Probably cost. A sapphire crystal an inch and a half in diameter for a watch and a sapphire crystal cut for the size of an iPhone are going to be two very different animals.
(And I'm not surprised it's not scratched. IIRC sapphire is only one notch down from diamond on the Moh's hardness scale, and when the glass on my own watch eventually gets badly scratched I intend to replace it with sapphire).
To be honest, I don't know how it all works at the business level, all I know is that I'm ordering my next laptop without windows and I'm going to spend up to 12 hours on the phone to get the discount for it.
Ah, then let me tell you a little.
It's as if all the antitrust stuff with Microsoft never happened. The sort of things a business is likely to want to do are so tied up with EULAs that it gets very expensive very fast. I have no idea how well some of the clauses would stand up in a court, but I've yet to work for a company that was keen on being the first test case.
Firstly, the only organisation allowed to image PCs with an OEM copy of Windows is... the OEM. You go out and buy 100 PCs with 100 OEM Windows licenses on them, fine. Good for you. But if you want to image them all with a corporate image so you can guarantee they all go out with the right software on them - nope. You can't just configure one of them appropriately and use it as the basis for your image to the other 99, you're meant to go out and buy a (separate) "Upgrade" copy of Windows under an Enterprise Licensing agreement - an annually renewable agreement which is rather cheaper per-annum than the normal cost of buying licenses, but once it expires you're no longer licensed to run anything.
You'll note I used the word "Upgrade" there. That's not accidental - the enterprise licensing agreement does NOT give you the right to install Windows on a PC that did not ship with an OS.
There are other terms in this Enterprise Licensing agreement that you might be interested to know about. Terms like "You will license this for every PC in your organisation". Explicitly not "You will license this for every PC in your organisation you intend to run Windows on". Microsoft Office has similar terms.
You can work around these restrictions (for some applications) by not going for the annually renewable license, but instead for the one-off license and get a volume discount. This isn't hugely popular because the one-off license typically costs about three times the price of the annually-renewable license, and if you were upgrading every three years or so anyway, saves you precisely nothing. In addition to this, the annually renewable license doesn't require you to keep on top of what's installed where - you simply square your licenses up with what you're using at renewal time. This isn't true of one-off licensing.
Windows Server is equally entertaining from a licensing perspective. You need a license for the server, a Client Access License for every computer that will be communicating with the server, if you want to run any software on the server (like Exchange) that's licensed separately and - if it's Microsoft software - typically requires separate client access licenses over and above the server CALs. Want to run Terminal Services but don't like the cost of CALs for terminal services (yes, they're extra)? Tough. The EULA for Windows Server explicitly demands you get Terminal Services CALs not just for Terminal Services, but any software that provides some sort of remote desktop experience.
I've done the arithmetic on this myself many times, because it really is absurdly expensive and for some time I couldn't figure out how anyone was still justifying the cost. Windows may well be cheaper if you've already got a significant Windows-based infrastructure in place - simply because the cost of migrating to a totally different platform is almost invariably going to be even more absurd. This goes some way to explaining why SBS on a basic Dell server is so cheap. Get the business stuck on Windows early, then as it expands it will find itself locked in a treadmill of ever-increasing prices.
If they make money, Microsoft will keep making them.
It's not always as simple as that in these big companies.
If you have two departments doing essentially the same thing and both pull in $1,000,000 per year while costing $600,000 per year, it is quite common to merge the departments, get rid of a number of staff and wind up with a single department that you hope will bring in $2,000,000 per year but only cost around $900,000. The numbers may vary but the idea remains much the same.
Break every flash browser game today? Probably not.
Stop development work on Flash, let it flounder and then when IE 11 comes out with a new plugin architecture (which oh-what-a-shame means Flash no longer runs) kill it altogether? I wouldn't bet against something like that.
Plus maybe then we can stop every MS site from needing SilverLight and every MS application installing an XPS Viewer/Printer.
Purely out of morbid curiosity, how many times in the last 20 years have Microsoft bought out a company that has a competing product in their portfolio and switched to the newly-acquired product, ditching their own?
I don't think most of them have even read the constitution.
I think it might be more that none have studied history. The whole point of "separation of church and state" was that the government has no right to dictate how people practise their religion.
It troubles me to no end the lengths people will go today in the name of religion. It's actually becoming common place for someone to have an extreme view and use the blanket of religion to protect them.
It was always this way. Hell, arguably the USA was founded by a bunch of people who wanted to practise religion in their own way and didn't see how it was the governments' business.
If you think people will go to extreme lengths today..... emigrating on a sail boat two hundred and fifty years ago was no picnic. A journey that took months, a bunk not much longer (and rather narrower) than the desk I'm sitting at now, any disease had nowhere to go but infect everyone on board. And the food had to be stuff that would keep, being as there was no refrigeration. Precious little idea of what you had to look forward to at the other end, being as the most you'd have heard would have been the odd letter from friends or relatives who'd already gone over. You'd have to be really hacked off to go to that kind of extreme.
XP didn't do that so easily (you can tile but IIRC you can only tile every window, not just two or three) - I admit that with Vista and later, Microsoft have really been paying attention to the display. The only amazing thing was the length of time it took them to do so.
A side effect is not only do you lose height, you can no longer buy a screen the next size up to gain resolution. Screens with higher res than 1920x1080 are really thin on the ground.
Certain operating systems (naming no names) have a GUI developed on the assumption that you don't have a terribly high res screen and so you only want one thing on the screen at a time.
This pervades the entire platform to such a degree that actually using the full space for several things becomes surprisingly difficult.
If he has been doing something like that and the only evidence is encrypted, then releasing the password would be a one-way ticket to several years of hell.
by touting convictions like the one in TFA as evidence of how you should always hand your key over without a fight, or without playing innocent they strengthen that idea amongst the public as to that's how it works.
From TFA (my emphasis):
Oliver Drage, 19, of Liverpool, was arrested in May 2009 by police tackling child sexual exploitation.
Hmm, 16 weeks in prison for refusing to hand over keys or:
If guilty, 5 years in prison for sexually exploiting children. If innocent, a lengthy trial with your name dragged through the mud by the tabloid press. Let's face it, everyone he knows will remember the trial but forget the verdict, and something like that's not the kind of thing you can easily shake off.
The law as it's actually written is a lot more complicated than how it's portrayed in the media. IIRC, the wording goes along the lines of "you may be ordered to surrender decryption keys and the onus is on you to demonstrate that you cannot - however all you need to demonstrate is reasonable doubt". There's a whole bunch of wording which goes into considerable detail here - and does cover people destroying keys once they receive such an order - but I'm not sure how it'd work were someone to develop a mechanism to store a key so it self destructs as soon as you reveal it.
Until Ballmer accepts this and lets Microsoft develop a new UI paradigm for portable devices they're doomed to failure over and over again.
Thing is, I don't believe Microsoft have ever in the whole of history developed a UI paradigm from scratch. They've cribbed from others, but never developed one from scratch.
Of course, now there's a UI out there that works quite well on slate devices, we can be more or less 90% certain that Microsoft will clone that.
That's largely because Apple understand something that Microsoft historically haven't.
A UI that works on a desktop PC does not necessarily work on a handheld device, simply because most of the assumptions made on a desktop PC (large screen, keyboard and mouse control) are no longer true. This has to go beyond just the desktop UI - applications must also account for this.
Hell, even Windows Mobile has historically not dealt with this terribly gracefully.
Did you scan them with an AV scanner that was already on there? Most malware these days makes at least a cursory effort to avoid AV scanners, and if it didn't block it in the first place, what makes you think it'll detect malware that's already resident?
I've tried arguments like that. Usually you wind up with some smartarse pointing you at a GUI tool which lets you do exactly that sort of thing, neatly missing the point that the CLI gives you the building blocks to do what you want - at the expense of you having to do some building in order to do anything. It's the difference between a toy car and a lego set containing all the components to build a car.
Most people on slashdot who actually use Windows are mindlessly clinking to the clunker than is XP, so they really have no idea of what Microsoft has done in the last 10 years.
I am afraid you are mistaken.
Most people on slashdot are clinging onto Windows '9x, and have no idea what Microsoft have accomplished in the past 12-15 years.
Having said that, I once administered a network of Win'9x machines, so I can thoroughly understand why they'd run away screaming in the opposite direction. But at least I'm aware that Microsoft have made some advances since then.
IME most tools that generate a shell script only do so one or two lines at a time with each option you set.
Of course, it helps if the thing your configuring actually has a true CLI where you can punch in commands to configure it - many Unix applications don't, you have to edit a config file somewhere.
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Probably cost. A sapphire crystal an inch and a half in diameter for a watch and a sapphire crystal cut for the size of an iPhone are going to be two very different animals.
(And I'm not surprised it's not scratched. IIRC sapphire is only one notch down from diamond on the Moh's hardness scale, and when the glass on my own watch eventually gets badly scratched I intend to replace it with sapphire).
To be honest, I don't know how it all works at the business level, all I know is that I'm ordering my next laptop without windows and I'm going to spend up to 12 hours on the phone to get the discount for it.
Ah, then let me tell you a little.
It's as if all the antitrust stuff with Microsoft never happened. The sort of things a business is likely to want to do are so tied up with EULAs that it gets very expensive very fast. I have no idea how well some of the clauses would stand up in a court, but I've yet to work for a company that was keen on being the first test case.
Firstly, the only organisation allowed to image PCs with an OEM copy of Windows is... the OEM. You go out and buy 100 PCs with 100 OEM Windows licenses on them, fine. Good for you. But if you want to image them all with a corporate image so you can guarantee they all go out with the right software on them - nope. You can't just configure one of them appropriately and use it as the basis for your image to the other 99, you're meant to go out and buy a (separate) "Upgrade" copy of Windows under an Enterprise Licensing agreement - an annually renewable agreement which is rather cheaper per-annum than the normal cost of buying licenses, but once it expires you're no longer licensed to run anything.
You'll note I used the word "Upgrade" there. That's not accidental - the enterprise licensing agreement does NOT give you the right to install Windows on a PC that did not ship with an OS.
There are other terms in this Enterprise Licensing agreement that you might be interested to know about. Terms like "You will license this for every PC in your organisation". Explicitly not "You will license this for every PC in your organisation you intend to run Windows on". Microsoft Office has similar terms.
You can work around these restrictions (for some applications) by not going for the annually renewable license, but instead for the one-off license and get a volume discount. This isn't hugely popular because the one-off license typically costs about three times the price of the annually-renewable license, and if you were upgrading every three years or so anyway, saves you precisely nothing. In addition to this, the annually renewable license doesn't require you to keep on top of what's installed where - you simply square your licenses up with what you're using at renewal time. This isn't true of one-off licensing.
Windows Server is equally entertaining from a licensing perspective. You need a license for the server, a Client Access License for every computer that will be communicating with the server, if you want to run any software on the server (like Exchange) that's licensed separately and - if it's Microsoft software - typically requires separate client access licenses over and above the server CALs. Want to run Terminal Services but don't like the cost of CALs for terminal services (yes, they're extra)? Tough. The EULA for Windows Server explicitly demands you get Terminal Services CALs not just for Terminal Services, but any software that provides some sort of remote desktop experience.
I've done the arithmetic on this myself many times, because it really is absurdly expensive and for some time I couldn't figure out how anyone was still justifying the cost. Windows may well be cheaper if you've already got a significant Windows-based infrastructure in place - simply because the cost of migrating to a totally different platform is almost invariably going to be even more absurd. This goes some way to explaining why SBS on a basic Dell server is so cheap. Get the business stuck on Windows early, then as it expands it will find itself locked in a treadmill of ever-increasing prices.
If they make money, Microsoft will keep making them.
It's not always as simple as that in these big companies.
If you have two departments doing essentially the same thing and both pull in $1,000,000 per year while costing $600,000 per year, it is quite common to merge the departments, get rid of a number of staff and wind up with a single department that you hope will bring in $2,000,000 per year but only cost around $900,000. The numbers may vary but the idea remains much the same.
Break every flash browser game today? Probably not.
Stop development work on Flash, let it flounder and then when IE 11 comes out with a new plugin architecture (which oh-what-a-shame means Flash no longer runs) kill it altogether? I wouldn't bet against something like that.
Plus maybe then we can stop every MS site from needing SilverLight and every MS application installing an XPS Viewer/Printer.
Purely out of morbid curiosity, how many times in the last 20 years have Microsoft bought out a company that has a competing product in their portfolio and switched to the newly-acquired product, ditching their own?
I don't think most of them have even read the constitution.
I think it might be more that none have studied history. The whole point of "separation of church and state" was that the government has no right to dictate how people practise their religion.
It troubles me to no end the lengths people will go today in the name of religion. It's actually becoming common place for someone to have an extreme view and use the blanket of religion to protect them.
It was always this way. Hell, arguably the USA was founded by a bunch of people who wanted to practise religion in their own way and didn't see how it was the governments' business.
If you think people will go to extreme lengths today..... emigrating on a sail boat two hundred and fifty years ago was no picnic. A journey that took months, a bunk not much longer (and rather narrower) than the desk I'm sitting at now, any disease had nowhere to go but infect everyone on board. And the food had to be stuff that would keep, being as there was no refrigeration. Precious little idea of what you had to look forward to at the other end, being as the most you'd have heard would have been the odd letter from friends or relatives who'd already gone over. You'd have to be really hacked off to go to that kind of extreme.
Maybe he's a US (or European) manager?
OS X assumes that you bought a large screen because you wanted to fit lots of things on it, not because you want one window which fills the lot.
I was thinking of XP, and while I've already been berated for thinking of a 10 year old OS, I would point out a couple of things:
1. XP still holds the greater share of the Windows market.
2. High-res screens existed long before XP debuted.
XP didn't do that so easily (you can tile but IIRC you can only tile every window, not just two or three) - I admit that with Vista and later, Microsoft have really been paying attention to the display. The only amazing thing was the length of time it took them to do so.
A side effect is not only do you lose height, you can no longer buy a screen the next size up to gain resolution. Screens with higher res than 1920x1080 are really thin on the ground.
Certain operating systems (naming no names) have a GUI developed on the assumption that you don't have a terribly high res screen and so you only want one thing on the screen at a time.
This pervades the entire platform to such a degree that actually using the full space for several things becomes surprisingly difficult.
According to TFA, he offered exactly that:
Cranick says he told the operator he would pay whatever is necessary to have the fire put out.
Which I'm sure your average 19 year old is:
A: Fully aware of.
B: Has total faith in.
If he has been doing something like that and the only evidence is encrypted, then releasing the password would be a one-way ticket to several years of hell.
by touting convictions like the one in TFA as evidence of how you should always hand your key over without a fight, or without playing innocent they strengthen that idea amongst the public as to that's how it works.
From TFA (my emphasis):
Oliver Drage, 19, of Liverpool, was arrested in May 2009 by police tackling child sexual exploitation.
Hmm, 16 weeks in prison for refusing to hand over keys or:
If guilty, 5 years in prison for sexually exploiting children.
If innocent, a lengthy trial with your name dragged through the mud by the tabloid press. Let's face it, everyone he knows will remember the trial but forget the verdict, and something like that's not the kind of thing you can easily shake off.
Tough choice.
The law as it's actually written is a lot more complicated than how it's portrayed in the media. IIRC, the wording goes along the lines of "you may be ordered to surrender decryption keys and the onus is on you to demonstrate that you cannot - however all you need to demonstrate is reasonable doubt". There's a whole bunch of wording which goes into considerable detail here - and does cover people destroying keys once they receive such an order - but I'm not sure how it'd work were someone to develop a mechanism to store a key so it self destructs as soon as you reveal it.
Until Ballmer accepts this and lets Microsoft develop a new UI paradigm for portable devices they're doomed to failure over and over again.
Thing is, I don't believe Microsoft have ever in the whole of history developed a UI paradigm from scratch. They've cribbed from others, but never developed one from scratch.
Of course, now there's a UI out there that works quite well on slate devices, we can be more or less 90% certain that Microsoft will clone that.
That's largely because Apple understand something that Microsoft historically haven't.
A UI that works on a desktop PC does not necessarily work on a handheld device, simply because most of the assumptions made on a desktop PC (large screen, keyboard and mouse control) are no longer true. This has to go beyond just the desktop UI - applications must also account for this.
Hell, even Windows Mobile has historically not dealt with this terribly gracefully.
So let me get this straight.
Windows 2012 will come with "GUI optional! Control everything from the command line!" as a selling point.
I imagine Ubuntu 12.10 Server will have "Command line optional! Control everything from the GUI!" as the selling point.
Did you scan them with an AV scanner that was already on there? Most malware these days makes at least a cursory effort to avoid AV scanners, and if it didn't block it in the first place, what makes you think it'll detect malware that's already resident?
Whereas with a GUI you can make a hundred mistakes which are all slightly different on each box.
I've tried arguments like that. Usually you wind up with some smartarse pointing you at a GUI tool which lets you do exactly that sort of thing, neatly missing the point that the CLI gives you the building blocks to do what you want - at the expense of you having to do some building in order to do anything. It's the difference between a toy car and a lego set containing all the components to build a car.
Yes, yes it is.
Most people on slashdot who actually use Windows are mindlessly clinking to the clunker than is XP, so they really have no idea of what Microsoft has done in the last 10 years.
I am afraid you are mistaken.
Most people on slashdot are clinging onto Windows '9x, and have no idea what Microsoft have accomplished in the past 12-15 years.
Having said that, I once administered a network of Win'9x machines, so I can thoroughly understand why they'd run away screaming in the opposite direction. But at least I'm aware that Microsoft have made some advances since then.
IME most tools that generate a shell script only do so one or two lines at a time with each option you set.
Of course, it helps if the thing your configuring actually has a true CLI where you can punch in commands to configure it - many Unix applications don't, you have to edit a config file somewhere.