(just kiddin', please ignore this and similar posts in this thread)

but i was first. – by disckiller

no piracy is stopped as keys are leaked before it even ships, but honest customers who overpaid for the crap are terribly inconvienienced. real smart on ms's part. really makes you believe in trustworthy computing, eh? – by /sm

best to switch over to linux, like this following case study.
guitar maker plays a linux tune
– by

hiladelphia, april 7 — with a blast of x-rays compressing a capsule of hydrogen to conditions approaching those at the center of the sun, scientists from sandia national laboratories reported today that they had achieved thermonuclear fusion, in essence detonating a tiny hydrogen bomb.

such controlled explosions would not be large enough to be dangerous and might offer an alternative way of generating electricity by harnessing fusion, the process that powers the sun. fusion combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing bountiful energy as a byproduct.

“it's the first observation of fusion for a pulsed power source,” said dr. ramon j. leeper, manager of the target physics department at sandia, in albuquerque, who presented the findings at a meeting of the american physical society here.

more at the nyt (reg req)

enjoy, fellow geeks! – by /sm

the company operates almost all of its business on open-source software, including red hat linux on its desktops and servers, staroffice on pcs, and e-mail from ximian. whitmore says the company spent about $20,000 to make the switch and cut $80,000 to $100,000 a year from its it budget. with a little more than 70 users, the it staff handled training on the fly. “there wasn't a lot of training involved, and we just handled questions from users as they popped up,” he says.

surprise this story came in two days ago
– by

i thought the windows update system wasn't supposed to “collect any personally identifiable information”.

i mean, not that i *believed* them… but they could at least be more subtle…

silly ms – by :-)

but that would be tooooo easy to do. . .m$ has to do things the hard way and model their security after 'open front door theme' – by werd strebor

then you have the same situation as you have now. – by businessgeek

no, the front door is only two feet wide and 3 feet tall, locked with a hundred deadbolts so it's damned hard to interface with non-ms computers over a normal ip network. you just can't do it without samba.

it's their windows that are wide open, giant picture windows made of cellophane. it's easier to hack into a ms box than it is to interface honestly with anotheros or app. – by /sm

– by dinobot

or

the windows paperclip

– by rax

in september, the city received a letter from microsoft [via the bsa] demanding that it produce an inventory and proof of purchase for every microsoft product on every computer the city owned. virginia beach was given 30 days to comply. i've been told unofficially that the letter did not even specifically address the city — it was a form letter.

form letter or no, virginia beach took it very seriously. it soon realized its chance of completing the task in the allotted 30 days was roughly on par with that of a democratic county in florida having sufficient time to do a manual recount. the city requested a 30-day extension, then dedicated five people — one-fourth of its it department — to the task, which was finally completed in late november at a cost of over $80,000. the city had searched its roughly 3,900 computers and identified more than 800 microsoft products for which proof of purchase could not be found.

that heinous crime was likely neither intentional nor unintentional piracy, but rather a policy failure by various city departments, which threw out the proofs of purchase instead of safeguarding them. nonetheless, the penalty was substantial.

it cost the city about $129,000 to acquire the missing licenses, meaning the little exercise cost a total of over $200,000. that money could have gone to the beach health clinic, the purchase of library books, or any number of uses that would have benefited the city more than the privilege of paying twice for the same software.

microsoft unleashes piracy police: are you safe?

that is why bsa is opposing open-source. if oregon goes open source, bsa can't bother oregon with a software audit. – by

– by nabisco

are you kidding? i love the butterfly! it's the only example ever of microsoft being honest in their branding or advertising.

a big fat bug- perfect symbol for microsoft. – by /sm

i'm a believer that in most high profile cases like this where installed market share is the target then they're engineered rather than one naughty boy stealing it.

bill knows that the one quick way to get things out and on the untapped market (the cheap end of the wedge) is, like a dealer offer the first rock of crack for free.

once you sort out a server and run a ton of shit on it the last thing you're gonna do a year down the line is ditch it and start again. backdoor, gurilla marketing.

and they'll make such a fuss over it but really, who're they kidding?

– by spacca

an overriding concern of moving to windows server 2003, didio says, has nothing to do with the technology itself, which she notes promises significant increases in reliability over windows server 2000 and nt, microsoft's current server operating systems. instead, it's the sheer complexity of any server migration. today's enterprise infrastructure is a complicated dance of not just servers, but legacy and custom applications, driver issues, hardware and bandwidth limitations, web-services interplay, and security.

survey says windows server 2003 adoption will be slow
– by

i rather listen to microsoft on their secret documents stating the advantages of *nix over windows.

1) familiarity. entrepreneurs in the startup world are generally familiar with one version of unix (usually through college education), and training in one easily converts to another. when setting up a new enterprise, it’s easy to work with what you know than to take time investigating the alternatives.

4) easy to minimize. the typical unix server is taking care of one task, not acting as a desktop and development platform for a user. it is particularly easy to cut down the load on the system so that only the minimum number of services is running. this reduced complexity aids stability and transparency.

5) transparent. it’s easy to look at a unix system and know what is running and why. although its configuration files may have arcane (and sometimes too-simple) syntax, they are easy to find and change.

6) preference for text files. most configuration setups, log files, and so on, are plain text files with reasonably short line lengths. although this may be marginally detrimental to performance (usually in circumstances where it doesn’t matter) it is a powerful approach because a small, familiar set of tools, adapted to working with short text lines, can be used by the administrators for most of their daily tasks. in particular, favorite tools can be used to analyze all the system’s log files and error reports.

7) powerful but simple scripting languages and tools. again, familiarity and consistency among unix implementations is the key. over the years, unix versions have evolved a good set of single-function commands and shell scripting languages that work well for ad-hoc and automated administration. the shell scripting languages fall just short of being a programming language (they have less power than vbscript or jscript). this may seem to be a disadvantage, but we must remember that operators are not programmers having to learn a block-structured programming language is a resistance point. scripts that combine executables into pipelines are simple to build incrementally and experimentally, and even the experienced hotmail administrators seem to be taking that approach for special purpose scripts (using cmd) rather than authoring with one of the object-oriented scripts.

on the other hand, perl (another language that has grown organically with a lot of community feedback) is more of a programming than scripting language. it is popular for repeated, automated tasks that can be developed and optimized by senior administrative staff who do have the higher level of programming expertise required.

– by open source gloating

consider the above list of unix strengths to be also a list of windows weaknesses. however, there are some specific issues that need to be called out.

1) a gui bias. windows 2000 server products continue to be designed with the desktop in mind. there are too many functions that are either too difficult or impossible to perform using a text-based interface.

why is this important? there are several reasons:

n gui operations are essentially impossible to script. with large numbers of servers, it is impractical to use the gui to carry out installation tasks or regular maintenance tasks.

n text-based operations are more versatile an administrator can usually do more to a system (good and bad) than is provided by the restricted, planned methods using the gui.

n there is in place at hotmail an established secure channel into the production system, using a text-based secure shell interface.

n using a gui amounts to hiding the true system modifications from the system administrators and operators. unix operators like the sense of control that comes from their ability to modify system tables and configuration files more directly.

n operating a gui through a slow network connection can be too slow to be useful. although this is less important, it can still be a consideration when there is a need to administer or diagnose a system through a dialup connection.

there are, indeed, many non-gui administrative programs provided in the core windows 2000 product and in the resource kit. the problem is that the collection is somewhat arbitrary, incoherent and inconsistent. programs seem to have been written to fill an immediate need and there is stylistic inconsistency and poor feature coverage.

2) complexity. a windows server out of the box is an elaborate system. although it performs specific tasks well (such as being a web server) there are many services that have a complex set of dependencies, and it is never clear which ones are necessary and which can be removed to improve the system’s efficiency.

3) obscurity. some parameters that control the system’s operation are hidden and difficult to fully assess. the metabase is an obvious example. the problem here is that is makes the administrator nervous in a single-function system he wants to be able to understand all of the configuration-related choices that the system is making on his behalf.

4) resource utilization. it’s true that windows requires a more powerful computer than linux or freebsd. in practice, this is a less important constraint. when you are building a large operation, you will use smaller numbers of relatively powerful systems. the pc systems in use at hotmail are perfectly capable of running windows, and the machine’s basic power is the same whether it is run with unix or windows. for most of the time, it is only executing application code and most of the extra elaboration is not apparent.

5) image size. the team was unable to reduce the size of the image below 900mb windows contains many complex relationships between pieces, and the team was not able to determine with safety how much could be left out of the image. although disk space on each server was not an issue, the time taken to image thousands of servers across the internal network was significant. by comparison, the equivalent freebsd image size is a few tens of mb.

6) reboot as an expectation. windows operations still involves too many reboots. sometimes they are unnecessary, but operators reboot a system rather than take the time to debug it. for example, a service may be hung, and rather than take the time to find and fix the problem, it is often more convenient to reboot. by contrast, unix administrators are conditioned to quickly identify the failing service and simply restart it they are helped in this by the greater transparency of unix and the small number of interdependencies. some reboots are demanded by an application installation, and are not strictly necessary.

7) license costs. as we will see when discussing load balancing, the license cost of windows software is a major consideration when converting from the unencumbered unix implementations. although there were no costs to the hotmail project, as a m?crosöft department, the team did consider the software costs in order to make the conversion a useful model for future customers.

n they used server in preference to advanced server (no features of advanced server were necessary).

n they reluctantly used services for unix and interix, to get access to features that were not adequately provided in windows. future releases of windows will have the features that would make it unnecessary to add those subsystems and avoid their notional cost.

n no business analysis was undertaken to determine whether the benefit of the conversion would outweigh the not – by open source gloating

“ms is #1 in the server industry”

lol! try #2 with about 30%. 2/3rds of the internet runs on apache (under various oss including microsodt).

please keep posting, i come here mostly for the humor! – by /sm

geeks don't buy servers, their pointy haired bosses do. phb knew in the early '80s that “nobody ever got fired for buying ibm”.

these days it's “nobody ever got fired for buying ms”.

who cares how inferior the product is? do you think phb will understand (or care about) a word of it? – by /sm

linux has been making inroads into k-12 education for years, but microsoft's move to require an audit of 300 school districts nationwide has brought open source into the educational limelight. as schools analyze alternatives to hefty licensing fees, lugs and linux-in-education organizations are pointing out that open source solutions are better suited to the educational environment, and are only a fraction of the cost.

linux in education: open source provides a better solution for schools
– by

boy, you have way too much time on your hands… – by hmmmm

as you may recall, the city of austin apparently lost its wrestling match with microsoft's legal department late in 2001 when it “caved in” and signed up for microsoft's most expensive licensing to avoid millions of dollars in fines for missing proofs of purchase.

i've been expecting to hear news about the city of austin's microsoft deal, but what i've received is not what i expected. several weeks ago, an investigative reporter from a local tv station inquired about that story, which would still be “news” in austin due to the lack of media coverage. i was told the station planned to cover it during the recent “sweeps” period. if it did, i missed it.

instead of an investigative report explaining why austin pays twice for every copy of microsoft windows it gets, the news i have to report was slipped in over the transom one night. it came in the form of an e-mail that appeared to be from jon harris, a deputy cio with the city of austin. however, when i checked with harris the next day, i learned he hadn't sent it. he did, however, confirm its contents:

brownlee bowmer, city of austin chief information officer, will be reassigned to water & wastewater cio as of april 1, 2003. pete collins will be replacing brownlee and acting cio for the city.

according to other anonymous sources, this is probably only the first move in a massive reorganization of the city's is infrastructure. whatever the true significance of the move, and whatever the final shape of the city's is department in the future, i think it is clear that bowmer is not being rewarded for his handling of the microsoft debacle.

have microsoft's strong-armed tactics in texas actually ended up hurting their business here? that could be. consider that pesky bill in the senate when i mentioned to bray that senator carona's bill might give linux and other free/open-source solutions more visibility in state government, he replied “we're certainly looking at it.”

open source making headway in texas government
is microsoft losing the hearts & minds of texans? signs point to yes

i guess the moral of the story is if microsoft messes with texas, texas messes with microsoft. – by

no really, who? – by ???

02/08/2003

texas prisons offer budget cuts but fear increase in crime
under duress, state agency pares medical, education spending.

04/09/2003

meetings set next week for laid-off prison workers
letters have been mailed to more than 200 workers within the texas department of criminal justice whose administrative and recreation supervision jobs will be eliminated by may 15.

now microsoft wants more money from texas department of criminal justice:

when last i visited with the texas department of criminal justice (tdcj), i spoke with larry todd of tdcj's media relations department. todd bravely asserted that tdcj was not going to cave in to microsoft and was fighting microsoft's claims that tdcj owed them millions of dollars. this is exactly the same sort of “marketing” that microsoft had used successfully in austin and elsewhere.

at the time, tdcj had just installed a new division manager (robert bray) for its it department, and my gloomy prognostication was that tdcj might struggle for a while but then eventually cave in as well. this week, i am happy to report that is definitely not the case.

i spoke with bray by phone recently and asked for an update on the situation. bray said, “we have computers, many of which are six, seven or even eight years old. the state only requires us to keep records for five years. we couldn't show proof of ownership of all the operating systems and microsoft office licenses that we had.”

evidently, redmond believes its licenses trump state law and demanded that tdcj agree to an expensive licensing scheme or face millions of dollars in fines. tdcj's own audit showed it was short about 2,000 licenses. the cost of those licenses was $283,000.

bray said microsoft “wanted us to go to seat-management, and that was in the millions of dollars. we simply didn't have the money.” tdcj sent microsoft a check for $283,000 instead of signing a multi-million dollar contract and considers the situation resolved. – by

i keep +$100k of pirated software on my machines at home and the only legit copy of anything i have is tomb raider and that was before i bought dual plextors and could copy it.

maybe microsoft is a virus, oozing into all corners of the digital flesh only to feed on and wither the host. maybe microsoft is more like heroine addiction and open source is the only way to kick it.

personally, i am addicted to ways i can get software for free. warez is like crack, and no talk of morality or decency will change my mind. – by bsa target?

smart bill! always thinking! – by x-plattform

so many games are published every month and even initially good games are obsolete in a few month. but there is only one new and shiny windows server os, one target for all the ambitious crackers.

and checking (partly) unique keys on a centralized server everytime you start the software works well with multi-player-games but would be quite unpopular with server systems (even if it is planned in the future).

and with every protection and hurdle, legal customers are getting more and more annoyed, reregistering after every install/system change/hardware change is just painful for admins, especially if they want to get the server up quickly again.
and the update-policy of ms meens that no big computer nets with “volume-licenses” can update their systems. pretty good if you look at the chain of updates/patches in the past you needed to plug the thousands of security flaws and other bugs.

microsoft really scored a goal there, but for which side? not their own, i guess. – by disckiller

now this is what i have to say to all you linux lovers:
there is absolutely nothing you can do with linux (application wise) that i can do with windows. you may argue that windows costs more than linux but when you consider that if you have a particular problem on one client's windows box, you can guarantee that the fix will work on every other windows box for every other client you have. they are all the same distribution of windows and i'm sure of that because they're all from the same company.

i think before you all continue taking your pot shots at microsoft and their products, you should all uninstall your windows xp machines and practice what you preach.

i've used linux from the days of slackware 2 up to now i have mandrake 8 installed. yes it's nice and it's very stable…but it doesn't hold a candle to the flexibility of my windows 2000 server. up and running 4 years now….. and it's home built using cheap parts.

all i'm saying is, try it before you bash it. and if you insist on bashing it, don't fucking use it. cuz i know that every one of you no named cowards out there are using windows. – by no named coward too

i have no mercy now… anything and everything of yours will be everyones!! as they say, what goes around comes around – and yours is coming around fast!
no doubt – open/s is the way, but not after i have some fun fu**ing up ms for fuc*ing me and our little company:: – by rave

“there is absolutely nothing you can do with linux (application wise) that i can do with windows.”

truer words were never spoken… lol…

and by the way, the reason we're posting from windows boxes is we're at work, and our phbs are ms dupes. “gee, if i'm not getting reamed financially, i don't feel like i've invested enough in my it infrastructure…” – by cha-cha

sure they allow me to install the operating system however, they do not allow for activation.

is there a link to an activation crack, that someone could post. – by arpace

three cheers for disinformation! – by dnm

with them blocking windowsupdates im not going to be able to donwload new security updates which will make me a target for an attack. and if i get hacked i aint going to recomend it to work its that simple.. most companys will not use copyed sw for the risk of getting caught….

what wrong with just using it to lean???

ps if anyone can help me get windowsupdates working that would be great – by money aint everythin

my ibm selectric typwriter, filing cabinets, the usps and one really fine secretary never looked so good…

and (woo-hoo) since i still use my brain, i don't even need 'spell check'.

thanks for making me feel grateful. – by small business owner

– by corsican

but like window i made a error so my pc was fucked up.

dont try it – by jax

step 1: create a powerful intellectual property license

step 2: leak a piracy key

step 3: send the bsa everywhere in the hopes of finding an installation with a bogus key

step 4: gather fines

step 5: deposit money in bank

goto step 3.

corollary: back the wto, nafta, etc. to extend the reach of the law in this manner, ones reach extends to all corners of the earth and for decades into the future

corollary: mske huge political contributions to assure the desired outcome if the president invites you to play golf and “contribute”, do so immediately or face a department of justice investigation.
– by wyl newland

roflmao!!!! – by computer_gospel