The thing is, companies like Microsoft and Apple are so cash-rich that they consider any fines resulting from legal action to be the cost of doing business, because unless those fines are in the range of billions, they do not even show up as a blip on the quarterly reports.
You mean, like selling people functionality which is avertised as a key feature then removing it, like Apple did on the iPhone with the 3.1.x updates?
Microsoft is evil for doing this, but they are not the only ones. Sometimes Slashdot's "most favored" manufacturers do this as well.:-( Unfortunately, when it comes to making a buck, committing what is effectively fraud (selling functionality then removing it after the sale is made) to sell it back at a premium (making the customer buy it twice or more) is becoming the standard way of doing business nowadays, because the punitive results from legal action are negligible and are just considered the cost of doing business.
Microsoft has been slapped for anticompetitive behavior many times in the past - but unfortunately the punishment for their abuse of a (legal) monopoly position has amounted to being thwapped with a wet noodle; inconsequential fines that they just consider part of the cost of doing business. Microsoft needs to be fined to the tune of BILLIONS for them to even notice the fines in their quarterly results, or their game, OS, office applications, development platforms, and other divisions need to be broken up. Until then, it will be business as usual, despite whatever laws are in place and what rulings are handed down by the courts.
In other words, they're Microsoft, and they will do what they want, and people will just keep buying.
You know, I WAS about to buy an Xbox 360 - one of my roommates has one and it's great for streaming netflix (it is the original rev and I've had to fix the ring of death multiple times).
This news (Microsoft restricting storage options) just killed any incentive I had to buy an Xbox.
Automakers may have done that, and also quit selling shop manuals to the public to try to lock customers in, but many techs at dealers have posted torrents. I just grabbed WIS for one of my cars the other night because the manufacturer no longer makes the manual available to the public, so it's either download it off a torrent or pay a "pirate" $20 for a "counterfeit" copy. The thing is, when you buy a car, you should also get a service manual. You WILL need it.
The current Apple OS, OS X, is based on NeXT and BSD (it's basically the new version of NeXT). The original MacOS had no relation at all to any *nix version.
Many of them do that, but some that do (the Motorolas) exhibit severe HDCP handshaking bugs when waking up, with the recommended "fix" being to leave the box on 24/7.
I don't know where you get your compact fluorescents, but mine come on immediately, and I don't notice any delay before they're at full brigtness. Maybe you just need to buy newer ones that have the latest high-tech solid-state ballasts.
I've tested a total of about six different models from four different manufacturers when I started using CFLs. They were all indoor models - they all took about 90 seconds to come up to full brightness at room temperature. Initial brightness was about 1/3 to 1/2 of full brightness. Yes, I used an industrial light meter, from the same location and distance from the fixture, using the same fixture.
More recently I installed outdoor CFL flood lamps; they suck. I haven't measured them but I can tell just by looking that initial brightness is way less than 1/10 of full brightness now that the weather is colder (late summer, it was fine). If I could be bothered I'd use the light meter, but I can tell you that people's complaints about CFLs for outdoor use are right: they're useless for several minutes in colder weather.
Screw casinos. If they don't want people counting cards, they shouldn't be offering games such as blackjack. Period. There is NOTHING ethically or morally wrong with counting cards; after all, the odds are known to both the "house" and the gambler Their problem is that when the offer blackjack, the cards dealt to everyone are known, so a careful observer would be able to know if there are more low or more high cards left in the deck. Since these are known factors and simply looking at what is dealt is not cheating, casinos have no business kicking people out for doing nothing beyond being attentive.
Don't want people counting cards? Stop offering blackjack or any other games where everything that is dealt is revealed to all.
I've thought about trying my hand at counting cards (I've never played blackjack btw) because the theory is simple enough; it's nothing more than keeping track of high and low cards - as I said the premise is easy enough but actually doing it under pressure in a fast-moving game while surrounded by distractions is entirely different. To see how simple the theory is check out the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting
How about people who live in the city and walk or use public transportation? What about people who own hatchbacks and are not comfortable leaving a laptop bag out in the car?
The movie industry is only making "pirated" content even more superior to the "genuine" product. They're missing the fact that most of the pre-release torrents are coming from their employees or from DVD replication houses to begin with.
There have been 3D games out for years. Magic Carpet had red/blue 3D modes, and I think there were 3D builds of Descent as well. Those games date back to the days of DOS/Win98 in real mode.
My first laptop, an NEC versa, was 3D. I mean, it had length, width, and depth. A REAL innovation would be a 2D laptop! Give me a foldable thin sheet with the power of an i7, with >4GB of RAM and 500GB of storage and THAT will be an innovation!
OK seriously though,. There are plenty of uses for 3D: 3D movies, gaming, architects' showing clients 3D models of their proposals, MRIs, "virtual" surgeries, etc. You'd want a 17" laptop for serious graphics work, but when/where portability is key, along with decent runtime (battery), a 15"-16" notebook is vastly superior.
*I* want a 17" notebook. My priority is ultimate performance with occasional portability (I also want a notebook for portability for diagnostics, etc.). I can't think of a single client who would want to lug around a 17" notebook; it'd be overkill for word processing, light CAD work, and so forth.
There needs to be a better solution though: it shouldn't be limited to wearing glasses all the time, sitting exactly on-axis with the screen, and so forth. It's better than the shutter glasses though, since it won't be limited to just one person.
That is not an option on shared hosting. Do you really think that dreamhost, hostmysite, and so forth will allow multiple-domain certs on an IP shared with 30 other customers? No, I don't think so. It's not even really practical on a VPS because if you host multiple clients, then you would have to get the certificate authority to add domains to that cert, and what if the expiration dates for the domains don't match? You'd have to re-up all the other domains, and I'm sure clients would just love that.
One problem with UAC in Vista was if UAC was enabled, there were some properties you could NOT get to at ALL - you could click on some linkbuttons in forms and dialogs and they simply would not open unless you actually were an administrator. Some of the system and graphics properties dialogs come to mind. Windows 7 doesn't seem to be anywhere near as broken in that regard.
You hit the nail on the head: Windows users usually are effectively running as root, and the fixes so far that Microsoft has come up with have been half-assed and failed mimicries of *nix-type models. What they desperately NEED to do is cut the cord on backwards compatibility, just like Apple did, and move to a straight *nix-like or VMS-like model where root/admin is god, and everyone else isn't, and applications aren't. They own VirtualPC and are rolling out XP Mode which is an XP environment inside of a single-purpose Virtual PC build for Windows 7 users. Why not use that enviromnment on top of a BSD (or even Linux) kernel, embrace and extend (but not extinguish) open source, and immediately gain an environment designed from the ground up with security in mind?
UAC is a lot less obtrusive in Windows 7 than it was in Vista. The OS X and Linux models are still a heck of a lot better, but it's still far, far less annoying than it was in Vista. I'm still not convinced it ends malware problems though; just cuts down very slightly on ID-10T issues.
I used to like to code at home. Unfortunately I haven't coded a line of C++ in years - I used to dabble at home and at work was a release engineer maintaining builds, fixing bugs, writing installers, and so forth. I'm self-employed now. My partners and contractors do most of the coding, and I do mostly sysadmin work, network buildouts, and video surveillance and when I do work in software it's just maintaining subversion and writing functional specs. Being self-employed, I work long hours. It's system administration anywhere from 8 to 20 hours a day. All too often I'm logged in at 2:00am working on systems, or am at a client sit until then doing after-hour buildouts or upgrades.
Because of that when I am home I just want to chill - but friends, roommates, and congregation members hit me up for help with their computers, so I help them out. In my free time, I just want to relax and hang out with friends. I'm so overworked and tired I can't even be bothered to touch my synthesizers, let alone work on my blog or dabble on iPhone apps I have been writing specs for.
I want to get back into OOP but there is such a thing as burnout - and I've hit it. I'd LOVE to go back to working 9-5, earning a lot more money to do what I do best (release engineering, keeping QA and development communication and progress in sync, automating the build process, mentoring QA engineers, and avoiding getting asked to fill in director-level positions). If I were to go back to that I'd get a lot of immediate gratification and would be able to go back to coding in my spare time, and maybe start some F/OSS projects I've had in mind for a while. However my partners and I are vested in building something and making it this far through this economy is a tremendous accomplishment and I want to see it through to the end and hopefully reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Is my life well-rounded right now? Aside from working long hours, I try to make it so.
Computer problems used to keep me up through the night: If I installed a bleeding-edge build of X or KDE and it broke, I used to stay up in front of the computer until I got it working. I used to work with MythTV until it worked (Myth is such an ugly app to set up by the way - it's a piece of crap, but wonderful once it is working). Now, I just want it to work. If it breaks, I'll work with it for a short while, then put it aside and log in from another computer at home, leaving it for the weekend. I'm too tired and too sick of dealing with sysadmin and customer support crap all day and night to care about my own computer having the latest and greatest on it, and am too tired and worn out to learn great projects like fog, amanda, and so on. I'd love to start programming some kde utilities but haven't the ambition, the time, or energy to do so. I long for the days when I can just leave work at work.
I don't doubt it, but on the other hand, Adobe, Microsoft, et. al really ought to lower their prices. Ever since Microsoft knocked Wordperfect/Corel Office and Lotus Smartsuite pretty much out of the market the price for Office Pro has quadrupled. Ever since Corel Draw became irrelevant and the graphics companies consolidated (Adobe buying up Aldus, Corel buying up Jasc, etc.) the Adobe apps have skyrocketed in price.
They got where they are through piracy: if fark-reading college students didn't pick up photoshop off of "warez" sites and learn their suites, Adobe might not have been able to maintain such dominance in the industry. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry didn't "pirate" Microsoft Office, maybe the monopoly wouldn't exist. Maybe Microsoft just might be more interested in interoperability because it would benefit them. They got where they are through piracy, and then implemented strict "activation" schemes now. The thing is, activation schemes only penalize paying customers. People who run 'cracked' software don't have to deal with false positives. They don't have to call Microsoft and wait on hold for 20 minutes for manual craptivation after they've done their second semi-annual Windows reinstall or did their video card upgrade. "Pirates" just install their cracked and slipstreamed Windows and Adobe Creative Suite install and they're done. Activation and Genuine Advantage don't affect them in the slightest.
It's pathetic when the "counterfeit" software is superior to the legitimate.
What is the solution? When it comes to operating systems, there is Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, and other options - or even Mac OS X if you're adventurous enough to explore the hackintosh option (or just pick up a Mini). When it comes to office suites, download openoffice.org. With rare exception, the OpenOffice.org Suite will do everything you need it to do, and if you're an advanced user, you'll find that many features (such as integration with databases) is actually easier and superior in OpenOffice. Sure, the macro language is lacking in documentation, but if you're a coder, you'll be too busy appreciating knowing that your macro will actually work on a Mac to think about missing VBA.
When it comes to graphic suites, unless you need things like layer effects, droplets, and other advanced features, gimp, inkscape, and xara extreme are very likely good enough for you. If you know what layer effects are, then no, gimp won't replace Photoshop, but your living probably does rely on Adobe product to some extent so go out and buy it; yes, it runs on Crossover Office (or even wine with some finagling).
I run Linux about 95% of the time. F/OSS does it for me. Here is what I still need Windows for:
* running my embroidery machine
* Netflix (damn you, netflix! Bring the flash player back!)
* syncing my iPhone (let's get with it, Amarok!)
* several games that run on neither Crossover nor Cedega - and yes, a couple of them are Microsoft games
Now, I had a really good Hackintosh install running for a while - but I had to wipe it to free up a drive for a job. When I go back to the Hackintosh I plan to install Snow Leopard. I would love to run OS X 100% of the time (Yes, it's legal. I do own a Mac but like PC hardware better; I use workstation motherboards and faster CPUs and video cards) but I find the KDE environment so productive with kioslaves in konqueror, it's hard to give it up and switch to the Finder. Most F/OSS software I run on Linux is also available on OS X. Worst case, it runs under fink.
Seriously though: let's give companies what they want. They got where they are through "piracy" because tom, dick, and harry learned the apps at home and brought that knowledge to the office where it influenced purchase decisions. Download F/OSS instead, learn it, and bring that knowledge to the office. You'll see Adobe, Microsoft, etc. either lowering their prices or even "licensing" software free for personal use, much like the antivirus companies did.
Uh, no. Why should small businesses be forced to pay a certificate authority for certificates for appliances (spam filters, etc.), terminal services web pages, external access to webmail and intranet pages over SSL when a self-signed cert (even an expired one) will do? This is a user education issue, not a "let's get rid of it for everyone." It is for corporate use that you can optionally install self-signed certs into any of the mainstream browsers. There is a legitimate need for such things, and forcing everyone to pay for signed certs is a colossal waste of money.
Where it comes to e-commerce though, I agree with you, because however slight the protection may be, there is a very slight assurance that yes, https://www.foo.com/ is actually run by foocorp, not $phisher. Now, the verification process for most certificate resellers is between minimal and nonexistent, but most phishers won't even bother with SSL to begin with.
But let me hazard a guess here: You work for a certificate authority or reseller, right?
There is a much larger processing requirement for transferring everything via https plus the bandwidth requirement is higher. Some days slashdot loads slow enough - do you really want to see a performance reduction? What you'll see is a return of ads to offset the increased server and bandwidth costs, and the ads will slow load time as well. (What, you still see ads here? Stop trolling, get your karma up then you can turn ads off)
I know, you're kidding, but a lot of people are going to take your comment seriously, hop on this and say "Yeah, why doesn't/. do everything over https?" - what they don't realize is that it introduces a fair bit of overhead that adds up very quickly when you have thousands of concurrent users.
Years ago when I first set up SSL it was a pain in the neck. Installing third-party certs was a painful process with little, outdated docs on how to do it with Apache, but what was worse was I also had to set up self-signed certificates and that was an even more painful process because the documentation was so sparse there might not have been any. webmin didn't help much either, so I had to do a lot of searching and some reading of code in the supporting projects to figure it all out. Once I knew what needed to be in place it was fairly straightforward but getting their was a major pain in the neck. It's not so much a matter of a complicated process, but what directives do I need to add to.conf files?
I wrote a howto for myself so the process could be repeated. I should have completed the howto for public consumption but being self employed there is never any time for that kind of thing.
At this point the docs should be much better - at least I hope they are.
Windows was a little easier but not much. Sure, it's point-and-click, but when you have to click around in 38 different dialog boxes (Yes yes I know, 38 is an exaggeration), you'll be wish you could just do it all from the command line. The process on Windows is easily as complicated as on Linux, in fact slightly more so once you understand the steps. Fortunately Microsoft released a tool for making creation/installation of SSL certs a much easier process. Check out these sites:
In later versions of Windows they have made it a heck of a lot easier. In 2008 it's a breeze - you don't even need to download any resource kit tools to make it easy.
1. They are proclaiming it to be open source, which is deceptive. It's "open source" except where it matters (device drivers/modules) from a maintainability perspective.
2. Their employees are astroturfing
3. Releasing open source drivers does not in any way reveal your chip mask and hardware architecture. Atheros' real competitors have access to electron microscopes and everything else it takes to buy a router off the shelf and copy chips exactly; simply keeping the drivers closed is not going to deter, say, realtek or broadcom in the slightest.
Besides, Buffalo is supporting open source through action (money) not just in press releases - beating Netgear to the punch by a couple of years. Netgear is just playing the "me too! Signed, metoo@aol.com" game.
Slashdot Mirror
"It looks like IBM isn't much of a friend of Microsoft's anymore."
Anymore? This is old news. Remember OS/2?
circumvention for the purpose of interoperability is expressly allowed by the exclusion clause in the DMCA.
The thing is, companies like Microsoft and Apple are so cash-rich that they consider any fines resulting from legal action to be the cost of doing business, because unless those fines are in the range of billions, they do not even show up as a blip on the quarterly reports.
You mean, like selling people functionality which is avertised as a key feature then removing it, like Apple did on the iPhone with the 3.1.x updates?
Microsoft is evil for doing this, but they are not the only ones. Sometimes Slashdot's "most favored" manufacturers do this as well. :-( Unfortunately, when it comes to making a buck, committing what is effectively fraud (selling functionality then removing it after the sale is made) to sell it back at a premium (making the customer buy it twice or more) is becoming the standard way of doing business nowadays, because the punitive results from legal action are negligible and are just considered the cost of doing business.
Microsoft has been slapped for anticompetitive behavior many times in the past - but unfortunately the punishment for their abuse of a (legal) monopoly position has amounted to being thwapped with a wet noodle; inconsequential fines that they just consider part of the cost of doing business. Microsoft needs to be fined to the tune of BILLIONS for them to even notice the fines in their quarterly results, or their game, OS, office applications, development platforms, and other divisions need to be broken up. Until then, it will be business as usual, despite whatever laws are in place and what rulings are handed down by the courts.
In other words, they're Microsoft, and they will do what they want, and people will just keep buying.
You know, I WAS about to buy an Xbox 360 - one of my roommates has one and it's great for streaming netflix (it is the original rev and I've had to fix the ring of death multiple times).
This news (Microsoft restricting storage options) just killed any incentive I had to buy an Xbox.
Automakers may have done that, and also quit selling shop manuals to the public to try to lock customers in, but many techs at dealers have posted torrents. I just grabbed WIS for one of my cars the other night because the manufacturer no longer makes the manual available to the public, so it's either download it off a torrent or pay a "pirate" $20 for a "counterfeit" copy. The thing is, when you buy a car, you should also get a service manual. You WILL need it.
$699 per processor per installation.
The current Apple OS, OS X, is based on NeXT and BSD (it's basically the new version of NeXT). The original MacOS had no relation at all to any *nix version.
Many of them do that, but some that do (the Motorolas) exhibit severe HDCP handshaking bugs when waking up, with the recommended "fix" being to leave the box on 24/7.
I've tested a total of about six different models from four different manufacturers when I started using CFLs. They were all indoor models - they all took about 90 seconds to come up to full brightness at room temperature. Initial brightness was about 1/3 to 1/2 of full brightness. Yes, I used an industrial light meter, from the same location and distance from the fixture, using the same fixture.
More recently I installed outdoor CFL flood lamps; they suck. I haven't measured them but I can tell just by looking that initial brightness is way less than 1/10 of full brightness now that the weather is colder (late summer, it was fine). If I could be bothered I'd use the light meter, but I can tell you that people's complaints about CFLs for outdoor use are right: they're useless for several minutes in colder weather.
What? He accidentally the distribution rights? He accidentally the whole thing? OH NOES!
Screw casinos. If they don't want people counting cards, they shouldn't be offering games such as blackjack. Period.
There is NOTHING ethically or morally wrong with counting cards; after all, the odds are known to both the "house" and the gambler Their problem is that when the offer blackjack, the cards dealt to everyone are known, so a careful observer would be able to know if there are more low or more high cards left in the deck. Since these are known factors and simply looking at what is dealt is not cheating, casinos have no business kicking people out for doing nothing beyond being attentive.
Don't want people counting cards? Stop offering blackjack or any other games where everything that is dealt is revealed to all.
I've thought about trying my hand at counting cards (I've never played blackjack btw) because the theory is simple enough; it's nothing more than keeping track of high and low cards - as I said the premise is easy enough but actually doing it under pressure in a fast-moving game while surrounded by distractions is entirely different. To see how simple the theory is check out the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting
How about people who live in the city and walk or use public transportation?
What about people who own hatchbacks and are not comfortable leaving a laptop bag out in the car?
The movie industry is only making "pirated" content even more superior to the "genuine" product. They're missing the fact that most of the pre-release torrents are coming from their employees or from DVD replication houses to begin with.
False positives are worse; it is better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer.
There have been 3D games out for years. Magic Carpet had red/blue 3D modes, and I think there were 3D builds of Descent as well. Those games date back to the days of DOS/Win98 in real mode.
My first laptop, an NEC versa, was 3D. I mean, it had length, width, and depth. A REAL innovation would be a 2D laptop! Give me a foldable thin sheet with the power of an i7, with >4GB of RAM and 500GB of storage and THAT will be an innovation!
OK seriously though,. There are plenty of uses for 3D: 3D movies, gaming, architects' showing clients 3D models of their proposals, MRIs, "virtual" surgeries, etc. You'd want a 17" laptop for serious graphics work, but when/where portability is key, along with decent runtime (battery), a 15"-16" notebook is vastly superior.
*I* want a 17" notebook. My priority is ultimate performance with occasional portability (I also want a notebook for portability for diagnostics, etc.). I can't think of a single client who would want to lug around a 17" notebook; it'd be overkill for word processing, light CAD work, and so forth.
There needs to be a better solution though: it shouldn't be limited to wearing glasses all the time, sitting exactly on-axis with the screen, and so forth. It's better than the shutter glasses though, since it won't be limited to just one person.
That is not an option on shared hosting. Do you really think that dreamhost, hostmysite, and so forth will allow multiple-domain certs on an IP shared with 30 other customers? No, I don't think so. It's not even really practical on a VPS because if you host multiple clients, then you would have to get the certificate authority to add domains to that cert, and what if the expiration dates for the domains don't match? You'd have to re-up all the other domains, and I'm sure clients would just love that.
One problem with UAC in Vista was if UAC was enabled, there were some properties you could NOT get to at ALL - you could click on some linkbuttons in forms and dialogs and they simply would not open unless you actually were an administrator. Some of the system and graphics properties dialogs come to mind. Windows 7 doesn't seem to be anywhere near as broken in that regard.
You hit the nail on the head: Windows users usually are effectively running as root, and the fixes so far that Microsoft has come up with have been half-assed and failed mimicries of *nix-type models. What they desperately NEED to do is cut the cord on backwards compatibility, just like Apple did, and move to a straight *nix-like or VMS-like model where root/admin is god, and everyone else isn't, and applications aren't. They own VirtualPC and are rolling out XP Mode which is an XP environment inside of a single-purpose Virtual PC build for Windows 7 users. Why not use that enviromnment on top of a BSD (or even Linux) kernel, embrace and extend (but not extinguish) open source, and immediately gain an environment designed from the ground up with security in mind?
UAC is a lot less obtrusive in Windows 7 than it was in Vista. The OS X and Linux models are still a heck of a lot better, but it's still far, far less annoying than it was in Vista. I'm still not convinced it ends malware problems though; just cuts down very slightly on ID-10T issues.
I used to like to code at home. Unfortunately I haven't coded a line of C++ in years - I used to dabble at home and at work was a release engineer maintaining builds, fixing bugs, writing installers, and so forth. I'm self-employed now. My partners and contractors do most of the coding, and I do mostly sysadmin work, network buildouts, and video surveillance and when I do work in software it's just maintaining subversion and writing functional specs. Being self-employed, I work long hours. It's system administration anywhere from 8 to 20 hours a day. All too often I'm logged in at 2:00am working on systems, or am at a client sit until then doing after-hour buildouts or upgrades.
Because of that when I am home I just want to chill - but friends, roommates, and congregation members hit me up for help with their computers, so I help them out. In my free time, I just want to relax and hang out with friends. I'm so overworked and tired I can't even be bothered to touch my synthesizers, let alone work on my blog or dabble on iPhone apps I have been writing specs for.
I want to get back into OOP but there is such a thing as burnout - and I've hit it. I'd LOVE to go back to working 9-5, earning a lot more money to do what I do best (release engineering, keeping QA and development communication and progress in sync, automating the build process, mentoring QA engineers, and avoiding getting asked to fill in director-level positions). If I were to go back to that I'd get a lot of immediate gratification and would be able to go back to coding in my spare time, and maybe start some F/OSS projects I've had in mind for a while. However my partners and I are vested in building something and making it this far through this economy is a tremendous accomplishment and I want to see it through to the end and hopefully reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Is my life well-rounded right now? Aside from working long hours, I try to make it so.
Computer problems used to keep me up through the night: If I installed a bleeding-edge build of X or KDE and it broke, I used to stay up in front of the computer until I got it working. I used to work with MythTV until it worked (Myth is such an ugly app to set up by the way - it's a piece of crap, but wonderful once it is working). Now, I just want it to work. If it breaks, I'll work with it for a short while, then put it aside and log in from another computer at home, leaving it for the weekend. I'm too tired and too sick of dealing with sysadmin and customer support crap all day and night to care about my own computer having the latest and greatest on it, and am too tired and worn out to learn great projects like fog, amanda, and so on. I'd love to start programming some kde utilities but haven't the ambition, the time, or energy to do so. I long for the days when I can just leave work at work.
I don't doubt it, but on the other hand, Adobe, Microsoft, et. al really ought to lower their prices. Ever since Microsoft knocked Wordperfect/Corel Office and Lotus Smartsuite pretty much out of the market the price for Office Pro has quadrupled. Ever since Corel Draw became irrelevant and the graphics companies consolidated (Adobe buying up Aldus, Corel buying up Jasc, etc.) the Adobe apps have skyrocketed in price.
They got where they are through piracy: if fark-reading college students didn't pick up photoshop off of "warez" sites and learn their suites, Adobe might not have been able to maintain such dominance in the industry. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry didn't "pirate" Microsoft Office, maybe the monopoly wouldn't exist. Maybe Microsoft just might be more interested in interoperability because it would benefit them. They got where they are through piracy, and then implemented strict "activation" schemes now. The thing is, activation schemes only penalize paying customers. People who run 'cracked' software don't have to deal with false positives. They don't have to call Microsoft and wait on hold for 20 minutes for manual craptivation after they've done their second semi-annual Windows reinstall or did their video card upgrade. "Pirates" just install their cracked and slipstreamed Windows and Adobe Creative Suite install and they're done. Activation and Genuine Advantage don't affect them in the slightest.
It's pathetic when the "counterfeit" software is superior to the legitimate.
What is the solution? When it comes to operating systems, there is Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, and other options - or even Mac OS X if you're adventurous enough to explore the hackintosh option (or just pick up a Mini). When it comes to office suites, download openoffice.org. With rare exception, the OpenOffice.org Suite will do everything you need it to do, and if you're an advanced user, you'll find that many features (such as integration with databases) is actually easier and superior in OpenOffice. Sure, the macro language is lacking in documentation, but if you're a coder, you'll be too busy appreciating knowing that your macro will actually work on a Mac to think about missing VBA.
When it comes to graphic suites, unless you need things like layer effects, droplets, and other advanced features, gimp, inkscape, and xara extreme are very likely good enough for you. If you know what layer effects are, then no, gimp won't replace Photoshop, but your living probably does rely on Adobe product to some extent so go out and buy it; yes, it runs on Crossover Office (or even wine with some finagling).
I run Linux about 95% of the time. F/OSS does it for me. Here is what I still need Windows for:
* running my embroidery machine
* Netflix (damn you, netflix! Bring the flash player back!)
* syncing my iPhone (let's get with it, Amarok!)
* several games that run on neither Crossover nor Cedega - and yes, a couple of them are Microsoft games
Now, I had a really good Hackintosh install running for a while - but I had to wipe it to free up a drive for a job. When I go back to the Hackintosh I plan to install Snow Leopard. I would love to run OS X 100% of the time (Yes, it's legal. I do own a Mac but like PC hardware better; I use workstation motherboards and faster CPUs and video cards) but I find the KDE environment so productive with kioslaves in konqueror, it's hard to give it up and switch to the Finder. Most F/OSS software I run on Linux is also available on OS X. Worst case, it runs under fink.
Seriously though: let's give companies what they want. They got where they are through "piracy" because tom, dick, and harry learned the apps at home and brought that knowledge to the office where it influenced purchase decisions. Download F/OSS instead, learn it, and bring that knowledge to the office. You'll see Adobe, Microsoft, etc. either lowering their prices or even "licensing" software free for personal use, much like the antivirus companies did.
Uh, no. Why should small businesses be forced to pay a certificate authority for certificates for appliances (spam filters, etc.), terminal services web pages, external access to webmail and intranet pages over SSL when a self-signed cert (even an expired one) will do? This is a user education issue, not a "let's get rid of it for everyone." It is for corporate use that you can optionally install self-signed certs into any of the mainstream browsers. There is a legitimate need for such things, and forcing everyone to pay for signed certs is a colossal waste of money.
Where it comes to e-commerce though, I agree with you, because however slight the protection may be, there is a very slight assurance that yes, https://www.foo.com/ is actually run by foocorp, not $phisher. Now, the verification process for most certificate resellers is between minimal and nonexistent, but most phishers won't even bother with SSL to begin with.
But let me hazard a guess here: You work for a certificate authority or reseller, right?
There is a much larger processing requirement for transferring everything via https plus the bandwidth requirement is higher. Some days slashdot loads slow enough - do you really want to see a performance reduction? What you'll see is a return of ads to offset the increased server and bandwidth costs, and the ads will slow load time as well. (What, you still see ads here? Stop trolling, get your karma up then you can turn ads off)
I know, you're kidding, but a lot of people are going to take your comment seriously, hop on this and say "Yeah, why doesn't /. do everything over https?" - what they don't realize is that it introduces a fair bit of overhead that adds up very quickly when you have thousands of concurrent users.
Years ago when I first set up SSL it was a pain in the neck. Installing third-party certs was a painful process with little, outdated docs on how to do it with Apache, but what was worse was I also had to set up self-signed certificates and that was an even more painful process because the documentation was so sparse there might not have been any. webmin didn't help much either, so I had to do a lot of searching and some reading of code in the supporting projects to figure it all out. Once I knew what needed to be in place it was fairly straightforward but getting their was a major pain in the neck. It's not so much a matter of a complicated process, but what directives do I need to add to .conf files?
I wrote a howto for myself so the process could be repeated. I should have completed the howto for public consumption but being self employed there is never any time for that kind of thing.
At this point the docs should be much better - at least I hope they are.
Windows was a little easier but not much. Sure, it's point-and-click, but when you have to click around in 38 different dialog boxes (Yes yes I know, 38 is an exaggeration), you'll be wish you could just do it all from the command line. The process on Windows is easily as complicated as on Linux, in fact slightly more so once you understand the steps. Fortunately Microsoft released a tool for making creation/installation of SSL certs a much easier process. Check out these sites:
http://www.visualwin.com/SelfSSL/
http://www.somacon.com/p42.php
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=80a1b6e6-829e-49b7-8c02-333d9c148e69&DisplayLang=en
In later versions of Windows they have made it a heck of a lot easier. In 2008 it's a breeze - you don't even need to download any resource kit tools to make it easy.
Some problems:
1. They are proclaiming it to be open source, which is deceptive. It's "open source" except where it matters (device drivers/modules) from a maintainability perspective.
2. Their employees are astroturfing
3. Releasing open source drivers does not in any way reveal your chip mask and hardware architecture. Atheros' real competitors have access to electron microscopes and everything else it takes to buy a router off the shelf and copy chips exactly; simply keeping the drivers closed is not going to deter, say, realtek or broadcom in the slightest.
Besides, Buffalo is supporting open source through action (money) not just in press releases - beating Netgear to the punch by a couple of years. Netgear is just playing the "me too! Signed, metoo@aol.com" game.