Yes, when you distribute to them the binaries. If I don't give you a binary I don't have to give you squat. No distribution, no source:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of
running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program
is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the
Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
Distribution. And the point we care about:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of
Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: [options for obtaining source]
No where does it say that if I do not distribute the code to you do I need to give you the source. Nowhere does it specify you can demand someone to give you the source code without having them distribute you the work (in binary format typically) first.
Now go back and reread it yourself. Examples were taken from GPLv2 because that is what is relevant in this case (not v3).
If they have not distributed their software to me then I have no right to request the source code. GPL is only enacted upon distribution. However if I get a trial copy of their software this counts as distribution and as such one needs to make a copy of the relevant source code available. I can take any GPL product and bastardize it however I feel like. Until I distribute it to someone, I am free to do what I like. If I do not distribute my product to you, then you have no right for my modifications. So you are wrong, how about you let the people who know what they're talking about worry about it and you play with your little PS3.
But most magazines have the legal requirement to either mark that its an advertisement (ever seen those full page magazine articles with 'advertisement' placed somewhere on the page) or that they derived some benefit from it (e.g. an article a while back from Angus Kidman with the text "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion" (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/ 04/27/1224215)).
This doesn't have that sort of marking, there in lies the issue. Its not clearly linked with a company (e.g. blogs.microsoft.com) and it is them being paid off by companies. Cash for comment. Actually illegal in Australia (see John Laws on the same subject).
Actually in Australia there are blackberry plans with unlimited internet, with slightly more expensive calls and sms. I'm also predicting the same provider who offers this will probably get the iphone (more because of who owns it than anything else) when it finally makes its way to aus.
I believe he meant that the DMA members volunteer to do this, unlike other laws which are enforced upon all people. Sort of like a gentleman's agreement, you pay us a dollar and we agree we don't bother you (and a dollar a year to maintain a list is fine by me, imagine if it was per letter you received or sent!). If you're not a member (e.g. you don't volunteer to join) then you're not bound to it, unlike law which binds all. I believe this is the usage of volunteer, not that the members could opt out but groups could opt-in to join.
I'm pretty certain its illegal to share any of the files one would acquire through this method. This is calling out a specific example (iTunes Store) where sharing the property gained is very much an illegal act. Did you read the posting title? (I'm assuming you didn't actually read the slashdot body heaven forbid the article itself)
Jobs has never over hyped a product just like Gates has never over hyped a product. Remember those four pillars of Longhorn? Turns out that the Vista house only needed one pillar to stay up...both are sales people. Sales people hype. They can't do much else so let them hype.
Yes but isn't that amazing. The only thing that could compete with the monopoly is a project primarily run by people who derive no direct profit from it and don't have the resources to throw millions of dollars in what should be in theory a unified effort. Microsoft doesn't have to deal with the fragmentation that is the Linux community: GNOME has its own release schedule, the Kernel has its own release schedule, various other applications have their own release schedule, but yet some how distributions are able to put this all together to get a pretty stable mix (see Debian). I often sit back and wonder "hey, thats really cool" because nothing else has really so effective in our history. And on the subject of Microsoft TV, it came around '98 with WebTV and died. Now Apple are trying and seem to have had some measure of success. Where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly they're not doing as well as they'd like you to believe and I feel they're starting to fight on too many different battlefronts (e.g. Sony for PS3, Google on Search, Apple on OS/iTunes/AppleTV/iPod and Linux on servers). We already have Linux powering TV solutions with what I'd almost suggest is more market share than Windows Media Centre (they had to put it into Vista nobody was buying it). And if they keep doing things like Vista and Office 2007, more and more people are bound to get wary of them. The wave has already started, but I wonder what the future will hold.
LGPL will be included in GPLv3 and as such merged into one license for both cases. The difference is that there will be options in GPLv3 where GPLv2 doesn't have this option. IANAL but this is basically how it was explained to me by a friend of mine.
Now what I loved was all of the managers: 1x Group Program Manager 5x Program Manager (one of which is the token female) 1x Product Manager 1x Product Unit Manager 1x Engineering Manager 1x Test Developer 5x Developers
Or to reduce it to developers and managers: 5x Developers vs 10x Managers - I wonder who the three people missing are? No wonder Microsoft have issues shipping product, 1:2 dev to manager ratio is insane!
Its an advertisement! Read the bottom: "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion". The thing mentions Hyperion a dozen times, its the old trick of substituting news with press releases written by companies.
The problem, as any emulator writer will tell you, is that game developers often use 'undocumented features' of consoles to get better performance out of them. Some find that if you put something into XYZ register in a certain order the system reacts in a certain manner specific to the hardware. Whilst its on one hand really useful (you have a complete reference system) but on the other hand really complicated (while specifications might be perfect, the realm outside of them typically isn't). This is what makes it harder. Plus you have the whole NVidia does things this way and ATI does it another way to further complicate the mess on top of the CPU architecture switch (and issues there, which these days are more and more trivial but still provide complications). Emulating things properly is a hard business, though in this realm you've got to congratulate Apple for managing to switch their OS from three different CPU's (latest being the transition from the Power to the Intel and prior to that Motorolla to Power) and getting 32-bit and 64-bit computing IMHO right.
Because some of us use more than one computer. Like on my desktop I use Epiphany for regular stuff and Firefox when I need to do web dev stuff. Then I have my Mac, which is Safari and Firefox (same rule, spend most of my time in Safari since I go to multiple networks). Then when I go to work I (funnily enough) work on items that are personally interesting (I love my job) so sometimes what I search at home is relevant at work and vice versa, some times what I research at work is relevant to things I want to play with at home. At work I use Firefox (usually on a Windows box and IE isn't really a web browser) and sometimes its useful when I search for something ages ago to see the date and time for the ones I went to long after its disappeared from my search history. As you can probably figure out, I've used it for months now and I don't have any issues with it. I use my home del'icio'us account as well at work, to be honest for the same reason (plus it makes my bookmarks more portable as well).
With the advent of Office 2007 and its horrible interface and other changes that make it incompatible with things, failures in other organisations upgrades of our document management system, we're getting closer to getting of the MS platform. At present we're in a lockin situation: we rely on Office to integrate with our document management solution (which is important to us because document retention is important for legal reasons). But since our document management solution is looking like it'll require a large amount of work to get it upgraded in the future and Office 2k7 will cause issues, OpenOffice.org and Alfresco look far more inviting.
Indeed, Microsoft's ability to create development tools that even morons can use has been its blessing (lots of developers move to the platform because its easy) and its curse (some of those same developers shouldn't actually be coding and we get buggy programs).
What you really need to consider is this move _historically_. Years ago Microsoft were giving away (or very cheaply selling) the tools and documentation required to get developers up and running on their platform which helped them further dominate their competition. Credit where credit is due, people go where the applications are and given that Microsoft was the cheapest (and nastiest) platform of the day with some of the cheapest developer costs (as well as a killer marketting team) and they've thrived since then. Now the cost for other systems are coming down (like Linux, and to a lesser extent Mac) people are realizing there is life outside of Microsoft again.
You mean to consider that you would get VoIP running at decent quality over GPRS? Given that most of the time the speeds are sub dialup speed I would suggest that running Skype on that would be rather pointless. Not only that but consider the reason they're disallowing voice isn't just for the annoyance factor but because they haven't got the appropriate downlink technology up to speed. Whilst a heavy MMS is chunky, you don't have latency issues (who cares if it takes 5 minutes for the message to actually get transmitted, you're not going to notice; with voice you have to provide a certain level of quality or surprise surprise it drops out) and the other options (e.g. SMS) come nowhere close when comparing the throughput and size wise to streaming voice.
Telstra. Australia. Line check: $90 fee if there is no issues found, however if there is an issue they fix it (no fees).
I had an issue with my ADSL line randomly after it working for a rather large amount of time. I talked to the ISP and since the modem was just under a year old (and theirs) they replaced it. Twice. Both times the modem from their end showed up to be perfectly fine. I pushed for a line check and was warned that it would cost $90 if it found nothing. I took the plunge since three modems had problems with the line and I was confident that it dropping out every five minutes was not due to anything connected to the modem (even disconnected all but phone line and power whilst onto tech support on mobile and watched it disconnect and reconnect every five minutes, was rather confident that it was line based by then)
First technician. Late one afternoon. Sat there and found no issue with the line. Second technician. Late one afternoon again. Sat there and found no issue with the line. Third technician. Early one morning. 8:30am. Sat there and said the problem was so obvious he can't work out why the other two hadn't seen it. After the first two I sat there and watched him solve the problem. By this time it'd been a few months of issues. Great bloke though.
It seems that a policy ages ago was to use three sets of wire, the normal pair for the line and then link a third to another junction box up the footpath. It was this wire that was causing the issues (just outside a high turnover rental property), he simply cut it off, rebundled the other two and it has worked perfectly fine ever since. I never got a bill from Telstra over it (lucky them) but it took me three guys to find the solution. Now I ask for the appointments to be made in the morning only. Solution only works when the technicians aren't 1) trying to get home on time/early or 2) incompetant at finding the problem.
1) The other day at work our new help desk co-ordinator came to me with a strange problem. A user wanted to set up a mailing list. I asked him if he had given the user a project request form to which he replied that he hadn't it was such a simple request. One of the other techs, who has been with the organisation longer, was involved as the co-ordinator tried to point out his 'can do' attitude against my 'block the user' attitude. He ended up explaining that he had talked to the user and found out what they really wanted was completely different to what the user had originally requested (which was a one sentence piece of nothingness) or what the user then requested (lengthy email of nothingness) that I was being asked about.
2) On the flip side, in the bad old days of dial up from time to time my provider would have issues with their RADIUS server. How did I know? After it would fail to connect I would use Minicom and do things by hand. If things were peachy I could manually start ppp and off we went. Occaisionally though I would get an error message from the RADIUS server or claiming the system was unable to connect to the RADIUS server. I ended up ringing them and telling them that they had a problem. They insisted repeatedly that it was an issue with my set up (hey, I ran Linux, it _had_ to be an issue with my set up - it wasn't in the script!) and that altering my setup would fix the problem. I normally waited half a day for them to realize their server had died and then kick it in the guts before reconnecting.
So there are two scenarios, one where the user doesn't know what they want/what the problem is and another where I knew exactly what the problem is but it didn't get fixed. I can under the ISP point of view, but I've since moved to an ISP who doesn't continually treat me like I'm a moron and as such I end up unable to use their service. In fact they usually sound happier when I inform them I've completed their standard checklist and they can just file an incident with the requested details.
You can see that almost every major centre in Australia has various ISP's trying to get your money, but to be honest its utter trash the idea that they will cut off telephone use, as thats typically Telstra domain not ISP domain. The author is just proving he doesn't know what he's talking about.
You have to consider that schools and universities are usually not going to go out and release something that extensive without doing some insane amount of testing. How many schools are running Vista at present? From my limited experience here in Aus, whilst we have the machines to run Vista (e.g. specs wise), none of them are actually running it. I personally don't expect a large campus wide rollout until the next year, after SP1, and once most applications have had a chance to get ported to Vista. Schools, and especially universities, run all sorts of specialized programs. I picked two off the top of my head, Matlab and SPSS. Matlab is heavy in the Science side of thing and SPSS (at least at my Uni) is heavily used and taught in Statistics.
One site (UMich, http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/vista_ac/archives/2006/ 04/matlab_70.html) notes that Matlab 7 doesn't appear to run, however another (UW-Maddison http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5175) notes that Matlab 2007a is compatible (updated I would suggest) but SPSS isn't working. Applications will release patches to fix things but its not going to be instantaneous. Mac OS X 10.5 will go through a similar process, though I don't think it will be as drastic an issue, IT support departments are going to want to thoroughly test it before it gets released. This goes for any large deployment organisation and the number of smaller applications that need to be supported (e.g. compilers for smaller languages like Haskell, Prolog or LISP) the longer it will take to get fully tested.
More the truth of the matter. I was once asked by my manager who was moving to Linux on the desktop full time what I used for mail notification with Evolution. I told him simply that I didn't. It was pointless for me to have any application notifying me constantly that I had new mail as it interrupted my work flow and I can easily rely on being emailed at least once an hour. I see this time after time in the GIS sections where a "you've got mail" notification popup will appear whilst in the middle of something completely frustrating the guys as they carefully reselect things. I get enough emails that if its urgent I have the suggestion to ring me. That way reading and responding to emails is in one big chunk, typically three times a day.
I'd pick the Mavica - you didn't need anything extremely special and it made it light weight. Every had a floppy disk drive and all you needed was a spare one, take the snaps and its on the computer. No fidling with cables or software, it was there, on the computer as a JPG. Build like a brick (hey, it had a floppy drive in it after all) but the thing was a great machine.
So the great firewall of Canada? Makes them sound like another nation that starts with C and what they do with objectionable internet content. The proof is there...I guess Canada would just be the next!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, when you distribute to them the binaries. If I don't give you a binary I don't have to give you squat. No distribution, no source:
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.Distribution. And the point we care about:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: [options for obtaining source]No where does it say that if I do not distribute the code to you do I need to give you the source. Nowhere does it specify you can demand someone to give you the source code without having them distribute you the work (in binary format typically) first.
Now go back and reread it yourself. Examples were taken from GPLv2 because that is what is relevant in this case (not v3).
If they have not distributed their software to me then I have no right to request the source code. GPL is only enacted upon distribution. However if I get a trial copy of their software this counts as distribution and as such one needs to make a copy of the relevant source code available. I can take any GPL product and bastardize it however I feel like. Until I distribute it to someone, I am free to do what I like. If I do not distribute my product to you, then you have no right for my modifications. So you are wrong, how about you let the people who know what they're talking about worry about it and you play with your little PS3.
But most magazines have the legal requirement to either mark that its an advertisement (ever seen those full page magazine articles with 'advertisement' placed somewhere on the page) or that they derived some benefit from it (e.g. an article a while back from Angus Kidman with the text "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion" (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/ 04/27/1224215)).
This doesn't have that sort of marking, there in lies the issue. Its not clearly linked with a company (e.g. blogs.microsoft.com) and it is them being paid off by companies. Cash for comment. Actually illegal in Australia (see John Laws on the same subject).
Thats the issue.
Actually in Australia there are blackberry plans with unlimited internet, with slightly more expensive calls and sms. I'm also predicting the same provider who offers this will probably get the iphone (more because of who owns it than anything else) when it finally makes its way to aus.
I believe he meant that the DMA members volunteer to do this, unlike other laws which are enforced upon all people. Sort of like a gentleman's agreement, you pay us a dollar and we agree we don't bother you (and a dollar a year to maintain a list is fine by me, imagine if it was per letter you received or sent!). If you're not a member (e.g. you don't volunteer to join) then you're not bound to it, unlike law which binds all. I believe this is the usage of volunteer, not that the members could opt out but groups could opt-in to join.
I'm pretty certain its illegal to share any of the files one would acquire through this method. This is calling out a specific example (iTunes Store) where sharing the property gained is very much an illegal act. Did you read the posting title? (I'm assuming you didn't actually read the slashdot body heaven forbid the article itself)
Jobs has never over hyped a product just like Gates has never over hyped a product. Remember those four pillars of Longhorn? Turns out that the Vista house only needed one pillar to stay up...both are sales people. Sales people hype. They can't do much else so let them hype.
Yes but isn't that amazing. The only thing that could compete with the monopoly is a project primarily run by people who derive no direct profit from it and don't have the resources to throw millions of dollars in what should be in theory a unified effort. Microsoft doesn't have to deal with the fragmentation that is the Linux community: GNOME has its own release schedule, the Kernel has its own release schedule, various other applications have their own release schedule, but yet some how distributions are able to put this all together to get a pretty stable mix (see Debian). I often sit back and wonder "hey, thats really cool" because nothing else has really so effective in our history. And on the subject of Microsoft TV, it came around '98 with WebTV and died. Now Apple are trying and seem to have had some measure of success. Where Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly they're not doing as well as they'd like you to believe and I feel they're starting to fight on too many different battlefronts (e.g. Sony for PS3, Google on Search, Apple on OS/iTunes/AppleTV/iPod and Linux on servers). We already have Linux powering TV solutions with what I'd almost suggest is more market share than Windows Media Centre (they had to put it into Vista nobody was buying it). And if they keep doing things like Vista and Office 2007, more and more people are bound to get wary of them. The wave has already started, but I wonder what the future will hold.
LGPL will be included in GPLv3 and as such merged into one license for both cases. The difference is that there will be options in GPLv3 where GPLv2 doesn't have this option. IANAL but this is basically how it was explained to me by a friend of mine.
Now what I loved was all of the managers:
1x Group Program Manager
5x Program Manager (one of which is the token female)
1x Product Manager
1x Product Unit Manager
1x Engineering Manager
1x Test Developer
5x Developers
Or to reduce it to developers and managers: 5x Developers vs 10x Managers - I wonder who the three people missing are? No wonder Microsoft have issues shipping product, 1:2 dev to manager ratio is insane!
Its an advertisement! Read the bottom: "Angus Kidman travelled to Orlando as a guest of Hyperion". The thing mentions Hyperion a dozen times, its the old trick of substituting news with press releases written by companies.
The problem, as any emulator writer will tell you, is that game developers often use 'undocumented features' of consoles to get better performance out of them. Some find that if you put something into XYZ register in a certain order the system reacts in a certain manner specific to the hardware. Whilst its on one hand really useful (you have a complete reference system) but on the other hand really complicated (while specifications might be perfect, the realm outside of them typically isn't). This is what makes it harder. Plus you have the whole NVidia does things this way and ATI does it another way to further complicate the mess on top of the CPU architecture switch (and issues there, which these days are more and more trivial but still provide complications). Emulating things properly is a hard business, though in this realm you've got to congratulate Apple for managing to switch their OS from three different CPU's (latest being the transition from the Power to the Intel and prior to that Motorolla to Power) and getting 32-bit and 64-bit computing IMHO right.
Because some of us use more than one computer. Like on my desktop I use Epiphany for regular stuff and Firefox when I need to do web dev stuff. Then I have my Mac, which is Safari and Firefox (same rule, spend most of my time in Safari since I go to multiple networks). Then when I go to work I (funnily enough) work on items that are personally interesting (I love my job) so sometimes what I search at home is relevant at work and vice versa, some times what I research at work is relevant to things I want to play with at home. At work I use Firefox (usually on a Windows box and IE isn't really a web browser) and sometimes its useful when I search for something ages ago to see the date and time for the ones I went to long after its disappeared from my search history. As you can probably figure out, I've used it for months now and I don't have any issues with it. I use my home del'icio'us account as well at work, to be honest for the same reason (plus it makes my bookmarks more portable as well).
I clicked on this and it mentioned initially that there was nothing for me to see here and then magically came up. Did I miss something?
With the advent of Office 2007 and its horrible interface and other changes that make it incompatible with things, failures in other organisations upgrades of our document management system, we're getting closer to getting of the MS platform. At present we're in a lockin situation: we rely on Office to integrate with our document management solution (which is important to us because document retention is important for legal reasons). But since our document management solution is looking like it'll require a large amount of work to get it upgraded in the future and Office 2k7 will cause issues, OpenOffice.org and Alfresco look far more inviting.
Indeed, Microsoft's ability to create development tools that even morons can use has been its blessing (lots of developers move to the platform because its easy) and its curse (some of those same developers shouldn't actually be coding and we get buggy programs).
What you really need to consider is this move _historically_. Years ago Microsoft were giving away (or very cheaply selling) the tools and documentation required to get developers up and running on their platform which helped them further dominate their competition. Credit where credit is due, people go where the applications are and given that Microsoft was the cheapest (and nastiest) platform of the day with some of the cheapest developer costs (as well as a killer marketting team) and they've thrived since then. Now the cost for other systems are coming down (like Linux, and to a lesser extent Mac) people are realizing there is life outside of Microsoft again.
Why not, they already ship it in the OS, might be there under the hood somewhere.
You mean to consider that you would get VoIP running at decent quality over GPRS? Given that most of the time the speeds are sub dialup speed I would suggest that running Skype on that would be rather pointless. Not only that but consider the reason they're disallowing voice isn't just for the annoyance factor but because they haven't got the appropriate downlink technology up to speed. Whilst a heavy MMS is chunky, you don't have latency issues (who cares if it takes 5 minutes for the message to actually get transmitted, you're not going to notice; with voice you have to provide a certain level of quality or surprise surprise it drops out) and the other options (e.g. SMS) come nowhere close when comparing the throughput and size wise to streaming voice.
Telstra. Australia. Line check: $90 fee if there is no issues found, however if there is an issue they fix it (no fees).
I had an issue with my ADSL line randomly after it working for a rather large amount of time. I talked to the ISP and since the modem was just under a year old (and theirs) they replaced it. Twice. Both times the modem from their end showed up to be perfectly fine. I pushed for a line check and was warned that it would cost $90 if it found nothing. I took the plunge since three modems had problems with the line and I was confident that it dropping out every five minutes was not due to anything connected to the modem (even disconnected all but phone line and power whilst onto tech support on mobile and watched it disconnect and reconnect every five minutes, was rather confident that it was line based by then)
First technician. Late one afternoon. Sat there and found no issue with the line.
Second technician. Late one afternoon again. Sat there and found no issue with the line.
Third technician. Early one morning. 8:30am. Sat there and said the problem was so obvious he can't work out why the other two hadn't seen it. After the first two I sat there and watched him solve the problem. By this time it'd been a few months of issues. Great bloke though.
It seems that a policy ages ago was to use three sets of wire, the normal pair for the line and then link a third to another junction box up the footpath. It was this wire that was causing the issues (just outside a high turnover rental property), he simply cut it off, rebundled the other two and it has worked perfectly fine ever since. I never got a bill from Telstra over it (lucky them) but it took me three guys to find the solution. Now I ask for the appointments to be made in the morning only. Solution only works when the technicians aren't 1) trying to get home on time/early or 2) incompetant at finding the problem.
See I approach this from two sides.
1) The other day at work our new help desk co-ordinator came to me with a strange problem. A user wanted to set up a mailing list. I asked him if he had given the user a project request form to which he replied that he hadn't it was such a simple request. One of the other techs, who has been with the organisation longer, was involved as the co-ordinator tried to point out his 'can do' attitude against my 'block the user' attitude. He ended up explaining that he had talked to the user and found out what they really wanted was completely different to what the user had originally requested (which was a one sentence piece of nothingness) or what the user then requested (lengthy email of nothingness) that I was being asked about.
2) On the flip side, in the bad old days of dial up from time to time my provider would have issues with their RADIUS server. How did I know? After it would fail to connect I would use Minicom and do things by hand. If things were peachy I could manually start ppp and off we went. Occaisionally though I would get an error message from the RADIUS server or claiming the system was unable to connect to the RADIUS server. I ended up ringing them and telling them that they had a problem. They insisted repeatedly that it was an issue with my set up (hey, I ran Linux, it _had_ to be an issue with my set up - it wasn't in the script!) and that altering my setup would fix the problem. I normally waited half a day for them to realize their server had died and then kick it in the guts before reconnecting.
So there are two scenarios, one where the user doesn't know what they want/what the problem is and another where I knew exactly what the problem is but it didn't get fixed. I can under the ISP point of view, but I've since moved to an ISP who doesn't continually treat me like I'm a moron and as such I end up unable to use their service. In fact they usually sound happier when I inform them I've completed their standard checklist and they can just file an incident with the requested details.
The APC Broadband Choice section gets its information of Whirlpool, http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
You can see that almost every major centre in Australia has various ISP's trying to get your money, but to be honest its utter trash the idea that they will cut off telephone use, as thats typically Telstra domain not ISP domain. The author is just proving he doesn't know what he's talking about.
You have to consider that schools and universities are usually not going to go out and release something that extensive without doing some insane amount of testing. How many schools are running Vista at present? From my limited experience here in Aus, whilst we have the machines to run Vista (e.g. specs wise), none of them are actually running it. I personally don't expect a large campus wide rollout until the next year, after SP1, and once most applications have had a chance to get ported to Vista. Schools, and especially universities, run all sorts of specialized programs. I picked two off the top of my head, Matlab and SPSS. Matlab is heavy in the Science side of thing and SPSS (at least at my Uni) is heavily used and taught in Statistics. One site (UMich, http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/vista_ac/archives/2006/ 04/matlab_70.html) notes that Matlab 7 doesn't appear to run, however another (UW-Maddison http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5175) notes that Matlab 2007a is compatible (updated I would suggest) but SPSS isn't working. Applications will release patches to fix things but its not going to be instantaneous. Mac OS X 10.5 will go through a similar process, though I don't think it will be as drastic an issue, IT support departments are going to want to thoroughly test it before it gets released. This goes for any large deployment organisation and the number of smaller applications that need to be supported (e.g. compilers for smaller languages like Haskell, Prolog or LISP) the longer it will take to get fully tested.
More the truth of the matter. I was once asked by my manager who was moving to Linux on the desktop full time what I used for mail notification with Evolution. I told him simply that I didn't. It was pointless for me to have any application notifying me constantly that I had new mail as it interrupted my work flow and I can easily rely on being emailed at least once an hour. I see this time after time in the GIS sections where a "you've got mail" notification popup will appear whilst in the middle of something completely frustrating the guys as they carefully reselect things. I get enough emails that if its urgent I have the suggestion to ring me. That way reading and responding to emails is in one big chunk, typically three times a day.
I'd pick the Mavica - you didn't need anything extremely special and it made it light weight. Every had a floppy disk drive and all you needed was a spare one, take the snaps and its on the computer. No fidling with cables or software, it was there, on the computer as a JPG. Build like a brick (hey, it had a floppy drive in it after all) but the thing was a great machine.
So the great firewall of Canada? Makes them sound like another nation that starts with C and what they do with objectionable internet content. The proof is there...I guess Canada would just be the next!