My MP tried telling me the exact same thing. AFAICT, the only reason they're patentable is that the Patent Office hasn't actually read the law that governs how it may issue patents.
Until such time as lecturers start communicating via the university email system, then you'll also be locked out of your own course.
I was lucky - most of my lecturers didn't like the university email system much either so at the beginning of the year they asked everyone to write down their name and preferred email address on a list. But quite a few people weren't so lucky...
Though I can't see the fact that Apple would be distributing old code being a particularly big problem (Hell, Office XP runs on Windows '98), I think we're both losing sight of the main issue:
"What's in it for Apple?"
Seriously. What business benefit does this bring Apple? Potentially more people switching? Yes, but if they only plan on running Windows apps, why would they spend the extra money for an Apple computer? The group of people who are likely to switch probably don't have many apps they need which run only on Windows, and would therefore be quite happy with dual-booting or virtualisation.
Cringely's idea is remarkably similar to Dvorak's earlier postulation that the next version of MacOS would be Windows-based. In both cases, the assertion is based on one possible rumour citing a "reliable source" being taken to extreme. In both cases, the net result has been a massive number of people reading their columns - which is always good for advertising revenue.
Are Cringely and Dvorak the same person? I think we should be told.
I was really amused at the way he mentioned "the Windows API" like it was half a dozen export functions from some 3rd party dll. If he'd ever gone to MSDN (or had installed any version of Visual Studio with the appropriate documentation), he'd know that attempting simply to implement enough of the core Win32 API to be useful would be virtually impossible.
If what he said about the cross-licensing agreement is true, it may be the case that it's not necessary - Apple already have the source for most of the DLL's concerned and they just have to provide the parts of the API that the NT kernel usually provides.
Lets just copy it, and set something that says that you have created the sole backup you are leagally (sic) allowed to create.
What happens if the original disk becomes unreadable for some reason - can you make another copy of the backup? Because if not, the usefulness as a backup is limited.
But nothing will happen which is a giant signal to them that amercians and Tech people want DRM desperately.
Don't know about the USA, but in the UK they've discovered a nice easy way to get around this.
Let's say that an issue which the government is in favour of causes 3000 letters to be written (out of a population of 60 million). Of these letters, 2998 are against the issue, 2 are in favour.
The 59,997,000 people who didn't write in are lumped together with the 2 in favour, so the government states:
"We received 3000 letters from an electorate of 60 million. We assume that those that didn't write are either in favour or don't much care either way.
From this, we see that 2,998 people are against this idea, and 59,997,002 people are either in favour or have no opinion."
Hah-le-blinking-lujah! A slashdotter who doesn't see sunlight streaming out of Linus Torvalds' backside!
Seriously, it (should be) common sense. Play to a piece of software's strengths, not its weaknesses.
Rumour has it that someone on the same Computer Science degree course as me installed Linux for the first time on his only computer that he was preparing his final year project on (worth something like 20% of the whole degree) 3 weeks before the deadline without having first taken backups.
I make no public judgement on this, but leave it to the gallery to discuss the wisdom of such an action.
This, as far as I can tell, leaves only one sane alternative. Teach the cat to work the various home cinema devices, and use her as a voice-activated remote control.
I've got a Philips SBC RU 865, and it's a cracking piece of kit.
I thought all the touchscreen LCD models were either hugely expensive, awkward (I don't want to use a stylus for the thing!), too bulky or a combination of the three. This was about £30, is mostly good old-fashioned push button based, supports most things in the house out of the box, can learn commands for things it doesn't support, and buttons can be programmed with macros to do several things at once.
I've set it up so when I press "power" on the TV, the amplifier comes on as well. And I've done something similar with buttons which don't make much sense in TV mode - for instance, Record turns on the TV, amplifier and DVD player and ejects the DVD tray.
The only bugbear I have is that its support for my cable box is pretty poor.
This is wild speculation here, so make of it what you will, but:
Seeing as, by modern standards, FreeDOS does absolutely nothing, it's a doddle to support. It's probably an awful lot easier to get decent pricing from Microsoft when you're shipping boxes with an alternative OS which isn't linux. The boxes are sold in the full knowledge that there is no way they'll be running FreeDOS within 10 minutes of being first switched on.
On the other hand, shipping something like Ubuntu would require rather more support and also mean when discussing pricing with MS, they have to explain why they're shipping desktop PCs with Linux.
In that case, maybe you can confirm I'm not losing my mind. Because I remember reading about the idea of a "clockless" CPU in Acorn User (or one of those magazines, I forget now) something like 10 years ago.
You make reasonable points, though I reserve the right to disagree with some.
I take it you haven't used different versions of MS Office over the years or tried OpenOffice recently. I have done both.
Former employers have handled the incompatabilities in different versions of Office very easily - they didn't ever upgrade. Yes, I was using Office '97 in the year 2003.
My current workplace has settled on one version - Office XP, as it happens - and I have no plans to upgrade everyone to 2003. There are several issues with 2003 which make it a non-starter for us, so XP it is.
Regarding recent versions of OpenOffice : I grant you they're far better. But, despite the (very true) argument that 98% of people don't use most of the features, that means 2% of people do. And, more often than not, the 2% that is using some particularly obscure feature is in an important role within the business (think: senior finance management), and the cost-savings argument has to be phenomenally large to merit the work of running two office suites at once. Seeing as business volume licensing for Office typically knocks at least 50-70% off the "official boxed retail price" (does anyone actually pay this?), the per-user cost starts to look pretty reasonable.
As I said before, I don't think it's impossible. But there's a certain/. mindset which seems to say "It's easy! You've got OpenOffice, what more do you want?!" - clearly from your post you've not subscribed to that.
Sage is a popular piece of accounting software. http://www.sage.co.uk/ Finance folk tend to be fairly conservative in outlook, so an alternative that was developed by a bunch of people calling themselves hackers which has a lousy user interface simply isn't going to be accepted.
Your restaurant analogy is flawed because it's a lot easier to stop eating at a particular restaurant than it is to stop using Windows.
A lot of the problem is inertia - while I don't debate for one moment that it's possible to move off Windows altogether, what I do argue is that it's difficult.
You see, any half-sane business has already solved 95%+ of the problems with Windows' insecurities with the aid of antivirus software, locking down desktops and firewalling everything pretty thoroughly. This means that the "OMG OMG my computer is broken and full of spyware" is less common - and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Secondly, it's not 1992 any more. Any modern business has thousands of documents stored in proprietary formats. Saying "Use OpenOffice and convert it, and pray you never come across a document which is complicated and breaks in the conversion" simply isn't going to fly. Particularly when you've got accountants who, wanting to do something clever with the financial forecasts, built some honking great thing up out of linking together half a dozen spreadsheets. Granted, this may not be a particularly good way of solving the problem but the accountant doesn't want to agonise over the best way to solve it - they just want it solved. And as far as they're concerned, it's now solved, so please don't break it, OK?
Finally, the idea that "there's no need to use Windows" assumes that there exists a non-Windows equivalent for everything, which is equally capable or that the software runs OK in Wine. For 95% of things, that's true, but that other 5% is an absolute killer. Show me the equivalents to:
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe PageMaker
Sage. Including accounting for different tax laws and currencies in different parts of the world, and offering various additional plugins for payroll, sales etc.
negotiating relatively cheap (compared to the fines you'd suffer if they took you to court) out of court settlements.
Whoa. Stop right there.
Granted, there's plenty of case law for what kind of punishment might be exacted on someone who's behind distributing bootleg CDs by the thousand. The RIAA would like similar punishments meted out to file sharers, but how many cases have actually been to court and resulted in that?
Rebuilding PCs shouldn't be necessary even in a networked environment: If your applications or operating system can't operate securely in a networked environment with or without a firewall then it shouldn't be using TCP/IP anyway: A virus is only harmless data, unless your system is designed to run it on sight.
Granted, but until such time as Microsoft builds a secure, reliable operating system which is adopted by 98% of organisations for their desktop PCs, the current state of affairs is what we've got. Solutions for rebuilding are therefore a necessary evil.
Embrace it. Stop doing stupid size and.EXE and.DOC restrictions for those of us stuck in Windowsland. Invest in mailbox storage, or educate users on how to properly archive.
We tried that.
The mail server crawled to a screeching halt the first time someone sent a 200MB file to 15 people. Disk storage is far from the only bottleneck - you've also got to account for network bandwidth. Just because it left the factory in a box marked "server" does not mean there's any magic which makes its network card faster. So we put a limit on attachment sizes.
Then a secretary received an attachment called hello.jpg.exe. She knew full well that she shouldn't open.exe's, but she thought it was a picture, and opened it. After we'd cleared up the resulting mess, mailing of.exe files was blocked.
In places like that I'm sometimes tempted to print off stickers saying "There is a free cash machine directly opposite this store" and quietly fix them on.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
Now all you need to do if you suffer from RSI is to get your employer to agree to you writing everything in Haskell.
Yeah, I know. I pointed this one out, and asked for an explanation, but that paragraph of my letter was mysteriously ignored.
Strange, that.
My MP tried telling me the exact same thing. AFAICT, the only reason they're patentable is that the Patent Office hasn't actually read the law that governs how it may issue patents.
Until such time as lecturers start communicating via the university email system, then you'll also be locked out of your own course.
I was lucky - most of my lecturers didn't like the university email system much either so at the beginning of the year they asked everyone to write down their name and preferred email address on a list. But quite a few people weren't so lucky...
FTFP:
does not support POP or IMAP
SMTP is irrelevant here. You don't use SMTP to get mail, just to send it.
You could at least have read the /. preview ;)
Windows Live does not support any browsers besides IE 6, does not support POP or IMAP
Though I can't see the fact that Apple would be distributing old code being a particularly big problem (Hell, Office XP runs on Windows '98), I think we're both losing sight of the main issue:
"What's in it for Apple?"
Seriously. What business benefit does this bring Apple? Potentially more people switching? Yes, but if they only plan on running Windows apps, why would they spend the extra money for an Apple computer? The group of people who are likely to switch probably don't have many apps they need which run only on Windows, and would therefore be quite happy with dual-booting or virtualisation.
Cringely's idea is remarkably similar to Dvorak's earlier postulation that the next version of MacOS would be Windows-based. In both cases, the assertion is based on one possible rumour citing a "reliable source" being taken to extreme. In both cases, the net result has been a massive number of people reading their columns - which is always good for advertising revenue.
Are Cringely and Dvorak the same person? I think we should be told.
I was really amused at the way he mentioned "the Windows API" like it was half a dozen export functions from some 3rd party dll. If he'd ever gone to MSDN (or had installed any version of Visual Studio with the appropriate documentation), he'd know that attempting simply to implement enough of the core Win32 API to be useful would be virtually impossible.
If what he said about the cross-licensing agreement is true, it may be the case that it's not necessary - Apple already have the source for most of the DLL's concerned and they just have to provide the parts of the API that the NT kernel usually provides.
Lets just copy it, and set something that says that you have created the sole backup you are leagally (sic) allowed to create.
What happens if the original disk becomes unreadable for some reason - can you make another copy of the backup? Because if not, the usefulness as a backup is limited.
But nothing will happen which is a giant signal to them that amercians and Tech people want DRM desperately.
Don't know about the USA, but in the UK they've discovered a nice easy way to get around this.
Let's say that an issue which the government is in favour of causes 3000 letters to be written (out of a population of 60 million). Of these letters, 2998 are against the issue, 2 are in favour.
The 59,997,000 people who didn't write in are lumped together with the 2 in favour, so the government states:
"We received 3000 letters from an electorate of 60 million. We assume that those that didn't write are either in favour or don't much care either way.
From this, we see that 2,998 people are against this idea, and 59,997,002 people are either in favour or have no opinion."
Hah-le-blinking-lujah! A slashdotter who doesn't see sunlight streaming out of Linus Torvalds' backside!
Seriously, it (should be) common sense. Play to a piece of software's strengths, not its weaknesses.
Rumour has it that someone on the same Computer Science degree course as me installed Linux for the first time on his only computer that he was preparing his final year project on (worth something like 20% of the whole degree) 3 weeks before the deadline without having first taken backups.
I make no public judgement on this, but leave it to the gallery to discuss the wisdom of such an action.
I have to admit, you have a point.
This, as far as I can tell, leaves only one sane alternative. Teach the cat to work the various home cinema devices, and use her as a voice-activated remote control.
I've got a Philips SBC RU 865, and it's a cracking piece of kit.
I thought all the touchscreen LCD models were either hugely expensive, awkward (I don't want to use a stylus for the thing!), too bulky or a combination of the three. This was about £30, is mostly good old-fashioned push button based, supports most things in the house out of the box, can learn commands for things it doesn't support, and buttons can be programmed with macros to do several things at once.
I've set it up so when I press "power" on the TV, the amplifier comes on as well. And I've done something similar with buttons which don't make much sense in TV mode - for instance, Record turns on the TV, amplifier and DVD player and ejects the DVD tray.
The only bugbear I have is that its support for my cable box is pretty poor.
Agreed, RISC OS 2 had something very similar and that was available in 1988.
This is wild speculation here, so make of it what you will, but:
Seeing as, by modern standards, FreeDOS does absolutely nothing, it's a doddle to support. It's probably an awful lot easier to get decent pricing from Microsoft when you're shipping boxes with an alternative OS which isn't linux. The boxes are sold in the full knowledge that there is no way they'll be running FreeDOS within 10 minutes of being first switched on.
On the other hand, shipping something like Ubuntu would require rather more support and also mean when discussing pricing with MS, they have to explain why they're shipping desktop PCs with Linux.
In that case, maybe you can confirm I'm not losing my mind. Because I remember reading about the idea of a "clockless" CPU in Acorn User (or one of those magazines, I forget now) something like 10 years ago.
Took them long enough to get it off the ground...
That's got to be an april fool. How can anyone be so IT ignorant yet get paid to write about it?
Mind you, they say "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, write about it".
You make reasonable points, though I reserve the right to disagree with some.
/. mindset which seems to say "It's easy! You've got OpenOffice, what more do you want?!" - clearly from your post you've not subscribed to that.
I take it you haven't used different versions of MS Office over the years or tried OpenOffice recently.
I have done both.
Former employers have handled the incompatabilities in different versions of Office very easily - they didn't ever upgrade. Yes, I was using Office '97 in the year 2003.
My current workplace has settled on one version - Office XP, as it happens - and I have no plans to upgrade everyone to 2003. There are several issues with 2003 which make it a non-starter for us, so XP it is.
Regarding recent versions of OpenOffice : I grant you they're far better. But, despite the (very true) argument that 98% of people don't use most of the features, that means 2% of people do. And, more often than not, the 2% that is using some particularly obscure feature is in an important role within the business (think: senior finance management), and the cost-savings argument has to be phenomenally large to merit the work of running two office suites at once. Seeing as business volume licensing for Office typically knocks at least 50-70% off the "official boxed retail price" (does anyone actually pay this?), the per-user cost starts to look pretty reasonable.
As I said before, I don't think it's impossible. But there's a certain
Sage is a popular piece of accounting software. http://www.sage.co.uk/ Finance folk tend to be fairly conservative in outlook, so an alternative that was developed by a bunch of people calling themselves hackers which has a lousy user interface simply isn't going to be accepted.
A lot of the problem is inertia - while I don't debate for one moment that it's possible to move off Windows altogether, what I do argue is that it's difficult.
You see, any half-sane business has already solved 95%+ of the problems with Windows' insecurities with the aid of antivirus software, locking down desktops and firewalling everything pretty thoroughly. This means that the "OMG OMG my computer is broken and full of spyware" is less common - and if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Secondly, it's not 1992 any more. Any modern business has thousands of documents stored in proprietary formats. Saying "Use OpenOffice and convert it, and pray you never come across a document which is complicated and breaks in the conversion" simply isn't going to fly. Particularly when you've got accountants who, wanting to do something clever with the financial forecasts, built some honking great thing up out of linking together half a dozen spreadsheets. Granted, this may not be a particularly good way of solving the problem but the accountant doesn't want to agonise over the best way to solve it - they just want it solved. And as far as they're concerned, it's now solved, so please don't break it, OK?
Finally, the idea that "there's no need to use Windows" assumes that there exists a non-Windows equivalent for everything, which is equally capable or that the software runs OK in Wine. For 95% of things, that's true, but that other 5% is an absolute killer. Show me the equivalents to:
negotiating relatively cheap (compared to the fines you'd suffer if they took you to court) out of court settlements.
Whoa. Stop right there.
Granted, there's plenty of case law for what kind of punishment might be exacted on someone who's behind distributing bootleg CDs by the thousand. The RIAA would like similar punishments meted out to file sharers, but how many cases have actually been to court and resulted in that?
Rebuilding PCs shouldn't be necessary even in a networked environment: If your applications or operating system can't operate securely in a networked environment with or without a firewall then it shouldn't be using TCP/IP anyway: A virus is only harmless data, unless your system is designed to run it on sight.
Granted, but until such time as Microsoft builds a secure, reliable operating system which is adopted by 98% of organisations for their desktop PCs, the current state of affairs is what we've got. Solutions for rebuilding are therefore a necessary evil.
As a UK inhabitant, I read this and the mind boggles:
Now just try to find a front loading washing machine in a U.S. store that doesn't cost $800+.
Just try to find a non front-loading washing machine in a UK store.
We tried that.
The mail server crawled to a screeching halt the first time someone sent a 200MB file to 15 people. Disk storage is far from the only bottleneck - you've also got to account for network bandwidth. Just because it left the factory in a box marked "server" does not mean there's any magic which makes its network card faster. So we put a limit on attachment sizes.
Then a secretary received an attachment called hello.jpg.exe. She knew full well that she shouldn't open
I was probably born, but far too young to appreciate it ;)
AFAICT, I think it effectively meant "whacking great multiprocessor computer with very fast connection between processors".
Probably they don't know about the bank one.
In places like that I'm sometimes tempted to print off stickers saying "There is a free cash machine directly opposite this store" and quietly fix them on.