Unfortunately, it seems that our government is in bed with so many corporations, and they don't want to threaten their corporate benefactors. Therefore, they'll never bring up such a thing, because of all the feathers that the subject would ruffle.
Personally, I think Microsoft's proved more than enough times that the corporate death penalty should be an available option when companies get that large - as Cringely pointed out, in a roundabout way, Microsoft has so much money on hand, financial "remedies" aren't, when the company in question can afford to just consider fines for non-compliance as a business expense.
Hah. Seriously? Guess they only put it down here in the states. I don't know why they'd want to keep that brand alive anyway, given how terrible their systems have always been known to be (as mentioned earlier, "Packard Hell" - a name that they definitely earned).
Packard Bell was bought out by NEC, which (mercifully) put the brand down. I remember working on Packard Bell systems when I was working as a tech some years ago, and how terrible they were. However, Gateways were a (very) close second; people always wondered why I said "no, I would never buy a Gateway computer". (I said that because of my own experience with them.)
I saw a quote some time ago that described Bill Gates as a "technological Willy Wonka". I think this is still how many of the "average Joe" type people, who really don't know much about computers and technology (the kind that consider themselves to be pretty smart if they can turn them on) see him. Unfortunately, I don't really know what can be done to dispel this impression. Maybe required viewings of "Pirates of Silicon Valley" will educate them... or maybe not. I dunno.
Not all/. readers think this way - while I admit I like some of Apple's industrial design (I say this with a PowerBook Pismo running Debian Linux sitting on my lap), their OS does not thrill me. Apple does come up with some really awesome ideas, but they've made their share of screw-ups as well. And I do believe software patents are utterly ridiculous. And no, I'm not that excited over the iPod.
Unfortunately, looking at ESR's followup, it's going to be pretty difficult (without taking away perfectly valid functionality, anyway) to do what he's talking about. How exactly can you verify that there's not a Windows print server on a non-local subnet that you want to use? Or CUPS, or LPD? What is your machine going to do? Scan the entire IPv4, or IPv6, address space every time you want to add a stupid printer?
I mean, if the Windows print servers are local, and you can see the broadcasts, or you use SLP on your network, or you're using NetWare (NCP) printing, you can pick up on printers on your own network. And what about older printers that don't to IEEE-1284 bidi communication? It's not like they have the ability to tell anyone they're there.
I can see saying "these are the printers I can see just by checking", and narrowing the list by default, with a "Show all available communication methods" button (aka "Advanced..." or similar), but autodetection isn't perfect, and in certain cases isn't feasible (figuring out that every UNIX host on your network is running CUPS, as a condition for disabling printind via LPD? what if a host is packet filtering, so your scans are inconclusive? what then?), so taking away the ability to access those services just because the software can't automagically detect them is a mistake.
DVD-RAM is supported on Linux. I know people who've used it. However, DVD-RAM is not like a "DVD" per se - it's a cartridge-based media, based on similar technology, but you won't be burning video to them and popping them in your set-top DVD player.
Actually, probably not... unless you can trick the drive into recording the spiral track from the outer edge in, like Xbox discs are made, I don't think that's going to happen.
If they're talking about "third party software" (yes, I RTFA'd), I'd bet dollars to donuts it speaks SCSI-3 MMC (or the IDE equivalent, ATAPI MMC, which is basically the same except for a few commands), which means it'll work perfectly well with Linux. Yes, IDE drives from an x86 will work fine in a PPC (or any other system that has, or can be gifted with, an ATA/IDE bus), but these companies don't care about us fringe people using our Linux/*BSD machines, just the Windows (and Mac, sorta kinda maybe) using masses...
So a corporation throwing their weight around, and forcing competitors out of the market, is just fine, and no one should say anything? I really hope you're kidding. There needs to be responsibility, and there needs to be ways to prevent companies from forcing others to do what they want by virtue of their size (like going out of business because Big Company X has decided "we want this market, it's ours now!")...
Wrong. AC3 is the encoding used on DVDs. AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, is a totally different audio format (AAC and AC3 were both developed by Dolby, but they're not the same). AAC is the "official" companion audio bitstream format for MPEG-4.
Maybe those poor schmoes using IE, but I never see a popup ad, and I block most banner ads too. I run Mozilla (Mozilla Firefox, specifically), so it magically blocks them all for me. It's funny for me, because I'm so used to browsing the web unaccosted by pop-ups that I barely know what people are talking about when they mention them, other than that "oh yeah, you must be using that _other_ browser..."
And yeah, I think these popup-based sales solicitation methods are cheesy. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of one. I'm a big boy, and if I want to buy something from you, I'll let you know. Otherwise, please leave me the hell alone, thank you, I'll be here all week...
It's more like them calling you up unsolicited, not you calling them up and harassing them. Personally, I'll stick with using Mozilla - just in case I'm ever browsing RackSpace's site (not likely, but...) and they ever try to "pop-up" me, my browser will make sure I don't even notice.
RackSpace (and whoever else may use this), some people may like it fine, but the technical people who neither need nor desire hand-holding through purchasing decisions will find this offensive. If you want to keep their business, you might consider toning it down a notch or two. If you don't care - hey, keep on doing what you're doing, it'll all work itself out anyway.
This kind of crap never made any sense to me when I was a kid, and it makes even less sense now. Who are these cretins who are so afraid of "bad words" anyway?
The really funny part is, if anything, my parents used far worse language than anything I ever remember hearing in a movie, on TV, or on the radio. Where do these people think kids usually learn bad language? I'll bet in most cases, they hear far worse, and far MORE, at home, from their OWN PARENTS no less, than from any form of media. Has any research ever been done about THAT?
Why the hell is it that "religious" people assume that religion == morality? Can someone please explain this one to me? Consider the stupid crap people do, and have done, in the name of religion, god, and whatever else.
Also, I'd consider the attitudes and behaviors of the religious, or at least Christian, people I've known, versus the people who either (a) are atheist/agnostic or (b) don't feel the need to bring religion up in relation to everything. In my experience, they're actually nicer, easier to deal with, more conscientious, and dare I say, more moral, than some of the "Christians" I've known.
Not that Christians are bad people - many of them are good, conscientious people as well. But the small percentage of people that are real assholes, and IMO generally less-than-moral people, seem to be, or at least consider themselves, of the Christin persuasion.
There are two kinds of suspend: suspend to RAM (S2R) (which still requires power for the RAM and may or may not be able to turn of mostly everythign else, depending on hardware and BIOS capabilities) and suspend to disk (S2D), which, of course, can consume essentially nothing.
I ran Debian on an iBook (an older round iBook) while I worked for a previous employer. It would happily sleep for days, nearly a week at a time, without draining its battery. (I currently run it on a PowerBook Pismo - I use it frequently enough that I don't get a chance to really gauge it, but the power loss during sleep still seems pretty small.) At another previous employer, I ran Debian on a Gateway laptop. Suspend (APM suspend, at the time, ACPI was still new at the time) was pretty flaky. Unfortunately, I've seen worse experiences with suspend in Windows than in Linux.
Linux is still problematic, since it's ACPI support is much-improved lately, but still not really up to the task. So far as I'm concerned, this is still a major area where Linux is just not really capable of playing in the modern world yet - pretty much everything today should have and use ACPI, not just laptops.
That you even suggest this is to ignore a big part of ACPI, that being its scope - it's not just for power management, but for system configuration management and a lot of other stuff. Also you ignore how complicated ACPI is to implement, not to mention the fact that each BIOS vendor's implementations have their own totally different set of bugs. On Apple's gear, suspend works better in general - because there's one firmware (OpenFirmware) and one hardware maker (Apple). The bugs are there, but it's a lot easier to isolate them when you have a (fairly) common implementation to work with.
Actually, Office for OS X is still a lot different from anything written for an "actual UNIX" - it's written to the Carbon API, which is pretty close to the old MacOS APIs, not like the Cocoa APIs, where OpenStep and GNUStep provide reasonably portable implementations to build against. A lot of applications currently written for OS X are still written to the Carbon API, so they hardly qualify as anything you could either just rebuild, or quickly port, to Linux, *BSD or another *NIX-like OS.
That was my impression of it as well. Also that he really felt the need to talk himself up and make himself sound impressive and well-connected, but as others mentioned, while being very vague about to what and/or whom he was specifically connected. Pretty ridiculous, IMO.
It's not saying that it costs $45, but it averages at about $45 per year (apparently, that means that a computer lasts somewhere around 3-4 years before it needs an OS upgrade).
*Sam whips head/bomb out of his coat* Sam: "Where should I put this so it doesn't hurt anyone we know or care about?" Max: "Out the window, Sam. There's nothin' but strangers out there." *Sam tosses head/bomb out window, and BLAM* Sam: "I hope there was nobody on that bus." Max: "Nobody WE know at least!"
It's still there because older installers still use it as a way to install the icons for the apps they install. It's messy. I think the old Windows File Manager is still there too.
Lucas ain't doing crap with SWG. It appears that Sony (the same people that did Evercra^W^W^Wquest) are doing this one. Knights of the Old Republic was a BioWare title. What _exactly_ is LucasArts _doing_ these days? Sitting around on their thumbs, counting ceiling tiles in their offices? They farm out nearly every title that has their brand on it anymore - they've become nothing but a business dedicated to farming out development to other software houses, it seems.
"You used to be cool - but then you sold out" seems to be exceedingly appropriate here...
Because the "Strawberry Shortcake" character and properties belong to American Greetings. The fact that American McGee's name was mentioned didn't have anything to do with anything, other than the fact that American likes to take stories that have been turned a bit too happy, and expose their darker side...
There's a difference between his words and his actions. His mouth is saying "I don't really approve, but what choice have I got?" but his actions are saying "This is just fine with me." Also, by caving like he did, as others have pointed out, this makes his company prime fodder for this kind of thing in the future - since it's now known he'll cave to the demands of a company that's still tied up in court, and is generally considered by anyone "in the know" to be off their collective rocker, every two-bit jackass who thinks he can make a buck off them to "protect" them from a "potential lawsuit" will be banging on their door, lookin' to score some of that action.
Have you ever _used_ Debian? I think most of the people who make the "you have to do it all by hand!" complaints about Debian have never used it. I can print _just fine_ to both the HP LaserJet 4L and the color DeskJet we have at the office from my dual-headed Debian workstation - and all I had to do was install cups, smbclient, and the foomatic packages, grab and install the driver from linuxprinting.org, configure the printer, and go. I can print from any app that supports printing. If you're going to complain about Debian, at least use it first. (And learn to use the packaging system - synaptic, aptitude, and/or apt-get and apt-cache at the prompt. You'd be surprised how much software is actually already packaged for you.)
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Unfortunately, it seems that our government is in bed with so many corporations, and they don't want to threaten their corporate benefactors. Therefore, they'll never bring up such a thing, because of all the feathers that the subject would ruffle.
Personally, I think Microsoft's proved more than enough times that the corporate death penalty should be an available option when companies get that large - as Cringely pointed out, in a roundabout way, Microsoft has so much money on hand, financial "remedies" aren't, when the company in question can afford to just consider fines for non-compliance as a business expense.
Hah. Seriously? Guess they only put it down here in the states. I don't know why they'd want to keep that brand alive anyway, given how terrible their systems have always been known to be (as mentioned earlier, "Packard Hell" - a name that they definitely earned).
Packard Bell was bought out by NEC, which (mercifully) put the brand down. I remember working on Packard Bell systems when I was working as a tech some years ago, and how terrible they were. However, Gateways were a (very) close second; people always wondered why I said "no, I would never buy a Gateway computer". (I said that because of my own experience with them.)
I saw a quote some time ago that described Bill Gates as a "technological Willy Wonka". I think this is still how many of the "average Joe" type people, who really don't know much about computers and technology (the kind that consider themselves to be pretty smart if they can turn them on) see him. Unfortunately, I don't really know what can be done to dispel this impression. Maybe required viewings of "Pirates of Silicon Valley" will educate them... or maybe not. I dunno.
Not all /. readers think this way - while I admit I like some of Apple's industrial design (I say this with a PowerBook Pismo running Debian Linux sitting on my lap), their OS does not thrill me. Apple does come up with some really awesome ideas, but they've made their share of screw-ups as well. And I do believe software patents are utterly ridiculous. And no, I'm not that excited over the iPod.
Unfortunately, looking at ESR's followup, it's going to be pretty difficult (without taking away perfectly valid functionality, anyway) to do what he's talking about. How exactly can you verify that there's not a Windows print server on a non-local subnet that you want to use? Or CUPS, or LPD? What is your machine going to do? Scan the entire IPv4, or IPv6, address space every time you want to add a stupid printer?
I mean, if the Windows print servers are local, and you can see the broadcasts, or you use SLP on your network, or you're using NetWare (NCP) printing, you can pick up on printers on your own network. And what about older printers that don't to IEEE-1284 bidi communication? It's not like they have the ability to tell anyone they're there.
I can see saying "these are the printers I can see just by checking", and narrowing the list by default, with a "Show all available communication methods" button (aka "Advanced..." or similar), but autodetection isn't perfect, and in certain cases isn't feasible (figuring out that every UNIX host on your network is running CUPS, as a condition for disabling printind via LPD? what if a host is packet filtering, so your scans are inconclusive? what then?), so taking away the ability to access those services just because the software can't automagically detect them is a mistake.
DVD-RAM is supported on Linux. I know people who've used it. However, DVD-RAM is not like a "DVD" per se - it's a cartridge-based media, based on similar technology, but you won't be burning video to them and popping them in your set-top DVD player.
Actually, probably not... unless you can trick the drive into recording the spiral track from the outer edge in, like Xbox discs are made, I don't think that's going to happen.
If they're talking about "third party software" (yes, I RTFA'd), I'd bet dollars to donuts it speaks SCSI-3 MMC (or the IDE equivalent, ATAPI MMC, which is basically the same except for a few commands), which means it'll work perfectly well with Linux. Yes, IDE drives from an x86 will work fine in a PPC (or any other system that has, or can be gifted with, an ATA/IDE bus), but these companies don't care about us fringe people using our Linux/*BSD machines, just the Windows (and Mac, sorta kinda maybe) using masses...
So a corporation throwing their weight around, and forcing competitors out of the market, is just fine, and no one should say anything? I really hope you're kidding. There needs to be responsibility, and there needs to be ways to prevent companies from forcing others to do what they want by virtue of their size (like going out of business because Big Company X has decided "we want this market, it's ours now!")...
Wrong. AC3 is the encoding used on DVDs. AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, is a totally different audio format (AAC and AC3 were both developed by Dolby, but they're not the same). AAC is the "official" companion audio bitstream format for MPEG-4.
Maybe those poor schmoes using IE, but I never see a popup ad, and I block most banner ads too. I run Mozilla (Mozilla Firefox, specifically), so it magically blocks them all for me. It's funny for me, because I'm so used to browsing the web unaccosted by pop-ups that I barely know what people are talking about when they mention them, other than that "oh yeah, you must be using that _other_ browser..."
And yeah, I think these popup-based sales solicitation methods are cheesy. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of one. I'm a big boy, and if I want to buy something from you, I'll let you know. Otherwise, please leave me the hell alone, thank you, I'll be here all week...
It's more like them calling you up unsolicited, not you calling them up and harassing them. Personally, I'll stick with using Mozilla - just in case I'm ever browsing RackSpace's site (not likely, but...) and they ever try to "pop-up" me, my browser will make sure I don't even notice.
RackSpace (and whoever else may use this), some people may like it fine, but the technical people who neither need nor desire hand-holding through purchasing decisions will find this offensive. If you want to keep their business, you might consider toning it down a notch or two. If you don't care - hey, keep on doing what you're doing, it'll all work itself out anyway.
This kind of crap never made any sense to me when I was a kid, and it makes even less sense now. Who are these cretins who are so afraid of "bad words" anyway?
The really funny part is, if anything, my parents used far worse language than anything I ever remember hearing in a movie, on TV, or on the radio. Where do these people think kids usually learn bad language? I'll bet in most cases, they hear far worse, and far MORE, at home, from their OWN PARENTS no less, than from any form of media. Has any research ever been done about THAT?
Just my own opinion on the subject...
Why the hell is it that "religious" people assume that religion == morality? Can someone please explain this one to me? Consider the stupid crap people do, and have done, in the name of religion, god, and whatever else.
Also, I'd consider the attitudes and behaviors of the religious, or at least Christian, people I've known, versus the people who either (a) are atheist/agnostic or (b) don't feel the need to bring religion up in relation to everything. In my experience, they're actually nicer, easier to deal with, more conscientious, and dare I say, more moral, than some of the "Christians" I've known.
Not that Christians are bad people - many of them are good, conscientious people as well. But the small percentage of people that are real assholes, and IMO generally less-than-moral people, seem to be, or at least consider themselves, of the Christin persuasion.
There are two kinds of suspend: suspend to RAM (S2R) (which still requires power for the RAM and may or may not be able to turn of mostly everythign else, depending on hardware and BIOS capabilities) and suspend to disk (S2D), which, of course, can consume essentially nothing.
I ran Debian on an iBook (an older round iBook) while I worked for a previous employer. It would happily sleep for days, nearly a week at a time, without draining its battery. (I currently run it on a PowerBook Pismo - I use it frequently enough that I don't get a chance to really gauge it, but the power loss during sleep still seems pretty small.) At another previous employer, I ran Debian on a Gateway laptop. Suspend (APM suspend, at the time, ACPI was still new at the time) was pretty flaky. Unfortunately, I've seen worse experiences with suspend in Windows than in Linux.
Linux is still problematic, since it's ACPI support is much-improved lately, but still not really up to the task. So far as I'm concerned, this is still a major area where Linux is just not really capable of playing in the modern world yet - pretty much everything today should have and use ACPI, not just laptops.
That you even suggest this is to ignore a big part of ACPI, that being its scope - it's not just for power management, but for system configuration management and a lot of other stuff. Also you ignore how complicated ACPI is to implement, not to mention the fact that each BIOS vendor's implementations have their own totally different set of bugs. On Apple's gear, suspend works better in general - because there's one firmware (OpenFirmware) and one hardware maker (Apple). The bugs are there, but it's a lot easier to isolate them when you have a (fairly) common implementation to work with.
Actually, Office for OS X is still a lot different from anything written for an "actual UNIX" - it's written to the Carbon API, which is pretty close to the old MacOS APIs, not like the Cocoa APIs, where OpenStep and GNUStep provide reasonably portable implementations to build against. A lot of applications currently written for OS X are still written to the Carbon API, so they hardly qualify as anything you could either just rebuild, or quickly port, to Linux, *BSD or another *NIX-like OS.
That was my impression of it as well. Also that he really felt the need to talk himself up and make himself sound impressive and well-connected, but as others mentioned, while being very vague about to what and/or whom he was specifically connected. Pretty ridiculous, IMO.
It's not saying that it costs $45, but it averages at about $45 per year (apparently, that means that a computer lasts somewhere around 3-4 years before it needs an OS upgrade).
Actually, it was more like:
*Sam whips head/bomb out of his coat*
Sam: "Where should I put this so it doesn't hurt anyone we know or care about?"
Max: "Out the window, Sam. There's nothin' but strangers out there."
*Sam tosses head/bomb out window, and BLAM*
Sam: "I hope there was nobody on that bus."
Max: "Nobody WE know at least!"
Yes, I'm a pedant.
It's still there because older installers still use it as a way to install the icons for the apps they install. It's messy. I think the old Windows File Manager is still there too.
Lucas ain't doing crap with SWG. It appears that Sony (the same people that did Evercra^W^W^Wquest) are doing this one. Knights of the Old Republic was a BioWare title. What _exactly_ is LucasArts _doing_ these days? Sitting around on their thumbs, counting ceiling tiles in their offices? They farm out nearly every title that has their brand on it anymore - they've become nothing but a business dedicated to farming out development to other software houses, it seems.
"You used to be cool - but then you sold out" seems to be exceedingly appropriate here...
Because the "Strawberry Shortcake" character and properties belong to American Greetings. The fact that American McGee's name was mentioned didn't have anything to do with anything, other than the fact that American likes to take stories that have been turned a bit too happy, and expose their darker side...
There's a difference between his words and his actions. His mouth is saying "I don't really approve, but what choice have I got?" but his actions are saying "This is just fine with me." Also, by caving like he did, as others have pointed out, this makes his company prime fodder for this kind of thing in the future - since it's now known he'll cave to the demands of a company that's still tied up in court, and is generally considered by anyone "in the know" to be off their collective rocker, every two-bit jackass who thinks he can make a buck off them to "protect" them from a "potential lawsuit" will be banging on their door, lookin' to score some of that action.
Have you ever _used_ Debian? I think most of the people who make the "you have to do it all by hand!" complaints about Debian have never used it. I can print _just fine_ to both the HP LaserJet 4L and the color DeskJet we have at the office from my dual-headed Debian workstation - and all I had to do was install cups, smbclient, and the foomatic packages, grab and install the driver from linuxprinting.org, configure the printer, and go. I can print from any app that supports printing. If you're going to complain about Debian, at least use it first. (And learn to use the packaging system - synaptic, aptitude, and/or apt-get and apt-cache at the prompt. You'd be surprised how much software is actually already packaged for you.)