules Mono graphics card (quote: "As this card technology is 15 years old, most people will answer N here.")
6850 UART support (used for MIDI on some elderly sound cards. Rarely).
yet does not include very good support for wireless NICs, and video card support is entirely dependent on a vendor-produced module which may or may not insert cleanly into the kernel, and thus may or may not render the system thoroughly unstable.
Either you can rehabilitate criminals, or you can't.
Similarly, either jail is an effective rehabilitation tool or it isn't.
This gives a number of scenarios:
1. Criminal is jailed, criminal cannot be rehabilitated.
Why bother? Just shoot them on conviction and save society the money. (Yes I know that's an extreme viewpoint. Bear with me, this is a thought experiment). 2. Criminal is not jailed, criminal cannot be rehabilitated
So society sees little point in jailing the criminal, but they are free to commit crime which is one thing jail does prevent. Ouch. 3. Criminal is jailed, and can be rehabilitated. But jail's a lousy tool for rehabilitation.
Why bother? While the criminal can in theory be rehabilitated, society doesn't have an effective means to do so. Shoot them and save the money. 4. Criminal is jailed, can be rehabilitated. Jail works for rehabilitation.
Oh goody. Finally something that works. Except that every developed country in the world has lousy recidivism rates for formerly jailed ex-convicts, which suggests that this option is far removed from the real world.
The idea of a generic ABI for that kind of thing has been mooted a few times. As I recall, the main concern is that maintaining compatability for such a thing will sooner or later become such an albatross around the neck of the kernel developers purely for the benefit of a handful of hardware vendors so they can release closed-source drivers (either in kernel or userspace) rather than the actual users (who, lest we forget, are pouring far more money into Linux via RedHat, SuSE, IBM et al) that it's a rather pointless exercise.
The kernel developers are seeking to build a solid, stable kernel which runs with most common hardware. Not a complete distro with support for every random graphics card ever produced. Closed source binary blobs run completely contrary to the "solid, stable" bit.
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If it's now your right to be able to format shift the music you bought wouldn't any technology that prevents you from doing that be illegal?
There is a difference between something being "a right" and something being "not wrong".
IANAL, but AFAICT most legal systems work on the basis that you can do anything you like as long as it's not on the big list of things which are "wrong" - but that does not prevent someone else putting barriers to stop you doing something, as long as those barriers aren't specifically on the list of things which are "wrong".
Generally speaking, laws making sure people have "a right" are fairly basic things left to constitutions, and cover simple things like "everyone has a right to a fair trial", or "everyone has a right to live peacefully, without fear of undue persecution by their neighbours or their government".
Where things start to get complicated is where one law contradicts another without specifically saying "This law replaces the older law", or where the language used is open to interpretation.
This is pretty OT, so mods do as you will, but it reminds me of a story (I can't remember the name of it or a lot of detail, so if someone else can fill in the blanks, please do). Relevant to the idea of parents trying to cover their kids in cotton-wool though.
Many years ago, there was a king. He was very rich, he lived in a nice castle and had anything he wanted. Anyhow, one of his wives fell pregnant and he consulted a soothsayer.
The soothsayer predicted that his son would see a poor man and a sick man, and on so doing would give away all his wealth.
The king was shocked at this, and went to extreme lengths to ensure that his son be brought up without ever seeing anyone poor or sick.
Many years passed. The prince grew older, and as a teenager sneaked out of the castle with some guy who worked there. He'd never been out before, and teenagers being what they are, he desperately wanted to see the world. They went into the city, and while they were walking they passed a man begging in the streets.
"What's he doing?" said the prince.
"He is poor", said the palace aide, "He has no food, he is hungry."
"No food? That's terrible!"
And so they continued. Before long they met a leper, covered in festering sores.
"What's wrong with him?" asked the prince.
"He is a leper", said the aide. "He has a terrible illness which makes him look like that."
"An illness? Terrible!"
They walked on. But as they did, the prince couldn't stop thinking of the poor man or the leper. He'd never seen anyone poor or sick in the palace, and it shocked him to think that there were those who were worse off than him. When he returned home, he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to give all his great wealth to the poor and needy, such that they might have a better lot......
Thank you.
When I was looking for an MP3 player, I came to roughly the same conclusion. If you want something with a half-decent screen and 20-30GB capacity, there's only a few on the market and there's not a huge price difference between any of them.
Throw in "Must work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux; must be rather lighter to carry than a breeze block" and suddenly the competition collapses altogether.
I'm talking about a secondary school and student computers - think "ages 11-18".
I looked into an NT migration, and found that in theory it was possible but there was one minor glitch. My boss at the time demanded that a single specific program run or he wouldn't sanction such a migration.
This specific program was an application launcher designed to make things easier by allowing an admin to set up and group a handful of single-click icons to launch applications - desktop icons and the start menu being deemed "too difficult". And it didn't work on NT at all.
In the "old days" a passport could have had a new photo glued over the top. These could be spotted and rejected. Any new hacks that had a glued-over photo that corresponded with the pic in the RFID chip, would be far less likely to be picked-up. Guards would believe it, because the technology would convince them the passport was genuine.
Does anyone know if the data these RFID chips contain includes a digital signature? If not, what's to stop someone:
1. Read RFID from a passport
2. Change the picture in the RFID data.
3. Write this altered data to a new, fake passport with the same picture on there. (I'm sure they're easy enough to get hold of with the right contacts and enough money).
Bingo. One passport which looks genuine to both the guard and to their machinery.
I had to support 120 Win9x boxes for a year. I still have the nightmares.
Without Ghost, it was, to all intents and purposes, impossible to manage in any meaningful way. With Ghost, the only sensible way to manage it was "when in doubt, reimage first and ask questions later".
Stable? When you see 15% of the workstations have been left logged on because a program had locked them up completely, that is not stable. Hint: Half-decent pre-emptive multi-tasking is a lot harder to bring down than that.
Spaces and mixed case in the filenames? Give me a break, Unix had had that for years.
"Better than previous versions of Windows" may be true, but it's like saying "Cholera is better than bubonic plague".
Actually, we don't develop any software which speaks to an SQL server anyhow (though we have purchased some commercial software which does). I was talking theoretically.
In any case, I can see a place for a workstation database to test against initially just to make sure the code doesn't do anything too glaringly wrong. Then check into CVS and do the real tests against a QA database on a real server of the same version/patch level.
This is what you get for having systems that can be administered using a simple mouseclick by somone with only superficial knowledge of the matter!
I disagree. My take is "this is what you get for hiring people who believe that the correct way to fix a large number of systems is to click "next next next" on every one of those systems like a trained chimpanzee". What are such people doing in IT anyhow? The whole point of computers is to make repetitive tasks quick and easy, why are you giving yourself a repetitive task?
At a previous employer, we had about 800-1,000 people using a mix of NT4 and 2K on the desktop. Didn't bother us. When it was necessary to do something to a whole bunch of machines, we scripted it with a batch file and pstools (google for it - I'm too lazy to provide a link). Worked a treat. You'd be amazed (and probably faintly disturbed) at what can be done in a batch file if you're bloody minded enough. It's possible (though not much fun) to simulate grep with a for loop.
Now I'm the IT manager. One of my interview questions is "How do you install software on one desktop? OK, now how do you install software on 100 desktops?". Anyone who hasn't got the wherewithall to think that it must be scriptable is not someone I wish to hire.
Now you don't know anything about the detailed inner workings of Dell or HP's business model, their support costs, supply chain, etc. and you don't know that even if they could offer an OS-Free PC at a cost, including support costs, lower then the current PCs with Windows. You don't know
/,). So we have differing opinions, so what? TWIAVBP.
I accept that. But I am certain that the main reason has less to do with support and inventory issues that surround handling more than 1 build and more to do with Microsoft breathing down their neck.
But what you do know is that YOU want a PC without an OS AND you want to pay less then you would pay for a PC with an OS from Dell or HP. You want an HP product modified specifically for your tastes and you want the government to give it to you
Rule 1 : The government works for the will of the people. (In a modern democracy, any government which doesn't soon learns the hard way). If society feels that in some circumstances someone big and powerful has to intervene and say "Enough!", that's the government's job. That's what taxes are there for, that's why I vote, that's why I accept that sometimes the government may not do exactly what I want but if that's the will of society, I accept it.
In a truly free market, I wouldn't need the government to step in, Someone else would have already found a way to offer a PC for a slightly cheaper price without an OS. But as soon as you have a monopolist in the market, it's not truly free.
How much money are we talking about here really... $90?
As a percentage of the $350 PC you discuss above, that's almost 25%. Let's give you a 25% pay cut and see how you feel.
Maybe HP should offer a PC without an OS, set at the exact same price as the current PC w/ an OS, but bundled with a "special" install disk that preps the PC by formatting the hard disk.
This isn't that far off what I suggested upthread, except that I proposed that there be some mechanism whereby it is possible to know if the customer has taken this option and thus offer them a refund of the license.
Anyways, there really isn't any point in trying to convince you. You're set on using a government bludgeon to force others to give you what you want.
I dunno. I thought it was an interesting discussion (and rather more enlightened than most on
Why the hell should we care about the compatability virtues of a workstation SQL server?
How about because if you were developing code for me, and I found you testing your code against the production database on a real server, you'd be out the door so fast your head would spin?
(Though TBH I wouldn't give you access to the production database anyhow, but that's by the by.)
Vista is the most secure Windows yet.
Not true. Earlier versions of Windows didn't support networking in any way. Provided you keep your computer in a locked room, you're fine.
Technically, you're correct. But any business with any sense will look at the applications it needs first, then go base their OS choice on the strength of that.
So, if $APPLICATION isn't compatible with $OS, it's $OS that gets changed.
You can purchase PCs without operating systems from local vendors and many computer stores.
WHAT local vendors? Most of them have been driven out of business by Dell. Of the few that remain, I'd be paying a 20% premium for the privilege of buying a PC without Windows, and none of them have the infrastructure in place to OEM laptops. "But they can offer better support" - That's nice. I've got 22 years experience in computing, I don't think I need support from some spotty little 16 year old who works in the local computer store.
If Microsoft is using its power to force vendors to install its OS on every PC and pass the cost along to the customer then go after Microsoft.
It is, but legally it's far easier to go after the vendor for "illegally bundling" a product than it is to go after Microsoft for illegally abusing their monopoly. Furthermore, there are rather fewer local vendors and stores selling laptops without Windows. In my area, I can think of about 4 computer stores. None of the independents build laptops (naturally), the only other options are department stores or a major chain, neither of which will offer a PC without an OS.
And as a normal consumer, I can't go after Microsoft because at the OEM stage, I'm not the customer. Dell or HP are. It's extremely frustrating to have such a limited choice available when the only reason the choice is limited is because Microsoft say that's how it should be.
If HP, Dell, SystemMax, Gateway, etc have found that it's much more cost effective to satisfy the vast majority of the market by pre-installing windows then that's they're decision. It's their business.
Come off it.
It's doubtful Microsoft will pay the reseller for them giving a refund on an OEM product, so the OEM doesn't offer it. Even now, you can ask for a PC without an OS and the salesman will insist that he can't do that, as part of their contract with Microsoft states that they must ship every PC with Windows. Doesn't matter how much you point out that this has been declared illegal in various countries, they'd far rather lose one customer than piss off Microsoft.
Now I think of it, if you're a big enough customer, Dell will preload your company's own PC build at the factory so your IT department doesn't even have to do that with PCs they purchase. Anyone tried giving Dell a Linux build for this?
consider purchasing the hardware from another vendor
The whole crux of my argument is that there's only a few major vendors left, and they're all as bad as each other.
This is one of the reasons that 9 times out of 10, few large companies send a PC out with the Windows build that it shipped with on there. They don't know what that was, it's probably different to what it was a couple of months ago and it would very quickly become a support nightmare.
Because the margins on PC hardware are so tight that in order to make any money in the first place, you have to be building and selling in quantities like HP, Dell or Lenovo do. (There's a reason why IBM sold their PC hardware division, y'know).
And all these major companies state that for desktop PCs, it's Windows or no PC at all.
When I have a hardware problem and call up for support, I always get the same line: "We can't support you unless you're running windows."
/. if you can't do that?), then getting a warranty repair is easy, regardless of OS.
Clearly you have yet to master the art of dealing with technical support. Assuming you've already established what the problem is (and what are you doing on
"I'm not running anything, the hard disk doesn't even work for long enough to boot up".
"I'm not running anything, there's thick black smoke coming out of the power supply".
"I'm not getting much of a chance to run anything, it resets within 5 minutes of booting and I've reinstalled it twice now".
"It works fine, it just refuses to read any CD I put in there, even an audio CD." (Memorise a few plausible-sounding Windows error messages for this one)
Ahh but you are also forcing HP to provide technical support for linux - why should they have to deal with that "burden"
/. ever tried calling the likes of HP or Dell for any support other than "the hard disk/motherboard/PSU has just died, can I get a warranty replacement?"
Purely out of curiosity, has anyone on
Because I'm nearly certain that's about all you'll get in the way of support these days.
Then MS finds another way to kill and eat Novell
If Microsoft succeed in taking on the other mainstream Linux distributions, they don't need a way to kill and eat Novell. Remember that a lot of Linux development is undertaken by the various commercial entities such as RedHat, IBM et al. If they're out of the equation, suddenly Novell are left with an operating system which is dying on the vine as nobody else is supporting it.
Of course, this is all 5-10 years in the future here and the way Microsoft are going, I think the IT landscape will be very different in 10 years.
There is also the small issue of spyware and the like, and whether or not it should be blocked in that fashion. Though if you believe nobody has thought of tunnelling spyware traffic over HTTP you're fantastically naive - I've not actually looked into it, but I'd be astonished if they haven't, and if you don't have a half-decent AV solution which also looks out for spyware, you deserve all you get.
Of course it's not. But a lot of it depends on how you run your firewall.
If it's "every packet trying to cross the firewall in either direction is blocked unless it comes from the web proxy or the mail server" then Skype will also be blocked anyhow.
If it's "any packet trying to come in is blocked, but if the connection was originally set up from inside the network, anything goes" (which seems to be the most common configuration), then Skype will work quite happily.
Rpm (the CLI tool, not the format) should be like dpkg in the Debian world -- a very low level tool for package management. If you want something user friendly to use at the command line, use yum, apt-rpm, yast, or whatever other high level tool floats your boat.
It wasn't all that long ago that this wasn't possible in RedHat. IIRC, everything before Fedora Core, "rpm -ivh <package>" was exactly what you did. If it had dependencies, it would tell you, but actually solving them was your problem. This was the exact reason I moved to Mandrake (as it was then), which had already improved matters substantially with a program called urpmi.
The Endless nights of pages way back when I was a Mikeysoft dork admin, just to reboot a computer at 3AM, EVERY night for 2 years. Some things never change.
Nothing personal, but if you didn't do something about that after the first few calls (such as some redundancy, or monitoring to automatically reboot the system), I'd say that the problem wasn't entirely Microsoft's.
While this may be technically true, I don't think it's much to be proud of in this day and age when the "wider range of hardware" is things like (taken from a 2.6.18 kernel "make menuconfig"):
yet does not include very good support for wireless NICs, and video card support is entirely dependent on a vendor-produced module which may or may not insert cleanly into the kernel, and thus may or may not render the system thoroughly unstable.
Let's try a thought experiment.
Either you can rehabilitate criminals, or you can't.
Similarly, either jail is an effective rehabilitation tool or it isn't.
This gives a number of scenarios:
1. Criminal is jailed, criminal cannot be rehabilitated.
Why bother? Just shoot them on conviction and save society the money. (Yes I know that's an extreme viewpoint. Bear with me, this is a thought experiment).
2. Criminal is not jailed, criminal cannot be rehabilitated
So society sees little point in jailing the criminal, but they are free to commit crime which is one thing jail does prevent. Ouch.
3. Criminal is jailed, and can be rehabilitated. But jail's a lousy tool for rehabilitation.
Why bother? While the criminal can in theory be rehabilitated, society doesn't have an effective means to do so. Shoot them and save the money.
4. Criminal is jailed, can be rehabilitated. Jail works for rehabilitation.
Oh goody. Finally something that works. Except that every developed country in the world has lousy recidivism rates for formerly jailed ex-convicts, which suggests that this option is far removed from the real world.
Sounds like every option sucks to me.
The idea of a generic ABI for that kind of thing has been mooted a few times. As I recall, the main concern is that maintaining compatability for such a thing will sooner or later become such an albatross around the neck of the kernel developers purely for the benefit of a handful of hardware vendors so they can release closed-source drivers (either in kernel or userspace) rather than the actual users (who, lest we forget, are pouring far more money into Linux via RedHat, SuSE, IBM et al) that it's a rather pointless exercise.
The kernel developers are seeking to build a solid, stable kernel which runs with most common hardware. Not a complete distro with support for every random graphics card ever produced. Closed source binary blobs run completely contrary to the "solid, stable" bit.