If you want an affordable solution, purchase a ready-made template for a CMS. You could then always hire someone to tweak it according to your wishes.
This leads to the following: - Quick implementation time; - Low costs; - Someone non-technical can update the content so you don't have to do it.
As a technical person, I know I will never burn my fingers again on designing a website myself! Being good at PHP etc. is one thing, but designing a site or template that actually looks right is something completely different. It requires a skill that you either do, or do not have. In my experience, most technical people don't have them.:)
Quote: "What difference does it make to you if you pay $12 shipping on a $5 item, or $5 shipping on a $12 item? None! I hate buyers like you."
What reason does a seller have for charging more than the actual shipping costs, other than making up for the too small selling price? (And therefore showing up more positively in the search results) While I understand this practice very well, it remains a misleading practice which eBay should prohibit.
I don't think that charging 1200% of the actual shipping costs is realistic anymore. (Regardless of the "handling" costs, whatever that may be!)
However, I agree that if a buyer agrees to do business with a seller using such a practice (and clearly mentioned it upfront) the buyer should be prepared to actually pay this cost. Personally, I prefer not to do any business with sellers utilizing this practice.
Actually, a lot of research has gone into making those tanks as safe a possible. In a crash: they will bend, not break. How often does a car catch file after a crash? Only very rarely.
Quote: "I **KNOW** a firewall can do this. However, nobody sells one at the price point of a NAT box."
That's because a firewall is pointless if you have to drop all incoming connections anyway because you're using NAT. The "firewalls" today are targeted at a somewhat niche market, causing them to be so expensive. Believe me, as soon as these home routers support IPV6, they WILL include a firewall! (for the same price)
(The reason is that implementing a good NAT implementation is a lot harder than implementing a simple firewall.)
In the Netherlands we already have this system that 3rd parties can rent the copper to the home for a fee of 10 EUR per month. (Which is actually just a maintenance fee) And if you are already paying for a phone connection on that line, the rent is for free. Result: 24mbit/1048kbit of high quality internet service for just 27.50 EURO.
And yes, the company previously holding the monopoly fought hard but lost.
Any way you try to turn it, it just won't work commercially. I have a 24mbit/1024kbit connection for EUR 27,50 per month.
The company I work for purchases a dedicated 2mbit up/down connection for EUR 300,- per month.
While the company has a right to upload/download all they want, I do not. It's totally great that I can download a the blazing speed of 1.5megabyte per second. But it would be terribly stupid of me to think I could download 24/7 and the concept would still work.
If you want -UNLIMITED- 24/7 downloading, purchase a 1:1 (not overbooked) business line and then you would have every right to complain. But as others have already said: You (probably) can't afford it.
Anyway, why is it so hard for some people to just behave?
In my opinion it's still much better than the mess that will unavoidably be created by having to compile packages yourself like you need to do with other distributions. I tried ubuntu once and -very- soon discovered that I needed to compile sshd by hand just because I wanted to use openct. Also it's missing quite a few packages that are a hell to track down. Furthermore, adding other unofficial repositories trashed my system because it kept giving me errors when I wanted to do upgrades.
In my experience, Gentoo provides almost any package and compilation option you'll ever need and is almost impossible to break.
Quote: "As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options."
Why don't you just copy the.config file over to the new kernel? Kernel migrations aren't a big issue at all imho.
The OLPC project has been to ambitious in the beginning. They only wanted to sell it to 3th world country's, taken ages to develop the thing and only wanted to use open source software. What they've ended up with is a lack of cash and a laptop that costs almost twice as much as intended. Commercial manufactures have developed something similar in only a fraction of the time and also sell it commercially. And now the OLPC project has to make all kinds of concessions.
As I've said more than a year ago, they should have just sold the thing commercially to get some cash flow going. Now they're even going as far as selling their sole to MS. And the "buy one get one" initiative is a joke at this point in time, for EUR 450,- you'll have a full blown laptop with much better specs. If they'd sold them one year earlier for 350,- they would have had much better chances to succeed.
Too bad it isn't software, otherwise you would even get away with it (and they would even overlook the fact that "Back to the future" has prior art).:)
It's portable in the sense that you can put it on a usb key and take it (and your settings) with you. (Not portable in the sense that it is cross platform)
For Linux, portability is not an issue. You can just untar the firefox binary on a usb key and just run it from there. Also, by manipulating the $HOME variable, you can define where the settings should be stored.
Sorry for being insensitive, but who needs a native language version? Your English seems to be just fine;)
You shouldn't surf for that kind of material with your regular browser, you should install a portable firefox for that! (http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable) That way, business and pleasure do not interfere and you won't look stupid everytime someone else is using your browser. Mixing those two things up is like downloading torrents at work.
Quote: "Can I downgrade it to Windows XP Pro and get a free Windows XP Pro license that's legit? That'd be good!..."
Yes, with vista business and higher you have the right to downgrade to Windows XP Pro. At work we purchase all our new PC's with Vista business and then just downgrade them to Windows XP Pro.
It will be cheaper to migrate to windows Vista in two years or so (In case I ever feel like doing so).
Quote: "by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years." Because usually in a few years the (now quite new) technology becomes 4 times cheaper and two times faster.
Also, the bottleneck of the bandwidth isn't the last mile. With ADSL2+ you can establish a 24Mbit connection without any additional infrastructure costs, but who has one at this moment? (I do, although I also would have been satisfied with half the speed) Usually, the main problem is carriers ripping you off and not the last mile! And you are not going to solve that problem by deploying an extremely expensive new infrastructure. And btw, the digging costs 10.000,- per kilometer. Who do you think will have to pay the bill? What the consumer wants is fiber optic speeds for less money than the copper connection (already there) costs, which (commercially) is just an insane and unworkable wish. And -that- is why fiber to the home does not work at this moment.
[quote]"The fact is that the vast majority of businesses do not want homogeneous IT infrastructures," Pund-IT analyst King said. "Instead, they want to be able to better and more easily manage their IT assets no matter what hardware or OS platforms they buy. Microsoft and Novell deserve congratulations on their one-year anniversary, but the needs of Linux and Windows customers are as much responsible for the partnership as the companies themselves.'"
I dont think any of that actually means anything. No really, it sounds like a bunch of Manager type talk but nothing concrete. All ideas and no real tangibles.[/quote]
--
Its quite clear actually. In technical terms, what he is saying is the following: Businesses want products that integrate with each other, instead of loose products. Novell products let you centrally manage a large array of different devices and operating systems: Windows, Linux, Servers, Workstations, PDA's, etc. (No other product I know of allows you to do that) You can have Novell products add a new user account in your ERP system when you create a new user.
So even though you may have a homogeneous IT infrastructure, it doesn't look that way anymore when using Novell, because everything integrates tightly.
Now, imagine you have 3000 users and 3000 workstations/laptops/pda's/e-mail accounts How on earth are you going to manage this consistently and efficiently with open source software? Think about: Creating user accounts, deploy new software, remotely deactivate a pda, imaging, printing, monitoring, users being able to log in at multiple offices, etc.
You will have to (choose one): a. Use separate systems for everything (thus manually create multiple accounts) b. Reinvent the wheel and write the glue code and automation yourself. (which is a really tremendous task) c. Use Microsoft products. (which are unstable, expensive, provide less features, and can't manage Linux!) d. Use Novell products. (which are stable, provide more features, cost less and manage both Linux and Windows seamlessly)
Novell is much more than just Linux. (Note: I am a Novell customer)
I agree on the fact that it would have been a better choice for them to choose KDE instead of Gnome, although KDE is optional. But who cares about a GUI on a server? You should disable it anyway.
Personally, our company is using Novell software with a lot of satisfaction (SLES, eDirectory, Groupwise, Zenworks, Intellisync). It really fills the open source gap and is rock solid. I really don't understand all of the bad press about Novell. Novell is really helping Linux into the business environment and is doing it very well and their pricing is very acceptable.
Without Novell, which solution could I choose to serve our windows workstations? I'd probably have to use active directory, Exchange and Windows server 2003. Which will soon turn into a stability nightmare. There really is no other software based on Linux that provides the functionality that Novell does.
Please remember that Novell offers much more than just the basic Linux stuff. It offers a Novell client for windows, eDirectory, ZENworks, iFolder, iPrint, Groupwise etc, etc. These are products targeted at managing Windows (and linux) workstations and servers but through a Linux server. Novell products integrate seamlessly with Windows and they even (implicitly) solve many of the typical windows problems for you.
SLES on itself, however, does not offer a Windows advantage when compared to other distro's. It is the commercial closed source software that Novell offers that makes the advantage.
I'll just have to respond to this one. As a fact, every decent IT vendor makes it possible to do a full firmware recovery. No matter what you screw up in the software.
Just some examples I have experience with: Linksys even has the WRT54GL router with the intent of people hacking it. Sony Ericsson phones have a fail safe for when you completely mess up your firmware. HP is going out of their way to make sure anything firmware related can't mess up your hardware.
Why would it be so unreasonable to expect the same from Apple for their IMHO overpriced phone? It's not like it's hard to do so.
BTW, with all this crap going on it's hard to understand why anyone would want to buy this phone.
I've filed a RTF bug (obvious and confirmed defect with all details included) beginning this year. Nobody has even responded on that.
Fixes bugs doesn't seem to be a high priority, and I can't blame them (because it's free). But it is turning our company's migration to OOo into a big failure.
There are quite some big issues with OOo that are in need of fixing and stand in the way of enterprise adoption. For home use however, OOo is great (I've been using it for many years already).
The best way is to provide software maintenance to your users and have them log in to a web page to download it. To download new versions etc. they will have to pay you annually and don't have to explicitly decide on whether an upgrade is worth the money. You then might as well skip the entire license activation thing.
As a system administrator I tend to like the idea to be able to provide people with the newest versions of software without the entire license hassle. New versions tend to fix a lot of problems, so I'm not keen on supporting old software. Also I do not support any unlicensed software, so the barrier is very high for people to use it. When software vendors make it easy for me to support their software for my users I will be more than happy to sign the bill when it arrives. On the other hand if the software we already payed for inflicts a lot of license pain on me, I will actively encourage the user to stop using it or switch to an alternative of a different vendor.
If you insist on using some kind of activation thing, just issue a license file and tell the user where to put it. BTW, always make it possible for users to pay for your software by -paper invoice- / bank transfer. Very few employees have access to the company credit card!
The installation of Linux is not the issue. Where distros fail (Both SUSE and Ubuntu) is the following: - GNOME is the default, and is NOT user friendly and looks different in both distro's - Mplayer and ogle are not installed on default, so you can't just throw in a DVD and start playing - Mplayerplugin is not installed on default
The average user (not me) just wants to do the following: - use a wireless card - use a printer - write a document - use MSN - use a photoshop kind of application - use bittorent - use the s-video port on a laptop - burn some CD's - view movies - listen to music - not being bothered with inserting a CD/DVD etc. when something needs to be installed
All the apps and possibilities are there, but still it doesnt "just work". SUSE requires other installation sources to be configured to install mplayer, but then ultimately the auto-update just breaks. Also you'll have to actively search for those other installation sources.
Regarding hardware: They should just make an HCL and make sure it works out-of-the-box flawlessly. I will happily purchase more expensive hardware if I can be sure it works flawlessly.
And.. when will ALSA just fix the 'sound card in use' issues, so it always works on default? when will they make it possible to make 'universal install packages' so an app can just be installed on ANY Linux distro?
I know there are legal issues surrounding the codecs, but a solution/workaround should be found to make it possible anyway. Last time I tried to view a DVD under SUSE, it took me a lot of time to get the apps installed, even though I have 10 years of Linux experience. IMHO, Gentoo does a much better job, but compiling from source takes too much time if you just want to install it on an old laptop.
IMHO, if they'd just fix the issues mentioned above then Linux would do MUCH BETTER on desktop then it does now. If enough money would be thrown into fixing the issues, it all could have been resolved within a year.
BTW, I love Linux and use it on my desktop at home and all servers at work.
Quote: "So -- was the code really stolen?" No, the code wasn't stolen: the code was potentially unlawfully duplicated (Since they haven't been convicted for the fact yet)
Slashdot Mirror
If you want an affordable solution, purchase a ready-made template for a CMS.
:)
You could then always hire someone to tweak it according to your wishes.
This leads to the following:
- Quick implementation time;
- Low costs;
- Someone non-technical can update the content so you don't have to do it.
As a technical person, I know I will never burn my fingers again on designing a website myself! Being good at PHP etc. is one thing, but designing a site or template that actually looks right is something completely different. It requires a skill that you either do, or do not have. In my experience, most technical people don't have them.
Quote: "What difference does it make to you if you pay $12 shipping on a $5 item, or $5 shipping on a $12 item? None! I hate buyers like you."
What reason does a seller have for charging more than the actual shipping costs, other than making up for the too small selling price? (And therefore showing up more positively in the search results)
While I understand this practice very well, it remains a misleading practice which eBay should prohibit.
I don't think that charging 1200% of the actual shipping costs is realistic anymore. (Regardless of the "handling" costs, whatever that may be!)
However, I agree that if a buyer agrees to do business with a seller using such a practice (and clearly mentioned it upfront) the buyer should be prepared to actually pay this cost.
Personally, I prefer not to do any business with sellers utilizing this practice.
Actually, a lot of research has gone into making those tanks as safe a possible.
In a crash: they will bend, not break.
How often does a car catch file after a crash? Only very rarely.
Quote: "I **KNOW** a firewall can do this. However, nobody sells one at the price point of a NAT box."
That's because a firewall is pointless if you have to drop all incoming connections anyway because you're using NAT. The "firewalls" today are targeted at a somewhat niche market, causing them to be so expensive.
Believe me, as soon as these home routers support IPV6, they WILL include a firewall! (for the same price)
(The reason is that implementing a good NAT implementation is a lot harder than implementing a simple firewall.)
In the Netherlands we already have this system that 3rd parties can rent the copper to the home for a fee of 10 EUR per month. (Which is actually just a maintenance fee)
And if you are already paying for a phone connection on that line, the rent is for free.
Result: 24mbit/1048kbit of high quality internet service for just 27.50 EURO.
And yes, the company previously holding the monopoly fought hard but lost.
I hope they didn't forget to include a step that says: "Arrange sufficient coffee"
Any way you try to turn it, it just won't work commercially.
I have a 24mbit/1024kbit connection for EUR 27,50 per month.
The company I work for purchases a dedicated 2mbit up/down connection for EUR 300,- per month.
While the company has a right to upload/download all they want, I do not.
It's totally great that I can download a the blazing speed of 1.5megabyte per second. But it would be terribly stupid of me to think I could download 24/7 and the concept would still work.
If you want -UNLIMITED- 24/7 downloading, purchase a 1:1 (not overbooked) business line and then you would have every right to complain. But as others have already said: You (probably) can't afford it.
Anyway, why is it so hard for some people to just behave?
In my opinion it's still much better than the mess that will unavoidably be created by having to compile packages yourself like you need to do with other distributions.
I tried ubuntu once and -very- soon discovered that I needed to compile sshd by hand just because I wanted to use openct. Also it's missing quite a few packages that are a hell to track down. Furthermore, adding other unofficial repositories trashed my system because it kept giving me errors when I wanted to do upgrades.
In my experience, Gentoo provides almost any package and compilation option you'll ever need and is almost impossible to break.
Quote: "As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options."
.config file over to the new kernel?
Why don't you just copy the
Kernel migrations aren't a big issue at all imho.
The OLPC project has been to ambitious in the beginning. They only wanted to sell it to 3th world country's, taken ages to develop the thing and only wanted to use open source software.
What they've ended up with is a lack of cash and a laptop that costs almost twice as much as intended. Commercial manufactures have developed something similar in only a fraction of the time and also sell it commercially. And now the OLPC project has to make all kinds of concessions.
As I've said more than a year ago, they should have just sold the thing commercially to get some cash flow going. Now they're even going as far as selling their sole to MS.
And the "buy one get one" initiative is a joke at this point in time, for EUR 450,- you'll have a full blown laptop with much better specs. If they'd sold them one year earlier for 350,- they would have had much better chances to succeed.
Too bad it isn't software, otherwise you would even get away with it (and they would even overlook the fact that "Back to the future" has prior art). :)
It's portable in the sense that you can put it on a usb key and take it (and your settings) with you. (Not portable in the sense that it is cross platform)
;)
For Linux, portability is not an issue. You can just untar the firefox binary on a usb key and just run it from there. Also, by manipulating the $HOME variable, you can define where the settings should be stored.
Sorry for being insensitive, but who needs a native language version? Your English seems to be just fine
You shouldn't surf for that kind of material with your regular browser, you should install a portable firefox for that! (http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable)
That way, business and pleasure do not interfere and you won't look stupid everytime someone else is using your browser.
Mixing those two things up is like downloading torrents at work.
Kids these days...
Quote: "Can I downgrade it to Windows XP Pro and get a free Windows XP Pro license that's legit? That'd be good! ..."
Yes, with vista business and higher you have the right to downgrade to Windows XP Pro.
At work we purchase all our new PC's with Vista business and then just downgrade them to Windows XP Pro.
It will be cheaper to migrate to windows Vista in two years or so (In case I ever feel like doing so).
Quote: "by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years."
Because usually in a few years the (now quite new) technology becomes 4 times cheaper and two times faster.
Also, the bottleneck of the bandwidth isn't the last mile. With ADSL2+ you can establish a 24Mbit connection without any additional infrastructure costs, but who has one at this moment? (I do, although I also would have been satisfied with half the speed)
Usually, the main problem is carriers ripping you off and not the last mile! And you are not going to solve that problem by deploying an extremely expensive new infrastructure. And btw, the digging costs 10.000,- per kilometer. Who do you think will have to pay the bill?
What the consumer wants is fiber optic speeds for less money than the copper connection (already there) costs, which (commercially) is just an insane and unworkable wish. And -that- is why fiber to the home does not work at this moment.
In the Netherlands you have to pay 19% tax over all services and goods.
So I find it suprising there was no tax at all over services in the USA.
[quote]"The fact is that the vast majority of businesses do not want homogeneous IT infrastructures," Pund-IT analyst King said. "Instead, they want to be able to better and more easily manage their IT assets no matter what hardware or OS platforms they buy. Microsoft and Novell deserve congratulations on their one-year anniversary, but the needs of Linux and Windows customers are as much responsible for the partnership as the companies themselves.'"
I dont think any of that actually means anything. No really, it sounds like a bunch of Manager type talk but nothing concrete. All ideas and no real tangibles.[/quote]
--
Its quite clear actually. In technical terms, what he is saying is the following:
Businesses want products that integrate with each other, instead of loose products.
Novell products let you centrally manage a large array of different devices and operating systems: Windows, Linux, Servers, Workstations, PDA's, etc. (No other product I know of allows you to do that)
You can have Novell products add a new user account in your ERP system when you create a new user.
So even though you may have a homogeneous IT infrastructure, it doesn't look that way anymore when using Novell, because everything integrates tightly.
Now, imagine you have 3000 users and 3000 workstations/laptops/pda's/e-mail accounts
How on earth are you going to manage this consistently and efficiently with open source software?
Think about: Creating user accounts, deploy new software, remotely deactivate a pda, imaging, printing, monitoring, users being able to log in at multiple offices, etc.
You will have to (choose one):
a. Use separate systems for everything (thus manually create multiple accounts)
b. Reinvent the wheel and write the glue code and automation yourself. (which is a really tremendous task)
c. Use Microsoft products. (which are unstable, expensive, provide less features, and can't manage Linux!)
d. Use Novell products. (which are stable, provide more features, cost less and manage both Linux and Windows seamlessly)
Novell is much more than just Linux.
(Note: I am a Novell customer)
I agree on the fact that it would have been a better choice for them to choose KDE instead of Gnome, although KDE is optional.
But who cares about a GUI on a server? You should disable it anyway.
Personally, our company is using Novell software with a lot of satisfaction (SLES, eDirectory, Groupwise, Zenworks, Intellisync). It really fills the open source gap and is rock solid.
I really don't understand all of the bad press about Novell. Novell is really helping Linux into the business environment and is doing it very well and their pricing is very acceptable.
Without Novell, which solution could I choose to serve our windows workstations? I'd probably have to use active directory, Exchange and Windows server 2003. Which will soon turn into a stability nightmare.
There really is no other software based on Linux that provides the functionality that Novell does.
Please remember that Novell offers much more than just the basic Linux stuff.
It offers a Novell client for windows, eDirectory, ZENworks, iFolder, iPrint, Groupwise etc, etc.
These are products targeted at managing Windows (and linux) workstations and servers but through a Linux server.
Novell products integrate seamlessly with Windows and they even (implicitly) solve many of the typical windows problems for you.
SLES on itself, however, does not offer a Windows advantage when compared to other distro's. It is the commercial closed source software that Novell offers that makes the advantage.
RedHat does not offer such services for Windows.
(Please note that I am just a Novell Open Workgroup Suite customer. http://www.novell.com/products/openworkgroupsuite/ )
I'll just have to respond to this one.
As a fact, every decent IT vendor makes it possible to do a full firmware recovery. No matter what you screw up in the software.
Just some examples I have experience with:
Linksys even has the WRT54GL router with the intent of people hacking it.
Sony Ericsson phones have a fail safe for when you completely mess up your firmware.
HP is going out of their way to make sure anything firmware related can't mess up your hardware.
Why would it be so unreasonable to expect the same from Apple for their IMHO overpriced phone? It's not like it's hard to do so.
BTW, with all this crap going on it's hard to understand why anyone would want to buy this phone.
I've filed a RTF bug (obvious and confirmed defect with all details included) beginning this year. Nobody has even responded on that.
Fixes bugs doesn't seem to be a high priority, and I can't blame them (because it's free).
But it is turning our company's migration to OOo into a big failure.
There are quite some big issues with OOo that are in need of fixing and stand in the way of enterprise adoption. For home use however, OOo is great (I've been using it for many years already).
The best way is to provide software maintenance to your users and have them log in to a web page to download it.
To download new versions etc. they will have to pay you annually and don't have to explicitly decide on whether an upgrade is worth the money. You then might as well skip the entire license activation thing.
As a system administrator I tend to like the idea to be able to provide people with the newest versions of software without the entire license hassle.
New versions tend to fix a lot of problems, so I'm not keen on supporting old software. Also I do not support any unlicensed software, so the barrier is very high for people to use it.
When software vendors make it easy for me to support their software for my users I will be more than happy to sign the bill when it arrives. On the other hand if the software we already payed for inflicts a lot of license pain on me, I will actively encourage the user to stop using it or switch to an alternative of a different vendor.
If you insist on using some kind of activation thing, just issue a license file and tell the user where to put it.
BTW, always make it possible for users to pay for your software by -paper invoice- / bank transfer. Very few employees have access to the company credit card!
The installation of Linux is not the issue.
Where distros fail (Both SUSE and Ubuntu) is the following:
- GNOME is the default, and is NOT user friendly and looks different in both distro's
- Mplayer and ogle are not installed on default, so you can't just throw in a DVD and start playing
- Mplayerplugin is not installed on default
The average user (not me) just wants to do the following:
- use a wireless card
- use a printer
- write a document
- use MSN
- use a photoshop kind of application
- use bittorent
- use the s-video port on a laptop
- burn some CD's
- view movies
- listen to music
- not being bothered with inserting a CD/DVD etc. when something needs to be installed
All the apps and possibilities are there, but still it doesnt "just work".
SUSE requires other installation sources to be configured to install mplayer, but then ultimately the auto-update just breaks. Also you'll have to actively search for those other installation sources.
Regarding hardware: They should just make an HCL and make sure it works out-of-the-box flawlessly. I will happily purchase more expensive hardware if I can be sure it works flawlessly.
And..
when will ALSA just fix the 'sound card in use' issues, so it always works on default?
when will they make it possible to make 'universal install packages' so an app can just be installed on ANY Linux distro?
I know there are legal issues surrounding the codecs, but a solution/workaround should be found to make it possible anyway. Last time I tried to view a DVD under SUSE, it took me a lot of time to get the apps installed, even though I have 10 years of Linux experience.
IMHO, Gentoo does a much better job, but compiling from source takes too much time if you just want to install it on an old laptop.
IMHO, if they'd just fix the issues mentioned above then Linux would do MUCH BETTER on desktop then it does now.
If enough money would be thrown into fixing the issues, it all could have been resolved within a year.
BTW, I love Linux and use it on my desktop at home and all servers at work.
Quote: "So -- was the code really stolen?"
No, the code wasn't stolen: the code was potentially unlawfully duplicated (Since they haven't been convicted for the fact yet)
But I doubt it would make an exciting headline.
So why couldn't they be applecomputers.com and applerecords.com?
Your suggestion only moves the problem to a higher level, since they'd then both want 'apple' instead of 'apple.com'.