Could be interesting. I think Linux might really make sense for them. Sure, you can steal MS software, but you can't really put together the necessary MS enterprise infrastructure without buying a lot of stuff from MS and paying a lot of fancy consultants. Linux certainly cuts down on that. I think it would be a smart move for them.
Good point, actually. It's a great hack, but I'm afraid that in practice it would be a huge fire hazard. Ever see an oil filled capacitor go up in smoke? Can you imagine if this somehow caught fire and the containment vessel broke?
The Anti-Spyware, that is. It is spyware itself, of course, but it is still an awfully nice piece of software. I have been cleaning my one remaining Windows machine manually - this found a lot of crap I had not caught. Sure feels good to stamp this stuff out. People ought to stop whining and try this one. To be sure, this is MS covering its tail, because I think there is a lot of potential liability for them to do nothing about Spyware. Since they are ultimately doing this for their protection (not yours), they do a pretty good job of it. Well worth downloading, I say.
The article jumps to the conclusion that this warranty covers lost data. That's not what it says. It says "DIRECT" damages, up to a $5.00 cap - Someone in a stingy mood might argue that this covers the replacement cost for the defective software, and that any "data loss" would be INDIRECT (and not covered). Take film as an example - the mfgr will cover you for the cost of new film, not for the value of your lost wedding pictures.
I see they are using Lucene as their search engine. Lucene a powerful open source indexing system from the Apache Jakarta project written in Java. It's nice to see this, rather than MS indexing service or some other proprietary search solution. Lucene, with the appropriate open source plugins, can index a wide range of content, including MS Office and PDF files.
Nintendo led the way in this practice in the 1980s - a closed console (computer) that would only work with cartridges (software) that Nintendo had blessed (which usually meant Nintendo manufactured them, on pricing that included a license fee).
Although relentlessly attacked in court by a company then called Atari Games, Nintendo's approach held up, as far as I know. Later, market pressure from Sega and then Sony forced Nintendo to moderate some of its requirements, but they pretty much defined the business model for the console sector for years to come.
I see this as firmly within that tradition. What's the big deal? As we saw with Nintendo, there was really no monopoly after competition got going.
Grokster is a business. If you couldn't use it to trade infringing copies, I'm afraid the service would have no commercial viability whatsoever. The mere fact that it's CAPABLE of exchanging noninfringing files I don't think is sufficient justification.
A better case, perhaps, could be made for bittorent.
The "indemnification" point is serious FUD based on way overblown fears of end user patent liability.
In fact, the most likely "patent" scenario is the one we have today: i.e., patent "hold-ups" in which 2-bit "inventors" demand "royalties" from software users, based on patents they probably never should never have been granted. These patent owners want to bleed a lot of companies for relatively small bucks each. They do not in fact want to actually shut anyone down; they just want to collect a small "tax" from a big population. These are nuisances to big companies (the usual targets of such claims), and certainly potential expense items, but NOT the sort of thing that should make a strategic difference in one's technology direction.
All that being said, offering uncapped indemnification to customers against potential software patent claims is a valid selling point. Of course, Microsoft software is no less vulnerable to these claims than anyone else's, and the email was a little unclear whether the "uncapped" amount was for the costs of legal defense (attorneys' fees) or that plus the actual liability to the patent owner.
Microsoft's offer of indemnification is credible if for no other reason than Microsoft's huge financial liquidity. In the open source world, there are also a few companies, such as IBM, that have good financial credit and can credibly make a comparable offer. But there are quite a few providers who are not in a position to do this.
Perhaps the answer for the others would be to offer reasonably priced group insurance from a financially sound insurer . . . IF the market considers that a response like that is even necessary.
Windows I can't help you with, but if you are migrating from one Linux distro to another, just create separate partitions for / and/home. Then, you can switch distribitions, and so long as you keep your/home partition and mount it as/home, many of your settings from the prior installation will simply carry right over.
Of course there may be benefit to backing up/home and starting everything fresh. You may like the default setups in the new distro better than what you had cobbled yourself under the old one. One way to try this out in advance is to run a live CD of the target distribution before installing it.
If you don't have to be absolutely compatible, there are plenty of free (really free) spreadsheets. Gnumeric, being considerably more lightweight that Openoffice, does the trick for me most of the time.
When nothing other than Excel will do, why not just run Citrix (or some virtual box if you don't have access to a Citrix server) and run real Excel?
If you seriously need Excel, I doubt this will be a satisfactory long-term solution, for any number of reasons. Plus, it ain't free.
In sum, who needs another me-too piece of proprietary software?
"spin the straw of ignorance into the gold of brilliant foresight."
But don't blame the tool for this. Nothing in the spreadsheet paradigm keeps you from "bracketing" your assumptions or data (i.e., incorporate a "plus or minus" range for each input point), though with such a discipline each column (including all input columns and all dependent calculated columns) would have to be replaced by three columns representing the best guess and the outlying maxima and minima.
Sure, this (and other) "requirements" or "constraints" could be built into the tool, but then it would be a different, more limited product.
This is sort of like blaming word processors because they permit people to write drivel, or badly formatted documents.
OTOH, a bracketing "control" of some sort for a spreadsheet would be very nice, though it would probably require a redesign because (absent the complexity of having multiple columns) each cell would then represent a range of possible values rather than a single unambiguous value.
There IS a response to these types of groundless threats, it's called a "declaratory judgment" - a definitive court declaration that a bully (e.g., SCO) has no basis for its bullying. A class action could be brought at any time by Linux users seeking a court declaration that SCO's claims are completely bogus. The procedure for doing this is on the books, and well known. Somebody just has to decide it's worthwhile. Sooner or later, someone probably will, though there is unlikely to be any big pot of monetary gold for the winner (other than getting back their own attorney fees, if SCO has any money left at that point).
Debian does have DVD burning capability. Look at K3B from the KDE project. It's available in Debian Sid and I believe Testing, and it does burn DVDs. It also helps to run kernel 2.6, but it works in 2.4 too.
As for CUPS, Debian's defeult setup generally lets me print to a shared CUPS printer somewhere on my network. Haven't had all of ESR's problems (lately, anyway).
That's not TOO difficult, but answering the questions from the post-install scripts can be. It is easy to answer them incorrectly and get wierd configurations or deamons that run at boot which you don't need and which muck things up. Of course that can easily happen in Windows too, but Linux is supposed to be better than Windows.
It's great for ME, but think about what you have to go through, even with apt-get or synaptic, in order, for example, to install nvidia drivers, decide whether they should have threadlocal support, adding yourself to the audio, video and scanner groups, learning the octal codes for permissions, deciding whether NFS should be kernel or user, or any of the other system admin stuff you have to master in order to be a successful Linux user.
OS X would be the answer, if only a usefully fast setup didn't cost a fortune.
There is nuthin like being able to run a free OS on dirt cheap commodity hardware.
No, someone will come along with a better distro, along the lines of knoppix but more upgradeable.
Yes, but the same stuff works on Debian. A straight Debian install these days is pretty easy, and will give you a more stable setup that Knoppix, good as Knoppix is.
Look at the cheatcodes - there is one specifically for this, I think, also one to create an image of the CD on the hard drive (NOT a normal HD install) and work from that, and the two can probably be combined - i.e., initiate the boot from the hard drive and tell it to load the CD image from the hard drive into RAM. Yes that would be quick.
This guy's sin was that he sat on his patent applications for decades so he could spring them after his ideas were commercialized by companies who had no clue that his patents were incubating. At the same time he would secretly amend his patent applications to match machinery coming on the market. Of course, he didn't invent that much either, but that's not what he go nailed on. So the court held that his patents are unenforceable because of his delay in pushing them out of the patent office.
The thing to bear in mind is that the law was changed in 1995 -- to make the term of a patent run from the date the application is filed, rather than the date it is granted -- so this guy's particular trick won't work that well any more. Plus, now patent applications get published after 18 months, so there is less of a surprise factor.
Just the same, the ripoffs go on - like the case making the rounds right now which goes after embedded PLCs on the manufacturing floor that are controlled through a spreadsheet interface - as used in half of industrial America at least. Another big shakedown involves patents on distribution of streaming video over the web. This decision addresses last generations' abuses. It will do absloutely nothing to stop most of the current brand of patent shenanigans.
Off the 'K' menu, under KNOPPIX-Configure, there is a selection to "Create a persistent KNOPPIX Home Directory" - it is fully scripted and GUI-fied, and made specifically to put your persisten info on a USB memory device.
I just put in my compact flash card from my digital camera, in a USB flash-card reader, and it worked fine. It set the thing up without a hitch and it does everything that Mandrake claims (and probably more). The way it works (though you don't have to know this) is by emulating a Linux partition on your memory device by "loopback" mounting an ordinary file (i.e., knoppix.img). That way, you can leave your device formatted as VFAT (which is what most of them want to be), yet APPEAR to the running Linux system to have an ext2 partition. You don't have to rebuild the CD or do any of the low-level fiddling.
The only funky part is that you have to tell it to use your USB memory as the home directory when you boot up ( knoppix home=/dev/sda1/knoppix.img ). If you forget to do this it boots autmatically using the RAM disk instead of your USB drive. It would be nice, actually, to rebuild the CD to make the memory device image file the default home directory, though it would not make a great deal of difference.
I also tried the Mandrake CD but couldn't get this to work. I think they really just want your money.
Knoppix is much more solid, IMO, though it is nice to look at all of these live CDs for ideas as to how to set up your "normal" HD installation.
Anyway, setting this up on KNOPPIX turned out to be a piece of cake and I have yet to get this to work on Mandrake.
Well, that's the sense of it. However, the document claims to be an "asset purchase" agreement- the $64 question then being exactly WHICH assets were PURCHASED.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be interesting. I think Linux might really make sense for them. Sure, you can steal MS software, but you can't really put together the necessary MS enterprise infrastructure without buying a lot of stuff from MS and paying a lot of fancy consultants. Linux certainly cuts down on that. I think it would be a smart move for them.
Good point, actually. It's a great hack, but I'm afraid that in practice it would be a huge fire hazard. Ever see an oil filled capacitor go up in smoke? Can you imagine if this somehow caught fire and the containment vessel broke?
umount
The Anti-Spyware, that is. It is spyware itself, of course, but it is still an awfully nice piece of software. I have been cleaning my one remaining Windows machine manually - this found a lot of crap I had not caught. Sure feels good to stamp this stuff out. People ought to stop whining and try this one. To be sure, this is MS covering its tail, because I think there is a lot of potential liability for them to do nothing about Spyware. Since they are ultimately doing this for their protection (not yours), they do a pretty good job of it. Well worth downloading, I say.
The article jumps to the conclusion that this warranty covers lost data. That's not what it says. It says "DIRECT" damages, up to a $5.00 cap - Someone in a stingy mood might argue that this covers the replacement cost for the defective software, and that any "data loss" would be INDIRECT (and not covered). Take film as an example - the mfgr will cover you for the cost of new film, not for the value of your lost wedding pictures.
I see they are using Lucene as their search engine. Lucene a powerful open source indexing system from the Apache Jakarta project written in Java. It's nice to see this, rather than MS indexing service or some other proprietary search solution. Lucene, with the appropriate open source plugins, can index a wide range of content, including MS Office and PDF files.
Nintendo led the way in this practice in the 1980s - a closed console (computer) that would only work with cartridges (software) that Nintendo had blessed (which usually meant Nintendo manufactured them, on pricing that included a license fee).
Although relentlessly attacked in court by a company then called Atari Games, Nintendo's approach held up, as far as I know. Later, market pressure from Sega and then Sony forced Nintendo to moderate some of its requirements, but they pretty much defined the business model for the console sector for years to come.
I see this as firmly within that tradition. What's the big deal? As we saw with Nintendo, there was really no monopoly after competition got going.
Further to my point, exactly. May you really meant "BZZZZT! Right"
Grokster is a business. If you couldn't use it to trade infringing copies, I'm afraid the service would have no commercial viability whatsoever. The mere fact that it's CAPABLE of exchanging noninfringing files I don't think is sufficient justification.
A better case, perhaps, could be made for bittorent.
The "indemnification" point is serious FUD based on way overblown fears of end user patent liability.
In fact, the most likely "patent" scenario is the one we have today: i.e., patent "hold-ups" in which 2-bit "inventors" demand "royalties" from software users, based on patents they probably never should never have been granted. These patent owners want to bleed a lot of companies for relatively small bucks each. They do not in fact want to actually shut anyone down; they just want to collect a small "tax" from a big population. These are nuisances to big companies (the usual targets of such claims), and certainly potential expense items, but NOT the sort of thing that should make a strategic difference in one's technology direction.
All that being said, offering uncapped indemnification to customers against potential software patent claims is a valid selling point. Of course, Microsoft software is no less vulnerable to these claims than anyone else's, and the email was a little unclear whether the "uncapped" amount was for the costs of legal defense (attorneys' fees) or that plus the actual liability to the patent owner.
Microsoft's offer of indemnification is credible if for no other reason than Microsoft's huge financial liquidity. In the open source world, there are also a few companies, such as IBM, that have good financial credit and can credibly make a comparable offer. But there are quite a few providers who are not in a position to do this.
Perhaps the answer for the others would be to offer reasonably priced group insurance from a financially sound insurer . . . IF the market considers that a response like that is even necessary.
Windows I can't help you with, but if you are migrating from one Linux distro to another, just create separate partitions for / and /home. Then, you can switch distribitions, and so long as you keep your /home partition and mount it as /home, many of your settings from the prior installation will simply carry right over.
/home and starting everything fresh. You may like the default setups in the new distro better than what you had cobbled yourself under the old one. One way to try this out in advance is to run a live CD of the target distribution before installing it.
Of course there may be benefit to backing up
If you don't have to be absolutely compatible, there are plenty of free (really free) spreadsheets. Gnumeric, being considerably more lightweight that Openoffice, does the trick for me most of the time.
When nothing other than Excel will do, why not just run Citrix (or some virtual box if you don't have access to a Citrix server) and run real Excel?
If you seriously need Excel, I doubt this will be a satisfactory long-term solution, for any number of reasons. Plus, it ain't free.
In sum, who needs another me-too piece of proprietary software?
Want to play with this? Pop a Knoppix CD into any X86 machine on your network and try 'knopixterminalserver' (from the command line or the KDE menus).
Here
Deja voodoo.
"spin the straw of ignorance into the gold of brilliant foresight."
But don't blame the tool for this. Nothing in the spreadsheet paradigm keeps you from "bracketing" your assumptions or data (i.e., incorporate a "plus or minus" range for each input point), though with such a discipline each column (including all input columns and all dependent calculated columns) would have to be replaced by three columns representing the best guess and the outlying maxima and minima.
Sure, this (and other) "requirements" or "constraints" could be built into the tool, but then it would be a different, more limited product.
This is sort of like blaming word processors because they permit people to write drivel, or badly formatted documents.
OTOH, a bracketing "control" of some sort for a spreadsheet would be very nice, though it would probably require a redesign because (absent the complexity of having multiple columns) each cell would then represent a range of possible values rather than a single unambiguous value.
There IS a response to these types of groundless threats, it's called a "declaratory judgment" - a definitive court declaration that a bully (e.g., SCO) has no basis for its bullying. A class action could be brought at any time by Linux users seeking a court declaration that SCO's claims are completely bogus. The procedure for doing this is on the books, and well known. Somebody just has to decide it's worthwhile. Sooner or later, someone probably will, though there is unlikely to be any big pot of monetary gold for the winner (other than getting back their own attorney fees, if SCO has any money left at that point).
Debian does have DVD burning capability. Look at K3B from the KDE project. It's available in Debian Sid and I believe Testing, and it does burn DVDs. It also helps to run kernel 2.6, but it works in 2.4 too.
As for CUPS, Debian's defeult setup generally lets me print to a shared CUPS printer somewhere on my network. Haven't had all of ESR's problems (lately, anyway).
I have concluded from numerous observations that from time to time Maxwell's Equations stop working.
That's not TOO difficult, but answering the questions from the post-install scripts can be. It is easy to answer them incorrectly and get wierd configurations or deamons that run at boot which you don't need and which muck things up. Of course that can easily happen in Windows too, but Linux is supposed to be better than Windows.
It's great for ME, but think about what you have to go through, even with apt-get or synaptic, in order, for example, to install nvidia drivers, decide whether they should have threadlocal support, adding yourself to the audio, video and scanner groups, learning the octal codes for permissions, deciding whether NFS should be kernel or user, or any of the other system admin stuff you have to master in order to be a successful Linux user.
OS X would be the answer, if only a usefully fast setup didn't cost a fortune.
There is nuthin like being able to run a free OS on dirt cheap commodity hardware.
No, someone will come along with a better distro, along the lines of knoppix but more upgradeable.
Yes, but the same stuff works on Debian. A straight Debian install these days is pretty easy, and will give you a more stable setup that Knoppix, good as Knoppix is.
Look at the cheatcodes - there is one specifically for this, I think, also one to create an image of the CD on the hard drive (NOT a normal HD install) and work from that, and the two can probably be combined - i.e., initiate the boot from the hard drive and tell it to load the CD image from the hard drive into RAM. Yes that would be quick.
This guy's sin was that he sat on his patent applications for decades so he could spring them after his ideas were commercialized by companies who had no clue that his patents were incubating. At the same time he would secretly amend his patent applications to match machinery coming on the market. Of course, he didn't invent that much either, but that's not what he go nailed on. So the court held that his patents are unenforceable because of his delay in pushing them out of the patent office.
The thing to bear in mind is that the law was changed in 1995 -- to make the term of a patent run from the date the application is filed, rather than the date it is granted -- so this guy's particular trick won't work that well any more. Plus, now patent applications get published after 18 months, so there is less of a surprise factor.
Just the same, the ripoffs go on - like the case making the rounds right now which goes after embedded PLCs on the manufacturing floor that are controlled through a spreadsheet interface - as used in half of industrial America at least. Another big shakedown involves patents on distribution of streaming video over the web. This decision addresses last generations' abuses. It will do absloutely nothing to stop most of the current brand of patent shenanigans.
If they thought the law was on their side they wouldn't have to go to Congress to try to change it.
Fat chance Congress will cut you guys a break, fellas. Looks like the endgame to me.
Off the 'K' menu, under KNOPPIX-Configure, there is a selection to "Create a persistent KNOPPIX Home Directory" - it is fully scripted and GUI-fied, and made specifically to put your persisten info on a USB memory device.
I just put in my compact flash card from my digital camera, in a USB flash-card reader, and it worked fine. It set the thing up without a hitch and it does everything that Mandrake claims (and probably more). The way it works (though you don't have to know this) is by emulating a Linux partition on your memory device by "loopback" mounting an ordinary file (i.e., knoppix.img). That way, you can leave your device formatted as VFAT (which is what most of them want to be), yet APPEAR to the running Linux system to have an ext2 partition. You don't have to rebuild the CD or do any of the low-level fiddling.
The only funky part is that you have to tell it to use your USB memory as the home directory when you boot up ( knoppix home=/dev/sda1/knoppix.img ). If you forget to do this it boots autmatically using the RAM disk instead of your USB drive. It would be nice, actually, to rebuild the CD to make the memory device image file the default home directory, though it would not make a great deal of difference.
I also tried the Mandrake CD but couldn't get this to work. I think they really just want your money.
Knoppix is much more solid, IMO, though it is nice to look at all of these live CDs for ideas as to how to set up your "normal" HD installation.
Anyway, setting this up on KNOPPIX turned out to be a piece of cake and I have yet to get this to work on Mandrake.
Well, that's the sense of it. However, the document claims to be an "asset purchase" agreement- the $64 question then being exactly WHICH assets were PURCHASED.