As a CS student, I often wonder why are labs are all WIndows. Its a horrible OS to write software in, IMHO.
It's especially a horrible OS to run a lab on. Ditto for Macs.
I don't see for the life of me how a university with a comprehensive identity-management system (they all have one, if they have email) gets by having desktop settings and file access tied to the machine and not the user. 'Specially given that college kids are not exactly sedentary.
When I was in school, we still used telnet and pine on AIX to check email. That at least gave you a small, portable console environment that was your own. Now that schools are moving to web-based email, things are even worse.
Three words, unis: Sun m.f.-ing Rays. The kids get their own desktop preferences, browser settings, bookmarks and files wherever they go; everyone's happy.
I had one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs. While other people were praising its beauty, I thought it was kinda ugly. As a fashion statement, the blue translucent plastic seemed somehow akin to bell-bottom trousers and leisure suits. The periodic release of new machines with different color schemes seemed to support that view.
But it was a fine computer. The original iMac was a brave departure from the beige boxes we'd all become so accustomed to. The compact all-in-one design simplified things for people who don't want to invest a lot of time in figuring out how everything goes together. (You or I may feel unfulfilled with any computer we haven't built with our bare hands from raw sand, but there are plenty of folks who just want to use the thing.)
The iMac moved things forward in part by turning its back on a lot of legacy stuff. The iMac upset a lot of long-time Mac fanatics who were upset that they couldn't plug their old ADB and serial peripherals into the USB ports. Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives, I guess the iMac's work here is done.
Snif... Drat... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
Look at the folks settling up for the RIAA cases...granted most of these people were in the wrong and knew they were -- but some of the ones falsely accused also realized it would be cheaper just to pay up than deal with it.
Yeah, but knowing you're innocent and knowing you're gonna win are two different things.
In a system where everyone pays their own legal fees, smaller parties are more likely to avoid lawsuits against bigger parties, because chances are the bigger party will continue the suit until the smaller one goes bankrupt.
You're assuming an open-and-shut case. For open-and-shut cases, this is probably true. But most cases are not open-and-shut. Loser-pays tends to discourage lawsuits whose favorable outcomes are not assured - i.e. most of them. Which I'll grant you includes most frivolous lawsuits, but some legitimate ones as well.
Case in point: guitar manufacturer Ernie Ball. When you get hit with a software EULA violation, you have to pay the SPA's legal fees if you fight it and lose. As Sterling Ball says in the linked interview, no one wants to fight it - everyone settles.
In terms of statistics, just compare the total number of lawsuits in the US and Europe. We have more suits of every kind, including more David vs. Goliath ones. Whether that's worth the price of ubiquitous litigation is open to question, but it is the case.
If you, as a small corporation, non-profit or individual, go up in court against a large corporation or an ambulance-chasing shark, your chances or losing are better than not. Loser-pays systems therefore discourage discourage lawsuits by the little guy against the big guy, and make the little guy more likely to throw up his hands and settle when sued by the big guy.
Although they certainly do make for litigation-happiness, overall the non-loser-pays system is healthier for democratic participation in the legal system.
Many ISP's and low-budget group have self-signed certs. They're easy to make. Hopefully this project will make it easier. I have quite often seen sites with a self-signed cert and another page giving the fingerprint of the cert. Most vendors allow these, but they aren't "trusted".
The only reason the big companies charge so much (their claim, not mine) is the insurance they provide, and the fact that they are "trusted" by the various vendors.
Any new group wanting to be a trusted CA will face the liability issue -- if one of your customers sues you, even if you try to disclaim all liability up front, you will still face massive court fees. Even if you won in court, you would lose financially if not insured.
There is no technical or logistical problem with setting up a Free (and free) common-geek's CA, the problems are entirely legal ones. I know because I looked into it right after SSL came out. It looks like a good business plan, right up until someone takes you to court.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to use this malfunction and (necessarily) hazardous repair as an indictment of the current investment in manned, shuttle-based spaceflight.
However, until NASA has a better platform, they will probably continue to use the shuttle.
Perhaps if the open source movement were to desing and implement a shuttle replacement, we might have a working replacement faster than if NASA were told they have to come up with a cheaper faster replacement.
For those thinking of suggesting that Soyuz would work, might I remind you that every Soyuz capsule is a one time use vehicle. Even when everything goes right, it doesn't get re-used. It has no airlock, so either everyone gets suited up, or no-one does a space walk. It has no payload capability, so no sattelite recovery. It has no manipulator arm, so you can't rely upon it for doing sattelite maintenance as the shuttle crew has.
The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now. (The military provided some of the specs to support black projects, few of which have ever been attempted.)
The Civilian side of the project was to haul people and material to and from the space station that was being desinged by NASA, which was not the international space station. It was also decided to use it to deploy sattelites as well once the capacity of the payload bay was defined.
As a jeep, the shuttle has done an ok job. If you think we need a better design, I am all for it. Start working on that better desing, and give us status reports as you find the time.
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of Stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS innovation stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
M$ gates announces a recylced idea for a portable that shows sport scores, headlines, and plays RIAA/MPAA approved media. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to switch to 802.11a for the smartScreens and not 802.11g. I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
One small step towards fixing this is to be involved as much as possible with all new computer installations.
By which you mean...
Your mum is getting a new computer? Go in there and set it up for her
Sorry people, but while setting up a more secure browser for your dear ol' mum is a touching gesture of filial piety, the mothers-of-Slashdot-readers market alone is not going to tip the balance in favor of Firefox.
If you are really intersted in effective advocacy, small-town papers are usually starved for content. Write a puff piece on Firefox, emphasize tabbed browsing and above all security; don't dwell too long on stuff like web standards that most people won't understand or care about; and include instructions about what to do if a page is IE-only.
1.0 will be coming out in not too long. Fire up AbiWord and get cracking, sir.
Also "remove all the IE icons and she won't know the difference" is a patronizing, dishonest and potentially dangerous path. What happens if the bank website goes ie-only? What's she gonna do? That's right, blame Firefox and above all you.
The people who were behiond 9/11 weren't known terrorists/criminals. They were quiet people, under the radar....
Ah, but they were foreign nationals. And the gov't is now requiring biometric data to be collected from all foreign nationals entering the country. Which I'll grant you wouldn't have solved the 9/11 problem, although similar data did help catch the Washington snipers.
For the record, I have mixed feelings about the gov't keeping biometric data on anyone but it has helped in the past and may in the future as well.
I give a shit about minor bugfixes and splash screens are a total waste of my time. Who cares about pointless crap like splash screens?
Splash screens: minor but annoying problem.
Closed, disdainful developer culture: major problem.
Mozilla has other problems too.
* Mixed messages: is FireBirdFoxWhatever going to replace the big Mo' or what?
* Branding clumsiness: the standalone browser has gone through how many name changes?
* Little support/documentation for non-Mozilla developers intersted in Mozilla as a platform: there are a reasons why no one uses XUL, and very few of them are technical.
These are all serious problems. The splash screen thing is only the most prominent symptom.
This is a very sad day for the Shareware movement. It just breaks my heart to see fine people like Rick Stahlmann and the Electronic Frontier Foundation being hauled into court for minor violations. I mean, seeing as how all this NU GLP software is only for hobbyists anyways, how much could they really have stolen? I fear this will distract them from more important things, like the fine work they've been doing on the eMac.
I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping it will all blow over soon.
I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install. Some of my recent important documents were saved on my email account, but the old ones got lost.
This is great news from Google. If I had a terabyte of storage accessible from anywhere I'd hardly use my harddrive at all.
Has Google published APIs to GMail yet? I'd love to rewire OpenOffice's save function through Evolution so it stores it right on my GMail address.
Another day, another coat of more-Gigahertz paint slapped on the crude and aging x86 architecture. Open Source OS's like Linux have allowed us to finally take advantage of the bleeding-edge software technology of the 70's, yet the Intel/AMD duopoly keeps us stuck in even more primitive waters for hardware.
Perhaps, if Microsoft's software monopoly ever gets seriously challenged, we'll finally have a chance to take this register-starved, CISC-mired turkey out back and give it a proper burial.
Most of the larger/more reputable tax packages are already phasing in web-based clients alongside or in place of their shrinkwrap offerings. This will become a non-issue for the Wine team before very long.
This is a good thing. It's nice to have more Windows apps that work under emulation, it's better to have more native Linux apps, but it's best to have more apps that are entirely platform-neutral. (We need to make sure they aren't IE-only though.)
This is specific to games where you may develop the engine using open source tools and release the engine as open source, but charge for all your data files the engine uses for your particular game.
Let's take a look at gaming development under the GLP. It offers an excellant case-study of how GNUlatic-ism will destory America.
1. NetHack: This game promises to connect your computer to a "net"work and expose it to "hack"ers. This is not a good model for a law-abiding company
2. Frozen Bubble: I'm not up on the street-lingo these days, but I'm 101% sure this is a drug reference; perhaps to "crystal methane" or "the acid". Do you want drug users working for your firm? Is that a way to be profitable? Also, I believe it comes from France, that notorious hangout for Maoists and ne'er-do-wells.
3. Klotski: Like many pinko names, it begins with a "K-" and ends with a "-ski". It's also affiliated with a sinister group of known East German "hackers" whose avowed goal is to "conqer" the American workplace.
I could proffer further examples, but any healthy-minded citizen will clearly see that GLP games encourage roguery of the worst kind and are unsuitable for emulation by the large, dependable corporations upon which our Constitution is based.
If the Chicoms make it to Mars first, American industry is doomed.
Our IT companies are losing out to cheap foreign competitors from countries that are poor but have highly-educated workforces. A newly colonized Mars would be extremely poor (no natural resources!) and everyone who lived there would be a MENSA-level scientist!. There's no way a patriotic John Q. MSCE could compete with that kind of competition competitively.
Also, if some Chicom "hacker" outfit wanted to publish stolen source code or red-blooded American credit card passwords over the World Wide Web, a Mars-based broadcasting rig would be unreachable by current missile technology!!!
Our national security and livelihoods are in danger. We must colonize Mars immediately and render it a Chicom-free zone.
Call me crazy or mod me down, but I'm positive that this has something to do with CICSO's previous tussle with the GPL.
I can only assume one of two things:
1. CICSO's use of code that's open to just anyone allowed a "hacker" to access vulnerabilities in its systems.
2. Due to its earlier minor and well-intentioned misstep, some GNUlatic decided to take revenge on CICSO.
In either case, this sends a loud and clear message to all businesses out there: messing with GPL code will get you burned, and burned badly. DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!.
Stay away while you still have your security intact. GNUlatics only want to hurt you.
A while ago, some a-hole in my area went around installing SCO-Unix in a bunch of local government and health industry offices in my area - police stations, small hospitals, etc.
These people are more upgrade-phobic than you'd believe (the desktops often still run Win95 or even 3.2). So it actually does come in handy, yes.
Slashdot Mirror
As a CS student, I often wonder why are labs are all WIndows. Its a horrible OS to write software in, IMHO.
It's especially a horrible OS to run a lab on. Ditto for Macs.
I don't see for the life of me how a university with a comprehensive identity-management system (they all have one, if they have email) gets by having desktop settings and file access tied to the machine and not the user. 'Specially given that college kids are not exactly sedentary.
When I was in school, we still used telnet and pine on AIX to check email. That at least gave you a small, portable console environment that was your own. Now that schools are moving to web-based email, things are even worse.
Three words, unis: Sun m.f.-ing Rays. The kids get their own desktop preferences, browser settings, bookmarks and files wherever they go; everyone's happy.
I had one of the original Bondi Blue iMacs. While other people were praising its beauty, I thought it was kinda ugly. As a fashion statement, the blue translucent plastic seemed somehow akin to bell-bottom trousers and leisure suits. The periodic release of new machines with different color schemes seemed to support that view.
But it was a fine computer. The original iMac was a brave departure from the beige boxes we'd all become so accustomed to. The compact all-in-one design simplified things for people who don't want to invest a lot of time in figuring out how everything goes together. (You or I may feel unfulfilled with any computer we haven't built with our bare hands from raw sand, but there are plenty of folks who just want to use the thing.)
The iMac moved things forward in part by turning its back on a lot of legacy stuff. The iMac upset a lot of long-time Mac fanatics who were upset that they couldn't plug their old ADB and serial peripherals into the USB ports. Some people were aghast at the absence of the floppy drive. Now that Dell has embraced the idea of computers without floppy drives, I guess the iMac's work here is done.
Snif... Drat... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
Look at the folks settling up for the RIAA cases...granted most of these people were in the wrong and knew they were -- but some of the ones falsely accused also realized it would be cheaper just to pay up than deal with it.
Yeah, but knowing you're innocent and knowing you're gonna win are two different things.
Either way you are screwed.
Indeed. The law is a bear.
In a system where everyone pays their own legal fees, smaller parties are more likely to avoid lawsuits against bigger parties, because chances are the bigger party will continue the suit until the smaller one goes bankrupt.
You're assuming an open-and-shut case. For open-and-shut cases, this is probably true. But most cases are not open-and-shut. Loser-pays tends to discourage lawsuits whose favorable outcomes are not assured - i.e. most of them. Which I'll grant you includes most frivolous lawsuits, but some legitimate ones as well.
Case in point: guitar manufacturer Ernie Ball. When you get hit with a software EULA violation, you have to pay the SPA's legal fees if you fight it and lose. As Sterling Ball says in the linked interview, no one wants to fight it - everyone settles.
In terms of statistics, just compare the total number of lawsuits in the US and Europe. We have more suits of every kind, including more David vs. Goliath ones. Whether that's worth the price of ubiquitous litigation is open to question, but it is the case.
If you, as a small corporation, non-profit or individual, go up in court against a large corporation or an ambulance-chasing shark, your chances or losing are better than not. Loser-pays systems therefore discourage discourage lawsuits by the little guy against the big guy, and make the little guy more likely to throw up his hands and settle when sued by the big guy.
Although they certainly do make for litigation-happiness, overall the non-loser-pays system is healthier for democratic participation in the legal system.
Many ISP's and low-budget group have self-signed certs. They're easy to make. Hopefully this project will make it easier. I have quite often seen sites with a self-signed cert and another page giving the fingerprint of the cert. Most vendors allow these, but they aren't "trusted".
The only reason the big companies charge so much (their claim, not mine) is the insurance they provide, and the fact that they are "trusted" by the various vendors.
Any new group wanting to be a trusted CA will face the liability issue -- if one of your customers sues you, even if you try to disclaim all liability up front, you will still face massive court fees. Even if you won in court, you would lose financially if not insured.
There is no technical or logistical problem with setting up a Free (and free) common-geek's CA, the problems are entirely legal ones. I know because I looked into it right after SSL came out. It looks like a good business plan, right up until someone takes you to court.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to use this malfunction and (necessarily) hazardous repair as an indictment of the current investment in manned, shuttle-based spaceflight.
However, until NASA has a better platform, they will probably continue to use the shuttle.
Perhaps if the open source movement were to desing and implement a shuttle replacement, we might have a working replacement faster than if NASA were told they have to come up with a cheaper faster replacement.
For those thinking of suggesting that Soyuz would work, might I remind you that every Soyuz capsule is a one time use vehicle. Even when everything goes right, it doesn't get re-used. It has no airlock, so either everyone gets suited up, or no-one does a space walk. It has no payload capability, so no sattelite recovery. It has no manipulator arm, so you can't rely upon it for doing sattelite maintenance as the shuttle crew has.
The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now. (The military provided some of the specs to support black projects, few of which have ever been attempted.)
The Civilian side of the project was to haul people and material to and from the space station that was being desinged by NASA, which was not the international space station. It was also decided to use it to deploy sattelites as well once the capacity of the payload bay was defined.
As a jeep, the shuttle has done an ok job. If you think we need a better design, I am all for it. Start working on that better desing, and give us status reports as you find the time.
It seems to me that this has got to be an all time low point for announcements of innovation in consumer electronics. Why? Maybe its because of the down turn in the tech-market means new products are not being developed. Another possibility is that microsoft's moves into hardware production(x box,phones) and Hardware specification (palladium, watches, media player, smartScreens) is having a chilling effect on the electronics industry. Recently they (allegedly) tried bankrupt a phone maker and move his technology to a competitor. Shades of Stacker and all the other software companies microsoft co-opted, ruined then bought their technology.
There is little doubt that MS stifled innovation in software. Just the fact that jobs could tweak an open source project to tripple the speed of a web browser over IE, when IE has had a clear field to innovate for five years or more, speaks volumes about the MS innovation stifle field. How could apple even dream they could technologically beat MS in the Power point market, but they did.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
M$ gates announces a recylced idea for a portable that shows sport scores, headlines, and plays RIAA/MPAA approved media. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to switch to 802.11a for the smartScreens and not 802.11g. I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
One small step towards fixing this is to be involved as much as possible with all new computer installations.
By which you mean...
Your mum is getting a new computer? Go in there and set it up for her
Sorry people, but while setting up a more secure browser for your dear ol' mum is a touching gesture of filial piety, the mothers-of-Slashdot-readers market alone is not going to tip the balance in favor of Firefox.
If you are really intersted in effective advocacy, small-town papers are usually starved for content. Write a puff piece on Firefox, emphasize tabbed browsing and above all security; don't dwell too long on stuff like web standards that most people won't understand or care about; and include instructions about what to do if a page is IE-only.
1.0 will be coming out in not too long. Fire up AbiWord and get cracking, sir.
Also "remove all the IE icons and she won't know the difference" is a patronizing, dishonest and potentially dangerous path. What happens if the bank website goes ie-only? What's she gonna do? That's right, blame Firefox and above all you.
The people who were behiond 9/11 weren't known terrorists/criminals. They were quiet people, under the radar....
Ah, but they were foreign nationals. And the gov't is now requiring biometric data to be collected from all foreign nationals entering the country. Which I'll grant you wouldn't have solved the 9/11 problem, although similar data did help catch the Washington snipers.
For the record, I have mixed feelings about the gov't keeping biometric data on anyone but it has helped in the past and may in the future as well.
I give a shit about minor bugfixes and splash screens are a total waste of my time. Who cares about pointless crap like splash screens?
Splash screens: minor but annoying problem.
Closed, disdainful developer culture: major problem.
Mozilla has other problems too.
* Mixed messages: is FireBirdFoxWhatever going to replace the big Mo' or what?
* Branding clumsiness: the standalone browser has gone through how many name changes?
* Little support/documentation for non-Mozilla developers intersted in Mozilla as a platform: there are a reasons why no one uses XUL, and very few of them are technical.
These are all serious problems. The splash screen thing is only the most prominent symptom.
This is a very sad day for the Shareware movement. It just breaks my heart to see fine people like Rick Stahlmann and the Electronic Frontier Foundation being hauled into court for minor violations. I mean, seeing as how all this NU GLP software is only for hobbyists anyways, how much could they really have stolen? I fear this will distract them from more important things, like the fine work they've been doing on the eMac.
I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping it will all blow over soon.
I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install. Some of my recent important documents were saved on my email account, but the old ones got lost.
This is great news from Google. If I had a terabyte of storage accessible from anywhere I'd hardly use my harddrive at all.
Has Google published APIs to GMail yet? I'd love to rewire OpenOffice's save function through Evolution so it stores it right on my GMail address.
Another day, another coat of more-Gigahertz paint slapped on the crude and aging x86 architecture. Open Source OS's like Linux have allowed us to finally take advantage of the bleeding-edge software technology of the 70's, yet the Intel/AMD duopoly keeps us stuck in even more primitive waters for hardware.
Perhaps, if Microsoft's software monopoly ever gets seriously challenged, we'll finally have a chance to take this register-starved, CISC-mired turkey out back and give it a proper burial.
Most of the larger/more reputable tax packages are already phasing in web-based clients alongside or in place of their shrinkwrap offerings. This will become a non-issue for the Wine team before very long.
This is a good thing. It's nice to have more Windows apps that work under emulation, it's better to have more native Linux apps, but it's best to have more apps that are entirely platform-neutral. (We need to make sure they aren't IE-only though.)
This is specific to games where you may develop the engine using open source tools and release the engine as open source, but charge for all your data files the engine uses for your particular game.
Let's take a look at gaming development under the GLP. It offers an excellant case-study of how GNUlatic-ism will destory America.
1. NetHack: This game promises to connect your computer to a "net"work and expose it to "hack"ers. This is not a good model for a law-abiding company
2. Frozen Bubble: I'm not up on the street-lingo these days, but I'm 101% sure this is a drug reference; perhaps to "crystal methane" or "the acid". Do you want drug users working for your firm? Is that a way to be profitable? Also, I believe it comes from France, that notorious hangout for Maoists and ne'er-do-wells.
3. Klotski: Like many pinko names, it begins with a "K-" and ends with a "-ski". It's also affiliated with a sinister group of known East German "hackers" whose avowed goal is to "conqer" the American workplace.
I could proffer further examples, but any healthy-minded citizen will clearly see that GLP games encourage roguery of the worst kind and are unsuitable for emulation by the large, dependable corporations upon which our Constitution is based.
If the Chicoms make it to Mars first, American industry is doomed.
Our IT companies are losing out to cheap foreign competitors from countries that are poor but have highly-educated workforces. A newly colonized Mars would be extremely poor (no natural resources!) and everyone who lived there would be a MENSA-level scientist!. There's no way a patriotic John Q. MSCE could compete with that kind of competition competitively.
Also, if some Chicom "hacker" outfit wanted to publish stolen source code or red-blooded American credit card passwords over the World Wide Web, a Mars-based broadcasting rig would be unreachable by current missile technology!!!
Our national security and livelihoods are in danger. We must colonize Mars immediately and render it a Chicom-free zone.
Call me crazy or mod me down, but I'm positive that this has something to do with CICSO's previous tussle with the GPL .
I can only assume one of two things:
1. CICSO's use of code that's open to just anyone allowed a "hacker" to access vulnerabilities in its systems.
2. Due to its earlier minor and well-intentioned misstep, some GNUlatic decided to take revenge on CICSO.
In either case, this sends a loud and clear message to all businesses out there: messing with GPL code will get you burned, and burned badly. DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!.
Stay away while you still have your security intact. GNUlatics only want to hurt you.
A while ago, some a-hole in my area went around installing SCO-Unix in a bunch of local government and health industry offices in my area - police stations, small hospitals, etc.
These people are more upgrade-phobic than you'd believe (the desktops often still run Win95 or even 3.2). So it actually does come in handy, yes.