Yes, because you'd have to be INSANE to use Ubuntu for E-mail, Firefox and 95% of what computers do for people, such office work, solitaire and software development.
The opposite of the truth is often a lie. Debian is a sane place to put your email and other important stuff. It's stable and upgrades better than anything I've seen. Putting it elsewhere may not be "insane", so speak for yourself not me.
Placing that important work on a system that has non free software is not a good idea and might be worse than you think. Quality is usually less than free equivalents, so your performance will degrade in proportion to the amount of non free software you use. When such an option even exists, non free software is always more difficult to upgrade than free software. More important problems are in the EULA. Microsoft, to name an extreme example, gives itself the right to inspect your files for "copyright violation" and delete them at will with no further obligation to you. Clearly, it's insane to software from a company like that. Others may not be as bad, but you never can tell with non free software. Non free software, regardless of it's function, is dangerous. Non free software is written to do the bidding of it's owners.
i feel like a traitor, but should i at least look at ubuntu?
That depends on what you want to do. If you want to play games with accelerated graphics or watch YouTube or other flash stuff, you need Ubuntu's non free goodies. If you want a sane place to put your email, web research and 95% of what computers do for people, you want Debian's free goodness. Debian runs well and upgrades gracefully. A simple rule might be: Stable on the server, Testing on your desktop, Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, Linspire, etc on your toybox. If playing with the software itself is your thing, go for Sid. Give the people what they want. That includes yourself.
Things are looking good as far as a mere user like me is concerned.
Exactly. What problems are actually showing up in software?
A developer is leaving, that's a problem. It's sad to see a talented developer go, but someone else will step up the the plate and prove that every developer indeed deserves a voice.
A developer claims that mailing lists made him irritable. That's a problem that has one of two causes, the lists have been infiltrated by trolls or he needs to more tolerant and less easily bothered. The solution treats both causes. Realize that some people on your list are intentionally provoking you and ignore them. Realize also that differences can always be worked out and that not everything has to go exactly your way. If you are right, the project will get back to your way even when it makes mistakes.
Free software has enemies, that's a problem. Back in 1998, Microsoft declared war on free software with their Halloween Document and targeted the user community. Trolling lists is something they have been doing all the way back to Steven Barkto. It disrupts useful activity, promotes ill will and distrust of your neighbor and can even move organizations to the wrong conclusions and in the wrong directions. Eventually, the truth comes out so the strategy is ultimately wasteful. There is nothing M$ can do to make non free software competitive and they can't really shut down free software. There are far too many projects and damaged communication channels are routed around. The co operative spirit of free software depends on good will, but free software creates that good will in abundance.
The answer is not to make a king. If you think your peer is annoying now, imagine them with the king like power to make decisions you want for yourself.
None of these problems is an actual software problem. The kind of people who pretend such things are a big deal are the kinds of people that said free software could not make a friendly user interface, usable documentation, a coherent distribution, a kernel, a compiler, a text editor, etc. Etch is a fantastic distribution that shows that things are working very well.
You see, this is the part that really torques me off about the hardcore Linux user. They assume the average user is willing to put up with the quirks, the kernel re-compiles, the beta (or alpha!) drivers, and the hacked-support-for-my-Sony-special-widget issues. You just don't get it, do you?
I see why you are angry. Quirks - see any windoze GUI. Compiles? leave that for people who enjoy that kind of thing. If those are your only options you might be angry.
It's easier to take the live CD to the store and have it work forever than it is to try to use and keep up a windoze box. If you have already invested in difficult hardware, you are screwed until the free software world envelops it, a process that takes between one and five years.
The reason why people put up with Apple's DRM'ed technology is because its easy to use. Non-tech people can and do use it... a DRM-less MP3 will work with the iPod, which is very important to compete, but how will it be delivered to the user? Will it automatically show up in a playlist in a program such as iTunes so that a non-tech person doesn't have to search for the downloaded file and put it where it belongs so he/she can immediately play it after its done?
If it does not show up in such a list, iTunes is not easy to use.
Amarok is easy. You dump your music into any directories you chose and Amarok scans it into a database. The interface then presents it to you in about 14 different ways all searchable, by Artist/Album or any combination of tags, file system, radio stream and context. Context view pulls up a list of your collection of the current artist, and has tabs for artist and lyric info from the web. It will eat any format of music you throw at it and spits it out beautifully. Scripts are available to load both nice iPods and cheap ass mp3 players.
The only problem remaining is not one for this service, limits of available mp3 players. The mp3 player scripts, unfortunately don't yet keep track of the format your player needs, so the $50 player from walmart will limit you to transcoding to mp3, which is a massive pain if you have any other kind of music and want to use such a cheap player. Non technical users mostly have mp3 and will feel no pain.
Technical users have options that will get to others later. OpenZaurus will play ogg, mp3, aac, etc, so it is easy. Soon enough, players as easy as OpenZaurus will hit the market. Trekstor already does it, but is difficult to find in the US. At that point, the world will be easy and iTunes will look very difficult.
The funny thing is that M$ could easily unseat Apple if they made a few sacrifices and pulled their head out of their ass. The above grocery list is easy to meet and they have flooded the market with cheap devices that could do it with one or two mods. They are so interested in owning ALL of the pie that they are squandering their chance to own MOST of the DRM'd music market. Silly tricks like moving from USBFS to MTP and trying to force everyone onto WiMP were a waste of their time. The DRM market is going to shrink and vanish as people who publish non DRM'd stuff start making more money than their greedier peers. Even then M$ could still make money as a distributor and promoter but it's doubtful they will realize that in time. Their inability to play nice with others is the primary threat to their customer loyalty. It makes their platform suck and people are moving off it. Their demise in media is a great blessing for every other platform.
The last time I installed Ubuntsu on my Vaio Type U, suspend to RAM did not work at all.... Suspend to ram/disk is such a basic functionality, and I just could not believe that nobody figured out how to make it work without problems. Moreover, I had to struggle with configuration files for two days to make my Bluetooth adapter work.
Those are not Linux problems, they are Sony problems. Sony, obviously, knows how to make their hardware work which is why those things sort of work under Windoze. I say sort of because XP is neither stable nor network safe, so nothing Sony does for it will last long. It would be nice of Sony to put their effort where the market is moving or at least to give out the information needed for others to make drivers. What you really should ask is why it's possible to buy that computer with Windoze but not with any of the much less expensive alternatives. That's right, the anti-trust violations M$ was busted for years ago.
The best way to move the market and please yourself is to buy stuff that works. It takes research effort up front but you will recoup that many times over the life of the machine. More importantly, you send the only message markets understand: money. I'll research the specific model before I buy. The easiest research is to take a live CD to the store. If it runs and things work, I might buy the machine. Anything else is a gamble.
I've been happy with used thinkpads. I've gotten them from Certified Used and Local Stores. Power management works well with all of them with nothing more than Debian right out of the box. The machine I'm writing this on has a good 66 days of uptime under Etch and I booted it last only because I wanted to use it's optical drive to install to another hard drive. Sarge just never goes down. Anything from a PII with 256 MB and better is usable for normal everyday use, though I've migrated to 1 GHz class processors. All I miss are software related to video editing and accelerated graphics which are all patented and NDA'd to hell.
Trackhead, point out on the doll where Vista touched you. ..
In the wallet, of course. M$ is going to waste $6.2 billion promoting what's looking more and more like XP SP3, super digital restriction. While I won't directly pay for that, many will. Schools, government and everyone not bright enough to use free software will pay. They will pass that cost along as taxes and higher prices. As Steve Baller likes to say, the upfront cost of software are just the beginning and all of the tremendous inefficiencies of Windoze will also be passed along in higher prices and poorer service. I don't even want to think of the costs to the economy that comes from Microsoft's inability to design a network safe OS are. All of the above easily adds up to multiples of M$'s annual net revenue.
Talk about branding for the sheer point of making people associate your brand with irritation.
They should be annoyed they have to boot everyday. The advert noise is just icing on the top.
Who knows, they might make things a little better. I thought the current Windoze start up noise was bad. Coffee shops, book stores, libraries, anywhere people bring laptops you hear that God Damned noise because M$ power management blows and because they make it hard to turn the spam off. Now it will be impossible to turn the spam off. Hopefully there will be as many start up noises as "versions" of Vista. The "I just paid $400 for a second rate OS" noise will alert everyone that someone very stupid is in the room. Other bling noises will at least bring less monotony than the ever present XP noise. Oh, who am I kidding, M$ laptops have been getting nothing but more annoying and difficult to customize. Trust M$ to screw it up even more.
You have to love an OS that has uptime measured in months.
Someone who loves M$, apparently. The summary about Microsoft's "seat" and the "Microsoft haters" and "upstarts" who would have taken their chair makes me think of the movie Tombstone or Steve Ballmer's famous chair throwing temper tantrum. Don't bother to read the article because there's nothing more there but the same kind of embarrassing nonsense. The author apparently thinks that it's OK to steal and lock down other people's innovative ideas, sue public schools and all the other villiany that comes from M$ and that no rational person should mind the abuse because M$ is eternal. So it is with WinTel fanboys everywhere and that is nothing new.
Ah, the power of non free propaganda. People's heads are so filled with stuff that is at odds with their own experience. They might as well have asked, "How do I make money with a computer?" Of the bazillions of ways to do that, only one of them is the non free way and very few people really make money that way. Really, ask yourself, do you or anyone you know make most of their money writting non free code? Why is it that so many people feel the need to support a model so few people are involved with? That's the power of non free propaganda. It needs to be addressed by knocking down the assumptions that support the conclusions best expressed here: If you don't give me money, your computer will be useless. Most of the missconceptions the public has about software have been created to support that demonstrably false conclusion. Let's look at the particular question.
What kind of an economic model does an entrepreneur look at when he starts out with free software? is vague and hard to answer. What exactly does that mean? At best, they are asking for a laundry list of ways to make money with free software. There are as many ways to answer that question as there are ways to make money with a computer. The only difference between free software and non free is user freedom. You get all the tools you need for the job without cost and you can do anything you want with them. The only way you can't make money with free software is to take someone else`s work and make use it to deny the end user of their rights. The only reason people ask that question is because they are bombarded with FUD that says you can't make a living with free software and that the free software models will one day collapse because of that. After 20 years of GNU growth and mainstream acceptance, you would think that question would go away. It's important to understand that free software is not dependent on any economic model so it is here to stay.
Your statement,
I wonder why RMS is so opposed to economic acceptance. It seems that he believes F/OSS's noble goals will be corrupted if Linux gains momentum in the corporate world, but don't we have the GPL to prevent just that? Ultimately, corporate support will help secure the foundation of F/OSS -- I'm thinking of IBM and Sun, and the corporate support behind OpenBSD and FreeBSD
is equally vague and missleading. While free software is about freedom and not about making money, there is no hostility to commercial activity or corporate involvement. A FSF newsletter a while back was positively glowing over the way free software has been adopted by embedded developers. It's pretty obvious from this that free software can be commercial software and that no one has a grudge against that.
use find to make a big tar file with what you want.
use split to get it into DVD sized pieces.
burn each with k3b, label the result and put it in a CD book.
on restore, cat file 1 file 2 file 3 file N > name.tar
untar your archive.
You could probably perform the above from a Knopix CD and an external hard drive. K3b might even have multi-disk support but I have not looked for it.
Yes, I know you could just use the external hard drive to store the data. A fire wire drive is the easiest and fastest way to make a back up. Plug it in and use grsync. Sounds great, but it's not always the best idea.
Sometimes you have more data than you have hard drive or better use for the drive.
If you are paranoid, you need write once media. Any live and writable drive is going to get hosed if your little XP computer is 0wnzered by some dirt bag who wants to erase everything you have. In that case, you can say good bye to all the data on your network when they keylog your passwords, and on your external drive as soon as you plug it in. A nice touch would be a fake dialog for you that shows their progress in wiping your drive as if it were restoring.
So I was just talking about big dumb companies not being able to keep data they should not have in the first place? ATT loses credit card data. That's information they actually need. Do you think they care about your email, besides keeping it for the NSA? Stooges.
This is the same problem companies had with old hard drives from their employee's computers both at work and at home. People give away or sell their old equipment and with it go their "secrets". Of course, the more important pieces of information were already snooped by industrial espionage, given the sorry state of security on the dominant software platform. Keyloggers abound and employees have been sending things unencrypted all along.
Non free "smart" phones exasperate the problem because they are even more closed than the dominant platform. How do you wipe the "hard drive" on the thing without ruining it? Does the local phone shop even have what's needed to wipe and reload the flash memory? I can only imagine the mess Windoze mobile versions are. Then there's the cell phone aspect of all this. How much liberty does the phone company have to read and manipulate the contents? The Baby Bells have lately brought new meanings to the term "untrusted network".
Free software phones, like the one being developed by Trolltech have a lot of potential to fix the problems. If it has the usual KDE encryption goodies, your messages and data will be secure. Moreover, reasonable steps can be taken to separate system files from your files and keep your safe. How hard would it be to have a removable SD card as your home directory? If you've ever dropped a PDA and shattered it's screen you know that having removable memory with files in standard formats are good for more than privacy when you sell the phone. The non free phones are going to go the way of non free dedicated Internet access terminals of eight years ago, right down the drain. The way Vista is going with "signed" code and other nonsense, I don't think M$ has learned that lesson or that their "smart phones" will be getting any smarter any time soon.
Even if you take preventive measures to erase sensitive data from devices, you still have mega-corporations who accidentally release sensitive data like a good smelly fart.
Even when they don't release it publically, they lack both the competence or will to keep it to themselves. I remember, ten years ago, an acquaintance who taunted a friend with private medical information. She had been a clerk for a debt collection agency and used her access to look up all of her friends. The big dumb companies share things they should not and don't keep tabs on it. Imagine what clerks at ChoicePoint could do, then think of how owned their little windoze terminals are. There's not much real privacy left anymore.
Cell phones are not free platforms and the owners are some of the most notorious abusers of personal privacy. Almost all of the Baby Bells were too happy to comply when the Bush administration asked them to break the law and tap their customers. Just to get a Cigular phone six years ago, I had to give the creeps monthly access to my credit record! You have to remember that the parent company at one time refused to allow people to plug modems into their network. The babies continue to stonewall broadband to this day. They will do anything and everything to get some crummy little franchises over their users. Your "secrets" are the last of their concerns, except where it can be used for their own marketing purposes.
My answer kind of sucks, but it works. My cell phone is nothing more. I put names into it because the phone company already knows who I'm talking to. Nothing else goes in. I don't SMS, I will never use their calenders. I resent GPS tracking. I'll never trust their cameras and I'll keep it in a box if I'm ever talking about something sensitive. The damn thing is like a bug in my pocket that can be abused by anyone with the technical wherewithal to pull the wool over the Baby Bells. These days, that's about anyone.
Why not display the video using a PC with a video card that has composite or S-video output? You should be able to hook up to any modern TV or projector. You could encode the video in whatever format you want: lossless DV, Ogg Theora, XviD, even WMV if you are really sadistic.
Yes, there are many benefits to digital media, but only if it's free. DVDs should have all of the benefits but don't, because the media companies are afraid and they have crippled the hardware. The same companies will provide the same crippling on your PC as well. Unless you find a 100% free software solution, you will be at the mercy of those who are currently making your life difficult. Given the magnitude of the problem and the willfulness of infliction, it's hard to justify a hardware purchase from those companies involved. The more money you give DRM, the worse it gets.
That's the problem. It's not, and as such most people still need to buy it... including authors, musicians, actors, and developers. Yes, in a utopian world everything would be free. But I don't live in that world, and neither do you.
So, you would take the one utopian part of our world and make it as nasty as the rest?
It is a classic theorem of economics that public goods are under-produced.
Oh, do tell. You obviously have the public good formost in your mind. Still, I don't think your abstractions hold up beyond themselves and are meaningless.
How do you explain music, poetry, stories and all that which people created before machine presses and copyright? People have been singing and dancing forever and they will continue to do so despite your inability to profit from or diminish their joy.
DRM turns information goods into private goods. Now they can be sold and owned. They become excludable. The investment needed to produce them can be recovered by charging for their sale.... DRM is an optimal way to manage information goods.
Let's turn this on it's head. If it were possible to effortlessly and infinitely reproduce bread, would you degrade that process? Do you think it's more important for big commercial makers of wheat and bread to profit than it is for others to eat? Why do you want to do that to information? Music and knowledge are bread for the mind and soul. It is insane to limit their distribution for the benefit of "owners." Ideas are not property and trying to make them so is stupid and wasteful.
I'd like to tell you that DRM will be circumvented by customers, but the market will do it first. Companies that cling to DRM will have no customers when confronted by reasonable competition. Now that's an optimal way to manage information.
All compact fluorescents contain trace amounts of mercury. But don't worry. First of all, there is far less mercury in CFLs than in other items knocking about the house: CFLs (4 mg), thermometers (500 mg), older thermostats (3,000 mg). Plus, using CFLs actually prevents mercury from being released into the air thanks to their huge energy savings. A power plant, for instance, emits about 10 mg of mercury to produce the electricity to run an incandescent bulb compared to only 2.4 mg of mercury to run a CFL for the same amount of time
Which is great news, if true. Burning coal puts mercury in the air and that makes it so that pregnant women can't eat fish. The wrong decisions will make things worse, the right ones will start the long process of recovery. If Wal-Mart wants to be green they will have to have some kind of return policy. Done right, the return will pay for itself.
My knee-jerk reaction was "Of course not", but this actually makes sense. At least now the "I only pirate to decide whether to buy it" crowd has no excuse any more.
How many knees do you have?
Yes, an advertisement revenue model makes sense. It's what's powered the US free press since before 1776, it powered radio and TV though they were government franchises, and it is now powering most of the free internet. It's a model that works.
The rest of your comment makes no sense at all. Newspapers, radio and TV never came with the kind of restrictions this music is likely to come with. In order to enjoy this music you will have to give up control of your computer, which also stores your private documents and acts as your press. DRM is a bad deal and companies that offer music without DRM are going to win this game. Worse, no immunity at all will be given to people who use the service, any more than temporary M$ give aways make a business less prone to a BSA raid. Innocent people are being extorted for sharing now, you know dead people, people who don't know how to use a computer, etc. Use of this service will only put the wrong kind of music and software on your computer. In all, it will make you more liable to that kind of legal abuse.
It's too little too late. If they would actually present the world with something more like their old radio model, they would be making a much better start. The time for that was ten years ago. Instead, they have wasted their money on useless DRM schemes and sued their fans. They can rot with their 60 year old music. I'm not having any of it until it's really free and I can use it to amuse my friends without getting sued.
How is a word processor considered a competition for the entire office suite?
If you read so much as the summary, you would have noticed spreadsheets and presentation tools too. Those will go a long way to competing, even if they don't have as many features.
If you understand what M$ is selling with M$ Office, you understand why the new services are such a great threat. What M$ is selling is the ability of "information workers" to co-operate in the creation of "complex business documents". What that boils down to is formatted text with a few graphs, figures and equations along with a presentation with the same. There's much FUD about Open Office not being able to work "100%" with M$ Office. It's FUD because M$ Office does not work 100% with itself because it's format has been ruined by decades of anti-competitive effort. The more they change it the less well it works. Web services leap all of that FUD in a single bound and provide better sharing and reliability to boot. If you had ten employees, would you deck them all out with $600 worth of OS and M$ Office so they can then abuse your network server with Word Docs and Power Point, or would you rather transfer a few bytes to a service you can invite anyone in the world to join as needed? If you don't buy the latest and greatest M$ Office every two years, the first option won't really let you share with others outside the company regardless of how long your users wait for email. More is on the way and these services will get better. When people get used to the new workflow, stand alone office suits with impossible file formats will finally be a thing of the past. Good riddance.
here I was, thinking I could write a text document without Internet access. How stupid of me.
Just think, some people think they can share text without Microsoft Word. Amazing isn't it?
That's really what this is about, being able to co-operate in authoring formated text without having to sync everyone's $400 text editor. If all you want is to mod a configuration file, by all means use a free vi. If you have to co-operate with ten other people to make formatted text output, these services will be much cheaper and easier than the brain dead method common in the fortune 500 world, "standardizing on M$ Office" and the swapping bloated results via email. For internal documentation, these people should be moving to wikis. For anyone who still needs paper, and I'm not sure why they do, web services are a great way to go.
It's always nice to see someone appreciating Debian for what it is: simple, stable and free. The installer is only the beginning. File structure, modules and software configuration all follow the same philosophy. This makes maintaining and adding to the system as easy as it was to set up. It's easy to customize and hard to make it bloated. Nothing is hidden and everything is easy to change through text file manipulation or various GUIs. The lack of non free software makes a difference in start up time, smooth running and customization. Right now, that blocks you out of a lot of entertainment, such as YouTube, but things are quickly changing on that front. For basic desktop and laptop use, Etch is an excellent contender. If you need Flash and all that, there are Debian derivatives like Xandros, Ubuntu or Mepis. Those distributions might still be better for a complete Linux newbie. For people who want a system for work and who have a few years of unix, Debian is calling.
That said, I wish Ravi could be a little more patient. When he writes:
how much effort will it take to provide a download link to the latest version of Debian simultaneously recommending a specific version for desktop users (even if it is in beta stage) on the main page of debian.org site ? I would guess not much. The download link provided at present takes the visitor to Debian Sarge which is too outdated for use as a Desktop.
he should know that Etch is due to go stable in December. That's just three months away! At that time, Etch will be as easy to find as Sarge is today. The release roadmap does not have a general freeze until October and newbies should wait until then if they, like Ravi, don't have a good network connection. Though Etch has been a great distribution to use for a year or so, there have been a lot of package changes. Not all of them have been smooth and there's nothing like 500MB of update to sour a Debian newbie.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because you'd have to be INSANE to use Ubuntu for E-mail, Firefox and 95% of what computers do for people, such office work, solitaire and software development.
The opposite of the truth is often a lie. Debian is a sane place to put your email and other important stuff. It's stable and upgrades better than anything I've seen. Putting it elsewhere may not be "insane", so speak for yourself not me.
Placing that important work on a system that has non free software is not a good idea and might be worse than you think. Quality is usually less than free equivalents, so your performance will degrade in proportion to the amount of non free software you use. When such an option even exists, non free software is always more difficult to upgrade than free software. More important problems are in the EULA. Microsoft, to name an extreme example, gives itself the right to inspect your files for "copyright violation" and delete them at will with no further obligation to you. Clearly, it's insane to software from a company like that. Others may not be as bad, but you never can tell with non free software. Non free software, regardless of it's function, is dangerous. Non free software is written to do the bidding of it's owners.
You're full of it.
Yes thank you, there's more where that came from.
i feel like a traitor, but should i at least look at ubuntu?
That depends on what you want to do. If you want to play games with accelerated graphics or watch YouTube or other flash stuff, you need Ubuntu's non free goodies. If you want a sane place to put your email, web research and 95% of what computers do for people, you want Debian's free goodness. Debian runs well and upgrades gracefully. A simple rule might be: Stable on the server, Testing on your desktop, Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, Linspire, etc on your toybox. If playing with the software itself is your thing, go for Sid. Give the people what they want. That includes yourself.
Things are looking good as far as a mere user like me is concerned.
Exactly. What problems are actually showing up in software?
A developer is leaving, that's a problem. It's sad to see a talented developer go, but someone else will step up the the plate and prove that every developer indeed deserves a voice.
A developer claims that mailing lists made him irritable. That's a problem that has one of two causes, the lists have been infiltrated by trolls or he needs to more tolerant and less easily bothered. The solution treats both causes. Realize that some people on your list are intentionally provoking you and ignore them. Realize also that differences can always be worked out and that not everything has to go exactly your way. If you are right, the project will get back to your way even when it makes mistakes.
Free software has enemies, that's a problem. Back in 1998, Microsoft declared war on free software with their Halloween Document and targeted the user community. Trolling lists is something they have been doing all the way back to Steven Barkto. It disrupts useful activity, promotes ill will and distrust of your neighbor and can even move organizations to the wrong conclusions and in the wrong directions. Eventually, the truth comes out so the strategy is ultimately wasteful. There is nothing M$ can do to make non free software competitive and they can't really shut down free software. There are far too many projects and damaged communication channels are routed around. The co operative spirit of free software depends on good will, but free software creates that good will in abundance.
The answer is not to make a king. If you think your peer is annoying now, imagine them with the king like power to make decisions you want for yourself.
None of these problems is an actual software problem. The kind of people who pretend such things are a big deal are the kinds of people that said free software could not make a friendly user interface, usable documentation, a coherent distribution, a kernel, a compiler, a text editor, etc. Etch is a fantastic distribution that shows that things are working very well.
It might just run linux. If not I'm sure Firefox or a good live CD can fix things for you.
For every joke there's some nut to make it happen.
You see, this is the part that really torques me off about the hardcore Linux user. They assume the average user is willing to put up with the quirks, the kernel re-compiles, the beta (or alpha!) drivers, and the hacked-support-for-my-Sony-special-widget issues. You just don't get it, do you?
I see why you are angry. Quirks - see any windoze GUI. Compiles? leave that for people who enjoy that kind of thing. If those are your only options you might be angry.
It's easier to take the live CD to the store and have it work forever than it is to try to use and keep up a windoze box. If you have already invested in difficult hardware, you are screwed until the free software world envelops it, a process that takes between one and five years.
The reason why people put up with Apple's DRM'ed technology is because its easy to use. Non-tech people can and do use it ... a DRM-less MP3 will work with the iPod, which is very important to compete, but how will it be delivered to the user? Will it automatically show up in a playlist in a program such as iTunes so that a non-tech person doesn't have to search for the downloaded file and put it where it belongs so he/she can immediately play it after its done?
If it does not show up in such a list, iTunes is not easy to use.
Amarok is easy. You dump your music into any directories you chose and Amarok scans it into a database. The interface then presents it to you in about 14 different ways all searchable, by Artist/Album or any combination of tags, file system, radio stream and context. Context view pulls up a list of your collection of the current artist, and has tabs for artist and lyric info from the web. It will eat any format of music you throw at it and spits it out beautifully. Scripts are available to load both nice iPods and cheap ass mp3 players.
The only problem remaining is not one for this service, limits of available mp3 players. The mp3 player scripts, unfortunately don't yet keep track of the format your player needs, so the $50 player from walmart will limit you to transcoding to mp3, which is a massive pain if you have any other kind of music and want to use such a cheap player. Non technical users mostly have mp3 and will feel no pain.
Technical users have options that will get to others later. OpenZaurus will play ogg, mp3, aac, etc, so it is easy. Soon enough, players as easy as OpenZaurus will hit the market. Trekstor already does it, but is difficult to find in the US. At that point, the world will be easy and iTunes will look very difficult.
The funny thing is that M$ could easily unseat Apple if they made a few sacrifices and pulled their head out of their ass. The above grocery list is easy to meet and they have flooded the market with cheap devices that could do it with one or two mods. They are so interested in owning ALL of the pie that they are squandering their chance to own MOST of the DRM'd music market. Silly tricks like moving from USBFS to MTP and trying to force everyone onto WiMP were a waste of their time. The DRM market is going to shrink and vanish as people who publish non DRM'd stuff start making more money than their greedier peers. Even then M$ could still make money as a distributor and promoter but it's doubtful they will realize that in time. Their inability to play nice with others is the primary threat to their customer loyalty. It makes their platform suck and people are moving off it. Their demise in media is a great blessing for every other platform.
The last time I installed Ubuntsu on my Vaio Type U, suspend to RAM did not work at all. ... Suspend to ram/disk is such a basic functionality, and I just could not believe that nobody figured out how to make it work without problems. Moreover, I had to struggle with configuration files for two days to make my Bluetooth adapter work.
Those are not Linux problems, they are Sony problems. Sony, obviously, knows how to make their hardware work which is why those things sort of work under Windoze. I say sort of because XP is neither stable nor network safe, so nothing Sony does for it will last long. It would be nice of Sony to put their effort where the market is moving or at least to give out the information needed for others to make drivers. What you really should ask is why it's possible to buy that computer with Windoze but not with any of the much less expensive alternatives. That's right, the anti-trust violations M$ was busted for years ago.
The best way to move the market and please yourself is to buy stuff that works. It takes research effort up front but you will recoup that many times over the life of the machine. More importantly, you send the only message markets understand: money. I'll research the specific model before I buy. The easiest research is to take a live CD to the store. If it runs and things work, I might buy the machine. Anything else is a gamble.
I've been happy with used thinkpads. I've gotten them from Certified Used and Local Stores. Power management works well with all of them with nothing more than Debian right out of the box. The machine I'm writing this on has a good 66 days of uptime under Etch and I booted it last only because I wanted to use it's optical drive to install to another hard drive. Sarge just never goes down. Anything from a PII with 256 MB and better is usable for normal everyday use, though I've migrated to 1 GHz class processors. All I miss are software related to video editing and accelerated graphics which are all patented and NDA'd to hell.
Trackhead, point out on the doll where Vista touched you. . .
In the wallet, of course. M$ is going to waste $6.2 billion promoting what's looking more and more like XP SP3, super digital restriction. While I won't directly pay for that, many will. Schools, government and everyone not bright enough to use free software will pay. They will pass that cost along as taxes and higher prices. As Steve Baller likes to say, the upfront cost of software are just the beginning and all of the tremendous inefficiencies of Windoze will also be passed along in higher prices and poorer service. I don't even want to think of the costs to the economy that comes from Microsoft's inability to design a network safe OS are. All of the above easily adds up to multiples of M$'s annual net revenue.
The average person uses nowhere near the bandwidth of his connection, and that allows them to charge cheaper rates by overselling.
The average person's broadband connected computer is pumping out spam and DoS attacks, which is why 85% of the world's spam comes from them.
Talk about branding for the sheer point of making people associate your brand with irritation.
They should be annoyed they have to boot everyday. The advert noise is just icing on the top.
Who knows, they might make things a little better. I thought the current Windoze start up noise was bad. Coffee shops, book stores, libraries, anywhere people bring laptops you hear that God Damned noise because M$ power management blows and because they make it hard to turn the spam off. Now it will be impossible to turn the spam off. Hopefully there will be as many start up noises as "versions" of Vista. The "I just paid $400 for a second rate OS" noise will alert everyone that someone very stupid is in the room. Other bling noises will at least bring less monotony than the ever present XP noise. Oh, who am I kidding, M$ laptops have been getting nothing but more annoying and difficult to customize. Trust M$ to screw it up even more.
You have to love an OS that has uptime measured in months.
Someone who loves M$, apparently. The summary about Microsoft's "seat" and the "Microsoft haters" and "upstarts" who would have taken their chair makes me think of the movie Tombstone or Steve Ballmer's famous chair throwing temper tantrum. Don't bother to read the article because there's nothing more there but the same kind of embarrassing nonsense. The author apparently thinks that it's OK to steal and lock down other people's innovative ideas, sue public schools and all the other villiany that comes from M$ and that no rational person should mind the abuse because M$ is eternal. So it is with WinTel fanboys everywhere and that is nothing new.
Ah, the power of non free propaganda. People's heads are so filled with stuff that is at odds with their own experience. They might as well have asked, "How do I make money with a computer?" Of the bazillions of ways to do that, only one of them is the non free way and very few people really make money that way. Really, ask yourself, do you or anyone you know make most of their money writting non free code? Why is it that so many people feel the need to support a model so few people are involved with? That's the power of non free propaganda. It needs to be addressed by knocking down the assumptions that support the conclusions best expressed here: If you don't give me money, your computer will be useless. Most of the missconceptions the public has about software have been created to support that demonstrably false conclusion. Let's look at the particular question.
What kind of an economic model does an entrepreneur look at when he starts out with free software? is vague and hard to answer. What exactly does that mean? At best, they are asking for a laundry list of ways to make money with free software. There are as many ways to answer that question as there are ways to make money with a computer. The only difference between free software and non free is user freedom. You get all the tools you need for the job without cost and you can do anything you want with them. The only way you can't make money with free software is to take someone else`s work and make use it to deny the end user of their rights. The only reason people ask that question is because they are bombarded with FUD that says you can't make a living with free software and that the free software models will one day collapse because of that. After 20 years of GNU growth and mainstream acceptance, you would think that question would go away. It's important to understand that free software is not dependent on any economic model so it is here to stay.
Your statement,
I wonder why RMS is so opposed to economic acceptance. It seems that he believes F/OSS's noble goals will be corrupted if Linux gains momentum in the corporate world, but don't we have the GPL to prevent just that? Ultimately, corporate support will help secure the foundation of F/OSS -- I'm thinking of IBM and Sun, and the corporate support behind OpenBSD and FreeBSD
is equally vague and missleading. While free software is about freedom and not about making money, there is no hostility to commercial activity or corporate involvement. A FSF newsletter a while back was positively glowing over the way free software has been adopted by embedded developers. It's pretty obvious from this that free software can be commercial software and that no one has a grudge against that.
If this is true, and in the US, your friend can sue and easily win as sharing medical data is a HIPPA violation
It was billing information. Today that information might not have as many details but it did then. At the time there was no HIPPA.
Quick and Dirty:
You could probably perform the above from a Knopix CD and an external hard drive. K3b might even have multi-disk support but I have not looked for it.
Yes, I know you could just use the external hard drive to store the data. A fire wire drive is the easiest and fastest way to make a back up. Plug it in and use grsync. Sounds great, but it's not always the best idea.
Sometimes you have more data than you have hard drive or better use for the drive.
If you are paranoid, you need write once media. Any live and writable drive is going to get hosed if your little XP computer is 0wnzered by some dirt bag who wants to erase everything you have. In that case, you can say good bye to all the data on your network when they keylog your passwords, and on your external drive as soon as you plug it in. A nice touch would be a fake dialog for you that shows their progress in wiping your drive as if it were restoring.
So I was just talking about big dumb companies not being able to keep data they should not have in the first place? ATT loses credit card data. That's information they actually need. Do you think they care about your email, besides keeping it for the NSA? Stooges.
This is the same problem companies had with old hard drives from their employee's computers both at work and at home. People give away or sell their old equipment and with it go their "secrets". Of course, the more important pieces of information were already snooped by industrial espionage, given the sorry state of security on the dominant software platform. Keyloggers abound and employees have been sending things unencrypted all along.
Non free "smart" phones exasperate the problem because they are even more closed than the dominant platform. How do you wipe the "hard drive" on the thing without ruining it? Does the local phone shop even have what's needed to wipe and reload the flash memory? I can only imagine the mess Windoze mobile versions are. Then there's the cell phone aspect of all this. How much liberty does the phone company have to read and manipulate the contents? The Baby Bells have lately brought new meanings to the term "untrusted network".
Free software phones, like the one being developed by Trolltech have a lot of potential to fix the problems. If it has the usual KDE encryption goodies, your messages and data will be secure. Moreover, reasonable steps can be taken to separate system files from your files and keep your safe. How hard would it be to have a removable SD card as your home directory? If you've ever dropped a PDA and shattered it's screen you know that having removable memory with files in standard formats are good for more than privacy when you sell the phone. The non free phones are going to go the way of non free dedicated Internet access terminals of eight years ago, right down the drain. The way Vista is going with "signed" code and other nonsense, I don't think M$ has learned that lesson or that their "smart phones" will be getting any smarter any time soon.
Even if you take preventive measures to erase sensitive data from devices, you still have mega-corporations who accidentally release sensitive data like a good smelly fart.
Even when they don't release it publically, they lack both the competence or will to keep it to themselves. I remember, ten years ago, an acquaintance who taunted a friend with private medical information. She had been a clerk for a debt collection agency and used her access to look up all of her friends. The big dumb companies share things they should not and don't keep tabs on it. Imagine what clerks at ChoicePoint could do, then think of how owned their little windoze terminals are. There's not much real privacy left anymore.
Cell phones are not free platforms and the owners are some of the most notorious abusers of personal privacy. Almost all of the Baby Bells were too happy to comply when the Bush administration asked them to break the law and tap their customers. Just to get a Cigular phone six years ago, I had to give the creeps monthly access to my credit record! You have to remember that the parent company at one time refused to allow people to plug modems into their network. The babies continue to stonewall broadband to this day. They will do anything and everything to get some crummy little franchises over their users. Your "secrets" are the last of their concerns, except where it can be used for their own marketing purposes.
My answer kind of sucks, but it works. My cell phone is nothing more. I put names into it because the phone company already knows who I'm talking to. Nothing else goes in. I don't SMS, I will never use their calenders. I resent GPS tracking. I'll never trust their cameras and I'll keep it in a box if I'm ever talking about something sensitive. The damn thing is like a bug in my pocket that can be abused by anyone with the technical wherewithal to pull the wool over the Baby Bells. These days, that's about anyone.
Why not display the video using a PC with a video card that has composite or S-video output? You should be able to hook up to any modern TV or projector. You could encode the video in whatever format you want: lossless DV, Ogg Theora, XviD, even WMV if you are really sadistic.
Yes, there are many benefits to digital media, but only if it's free. DVDs should have all of the benefits but don't, because the media companies are afraid and they have crippled the hardware. The same companies will provide the same crippling on your PC as well. Unless you find a 100% free software solution, you will be at the mercy of those who are currently making your life difficult. Given the magnitude of the problem and the willfulness of infliction, it's hard to justify a hardware purchase from those companies involved. The more money you give DRM, the worse it gets.
That's the problem. It's not, and as such most people still need to buy it... including authors, musicians, actors, and developers. Yes, in a utopian world everything would be free. But I don't live in that world, and neither do you.
So, you would take the one utopian part of our world and make it as nasty as the rest?
It is a classic theorem of economics that public goods are under-produced.
Oh, do tell. You obviously have the public good formost in your mind. Still, I don't think your abstractions hold up beyond themselves and are meaningless.
How do you explain music, poetry, stories and all that which people created before machine presses and copyright? People have been singing and dancing forever and they will continue to do so despite your inability to profit from or diminish their joy.
DRM turns information goods into private goods. Now they can be sold and owned. They become excludable. The investment needed to produce them can be recovered by charging for their sale. ... DRM is an optimal way to manage information goods.
Let's turn this on it's head. If it were possible to effortlessly and infinitely reproduce bread, would you degrade that process? Do you think it's more important for big commercial makers of wheat and bread to profit than it is for others to eat? Why do you want to do that to information? Music and knowledge are bread for the mind and soul. It is insane to limit their distribution for the benefit of "owners." Ideas are not property and trying to make them so is stupid and wasteful.
I'd like to tell you that DRM will be circumvented by customers, but the market will do it first. Companies that cling to DRM will have no customers when confronted by reasonable competition. Now that's an optimal way to manage information.
All compact fluorescents contain trace amounts of mercury. But don't worry. First of all, there is far less mercury in CFLs than in other items knocking about the house: CFLs (4 mg), thermometers (500 mg), older thermostats (3,000 mg). Plus, using CFLs actually prevents mercury from being released into the air thanks to their huge energy savings. A power plant, for instance, emits about 10 mg of mercury to produce the electricity to run an incandescent bulb compared to only 2.4 mg of mercury to run a CFL for the same amount of time
Which is great news, if true. Burning coal puts mercury in the air and that makes it so that pregnant women can't eat fish. The wrong decisions will make things worse, the right ones will start the long process of recovery. If Wal-Mart wants to be green they will have to have some kind of return policy. Done right, the return will pay for itself.
My knee-jerk reaction was "Of course not", but this actually makes sense. At least now the "I only pirate to decide whether to buy it" crowd has no excuse any more.
How many knees do you have?
Yes, an advertisement revenue model makes sense. It's what's powered the US free press since before 1776, it powered radio and TV though they were government franchises, and it is now powering most of the free internet. It's a model that works.
The rest of your comment makes no sense at all. Newspapers, radio and TV never came with the kind of restrictions this music is likely to come with. In order to enjoy this music you will have to give up control of your computer, which also stores your private documents and acts as your press. DRM is a bad deal and companies that offer music without DRM are going to win this game. Worse, no immunity at all will be given to people who use the service, any more than temporary M$ give aways make a business less prone to a BSA raid. Innocent people are being extorted for sharing now, you know dead people, people who don't know how to use a computer, etc. Use of this service will only put the wrong kind of music and software on your computer. In all, it will make you more liable to that kind of legal abuse.
It's too little too late. If they would actually present the world with something more like their old radio model, they would be making a much better start. The time for that was ten years ago. Instead, they have wasted their money on useless DRM schemes and sued their fans. They can rot with their 60 year old music. I'm not having any of it until it's really free and I can use it to amuse my friends without getting sued.
How is a word processor considered a competition for the entire office suite?
If you read so much as the summary, you would have noticed spreadsheets and presentation tools too. Those will go a long way to competing, even if they don't have as many features.
If you understand what M$ is selling with M$ Office, you understand why the new services are such a great threat. What M$ is selling is the ability of "information workers" to co-operate in the creation of "complex business documents". What that boils down to is formatted text with a few graphs, figures and equations along with a presentation with the same. There's much FUD about Open Office not being able to work "100%" with M$ Office. It's FUD because M$ Office does not work 100% with itself because it's format has been ruined by decades of anti-competitive effort. The more they change it the less well it works. Web services leap all of that FUD in a single bound and provide better sharing and reliability to boot. If you had ten employees, would you deck them all out with $600 worth of OS and M$ Office so they can then abuse your network server with Word Docs and Power Point, or would you rather transfer a few bytes to a service you can invite anyone in the world to join as needed? If you don't buy the latest and greatest M$ Office every two years, the first option won't really let you share with others outside the company regardless of how long your users wait for email. More is on the way and these services will get better. When people get used to the new workflow, stand alone office suits with impossible file formats will finally be a thing of the past. Good riddance.
here I was, thinking I could write a text document without Internet access. How stupid of me.
Just think, some people think they can share text without Microsoft Word. Amazing isn't it?
That's really what this is about, being able to co-operate in authoring formated text without having to sync everyone's $400 text editor. If all you want is to mod a configuration file, by all means use a free vi. If you have to co-operate with ten other people to make formatted text output, these services will be much cheaper and easier than the brain dead method common in the fortune 500 world, "standardizing on M$ Office" and the swapping bloated results via email. For internal documentation, these people should be moving to wikis. For anyone who still needs paper, and I'm not sure why they do, web services are a great way to go.
It's always nice to see someone appreciating Debian for what it is: simple, stable and free. The installer is only the beginning. File structure, modules and software configuration all follow the same philosophy. This makes maintaining and adding to the system as easy as it was to set up. It's easy to customize and hard to make it bloated. Nothing is hidden and everything is easy to change through text file manipulation or various GUIs. The lack of non free software makes a difference in start up time, smooth running and customization. Right now, that blocks you out of a lot of entertainment, such as YouTube, but things are quickly changing on that front. For basic desktop and laptop use, Etch is an excellent contender. If you need Flash and all that, there are Debian derivatives like Xandros, Ubuntu or Mepis. Those distributions might still be better for a complete Linux newbie. For people who want a system for work and who have a few years of unix, Debian is calling.
That said, I wish Ravi could be a little more patient. When he writes:
how much effort will it take to provide a download link to the latest version of Debian simultaneously recommending a specific version for desktop users (even if it is in beta stage) on the main page of debian.org site ? I would guess not much. The download link provided at present takes the visitor to Debian Sarge which is too outdated for use as a Desktop.
he should know that Etch is due to go stable in December. That's just three months away! At that time, Etch will be as easy to find as Sarge is today. The release roadmap does not have a general freeze until October and newbies should wait until then if they, like Ravi, don't have a good network connection. Though Etch has been a great distribution to use for a year or so, there have been a lot of package changes. Not all of them have been smooth and there's nothing like 500MB of update to sour a Debian newbie.