In times of war investigatory and related power have always increased. However the American people only allow this during the emergency, Once the emergency is over things return to normal. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt,... they all did things that would only be tolerated during war.
The US Navy may not be a pirate fleet, but they got shut down by closed source junk once. NT left at least one "smart" ship dead in the water to be towed back to port. That was 1998, before they destabilized NT further to create XP. Bill Gates got more than his money's worth when he bought into the Electric Boat company. Ossam Bin Laden would be proud of him.
There is oversight. Congressional committees were informed years ago. However election season is upon us so there is a lot of fake outrage and posing for the cameras and microphones going on.
This is a scandal of first order. The goal is unconstitutional, the attitude is nuamerican and the means are illegal. This is the kind of shit we fought the Cold War to avoid. I'm furious and you should be too.
As the American Taliban tightens it's grip on your reading, conversations and whereabouts, the terrorists win. A few bandits flying into buildings, even the destruction of an entire American city is not an excuse to destroy the things this country stands for. A few more slips down the slope and you wont be able to tell the difference between the Axis of Evil and home.
Microsoft has yet to release a browser that comes close to supporting standards. This is often shouted and an easy way to bash MS. It's also completely wrong. Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time.
It looks like you are saying that IE is more standards compliant than anything else, but you are not. As you admit:
... not that IE6 was a particularly bad release. It's that it's bad by today's standards, and nothing's been done to fix it.
... a browser [IE] released in 2001... that's had almost no standards-related bug fixes since then is much worse than a browser that's been through constant maintenance [Mozilla, Konqueror, Dillo, Insert Favorite Browser Here]
I'm glad you made that so clear. The mainstream Microsoft browser is a five and a half year old piece of shit because Microsoft wasted all of their time on Active Desktop, DRM and other lock in garbage instead of real standards, speed, stability or security. For a minute, it looked like you were saying the opposite because you have some ancient hatred of Netscape or something.
A user presents a mocking list of problems they have that others don't.
From the other day, Mark Golden of the WSJ tried out six distributions from a Dummies book. The things that worked are worth mentioning:
Basic tasks like printing, email and Internet browsing worked easily. Even though none of the Linux versions recognized my particular model of Epson color printer, the device worked fine after I designated it as a similar Epson model. Setting up email to use my account with an Internet service provider required some configuration, as does setting up Microsoft Outlook email. I was able to book an airline ticket online, reply to an invitation and look at satellite maps in the Google search engine. I also did some online banking... my electronic bill payments went through just the same.
He had some Viao hardware issues but he was using old software and those problems might be fixed now. Two things are sure, Vista won't run on his laptop and DRM is killing M$.
As for your specific complaints, Kooka and SANE work most SCSI and USB scanners, right out of the box. Crappy wireless cards should be avoided because one or two Broadc - companies suck life. Just take it back and get one that works. Audio almost always works out of the box unless you have very new hardware from an uncooperative company. Flash sucks because it's non free but your GNU Linux desktop should be much faster than Windows.
The part of the quote Dunn ignores does not seem to be part of Dunn's narrow world view. He concludes, in part, "...this is a beneficial program most users would probably not want help from," and must have used every ounce of will power to resist continuing, "but the dirty little pirates need this and prison!" He agrees with the malware author that P2P is all about "stealing."
It's pretty obvious that John Dunn does not care about people who create their own media or use P2P to share content that others want you to share. He tries to push it off onto Sophos by quoting them about Charles Bronson movies, where the hero is a murderer. He even leaves in, "...it's perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files too," but Dunn the only thing he worries about, while droning on about "benefits", is "security" being turned off and the next versions that might wipe out something else. If you are using P2P, Dunn does not like you and does not mind if someone wipes out your music, movies and photoalbum. It seems beyond Dunn that people outside the big three music publishers might make and share music, photo albums and movies that other find interesting. By his authoritative opinion, we are all consumers or pirates of pornography. Anything that gets in the way of big dumb companies making money, like alternate entertainment distribution systems, competition or viruses deleting M$ Word.docs, is EVIL and the people who use them must be grubby little masturbators.
Porn? Dunn does not use the word. Sophos consider the name "goporn.exe" which is left in the users directory "tempting." The masturbator and warez insults are entirely the trojan author's. Neither Sophos nor Dunn point out how insulting it would be to find porn or warez in what used to be a directory of baby pictures, movies and music. Such an omission is tacit approval. He can't even imagine such a thing.
Get this Dunn: there are no benefits to malware. If someone is on your computer eating your bandwith and doing things you did not ask for, they are fucking you. What I share has nothing to do with.DOC, porn or cracked software. I do use P2P, http and sftp and I don't want you or anyone else wiping that out.
[Vista] Beta 2 is out 'real soon now' and is supposed to fix most of that - if Beta 2 is still a train wreck *then* we can start complaining..
Five years and counting. Some people are more patient than others. In those five years XP has remained a network threatening security dissaster and has yet to implement basic end user features available in all other system.
Instead of fixing the real problems, Microsoft is busy working on the next generation of lock in. Remote shutoffs and forcing users to beg permission to use the OS on purchase and hardware change was not enough. Now the hardware itself is booby trapped. When Vista hits the shelf the complains will actually start.
My music is already in Itunes Microsoft... If the media player 11 interfaces with my Ipod i'll maybe consider it, until then... i dont really care about the itunes like features.
The whole DRM fiasco is so avoidable and life without it is so much better. If work forces you to use Windoze, it sucks to be you but you don't have to let that take over your entertainment and home life.
By the way, the GUI that Xine makes does all the cool stuff from keyboard shortcuts you want from a video player. If you want a real video editor, go for kino or cinerella. M$ will never give you any of that any more than M$ Word can be used for publishing.
Does this mean yet another round of new media formats I won't be able to play without using MS proprietary software?
With the utter failure of their online music business and half a billion a day in EU fines hanging over their head for "integrating" WiMP only M$ would be dumb enough to create yet more crappy file formats for lock out. You can count on it.
Finally, the DDoS died down enough to see the screen shots. Yep, another article was made visible and the trolls had to move on. In any case, what I say was unbelievably sorry. It's amazing someone would ask a question like this:
Really, what more possible features could you need in a media player other than the usual play, pause, rewind, etc. buttons, and some useful codecs (which, of course, Microsoft would never even dream of distributing, as they promote "piracy", or help alternative formats like Real).
Let's see, besides the usual codecs, you might have some useful features such as:
A choice of database backends. It's hard to imagine a music collection too large for postgress, I wonder what will choke WiMP.
Use of the Internet for something other than purchasing DRM crippled music. You know like lyric and artist look up, or cover find. The "Paste Art Here" for cover art is just pathetic after you've used Amarok's excellent cover art manager and track editor. Right click "look this up on Amazon" will never see the light of day... because using a publically published image would be like high seas piracy, right. Barf.
Playlist features? I wonder if their "Create Playlist" calls anything but some kind of manual drudgery. I've gotten used to Amarok's many dynamic playlist generators, from "music never played" to suggestions and plain random. Some of those features might be available from the "Library" section, but that would be confusing and as much par for the course as not having them.
How about expandability? I'm spoiled rotten by the many fine scripts for Amarok, like USB music device scripts that copy music and playlists sans DRM to normal and inexpensive portable music players.
Better GUI integration of the play buttons and graphic equalizer. Look at the way that dog hog up half of a clearly huge monitor. KDE and just about every other window manager have equalizers that live as small buttons on the menu bar and expand on use. Every KDE media player lives in the task bar and many have play/pause stop buttons there too. Of course, every window manager and free desktop program also has a simple and unobtrusive speaker with volume slider on the menu bar and they all work with each other. Even Nullsoft's Winamp has figured out how to make an equalizer unobtrusive. How hard could it have been for M$ to have integrated similar features into their own GUI without eating your whole screen?
Other players manage to put these features in without complicating the user's life. Microsoft seems to have made the user's life complicated without any of the goodies. It might not really work, but that's a another story.
All of the above, however is topped by the one or two features you won't find in a free media player, the shrill warning in the "about" screen, emphasis mine:
[incomprehesible version numbers and Product ID:god-awful-oem-bs.]
Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and international treaties.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law.
They ask you to press "OK" as if any sane person would say such a thing to their customer and that the customer should agree to such an insult.
The other feature you won't find in a free player is a desire to monopolize playback. If all of the above features are not for you, the free world has a wealth of light media players. You mentioned a couple. Xine's GUI, Noatun, Juk, xmms all have nice and light interfaces. All of the popular browsers have "open with" right click items, so you can override your default choices and none would obnoxiously slip in a new version against your will. Hell, when it comes down to it, you can just use sox and "play" from a command line, or make shell scripts to do it all for you. Simple is paths and a shell that works out of the box.
You never get that "Wow, I never saw this coming kind of viewpoint".
What planet do you live on? There's lot's excitement for people who discover GNU/Linux. Expectations are typically low, thanks to massive FUD campaigns. A by product of that FUD is an air of the dangerous and new that's irresistible to many. Those that bother to try and stick with it long enough to overcome the bad habits of commercial software are amply rewarded. In the end, they find the joy of free software, which continues to grow. Browsing software repositories is like walking through a candy store where everything is free and the candy only gets better as time goes on. New programs make it feel like Christmas all year long. What does the five year and counting M$ train wreck release cycle have to match that? Zip, zero, zilch, hype, FUD and other hot air.
Most of the people I know have barely heard of free software and are heavily FUDed about it. They have this strange notion that it's hard to use and won't work with their hardware. Some even confuse it with copyright violation and think it's somehow tainted and immoral. Big players, like IBM, Lowes, Chrysler, etc, have helped to alleviate the "rebel" image but the FUD still stick because the big dumb vendors like Dell still don't offer a GNU/Linux desktop machines for end users.
Anyone who's used a GNU/Linux system for any length of time knows the FUD for the BS but the discovery never ends. Media players are a prime example. I've been using free software since Red Hat 5.x in 1998 and I've watched a steady and constant improvement. Back then, things were so nasty I did not even bother with sound. Then came vorbis, sox, autoconfiguration, ALSA, xine and suddenly audio is easy. Today, you can get live CDs that run Amarok, which has to be one of the finest media players available. Amarok excels as a media player as Konqueror and Firefox excel as browsers. Everywhere you look at a GNU/Linux system you see more excellence. The product is greater than the sum of the parts and M$ can't keep up to save their life. Hell, they are finally getting a browser with tabs and a multiple desktop GUI, but it's so bloated and top heavy with, virus checking and DRM it won't even work.
The final, unmatchable and exciting discovery is how free software really works. Far from being evil, free software is morally superior. No free software project has ever sued a public school for copying a text editor and none ever will misuse the government and laws in such a hideous way. What Microsoft dissmisses as "Communism" is actually co-operative capitalism and free market innovation at it's finest. Getting something for nothing and finding out that's the way it should have been all along feels great. The lies and harm M$ heaps on free software all backfire and the user is left with an unshakable commitment to their own software freedom.
I was hoping for something tasty like a memory leak. Something that would gradually bring your machine to a crawl over a 2 hour period. Pissed-off users rebooting all day and not knowing why. Wailing and teeth-gnashing at Microsoft. Now that would have been worth the read...
It amazes me how many of the comments on the ABC News blog say, "the government should put leakers away for life!" and "treasonous journalists should be shot!"
I'd be able to dismiss that if I did not know people who actually think that way.
It's scary. Information gained this way can only be used for retribution because courts will throw it out. If any real laws were broken, they could get warrants. Secret jails, warantless searches, torture all with such perfect sang-froid. The people we are allowing to abuse foreigners in secret jails might develop domestic tastes.
The rot may be top down, but the fix must be bottom up. The same ugly attitudes will be ridden by whatever party is in power. The only thing that can stop such abuse is a national revulsion and attitude change. Given government control of broadcast and such underhanded tactics like this, it will be hard to effect that attitude change any other way than face to face.
The distros that come to mind are SimplyMEPIS, PCLinuxOS, and Kanotix. ...I'm a daily Slashdot reader, and even I'VE never heard of those.
You might not have heard about Mepis because you are no longer a newbie. The author managed to find Xandros, which is good. Mepis is the other distribution which specificall aims at ease of use and has won awards for it. It's one of the better Debian installers, because it runs live and has a GUI installer. The author might have done better had he consulted a LUG rather than a Dummies book, but overall he did very well.
You're not gonna win-over an already confused user by presenting him or her with 50 more obscure and semi-obscure choices. That person is just gonna say "fuck it" and stick with what he or she knows: Windows.
The author concludes: "I'll continue to toy with Xandros, and look at upgrades of other distributions to see if I can overcome the hurdles. In exchange for a reasonable amount of time, I'd jump at the chance to gain the speed, security and savings promised by Linux -- and to feel that Microsoft has a bit more competition."
A distribution for Vaio is just what he needs and Mepis has some of the other features he missed. Mepis comes with GTK pod and Amrok, so it will talk to his iPod without help from iTunes. Because I've avoided Vaio, I can't say how well Mepis will deal with his hardware, but it should do as well as Fedora.
Also, people want to install something with staying power. Half the distros out there are gonna be gone in a couple of years, replaced by a whole new set. How can you have faith installing something you've never heard of?
Mepis has been around a long time and has a considerable user community. It's not going anywhere. Have some faith and consider your options I Mepis more than I trust Microsoft, how about you?
My wife would like to understand.... She's definitely non-technical, but exceptionally smart.
That's who and why and I can understand that.
Her reaction is generally "just plan better". I argue that the industry has been struggling with this issue for decades. I don't think we're all morons to have built so much infrastructure and come so far, but we still can't solve the simple parts like accurately identifying how long it will take us to accomplish our goal.
Hmmm, I'm still not sure what you want to explain but I'll take a swing anyway. I can think of social, technical and legal complexities to software development. I've talked to my wife about all three. You might be thinking of something completely different.
Talking to my wife is not all that hard, even though she has no interest in programming. Her first and only practice was some kind of basic in grade school. She was an interior designer for a Steelcase for eight years and understands all three classes of difficulties.
So, how do you get from there to dinner table conversation with the wife who's never written a line of code? It's the same way you try to simplify everything and the largeness of the subject actually helps.
You start with what a program is and everything flows from there. My wife, like most people, understands modularity. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time," is one of her favorite sayings. She also has a basic idea that a program is something that takes information and does something with it. It does not take too much to explain that programs expect specific organization of their inputs to be able to deal with it and that smaller, simpler programs are easier to work with that big complex ones, and the wife then understands modular programming. It's a division of labor kind of thing that runs right into group development and organizational and social complexity. How do you know what the customer really needs? How do you make decisions about meeting those needs and turn those into a blueprint that you can follow? The free software world has solved those problems by letting the customer make the software themselves, and those customers have been organizing themselves very well. At that point, you zoom back into the perspective of a developer getting their hands on some huge project. If you can imagine that the free software developer knows what they want to accomplish, you are then faced with another embarrassment of riches: so many great tools, each of which can take years to explore. Did I say "free software developer"? Yes I did, because I did not want to wade into the swamp of NDA's, cross licensing, binary blobs and other horror stories of legal complexity. That can come later. By now, your wife's head will have popped but you will have explained software development complexity.
Like most things, none of the parts is particularly difficult, there's just a lot of parts.
I can't tell you how to explain software complexity until you tell me why you are doing this, who your are trying to convince and what aspect of "complexity" you want to relate. My general answer is that software is no more complex than any other practical task. My specific answer varies by audience. Talking to people who have never done a practical thing in their lives is different from talking to tradesmen or engineers. Most importantly, what you are really trying to achieve makes a difference. Why are you doing this?
I can think of a few legitimate reasons and many less honest goals. The world is awash with non-free propaganda, which is designed to make the user feel helpless. "Here there be dragons, trust us and stay out," they tell us at every turn right before blowing their horn about how many million lines of code they have bought and hacked together. Raise my spirits with a story of educational and respectful conversation. I'd love to hear about it.
What does matter is a legal/tax structure which encourages corporations to ship work overseas. Not to mention a system that favors large corporations over smaller ones.
Right on.
If you want to protect jobs, then ban multi-national and even multi-state corporations.
Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.
You don't have to go through all of that trouble if you take care of laws that favor larger companies. There are some economies of scale in any industry. The size of a company is not the problem, the problem is an unnatural lack of competition. Competition can and should be encouraged for the country to remain robust and competitive. It's as simple as rescinding obnoxious regulations, widening government bidding and enforcing existing antitrust laws.
Competition is good for everyone. Customers get good service, shareholders get good value and employees are paid what they are worth. You will never get a good deal in any industry that's dominated by one or two big players.
one could possibly force them face you in court and explain why they didn't just politely work with you and your concerns in the first place. Right to audit ought not to mean right to intimidate.
Meet the DMCA. If the BSA has "evidence" of your wrongdoing, you get to pay for the audit and the "violated" company's legal bills. See here for a reference story and what to do about this kind of extortion. Essentially, you are screwed and have to pay the fines demanded without a fight. A fight would cost the average company half a million dollars, more if you include the cost of business disruption.
Software contracts and licenses are not normal contracts. The "agreement" between you and a non free software company is that you are so greatfull for the software that you will do as you are told.
Treating customers like this, Microsoft has completely lost it.
They're only idiots if they don't have the world by the nuts.
That's wrong and they don't. It's been easy enough to escape their "product" for six year, as proved by Ball Guitar Strings, GM, Lowes and many others. Even if it was difficult to get away, it's stupid to insult and harass your customers. You should not make customers angry enough to use abacuses when there are dozens of firms ready to replace your product with something that's cheaper and easier.
Once the inspection team gets in, they try to get the customer to buy more products.
They never got to that point because AWC's lawyer told them to stick it.
It it works like a BSA raid, M$ will get a court order for an inspection based on some kind of "evidence", which could be anything from an anonymous phone call by a disgruntled employee to some program the secretary installed phoning home. AWC would then have the choice of paying for the inspection or another even more expensive "service" from a list M$ offers. The raid itself would involve massive disruption of work.
Slashdot Mirror
If we are at war now, we will never be at peace.
When informed of Total Information Awareness, Congress loudly and firmly killed it, but the NSA did it anyway in secret.
This is a scandal of first order. The goal is unconstitutional, the attitude is nuamerican and the means are illegal. This is the kind of shit we fought the Cold War to avoid. I'm furious and you should be too.
As the American Taliban tightens it's grip on your reading, conversations and whereabouts, the terrorists win. A few bandits flying into buildings, even the destruction of an entire American city is not an excuse to destroy the things this country stands for. A few more slips down the slope and you wont be able to tell the difference between the Axis of Evil and home.
It looks like you are saying that IE is more standards compliant than anything else, but you are not. As you admit:
and that
I'm glad you made that so clear. The mainstream Microsoft browser is a five and a half year old piece of shit because Microsoft wasted all of their time on Active Desktop, DRM and other lock in garbage instead of real standards, speed, stability or security. For a minute, it looked like you were saying the opposite because you have some ancient hatred of Netscape or something.
From the other day, Mark Golden of the WSJ tried out six distributions from a Dummies book. The things that worked are worth mentioning:
Basic tasks like printing, email and Internet browsing worked easily. Even though none of the Linux versions recognized my particular model of Epson color printer, the device worked fine after I designated it as a similar Epson model. Setting up email to use my account with an Internet service provider required some configuration, as does setting up Microsoft Outlook email. I was able to book an airline ticket online, reply to an invitation and look at satellite maps in the Google search engine. I also did some online banking ... my electronic bill payments went through just the same.
He had some Viao hardware issues but he was using old software and those problems might be fixed now. Two things are sure, Vista won't run on his laptop and DRM is killing M$.
As for your specific complaints, Kooka and SANE work most SCSI and USB scanners, right out of the box. Crappy wireless cards should be avoided because one or two Broadc - companies suck life. Just take it back and get one that works. Audio almost always works out of the box unless you have very new hardware from an uncooperative company. Flash sucks because it's non free but your GNU Linux desktop should be much faster than Windows.
It's pretty obvious that John Dunn does not care about people who create their own media or use P2P to share content that others want you to share. He tries to push it off onto Sophos by quoting them about Charles Bronson movies, where the hero is a murderer. He even leaves in, "...it's perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files too," but Dunn the only thing he worries about, while droning on about "benefits", is "security" being turned off and the next versions that might wipe out something else. If you are using P2P, Dunn does not like you and does not mind if someone wipes out your music, movies and photoalbum. It seems beyond Dunn that people outside the big three music publishers might make and share music, photo albums and movies that other find interesting. By his authoritative opinion, we are all consumers or pirates of pornography. Anything that gets in the way of big dumb companies making money, like alternate entertainment distribution systems, competition or viruses deleting M$ Word.docs, is EVIL and the people who use them must be grubby little masturbators.
Porn? Dunn does not use the word. Sophos consider the name "goporn.exe" which is left in the users directory "tempting." The masturbator and warez insults are entirely the trojan author's. Neither Sophos nor Dunn point out how insulting it would be to find porn or warez in what used to be a directory of baby pictures, movies and music. Such an omission is tacit approval. He can't even imagine such a thing.
Get this Dunn: there are no benefits to malware. If someone is on your computer eating your bandwith and doing things you did not ask for, they are fucking you. What I share has nothing to do with .DOC, porn or cracked software. I do use P2P, http and sftp and I don't want you or anyone else wiping that out.
Five years and counting. Some people are more patient than others. In those five years XP has remained a network threatening security dissaster and has yet to implement basic end user features available in all other system.
Instead of fixing the real problems, Microsoft is busy working on the next generation of lock in. Remote shutoffs and forcing users to beg permission to use the OS on purchase and hardware change was not enough. Now the hardware itself is booby trapped. When Vista hits the shelf the complains will actually start.
I'm seeing more of that... like the recent WSJ rejection of all Linux because the distro tried would not work iTunes (and a few "complex" M$Office docs). It's too bad people don't see the magic combination of:
The whole DRM fiasco is so avoidable and life without it is so much better. If work forces you to use Windoze, it sucks to be you but you don't have to let that take over your entertainment and home life.
By the way, the GUI that Xine makes does all the cool stuff from keyboard shortcuts you want from a video player. If you want a real video editor, go for kino or cinerella. M$ will never give you any of that any more than M$ Word can be used for publishing.
With the utter failure of their online music business and half a billion a day in EU fines hanging over their head for "integrating" WiMP only M$ would be dumb enough to create yet more crappy file formats for lock out. You can count on it.
Really, what more possible features could you need in a media player other than the usual play, pause, rewind, etc. buttons, and some useful codecs (which, of course, Microsoft would never even dream of distributing, as they promote "piracy", or help alternative formats like Real).
Let's see, besides the usual codecs, you might have some useful features such as:
Other players manage to put these features in without complicating the user's life. Microsoft seems to have made the user's life complicated without any of the goodies. It might not really work, but that's a another story.
All of the above, however is topped by the one or two features you won't find in a free media player, the shrill warning in the "about" screen, emphasis mine:
[incomprehesible version numbers and Product ID:god-awful-oem-bs.]
Warning: This computer program is protected by copyright law and international treaties.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this program, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the law.
They ask you to press "OK" as if any sane person would say such a thing to their customer and that the customer should agree to such an insult.
The other feature you won't find in a free player is a desire to monopolize playback. If all of the above features are not for you, the free world has a wealth of light media players. You mentioned a couple. Xine's GUI, Noatun, Juk, xmms all have nice and light interfaces. All of the popular browsers have "open with" right click items, so you can override your default choices and none would obnoxiously slip in a new version against your will. Hell, when it comes down to it, you can just use sox and "play" from a command line, or make shell scripts to do it all for you. Simple is paths and a shell that works out of the box.
What planet do you live on? There's lot's excitement for people who discover GNU/Linux. Expectations are typically low, thanks to massive FUD campaigns. A by product of that FUD is an air of the dangerous and new that's irresistible to many. Those that bother to try and stick with it long enough to overcome the bad habits of commercial software are amply rewarded. In the end, they find the joy of free software, which continues to grow. Browsing software repositories is like walking through a candy store where everything is free and the candy only gets better as time goes on. New programs make it feel like Christmas all year long. What does the five year and counting M$ train wreck release cycle have to match that? Zip, zero, zilch, hype, FUD and other hot air.
Most of the people I know have barely heard of free software and are heavily FUDed about it. They have this strange notion that it's hard to use and won't work with their hardware. Some even confuse it with copyright violation and think it's somehow tainted and immoral. Big players, like IBM, Lowes, Chrysler, etc, have helped to alleviate the "rebel" image but the FUD still stick because the big dumb vendors like Dell still don't offer a GNU/Linux desktop machines for end users.
Anyone who's used a GNU/Linux system for any length of time knows the FUD for the BS but the discovery never ends. Media players are a prime example. I've been using free software since Red Hat 5.x in 1998 and I've watched a steady and constant improvement. Back then, things were so nasty I did not even bother with sound. Then came vorbis, sox, autoconfiguration, ALSA, xine and suddenly audio is easy. Today, you can get live CDs that run Amarok, which has to be one of the finest media players available. Amarok excels as a media player as Konqueror and Firefox excel as browsers. Everywhere you look at a GNU/Linux system you see more excellence. The product is greater than the sum of the parts and M$ can't keep up to save their life. Hell, they are finally getting a browser with tabs and a multiple desktop GUI, but it's so bloated and top heavy with, virus checking and DRM it won't even work.
The final, unmatchable and exciting discovery is how free software really works. Far from being evil, free software is morally superior. No free software project has ever sued a public school for copying a text editor and none ever will misuse the government and laws in such a hideous way. What Microsoft dissmisses as "Communism" is actually co-operative capitalism and free market innovation at it's finest. Getting something for nothing and finding out that's the way it should have been all along feels great. The lies and harm M$ heaps on free software all backfire and the user is left with an unshakable commitment to their own software freedom.
Your hopes are not in vain. Just read any review of M$ AdCenter or Vista (train wreck ... not compelling to human beings). The slow down is not gradual, it's instant, and the damn thing might not work at all.
I'd be able to dismiss that if I did not know people who actually think that way.
It's scary. Information gained this way can only be used for retribution because courts will throw it out. If any real laws were broken, they could get warrants. Secret jails, warantless searches, torture all with such perfect sang-froid. The people we are allowing to abuse foreigners in secret jails might develop domestic tastes.
The rot may be top down, but the fix must be bottom up. The same ugly attitudes will be ridden by whatever party is in power. The only thing that can stop such abuse is a national revulsion and attitude change. Given government control of broadcast and such underhanded tactics like this, it will be hard to effect that attitude change any other way than face to face.
As Official Paladin of the Free Software Jihad surely you have a plan of action to counteract this dangerous trend?
Eliminating non human confirmed posts from Windoze machines would take care of your botnet and mailtool.
You might not have heard about Mepis because you are no longer a newbie. The author managed to find Xandros, which is good. Mepis is the other distribution which specificall aims at ease of use and has won awards for it. It's one of the better Debian installers, because it runs live and has a GUI installer. The author might have done better had he consulted a LUG rather than a Dummies book, but overall he did very well.
You're not gonna win-over an already confused user by presenting him or her with 50 more obscure and semi-obscure choices. That person is just gonna say "fuck it" and stick with what he or she knows: Windows.
The author concludes: "I'll continue to toy with Xandros, and look at upgrades of other distributions to see if I can overcome the hurdles. In exchange for a reasonable amount of time, I'd jump at the chance to gain the speed, security and savings promised by Linux -- and to feel that Microsoft has a bit more competition."
A distribution for Vaio is just what he needs and Mepis has some of the other features he missed. Mepis comes with GTK pod and Amrok, so it will talk to his iPod without help from iTunes. Because I've avoided Vaio, I can't say how well Mepis will deal with his hardware, but it should do as well as Fedora.
Also, people want to install something with staying power. Half the distros out there are gonna be gone in a couple of years, replaced by a whole new set. How can you have faith installing something you've never heard of?
Mepis has been around a long time and has a considerable user community. It's not going anywhere. Have some faith and consider your options I Mepis more than I trust Microsoft, how about you?
Mozilla has the majority of users but 28% still use a browser without a spell check and the trolls will never let up until M$ runs out of money.
One simple question: How does YouTube plan to make any money?
Mindless industry drone troll, 1929:
One simple question, Farnsworth: How do you plan to make any money?
That's who and why and I can understand that.
Her reaction is generally "just plan better". I argue that the industry has been struggling with this issue for decades. I don't think we're all morons to have built so much infrastructure and come so far, but we still can't solve the simple parts like accurately identifying how long it will take us to accomplish our goal.
Hmmm, I'm still not sure what you want to explain but I'll take a swing anyway. I can think of social, technical and legal complexities to software development. I've talked to my wife about all three. You might be thinking of something completely different.
Talking to my wife is not all that hard, even though she has no interest in programming. Her first and only practice was some kind of basic in grade school. She was an interior designer for a Steelcase for eight years and understands all three classes of difficulties.
Others have done a great job explaining complexities in terms of free software. Voices from the Open Source Revolution has a lot of clear thinking from software masters. Vixie's article about software engineering is particularly germain. You can also get a lot of good thought from the Free Software Foundation's philosophy pages. The Cathedral and the Bazaar deals with the issue explicitly. Indeed, there's an embarrassment of riches matched only by the wealth of text editors in the free software world.
So, how do you get from there to dinner table conversation with the wife who's never written a line of code? It's the same way you try to simplify everything and the largeness of the subject actually helps.
You start with what a program is and everything flows from there. My wife, like most people, understands modularity. "You eat an elephant one bite at a time," is one of her favorite sayings. She also has a basic idea that a program is something that takes information and does something with it. It does not take too much to explain that programs expect specific organization of their inputs to be able to deal with it and that smaller, simpler programs are easier to work with that big complex ones, and the wife then understands modular programming. It's a division of labor kind of thing that runs right into group development and organizational and social complexity. How do you know what the customer really needs? How do you make decisions about meeting those needs and turn those into a blueprint that you can follow? The free software world has solved those problems by letting the customer make the software themselves, and those customers have been organizing themselves very well. At that point, you zoom back into the perspective of a developer getting their hands on some huge project. If you can imagine that the free software developer knows what they want to accomplish, you are then faced with another embarrassment of riches: so many great tools, each of which can take years to explore. Did I say "free software developer"? Yes I did, because I did not want to wade into the swamp of NDA's, cross licensing, binary blobs and other horror stories of legal complexity. That can come later. By now, your wife's head will have popped but you will have explained software development complexity.
Like most things, none of the parts is particularly difficult, there's just a lot of parts.
I can think of a few legitimate reasons and many less honest goals. The world is awash with non-free propaganda, which is designed to make the user feel helpless. "Here there be dragons, trust us and stay out," they tell us at every turn right before blowing their horn about how many million lines of code they have bought and hacked together. Raise my spirits with a story of educational and respectful conversation. I'd love to hear about it.
Right on.
If you want to protect jobs, then ban multi-national and even multi-state corporations. Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.
You don't have to go through all of that trouble if you take care of laws that favor larger companies. There are some economies of scale in any industry. The size of a company is not the problem, the problem is an unnatural lack of competition. Competition can and should be encouraged for the country to remain robust and competitive. It's as simple as rescinding obnoxious regulations, widening government bidding and enforcing existing antitrust laws.
Competition is good for everyone. Customers get good service, shareholders get good value and employees are paid what they are worth. You will never get a good deal in any industry that's dominated by one or two big players.
Meet the DMCA. If the BSA has "evidence" of your wrongdoing, you get to pay for the audit and the "violated" company's legal bills. See here for a reference story and what to do about this kind of extortion. Essentially, you are screwed and have to pay the fines demanded without a fight. A fight would cost the average company half a million dollars, more if you include the cost of business disruption.
Software contracts and licenses are not normal contracts. The "agreement" between you and a non free software company is that you are so greatfull for the software that you will do as you are told.
Treating customers like this, Microsoft has completely lost it.
Loveless has a better ring. M$ Agent Loveless is the EULA enforcer.
That's wrong and they don't. It's been easy enough to escape their "product" for six year, as proved by Ball Guitar Strings, GM, Lowes and many others. Even if it was difficult to get away, it's stupid to insult and harass your customers. You should not make customers angry enough to use abacuses when there are dozens of firms ready to replace your product with something that's cheaper and easier.
They never got to that point because AWC's lawyer told them to stick it.
It it works like a BSA raid, M$ will get a court order for an inspection based on some kind of "evidence", which could be anything from an anonymous phone call by a disgruntled employee to some program the secretary installed phoning home. AWC would then have the choice of paying for the inspection or another even more expensive "service" from a list M$ offers. The raid itself would involve massive disruption of work.
This is the appropriate response.