we're getting closer and closer to the mock-up prediction someone made a while ago in a flash movie about Google or something... slightly remember automatically being served news cut out for us.
DRM is just to keep the dumb users from copying their music. If I want to copy an iTMS-encoded file, I do it digitally, on Mac's. Simple: Use jack (the open source music daemon) to relay data from your output to the input of any MP3 encoder (Lame for example). If you want to automate it you can use AppleScript to start/stop recordings, handle file naming etc.
Why would Apple let their sleek, cheap, fast boxes get converted to ugly, overpriced, average boxes and have their consumers suffer the wrath from Dell for not buying a real Dell?
Didn't they go to the moon a few times?
on
No Ice on the Moon
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· Score: 1
Or didn't they? Legend tells us that about 13 people have been on and around the moon. What did they see? Don't they have samples?
They bought out Connectix which created Virtual PC (let's not forget that boys & girls). They ook out the PowerPC support. They took out all Mac support. They took out all good functionality and copy-pasted their logo on it. They see it doesn't sell anymore and everyone's using different products. Now they are going to bring out the disk format to appease some people and next thing you know (next version probably) they are going to turn out and make some changes (maybe encryption) to the disk format and sell their product again.
In the mean time VMWare and Xen give out their products for free, keeping all customers happy and have much better functionality and support.
...my fellow Americans, and our millions of illegal aliens: It seems like just yesterday that I was strafing all your homes. Now. I'm standing here begging you not to make such good automobiles.
A lot of people seem to confuse PDF (the Adobe Portable Document Format) with PS (PostScript, a page description language and programming language) or PCL (Printer Control Language developed by HP) which is used for totally different purposes.
Although most self-respecting printers do use or support PCL, most advanced printers use PostScript and PDF is usually converted into PostScript before being sent to the printer. Some printers do accept PDF being uploaded or e-mailed to the device and thus being print out but I have seen few printers actually do that or that functionality being used at all.
XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,... and is just like ODF has been a long time, based on XML and instead of just compressing it, they put a binary shell around and/or in it which makes it totally unreadable and incompatible unless you use their stuff.
They steal your bank account number and then put $7,50 on each day and then appears a message that if you don't go to McDonalds and spend your 7,50 that your hard disk will be wiped. Once you are addicted they stop giving you free money...
Yeah, you can probably safe $25 by turning your computer off instead of the 10W standby (or sleep) mode but I think I safe more money by not turning off my computer.
How so: I earn $25/hour while freelancing. If I have to wait for my computer to boot up it uses more energy, time and it will go through my hard disk faster. It will also have to initialize all hardware which otherwise could have stayed off. Saying I have to turn my computer on once a day, it will take up on average 300 minutes that I lose waiting. That is easily 5 hours. That costs me $125 per year per computer. If I use more than 1 computer (quite frequently) or shut- and reboot my server it costs more minutes depending on the services (large MySQL database and Apache and SSL stuff for developing) it takes me 10-20 hours to wait for all services to come up, then I haven't downloaded all updates and cron jobs that would otherwise run at night, so I lose time in splitting bandwidth and processing on my server.
Then I haven't talked about the strain it puts (cold warm, initializing, heavy usage during startup) on critical components like hard disks especially in winter when it literally near-freezes in-house or during summer when you can sit in your underwear in the computer room. The fans keep the internal temperature pretty stable right throughout the year and I can also slightly profit in winter by the heat it puts out (less warming up with conventional heating systems) although that might be not so influential on the overal temperature.
Then I haven't talked about lost profits and time spent repairing power supply's and hard disks that crashed due to off-on-cycles. I have always had a computer in the house for the last 5 years while other house members like to put theirs out. My self-built server has been running happily along (with UPS) all that time while I had several hard disks crash in the others mostly during boot.
So when I get paid my wages through bank transfer or something similar I shouldn't get taxed? All money these days is virtual and is just a number in a database and since all my payments don't happen in real life, I shouldn't pay tax anywhere?
They will find a way to tax it if they see there is enough value in it. I hope it gets outlawed to tax on virtual goods. Then I can ask my company to pay me in WoW gold or Linden dollars after which I can purchase stuff in certain stores or from e-bay, online with my online-virtual-money.
Another question: if your virtual stuff remains on out-of-state or out-of-country servers and all exchanges happen through virtual accounts, how will they tax that?
Except for Chernobyl there has been few nuclear accidents that impacted much of civilian/non-technicians lifes. And Chernobyl was basically the same Americans did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII, a test in a place where lives were expendable without knowing the results. The rest of the accidents was usually contained to the site and sometimes a few technicians working at the plant. I think coal- or gas-explosions for the sake of generating power have requested multitudes of life not to mention the long-time results of exposure of the exhausts of coalplants to people living nearby and people working at the facilities.
Most nuclear accidents can be led to negligence or mistake by the operator and are usually contained to a meltdown and a complete controlled shutdown of the site follows which could lead to major power outages but I don't think we will have to go through another Chernobyl especially with all the fail-safes and controls.
Would be really funny if they just put some code in to generate images from it like this (I've seen captcha's done like this):/gen_image.php?street=1_infinite_loop&zip=95014&ca ll=police
I believe in Thursday the 12th. It's the day you should stay in bed.
I was late for work At work a laptop irrepairably failed A co-worker got fired More workload added None of my scripts worked Power went out in the building Imaging a computer failed 3 times Went home late, started snowing heavily on the way home No dinner ready Dinner tasted bad Had to get gas Had to pick friend up unexpectedly Got a ticket speeding for gas and friend Was late picking up friend Very late for a gathering Had to see ex-girlfriend Seems like I was disinvited for a party Went finallly home, apparently forgot the stove, pan burnt out and house smelling like charcoal House kept smelling like charcoal, annoying trying to sleep Dog wouldn't shut up and go to sleep, constantly came pushing to play with his ball Shut out dog, dog scratching to get back in During the night into the 13th power went out for the residence Freak snowstorm
Well, Thursday the 12th was the worst day in months. Nothing really bad happened on the 13th, actually my ex-girlfriend started e-mailing more frequently and I went home early from work.
IT is one of the most horrible jobs for relationships.
1) You work not by the clock, most are salaried and thus they 'expect' at least some overtime. I work '40' hours a week, but some of my collegues clock out long before I even have a view of the end 2) You work nights, weekends. Especially in smaller companies because you're the only point of advanced/superuser support but in bigger companies you have to because you're replaceable. You're on call 24/7 or at least once a month. 3) Stressed situations. Your manager sits on your ass for having as much work done, while end-users need your support because they are making the business. Usually you're not part of the core business, so you're merely an expense and you have a direct impact on business & performance 4) You come home and still have to keep up to date with the latest news and technologies so you're not outsmarted by some accounting dude that took the cheapest route
I have been there, I was married for over a year but the spouse couldn't keep up with the early leave, late arrival and nightly nagios alerts. It's horrible for every type of relationship because everytime you plan on something, the power goes out in the datacenter or the server crashes and there goes the planned romantic night.
I am an IT decision maker in a big Fortune500 business, among the big names in direct advertising.
We have an Enterprise agreement with Microsoft and lots of computers (servers & clients). Although it's all going slowly (just replaced all Windows XP computers) we will postpone Vista for a long time. The biggest reason is that there is no added value in going to Vista for our clients. As long as they can start Outlook, surf the net and have some business apps they will be happy.
Of course we have Mac's for the graphic editors but we're thinking about switching some people to Mac. Get them a Mini, a 19" TFT, keyboard, mouse and for less than $1000 they can run Office, all Adobe & Macromedia apps, Messenger, terminals, remote connections be integrated into AD and have a better overview of hardware/software/usage through ARD than possible with SMS. The support will cost less (currently 1 guy running a good 100 mac's and he's busy about 1-3 hours a day on that side, helping out on the Windows side the rest of the day), everybody can have their admin rights revoked without missing any functionality and they can still do their work perfectly.
Of course the problem is getting everyone over (which will probably never happen) but compared to shilling out $200-$400 for a Vista or XP license , a $100 for a new license if NECESSARY (comes with the hardware as opposed to standard pc's which come with Home) sounds pretty good
How come we don't need this DRM to load kernel drivers in OS X or Linux or SystemV or Plan9 or AIX or HP-UX then?
Microsoft needs to get its act together and start securing their OS, not locking it down for everyone.
In Mac OS X, my users can't install a kernel module, some people need admin access however they still can't load kernel modules since they're not in the sudoers file. Root (the smartest guy -me-) is the only one that can install kernel modules.
The fact that someone needs root access to run a program is wrong according to me. Users should get user level access by default, admin access if necessary, never root. If people are too big of a simpletons and just install everything they download, they are going to keep doing it and the fact that it's made easy for them (within 2 or 3 clicks) is just wrong but no protection will help against dumb users.
What Microsoft is doing here is locking out home programmers, startups, OSS developers, people with PICs or microcontrollers. Fits good for me, they can finally change to Linux/OS X but I'm not paying $500 and going through a series of processes to get control over my new USB device I just soldered last night.
What Redmond forgets though is that a lot of users (almost all dumb users) assume full control over their computers. They want to be able to install virusses, rootkits, spyware because that cool gimmicky program that comes with it requires it. They also want to copy their DVD's (HD- or Blu-Ray) for backup or other purposes and they're not going to call Microsoft why it's not working. They'll call me, "the guy that knows everything about computers" ask me why it doesn't work and I'll give them a LiveCD or show them off my PowerBook. I already converted lots of people Bill, beware.
Google is going to get in a battle with *AA over the legality of content on their websites. But now one of those small innovative company's (like Napster was) doesn't have to worry anymore about being strong-armed by the *AA because they don't have money. I don't think the *AA hasn't won a single case against a cash-giant like Google, they always go after the smaller IPO's, single mom's, 15yo girls and other "poor" people/companies which finally have to give up because of the cash drain and either settle or file for bankrupcy.
The good thing is that Google has a steady income of more cash which they can throw against the case if need be and they are thus going to be less likely to settle for a lump-sum and give up. They can also afford better lawyers and finally open the IP box of pandora and set an example/precedent.
Copyright violation would be that they show the whole book and/or export it as an e-book for you (with or without profit) no matter whether you can buy the book elsewhere or not.
I think most copyright laws have a clause in it that you can use excerpts from a book but not a whole book as long as you note the source of your information with the excerpt. This means that I can use a page out of a book and use it in my essay without having to pay copyrights for the whole book (would become even more expensive for students and other academia) or even copy it from the library aka from a book I don't own myself.
The same happens here. Google gives you the possibility to search for a phrase, displays which book it comes from and a small portion of the book where the phrase is displayed. It's not like they are giving the whole book to you as soon as you find the phrase. They don't steal the book, they get it out of the library, scan it in, OCR it and then if they find a phrase in that book you search for, they display you the particular page, but not the whole book. Just like I can go to the library, scan/copy the whole book (if I have money enough for paper/copies) and then use a single page in my essay.
In an undisclosed country I lived in, we got cable for home and since it was a startup it was ridden with problems.
Their billing software was totally automated, it didn't send us a single bill for 2 years long. They must have gotten wind of it and hosed their database or so since I started receiving bills afterwards but they were way off. The first one charged me around $180 (monthly was only $45) extra so I called them and they were going to update it. So I got a bill with $45 + 180 = $225 - $180 = $45. Next day the automated part of customer service sent me a bill again: $45 + $180 + $25 late fees. I wasn't even late for my normal payment and customer service had no idea what the extra $180 came up for everytime (neither did I). At one point I received every day another bill with different numbers so they did something to my account in the database (that's what the service rep. explained to me) and I got 2 months free Internet for all the trouble caused. But next month, it started all over again and so did the 3rd month. I ended up not paying anything for another 6 months thanks to that after which they changed billing systems and I got correct statements.
I think their machines had an improbability drive or a random number generator charging random people for stuff.
You can run Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, no matter what. It all depends on what you are able to pay upfront, in the long run, whether you are developing something yourself or if you have to use certain packages.
If you're starting absolutely fresh (no olden software that has to be migrated) I would definitely start with Linux or Mac OS. I would use Mac OS because of the relatively cheap hardware and stability that comes with them and of course the ease of install and management. I would choose Linux as the primary development platform and something you have to be able to scale for cheap to many machines. Windows is good enough for sales reps, but a BSOD on TV is more embarassing than a 1337 Kernel Panic.
What I would be more worried about is security. Not only physically, but also electronically against not only thieves and crooks, but also against unauthorized hardware access by employees (as in, oh, I got something on this thumb drive kinda thing). If you're working something real time 24/7, it's not easy to upgrade the system without having a pretty large testing environment. Also make sure you got backups. D2D backups are great in speed and shortening your backup window, but I have had more than once having whole RAID arrays fail because a single hard drive blew out the entire bus (Dell machines). This is less likely if each drive is controlled by a separate controller (like Apple's XRAID) but you should have definitely off-site tapes or something as dependable as tapes.
Another thing about them Apple's is that they allow you to micromanage the systems fairly easy while maintaining the integrity and stability of other Unix/BSD/Linux environments. Next to that, in the graphic business, almost everyone uses nothing BUT Mac's. Not only does it have specialized software but also great speed and ease-of-use while Linux takes a little longer to get to know for new graphic designers or freelancers. Next to that you also have the possibilities for compatibility with programs written for Linux (GTK, QT, X-Windows) but I wouldn't recommend using it for internet and network management and security (except for LDAP, their LDAP implementation is the greatest I have ever seen) since it's a pain in the butt and Linux works much easier and is more flexible in that area.
Also get some decent monitoring and reboot schedules on all critical machines. I have more than once seen different projects fail or have large downtimes because someone didn't monitor the SMART status of that oh-so-critical server or checked on the status of all daemons on that failover machine, they had the greatest uptime until they rebooted and it was noticed that their RAID0 array wasn't really consistent anymore for the last few months and half the server was basically running out of daemons sitting in memory and read their practical data over NAS shares.
I was going to check out what they had to say about it. They also released a press statement about the dust being kicked up:
Kan de Nedap stemmachine gemanipuleerd worden? Alles is te manipuleren.
Can the Nedap voting machine be manipulated? Everything can be manipulated
Is de Nedap stemmachine beveiligd tegen moedwillige manipulatie? Ja. Tegen iedere nieuwe bedreiging worden maatregelen genomen.
Is the Nedap voting machine secured against manipulation Yes. Against every new threat measures are taken
Kan de uitslag van de Nedap stemmachine gemanipuleerd worden? Veel moeilijker dan bij "papieren" verkiezingen
Can the results of the Nedap voting machine be manipulated? Much more difficult than with "paper" elections
Well, at least they're honest unlike Diebold over here that says they're system is the best and totally secure. Elections can and will always be manipulated as long as there are humans involved. If you make 1000's of people vote for a person by putting a gun against their head, you have succesfully manipulated the election.
Your comparing two entirely different products with each other:
Retail Windows XP Pro to a full-blown Workstation/Server Suite with e-mail and phone support. Try calling Microsoft with your Windows issue. You pay $55 for the initial call, they'll try to upsell you a support plan of course and then say that the issue is something to do with 3rd party software. You could compare SBS to RHWS please, pricing starts somewhere close to $1000 for 5 clients.
Next up QT compared to C#. Here you are comparing a multi-platform GUI-toolkit to a general programming framework. Compare GCC to C# or that IBM software for programming to Visual Studio. Also take in comparison the portability you get.
Cygwin to Unix services? Come on, you gotta be kidding me. They have nothing to do with each other.
I think you have poor product planning in your company and maybe someone with a MCP in your ordering department. Next to that, if you would open-source your software and share it, all those suites wouldn't cost you a dime. If you are a small company, your programmers should be capable enough of maintaining their own environment without support (it's been years since I called Microsoft, Apple, IBM's or RedHat's support line and we do have contracts with them) and if you're a bit bigger you might consider hiring a dedicated support guy. I have dealt with Dell and other companies before and before they handle your case and management gives permission for the guy to mess with the workstations/servers you will be 3 days out of production except if you give them half your paycheck.
This article looks more like a shameless plug for Microsoft FUD and a smart move by their marketing department towards their latest get-thee-f*cked campaign
Slashdot Mirror
we're getting closer and closer to the mock-up prediction someone made a while ago in a flash movie about Google or something... slightly remember automatically being served news cut out for us.
DRM is just to keep the dumb users from copying their music. If I want to copy an iTMS-encoded file, I do it digitally, on Mac's. Simple: Use jack (the open source music daemon) to relay data from your output to the input of any MP3 encoder (Lame for example). If you want to automate it you can use AppleScript to start/stop recordings, handle file naming etc.
I can't even bring myself to install Windows let alone use IE or the Windows FTP tool.
Why would Apple let their sleek, cheap, fast boxes get converted to ugly, overpriced, average boxes and have their consumers suffer the wrath from Dell for not buying a real Dell?
Or didn't they? Legend tells us that about 13 people have been on and around the moon. What did they see? Don't they have samples?
They bought out Connectix which created Virtual PC (let's not forget that boys & girls). They ook out the PowerPC support. They took out all Mac support. They took out all good functionality and copy-pasted their logo on it. They see it doesn't sell anymore and everyone's using different products. Now they are going to bring out the disk format to appease some people and next thing you know (next version probably) they are going to turn out and make some changes (maybe encryption) to the disk format and sell their product again.
In the mean time VMWare and Xen give out their products for free, keeping all customers happy and have much better functionality and support.
So now you can get a free McVirus when you buy an iPod or a Big Mac Menu?
As article mentioned, both come from Asia, due to an infected assembly machine running Windows (probably the one that formats the keepers of the data)
...my fellow Americans, and our millions of illegal aliens: It seems like just yesterday that I was strafing all your homes. Now. I'm standing here begging you not to make such good automobiles.
A lot of people seem to confuse PDF (the Adobe Portable Document Format) with PS (PostScript, a page description language and programming language) or PCL (Printer Control Language developed by HP) which is used for totally different purposes.
... and is just like ODF has been a long time, based on XML and instead of just compressing it, they put a binary shell around and/or in it which makes it totally unreadable and incompatible unless you use their stuff.
Although most self-respecting printers do use or support PCL, most advanced printers use PostScript and PDF is usually converted into PostScript before being sent to the printer. Some printers do accept PDF being uploaded or e-mailed to the device and thus being print out but I have seen few printers actually do that or that functionality being used at all.
XPS is just a document format as is ODF, PDF,
They steal your bank account number and then put $7,50 on each day and then appears a message that if you don't go to McDonalds and spend your 7,50 that your hard disk will be wiped. Once you are addicted they stop giving you free money...
Yeah, you can probably safe $25 by turning your computer off instead of the 10W standby (or sleep) mode but I think I safe more money by not turning off my computer.
How so: I earn $25/hour while freelancing. If I have to wait for my computer to boot up it uses more energy, time and it will go through my hard disk faster. It will also have to initialize all hardware which otherwise could have stayed off. Saying I have to turn my computer on once a day, it will take up on average 300 minutes that I lose waiting. That is easily 5 hours. That costs me $125 per year per computer. If I use more than 1 computer (quite frequently) or shut- and reboot my server it costs more minutes depending on the services (large MySQL database and Apache and SSL stuff for developing) it takes me 10-20 hours to wait for all services to come up, then I haven't downloaded all updates and cron jobs that would otherwise run at night, so I lose time in splitting bandwidth and processing on my server.
Then I haven't talked about the strain it puts (cold warm, initializing, heavy usage during startup) on critical components like hard disks especially in winter when it literally near-freezes in-house or during summer when you can sit in your underwear in the computer room. The fans keep the internal temperature pretty stable right throughout the year and I can also slightly profit in winter by the heat it puts out (less warming up with conventional heating systems) although that might be not so influential on the overal temperature.
Then I haven't talked about lost profits and time spent repairing power supply's and hard disks that crashed due to off-on-cycles. I have always had a computer in the house for the last 5 years while other house members like to put theirs out. My self-built server has been running happily along (with UPS) all that time while I had several hard disks crash in the others mostly during boot.
So when I get paid my wages through bank transfer or something similar I shouldn't get taxed? All money these days is virtual and is just a number in a database and since all my payments don't happen in real life, I shouldn't pay tax anywhere?
They will find a way to tax it if they see there is enough value in it. I hope it gets outlawed to tax on virtual goods. Then I can ask my company to pay me in WoW gold or Linden dollars after which I can purchase stuff in certain stores or from e-bay, online with my online-virtual-money.
Another question: if your virtual stuff remains on out-of-state or out-of-country servers and all exchanges happen through virtual accounts, how will they tax that?
50% increase in iPod sales after Jobs insisted they get you laid. Most referrals from Slashdot to the Apple Store
Next month:
1000's of virgins request their money back and start a class-action suit against Steve Jobs.
Except for Chernobyl there has been few nuclear accidents that impacted much of civilian/non-technicians lifes. And Chernobyl was basically the same Americans did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII, a test in a place where lives were expendable without knowing the results. The rest of the accidents was usually contained to the site and sometimes a few technicians working at the plant. I think coal- or gas-explosions for the sake of generating power have requested multitudes of life not to mention the long-time results of exposure of the exhausts of coalplants to people living nearby and people working at the facilities.
Most nuclear accidents can be led to negligence or mistake by the operator and are usually contained to a meltdown and a complete controlled shutdown of the site follows which could lead to major power outages but I don't think we will have to go through another Chernobyl especially with all the fail-safes and controls.
Would be really funny if they just put some code in to generate images from it like this (I've seen captcha's done like this): /gen_image.php?street=1_infinite_loop&zip=95014&ca ll=police
I believe in Thursday the 12th. It's the day you should stay in bed.
I was late for work
At work a laptop irrepairably failed
A co-worker got fired
More workload added
None of my scripts worked
Power went out in the building
Imaging a computer failed 3 times
Went home late, started snowing heavily on the way home
No dinner ready
Dinner tasted bad
Had to get gas
Had to pick friend up unexpectedly
Got a ticket speeding for gas and friend
Was late picking up friend
Very late for a gathering
Had to see ex-girlfriend
Seems like I was disinvited for a party
Went finallly home, apparently forgot the stove, pan burnt out and house smelling like charcoal
House kept smelling like charcoal, annoying trying to sleep
Dog wouldn't shut up and go to sleep, constantly came pushing to play with his ball
Shut out dog, dog scratching to get back in
During the night into the 13th power went out for the residence
Freak snowstorm
Well, Thursday the 12th was the worst day in months. Nothing really bad happened on the 13th, actually my ex-girlfriend started e-mailing more frequently and I went home early from work.
IT is one of the most horrible jobs for relationships.
1) You work not by the clock, most are salaried and thus they 'expect' at least some overtime. I work '40' hours a week, but some of my collegues clock out long before I even have a view of the end
2) You work nights, weekends. Especially in smaller companies because you're the only point of advanced/superuser support but in bigger companies you have to because you're replaceable. You're on call 24/7 or at least once a month.
3) Stressed situations. Your manager sits on your ass for having as much work done, while end-users need your support because they are making the business. Usually you're not part of the core business, so you're merely an expense and you have a direct impact on business & performance
4) You come home and still have to keep up to date with the latest news and technologies so you're not outsmarted by some accounting dude that took the cheapest route
I have been there, I was married for over a year but the spouse couldn't keep up with the early leave, late arrival and nightly nagios alerts. It's horrible for every type of relationship because everytime you plan on something, the power goes out in the datacenter or the server crashes and there goes the planned romantic night.
I am an IT decision maker in a big Fortune500 business, among the big names in direct advertising.
We have an Enterprise agreement with Microsoft and lots of computers (servers & clients). Although it's all going slowly (just replaced all Windows XP computers) we will postpone Vista for a long time. The biggest reason is that there is no added value in going to Vista for our clients. As long as they can start Outlook, surf the net and have some business apps they will be happy.
Of course we have Mac's for the graphic editors but we're thinking about switching some people to Mac. Get them a Mini, a 19" TFT, keyboard, mouse and for less than $1000 they can run Office, all Adobe & Macromedia apps, Messenger, terminals, remote connections be integrated into AD and have a better overview of hardware/software/usage through ARD than possible with SMS. The support will cost less (currently 1 guy running a good 100 mac's and he's busy about 1-3 hours a day on that side, helping out on the Windows side the rest of the day), everybody can have their admin rights revoked without missing any functionality and they can still do their work perfectly.
Of course the problem is getting everyone over (which will probably never happen) but compared to shilling out $200-$400 for a Vista or XP license , a $100 for a new license if NECESSARY (comes with the hardware as opposed to standard pc's which come with Home) sounds pretty good
How come we don't need this DRM to load kernel drivers in OS X or Linux or SystemV or Plan9 or AIX or HP-UX then?
Microsoft needs to get its act together and start securing their OS, not locking it down for everyone.
In Mac OS X, my users can't install a kernel module, some people need admin access however they still can't load kernel modules since they're not in the sudoers file. Root (the smartest guy -me-) is the only one that can install kernel modules.
The fact that someone needs root access to run a program is wrong according to me. Users should get user level access by default, admin access if necessary, never root. If people are too big of a simpletons and just install everything they download, they are going to keep doing it and the fact that it's made easy for them (within 2 or 3 clicks) is just wrong but no protection will help against dumb users.
What Microsoft is doing here is locking out home programmers, startups, OSS developers, people with PICs or microcontrollers. Fits good for me, they can finally change to Linux/OS X but I'm not paying $500 and going through a series of processes to get control over my new USB device I just soldered last night.
What Redmond forgets though is that a lot of users (almost all dumb users) assume full control over their computers. They want to be able to install virusses, rootkits, spyware because that cool gimmicky program that comes with it requires it. They also want to copy their DVD's (HD- or Blu-Ray) for backup or other purposes and they're not going to call Microsoft why it's not working. They'll call me, "the guy that knows everything about computers" ask me why it doesn't work and I'll give them a LiveCD or show them off my PowerBook. I already converted lots of people Bill, beware.
Google is going to get in a battle with *AA over the legality of content on their websites. But now one of those small innovative company's (like Napster was) doesn't have to worry anymore about being strong-armed by the *AA because they don't have money. I don't think the *AA hasn't won a single case against a cash-giant like Google, they always go after the smaller IPO's, single mom's, 15yo girls and other "poor" people/companies which finally have to give up because of the cash drain and either settle or file for bankrupcy.
The good thing is that Google has a steady income of more cash which they can throw against the case if need be and they are thus going to be less likely to settle for a lump-sum and give up. They can also afford better lawyers and finally open the IP box of pandora and set an example/precedent.
Copyright violation would be that they show the whole book and/or export it as an e-book for you (with or without profit) no matter whether you can buy the book elsewhere or not.
I think most copyright laws have a clause in it that you can use excerpts from a book but not a whole book as long as you note the source of your information with the excerpt. This means that I can use a page out of a book and use it in my essay without having to pay copyrights for the whole book (would become even more expensive for students and other academia) or even copy it from the library aka from a book I don't own myself.
The same happens here. Google gives you the possibility to search for a phrase, displays which book it comes from and a small portion of the book where the phrase is displayed. It's not like they are giving the whole book to you as soon as you find the phrase. They don't steal the book, they get it out of the library, scan it in, OCR it and then if they find a phrase in that book you search for, they display you the particular page, but not the whole book. Just like I can go to the library, scan/copy the whole book (if I have money enough for paper/copies) and then use a single page in my essay.
In an undisclosed country I lived in, we got cable for home and since it was a startup it was ridden with problems.
Their billing software was totally automated, it didn't send us a single bill for 2 years long. They must have gotten wind of it and hosed their database or so since I started receiving bills afterwards but they were way off. The first one charged me around $180 (monthly was only $45) extra so I called them and they were going to update it. So I got a bill with $45 + 180 = $225 - $180 = $45. Next day the automated part of customer service sent me a bill again: $45 + $180 + $25 late fees. I wasn't even late for my normal payment and customer service had no idea what the extra $180 came up for everytime (neither did I). At one point I received every day another bill with different numbers so they did something to my account in the database (that's what the service rep. explained to me) and I got 2 months free Internet for all the trouble caused. But next month, it started all over again and so did the 3rd month. I ended up not paying anything for another 6 months thanks to that after which they changed billing systems and I got correct statements.
I think their machines had an improbability drive or a random number generator charging random people for stuff.
You can run Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, no matter what. It all depends on what you are able to pay upfront, in the long run, whether you are developing something yourself or if you have to use certain packages.
If you're starting absolutely fresh (no olden software that has to be migrated) I would definitely start with Linux or Mac OS. I would use Mac OS because of the relatively cheap hardware and stability that comes with them and of course the ease of install and management. I would choose Linux as the primary development platform and something you have to be able to scale for cheap to many machines. Windows is good enough for sales reps, but a BSOD on TV is more embarassing than a 1337 Kernel Panic.
What I would be more worried about is security. Not only physically, but also electronically against not only thieves and crooks, but also against unauthorized hardware access by employees (as in, oh, I got something on this thumb drive kinda thing). If you're working something real time 24/7, it's not easy to upgrade the system without having a pretty large testing environment. Also make sure you got backups. D2D backups are great in speed and shortening your backup window, but I have had more than once having whole RAID arrays fail because a single hard drive blew out the entire bus (Dell machines). This is less likely if each drive is controlled by a separate controller (like Apple's XRAID) but you should have definitely off-site tapes or something as dependable as tapes.
Another thing about them Apple's is that they allow you to micromanage the systems fairly easy while maintaining the integrity and stability of other Unix/BSD/Linux environments. Next to that, in the graphic business, almost everyone uses nothing BUT Mac's. Not only does it have specialized software but also great speed and ease-of-use while Linux takes a little longer to get to know for new graphic designers or freelancers. Next to that you also have the possibilities for compatibility with programs written for Linux (GTK, QT, X-Windows) but I wouldn't recommend using it for internet and network management and security (except for LDAP, their LDAP implementation is the greatest I have ever seen) since it's a pain in the butt and Linux works much easier and is more flexible in that area.
Also get some decent monitoring and reboot schedules on all critical machines. I have more than once seen different projects fail or have large downtimes because someone didn't monitor the SMART status of that oh-so-critical server or checked on the status of all daemons on that failover machine, they had the greatest uptime until they rebooted and it was noticed that their RAID0 array wasn't really consistent anymore for the last few months and half the server was basically running out of daemons sitting in memory and read their practical data over NAS shares.
I was going to check out what they had to say about it. They also released a press statement about the dust being kicked up:
Kan de Nedap stemmachine gemanipuleerd worden?
Alles is te manipuleren.
Can the Nedap voting machine be manipulated?
Everything can be manipulated
Is de Nedap stemmachine beveiligd tegen moedwillige manipulatie?
Ja. Tegen iedere nieuwe bedreiging worden maatregelen genomen.
Is the Nedap voting machine secured against manipulation
Yes. Against every new threat measures are taken
Kan de uitslag van de Nedap stemmachine gemanipuleerd worden?
Veel moeilijker dan bij "papieren" verkiezingen
Can the results of the Nedap voting machine be manipulated?
Much more difficult than with "paper" elections
Well, at least they're honest unlike Diebold over here that says they're system is the best and totally secure. Elections can and will always be manipulated as long as there are humans involved. If you make 1000's of people vote for a person by putting a gun against their head, you have succesfully manipulated the election.
Your comparing two entirely different products with each other:
Retail Windows XP Pro to a full-blown Workstation/Server Suite with e-mail and phone support. Try calling Microsoft with your Windows issue. You pay $55 for the initial call, they'll try to upsell you a support plan of course and then say that the issue is something to do with 3rd party software. You could compare SBS to RHWS please, pricing starts somewhere close to $1000 for 5 clients.
Next up QT compared to C#. Here you are comparing a multi-platform GUI-toolkit to a general programming framework. Compare GCC to C# or that IBM software for programming to Visual Studio. Also take in comparison the portability you get.
Cygwin to Unix services? Come on, you gotta be kidding me. They have nothing to do with each other.
I think you have poor product planning in your company and maybe someone with a MCP in your ordering department. Next to that, if you would open-source your software and share it, all those suites wouldn't cost you a dime. If you are a small company, your programmers should be capable enough of maintaining their own environment without support (it's been years since I called Microsoft, Apple, IBM's or RedHat's support line and we do have contracts with them) and if you're a bit bigger you might consider hiring a dedicated support guy. I have dealt with Dell and other companies before and before they handle your case and management gives permission for the guy to mess with the workstations/servers you will be 3 days out of production except if you give them half your paycheck.
This article looks more like a shameless plug for Microsoft FUD and a smart move by their marketing department towards their latest get-thee-f*cked campaign