I'm with you on this one. There are some real easy things to look at when it comes to computers. If a ordinary user is going to switch from Windows, one of the reasons is typically DRM/updates/cost. The other is having to learn something new. If you have to learn something new, but you can do the learning on a FREE OS, then most average people are willing to try the FREE one first, especially if it can run that cherished 6 year old windows program that they just can't live without at the moment.
Even technical people are tired of MS for many reasons. One of my coworkers was going to buy a Mac laptop recently. That is until he found he can get a non-Mac laptop with support for Linux on it. (Thank you Dell, Lenovo et al)
MS should be more worried about the court case against the Russian school teacher than they are of Apple.
His blog was a bit difficult to read, but it looks like he is trying to find help installing Linux on the computers. With the visibility that this case is getting, I wonder how much good PR Linux will get? Perhaps Edubuntu or some other Distro group can send them (Russian educators) some free CDs?
Yeah, sure. This one species of mammals is totally different from all the rest of them.
Not to bait flames here, but the evidence for divine creation is pretty damned weak if you take into account all the imperfect humans that had to be involved in bringing us 'his word'... while the evidence for evolution is getting stronger all the time, and this little theory of evolution doesn't mind a few corrections here and there. It's a bit tolerant of the process of discovery.
Too true. I get a 'ripped off' feeling when I read a blog by a writer for a reasonable or respected periodical only to find it little more than efforts of some vendor's shill.
There are a lot of bloggers, and some of them are actually more interesting the the journalism version of the same information. They are pretty much the same thing to me, but I do know not to trust a blogger on anything important without checking the information elsewhere as well.
Is this just the start of a new set of litigation against MS for adding such clauses to their contracts with hardware vendors?
In the most earnest of ways, I hope it is. If it can be shown that vendors are not allowed by contract to support hardware that is not running the Windows software it was sold with would perhaps put a final end to the hold that MS has on vendors.
I'm kind of tired of hearing these discourses on old business models, thinkoftheartists, and other old school crap. Sure, perhaps that doesn't make a lot of sense point blank, but lets face it, the CD and DVD and now other media types give artists and the **AA member businesses the method to create art that is truly worth $18. The fact that they don't get it is reason enough for them to slowly die off.
Has anyone else caught wind of the NIN viral marketing that they are doing right now for a new album? They "GET IT" with how to use the new media and Internet. If the **AA actually got it we would not be having news stories like this. The **AA is losing, they are luddites of the new age, they are consciously killing themselves. If they would simply get on with it, create content that people would want to pay for, we could all rest easier.
If you go to Comedy Central (one of Viacom's properties) every Colbert clip etc. has a link where they state "Copy and past this link.... and let people have their way with it"
Well, the antithesis to the litigation phalanx of the **AA is for all of us to simply pony up $4000 USD and then begin copying and sharing as desired. The point of my comment was that they are urging people to keep records of ALL activity, not just file sharing.
That little bit of 'keep records on all users activity' information belies the fact that file sharing is not all that the people behind this farce are after. Welcome to 1984. When they begin mandating by law that all user activity is logged, you, me, everyone is fscked! No more secure online bill payments, no IMing, no nothing. Big brother is here to stay if this continues...
FTFA: "Reasonable data retention policies are essential," he said. "Lawsuits for music theft are just one example, but there are a host of other crimes regularly perpetrated on computer networks.
"As services providers, one would think universities would understand the need to retain these records."
This only goes to highlight what I believe is the governments complicity in the **AA litigation activities.
I just put this together. In my case, perhaps many others, MS has indeed, if not on purpose, recieved payment for what amounts to me getting Windows XP for free! There is something that is simply not right about that, not right on any level. At first glance, it appears that MS is paying Dell to give me XP. That can't be right. According to this story, if I voice my desire nicely I might get back %15 of the value of the Windows that I didn't actually pay for? OR, on the other hand, if I get that back, it makes the hardware that much cheaper so as to insinuate that MS is paying for Dell to give me MS Windows XP? No, I didn't pay for Windows as the system hardware was 25% cheaper than I could have purchased it on my own, piece by piece. In market terms, I didn't even pay full price for the hardware. Yes, I do understand that in volume things become cheaper, but the math on this seems to indicate that someone is getting fscked pretty good. It wasn't me this time.
I recently bought a Dell SR2030, mostly because the price it was selling at was more than 25% cheaper than I could buy the hardware. To me, that is a deal. It also came with Windows XP on it. I swapped that hard drive out with a 300GB SATA drive and installed Linux before the sales ticket cooled off.
I kept the Windows HD as sold because I can't get any money for it, and it might, read *might*, come in handy some day. Not that I'm counting on it, but hey, whatever. If I could go to the website and get the refund, that HD would be mounted as a Linux drive before breakfast!
After watching what happened to Apple, smart people should wait to see if wireless carriers are forced to become common carriers. Until they are common carrier status, its not worth trying to get into their game... sadly.
Thanks for adding that clarity. I've made way too much money helping people just understand MS Word. I try to teach them general principles and how Word handles those. The trouble is that they don't understand general document principles. When you show them what a page break is, their response is one of astonishment and relief: Oh, that's how to do that? Cool, thanks.
The one thing that MS did to make Word and Office quite usable (that HARDLY EVER gets implemented) is shared templates. Yes, even in the company that I work for, they have a website of logo pics and such rather than lock the applications to the 'shared templates' and make it work 'out of the box' for everyone. Even though MS has done some stuff right, nobody uses it that I can find. That is typical of mankind in general.
This is something that I urge all F/OSS proponents to do: Show how OOo can be used in a group environment and make those shared resources work, make OO work like everyone should have been making MS Office work all along.
Let me give you a hint: All voting irregularities are 'stuff that matters' and it's stuff that matters to geeks as well as everyone else. The war on drugs has been as absurd as the DMCA and the **AA's war in copyrights/fair use.
You might argue that this isn't a voting irregularity, but the vote result was 'irregularly' thrown out on bogus grounds. That is to say that our government is not listening to us, and THAT is something that matters!... unless of course, you are only 12 and reading/. from your mom's basement?
I'm not trying to belittle your opinion here, but there are those of us out here that remember those very same toe stubbing situations with MS Word itself, from version to version, and of course when there were still other word processing packages on the market.
It is inevitable that one software package will work slightly differently from a competing similar package. Add-ins, extras, templates will be different. What I like about OO is that you can make your own, and then share them with the world. - yes, sounded a bit fanboi-ish... meh
Stubbing your toes on office applications would still be a problem if MS hadn't been so successful at getting rid of it's competitors in this space. Currently, people just 'think' they don't know how to use MS Word. The real problem is that people don't know how to use office applications but they don't know there are any others besides MS. This means the don't have a chance to 'stub their toes' as it were.
Fonts, formatting, templates, and other *Standard features* of word processors give people trouble all the time, and if you stub your toes because OO isn't quite like MS Word, be happy because those things can be fixed. Finding them and reporting them is part of the process. Until Wordperfect died, people who used MS Word went through the same thing.
I was hoping someone would do this. I don't have a Linux laptop yet. The one I use is from work where they insist on Windows XP. If I could get it to perform properly using sleep mode I'd be rather happy. Moving back and forth from VPN to wired connection just upsets XP beyond my ability to sort it out.
My Linux boxes (and some Solaris boxes, no laptops) all manage to have ridiculous uptimes. Well, they did till the PHB said to reboot everything after DST patching regardless of requirement. We had a FC4 and a 'Redhat 9' system, both with over 18 months uptime. For these servers, boot time is not an issue.
At home, I can't see much differernce between XP and Fedora boot times. Does anyone know what distro boots quickest? Maybe I will see something to notice.
Not that I don't like a good MS bashing, but the government should be getting the bashing right now, not MS. The government branches/organizations should have been doing this all along, that is making every effort to ensure that their computing platforms are secure, AND comparing one vendor against another. That is how smart businesses are run. The fact that they are just now doing this is fscking scary! What compromises have already been exploited and not discovered as yet?
To me, this is something that should have ALREADY been done several years ago. If they manage to get through all the virus/malware attacks without suffering loss of information I'll be amazed since they are just now mandating secure computing environments??? WTF?
I thought about this for a bit, and while you might be right you are also missing an important part. Everytime that MS responds to F/OSS activities it hurts them. Yes, I know that is what a business needs to do, but here is the thing. MS has to pay for any change of direction or what not while the F/OSS community doesn't have that resource drain. MS has not historically invented anything spectacular. Yes, I know there are those that will argue, but they have 'embraced and extinguished' as much as purchased competitors to stop competition. Neither of those tactics is going to work on F/OSS software. This is pretty much a Goliath and David situation. Perhaps it's taking this David a few more than one little stone but Goliath is having some trouble here.
Apple or any other serious competitor to MS has never been able to get entire governments, countries, business groups etc. to abandon MS for their product in the way that F/OSS has done.
Clue: F/OSS isn't spending huge money on advertising, consumers are just getting fscking tired of MS shenanigans and Linux is mature enough (some would say better than MS) to be a replacement for MS products in a lot of situations.
So yes, the death will be slow, but this is killing MS, the MS business model, and fortunately for F/OSS MS is killing their own reputation.
FTFA: Knowing this axiom of human nature, network managers can manage their team more efficiently by challenging their network engineers with more specific forward-looking issues and, more importantly, making sure they're spending an adequate amount of time focused on these initiatives. If a network manager only calls out the engineering team when there's a problem, all that manager is doing is preserving the status quo, not improving.
I find it strange that a opinion on management problems is based on D&D, but that's just me. This didn't say anything about the problem where a network engineer sees a problem but is held back because the management can't envision the problem as a problem, never mind fixing it.
What I see more often is groups that are having trouble keeping up with required changes (SarbOx et al) to run around making things perfect. When a problem does happen, it is put out like a fire and work shifts back to making required changes rather than trying to make sure that particular fire doesn't happen again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you on this one. There are some real easy things to look at when it comes to computers. If a ordinary user is going to switch from Windows, one of the reasons is typically DRM/updates/cost. The other is having to learn something new. If you have to learn something new, but you can do the learning on a FREE OS, then most average people are willing to try the FREE one first, especially if it can run that cherished 6 year old windows program that they just can't live without at the moment.
Even technical people are tired of MS for many reasons. One of my coworkers was going to buy a Mac laptop recently. That is until he found he can get a non-Mac laptop with support for Linux on it. (Thank you Dell, Lenovo et al)
MS should be more worried about the court case against the Russian school teacher than they are of Apple.
His blog was a bit difficult to read, but it looks like he is trying to find help installing Linux on the computers. With the visibility that this case is getting, I wonder how much good PR Linux will get? Perhaps Edubuntu or some other Distro group can send them (Russian educators) some free CDs?
Yeah, sure. This one species of mammals is totally different from all the rest of them.
Not to bait flames here, but the evidence for divine creation is pretty damned weak if you take into account all the imperfect humans that had to be involved in bringing us 'his word'... while the evidence for evolution is getting stronger all the time, and this little theory of evolution doesn't mind a few corrections here and there. It's a bit tolerant of the process of discovery.
Too true. I get a 'ripped off' feeling when I read a blog by a writer for a reasonable or respected periodical only to find it little more than efforts of some vendor's shill.
There are a lot of bloggers, and some of them are actually more interesting the the journalism version of the same information. They are pretty much the same thing to me, but I do know not to trust a blogger on anything important without checking the information elsewhere as well.
Is this just the start of a new set of litigation against MS for adding such clauses to their contracts with hardware vendors?
In the most earnest of ways, I hope it is. If it can be shown that vendors are not allowed by contract to support hardware that is not running the Windows software it was sold with would perhaps put a final end to the hold that MS has on vendors.
Perhaps that is just wishful thinking...
I'm kind of tired of hearing these discourses on old business models, thinkoftheartists, and other old school crap. Sure, perhaps that doesn't make a lot of sense point blank, but lets face it, the CD and DVD and now other media types give artists and the **AA member businesses the method to create art that is truly worth $18. The fact that they don't get it is reason enough for them to slowly die off.
Has anyone else caught wind of the NIN viral marketing that they are doing right now for a new album? They "GET IT" with how to use the new media and Internet. If the **AA actually got it we would not be having news stories like this. The **AA is losing, they are luddites of the new age, they are consciously killing themselves. If they would simply get on with it, create content that people would want to pay for, we could all rest easier.
We need a new word to deal with this technology:
Webutation; The reputation an entity has, stemming from its web presence.
IANAL blah blah...
.... and let people have their way with it"
If you go to Comedy Central (one of Viacom's properties) every Colbert clip etc. has a link where they state "Copy and past this link
Someone needs to show this to the judge...
Well, the antithesis to the litigation phalanx of the **AA is for all of us to simply pony up $4000 USD and then begin copying and sharing as desired. The point of my comment was that they are urging people to keep records of ALL activity, not just file sharing.
That little bit of 'keep records on all users activity' information belies the fact that file sharing is not all that the people behind this farce are after. Welcome to 1984. When they begin mandating by law that all user activity is logged, you, me, everyone is fscked! No more secure online bill payments, no IMing, no nothing. Big brother is here to stay if this continues...
Mr Orwell, you were right.... sadly
FTFA:
"Reasonable data retention policies are essential," he said. "Lawsuits for music theft are just one example, but there are a host of other crimes regularly perpetrated on computer networks.
"As services providers, one would think universities would understand the need to retain these records."
This only goes to highlight what I believe is the governments complicity in the **AA litigation activities.
No more New Yorkers at my parties....
/.
Oh, wait, I read
Never mind
Counterfeit drivers licenses for 'Olympics visitors' to use to enter the US in
3....
2....
1....
Yes, replying to yourself is bad form... shrug
I just put this together. In my case, perhaps many others, MS has indeed, if not on purpose, recieved payment for what amounts to me getting Windows XP for free! There is something that is simply not right about that, not right on any level. At first glance, it appears that MS is paying Dell to give me XP. That can't be right. According to this story, if I voice my desire nicely I might get back %15 of the value of the Windows that I didn't actually pay for? OR, on the other hand, if I get that back, it makes the hardware that much cheaper so as to insinuate that MS is paying for Dell to give me MS Windows XP? No, I didn't pay for Windows as the system hardware was 25% cheaper than I could have purchased it on my own, piece by piece. In market terms, I didn't even pay full price for the hardware. Yes, I do understand that in volume things become cheaper, but the math on this seems to indicate that someone is getting fscked pretty good. It wasn't me this time.
Can anyone explain this math problem to me?
I recently bought a Dell SR2030, mostly because the price it was selling at was more than 25% cheaper than I could buy the hardware. To me, that is a deal. It also came with Windows XP on it. I swapped that hard drive out with a 300GB SATA drive and installed Linux before the sales ticket cooled off.
I kept the Windows HD as sold because I can't get any money for it, and it might, read *might*, come in handy some day. Not that I'm counting on it, but hey, whatever. If I could go to the website and get the refund, that HD would be mounted as a Linux drive before breakfast!
I'm all for making the refund easy!
After watching what happened to Apple, smart people should wait to see if wireless carriers are forced to become common carriers. Until they are common carrier status, its not worth trying to get into their game... sadly.
Thanks for adding that clarity. I've made way too much money helping people just understand MS Word. I try to teach them general principles and how Word handles those. The trouble is that they don't understand general document principles. When you show them what a page break is, their response is one of astonishment and relief: Oh, that's how to do that? Cool, thanks.
The one thing that MS did to make Word and Office quite usable (that HARDLY EVER gets implemented) is shared templates. Yes, even in the company that I work for, they have a website of logo pics and such rather than lock the applications to the 'shared templates' and make it work 'out of the box' for everyone. Even though MS has done some stuff right, nobody uses it that I can find.
That is typical of mankind in general.
This is something that I urge all F/OSS proponents to do: Show how OOo can be used in a group environment and make those shared resources work, make OO work like everyone should have been making MS Office work all along.
Let me give you a hint: All voting irregularities are 'stuff that matters' and it's stuff that matters to geeks as well as everyone else. The war on drugs has been as absurd as the DMCA and the **AA's war in copyrights/fair use.
... unless of course, you are only 12 and reading /. from your mom's basement?
You might argue that this isn't a voting irregularity, but the vote result was 'irregularly' thrown out on bogus grounds. That is to say that our government is not listening to us, and THAT is something that matters!
I'm not trying to belittle your opinion here, but there are those of us out here that remember those very same toe stubbing situations with MS Word itself, from version to version, and of course when there were still other word processing packages on the market.
It is inevitable that one software package will work slightly differently from a competing similar package. Add-ins, extras, templates will be different. What I like about OO is that you can make your own, and then share them with the world. - yes, sounded a bit fanboi-ish... meh
Stubbing your toes on office applications would still be a problem if MS hadn't been so successful at getting rid of it's competitors in this space. Currently, people just 'think' they don't know how to use MS Word. The real problem is that people don't know how to use office applications but they don't know there are any others besides MS. This means the don't have a chance to 'stub their toes' as it were.
Fonts, formatting, templates, and other *Standard features* of word processors give people trouble all the time, and if you stub your toes because OO isn't quite like MS Word, be happy because those things can be fixed. Finding them and reporting them is part of the process. Until Wordperfect died, people who used MS Word went through the same thing.
I was hoping someone would do this. I don't have a Linux laptop yet. The one I use is from work where they insist on Windows XP. If I could get it to perform properly using sleep mode I'd be rather happy. Moving back and forth from VPN to wired connection just upsets XP beyond my ability to sort it out.
My Linux boxes (and some Solaris boxes, no laptops) all manage to have ridiculous uptimes. Well, they did till the PHB said to reboot everything after DST patching regardless of requirement. We had a FC4 and a 'Redhat 9' system, both with over 18 months uptime. For these servers, boot time is not an issue.
At home, I can't see much differernce between XP and Fedora boot times. Does anyone know what distro boots quickest? Maybe I will see something to notice.
Additionally, the advent of special effects made the movies that went before look cheesy.
Not that I don't like a good MS bashing, but the government should be getting the bashing right now, not MS. The government branches/organizations should have been doing this all along, that is making every effort to ensure that their computing platforms are secure, AND comparing one vendor against another. That is how smart businesses are run. The fact that they are just now doing this is fscking scary! What compromises have already been exploited and not discovered as yet?
5 6222 and there is also help for Linux? http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/ 1534241
That it has been mandated to secure Windows installations and applications that run on it is in fact a step in the right direction. Now they just have to do the same with ALL other computing platforms. The NSA has a few hints on that http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/09/13
To me, this is something that should have ALREADY been done several years ago. If they manage to get through all the virus/malware attacks without suffering loss of information I'll be amazed since they are just now mandating secure computing environments??? WTF?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227533&cid=184 33111
Then they shouldn't try so damned hard to stop municipalities from providing public service broadband systems!
I thought about this for a bit, and while you might be right you are also missing an important part. Everytime that MS responds to F/OSS activities it hurts them. Yes, I know that is what a business needs to do, but here is the thing. MS has to pay for any change of direction or what not while the F/OSS community doesn't have that resource drain. MS has not historically invented anything spectacular. Yes, I know there are those that will argue, but they have 'embraced and extinguished' as much as purchased competitors to stop competition. Neither of those tactics is going to work on F/OSS software. This is pretty much a Goliath and David situation. Perhaps it's taking this David a few more than one little stone but Goliath is having some trouble here.
Apple or any other serious competitor to MS has never been able to get entire governments, countries, business groups etc. to abandon MS for their product in the way that F/OSS has done.
Clue: F/OSS isn't spending huge money on advertising, consumers are just getting fscking tired of MS shenanigans and Linux is mature enough (some would say better than MS) to be a replacement for MS products in a lot of situations.
So yes, the death will be slow, but this is killing MS, the MS business model, and fortunately for F/OSS MS is killing their own reputation.
FTFA: Knowing this axiom of human nature, network managers can manage their team more efficiently by challenging their network engineers with more specific forward-looking issues and, more importantly, making sure they're spending an adequate amount of time focused on these initiatives. If a network manager only calls out the engineering team when there's a problem, all that manager is doing is preserving the status quo, not improving.
I find it strange that a opinion on management problems is based on D&D, but that's just me. This didn't say anything about the problem where a network engineer sees a problem but is held back because the management can't envision the problem as a problem, never mind fixing it.
What I see more often is groups that are having trouble keeping up with required changes (SarbOx et al) to run around making things perfect. When a problem does happen, it is put out like a fire and work shifts back to making required changes rather than trying to make sure that particular fire doesn't happen again.