With Windows Vista, Microsoft shifted from the development path of Windows XP wide open to tampering with zero reaction, and has integrated an anti-piracy infrastructure into the platform. In direct correlation with the Windows Genuine Advantage and the Activation mechanisms, Windows Vista will be able to detect and blacklist non-genuine product keys, crack attempts, and identify the expiration of the initial 30-day grace period. The operating system will react to all by moving first into a non-genuine state and then into Reduced Functionality Mode.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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This document has been written in an attempt to review and contrast the samples of licenses made available by Microsoft and the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community. As these two have now become the most prominent purveyors of platforms and software application technology in the computer industry worldwide, we feel it would be instructive for business and organisational users to have a plain-language analysis of these key components of the software they use. We will also attempt a very simple quantitative analysis of what portions of both licenses devote to giving users rights, taking away user rights, and limiting the extent to which users can make legal claims or sue the purveyors of the software from both camps.
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In this whitepaper, we will make a powerful comparison between the two choices that businesses have for building XML-based web services: the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1, built by Sun Microsystems and other industry players, and Microsoft.NET 2, built by Microsoft Corporation. Some of the statements we make will offend you, and hopefully more of them will agree with you. So as you read this paper, please remember our three promises:
1. We promise to compare these choices at a logical, neutral, and unbiased level.
2. We promise to tell the tale about how we really do feel about these technologies.
3. We promise to dispel the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) that exists in the marketplace today.
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