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FSF Attacks Windows 7's "Sins" In New Campaign
CWmike writes "The Free Software Foundation today launched a campaign against Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, calling it 'treacherous computing' that stealthily takes away rights from users. At the Web site Windows7Sins.org, the Boston-based FSF lists the seven 'sins' that proprietary software such as Windows 7 commits against computer users. They include: Poisoning education, locking in users, abusing standards such as OpenDocument Format (ODF), leveraging monopolistic behavior, threatening user security, enforcing Digital Rights Management (DRM) at the request of entertainment companies concerned about movie and music piracy, and invading privacy. 'Windows, for some time now, has really been a DRM platform, restricting you from making copies of digital files,' said executive director Peter Brown. And if Microsoft's Trusted Computing technology were fully implemented the way the company would like, the vendor would have 'malicious and really complete control over your computer.'"
Yes, Computerworld fails to understand what they are talking about.
I too am from New Zealand and attended a speech RMS gave at Auckland University. I have also read almost all of his essays. 99% of the people (geeks included) that speak of Free Software and RMS fail to grasp important concepts of the Free Software movement.
Thats not to say I support this riduculous FUD campaign against Windows 7. It is as bad as Microsofts "Get the facts" crap they pulled. I believe in Free Softare, and have supported other campaigns that the FSF support, such as Defective By Design, but the FSF should be focusing on the strengths of Free Software, the community and the potential it has in the educational sector. Spending effort talking crap about Microsoft is time and resources wasted which could be better spend else where.
I work in a games company and was involved in art tools for many years. Anyone technical who digs into 3DS comes to hate it with a passion. It's a mess in desperate in need of a rewrite. Blender IS better to develop for. API/scripting aside, the rigging stuff in 3DS Max is terrible, it's not a proper animation package, we have dropped it here for animation, after it failed to do the job so badly it's supporters lost all authority on the matter. Maya is used for animation, Max if used at all, is used only by modelers. Blender IS better than Max for animation. There are artists here who love Blender (but it's only home they use it). The ones who have tried it and hate it, hate it because the interface is so different for Max/Maya. They don't want to learn a new interface. It's hard to argue it can't be used for high quality work when there is high quality work done with it (Big bunny, Elephant dream and others). I'm not involved with art tools and artists any more, but I keep in contact with those that are, and Blender is certainly one to watch. Especially as Maya quality decays under Autodesk and XSI is beginning to decay too. Why Autodesk was allowed to own Max, Maya and XSI is beyond me. Blender is one of a few of rays of hope.
He never had more than 33% percent of votes in any non-rigged election. If that qualifies as popular support or not, your decision. The world ain't black and white.
Hold my beer and watch this!
I think you really need a history class, I'm no expert but basically: Hitler had not promised to ban all other political parties (nor where his anti-semitic views on prominent display in nazi propaganda). Hitler tricked and schemed other politicians into giving him more power, in exchange for getting rid of the threat of communism (much like McCarthy), however once he had the power there was not much that could be done, without the ability to unify the 56% of the country that had voted for the other parties where powerless to do anything about it. Hitler was popular there is no denying that but
1) He never got the majority vote
2) He never promised to seize power and crush other democratic parties, merely to crush communism (which is what many democratic leaders where doing at the time)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
That's because society in general has conflated pedophilia with ephebophilia. Pedophilia, in it's technical sense, means "sex with pre-pubescents" (or rather, an inclination to such sex). Ephebophilia is an inclination towards sex with adolescents. Society, in it's endless quest to eliminate fine distinctions, uses "pedophilia" to mean "sex with children". It then uses the legal definition of child - "under 18" - rather than the biological one, and ends up with "pedophilia is sex with under 18s". Which leads to the cases like the 18 year-old with the 17 year-old girlfriend who's convicted of statuatory rape. What (I assume) Stallman means is probably quite true. 16 year olds having consensual sex is probably not going to do them any more harm than having consensual sex two years later.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
More civilized? Philadelphia just had some nice "security" recently.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/cityhall/46491137.html
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
If you have a look at the article he's responding to, it's about a dutch political party campaigning to have the age of consent lowered to 12, instead of 16. That's generally the onset of adolescence (ephebophilia), not pre-adolescence (pedophilia). He may have meant children. However "child" is an ambiguous word, that has multiple meanings, and whose meaning has changed over the years. It wasn't too long ago, historically, that a boy would be considered a man at around 13. Our society's legal definition has "child" defined at ~18. It's perfectly consonant that Stallman was talking about our society's legal definition of "child" rather than the biological definition of pre-pubescence.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The minimum age of consent not that long ago was 7-10 years old.
"Throughout most of the 19th century, the minimum age of consent for sexual intercourse in most American states was 10 years. In Delaware it was only 7 years.
As late as 1930, twelve states allowed boys as young as 14 and girls as young as 12 to marry (with parental consent)."
Or you could download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats which is free, doesn't require genuine software validation, and will patch anything back to Office 2000, which was released in 1999. It's a quick download and takes very little time to install.
The claim that Microsoft forces you to upgrade Office to maintain file format compatibility is simply incorrect. Arguing that you must upgrade to continue receiving support is disingenuous, because almost every software vendor does this -- including the F/OSS ones.
The Freelance Wizard
That is a wonderful little rant you've gone on there, too bad it's not true. The Windows 7 WordPad supports standard text files, RTF, ODF, and OOXML (and not .doc, which hasn't been supported since XP) just like TextEdit.
And before you rebut that you weren't talking about Windows 7; well then what was your point? The article is about the "sins" of...Windows 7.
Windows doesn't add DRM to anything. Windows supports playing some DRMed formats, but removing DRM support would provide less functionality, not more (those formats would not be playable).
Microsoft is not taking away your freedom by supporting DRMed formats. The people selling you DRMed content are. Your beef is with people like the MPAA, who won't sell you an unencumbered movie. Microsoft is just letting you watch it, if that's what you choose to purchase.
Slightly off-topic, but I am sure that W7 and IE Browsers are "tightly woven" with the Sharepoint portal. You can hardly use the portal without the IE Browsers and Office200x.
You don't need Office installed to use SharePoint. Of course, this kinda defeats the point, since SharePoint is most useful as a versioned library for Office documents.
Regarding browsers - you can browse SharePoint sites with Firefox or Safari, they are officially supported - you will miss some features (often useless stuff, like drag and drop of files from Explorer into SharePoint browser window), but all content is accessible.
For future release, this will improve in two ways. First, they are dropping IE6 support altogether with all the hacks it required, making the markup much closer to standards. Second, they're apparently going to use Silverlight if available to provide those "advanced features" in all browsers with the plugin installed, not just IE. Overall, the changelog promises "improved Firefox and Safari support", though it's hard to say how much it is actually improved yet. We'll have to see.
The second part actually has to do with working with Office documents without Office - this is called Office Web Applications. It seems that they also use Silverlight when available to enable full support for everything desktop Office can do, and otherwise fall back to plain HTML+CSS+JS mode, which would probably be roughly comparable to Google Docs feature-wise.