I want my car to be an iTunes client. It should have wifi and 100GB, and should sync whenever I pull into the garage
Not a bad start, but I'd rather have Amarok. Why not? Amarok is free after all. The iTunes does not do as much and will cost them money to license. Oh yeah, they could throw in a satellite network so you can sync from anywhere, games, a browser, Noatun and touch screens for the rear seats so your passengers can watch get their web fix, watch movies or play games on the way to work. One modern computer should be able to handle all of that or smaller devices could simply be networked. The hardware should be cheap enough by now and all of the software is just as free as Amarok. 100GB would be nice for movies, but you don't really need all of that if your sync works right. A firewire hook up should fix the storage problem at zero cost to the manufacturer and most people would plant a 250 GB drive.
The only think keeping the above from working right now is the greedy ball that is music and movie publishing. They want everything locked down and that's why you are seeing expensive commercial junk being installed when free stuff has been available for ages. At the very least, they could give you a freaking wire! Feel the full price of exclusive franchise multiplied by the government protected and union dominated auto industry. Markets without competition truly suck life.
While those idiot continue to fight about who's going to be the first to sell you a $250 jack, I'll keep plugging my Zaurus and my cheap mp3 player into the audio in jack of the $200 stereo I bought at WalMart.
it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals."
That's a joke, but it demonstrates a principle of digital information that people have not gotten used to yet.
The first time someone gets a copy of the original, the document will have doubled it's durability. If they really liberate it, they will immortalize it and greatly reduce the cost of distributing it. "Protecting" something you want to publish reduces it's chance of survival. This is not special to electronic publishing.
What's different is the cheapness of sharing and that removes the need to protect publications. Once upon a time, people chained books to their shelves because that book took a substantial fraction of someones' life to make or copy and there were very few coppies. Today, the contents can be duplicated without special material in the blink of an eye, unless there's some nasty DRM stuck on it. DRM makes it difficult for the honest user to read and impossible to copy. Chains are no longer required and making digital information more difficult to work with than what it replaces is perverse.
Keeping people from starving in the several ongoing world disasters is not something we should abandon but that has nothing to do with why portable laptops and networks are good for "developing" nations.
The simple justification for these projects is that it's cheaper education. Dead tree based information is expensive and fragile. Think of the tons of material required for every village to have even a rudimentary library. One leaky roof or arson can take it all away. Now realize how easily that library can be replaced with a few hundred gigs of storage and a good network. Think of how hard it would be to do permanent damage to that kind of system. For much less than the cost of libraries in key cities, a country can make the same information available in an impossible to deny way to all of it's citizens. Collaborative tools, like Wikipedia, are the future of knowledge distribution and not just for those of us rich enough to think of our computers as gaming platforms and superfluous additions to "real" research at a library. Educated people can take care of themselves and that's what the world needs most.
Gaaa, look at all the excuse making and shine on. While the problems he's having are very funny from a man who so often uses the phrase, "just works" to describe things that don't, the double think involved is disturbing. What does it take to cure a fanboy?
Businesses have never lined up to install a new Microsoft operating system. They always install new Windows versions gingerly and years after the fact. We're all familiar with the "wait for Service Pack 1 (SP1)" mantra that many enterprises extol.
XP is on Service pack 2 but Windoze 2000 is still the most used "enterprise" desktop OS. Why? Because M$ has not added anything of value in six years. Conservative practices are not an adequate excuse here.
beta testers never think any Windows version is ready: If we left the ship decision to testers, we'd still be testing Windows XP.
The beta testers are right. With rooted Microsoft machines making up 80% of the world's spam, we can say that no version of their OS is ready, despite the newest being six years old.
... beta testers simply like their exclusive little clique to continue as long as possible
I'm not sure what issue he has with this attitude. It takes non free software to create software elitism and it's all based on someone else calling the shots for you.
And then there are the online pundits, many of whom are barely old enough to legally buy alcohol. These guys are classic. Let's just say that a lack of experience and a strongly worded opinion don't result in the most coherent of arguments and leave it at that.
Once again, what a hypocrite.
We might call Windows Vista a "train wreck" for simplicity's sake. But it's getting better. Seriously.
[bad GUI complaints] So you open Network from the Start Menu and wait... and wait... and wait... while the damn thing finds all your networked PCs and servers. In XP, this process is instantaneous.
Instantaneous? Microsoft's brain, dead Netbios broadcast based networking protocol has never been instantaneous, quick or reliable. They made it complex in a failed attempt to keep others from being able to work with it. It compares very poorly to something like sftp through konqueror, where you can use organized bookmark folders to very quickly, securely and reliably reach any computer on the your LAN or the whole freaking internet. It looks like the networking in Vista still sucks despite the all the.NET hype.
Photoshop Elements 4 has literally gotten worse over time. Now, some key functionality simply doesn't work or, oddly, only partially works.
Is that an apologist reflex reaction, or what? M$ changes, product_x stays the same, but product_x has "gotten worse over time". I know what he means, but the language is amazing. Why can't he just say that vista changes broke Photoshop? He knows that lots of other programs are going to be broken too and that, as usual, everyone will have to replace all of their software when they buy a new computer if they want to maintain their current functionality.
In IE 7, the rich edit control that forms the basis of the third party ActiveX control we used to post article bodies not only doesn't work, it is actually deprecated in Vista so that it will never work, even if you manually install it. That means
Will it be ready in time? Actually, I think it could be.
Flying pigs come to mind.
It does not matter when they get it out, they are hosed. They have been making and breaking promisses for five years now. "Don't buy anything, our latest and greatest is just around the corner," is a song they've always sung but Vista is a new low. It will be a miracle if they get it out the door within six years, and it's going to be so broken no one is going to want it.
2003, 2005, 2007, they keep putting it off by two years because, fortunately, they can't get their worst lock down to work though they have been trying for 15 years. The non free software development model has been out of steam for just as long. When they threw DRM into the mess, they nullified their driver advantage for a system that's never going to work right. They have made all the wrong promisses to all the wrong people and their customers, who buy iPods have noticed. The list of new features are a sad kind of echo to all the Linux networking and desktop productivity improvements that they have been saying don't matter. Under the hood, there's even less. The lockdown is a massive waste that's ruining them, not saving them.
Their competition is running rings around them. Over the same time period, Debian has released two stable systems and is about to get in a third. Each has brought great improvements without adding too much confusion. The same software works everywhere, servers, desktops, laptops and hand held computers. Companies have been putting it in embedded devices and desktop penetration has been slow but steady. Apple has continued to rock on and is taking a sharp aim for Microsoft's bread and butter with new lower priced machines. In games, Xbox has been trounced. There is no place they are not taking a beating for their second rate offerings.
The release of Vista will be the end of them and it will signal the rise of the free desktop. It's not going to work right and people are going to be pissed. There's enough Linux out there for it to fill the performance void.
As for the lack of new interesting things in the OSS world, well I'll just say that you haven't been looking hard enough. Not all the interesting stuff comes in a.deb or.rpm
Not all of the interesting things are new, and that shows that this article is written by someone with very little free software experience or perspective. Some things, like excellent Window Managers, have been around for a decade in free software. Some of those capabilities, like pagers and virtual screens, are just making it into the M$ tree. Other things, like KDE's complete desktop, device and network integration will never make it because non free device makers won't co-operate and M$'s networking is second rate and insecure. Using a windows box for SFTP is a really bad idea. All of the things that make the Linux desktop productive can be found in distribution repositories and most of them come by default.
It's really aggravating to see that people still write articles like this. He has cluessly rejected two superior client applications, Evolution and Kontact, in favor of the worst of class because M$ makes it hard to work with their stuff. Not only does he reject the technically superior clients, he seems to be unaware of technically superior server side technology that does all the same things. Because M$ sucks life, he goes on to tell free developers that they need to work harder to be like and please M$. That's kind of like telling rape victims that they need to be tougher and less provocative. He's simply wrong and from that mistake he generalizes into the entire desktop. Shame on you OSWeekly.
Colbert praised Wikipedia for "wikiality," the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you - it becomes reality.
It's amazing how the big broadcast news companies have been making reality without opposition for so many decades. Up till now, the movers of the keys for "facts" have been very few indeed. Going from broadcast to distributed publishing and reporting has been a great thing for truth. The more impartial news sources you have, the more likely it is that you will know the truth.
Here's the fun part - Colbert actually did this.... Colbert then urged his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants [and fill it with crap]
Sometimes wrong is funny. Sometimes offensive is funny. This is not one of those times. Encouraging people to waste their time vandalizing a community resource will only destroy the community resource. This is about as funny as swapping books between libraries, or simply not returning them, so that people can't find the book they are looking for. If you want to go all out, you can have a good old fashion book burning for laughs. Most people have better things to do. Vandalism is about hatred and that's more pathetic than it is amusing.
What's really funny is that You Tube is giving complete unknowns better ratings than Stevie. Broadcast, with it's limits on who can contribute, is going the way of the dinosaur. Let's see him try to vandalize that with something smoother than his forehead.
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misstatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
No, it's nature makes it more resilient than most things. Everything can be broken, by it's very nature. Buildings can be set on fire, people can be murdered, it's all very easy to do and very hard to fix. Wiki can be fixed in a way no dead tree equivalent can be and there are more people wanting to fix than there are morons wanting to play pranks.
Backfired? No way. We all got a great laugh from this.
You must be easily amused. This joke is going to get old and go away fast. Nothing is as boring as academics and the usual fun material for pranks, sex, shit and all that are already covered in eye glazing detail. The vandalism crowd is going to keep getting it's kicks rolling houses and offending local pomps with practical jokes.
Try this: charge a newbie Windows-user for something like the Gimp, pocket their money, point them to the official website where they can get it for free, explain what you did was perfectly legal and then watch their reaction. Think they'll pay you again? No matter how legal it is for Linspire to run their CnR thingie, *nix-users don't want to pay for free software and a great many view it as a (legal) scam
If all you do is point, the user has a right to be pissed. That's not what Linspire or any other Linux company is doing. Most users expect you to sit down and make sure everything works before they pay you. If it does work, they will be happy to fork over the cash because you just saved them the difference between your hour's wage and the cost of a non free program that does the same thing, $600 - 40 = $560.
What the commercial Linux companies are doing is packaging free software so that it works together. That's a big job. They have to modify configuration files, compile and do other nasty tasks. Debian does it though volunteers and is big on user freedom. Linspire is using that base and adding non free junk. M$ takes non free junk, most of which comes from competitors, and passes it along.
What the user wants is something that works. The Linspire, Xandros and Mepis approach has it's benefits and dangers. The benefit is that all your non free hardware and popular software can work right out of the box. My wife loves watching You Tube with Mepis and it's much easier to set up than Debian proper. The dangers are all those associated with non free junk, a lack of long term credibility and difficulty upgrading. Binary blobs are just as sticky and brittle in the Linux world as they are elsewhere, though the sane separation of user and system files helps a lot. Upgrading Mepis is just as easy as installing it in the first place. The hard part is when you want a program that's not included. In the worst case, you have to download 500 MB of dependencies and they break your non free crappo. In the best case, you just install the newest CD and then get all your favorite applications. A completely free system does not have that issue. It can be incrementally upgraded for six to ten years, without fear of breaking installed applications, until the hardware is so obsolete it's not worth the electricity it eats. You should also note that it's easier for the distribution to not bother with non free junk that does not work. Distributions that make non free stuff go are having to do a lot of extra work, sometimes completely in the dark, to make sure it all works together. They also have to trust the non free software maker in a way that you should not. For most users, none of the above problems is a big deal and they are happy to fork over the money it takes to make sure things work right. Happy in slavery, sometimes and sometimes not.
What users really resent is the way M$ makes you feel like a sucker. You can go full out, buying nothing but "professional" versions of the software, the most expensive hardware AND IT STILL MIGHT NOT WORK. The more you add, the more likely it is something won't get along with something else and the system degrades with time no matter what you do. With a 12 minute half life on any network, no M$ system lasts very long. The difference between a Linspire "sucker" and a M$ "sucker" is about $1,000 is software and hardware costs. The addage is, "Linux" makes a new computer out of trash and Windoze makes a new computer into trash." DRM in Vista are going to make things even worse.
... primary legacy from its past colonial leadership is extreme poverty.
Yeah, war is not a good thing to base your economy on.
Old bones aside, it's good for anyone to avoid the M$ tax. $20,000,000 is money every school district has better uses for than software from a company that's as likely to sue them as give them anything useful.
OK, I considered the source, so what? He's someone who wants the internet to work like it works now. Is there something you want to add based on other things he's done?
of course the bbc reported this and asked the obvious question, "who will use this and why?" The answer was:
Dr Szeliski said:
"I think the photo-sharing websites will be early-adopters of this technology.
"Wherever people share photos, instead of just seeing a gallery of unorganised photos, now you can pull everyone else's photos together and make a rational sense out of it."
The other obvious application, he added, would be for tourism and property, where a city could provide a virtual tour or a hotel could potential visitors walk through its lobby.
Use 1 is silly because the combination defeats the purpose of photo sharing. People mostly want to share pictures of their friends with their friends. Unless they have stone friends, those are not going to show up on the composite. They also want to share some unique perspective, which will obviously be lost as well.
Use 2 makes more sense but it's going to take much more work than first meets the eye for a real estate agent to turn a house into a virtual tour. Every surface will have to be photographed to make a gapless model and the program will need a lot of help constructing interior spaces. It might be cheaper and faster to borrow your architect's CAD model or make one.
Such tools will eventually become common, but M$ is neither the originator nor will they be the first to provide one that works well. They have yet to provide an OS that works well and should spend their effort their instead of trying to take over every photo album. Most people don't want their photo albums rendered into some kind of impersonal "rational sense" that looks like Hitler art, devoid of people.
I don't get the privacy concern. If someone gains physical access to your machine, then the contents are vulnerable unless you take active steps to prevent it.
There are not steps you can take to protect yourself other than to use free software. Microsoft has granted itself the right to violate you, and you agreed to it. They can do it anytime they want through the daily encrypted communications they demand with your computer.
Physical access is not required for privacy violation. The EULA which kindly grants you permission to use your M$ crippled computer also grants M$ the right to search it at will. While they might finally be sharing some of the fruits of this search with you, it does not mean they are sharing it all or that you should want it in the first place. When you connect it to a network, your indexed thoughts and works can be sent to M$ for them to sell to the highest bidder.
This is really just a detail and variation on a longstanding truism. The OS is not free, so you will never really know what it's doing and it should not be trusted. The details of that violation are less important than awareness of the problem.
It's only a neat feature if it can be trusted. In this case, it can't and it's not.
What kind of reasonable privacy expectations should people have on a work computer?
Expectations of privacy are reasonable but unrealistic. You will be violated at work and you will also be violated at home.
Once upon a time, it was against the law to wiretap phones because they were part of a larger public network. Computers have somehow skipped around that and many large companies now feel free to treat their employees like prisons treat inmates.
Even if you don't believe in treating your employees with dignity, the threat of industrial espionage should not be discounted. Do you really trust Microsoft enough to index and parse all of your employee's work? I don't and I don't trust them to be able to keep it to themselves even if they did lack malicious intent. This "feature" creates a standard location for every industrial espionage program to mine. If M$ does not have a buyer for your information, someone else might.
Ignoring such altruistic issues as company loyalty, you reach the obvious conclusion that the same feature will be at home too. Companies can pay a staff to vainly try to block abuse of their networks. Home users will simply take the bad deal they have as long as they feel compelled to use M$ junk. "Savvy" users will add this to the very long list of chores owning a M$ computer brings with it, anti-virus, firewall administration, monthly re imaging and so on and so forth ad nausea.
Truly, MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
No, people just remember the EULA and other things M$ does. This is the company who's EULA grants them full search and delete rights to your files for use of their OS. It's also the company that demands encrypted communications with your computer on a daily basis. Fear of them abusing that power is well founded based on their previous treatment of partners, competitors and customers.
The problems are that it's being done by Microsoft and that networks are much better than they were in the VMS days. Microsoft's EULA grants them permission to send the results to themselves and they admit to contacting your computer daily. They have also granted themselves the right to delete your files at will. All of that so you can continue using second rate software. You don't really trust them, do you? Do you really want them indexing all of your work?
I don't get the privacy concern. If someone gains physical access to your machine, then the contents are vulnerable unless you take active steps to prevent it.
Physical access is not required for privacy violation in this case. The EULA which kindly grants you permission to use your M$ crippled computer also grants M$ the right to search it at will. While they might finally be sharing some of the fruits of this search with you, it does not mean they are sharing it all or that you should want it in the first place. When you connect it to a network, your indexed thoughts and works can be sent to M$ for them to sell to the highest bidder.
This is really just a detail and variation on a longstanding truism. The OS is not free, so you will never really know what it's doing and it should not be trusted. The details of that violation are less important than awareness of the problem.
Whenever I have to reinstall windows (or more often, linux since my main computer runs a different distro about every week), I do an audit of all my data. First, write down what you need to keep: emails? accounting data from Quicken? config info from other applications? bookmarks? Get it all down and back up everything to an external drive or a CDR.
A Linux recovery is much easier in the rare case you have a need because all user information and settings are in one place.
"tar cvf your_user_name.tar/home/your_user_name"
use konqueror to drag and drop that archive to another box or k3b to write a dvd.
reinstall, move your home back and untar it as root (tar xvf archive name)
If your distro was bright enough to have a separate home partion, the above steps are not needed. Just use the old partition with the new distro. Applications and settings are not hard to get anymore. In a pinch, just give them Mepis and be done with it. If it runs off the CD, it will run on the hard drive and installation takes about 20 minutes.
Let other people rape her. According to the poster,
she has a lot of games and art applications like Corel Painter that require Windows.
If she's got the money and need for those programs, she should also have the money to get the system fixed "right". She's obviously not going to pay for what she expects for free and what she calls "crap", so let her get the same crap and help from someone who cares much less. The full price of non free software is much larger than the purchase price, let her bear all of it.
When she's sick of it, set her up with Xandros and Parallels. Image her crummy Windoze install and rewrite it whenever it has problems. "Fixing" Windoze never works and it's a waste of time that's getting worse all the time. Keep it off the net as much as you can and it will last longer. Get her used to free software like the Gimp and Unreal Tournament and she won't go back to a single screen UI again.
That's a stupid thing for him to say. It shows his malicious intentions and his failure to carry through.
80% of the world's spam comes from security problems in his platform. This guy's work is either incompetent or hampered by others. Blaming it on his users is not good enough while Mac, Linux and Sun users are blissfully unaware of the Windoze swamp.
To date there are no such problems with free software, no worms, no trojans, ad servers, nothing, naada, zip. Sure, that dick might be able to root my particular box if he tried hard enough. So what? I can clean it up in twenty minutes and I've got enough redundancy and back ups to not even notice. Unlike the pay per play Windoze world, I can have live backups on multiple machines without losing my shirt.
All that silly bumper sticker shows is his intent to break something that works better than M$ junk. So far all effort in that direction have failed. Banks, search engines and other high profile chair targets continue working as usual, unless some M$ net storm messes things up.
I said that I couldn't fit "My other box is a 10,000 node zombie cluster of Windows machines" on a bumper sticker....he chuckled...
He was probably thinking, "My Windows bot net is bigger than yours. "
he was getting the disk through a "loop hole" where he could buy it if he also bought some "hardware".... So, a company willing to bend rules is also willing to break laws? Big surprise.
No one would be able to play these games if M$ did not in the first place. Their licensing and price structure is insane and some think there's a method to the madness - the ability to extort.
If you can step outside the Bill Gates distortion field for a minute, you might see the absurdity of it all. How are you, your retailer, their wholesaler or even M$ themselves supposed to be able to tell one pressed CD from another? They are identical as the "pirates" have presses just like the "legitimate" publisher. The only difference is where the money goes and I doubt even Carnivore can track that mess. Reality is that you don't need Windoze in the first place and that software ownership is an obsolete business model that never had a legitimate foundation. It was a swindle all along.
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I want my car to be an iTunes client. It should have wifi and 100GB, and should sync whenever I pull into the garage
Not a bad start, but I'd rather have Amarok. Why not? Amarok is free after all. The iTunes does not do as much and will cost them money to license. Oh yeah, they could throw in a satellite network so you can sync from anywhere, games, a browser, Noatun and touch screens for the rear seats so your passengers can watch get their web fix, watch movies or play games on the way to work. One modern computer should be able to handle all of that or smaller devices could simply be networked. The hardware should be cheap enough by now and all of the software is just as free as Amarok. 100GB would be nice for movies, but you don't really need all of that if your sync works right. A firewire hook up should fix the storage problem at zero cost to the manufacturer and most people would plant a 250 GB drive.
The only think keeping the above from working right now is the greedy ball that is music and movie publishing. They want everything locked down and that's why you are seeing expensive commercial junk being installed when free stuff has been available for ages. At the very least, they could give you a freaking wire! Feel the full price of exclusive franchise multiplied by the government protected and union dominated auto industry. Markets without competition truly suck life.
While those idiot continue to fight about who's going to be the first to sell you a $250 jack, I'll keep plugging my Zaurus and my cheap mp3 player into the audio in jack of the $200 stereo I bought at WalMart.
it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals."
That's a joke, but it demonstrates a principle of digital information that people have not gotten used to yet.
The first time someone gets a copy of the original, the document will have doubled it's durability. If they really liberate it, they will immortalize it and greatly reduce the cost of distributing it. "Protecting" something you want to publish reduces it's chance of survival. This is not special to electronic publishing.
What's different is the cheapness of sharing and that removes the need to protect publications. Once upon a time, people chained books to their shelves because that book took a substantial fraction of someones' life to make or copy and there were very few coppies. Today, the contents can be duplicated without special material in the blink of an eye, unless there's some nasty DRM stuck on it. DRM makes it difficult for the honest user to read and impossible to copy. Chains are no longer required and making digital information more difficult to work with than what it replaces is perverse.
Keeping people from starving in the several ongoing world disasters is not something we should abandon but that has nothing to do with why portable laptops and networks are good for "developing" nations.
The simple justification for these projects is that it's cheaper education. Dead tree based information is expensive and fragile. Think of the tons of material required for every village to have even a rudimentary library. One leaky roof or arson can take it all away. Now realize how easily that library can be replaced with a few hundred gigs of storage and a good network. Think of how hard it would be to do permanent damage to that kind of system. For much less than the cost of libraries in key cities, a country can make the same information available in an impossible to deny way to all of it's citizens. Collaborative tools, like Wikipedia, are the future of knowledge distribution and not just for those of us rich enough to think of our computers as gaming platforms and superfluous additions to "real" research at a library. Educated people can take care of themselves and that's what the world needs most.
Gaaa, look at all the excuse making and shine on. While the problems he's having are very funny from a man who so often uses the phrase, "just works" to describe things that don't, the double think involved is disturbing. What does it take to cure a fanboy?
Businesses have never lined up to install a new Microsoft operating system. They always install new Windows versions gingerly and years after the fact. We're all familiar with the "wait for Service Pack 1 (SP1)" mantra that many enterprises extol.
XP is on Service pack 2 but Windoze 2000 is still the most used "enterprise" desktop OS. Why? Because M$ has not added anything of value in six years. Conservative practices are not an adequate excuse here.
beta testers never think any Windows version is ready: If we left the ship decision to testers, we'd still be testing Windows XP.
The beta testers are right. With rooted Microsoft machines making up 80% of the world's spam, we can say that no version of their OS is ready, despite the newest being six years old.
I'm not sure what issue he has with this attitude. It takes non free software to create software elitism and it's all based on someone else calling the shots for you.
And then there are the online pundits, many of whom are barely old enough to legally buy alcohol. These guys are classic. Let's just say that a lack of experience and a strongly worded opinion don't result in the most coherent of arguments and leave it at that.
Once again, what a hypocrite.
We might call Windows Vista a "train wreck" for simplicity's sake. But it's getting better. Seriously.
Others have noticed he does this every release, shilling to get people ready to buy second rate.
[bad GUI complaints] So you open Network from the Start Menu and wait ... and wait... and wait... while the damn thing finds all your networked PCs and servers. In XP, this process is instantaneous.
Instantaneous? Microsoft's brain, dead Netbios broadcast based networking protocol has never been instantaneous, quick or reliable. They made it complex in a failed attempt to keep others from being able to work with it. It compares very poorly to something like sftp through konqueror, where you can use organized bookmark folders to very quickly, securely and reliably reach any computer on the your LAN or the whole freaking internet. It looks like the networking in Vista still sucks despite the all the .NET hype.
Photoshop Elements 4 has literally gotten worse over time. Now, some key functionality simply doesn't work or, oddly, only partially works.
Is that an apologist reflex reaction, or what? M$ changes, product_x stays the same, but product_x has "gotten worse over time". I know what he means, but the language is amazing. Why can't he just say that vista changes broke Photoshop? He knows that lots of other programs are going to be broken too and that, as usual, everyone will have to replace all of their software when they buy a new computer if they want to maintain their current functionality.
As an aside, I wondered if GIMP would have the same problems. he does not seem to have ever tried or mentioned that program. How funny.
In IE 7, the rich edit control that forms the basis of the third party ActiveX control we used to post article bodies not only doesn't work, it is actually deprecated in Vista so that it will never work, even if you manually install it. That means
Will it be ready in time? Actually, I think it could be.
Flying pigs come to mind.
It does not matter when they get it out, they are hosed. They have been making and breaking promisses for five years now. "Don't buy anything, our latest and greatest is just around the corner," is a song they've always sung but Vista is a new low. It will be a miracle if they get it out the door within six years, and it's going to be so broken no one is going to want it.
Microsoft started work on their plans for "Longhorn" in May 2001, some months before the release of Windows XP.[3] It was originally expected to ship sometime late in 2003 as a minor step between Windows XP and "Blackcomb"
2003, 2005, 2007, they keep putting it off by two years because, fortunately, they can't get their worst lock down to work though they have been trying for 15 years. The non free software development model has been out of steam for just as long. When they threw DRM into the mess, they nullified their driver advantage for a system that's never going to work right. They have made all the wrong promisses to all the wrong people and their customers, who buy iPods have noticed. The list of new features are a sad kind of echo to all the Linux networking and desktop productivity improvements that they have been saying don't matter. Under the hood, there's even less. The lockdown is a massive waste that's ruining them, not saving them.
Their competition is running rings around them. Over the same time period, Debian has released two stable systems and is about to get in a third. Each has brought great improvements without adding too much confusion. The same software works everywhere, servers, desktops, laptops and hand held computers. Companies have been putting it in embedded devices and desktop penetration has been slow but steady. Apple has continued to rock on and is taking a sharp aim for Microsoft's bread and butter with new lower priced machines. In games, Xbox has been trounced. There is no place they are not taking a beating for their second rate offerings.
The release of Vista will be the end of them and it will signal the rise of the free desktop. It's not going to work right and people are going to be pissed. There's enough Linux out there for it to fill the performance void.
As for the lack of new interesting things in the OSS world, well I'll just say that you haven't been looking hard enough. Not all the interesting stuff comes in a .deb or .rpm
Not all of the interesting things are new, and that shows that this article is written by someone with very little free software experience or perspective. Some things, like excellent Window Managers, have been around for a decade in free software. Some of those capabilities, like pagers and virtual screens, are just making it into the M$ tree. Other things, like KDE's complete desktop, device and network integration will never make it because non free device makers won't co-operate and M$'s networking is second rate and insecure. Using a windows box for SFTP is a really bad idea. All of the things that make the Linux desktop productive can be found in distribution repositories and most of them come by default.
It's really aggravating to see that people still write articles like this. He has cluessly rejected two superior client applications, Evolution and Kontact, in favor of the worst of class because M$ makes it hard to work with their stuff. Not only does he reject the technically superior clients, he seems to be unaware of technically superior server side technology that does all the same things. Because M$ sucks life, he goes on to tell free developers that they need to work harder to be like and please M$. That's kind of like telling rape victims that they need to be tougher and less provocative. He's simply wrong and from that mistake he generalizes into the entire desktop. Shame on you OSWeekly.
Colbert praised Wikipedia for "wikiality," the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you - it becomes reality.
It's amazing how the big broadcast news companies have been making reality without opposition for so many decades. Up till now, the movers of the keys for "facts" have been very few indeed. Going from broadcast to distributed publishing and reporting has been a great thing for truth. The more impartial news sources you have, the more likely it is that you will know the truth.
Here's the fun part - Colbert actually did this. ... Colbert then urged his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants [and fill it with crap]
Sometimes wrong is funny. Sometimes offensive is funny. This is not one of those times. Encouraging people to waste their time vandalizing a community resource will only destroy the community resource. This is about as funny as swapping books between libraries, or simply not returning them, so that people can't find the book they are looking for. If you want to go all out, you can have a good old fashion book burning for laughs. Most people have better things to do. Vandalism is about hatred and that's more pathetic than it is amusing.
What's really funny is that You Tube is giving complete unknowns better ratings than Stevie. Broadcast, with it's limits on who can contribute, is going the way of the dinosaur. Let's see him try to vandalize that with something smoother than his forehead.
On the contrary, it proved exactly what Colbert's point was. Wikipedia's very nature makes it prone to misstatements and error. Wikipedia practically had to shut itself down after Colbert proved his point.
No, it's nature makes it more resilient than most things. Everything can be broken, by it's very nature. Buildings can be set on fire, people can be murdered, it's all very easy to do and very hard to fix. Wiki can be fixed in a way no dead tree equivalent can be and there are more people wanting to fix than there are morons wanting to play pranks.
Backfired? No way. We all got a great laugh from this.
You must be easily amused. This joke is going to get old and go away fast. Nothing is as boring as academics and the usual fun material for pranks, sex, shit and all that are already covered in eye glazing detail. The vandalism crowd is going to keep getting it's kicks rolling houses and offending local pomps with practical jokes.
Try this: charge a newbie Windows-user for something like the Gimp, pocket their money, point them to the official website where they can get it for free, explain what you did was perfectly legal and then watch their reaction. Think they'll pay you again? No matter how legal it is for Linspire to run their CnR thingie, *nix-users don't want to pay for free software and a great many view it as a (legal) scam
If all you do is point, the user has a right to be pissed. That's not what Linspire or any other Linux company is doing. Most users expect you to sit down and make sure everything works before they pay you. If it does work, they will be happy to fork over the cash because you just saved them the difference between your hour's wage and the cost of a non free program that does the same thing, $600 - 40 = $560.
What the commercial Linux companies are doing is packaging free software so that it works together. That's a big job. They have to modify configuration files, compile and do other nasty tasks. Debian does it though volunteers and is big on user freedom. Linspire is using that base and adding non free junk. M$ takes non free junk, most of which comes from competitors, and passes it along.
What the user wants is something that works. The Linspire, Xandros and Mepis approach has it's benefits and dangers. The benefit is that all your non free hardware and popular software can work right out of the box. My wife loves watching You Tube with Mepis and it's much easier to set up than Debian proper. The dangers are all those associated with non free junk, a lack of long term credibility and difficulty upgrading. Binary blobs are just as sticky and brittle in the Linux world as they are elsewhere, though the sane separation of user and system files helps a lot. Upgrading Mepis is just as easy as installing it in the first place. The hard part is when you want a program that's not included. In the worst case, you have to download 500 MB of dependencies and they break your non free crappo. In the best case, you just install the newest CD and then get all your favorite applications. A completely free system does not have that issue. It can be incrementally upgraded for six to ten years, without fear of breaking installed applications, until the hardware is so obsolete it's not worth the electricity it eats. You should also note that it's easier for the distribution to not bother with non free junk that does not work. Distributions that make non free stuff go are having to do a lot of extra work, sometimes completely in the dark, to make sure it all works together. They also have to trust the non free software maker in a way that you should not. For most users, none of the above problems is a big deal and they are happy to fork over the money it takes to make sure things work right. Happy in slavery, sometimes and sometimes not.
What users really resent is the way M$ makes you feel like a sucker. You can go full out, buying nothing but "professional" versions of the software, the most expensive hardware AND IT STILL MIGHT NOT WORK. The more you add, the more likely it is something won't get along with something else and the system degrades with time no matter what you do. With a 12 minute half life on any network, no M$ system lasts very long. The difference between a Linspire "sucker" and a M$ "sucker" is about $1,000 is software and hardware costs. The addage is, "Linux" makes a new computer out of trash and Windoze makes a new computer into trash." DRM in Vista are going to make things even worse.
Yeah, war is not a good thing to base your economy on.
Old bones aside, it's good for anyone to avoid the M$ tax. $20,000,000 is money every school district has better uses for than software from a company that's as likely to sue them as give them anything useful.
OK, I considered the source, so what? He's someone who wants the internet to work like it works now. Is there something you want to add based on other things he's done?
Dr Szeliski said:
Use 1 is silly because the combination defeats the purpose of photo sharing. People mostly want to share pictures of their friends with their friends. Unless they have stone friends, those are not going to show up on the composite. They also want to share some unique perspective, which will obviously be lost as well.
Use 2 makes more sense but it's going to take much more work than first meets the eye for a real estate agent to turn a house into a virtual tour. Every surface will have to be photographed to make a gapless model and the program will need a lot of help constructing interior spaces. It might be cheaper and faster to borrow your architect's CAD model or make one.
Such tools will eventually become common, but M$ is neither the originator nor will they be the first to provide one that works well. They have yet to provide an OS that works well and should spend their effort their instead of trying to take over every photo album. Most people don't want their photo albums rendered into some kind of impersonal "rational sense" that looks like Hitler art, devoid of people.
what's your opinion of Apple saying OS X can only run on Apple hardware, legally?
Sounds really stupid, but I would not know or care if it's true or not.
Shouldn't that be "$talker"?
Only if you are paid to do it. That would make you a whore as well and it would not be surprising.
There are not steps you can take to protect yourself other than to use free software. Microsoft has granted itself the right to violate you, and you agreed to it. They can do it anytime they want through the daily encrypted communications they demand with your computer.
Physical access is not required for privacy violation. The EULA which kindly grants you permission to use your M$ crippled computer also grants M$ the right to search it at will. While they might finally be sharing some of the fruits of this search with you, it does not mean they are sharing it all or that you should want it in the first place. When you connect it to a network, your indexed thoughts and works can be sent to M$ for them to sell to the highest bidder.
This is really just a detail and variation on a longstanding truism. The OS is not free, so you will never really know what it's doing and it should not be trusted. The details of that violation are less important than awareness of the problem.
It's only a neat feature if it can be trusted. In this case, it can't and it's not.
What kind of reasonable privacy expectations should people have on a work computer?
Expectations of privacy are reasonable but unrealistic. You will be violated at work and you will also be violated at home.
Once upon a time, it was against the law to wiretap phones because they were part of a larger public network. Computers have somehow skipped around that and many large companies now feel free to treat their employees like prisons treat inmates.
Even if you don't believe in treating your employees with dignity, the threat of industrial espionage should not be discounted. Do you really trust Microsoft enough to index and parse all of your employee's work? I don't and I don't trust them to be able to keep it to themselves even if they did lack malicious intent. This "feature" creates a standard location for every industrial espionage program to mine. If M$ does not have a buyer for your information, someone else might.
Ignoring such altruistic issues as company loyalty, you reach the obvious conclusion that the same feature will be at home too. Companies can pay a staff to vainly try to block abuse of their networks. Home users will simply take the bad deal they have as long as they feel compelled to use M$ junk. "Savvy" users will add this to the very long list of chores owning a M$ computer brings with it, anti-virus, firewall administration, monthly re imaging and so on and so forth ad nausea.
Truly, MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
No, people just remember the EULA and other things M$ does. This is the company who's EULA grants them full search and delete rights to your files for use of their OS. It's also the company that demands encrypted communications with your computer on a daily basis. Fear of them abusing that power is well founded based on their previous treatment of partners, competitors and customers.
I don't get the privacy concern. If someone gains physical access to your machine, then the contents are vulnerable unless you take active steps to prevent it.
Physical access is not required for privacy violation in this case. The EULA which kindly grants you permission to use your M$ crippled computer also grants M$ the right to search it at will. While they might finally be sharing some of the fruits of this search with you, it does not mean they are sharing it all or that you should want it in the first place. When you connect it to a network, your indexed thoughts and works can be sent to M$ for them to sell to the highest bidder.
This is really just a detail and variation on a longstanding truism. The OS is not free, so you will never really know what it's doing and it should not be trusted. The details of that violation are less important than awareness of the problem.
It's only a neat feature if it can be trusted.
Whenever I have to reinstall windows (or more often, linux since my main computer runs a different distro about every week), I do an audit of all my data. First, write down what you need to keep: emails? accounting data from Quicken? config info from other applications? bookmarks? Get it all down and back up everything to an external drive or a CDR.
A Linux recovery is much easier in the rare case you have a need because all user information and settings are in one place.
If your distro was bright enough to have a separate home partion, the above steps are not needed. Just use the old partition with the new distro. Applications and settings are not hard to get anymore. In a pinch, just give them Mepis and be done with it. If it runs off the CD, it will run on the hard drive and installation takes about 20 minutes.
"Stalker. I'm proud".
she has a lot of games and art applications like Corel Painter that require Windows.
If she's got the money and need for those programs, she should also have the money to get the system fixed "right". She's obviously not going to pay for what she expects for free and what she calls "crap", so let her get the same crap and help from someone who cares much less. The full price of non free software is much larger than the purchase price, let her bear all of it.
When she's sick of it, set her up with Xandros and Parallels. Image her crummy Windoze install and rewrite it whenever it has problems. "Fixing" Windoze never works and it's a waste of time that's getting worse all the time. Keep it off the net as much as you can and it will last longer. Get her used to free software like the Gimp and Unreal Tournament and she won't go back to a single screen UI again.
If so, I'll bet he's looking forward to a job that's possible.
"My other box is your Linux box"
That's a stupid thing for him to say. It shows his malicious intentions and his failure to carry through.
80% of the world's spam comes from security problems in his platform. This guy's work is either incompetent or hampered by others. Blaming it on his users is not good enough while Mac, Linux and Sun users are blissfully unaware of the Windoze swamp.
To date there are no such problems with free software, no worms, no trojans, ad servers, nothing, naada, zip. Sure, that dick might be able to root my particular box if he tried hard enough. So what? I can clean it up in twenty minutes and I've got enough redundancy and back ups to not even notice. Unlike the pay per play Windoze world, I can have live backups on multiple machines without losing my shirt.
All that silly bumper sticker shows is his intent to break something that works better than M$ junk. So far all effort in that direction have failed. Banks, search engines and other high profile chair targets continue working as usual, unless some M$ net storm messes things up.
I said that I couldn't fit "My other box is a 10,000 node zombie cluster of Windows machines" on a bumper sticker....he chuckled...
He was probably thinking, "My Windows bot net is bigger than yours. "
he was getting the disk through a "loop hole" where he could buy it if he also bought some "hardware". ... So, a company willing to bend rules is also willing to break laws? Big surprise.
No one would be able to play these games if M$ did not in the first place. Their licensing and price structure is insane and some think there's a method to the madness - the ability to extort.
If you can step outside the Bill Gates distortion field for a minute, you might see the absurdity of it all. How are you, your retailer, their wholesaler or even M$ themselves supposed to be able to tell one pressed CD from another? They are identical as the "pirates" have presses just like the "legitimate" publisher. The only difference is where the money goes and I doubt even Carnivore can track that mess. Reality is that you don't need Windoze in the first place and that software ownership is an obsolete business model that never had a legitimate foundation. It was a swindle all along.