"Security" in this context can mean a lot of things.
It can mean "remote security" - as in, it's harder for someone to screw around with a system remotely.
It can mean "we've already solved the security problems inherent in this, our solutions will break horribly with XP and we're not sure how to fix that" - just because the OS is hideously insecure doesn't mean that you can't write an application which is reasonably secure, and as long as you've not connected it to a network, it's no worse than XP.
It can mean "job security" - as in, "the program we use does something clever under '98 which it can't under XP, the risk of rewriting it and in the process making a mistake which costs us a lot of expensive contracts is too great".
Or it could mean "We can't be bothered upgrading, so we're going to play the 'Security' card as a means of avoiding it".
I can see a lot of support for DRM within companies - from the "only run signed applications" angle.
Seriously. If the majority of your staff have a clearly defined role and only need their computer to do one or two tasks, what better way to guarantee that this is all their computer does than to nail what applications can be run in a GPO? Of course, it's been possible to lock down Windows quite a lot through policies for some time, so arguably it's not providing anything the business shouldn't have already implemented.
Or how about another angle - the "we're fed up of the press finding out about things before we're ready to issue a press release"? It's already a problem solved if you stop using plain vanilla email to send confidential memos, but how many organisations you know have actually done that?
Consider the following scenarios - all fictional, but all perfectly conceivable in any sizeable organisation:
App X runs just fine, but is reaching the end of its supported life. Version X+1 has already been discontinued and cannot be licensed, any upgrade has to be to X+2. But there is no upgrade path from X to X+2 unless you want to re-key all several million rows of data, so you've got to go to X+1 first. However you never bought version X+1, so you don't have installation media and, as discussed above, you can't (easily) get it.
App X is used exclusively by the finance department and is reaching the end of its supported life. X+1 is available, but it's very expensive. The finance director will have to sign off on any migration plan and he doesn't see the business need to upgrade - after all, version X has always worked so far. He's the one who'll be signing the cheque to buy version X+1. So what if the older version is not supported? We've not needed the support yet. In this case, technically the finance director is in the right - the change is expensive, has a risk attached and has little perceived benefit - however it might be wise for the IT department to have a plan B sitting in the wings in case application X suddenly breaks one day...
App X depends heavily on Fred's Shiny Database and will not speak to anything else. The company that developed App X went out of business long ago, but their product is still critical to the business. Nobody's got around to investigating a replacement because the only people in the IT department who even knew it existed were made redundant in the last round of layoffs. Meantime, Fred's Shiny Database Company has been taken over by Ceefax Data Ltd, who are discontinuing Fred's Shiny Database in favour of their own product.
Seriously. I use Xen myself, it's great, but I still had to figure a lot more out than I did with VMWare Server. If the object of the exercise when virtualising your servers is "make life easier", it makes no sense at all to use something which is rough around the edges.
The developers behind Xen have set up a company and intend to produce a product with a user interface, but AFAICT the free basic edition won't benefit from this.
My reckoning is this: In order for ODF (or indeed any XML based file format) to support embedding things like images, it must by definition allow you to embed binary blobs, right? (You can prove this in OO.o by choosing to embed images when you save a file).
I can envisage the Microsoft converter doing a reasonably good job of importing, but the export will be "produce a Word document, encode it as a binary blob and wrap it in ODF".
Seriously. The reason why is simple:
1. It allows them to tick the "Supports ODF" box (it does, but it completely breaks the spirit of ODF)
- The geek crowd on here would be astonished, and rather disappointed, at the number of decisions that are made on the basis of these tick boxes without ensuring that the vendor ticking the boxes isn't interpreting things to suit themselves. 2. It actually has the potential to be a marketing benefit. Seriously. Picture the screenshots: "This is how ODF that we import looks" (looks fine) "This is how ODF that we import that we created ourselves looks" (looks fine) "This is how OpenOffice imports the ODF we export" (looks completely broken).
The implication is that Word can import anything, including ODF. OpenOffice, however, can barely import its own native file format.
With current write speeds on consumer-level drives and the bus that they're connected to, it'll take you the better part of 2-3 years to write 50TB to it.
You say it's because all those developers played "idiotic games" -- hey, fine, maybe you're right. But the OP's point was that Microsoft doesn't say that -- even if it's true, Microsoft still makes the effort to try to keep those apps running -- and that's one of the reasons why Microsoft is successful. I'd say he's absolutely right.
I call bullshit
DOS programs which directly addressed the hardware even when there was no need to - died a death when NT-based versions of Windows took over. Drivers for a lot of once-common hardware - Wndows' driver model has changed so much that a lot of things which were discontinued before XP was released will never again work on a modern release of Windows. At least with Open Source drivers the option to port them to a more modern OS exists.
Others would, but they are the cost-conscious type who would very likely never purchase a Mac in the first place. They might, however, purchase OSX at a reasonable price (that is, lower than Windows!).
If they're that cost conscious, why would they buy an OS when one came "free" (yes I know it's not free, but the cost sure as hell wasn't itemised on the receipt) with their computer?
In fact, what a completely useless concept for article.
Hardware's cheap. People aren't, and the business certainly isn't
For any platform, chances are you're going to look at a whole bunch of variables:
What your developers are used to if you're developing your own application (or commissioning someone else to).
If you're getting your application(s) from elsewhere (either COTS or Free), what platform they need.
What current systems you have and (if necessary) how easy it will be to integrate the application with those systems.
What systems you have experience in running.
If the application will be crucial to the business, how confident you feel in betting the business on it. This is where Windows often wins - in the minds of the many CTOs who don't consider "I've posted a query to a mailing list" an appropriate action to take when hitting a problem, or who don't want to discover 18 months down the line that a crucial security fix requires upgrading part of the platform which in so doing will break the application (I'm talking about you guys, PHP).
Performance is going to come way down near the bottom of the list unless the difference is absolutely huge and cannot be made up by throwing some extra money at either a bigger server or a number of servers, which is likely to be significantly cheaper than the cost of retraining all your staff or hiring a team to write to a specific platform.
The CEO walks into the elevator, and sees a man stood there in jeans smoking a cigarette. The company had a strict no-smoking policy (this is some years ago, before it was commonplace) and a strict dress code.
Incensed, the CEO demands how much this man is paid.
"$750 per month" (told you it was some years ago!) "Here's $750. Get out and don't come back." "OK."... the elevator reaches the ground floor, and they both leave the building. The man in the jeans calmly walks out - and says "Oh, by the way, I don't actually work for your company. I was just dropping off a parcel!"
I was thinking "how much of The Exorcist are they going to see if they cut all violence, crude sexual content and bad language"? I imagine you'd see the rude "Do not pirate DVD" messages, the credits and not a lot between.
I was hoping they had "Trainspotting", and that I could watch it with all references to explicit drug use censored. Now that would be an interesting film.
* Sensual Content
* Crude Sexual Content
* Nudity
* Explicit Sexual Situations
Language
* Vain Reference to Deity
* Crude Language and Humor
* Ethnic and Social Slurs
* Cursing
* Strong Profanity
* Graphic Vulgarity
Other
* Explicit Drug Use
I'd buy it, turn all the filters on and then watch something like "The Exorcist" or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (yes, both of those films are supported by their filtering system).
I could watch the entire genre of horror movies in 20 minutes!
If you're running a business, you damn well should be keeping your invoices/receipts.
Of course, if the invoice simply says "Twenty (20) HP (insert random model number) computers at £400 each, total £8000" and doesn't specifically mention "Includes license for Windows XP Professional" then I forsee a problem with the BSA.
Same as buying glue; I'm sure the shop has every right to sell you that tube of glue, but they don't guarantee that it will stick anything.
Er... what? This case was in the UK, and here we have this little thing called the Sale of Goods Act - goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold.
Glue is obviously sold to fix things together, if it doesn't then it's not fit for purpose.
I see these analogies sometimes on here - come on, it cannot seriously be the case that in the USA you can't return faulty goods, no matter how faulty they are?
Lawyer: We have perfectly good book-keeping. Your honour, we have good reason to believe that this person has pirated the software, we'd like you to issue this warrant so we can go in there and investigate.
At $15,000 per annum, I am quite sure that calling up Borland and saying "Our continuing to use your software depends on us being able to provide proof of licensing to our superiors. Write us a letter confirming the license or the $15,000 we give you per year will become $0 per year" would have the desired effect.
selling your unwanted and unused OEM licenses (Like the bank in TFA did. This is all that this BS about COA not proving purchase is: being told that, nope, you're not allowed to sell those unwanted OEM licenses that you were forced to buy.)
Actually, it's always been the case that volume license agreements only give rights to upograde versions of Windows.
The idea is that if a new version of Windows comes out and you want to roll it out across the whole company, you don't have to rush off and buy a license for every workstation.
Now I've heard that Microsoft will eliminate the volume license key with Vista. That won't go over well with me. I don't have time to find and type in a unique key for every damn PC I setup. We're a big company with few IT staff.
From the direction Microsoft is going, if they do that my guess is the next version of Windows Server will include some kind of "license management" which extends to counting workstation OS licenses in lieu of having one license key per system.
This is pure speculation based on the fact that maintaining Windows properly in any sizeable organisation these days requires at least one Windows server - for Windows Update Services. But it would make a lot of sense - after all, the target market for Windows Server is businesses, businesses don't particularly want to be messing about with one key per system and so will happily do something to avoid that - and ooh look, it means they now need to buy at least one copy of the next version of Windows Server. Strange how it always works out that way, isn't it?
That a judge would not agree to that smacks of corruption and a willful ignorance of the facts and of reality.
That a judge has not agreed to that smacks to me of a guaranteed problem with the Business Software Alliance. You seen all your invoices from computer purchases lately? I bet you anything you like they don't give a detailed breakdown of everything including the fact that a Windows license was included - which means that without an invoice showing that, and the CoA "not being sufficient", it is not physically possible to use Windows and get through a BSA audit intact.
(That being said, I suspect companies with unbranded white box desktop PCs rather than a whole bunch of nice'n cheap Dells or HPs are at higher risk of being on the wrong end of an audit anyway).
Also, use a router, firewall software, Antivirus, and Firefox. Haven't any issues ever.
When having sex with a potentially infected prostitute, wear three condoms and wash your gonads in bleach afterwards.
Alternatively, don't sleep with infected whores.
(Mods: I am not trolling. I am pointing out the absurdity of having to use so many layers of security when an alternative OS would solve all those issues without the need for so many layers of security. It's a joke. Laugh.)
But businesses tend to be rather less inclined to open the source code, either because they can't think of a good reason why they should or they're concerned a competitor will use it against them.
Therefore even after your company's written their own software, there's still a good chance that there won't be any half-decent Free/OSS inventory management solutions.
Hey, don't steal ideas from the marketing department of Apple in the 80's, they might still have a patent on it:)
Hate to tell you this, but if they do have a patent on it there are literally dozens of companies in breach. Ironically, it's harder to get state schools to part with the cash - not because they've got less cash (though that is a factor), but because a lot of their decisions are made at the education authority level.
Slashdot Mirror
"Security" in this context can mean a lot of things.
It can mean "remote security" - as in, it's harder for someone to screw around with a system remotely.
It can mean "we've already solved the security problems inherent in this, our solutions will break horribly with XP and we're not sure how to fix that" - just because the OS is hideously insecure doesn't mean that you can't write an application which is reasonably secure, and as long as you've not connected it to a network, it's no worse than XP.
It can mean "job security" - as in, "the program we use does something clever under '98 which it can't under XP, the risk of rewriting it and in the process making a mistake which costs us a lot of expensive contracts is too great".
Or it could mean "We can't be bothered upgrading, so we're going to play the 'Security' card as a means of avoiding it".
I can see a lot of support for DRM within companies - from the "only run signed applications" angle.
Seriously. If the majority of your staff have a clearly defined role and only need their computer to do one or two tasks, what better way to guarantee that this is all their computer does than to nail what applications can be run in a GPO? Of course, it's been possible to lock down Windows quite a lot through policies for some time, so arguably it's not providing anything the business shouldn't have already implemented.
Or how about another angle - the "we're fed up of the press finding out about things before we're ready to issue a press release"? It's already a problem solved if you stop using plain vanilla email to send confidential memos, but how many organisations you know have actually done that?
Consider the following scenarios - all fictional, but all perfectly conceivable in any sizeable organisation:
However VMWare provides something Xen doesn't.
A user interface.
Seriously. I use Xen myself, it's great, but I still had to figure a lot more out than I did with VMWare Server. If the object of the exercise when virtualising your servers is "make life easier", it makes no sense at all to use something which is rough around the edges.
The developers behind Xen have set up a company and intend to produce a product with a user interface, but AFAICT the free basic edition won't benefit from this.
So you've obviously never sent your CV to an employment agency.
And please don't copy my sig. I own the copyright on it and will invoke the DMCA!
You're almost, but not quite there.
My reckoning is this: In order for ODF (or indeed any XML based file format) to support embedding things like images, it must by definition allow you to embed binary blobs, right? (You can prove this in OO.o by choosing to embed images when you save a file).
I can envisage the Microsoft converter doing a reasonably good job of importing, but the export will be "produce a Word document, encode it as a binary blob and wrap it in ODF".
Seriously. The reason why is simple:
1. It allows them to tick the "Supports ODF" box (it does, but it completely breaks the spirit of ODF)
- The geek crowd on here would be astonished, and rather disappointed, at the number of decisions that are made on the basis of these tick boxes without ensuring that the vendor ticking the boxes isn't interpreting things to suit themselves.
2. It actually has the potential to be a marketing benefit. Seriously. Picture the screenshots:
"This is how ODF that we import looks" (looks fine)
"This is how ODF that we import that we created ourselves looks" (looks fine)
"This is how OpenOffice imports the ODF we export" (looks completely broken).
The implication is that Word can import anything, including ODF. OpenOffice, however, can barely import its own native file format.
With current write speeds on consumer-level drives and the bus that they're connected to, it'll take you the better part of 2-3 years to write 50TB to it.
I call bullshit
DOS programs which directly addressed the hardware even when there was no need to - died a death when NT-based versions of Windows took over.
Drivers for a lot of once-common hardware - Wndows' driver model has changed so much that a lot of things which were discontinued before XP was released will never again work on a modern release of Windows. At least with Open Source drivers the option to port them to a more modern OS exists.
If they're that cost conscious, why would they buy an OS when one came "free" (yes I know it's not free, but the cost sure as hell wasn't itemised on the receipt) with their computer?
Hardware's cheap. People aren't, and the business certainly isn't
For any platform, chances are you're going to look at a whole bunch of variables:
Performance is going to come way down near the bottom of the list unless the difference is absolutely huge and cannot be made up by throwing some extra money at either a bigger server or a number of servers, which is likely to be significantly cheaper than the cost of retraining all your staff or hiring a team to write to a specific platform.
I've heard a similar urban legend.
... the elevator reaches the ground floor, and they both leave the building. The man in the jeans calmly walks out - and says "Oh, by the way, I don't actually work for your company. I was just dropping off a parcel!"
The CEO walks into the elevator, and sees a man stood there in jeans smoking a cigarette. The company had a strict no-smoking policy (this is some years ago, before it was commonplace) and a strict dress code.
Incensed, the CEO demands how much this man is paid.
"$750 per month" (told you it was some years ago!)
"Here's $750. Get out and don't come back."
"OK."
I was thinking "how much of The Exorcist are they going to see if they cut all violence, crude sexual content and bad language"? I imagine you'd see the rude "Do not pirate DVD" messages, the credits and not a lot between.
I was hoping they had "Trainspotting", and that I could watch it with all references to explicit drug use censored. Now that would be an interesting film.
Speaking as someone who lives in a still relatively censorship-free country (ie. not the US), what the hell is a V-chip?
I've got to get one of these just for the comedy value.
Seriously.
Apparently, I can selectively filter any combination of the following:
Violence
* Brutal and Gory Violence
* Strong Action Violence
* Disturbing Images
Sex and Nudity
* Sensual Content
* Crude Sexual Content
* Nudity
* Explicit Sexual Situations
Language
* Vain Reference to Deity
* Crude Language and Humor
* Ethnic and Social Slurs
* Cursing
* Strong Profanity
* Graphic Vulgarity
Other
* Explicit Drug Use
I'd buy it, turn all the filters on and then watch something like "The Exorcist" or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (yes, both of those films are supported by their filtering system).
I could watch the entire genre of horror movies in 20 minutes!
A reciept maybe? Good luck finding that.
If you're running a business, you damn well should be keeping your invoices/receipts.
Of course, if the invoice simply says "Twenty (20) HP (insert random model number) computers at £400 each, total £8000" and doesn't specifically mention "Includes license for Windows XP Professional" then I forsee a problem with the BSA.
Same as buying glue; I'm sure the shop has every right to sell you that tube of glue, but they don't guarantee that it will stick anything.
Er... what? This case was in the UK, and here we have this little thing called the Sale of Goods Act - goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold.
Glue is obviously sold to fix things together, if it doesn't then it's not fit for purpose.
I see these analogies sometimes on here - come on, it cannot seriously be the case that in the USA you can't return faulty goods, no matter how faulty they are?
Lawyer: We have perfectly good book-keeping. Your honour, we have good reason to believe that this person has pirated the software, we'd like you to issue this warrant so we can go in there and investigate.
At $15,000 per annum, I am quite sure that calling up Borland and saying "Our continuing to use your software depends on us being able to provide proof of licensing to our superiors. Write us a letter confirming the license or the $15,000 we give you per year will become $0 per year" would have the desired effect.
selling your unwanted and unused OEM licenses (Like the bank in TFA did. This is all that this BS about COA not proving purchase is: being told that, nope, you're not allowed to sell those unwanted OEM licenses that you were forced to buy.)
Actually, it's always been the case that volume license agreements only give rights to upograde versions of Windows.
The idea is that if a new version of Windows comes out and you want to roll it out across the whole company, you don't have to rush off and buy a license for every workstation.
Now I've heard that Microsoft will eliminate the volume license key with Vista. That won't go over well with me. I don't have time to find and type in a unique key for every damn PC I setup. We're a big company with few IT staff.
From the direction Microsoft is going, if they do that my guess is the next version of Windows Server will include some kind of "license management" which extends to counting workstation OS licenses in lieu of having one license key per system.
This is pure speculation based on the fact that maintaining Windows properly in any sizeable organisation these days requires at least one Windows server - for Windows Update Services. But it would make a lot of sense - after all, the target market for Windows Server is businesses, businesses don't particularly want to be messing about with one key per system and so will happily do something to avoid that - and ooh look, it means they now need to buy at least one copy of the next version of Windows Server. Strange how it always works out that way, isn't it?
That a judge would not agree to that smacks of corruption and a willful ignorance of the facts and of reality.
That a judge has not agreed to that smacks to me of a guaranteed problem with the Business Software Alliance. You seen all your invoices from computer purchases lately? I bet you anything you like they don't give a detailed breakdown of everything including the fact that a Windows license was included - which means that without an invoice showing that, and the CoA "not being sufficient", it is not physically possible to use Windows and get through a BSA audit intact.
(That being said, I suspect companies with unbranded white box desktop PCs rather than a whole bunch of nice'n cheap Dells or HPs are at higher risk of being on the wrong end of an audit anyway).
People need to learn to stop following links that anger them!
Just like they need to stop clicking on every link in every email they receive, yes?
Everybody did that after LoveBug and Melissa, and now very few pieces of malware spread by email. Isn't that right?
When having sex with a potentially infected prostitute, wear three condoms and wash your gonads in bleach afterwards.
Alternatively, don't sleep with infected whores.
(Mods: I am not trolling. I am pointing out the absurdity of having to use so many layers of security when an alternative OS would solve all those issues without the need for so many layers of security. It's a joke. Laugh.)
But businesses tend to be rather less inclined to open the source code, either because they can't think of a good reason why they should or they're concerned a competitor will use it against them.
Therefore even after your company's written their own software, there's still a good chance that there won't be any half-decent Free/OSS inventory management solutions.
Hey, don't steal ideas from the marketing department of Apple in the 80's, they might still have a patent on it :)
Hate to tell you this, but if they do have a patent on it there are literally dozens of companies in breach. Ironically, it's harder to get state schools to part with the cash - not because they've got less cash (though that is a factor), but because a lot of their decisions are made at the education authority level.