Who's to blame for rampant software piracy? According to Steve Ballmer, AMD and Intel. Oh, and Dell. Charge less for the computer, and there'll be more money to pay for Windows and Office.
Finally, a little bit more detail on the haziest (to me) story in my controversial Why I Dislike Microsoft has appeared: Gary Kildall's side of the CP/M-QDOS-PC DOS 1.0 story.
The story corroborates what I said, but I wish the story answered more questions.
For those of you who don't know, SCO is tired of Groklaw and setting up its own blog, prosco.net (not yet active; it goes live Nov. 1) to provide a counterpoint.
SCO, for the uninitiated, is a software company turned litigation company whose lawsuits against the likes of IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Daimler Chrysler and Autozone aren't doing well.
You need to back up your laptop, so you buy a monster (200+ GB) USB or Firewire hard drive. And then you can't use it in Symantec/Norton Ghost, for one of two reasons:
1. You can't format a FAT32 partition bigger than 32 gigabytes.
2. Ghost chokes when it tries to make a file larger than 4 gigabytes.
As soon as I upgraded to Mozilla Firefox 1.0, I started noticing that when I visited certain sites that had RSS/RDF feeds, a big orange "RSS" icon showed up in the lower right hand portion of the window.
That's cool. Click on that, and you can instantly see that site's current headlines, and know if the site has changed, just by looking in your bookmarks.
Except my site has an RSS feed and that icon didn't show up. Here's how I fixed it.
I've been playing with the Windows version of Inkscape, which bills itself as an open-source SVG editor. It doesn't bill itself as an Illustrator/Corel Draw/Freehand killer, but as a simple vector drawing program, it works.
PowerQuest, best known as the makers of PartitionMagic, got bought out by the monolith Symantec--soon to be the only large maker of utility software in the universe--back in December.
This eliminates DriveImage as a competitor to Ghost, gives Symantec a killer consumer app in PartitionMagic, and also gives Symantec the enterprise-class PartitionMagic-like apps.
The order came from higher up: Migrate these seven servers to VMWare. That would be easy if you were running Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, or basically any operating system not made by Microsoft. Give me an OS/2 hard drive out of a 386 with Microchannel, and I can have it booting on a P4 in a matter of minutes and probably have it operational in half an hour.
But Windows ties itself to the hardware too tightly. So you need a $10,000 software package to migrate it. That package is P2V, which stands for "PC to VMWare." I assume.
Spyware was grinding this PC to a screeching halt. I'd click on an icon, and the program never appeared. Or maybe it would finally appear 15 minutes later. And once I finally got a browser window open, it was so slow, I could pretty much forget about downloading any tools to fix it.
