During the US civil war Lincoln stripped away as many civil rights as you could imagine.
The civil war is a unique case in American history, and sort of a bad example for the point you're trying to make. In a civil war there will be martial law and an erosion of rights. How could citizens of one country fight their fellow citizens without this happening? It's part of civil war, and one of the reasons why you want to keep civil war from ever happening.
This deterioration of civil rights is NOT inherent to something like World War II, where the enemy is foreign rather than domestic. Which is why crap like the internment of Japanese-Americans during that war is so inexcusable.
If you force customers to upgrade too quick, you risk loosing customers. If you let them have the same shit forever,
you don't make money.
Sure you do. If the OS license is tied to a specific machine, you'll make money as soon as the user finds a reason to replace that old machine. (in practice the license doesn't even need to be tied to the machine, since an old OS won't support newer hardware very well)
Particularly with PC-based hardware, this tends to be a pretty fast cycle. Extending support in the way Microsoft has in this case is a smart way to increase user goodwill. Most users will be comforted by the fact that they could run their OS for a decade, but they won't do it. They'll upgrade like everyone else.
They simple realised that and adjusted support to the longer lifetime that their OSes unfortunately have in the wild.
What's unfortunate about an OS having a longer lifetime? Aside from being unfortunate for the salesman who would like to sell the user something new, who is hurt by having an OS last as long as the user wants it to?
1. Learn to recognize them 2. Avoid them when you can 3. Limit the walking around you do in them when you can't avoid them
This is infinitely more important than the minutia of body language or the policics of gun control which are being discussed here a lot. Maybe pointing this stuff out isn't politically correct or something. Heaven forbid we should appear elitist. (although I'd argue that recognizing where you aren't welcome is anything but)
When the techie is simply doing what the manager asks for, any decent manager takes
all of the blame for a failure.
It's important to keep in mind that the "techie" might be doing what the manager asks for well, or doing it very badly. Worker bees aren't automatically blameless when they screw up simply by virtue of their lowly position in the organization.
To put it another way, when you start assigning blame there's usually plenty to go around. People both succeed and fail as a group, most of the time anyhow.
Re:The swing of the pendulum
on
Why I.T. Matters
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· Score: 2, Insightful
some smart businesspeople (oxymoron?)
Not an oxymoron, and by saying so you sort of perpetuate the whole silly techie/businessman divide. Of course you DO have a legitimate gripe.:)
The thing to keep in mind is that few people in any profession are very good at it (or sadly, have an honest interest in getting good and staying good at it), that goes for both technical work or management.
Pretty much the only answer to:
"the dot-com bust was the fault of you techies."
is to point out that all those "techies" reported to management, and any decent manager takes a large portion of the blame for a failure.
The thing is, Apple is a fashionable company. They make fashionable computers and fashionable products and this puts them in a different league to Microsoft et al.
Doesn't the meaning of the word "fashion" imply that a lot of people ought to be using Apple computers, rather than a miniscule fraction of users?
Sony are too sensibly Japanese to be cool.
Right. That's why none of their consumer electronics designs like the Walkman or the Discman have ever been popular, trendsetting items.
Wow, this must be what happens when you stand in that Reality-Distortion Field for too long.
I'm sure sony execs are all cowering in fear in a corner somewhere. After all, they don't really know anything about consumer electronics, so how can they hope to compete?
finally they got the message Apple was gonna whoop em!
I'm pretty sure Sakharov himself continued studying Tokamaks or derivitive designs into the eighties. It's important to remember that the Russians were a lot more serious about getting fusion working than America ever was.
During the Carter administration transfer of fusion knowledge from the USSR to our country was actually suppressed - I'm not clear enough on the history to understand why, if indeed it was EVER clear. Anyway, fusion in the US has never been a serious effort, although there has obviously been a lot of money spent.
So you can copy the SUSE cds. Why don't they offer the ISOs directly is beyond me.
Probably for the same reason Debian tries to discourage iso downloads: bandwidth. The problem with isos is that the majority of users will download all of them even though they won't use all of their contents.
Of course isos can also kind of lock in a specific version, whereas a network installer allows the vendor to update specific packages without rebuilding the iso and making it available for download (with all the reflexive redownloading among users that that can entail). When you've got a bunch of packages on a server you can just update individual packages, which is nice. The ftp version of SuSE probably won't have the XFS install bug that the boxed version has.
As I believe someone else has pointed out, JDS is not intended to run on the latest hardware, it is designed to run very well on slightly older but much stabler hardware.
No, it's not. That is totally false.
It was designed to run on modern hardware, as well as "older but stabler" hardware. It was designed to do this about two years ago.
Maybe this is a subtle distinction but it's important. If you think there's some virtue in targeting only older, proven hardware with a software release, Sun JDS still isn't the system for you. It's just an older version of SuSE with some stuff added to it, there was no particular emphasis on targetting only stable hardware when it was created.
(that extra stuff Sun adds might be valuable, but it has nothing to do with "older but stabler" hardware)
There is also a growing body of evidence that pollution is bad (prior to recently, it was purely conjecture).
There's still not enough evidence to convice me that mercury in my fish is a bad thing. Until there is indisputable proof that it's bad, I'm going to keep ordering my fish with "extra mercury." (and wondering why they stare at me when they take my order)
Is the native version available for download, or just the "hosted" versions? The fact that's it's omitted from their list doesn't make it entirely clear - I guess I'm hoping the native version is somewhere else on their site.
It amazes me how bad open source people are at marketing. Why make your project, which requires a huge amount of excellent thinking, the butt of jokes?
Why give a name to your open source project that will cause those who have less than complete technical knowledge to feel uncomfortable about adopting what you have done?
I would think the only people rendered uncomfortable by their marketing would be subliterates who don't know who Dante is. I mean, who cares?
Realistically, it's not any more "restrictive" than linking against GPLed libraries or something, which would require you to GPL your app. The "services" part is a bit unusual but I wouldn't be surprised to see it in a future version of the GPL, or some other mainstream OSS license. Being able to offer software as a "service" is considered a loophole of the GPL by many.
And nobody leaves their BT clients open longer than it takes to download a file - I'm sorry, but relying on people's altruistic behavior is plain stupid.
Well, you're also relying on the fact that a lot people aren't going to be sitting at their computer waiting to turn off bittorrent the instant the download is complete.
Canada switched even though having a similiar amount of industrialization as the US.
Canada has never had anything approaching the amount of "industrialization" (or to be more precise, industrial capacity) that the United States has. That's probably a function of having a population one-tenth our size.
2) No artificially forced hardware upgrades. Linux can still run on a 486 with 32MB of Ram and make it usefull again, will XP?
If all you're interested in running on that 486 is an operating system they're equally useful. If you're interested in actually running some modern applications that make the computer more than an electronic means of creating heat and noise, you're equally screwed, since the 486 is an ancient underpowered piece of trash.
(as a purely practical matter, XP will probably refuse to run on the 486 just as any copy of SuSE newer than version 8.0 will, but the point still stands)
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The civil war is a unique case in American history, and sort of a bad example for the point you're trying to make. In a civil war there will be martial law and an erosion of rights. How could citizens of one country fight their fellow citizens without this happening? It's part of civil war, and one of the reasons why you want to keep civil war from ever happening.
This deterioration of civil rights is NOT inherent to something like World War II, where the enemy is foreign rather than domestic. Which is why crap like the internment of Japanese-Americans during that war is so inexcusable.
Yeah, I can really see how extending the online self-help support period boosts their support business.
Amazing what gets moderated to 5...
Sure you do. If the OS license is tied to a specific machine, you'll make money as soon as the user finds a reason to replace that old machine. (in practice the license doesn't even need to be tied to the machine, since an old OS won't support newer hardware very well)
Particularly with PC-based hardware, this tends to be a pretty fast cycle. Extending support in the way Microsoft has in this case is a smart way to increase user goodwill. Most users will be comforted by the fact that they could run their OS for a decade, but they won't do it. They'll upgrade like everyone else.
What's unfortunate about an OS having a longer lifetime? Aside from being unfortunate for the salesman who would like to sell the user something new, who is hurt by having an OS last as long as the user wants it to?
1. Learn to recognize them
2. Avoid them when you can
3. Limit the walking around you do in them when you can't avoid them
This is infinitely more important than the minutia of body language or the policics of gun control which are being discussed here a lot. Maybe pointing this stuff out isn't politically correct or something. Heaven forbid we should appear elitist. (although I'd argue that recognizing where you aren't welcome is anything but)
It's important to keep in mind that the "techie" might be doing what the manager asks for well, or doing it very badly. Worker bees aren't automatically blameless when they screw up simply by virtue of their lowly position in the organization.
To put it another way, when you start assigning blame there's usually plenty to go around. People both succeed and fail as a group, most of the time anyhow.
Not an oxymoron, and by saying so you sort of perpetuate the whole silly techie/businessman divide. Of course you DO have a legitimate gripe.
The thing to keep in mind is that few people in any profession are very good at it (or sadly, have an honest interest in getting good and staying good at it), that goes for both technical work or management.
Pretty much the only answer to:
is to point out that all those "techies" reported to management, and any decent manager takes a large portion of the blame for a failure.
Or, if "we" were clever, "we" just wouldn't use their service.
Doesn't the meaning of the word "fashion" imply that a lot of people ought to be using Apple computers, rather than a miniscule fraction of users?
Right. That's why none of their consumer electronics designs like the Walkman or the Discman have ever been popular, trendsetting items.
Wow, this must be what happens when you stand in that Reality-Distortion Field for too long.
I'm sure sony execs are all cowering in fear in a corner somewhere. After all, they don't really know anything about consumer electronics, so how can they hope to compete?
finally they got the message Apple was gonna whoop em!
I'm pretty sure Sakharov himself continued studying Tokamaks or derivitive designs into the eighties. It's important to remember that the Russians were a lot more serious about getting fusion working than America ever was.
During the Carter administration transfer of fusion knowledge from the USSR to our country was actually suppressed - I'm not clear enough on the history to understand why, if indeed it was EVER clear. Anyway, fusion in the US has never been a serious effort, although there has obviously been a lot of money spent.
Tokamak isn't a program or project, it's a design. A design made by Russians in the fifties:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
I can't say what he was referring to when he mentioned "this program." The program he was talking about might very well have been a sham.
If you're a Suse user and you try out JDS, the impression it leaves is "strip mined" rather than "preconfigured."
Probably for the same reason Debian tries to discourage iso downloads: bandwidth. The problem with isos is that the majority of users will download all of them even though they won't use all of their contents.
Of course isos can also kind of lock in a specific version, whereas a network installer allows the vendor to update specific packages without rebuilding the iso and making it available for download (with all the reflexive redownloading among users that that can entail). When you've got a bunch of packages on a server you can just update individual packages, which is nice. The ftp version of SuSE probably won't have the XFS install bug that the boxed version has.
No, it's not. That is totally false.
It was designed to run on modern hardware, as well as "older but stabler" hardware. It was designed to do this about two years ago.
Maybe this is a subtle distinction but it's important. If you think there's some virtue in targeting only older, proven hardware with a software release, Sun JDS still isn't the system for you. It's just an older version of SuSE with some stuff added to it, there was no particular emphasis on targetting only stable hardware when it was created.
(that extra stuff Sun adds might be valuable, but it has nothing to do with "older but stabler" hardware)
Since political speech is traditionally the most protected of all forms of speech in first amendment case law, that shouldn't be a problem.
There's still not enough evidence to convice me that mercury in my fish is a bad thing. Until there is indisputable proof that it's bad, I'm going to keep ordering my fish with "extra mercury." (and wondering why they stare at me when they take my order)
Is the native version available for download, or just the "hosted" versions? The fact that's it's omitted from their list doesn't make it entirely clear - I guess I'm hoping the native version is somewhere else on their site.
I would think the only people rendered uncomfortable by their marketing would be subliterates who don't know who Dante is. I mean, who cares?
Realistically, it's not any more "restrictive" than linking against GPLed libraries or something, which would require you to GPL your app. The "services" part is a bit unusual but I wouldn't be surprised to see it in a future version of the GPL, or some other mainstream OSS license. Being able to offer software as a "service" is considered a loophole of the GPL by many.
Well, you're also relying on the fact that a lot people aren't going to be sitting at their computer waiting to turn off bittorrent the instant the download is complete.
Canada has never had anything approaching the amount of "industrialization" (or to be more precise, industrial capacity) that the United States has. That's probably a function of having a population one-tenth our size.
If all you're interested in running on that 486 is an operating system they're equally useful. If you're interested in actually running some modern applications that make the computer more than an electronic means of creating heat and noise, you're equally screwed, since the 486 is an ancient underpowered piece of trash.
(as a purely practical matter, XP will probably refuse to run on the 486 just as any copy of SuSE newer than version 8.0 will, but the point still stands)
"Stuff" being the precise technical term of choice for all anti-MS fanatics.
Why not just login to your system normally and run "System Update" in Yast?