I’m going to install Red Hat on my laptop in their honor

I’ve yapped about the SCO mess before, a couple of times. The news usually sucks, as SCO makes one bizarre claim after another.  But this is some really good news.

Posted by JimK at 12:52 AM on August 05, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

Yes, it *is* stealing.

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I’m fully aware of the fact that I am doing *nothing* noble by not paying for it.  I’m stealing, and I’m not going to offer any excuse whatsoever.  I’m wrong.  If I had more money in my life, I wouldn’t even buy it...it’s ridiculously expensive, especially when you can see other applications doing near the same thing for a fraction of the cost.  And I do mean a *fraction*...Paint Shop Pro will probably serve 90% of Photoshop users that are NOT graphics professionals just fine, and does around 80% of what Photoshop can do.  And it costs $99.

Basically, I’m saying Adobe is picking your pocket just because they can.  Hey, it’s a free market, and they can get whatever price corporations are willing to pay.  Besides, I seriously doubt that there are very many graphics industry professional with bootleg copies...it’s mostly home users, and they were never gonna pay $609.

Adobe need to push the fact that Photoshop Elements offers home users near the same functionality for the magic price point of...you guessed it, $99.

Now...on to why this online activation is stupid.

Larger businesses that sign enterprise contracts won’t have to deal with the new process. That’s because online activation can be an added burden in already complex IT environments, and because most companies don’t intentionally misappropriate software anyway, says McManus.

Ha.  Yeah, because no one pirates the corporate volume license version of Windows XP.

Every copy of Photoshop I have ever owned since 3.04 has been given to me by someone who worked at a corporation, and it was all volume licensed.  All it takes is one guy to copy the CD, and there is no copy protection mechanism on earth that has not been defeated so far.

This is just a waste of time and resources.  If you want to get people to buy Photoshop, offer something to the home user they can’t get with a bootleg.  Offer something to entice them to buy a registered copy of Elements.  Most everyone can afford $99, or they can save to get he hundred bucks.  You have to make it worth their while.

That;s what the software, movie and record industry doesn’t understand...*everything* has become so overpriced and so not worth the money that it becomes almost necessary to pirate it.

Lower the costs and make it worth paying for, and people will flock to your product.

Now...thanks to Fark, not only did I see this story about Adobe, but I got this little gem as well. Don’t copy that floppy!*


* for those too young to remember, software used to come on things called “floppies.” Think of them as 8-tracks, only thinner.  Nevermind...you spoiled brats wouldn’t understand what it was like to install an operating system from 21 floppy discs, or what it was like to boot from one 5 1/4 floppy and run software from the other...

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Posted by JimK at 11:55 PM on July 06, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

Just a reminder if you happen to read this site from work

There has been a LOT of talk this week about appropriate use of computers while at work.  I just wanted to remind anyone reading this site that I use the Web Fire Escape.  What the hell is that?  It’s this little button:

When you click it, it will take you somewhere safe.  Visit the site and you can set a cookie that will take you to a work-safe site of your choosing, or to a fake Word or Excel document.  I recommend the URL.

If you have a blog...do your readers a favor and set it up.

Posted by JimK at 05:40 AM on June 26, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

Apple bites in, might be finding half of a worm

Is Apple lying to you?

Posted by JimK at 11:45 PM on June 24, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

Update

The server switch is not as easy as I thought...the IP-based hosting somehow got hosed, so I was forced to go with name-based.  Since Lee and I share a server, and we import headlines from each other’s sites, AND I haven’t moved his yet, that’s causing a few minor problems.

However, 98% of the move seems to have gone OK.  Now I have to move 20-some-odd other domains so I can stop paying so damn much.  :)

Speaking of which...if you’re feeling generous, you could always hit that tip jar...*cough*

Posted by JimK at 09:53 PM on June 20, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

SCO (Caldera) at it again

IBM losing its Unix license?

Posted by JimK at 03:55 AM on June 17, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

Forget catfights…the real action is in Geekfights™!

Novell Douses ‘Smoking Gun’ Against SCO

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SCO (not even truly SCO, but a company called Caldera which bought up the defunct SCO Group) is claiming they own Linux, due to a tenuous licensing agreement with Novell over the System V code.  Why is this an issue?  Well, Unix or a variant thereof powers virtually the entire freaking Internet.  The machine you are reading this from is powered by Red Hat Linux, a Unix derivative developed from help given to the open source community from IBM, whom SCO is suing over Unix in the first place.

Got all that?  Well, try this history on if it’s hard to follow.

This has been like a cat-fight in the tech press, with SCO playing the part of the petulant mistress, upset because her lover chose to stay with his wife.  Bottom line is, they are trying to litigate their way to profitability, with the likely goal of being sold off to someone who wants the Unix royalties.  But Novell says no deal, dude...we never sold you Unix.

Caldera-SCO has even threatened Linus Torvalds (site requires login, user name & password right-thoughts), the original developer of Linux, if more people don’t step up and pay this technological greenmail.  Oh, hey, there’s a great idea.  Piss off the god of tech-heads everywhere...like anything Caldera EVER tries to do again will be safe from a massively destructive onslaught of hackers and script kiddies.  If it’s networked and Caldera has a part in it, it WILL get hacked if they go after Linus.

IN the end, this is more about the idea that a company can buy the leftovers of another company and sue it’s way into some cash...all the while making spurious claims and refusing to pony up the proof required to demonstrate that they indeed own this stuff.

And the funniest part is, if they win?  Ten minutes later the open source community will have a new kernel for Linux, and ten minutes after that it will be ported to every major distribution, and not a line of it will be based on System V.

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Posted by JimK at 04:47 PM on May 30, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

A cool idea for you folks at work

I ran across this on TotalFark today...it’s a nifty button you can put in your blog so that people reading at work can escape quickly when a boss or manager comes by.

Try it!

It’ll be at the bottom of each post from now on, only my version will be red.  :)

Posted by JimK at 02:21 AM on May 12, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)

More on our problems

Well, well well.

I took a gander through my email to see if the IP numbers that are trying to DOS our server matched any I have in my hate mail files.  Lo and behold, they do!  All of them wrote to me about a particular topic:

Bartcop.

All from Toronto, all from the 65.95.x.x range of IP numbers...which are dynamically allocated DSL ip numbers from Sympatico.ca.

Once we contact Sympatico and find out who was logged in during these specific times to these specific IP numbers, we’ll prosecute them as hard as we can.

It made me think about the webhost venture, and I have a solution to deal with this kind of thing: segmenting.  I will simply add servers whenever there are too many clients on one machine, that way we guarantee that if one box goes down for a few hours, it doesn’t take everyone down.  I was planning on keeping the number of virtual hosts per machine low anyway, because I hated being hosted with 300 other people on one slow webserver.  I plan to limit low-to-medium traffic sites to no more than 25 domains per server, and higher traffic sites will likely be hosted in groups of 5 to 10 depending on traffic.

Posted by JimK at 02:43 AM on May 06, 2003
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)