kermitthehermit

I see. It would be really nice to have a community which develops hellepoll.

After all, having a maintained alternative to node.js written in C++ would be very nice.

I'm not saying node.js isn't OK or that those who use it are doing something wrong. It's good to have many tools for different scenarios and different preferences.

Would you like to start such a community for hellepoll? I'd be the first one to join you.

Thank you for your reply and for publishing hellepoll.

This is pretty cool.

Do you plan to continue working on hellepoll? I liked the idea and would love to see it developed further.

I couldn't agree more with the part about the search.

It looks like they're in a bad position already if they plan to deploy such a feature. I'm guessing they're having some internal issues, they must be concerned with their situation as a company.

'Don't be evil' went down the drain in the meantime.

I don't normally wish people any kind of death other than a good natural one when they're extremely old, but I can certainly wish the corrupt politicians slow excruciatingly painful deaths.

This further proves that laws against this exact kind of thing have to be created, simply abolishing PIPA / SOPA is NOT by any means enough.

It's not OK to do this. This kind of thing has to stop.

They should add this for the base OS. Seriously, they should make it possible for people to debug their OSes and provide them with rewards and financial rewards as well.

At least this way some old bugs would actually go away.

Can we know for sure some of those folks didn't make those statements after being blackmailed by their record labels or some "interested party"?

The way I see it, people change their positions when:

a)they're blackmailed - either you stop endorsing that shit or you're history

b)they notice everyone else is on the other side and they switch so that they're on the winner's side - see some of the beloved politicians & companies (BSA, MS, etc) pulling the plug on their support of SOPA

It's pretty easy to blackmail a musician when you're the record label. You certainly have far more money than the musician and dying from an overdose happens in the world of the musicians; the death of the musician even helps the record label with sales, doesn't it?

It's better to allow these sites to continue to exist and demand that they comply with the requests than take them down with the FBI or whatever law enforcement agency.

The precedent is far too dangerous. It's so dangerous that it could make PIPA / SOPA look like little cute puppies.

The moral issues of being a pirate or not being a pirate and of allowing or not allowing piracy to exist are more of a "feel good, don't be weird" matter.

These legal precedents can and will be used to silence any kind of protests and all things like: articles / reports about police brutality, murders, people "vanishing" conveniently when what they're saying is incovenient for someome, fake votes, scandals of all sorts.

Today it's Megaupload, tomorrow it will be YouTube. After that, they will interrupt a live report which is incovenient.

If you think those who rule are better than this, you're wrong. We've seen it before and we're seeing it again: Apple used the FBI and the police on the country's territory as its own security force as if the country was its headquarters, the FBI seems to be used more and more to go after pirates and other such things.

Meanwhile, all kinds of bad things happen around the world, but the law enforcement agencies are too busy to defend the copyrights of big companies which want more billions in the pockets of those who own those companies.

While the people are paying their taxes and are expecting to live a life without being worried they'll be nuked by some insane dictator, they really don't want to look over their shoulder to make sure the politicians who are ruling the country aren't being replaced by the puppets of the corporations.

After all, making sure a 12 year old doesn't download an mp3 from Megaupload is far more important than making sure my children won't be having a probe in their bodies to tell the companies and the government where they are, what they eat, what they like, if they're sick, what they're seeing and saying and what their opinion is on the ads they see.

If you've bought a Windows 7 kit and your DVD got damaged, you could copy a friend's disc or use one downloaded from work off technet / software assurance / msdn.

The point is that it's OK from a legal point of view, as long as you use your original serial number for the same windows edition.

I 'swapped' discs back when Windows 7 SP1 came out. I got the update off SA and the updated ISOs as well.

Should you have to prove you actually bought a license of that OS, you should have

a) the invoice & warranty papers of the computer it came preinstalled on and being used on - if preinstalled; possibly the restore disc as well if there is one b) the invoice, the original (damaged or not) disc and the box of the original windows kit - if bought separately as a windows install kit

Those are required to prove that you're the rightful owner of that Windows kit. I don't know if you can resell a PC with Windows on it.

Microsoft is very silly to make people jump through so many hoops. Especially when the pirates enjoy a better service.

Also, they should offer downloads to people who got the OS preinstalled on their machines. Apple is giving people this serice under the form of network restore since 10.7.

No, not really. They can check the hashes against those of official ISOs from M$, thus making sure they don't come with extra "features".

As for updates, they can get those too. However, MS might be reading their mail and all they type if they use a "cracked" version of windows without an original serial number.

However, his point is 100% valid. The need for serials / activations is giving people enough reasons to skip buying Windows and pirate it or simply install Linux.

If Windows would've costed 50 USD everywhere and had a milder "security" system, they'd be selling at least 5-10 times more copies.

Some countries have all sorts of big and small taxes which drive the prices of the windows licenses up by 10-40% and some shops also add their own profit margins. Having them be so expensive in the first place doesn't help at all.

>I had full executive support in investigating a port, but had I brought forth a proposal to proceed I would have faced arguments from many that I was undermining Microsoft’s entire business plan.

Yes, you're right. That's what it was actually about. MS was (and still is) trying to kill all competition. Building products for the competition is a sort of approval and a confirmation that the particular product is worth using.

>I had full executive support in investigating a port, but had I brought forth a proposal to proceed I would have faced arguments from many that I was undermining Microsoft’s entire business plan.

See? Read that part "I was undermining Microsoft's entire business plan", please. That also includes the monoculture and the perfect vendor lock in.

The main issue is that you can't easily move to another platform when your entire app / system runs on MS software. If you use Oracle's DB or something else for an app with a DB, you could move away from Windows if you decided to, provided you are ready to and can make the required changes to your app's code.

As for "my rant", it looks like the porting to *NIX was just an idea, not something they were seriously considering. I never expected them to do it because some people would choose not to buy Windows licenses and just buy SQL Server licenses, not both.

That's hardly a rant. It's just the long story of MS vs. the "viral" open source / free software.

This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering.

I'd reduce it all down to: we didn't want people to use SQL Server on *NIX because we wanted to sell them expensive OS licenses & licenses for other products.

>environment no one really knows nor cares what the underlying OS is. SQL Azure thus becomes Microsoft’s answer for those who don’t want to run an in-house Windows Server just so they can run SQL Server.

Nope, not really, I do care about the database and about the underlying OS. I don't like to use Windows for web hosting mainly due to its unpredictable HDD space usage (Windows folder growth vs number of installed updates over time).

Also, in Microsoft land, it's pretty difficult to be "up to date" with everything. You install hundreds of updates for the OS, the database and other components and there are some extra hotfixes you normally get when you have a support contract with them.

There's also the issue of the performance. You need more hardware for Windows than for other OSes. I had an "enterprise" CRM we will not name which had low performance on a Windows 2008 R1 Standard. I tried to upgrade it to R2 and the CRM stopped working completely. Of course, this wasn't done on the production box.