Really? TFA talks about not being able to discuss contracts with third parties.
There's a difference between A company drawing up their own different business plan and then haggling on the price to showing your business plan to them and getting them to provide the exact service you spent ages planning for a slightly lower price.
That's kind of my point. These NDAs are used because it can be impossible to stop customers trying to get other companies to undercut you and take advantage of the work you've already done.
I get the impression a lot of people who say that restrictions on what you can say about your service is immoral, even if it isn't illegal, haven't experienced what it's like to be at a very small IT company.
Customers will mess you around big time. They'll get you to spend a lot of time preparing an assessment and quote, get you to travel halfway around the country to have a 45 minute meeting with you which is fair enough. However they'll then take your proposal, show it to another company who spend some time figuring out how they'd provide a similar service and travel up for a meeting. The customer would then say "can you do this £500 cheaper?". If they say yes they go back to the first company to see if they'll go lower.
You can argue this is just being sensible but in truth, you're using up a lot of other people's time and eventually they'll have next to no profit margin but can't give up the contract because so much time has been invested already. Whilst this is going on, the company has to take the focus away from looking for new contracts to work with them.
This can utterly destroy small businesses who need a steady stream of income to keep their head above water. I work for a company who suffers from this but thankfully it's comprised of a lot of small companies in similar situations and they'll warn each other if there's a customer wasting time like this. Not every company is IBM, Microsoft etc. who can absorb the cost of these customers. We were almost driven to administration by one particular religious group who, after stringing us along for a month and having us draw up a complex proposal and organise government assistance for them, decided to show our proposal to a different company and get them to undercut us.
Many companies have no choice but to force NDAs on lots of aspects of proposals because of this.
Any linux distro able to do that would take around as long to boot as windows (depending on startup aps) which eliminates the point of having this kind of setup. Then you'd have to deal with the added drain on resources running a VM on top of another OS would have, both in terms of CPU and ram usage and in terms of battery life.
Newtonian physics/mechanics is in common usage and although there's no 'Einstienian", there is the term 'relativistic' applied to the branch of physics he's most famous for
Yeah, how stupid of them to sell a version of windows that's legal at only $5 or so more than it would cost them to buy a pirated version (if they're that poor they're not exactly going to be on a bittorrent friendly internet connection).
Even in poor countries, if you're spending $300 on a PC, $10-$15 to have a legal, rootkit free OS, even one that isn't fully featured, makes it hard to justify Piracy. $15 premium for system builders to be able to claim that their PC's are 100% legal and legit?
You will NEVER see this edition in the west. This is designed for ultra poor countries and it's a fraction of the price of other editions. The version you will see on netbooks will be Home Basic (the most logical version for a fully compatible, budget laptop), not this.
Has anyone even seen a computer with Vista/XP starter edition?
The FUD surrounding Windows 7 is getting increasingly desperate each day. Slashdot is almost becoming a parody of itself on this front. If there's valid things to criticise MS on then fine but don't twist things around in a desperate bid to make them look evil in such a pathetic manner.
"What makes this criticism interesting is that this is an attack on the policies of what will certainly be the next British government â" it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office."
No it isn't. In fact it's incredibly common. They do it face to face every week with Prime Ministers Questions. These debates get incredibly heated and they're constantly slagging off each others' policies. Outside of parliament the papers continue attacks on policy, as do the talking heads on various news channels. Heck the Tories are still getting flak for Thatcher.
The summary is making far too big of a deal out of this. IT in itself won't be a battleground, in fact I doubt it'll make open debate outside of dedicated sessions on the subject that are attended by a dozen or so MPs and only gets aired on BBC parliament.
What will be the big issues in an election when it's called with be the following (possibly in this order); economy > crime > security (and privacy) > Green policies > education . The Tory party are not going to win any seats by spending time talking about open source.
There have been at least 3 majorly different codebases for the windows kernel(s). 9x, NT and Vista. I'm not the most knowledgable person when it comes to Linux but I believe the current kernel is still building on the early versions rather than a grounds up redesigns at various points.
Also, are you seriously telling me that a person will find it easier to know if Ubuntu or Kubuntu is more suited to them than "home premium or professional" (the only two choices they'll see in a store)? The Windows name is at least descriptive of what kind of target user it has in mind.
because it's an easy excuse for bashing MS. The fact that the end consumer will only ever have to make a choice between professional or home premium is besides the point.
At least 4 of the versions are designed for specific types of situations where a more heavily altered version of the OS is preferable
Games performance isn't really the issue for these. These things aren't designed for games.
What these are best used for are Media Centre setups. However it doesn't play all 1080p content smoothly which is a major issue. There are plenty of options for this kind of thing, the Popcorn hour, the WD HDTV box. Those are good to a point but fall down on format support, especially mkv which doesn't have full subtitle and codec support on either.
The current best option is an energy efficient Athlon based setup. These cost about $75-$100 more than an atom system and use a bit more power but they'll play back any video you throw at them without dropping any frames.
Maybe with a dual core atom and using dual core optimised codecs this will reach the goal of never having to notice a dropped frame, regardless of format and bit rate but this atom solution still isn't the Media center beast it could be.
Because you're spreading a minority to a minority. With a virus on Linux, if you try to infect random desktops, you've just a 2% chance of finding a desktop then that chance is lowered further because it has to look for something unpatched.
If you're a lucky virus writer, you could possibly infect a couple dozen machines that way. It's not worth their time to do that.
Look at vaccinations. To protect a population against a disease, you only need something that 90% of people to be protected against it. The other 10% are safe because they have no one to catch it from.
Linux servers have to be constantly patched to protect them because they can and do fall victim to specifically targeted attacks (just google; linux servers attacked vulnerability, to see plenty of examples). OSX has had some high profile viruses recently too.
The biggest protection minority OS' have is their minority standing.
Let me guess, your the type of person who thinks Linux can't get viruses? That it doesn't crash? That Linux wouldn't result in even more phonecalls from parents because they're having trouble installing a piece of hardware or software?
getting them to do command line functions over the phone isn't fun.
I'd say 'what the hell' too. But in response to your point that Microsoft's model doesn't work.
The single distribution model has been incredibly effective for MS with XP. It's well recognised, problems are easy to troubleshoot because they of the vast wealth of info available for it and the fact that you know from one XP system to the next, you can do things exactly the same way.
It's hard enough for the average person to learn even slight differences (one of the reasons for resistance to the 'ribbon' in office, despite it being faster and better than toolbard). Having to know the difference between Linux on their eeePC, Ubuntu, Gentoo, mandrake or whatever will be beyond the average non-techie.
You can argue about XP being a virus magnet but a patched up system with an anti-virus is incredibly hard to infect without the user doing something stupid (clicking yes to something, running something untested). It also has next to nothing to do with the single distribution model.
ATM's don't let you yank out the card but there are scores of Chip and Pin machines that will.
Who says the system is worse? Spoilage rate and costs are only 2 factors. There's staff levels, level of monitoring needed, speed of voting, speed of counting etc.
2% spoilage isn't huge and it's probably safe to assume that it'll improve in the next election. All the advantages with only a slight difference in spoilage would make it a sensible choice.
The EFF says the system is flawed because it requires people to verify their vote once they selected it? It would be far worse if there wasn't a verification.
It's not like this is unusual behaviour in any electronic system. You don't take your bank card out of an ATM or chip and pin machine until you're told to and most ATMs require a 'yes I'm sure' for any actions that would cost. You also don't yank out your card until you're told to.
A 2% spoilage rate although higher than the typical rate, isn't incredibly high. At some point you really can't make the process any easier without your actions actually making mistakes and confusion more likely. Of course there's the question : do you really want people who can't handle incredibly basic instructions voting?
Most viruses are caught either through stupid users clicking something they shouldn't or through exploits, most commonly through the internet browser but also through opening infected files using a certain piece of software .
The majority of windows users get their software through distributors too.
You could write a list several pages long about what teachers 'need' to know or the teach, each of them is a huge deal to someone somewhere. Schools teach HTML using tags that would make the W3C tear their hair out, few schools teach proper web safty or how to more effectively use search engines, there's only ever a narrow range of programs taught etc.
Each of these things is a big issue but all these things can never be resolved. You only have so many school hours in a day to teach people. Yes learning CSS alongside HTML would be good, but that takes time and is harder to teach. Yes teaching OO alongside Office would be beneficial but again that takes more time.
There's only so much you can teach classes before students either get overloaded with too much info in too little time or you have to push something out.
It's why so many places force teachings of things like slavery or the holocaust. You can't cover all of world history in a history class so you have to prioritise some things at the expense of others.
If I was in boy george's house at the time, I would fully expect to be called in for formal police questioning which I wouldn't be able to refuse without penalty. No one has been arrested here.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? TFA talks about not being able to discuss contracts with third parties.
There's a difference between A company drawing up their own different business plan and then haggling on the price to showing your business plan to them and getting them to provide the exact service you spent ages planning for a slightly lower price.
That's kind of my point. These NDAs are used because it can be impossible to stop customers trying to get other companies to undercut you and take advantage of the work you've already done.
I get the impression a lot of people who say that restrictions on what you can say about your service is immoral, even if it isn't illegal, haven't experienced what it's like to be at a very small IT company.
Customers will mess you around big time. They'll get you to spend a lot of time preparing an assessment and quote, get you to travel halfway around the country to have a 45 minute meeting with you which is fair enough. However they'll then take your proposal, show it to another company who spend some time figuring out how they'd provide a similar service and travel up for a meeting. The customer would then say "can you do this £500 cheaper?". If they say yes they go back to the first company to see if they'll go lower.
You can argue this is just being sensible but in truth, you're using up a lot of other people's time and eventually they'll have next to no profit margin but can't give up the contract because so much time has been invested already. Whilst this is going on, the company has to take the focus away from looking for new contracts to work with them.
This can utterly destroy small businesses who need a steady stream of income to keep their head above water. I work for a company who suffers from this but thankfully it's comprised of a lot of small companies in similar situations and they'll warn each other if there's a customer wasting time like this. Not every company is IBM, Microsoft etc. who can absorb the cost of these customers. We were almost driven to administration by one particular religious group who, after stringing us along for a month and having us draw up a complex proposal and organise government assistance for them, decided to show our proposal to a different company and get them to undercut us.
Many companies have no choice but to force NDAs on lots of aspects of proposals because of this.
Any linux distro able to do that would take around as long to boot as windows (depending on startup aps) which eliminates the point of having this kind of setup. Then you'd have to deal with the added drain on resources running a VM on top of another OS would have, both in terms of CPU and ram usage and in terms of battery life.
It's going to be a GUI that just links dozens of different emulators?
Newtonian physics/mechanics is in common usage and although there's no 'Einstienian", there is the term 'relativistic' applied to the branch of physics he's most famous for
Yeah, how stupid of them to sell a version of windows that's legal at only $5 or so more than it would cost them to buy a pirated version (if they're that poor they're not exactly going to be on a bittorrent friendly internet connection).
Even in poor countries, if you're spending $300 on a PC, $10-$15 to have a legal, rootkit free OS, even one that isn't fully featured, makes it hard to justify Piracy. $15 premium for system builders to be able to claim that their PC's are 100% legal and legit?
You will NEVER see this edition in the west. This is designed for ultra poor countries and it's a fraction of the price of other editions. The version you will see on netbooks will be Home Basic (the most logical version for a fully compatible, budget laptop), not this.
Has anyone even seen a computer with Vista/XP starter edition?
The FUD surrounding Windows 7 is getting increasingly desperate each day. Slashdot is almost becoming a parody of itself on this front. If there's valid things to criticise MS on then fine but don't twist things around in a desperate bid to make them look evil in such a pathetic manner.
"What makes this criticism interesting is that this is an attack on the policies of what will certainly be the next British government â" it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office."
No it isn't. In fact it's incredibly common. They do it face to face every week with Prime Ministers Questions. These debates get incredibly heated and they're constantly slagging off each others' policies. Outside of parliament the papers continue attacks on policy, as do the talking heads on various news channels. Heck the Tories are still getting flak for Thatcher.
The summary is making far too big of a deal out of this. IT in itself won't be a battleground, in fact I doubt it'll make open debate outside of dedicated sessions on the subject that are attended by a dozen or so MPs and only gets aired on BBC parliament.
What will be the big issues in an election when it's called with be the following (possibly in this order); economy > crime > security (and privacy) > Green policies > education . The Tory party are not going to win any seats by spending time talking about open source.
well yeah, as that point wasn't raised at all in your previous posts. Sadly I lack the ability to read your mind to find points to refute.
There have been at least 3 majorly different codebases for the windows kernel(s). 9x, NT and Vista. I'm not the most knowledgable person when it comes to Linux but I believe the current kernel is still building on the early versions rather than a grounds up redesigns at various points.
Also, are you seriously telling me that a person will find it easier to know if Ubuntu or Kubuntu is more suited to them than "home premium or professional" (the only two choices they'll see in a store)? The Windows name is at least descriptive of what kind of target user it has in mind.
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/derivatives
Yeah Ubuntu only has 8 versions based around the same kernel!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin
because it's an easy excuse for bashing MS. The fact that the end consumer will only ever have to make a choice between professional or home premium is besides the point.
At least 4 of the versions are designed for specific types of situations where a more heavily altered version of the OS is preferable
It doesn't, that's my point
Games performance isn't really the issue for these. These things aren't designed for games.
What these are best used for are Media Centre setups. However it doesn't play all 1080p content smoothly which is a major issue. There are plenty of options for this kind of thing, the Popcorn hour, the WD HDTV box. Those are good to a point but fall down on format support, especially mkv which doesn't have full subtitle and codec support on either.
The current best option is an energy efficient Athlon based setup. These cost about $75-$100 more than an atom system and use a bit more power but they'll play back any video you throw at them without dropping any frames.
Maybe with a dual core atom and using dual core optimised codecs this will reach the goal of never having to notice a dropped frame, regardless of format and bit rate but this atom solution still isn't the Media center beast it could be.
Because you're spreading a minority to a minority. With a virus on Linux, if you try to infect random desktops, you've just a 2% chance of finding a desktop then that chance is lowered further because it has to look for something unpatched.
If you're a lucky virus writer, you could possibly infect a couple dozen machines that way. It's not worth their time to do that.
Look at vaccinations. To protect a population against a disease, you only need something that 90% of people to be protected against it. The other 10% are safe because they have no one to catch it from.
Linux servers have to be constantly patched to protect them because they can and do fall victim to specifically targeted attacks (just google; linux servers attacked vulnerability, to see plenty of examples). OSX has had some high profile viruses recently too.
The biggest protection minority OS' have is their minority standing.
Let me guess, your the type of person who thinks Linux can't get viruses? That it doesn't crash? That Linux wouldn't result in even more phonecalls from parents because they're having trouble installing a piece of hardware or software?
getting them to do command line functions over the phone isn't fun.
I'd say 'what the hell' too. But in response to your point that Microsoft's model doesn't work.
The single distribution model has been incredibly effective for MS with XP. It's well recognised, problems are easy to troubleshoot because they of the vast wealth of info available for it and the fact that you know from one XP system to the next, you can do things exactly the same way.
It's hard enough for the average person to learn even slight differences (one of the reasons for resistance to the 'ribbon' in office, despite it being faster and better than toolbard). Having to know the difference between Linux on their eeePC, Ubuntu, Gentoo, mandrake or whatever will be beyond the average non-techie.
You can argue about XP being a virus magnet but a patched up system with an anti-virus is incredibly hard to infect without the user doing something stupid (clicking yes to something, running something untested). It also has next to nothing to do with the single distribution model.
ATM's don't let you yank out the card but there are scores of Chip and Pin machines that will.
Who says the system is worse? Spoilage rate and costs are only 2 factors. There's staff levels, level of monitoring needed, speed of voting, speed of counting etc.
2% spoilage isn't huge and it's probably safe to assume that it'll improve in the next election. All the advantages with only a slight difference in spoilage would make it a sensible choice.
The EFF says the system is flawed because it requires people to verify their vote once they selected it? It would be far worse if there wasn't a verification.
It's not like this is unusual behaviour in any electronic system. You don't take your bank card out of an ATM or chip and pin machine until you're told to and most ATMs require a 'yes I'm sure' for any actions that would cost. You also don't yank out your card until you're told to.
A 2% spoilage rate although higher than the typical rate, isn't incredibly high. At some point you really can't make the process any easier without your actions actually making mistakes and confusion more likely. Of course there's the question : do you really want people who can't handle incredibly basic instructions voting?
Most viruses are caught either through stupid users clicking something they shouldn't or through exploits, most commonly through the internet browser but also through opening infected files using a certain piece of software .
The majority of windows users get their software through distributors too.
You could write a list several pages long about what teachers 'need' to know or the teach, each of them is a huge deal to someone somewhere. Schools teach HTML using tags that would make the W3C tear their hair out, few schools teach proper web safty or how to more effectively use search engines, there's only ever a narrow range of programs taught etc.
Each of these things is a big issue but all these things can never be resolved. You only have so many school hours in a day to teach people. Yes learning CSS alongside HTML would be good, but that takes time and is harder to teach. Yes teaching OO alongside Office would be beneficial but again that takes more time.
There's only so much you can teach classes before students either get overloaded with too much info in too little time or you have to push something out.
It's why so many places force teachings of things like slavery or the holocaust. You can't cover all of world history in a history class so you have to prioritise some things at the expense of others.
I hope you're not suggesting that sometimes people may lie to the police!
If I was in boy george's house at the time, I would fully expect to be called in for formal police questioning which I wouldn't be able to refuse without penalty. No one has been arrested here.