By that logic, no-one has a god-given right to transfer their music onto an MP3 player. Nor do they have a god-given right to play it on a high-end CD player (yes, some high-end ones digitally rip the music), nor even on a DVD player (same story there), nor an in-car CD player.
If I interpret your POV to mean "the record industry is allowed to use whatever means it deems necessary to protect their property", it therefore follows that CDs with intentionally-broken error correction, which by definition are more susceptible to damage are perfectly acceptable. No-one has the right to play a CD which has acquired a minor scratch.
Now, in theory, the free market could work this one out. But there isn't a free market in music. There are a small number of players which control 98% of what's out there, and these players collude to maintain the status quo. My instinctive guess is that we'll continue to see such asinine copy protection schemes until computers and music players either use such radically different means of storage that a means of getting the music to the computer simply doesn't exist (cf. dreamcast discs); or the need to sell music in chunks of 10-15 tracks on a physical medium goes away, perhaps to be replaced with a subscription model or something micropayment based.
And in many companies, 95% of users never use anything beyond "send & receive email" and as long as the GUI doesn't totally suck will be happy with it.
You're describing requirements which are typical of a power user who knows most all the features and uses them all. Most people simply don't come under this heading.
Unfortunately, users like you describe are also the most difficult to convert because there is always at least one feature that there is no direct equivalent for in any other tool. A migration to Linux on the desktop would be a huge project for most companies, and couldn't reasonably be expected to bring in significant savings for at least 2 years - mainly because you'd have to spend money on training your staff and managing the project. Granted, that is money which isn't being spent on software licensing, but it's still money and there's a finite supply.
Ultimately, it boils down to "What is the business benefit of the change?"
"We'll save money.... well, OK, not for a few years, but we will eventually."
"OK, what's the business risk?"
"Ah. Well, we'll have a lot of user resistance to counter. A lot of people won't like the change, will make a huge noise about it, and we'll have to increase the amount of training we offer at induction time for new staff."
"Anything else?"
"We don't actually know how well it will work. Sure, it seems fine on the few desktops we've tested it on but there are likely to be problems out there we haven't even contemplated. And Microsoft Office doesn't exist in Linux so we'll have to use something else. But don't worry, it can still open & save Office files... except that if there's anything hugely complicated or it's the wrong version of Office it can't. And there isn't a simple direct replacement for Access."
"Is that all?"
"Well, we're still working on a replacement for Outlook and Exchange. So far we've looked at a number of solutions, but none of them are particularly good. About the closest we can give you in terms of functionality is something web-based - which of course won't have an 'offline' option for out of office use"
"Any more?"
"Well, there's the current locked-down desktop policy. While we can implement it in Linux, we're not sure how we'd go about deploying it to many users simultaneously - particularly not if we needed to make any changes to desktop configuration. It looks like we'd have to write something in house."
Doesn't sound like such a great idea then, does it? Don't get me wrong, I've used Linux myself as a desktop and I think it's come a long way in 10 years. But I still maintain that it's got a way to go before a desktop migration doesn't cause raised eyebrows - guaranteed if the email problem raised (which I think is frankly the least of the problems) is solved, the likes of Gartner will come up with something else which is a showstopper.
Hackers are not going to take away all your "performance": Better tell my neighbour that. Her daughter's PC was bogged down with over a thousand pieces of spyware. In the end a reinstall would have been significantly quicker than a spyware-hunt, with the added bonus that there would be no niggling "I thought I got rid of that!" feeling.
Spamming: Yes, my network's protected. That doesn't, however, mean that my mail relay has an infinite amount of system resources. Spam-filtering is pretty system-intensive, and frankly I'd rather not have to set up a filtering relay. It's extra hassle to set up and another layer of things to potentially go wrong.
DDoS: How exactly do you propose I prevent a 2Mb (or even a 10Mb) line from being swamped if it's hit by connections from a hundred people with 512Kb upload speed each?
If you want to correct lighting in your home photos (even more nescesary than for pro photographers due to slow lenses, bad metering and on-camera flash with low-end digital point & shoots) you'd best do it in 16 bit mode (camera set to raw)
ICBW, but I'm not aware of many low-end digital point & shoot camera which support some form of raw output.
You're right on the Exchange front. I searched for ages and tried several. I concluded:
OpenExchange: Part English, part German. Translation not 100% (some Help sections skip between languages for no apparent reason). French translation not up to date (big problem for my employer). A bitch to install free version. Commercial version a bitch to get them to sell it to you - there's a company in Germany which put me through to the US, which employs all of 4 people. Commercial version not significantly cheaper per-seat than Exchange, particularly if you factor in Outlook integration tool.
OpenGroupware.org: Still in Beta. French translation shaky. Outlook integration shaky. Probably OK if you're happy with 100% web-based.
Horde: Web based. Not bad. Well internationalized. Current version very powerful and flexible; provides a full-blown development environment for your own additions. Finding solutions to problems was a bit involved - I had to actually think:). It's been around a while, but the current version hasn't been out long so searches tend to bring up results relating to old versions - which have changed so much that they're no longer particularly relevant.
Eventually I concluded that your best bet if you want a groupware product is to go for something web-based rather than demanding Outlook integration - however plenty of management-types demand the Outlook integration. Frankly, (and I'll be burnt at the stake for saying this) if you want decent integration with Outlook, Exchange is the only sensible choice.
IBM: Solutions/Support. The OS is secondary; zOS, AIX or Linux. Sun: Solutions/support. The OS is secondary, but can be Solaris or Linux. Novell: Linux/Solutions/Support. The OS has been completely dropped in favour of Linux. HP: Linux. SGI: Linux. Microsoft: Lin... ah, no, Windows.
"Well, that'd be the highly respected developer sitting opposite you who's got 5 years' experience with this code, whereas you have about 5 weeks. Next question?"
That's all very nice if you've got the expertise to remove the rootkit. What if you don't? What if you do, but by the time you got around to dowloading Sony's rootkit removal tool you've been infected with a virus which took advantage of it?
I assume Sony will reimburse you for the time and effort involved in fixing this, yes?
Because there are still a lot of people who consider a computer to be a mystical box, which does strange and random things for no apparent reason.
Because there are still a lot of people who don't actually read the menus or look at the icons - they simply click in the locations they've always clicked on to achieve the same effect.
And finally, because the number of people in this world who fall into either of the above categories is still so great that in many areas you simply cannot run your business if you refuse to employ them - you'd rapidly find more than a grain of truth to the old saying "You just can't get the staff...."
5. A handful of businesses will change - maybe their new OSL license doesn't allow them to use old versions any more, or they roll out Windows Vista which.... abracadabra! doesn't support older versions of office or SOMETHING like that. The companies these people interact with will eventually tire of receiving documents they can't open, and upgrade themselves. The whole thing continues in a domino effect.
since they give you a computer which you can install anything on
Stop right there. Sometimes IT people and even developers can install anything on, generally everybody else gets the system locked down to a greater or lesser extent.
Fascist? Maybe. Reduces number of calls to the helpdesk? Definitely. Reduces the risk of a rather nasty audit by the BSA? Definitely. Reduces the risk of inadvertantly introducing malware? Definitely. Inconvenience to users? Only if you haven't got the good sense to find out what your users need and make sure they've got it.
It's not stated if these boxes were facing the Internet. If not, then the risk of attack is somewhat reduced. And upgrades carry a risk too - the risk that they'll break something.
Stock prices seldom reflect what the company is actually doing, and are more often driven by either the market in general or mindless "analysts" who wouldn't know what AMD does if a chip were to bite them in the bum.
Though my understanding is that modern consoles provide an API in the form of a developer's kit with most of the basic stuff already written, so there's no need for games developers to dive into hardware-specific stuff.
Whether or not they do, however, is another matter entirely....
if apple devs can bust out with universal binarys why cant you
Erm... Maybe because a universal binary isn't. It's two binaries - one for x86 and one for PPC. (Not sure if they're both rolled into the same file, but that's not really relevant).
You have to compile an application as a universal binary - it doesn't magically become that way.
He made an OS and even though it is an inferior product, gave the buyer the freedom to install it on the hardware of their choice. He's doing pretty well these days.
But the thing that really cemented his position was his attitude to anyone who wanted to sell a computer compatible with his operating system WITHOUT actually selling his operating system alongside it.
Yes I know;). There seems to be this wonderfully naive idea on/. that as soon as Bill's Evil Empire (TM) is Crushed By the Almighty Penguin, spyware, viruses and other assorted rubbish will simply cease to exist.
My guess is it will still exist, largely because people will do everything as "root". Either that or they'll happily punch in their root password when some random dialogue box asks for it - and if all your trojan has to do is gobble up lots of CPU and RAM and connect to the outside world using a port >1024 it doesn't need to be root anyway.
It's all very well arguing that the plethora of Linux distributions prevents this, but if your trojan is a statically-compiled binary and it follows the expectations laid down in the LSB, it could easily affect the most common distributions.
That popping sound is of my karma exploding. Mod me troll, see if it scares me.
In a corporate environment that may ring true. Even then, it breaks down entirely if users are able to execute a file which is located at any arbitary location on disk - who says the spyware needs to go through a formal install procedure?
However, at home (where a lot of these infested boxes are), users need SOME means of installing software.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'll bite, troll.
By that logic, no-one has a god-given right to transfer their music onto an MP3 player. Nor do they have a god-given right to play it on a high-end CD player (yes, some high-end ones digitally rip the music), nor even on a DVD player (same story there), nor an in-car CD player.
If I interpret your POV to mean "the record industry is allowed to use whatever means it deems necessary to protect their property", it therefore follows that CDs with intentionally-broken error correction, which by definition are more susceptible to damage are perfectly acceptable. No-one has the right to play a CD which has acquired a minor scratch.
Now, in theory, the free market could work this one out. But there isn't a free market in music. There are a small number of players which control 98% of what's out there, and these players collude to maintain the status quo. My instinctive guess is that we'll continue to see such asinine copy protection schemes until computers and music players either use such radically different means of storage that a means of getting the music to the computer simply doesn't exist (cf. dreamcast discs); or the need to sell music in chunks of 10-15 tracks on a physical medium goes away, perhaps to be replaced with a subscription model or something micropayment based.
And in many companies, 95% of users never use anything beyond "send & receive email" and as long as the GUI doesn't totally suck will be happy with it.
You're describing requirements which are typical of a power user who knows most all the features and uses them all. Most people simply don't come under this heading.
Unfortunately, users like you describe are also the most difficult to convert because there is always at least one feature that there is no direct equivalent for in any other tool. A migration to Linux on the desktop would be a huge project for most companies, and couldn't reasonably be expected to bring in significant savings for at least 2 years - mainly because you'd have to spend money on training your staff and managing the project. Granted, that is money which isn't being spent on software licensing, but it's still money and there's a finite supply.
Ultimately, it boils down to "What is the business benefit of the change?"
"We'll save money.... well, OK, not for a few years, but we will eventually."
"OK, what's the business risk?"
"Ah. Well, we'll have a lot of user resistance to counter. A lot of people won't like the change, will make a huge noise about it, and we'll have to increase the amount of training we offer at induction time for new staff."
"Anything else?"
"We don't actually know how well it will work. Sure, it seems fine on the few desktops we've tested it on but there are likely to be problems out there we haven't even contemplated. And Microsoft Office doesn't exist in Linux so we'll have to use something else. But don't worry, it can still open & save Office files... except that if there's anything hugely complicated or it's the wrong version of Office it can't. And there isn't a simple direct replacement for Access."
"Is that all?"
"Well, we're still working on a replacement for Outlook and Exchange. So far we've looked at a number of solutions, but none of them are particularly good. About the closest we can give you in terms of functionality is something web-based - which of course won't have an 'offline' option for out of office use"
"Any more?"
"Well, there's the current locked-down desktop policy. While we can implement it in Linux, we're not sure how we'd go about deploying it to many users simultaneously - particularly not if we needed to make any changes to desktop configuration. It looks like we'd have to write something in house."
Doesn't sound like such a great idea then, does it? Don't get me wrong, I've used Linux myself as a desktop and I think it's come a long way in 10 years. But I still maintain that it's got a way to go before a desktop migration doesn't cause raised eyebrows - guaranteed if the email problem raised (which I think is frankly the least of the problems) is solved, the likes of Gartner will come up with something else which is a showstopper.
Doing that doesn't prevent **-Beatles-Beatles (no I won't link it) from linking to georgeharrison.info, and thus going up in Google's PageRank.
ITYM "heroin addicts"
Heroine addicts just can't get enough of the plucky female who wins the day.
Say, I live in Bristol. If it's my next door neighbour, would you mind letting me know so I can warn her?
The poor old dear will get the fright of her life otherwise...
OK, you're a troll, but I'll bite.
Hackers are not going to take away all your "performance": Better tell my neighbour that. Her daughter's PC was bogged down with over a thousand pieces of spyware. In the end a reinstall would have been significantly quicker than a spyware-hunt, with the added bonus that there would be no niggling "I thought I got rid of that!" feeling.
Spamming: Yes, my network's protected. That doesn't, however, mean that my mail relay has an infinite amount of system resources. Spam-filtering is pretty system-intensive, and frankly I'd rather not have to set up a filtering relay. It's extra hassle to set up and another layer of things to potentially go wrong.
DDoS: How exactly do you propose I prevent a 2Mb (or even a 10Mb) line from being swamped if it's hit by connections from a hundred people with 512Kb upload speed each?
If you want to correct lighting in your home photos (even more nescesary than for pro photographers due to slow lenses, bad metering and on-camera flash with low-end digital point & shoots) you'd best do it in 16 bit mode (camera set to raw)
ICBW, but I'm not aware of many low-end digital point & shoot camera which support some form of raw output.
You're right on the Exchange front. I searched for ages and tried several. I concluded:
:). It's been around a while, but the current version hasn't been out long so searches tend to bring up results relating to old versions - which have changed so much that they're no longer particularly relevant.
OpenExchange: Part English, part German. Translation not 100% (some Help sections skip between languages for no apparent reason). French translation not up to date (big problem for my employer). A bitch to install free version. Commercial version a bitch to get them to sell it to you - there's a company in Germany which put me through to the US, which employs all of 4 people. Commercial version not significantly cheaper per-seat than Exchange, particularly if you factor in Outlook integration tool.
OpenGroupware.org: Still in Beta. French translation shaky. Outlook integration shaky. Probably OK if you're happy with 100% web-based.
Horde: Web based. Not bad. Well internationalized. Current version very powerful and flexible; provides a full-blown development environment for your own additions. Finding solutions to problems was a bit involved - I had to actually think
Eventually I concluded that your best bet if you want a groupware product is to go for something web-based rather than demanding Outlook integration - however plenty of management-types demand the Outlook integration. Frankly, (and I'll be burnt at the stake for saying this) if you want decent integration with Outlook, Exchange is the only sensible choice.
Tackhead, message from your boss. He says to quit reading slashdot, and lose those Linux servers you've got because Windows is faster and more secure.
What OS vendors? There's only one left.
IBM: Solutions/Support. The OS is secondary; zOS, AIX or Linux.
Sun: Solutions/support. The OS is secondary, but can be Solaris or Linux.
Novell: Linux/Solutions/Support. The OS has been completely dropped in favour of Linux.
HP: Linux.
SGI: Linux.
Microsoft: Lin... ah, no, Windows.
Or "Who the hell wrote this?"
"Well, that'd be the highly respected developer sitting opposite you who's got 5 years' experience with this code, whereas you have about 5 weeks. Next question?"
That's all very nice if you've got the expertise to remove the rootkit. What if you don't? What if you do, but by the time you got around to dowloading Sony's rootkit removal tool you've been infected with a virus which took advantage of it?
I assume Sony will reimburse you for the time and effort involved in fixing this, yes?
Because there are still a lot of people who consider a computer to be a mystical box, which does strange and random things for no apparent reason.
Because there are still a lot of people who don't actually read the menus or look at the icons - they simply click in the locations they've always clicked on to achieve the same effect.
And finally, because the number of people in this world who fall into either of the above categories is still so great that in many areas you simply cannot run your business if you refuse to employ them - you'd rapidly find more than a grain of truth to the old saying "You just can't get the staff...."
.
We're on Office XP. We have an excellent reason NOT to upgrade to Office 2003 - Outlook's IMAP support seems to be broken in 2003.
So why would I suggest an upgrade again? Hmm.... Good question. Nope, can't think of a reason.
I'd add:
5. A handful of businesses will change - maybe their new OSL license doesn't allow them to use old versions any more, or they roll out Windows Vista which.... abracadabra! doesn't support older versions of office or SOMETHING like that. The companies these people interact with will eventually tire of receiving documents they can't open, and upgrade themselves. The whole thing continues in a domino effect.
It's worked before.
Hence my final point:
Inconveniences the user - Only if you haven't got the good sense to find out what they need and make sure they've got it
since they give you a computer which you can install anything on
Stop right there. Sometimes IT people and even developers can install anything on, generally everybody else gets the system locked down to a greater or lesser extent.
Fascist? Maybe.
Reduces number of calls to the helpdesk? Definitely.
Reduces the risk of a rather nasty audit by the BSA? Definitely.
Reduces the risk of inadvertantly introducing malware? Definitely.
Inconvenience to users? Only if you haven't got the good sense to find out what your users need and make sure they've got it.
It's not stated if these boxes were facing the Internet. If not, then the risk of attack is somewhat reduced. And upgrades carry a risk too - the risk that they'll break something.
Stock prices seldom reflect what the company is actually doing, and are more often driven by either the market in general or mindless "analysts" who wouldn't know what AMD does if a chip were to bite them in the bum.
There is that too ;)
Though my understanding is that modern consoles provide an API in the form of a developer's kit with most of the basic stuff already written, so there's no need for games developers to dive into hardware-specific stuff.
Whether or not they do, however, is another matter entirely....
I just downloaded Ubuntu 5.10 about 20 minutes ago. I did wonder why the first mirror was so slow...
if apple devs can bust out with universal binarys why cant you
Erm... Maybe because a universal binary isn't. It's two binaries - one for x86 and one for PPC. (Not sure if they're both rolled into the same file, but that's not really relevant).
You have to compile an application as a universal binary - it doesn't magically become that way.
He made an OS and even though it is an inferior product, gave the buyer the freedom to install it on the hardware of their choice. He's doing pretty well these days.
But the thing that really cemented his position was his attitude to anyone who wanted to sell a computer compatible with his operating system WITHOUT actually selling his operating system alongside it.
Yes I know ;). There seems to be this wonderfully naive idea on /. that as soon as Bill's Evil Empire (TM) is Crushed By the Almighty Penguin, spyware, viruses and other assorted rubbish will simply cease to exist.
My guess is it will still exist, largely because people will do everything as "root". Either that or they'll happily punch in their root password when some random dialogue box asks for it - and if all your trojan has to do is gobble up lots of CPU and RAM and connect to the outside world using a port >1024 it doesn't need to be root anyway.
It's all very well arguing that the plethora of Linux distributions prevents this, but if your trojan is a statically-compiled binary and it follows the expectations laid down in the LSB, it could easily affect the most common distributions.
That popping sound is of my karma exploding. Mod me troll, see if it scares me.
In a corporate environment that may ring true. Even then, it breaks down entirely if users are able to execute a file which is located at any arbitary location on disk - who says the spyware needs to go through a formal install procedure?
However, at home (where a lot of these infested boxes are), users need SOME means of installing software.