note that Computer World doesn't call this a "sales force scare tactic" as the headline implies. That term isn't even used in the article.
The article says:
The attorney, suspecting that Lawless' actions were part of an elaborate sales effort, basically told her to back off.
and it adds up:
The fact is, if Microsoft really has reason to believe that a company is using unlicensed copies of its software, it sics the Business Software Alliance on the company. It doesn't turn the matter over to one of its sales managers.
Telling your sales force to threaten and intimidate customers is a scare tactic designed to sell crap. These idiots think they have the world by the nuts.
The complexities of license compliance and the threat of a BSA raid is one of the best reasons to avoid the non free software offered by M$ and the other BSA member companies.
"capos." These prisoners were collaborators with the SS and an instrument of the camp regime of humiliation and cruelty. Their role was to break the spirits of the other prisoners. The Capos had warm clothing, enough to eat, and lived in a reserved section of the prison barracks.
Is it true, that as a Microsoft Amb ass adors get cool stuff, like Free software? Yes it is!
As part of the award, Microsoft connects Student Ambassadors with some great resources and benefits to help them be even more successful within their campus technical communities. And some stuff that's just for fun. A sampling... Personalized award plaque Lots of things - bags, shirts, and more - with the program logo on them Tons of software: MSDN Universal Subscription (good for 1-year) PLUS a variety of Microsoft desktop application software titles.NET books from Microsoft Press Exclusive access to the private Student Ambassador Portal and Forums Special access to private Webcasts and training Unique opportunities with Microsoft throughout the year
The above, equating M$ advocacy with fascist collaboration, is a joke. Bill Gates, while working closely and dining with Chairman Hu, is no Hitler. He does not have the ability to commit atrocities any worse than running M$NBC, suing public schools systems, blackmailing ISPs, hardware makers and software firms, working on Carnivore and Paladium. Before he takes your life, he must first finish taking your liberty and any real dictator will quickly acquire Mr. Gate's wealth and power for his own. You still have practical and legal alternatives.
It's the same idea with a different level of power and authority. M$As are supposed to astroturf on line and in person, just like our little Red Lady. Their little reports can't get you thrown into jail, yet, but they might get you on a few blacklists, smear your reputation, block your Ebay sale and spam you. Recruitment intimidation and rewards are vastly different, but the spirit is the same.
A customer who has "little interest in PC systems", multiple PCs and spyware problems is eating your time.
Before the regular cries of 'Supply Ubuntu' get too loud - that will _not_ work. They aren't up to Windows after a couple of years, and will expect interoperability with Windows systems (through college/employer) and don't have the technical skills to manage a *nix system.
There's so much screwed up here and your personal losses should emphasize that. Sell them a new computer to get the work done that you support. Put on an OS you know well and can administer remotely via OpenSSH and make the whole deal worth your while. You are not responsible for the rest and should quit wasting your time on it.
The ease of use of free software will surprise you. My wife and four year old girl work KDE's desktop with ease. I manage to get along very well without Windoze with less effort than my Windoze using peers, despite continued compatibility breaking changes M$ throws out constantly. I know several people like that who have all sorts of jobs in primarily Windoze environments.
Your customer's institutions and software vendors have failed them. The customer does not have the skills to manage a Windoze system but that's not their job, is it? The end result is less than interoperable with any network other than the botnet. These are not your systems or your problems. Make the University/Company IT support your customer outside of your system's unique product, regardless of what OS it runs on. It's not your job to set up email and you can't do it because you don't run the mail server for example. If the company won't make life easy for it's own, you can't either. Don't pretend that you can solve all of their problems. If all you do is sell hardware, you don't have any more obligations than Dell does for software.
Your losses should give you some resolve. Your time and your life are limited. Spend your work time with customers and more of your time with your friends and relatives.
I'm sooooo glad I don't do Windows and don't have to.
I told them [stupid management on a government program] , at the time, that SGI was losing marketshare in its primary marketplace (computer animation, rendering, etc). I didn't see SGI being around much longer and urged them to reconsider and purchase from a company that would still be around in a few years.
Wikipedia says, you were the primary market: Conventional wisdom holds that SGI's core market has traditionally been Hollywood special effects studios. In fact, SGI's largest markets in terms of dollars of revenue generated have always been government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing.
You also say, [SGI hardware] is already obsolete.
The same wiki article has some interesting things to say about Scalable Node computing:
This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve a higher sustained vs peak performance ratio than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional Clusters or Massively parallel computers which require applications code to be written (or re-written) to do explicit message-passing communication between their nodes.
The same article goes on to say that SGI suffered from a nasty transition to Itanium at the expense of their own processors, which decimated their workstation market. If you were buying those, I suppose your were purchasing some hurting hardware. If you were buying clusters, who's did you recommend?
Finally, you claim: This is not a troll. Why bother with that?
Apple Records is a record label, founded in 1968 as a division of Apple Corps Ltd. by The Beatles.... EMI and Capitol agreed to distribute Apple Records until 1975; Apple owned the rights to records by artists they signed, while EMI retained ownership of the Beatles' records, though issuing them under the Apple label. The label survived the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, and was resurrected in the late 1980s, for use on all Beatles CDs. Apple Records own the rights to all of the Beatle videos and movie clips.... During the 1974 proceedings dissolving the Beatles as an entity, a court ruling decreed that eighty perent of all profits from Beatles albums (as a group) would accrue to Apple Records, and five percent would go to each of the four members.
What did the label actually do? If we assume Apple took care of all the nasty little details of signing bands recording their music, what did Capitol and EMI do? Are they lables even though they did little more than make a contract and "distribute" recorded music?
How is that different from what Apple Computer is doing? The only obvious difference between what Apple is doing and what the "labels" are doing is that, once again, the labels are keeping all of the money and others are doing all the work. Apple has indeed become a publisher of music and a label and just another part of the business of screwing musicians.
They also look like they have violated their agreement by using their apple logo and name all over the iTunes site.
I think Linux is great. But everyone else does not know it, and everyone else is who it would have to appeal to if they want to sell more than one.
People are not going to care what's running it any more than they care what kind of software runs their cameras or automobiles. It just has to work to get a good reputation. With M$ spending big bucks to push the concept, people will buy the Samsung "knock off" which sells for $400 less than the Origami as long as Origami's dismal reviews don't poison the entire class of device.
You don't know how long and hard I've been looking for what I need, without success, and how frustrating it is to continue to find things that would be great if only I could tweak one little aspect of them.
OK, I understand that. Thanks to the most expensive and silly portable music player in the world, I know that TrekStor does ogg and mp3. Thanks to Rockbox, my wife's Iriver will work much better. I've been waiting for that a long time. Sooner or later, cool thing come because the turds can't win forever.
There will be more of these pads and they will get cheaper and more varied.
I'll tell you the real reason why nobody wants the damn thing: it's too flat-out weird. First of all, it runs Linux (no flames please; everyone should be able to admit that most people don't use Linux).... And finally, it's slow. I don't care what kind of IPC it has; 624 MHz just isn't fast enough for something big enough to be a real computer.
Your reasoning is less than convincing. It's hard to determine the market reaction to a device that's just become available, so I'm not convinced that "nobody wants the damn thing". Did you throw a chair when you said that? Moreover, Linux will make it work better than you expect. Linux performs better and has better handwriting recognition than M$ does.
600 MHz is more than enough to run media. I know it because my old laptop was a 233 MHz P2. It could play music with JuK or Noatun without skipping while word processing and web browsing and was able to play full length movies like Star Wreck full screen without a problem. Even if the Xscale is skimpy to save power, the PeperPad should do just fine.
Now, count to ten and take a few deep breaths so you can calm down. A new device is nothing to get angry about, unless you work for M$ and see the new devices as cheaper and better than your last attempt to revive the tablet PC bomb.
I think it's overpriced, but that's the way new devices are generally introduced. Many cheaper and more powerful devices will be made and eventually you will find them selling for $15 in the supermarket check out line. At that price, of course, it will be running free software. Cheers!
Supposedly the handwriting recognition of Windows Mobile is very good.
Nope, the note taking application lets you scribble onto a page. It looks neat, but it does not do OCR very well. This is what I've come to expect from M$ character recognition, which never works when I try it.
I expect the free software world to My handspring spoiled me but Xstroke, a full screen graffiti system, works about as well. A combination of Xstroke and graphics program to put writting and drawings where you put the pen down would be killer.
The WP article described note taking with M$ this way:
In Microsoft's Windows Journal note-taking program, you can write anywhere on the screen -- but your handwriting isn't converted to text automatically, making these files impractical to share with other people. You're also liable to scramble your input every time you brush the screen with the knuckles of your stylus-wielding hand.
[list of modbombed posts]... Troll much? And this is just the past four days. And what about this?
People like you shouldn't get modded up just because they post the occasional regurgitated anti-**AA essay and troll the heck out of Slashdot the rest of the time.
Only idiots who waste their lives gaming Slashdot's moderation system care about mod points. Go fuckyourself, John Marriot, aka Ackbar the bartender.
Well, well, well. It looks like you have changed your robots.txt to exclude searches from archive.org and google. That's too bad, I kind of liked looking at you exhort yourself to mod twitter down.
I wonder when you are going to be bright enough to change your site registration so you can tell would be employers you grew up and are ashamed of being such a complete asshole for so long. You do realize that site, which constitutes unlawful harassment, makes you the last person anyone would want to hire, don't you? Nah, you'll never get it. Go ahead and play your pathetic little games.
... copyright is the best means we've found to compensate artists. If you have a better idea, of course, do pray share it with us.
No it's not and it's only part of the problem. The current system does not pay artists. Exclusive franchises never pay anyone but themselves and they are entirely clueless. People have been making, sharing and profiting from music long before mass production and insane copyright laws. They will continue to do so. These guys figured out how to make plenty of money and let people share their music a long time ago. You make money doing things for people. The music industry does very little of that but keeps the rewards for itself. Copyright is only one of their tools. Creative Commons is trying to pull something useful from copyright laws. You can be sure they are on the RIAA hit list.
The fall in cost of reproduction and distribution seems to me to make copyright laws more relevant than less so. When it was expensive to reproduce original works, the incentive to do so is minimal and copyright laws didn't matter very much...With modern technologies reducing such costs, the incentive to copy becomes much greater.
You have completely missunderstood the purpose of copyright and give undue importance to all the wrong things. If the goal of copyright is to make money for publishers, your reasoning is correct. If the goal of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", you are wrong. The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time. The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes. The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living. Exclusive franchises were hated then and should be today.
The RIAA are demanding government protection from legitimate competitors and a defacto control of culture. If you don't understand this, you don't understand how the music industry works. It's not so much your ability to get music that matters to them, it's their inability to control what you are exposed to that scares them to death. They seek to perpetuate an empire of control based on the technical limitations of 20th century broadcast and recording technology and a great deal of racketeering. Without RIAA only stores, selling junk sampled on the nations three radio networks, the world's big three music publishers start to look as good or worse than any other music publisher. Musicians and artists would then be able to market themselves freely and keep more of their earnings and the industry would collapse. Make no mistake at the level of control they seek with DRM and broadcast flags. They want the ability to limit what you are exposed to and are willing to pay for and then to squeeze you for every play while paying the artist next to nothing. The riches they earn are based on exclusion and extortion, not on the promotion of excellence and that directly contradicts the purpose of copyright.
In a world of cheap publishing there should be as many publishers as there are artists. Why not? Anyone can set up a web page. There's no longer a technical reason to reject any manuscript and not offer it to the public. The previous legitimate purpose of publishers, to chose and promote excellence, has been also co-opted by web. Copyright laws, based on paper and mechanical copy are insanely restrictive and obsolete.
We were wondering if you're going to get around to replying to this any time soon. Or any of the other messages currently in your posting history marked as troll.
No, I don't bother to follow your silly little links or mod bombing. Go get an IT job, a life or something useful.
Microsoft is still waiting on a substantial number of corporations to migrate from Windows 2000, MS Office 2000, and VS6. And they're chasing their tails trying to find out how to convince businesses to migrate by paying lots of money for new software, new hardware, increased TCO. What makes you think they're going to switch to non-MS Office?
That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.
I think at some point you need to draw the line regarding support for older hardware and peripherals. I mean, excessive backwards compatibility has retarded advancement of the industry IMHO.
In free software, the line is drawn when needed and it never retards anything. ALSA, for example, has OSS driver support so lots of really crusty old sound cards still work and work well. That has not kept people from making or working on newer cards. Old free binaries that no one maintained work about as well or better than old non free binaries. Typically people make "old libs" packages to support both, so you might still be able to run that ancient non-free copy of Word Perfect for Linux. Chances are that some newer package, like KWord, will do the same things for you and you don't need the old package afterall. In the case of a free package, you can fix the source yourself if you really need it an no one else has the same need, but that's really rare. One of the reasons free software works is because enough people need the same things done to make cooperation possible. A free package only really dies when no one really needs it.
there is a problem; if you report a bug in a Redhat/SuSE kernel on the lk.ml you get a 'that's Redhat/SuSE problem - speak to them'.
Even if that's true, so what? Kernel maintainers are free to look at and use Red Hat, Suse, Debian and other distribution's kernels and mailing lists. Information shared is never lost in free software.
It is also not just a case of old hardware; in the last few kernels I've had leaks that make a simple firewall die repeatedly after a few months, I've got a machine with a slow RAM kernel leak that makes a simple DHCP server fall over every few months, and I've had a 2.6.1x kernel that couldn't run an NFS server for 24 hours without falling over.
Is there a reason you need a new 2.6 kernel instead of a 2.4 kernel for DHCP or NFS servers? You could use an older, more stable 2.6 or 2.4 kernel if you need uptime. I'm lazy and stock Debian Kernels work for me. When they don't, I use one that does.
The painful truth is that very few developers, in open source or otherwise, like fixing old code or old bugs.... This is what separates professional developers from the rest. We work on it regardless of how much it benefits us.
So, you are telling us you hate your job but you do it to make a living? Sounds normal, but that's sad to hear from one of the lucky few people who actually get paid to write commercial code. Few people live to work, most work to live. It's not really so painful and it's not special to free software. It does not make the stuff you make better than free software either.
The reality is that free software is better than non free software at meeting user needs. Free software has turned my garbage into fine working machines and I've never lost a piece of hardware or software function because the software dissapeared. Free software is still growing in breadth and depth in a way that non free can never meet.
Free software never expires like non free does. When your company decides, for whatever reason, that you will do X, others will be able to do Y if Y is free. If your company makes non free software, Y will only be worked on by people who may or may not really care. The result is apparent in code quality, where free code time and time again is judged much cleaner than non free code. It's also apparent in how long software and device support hangs around. Free software lasts as long as there's a real economic need for it, sometimes longer. Non free software is routinely extinguished by greedy companies.
If you really need old hardware support, you can fall back to older kernels and distributions that still support them. Debian Etch, for example, has a 2.4 kernel line. More often than not a better piece of hardware can be found to do the job. I you absolutely, positively must run that old 150 MHz Cyrix Media GX someone gave you, you can always install Woody but why bother when people are throwing away 1GHz P3s? A machine that's been running continuously will have been upgraded when needed. Free software makes that kind of thing as easy or easier than setting up a new box.
I use all sorts of old hardware that would be useless under non-free software. I've got a 90MHz P1 for a network gateway and storage appliance. My best laptop is a P3 and I still regularly use P1 and P2 models. My best desktop is a 1 GHz Athlon. I could use a little more storage space. Many of my desktops are still using 5 GB hard drives. I may go buy a $50 250 GB hard drive one day. In the mean time, I've saved thousands of dollars in software and hardware costs and gotten more function from it than I'd ever have with non free stuff.
Free software, as usual, has fewer problems than non free. The 2.6 kernel bugs are a non issue for most people.
LWN reviewed players back in November of 2005. It's a nice article which ends up recommending Amarok for all the right reasons. Amarok has gotten better since and now works out of the box on Debian Etch.
There's a revolution in content going on. Between Amarok and the Internet Archive, free canned music has never been easier or richer. There's already good collaboration with other free efforts like Wikipedia, I'm looking forward to more to take mass culture back from RIAA flunkies. The non free players, hobbled with DRM, will never match the performance of the free players. This alone is sufficient incentive for people to migrate to free platforms. The whole package is greater than the sum of it's parts.
If you're on windows you're shit-out-of-luck in the amaroK department though.
KDE is being ported to Winblows. When that happens, you will be able to run the world's best music manager on the world's least stable and least user friendly platform.
Microsoft is still waiting on a substantial number of corporations to migrate from Windows 2000, MS Office 2000, and VS6. And they're chasing their tails trying to find out how to convince businesses to migrate by paying lots of money for new software, new hardware, increased TCO. What makes you think they're going to switch to non-MS Office?
That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.
"Giving away" songs that can be listened to 5 times, if you use the worst music player on the market (WMP) to bring back the buzz! Right. Trading advertising for music play, welcome back to broadcast dude. I'm thrilled, I really am. Bring me DRM, your music files are soooooo cooooool, I'm willing to let you own my computer.
Slashdot Mirror
note that Computer World doesn't call this a "sales force scare tactic" as the headline implies. That term isn't even used in the article.
The article says:
The attorney, suspecting that Lawless' actions were part of an elaborate sales effort, basically told her to back off.
and it adds up:
The fact is, if Microsoft really has reason to believe that a company is using unlicensed copies of its software, it sics the Business Software Alliance on the company. It doesn't turn the matter over to one of its sales managers.
Telling your sales force to threaten and intimidate customers is a scare tactic designed to sell crap. These idiots think they have the world by the nuts.
The complexities of license compliance and the threat of a BSA raid is one of the best reasons to avoid the non free software offered by M$ and the other BSA member companies.
Is it true, that as a Microsoft Amb ass adors get cool stuff, like Free software? Yes it is!
As part of the award, Microsoft connects Student Ambassadors with some great resources and benefits to help them be even more successful within their campus technical communities. And some stuff that's just for fun. A sampling... Personalized award plaque Lots of things - bags, shirts, and more - with the program logo on them Tons of software: MSDN Universal Subscription (good for 1-year) PLUS a variety of Microsoft desktop application software titles .NET books from Microsoft Press Exclusive access to the private Student Ambassador Portal and Forums Special access to private Webcasts and training Unique opportunities with Microsoft throughout the year
The above, equating M$ advocacy with fascist collaboration, is a joke. Bill Gates, while working closely and dining with Chairman Hu, is no Hitler. He does not have the ability to commit atrocities any worse than running M$NBC, suing public schools systems, blackmailing ISPs, hardware makers and software firms, working on Carnivore and Paladium. Before he takes your life, he must first finish taking your liberty and any real dictator will quickly acquire Mr. Gate's wealth and power for his own. You still have practical and legal alternatives.
It's the same idea with a different level of power and authority. M$As are supposed to astroturf on line and in person, just like our little Red Lady. Their little reports can't get you thrown into jail, yet, but they might get you on a few blacklists, smear your reputation, block your Ebay sale and spam you. Recruitment intimidation and rewards are vastly different, but the spirit is the same.
First have them call IT in the Windoze centric cesspool they work in. This customer belongs to someone else.
Dell's, Toshiba's number are net. p.
Before the regular cries of 'Supply Ubuntu' get too loud - that will _not_ work. They aren't up to Windows after a couple of years, and will expect interoperability with Windows systems (through college/employer) and don't have the technical skills to manage a *nix system.
There's so much screwed up here and your personal losses should emphasize that. Sell them a new computer to get the work done that you support. Put on an OS you know well and can administer remotely via OpenSSH and make the whole deal worth your while. You are not responsible for the rest and should quit wasting your time on it.
The ease of use of free software will surprise you. My wife and four year old girl work KDE's desktop with ease. I manage to get along very well without Windoze with less effort than my Windoze using peers, despite continued compatibility breaking changes M$ throws out constantly. I know several people like that who have all sorts of jobs in primarily Windoze environments.
Your customer's institutions and software vendors have failed them. The customer does not have the skills to manage a Windoze system but that's not their job, is it? The end result is less than interoperable with any network other than the botnet. These are not your systems or your problems. Make the University/Company IT support your customer outside of your system's unique product, regardless of what OS it runs on. It's not your job to set up email and you can't do it because you don't run the mail server for example. If the company won't make life easy for it's own, you can't either. Don't pretend that you can solve all of their problems. If all you do is sell hardware, you don't have any more obligations than Dell does for software.
Your losses should give you some resolve. Your time and your life are limited. Spend your work time with customers and more of your time with your friends and relatives.
I'm sooooo glad I don't do Windows and don't have to.
I told them [stupid management on a government program] , at the time, that SGI was losing marketshare in its primary marketplace (computer animation, rendering, etc). I didn't see SGI being around much longer and urged them to reconsider and purchase from a company that would still be around in a few years.
Wikipedia says, you were the primary market: Conventional wisdom holds that SGI's core market has traditionally been Hollywood special effects studios. In fact, SGI's largest markets in terms of dollars of revenue generated have always been government and defense applications, energy, and scientific and technical computing.
You also say, [SGI hardware] is already obsolete.
The same wiki article has some interesting things to say about Scalable Node computing:
This makes an SN system far easier to program and able to achieve a higher sustained vs peak performance ratio than non-cache-coherent systems like conventional Clusters or Massively parallel computers which require applications code to be written (or re-written) to do explicit message-passing communication between their nodes.
The same article goes on to say that SGI suffered from a nasty transition to Itanium at the expense of their own processors, which decimated their workstation market. If you were buying those, I suppose your were purchasing some hurting hardware. If you were buying clusters, who's did you recommend?
Finally, you claim: This is not a troll. Why bother with that?
Apple Records is a record label, founded in 1968 as a division of Apple Corps Ltd. by The Beatles. ... EMI and Capitol agreed to distribute Apple Records until 1975; Apple owned the rights to records by artists they signed, while EMI retained ownership of the Beatles' records, though issuing them under the Apple label. The label survived the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, and was resurrected in the late 1980s, for use on all Beatles CDs. Apple Records own the rights to all of the Beatle videos and movie clips. ... During the 1974 proceedings dissolving the Beatles as an entity, a court ruling decreed that eighty perent of all profits from Beatles albums (as a group) would accrue to Apple Records, and five percent would go to each of the four members.
What did the label actually do? If we assume Apple took care of all the nasty little details of signing bands recording their music, what did Capitol and EMI do? Are they lables even though they did little more than make a contract and "distribute" recorded music?
How is that different from what Apple Computer is doing? The only obvious difference between what Apple is doing and what the "labels" are doing is that, once again, the labels are keeping all of the money and others are doing all the work. Apple has indeed become a publisher of music and a label and just another part of the business of screwing musicians.
They also look like they have violated their agreement by using their apple logo and name all over the iTunes site.
People are not going to care what's running it any more than they care what kind of software runs their cameras or automobiles. It just has to work to get a good reputation. With M$ spending big bucks to push the concept, people will buy the Samsung "knock off" which sells for $400 less than the Origami as long as Origami's dismal reviews don't poison the entire class of device.
You don't know how long and hard I've been looking for what I need, without success, and how frustrating it is to continue to find things that would be great if only I could tweak one little aspect of them.
OK, I understand that. Thanks to the most expensive and silly portable music player in the world, I know that TrekStor does ogg and mp3. Thanks to Rockbox, my wife's Iriver will work much better. I've been waiting for that a long time. Sooner or later, cool thing come because the turds can't win forever.
There will be more of these pads and they will get cheaper and more varied.
Your reasoning is less than convincing. It's hard to determine the market reaction to a device that's just become available, so I'm not convinced that "nobody wants the damn thing". Did you throw a chair when you said that? Moreover, Linux will make it work better than you expect. Linux performs better and has better handwriting recognition than M$ does.
600 MHz is more than enough to run media. I know it because my old laptop was a 233 MHz P2. It could play music with JuK or Noatun without skipping while word processing and web browsing and was able to play full length movies like Star Wreck full screen without a problem. Even if the Xscale is skimpy to save power, the PeperPad should do just fine.
I've addressed your strange keypad objection here and talked about handwriting recognition here.
Now, count to ten and take a few deep breaths so you can calm down. A new device is nothing to get angry about, unless you work for M$ and see the new devices as cheaper and better than your last attempt to revive the tablet PC bomb.
I think it's overpriced, but that's the way new devices are generally introduced. Many cheaper and more powerful devices will be made and eventually you will find them selling for $15 in the supermarket check out line. At that price, of course, it will be running free software. Cheers!
You think that people won't buy the Blackberry because it has a "strange" thumb operated keyboard? Sorry, I've talked to lawyers that love them.
Supposedly the handwriting recognition of Windows Mobile is very good.
Nope, the note taking application lets you scribble onto a page. It looks neat, but it does not do OCR very well. This is what I've come to expect from M$ character recognition, which never works when I try it.
I expect the free software world to My handspring spoiled me but Xstroke, a full screen graffiti system, works about as well. A combination of Xstroke and graphics program to put writting and drawings where you put the pen down would be killer.
The WP article described note taking with M$ this way:
In Microsoft's Windows Journal note-taking program, you can write anywhere on the screen -- but your handwriting isn't converted to text automatically, making these files impractical to share with other people. You're also liable to scramble your input every time you brush the screen with the knuckles of your stylus-wielding hand.
In other words, it sucks.
Only idiots who waste their lives gaming Slashdot's moderation system care about mod points. Go fuck yourself, John Marriot, aka Ackbar the bartender.
Well, well, well. It looks like you have changed your robots.txt to exclude searches from archive.org and google. That's too bad, I kind of liked looking at you exhort yourself to mod twitter down.
No big deal, any day's page shows how a pathetic and mean spirited loser spends his time. Mod up, Mod down! LOL, what a waste.
I wonder when you are going to be bright enough to change your site registration so you can tell would be employers you grew up and are ashamed of being such a complete asshole for so long. You do realize that site, which constitutes unlawful harassment, makes you the last person anyone would want to hire, don't you? Nah, you'll never get it. Go ahead and play your pathetic little games.
No it's not and it's only part of the problem. The current system does not pay artists. Exclusive franchises never pay anyone but themselves and they are entirely clueless. People have been making, sharing and profiting from music long before mass production and insane copyright laws. They will continue to do so. These guys figured out how to make plenty of money and let people share their music a long time ago. You make money doing things for people. The music industry does very little of that but keeps the rewards for itself. Copyright is only one of their tools. Creative Commons is trying to pull something useful from copyright laws. You can be sure they are on the RIAA hit list.
You have completely missunderstood the purpose of copyright and give undue importance to all the wrong things. If the goal of copyright is to make money for publishers, your reasoning is correct. If the goal of copyright is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", you are wrong. The original term of US copyrights was 14 years, despite the tremendous cost of publishing at the time. The goal is to spread information and culture, not to make sure a bunch of greedheads have money. As the cost of that spread declines, the time required to recoup costs diminishes and vanishes. The spirit of America is that you are free to do what you want but no one owes you a living. Exclusive franchises were hated then and should be today.
The RIAA are demanding government protection from legitimate competitors and a defacto control of culture. If you don't understand this, you don't understand how the music industry works. It's not so much your ability to get music that matters to them, it's their inability to control what you are exposed to that scares them to death. They seek to perpetuate an empire of control based on the technical limitations of 20th century broadcast and recording technology and a great deal of racketeering. Without RIAA only stores, selling junk sampled on the nations three radio networks, the world's big three music publishers start to look as good or worse than any other music publisher. Musicians and artists would then be able to market themselves freely and keep more of their earnings and the industry would collapse. Make no mistake at the level of control they seek with DRM and broadcast flags. They want the ability to limit what you are exposed to and are willing to pay for and then to squeeze you for every play while paying the artist next to nothing. The riches they earn are based on exclusion and extortion, not on the promotion of excellence and that directly contradicts the purpose of copyright.
In a world of cheap publishing there should be as many publishers as there are artists. Why not? Anyone can set up a web page. There's no longer a technical reason to reject any manuscript and not offer it to the public. The previous legitimate purpose of publishers, to chose and promote excellence, has been also co-opted by web. Copyright laws, based on paper and mechanical copy are insanely restrictive and obsolete.
We were wondering if you're going to get around to replying to this any time soon. Or any of the other messages currently in your posting history marked as troll.
No, I don't bother to follow your silly little links or mod bombing. Go get an IT job, a life or something useful.
That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.
In free software, the line is drawn when needed and it never retards anything. ALSA, for example, has OSS driver support so lots of really crusty old sound cards still work and work well. That has not kept people from making or working on newer cards. Old free binaries that no one maintained work about as well or better than old non free binaries. Typically people make "old libs" packages to support both, so you might still be able to run that ancient non-free copy of Word Perfect for Linux. Chances are that some newer package, like KWord, will do the same things for you and you don't need the old package afterall. In the case of a free package, you can fix the source yourself if you really need it an no one else has the same need, but that's really rare. One of the reasons free software works is because enough people need the same things done to make cooperation possible. A free package only really dies when no one really needs it.
Even if that's true, so what? Kernel maintainers are free to look at and use Red Hat, Suse, Debian and other distribution's kernels and mailing lists. Information shared is never lost in free software.
It is also not just a case of old hardware; in the last few kernels I've had leaks that make a simple firewall die repeatedly after a few months, I've got a machine with a slow RAM kernel leak that makes a simple DHCP server fall over every few months, and I've had a 2.6.1x kernel that couldn't run an NFS server for 24 hours without falling over.
Is there a reason you need a new 2.6 kernel instead of a 2.4 kernel for DHCP or NFS servers? You could use an older, more stable 2.6 or 2.4 kernel if you need uptime. I'm lazy and stock Debian Kernels work for me. When they don't, I use one that does.
So, you are telling us you hate your job but you do it to make a living? Sounds normal, but that's sad to hear from one of the lucky few people who actually get paid to write commercial code. Few people live to work, most work to live. It's not really so painful and it's not special to free software. It does not make the stuff you make better than free software either.
The reality is that free software is better than non free software at meeting user needs. Free software has turned my garbage into fine working machines and I've never lost a piece of hardware or software function because the software dissapeared. Free software is still growing in breadth and depth in a way that non free can never meet.
Free software never expires like non free does. When your company decides, for whatever reason, that you will do X, others will be able to do Y if Y is free. If your company makes non free software, Y will only be worked on by people who may or may not really care. The result is apparent in code quality, where free code time and time again is judged much cleaner than non free code. It's also apparent in how long software and device support hangs around. Free software lasts as long as there's a real economic need for it, sometimes longer. Non free software is routinely extinguished by greedy companies.
If you really need old hardware support, you can fall back to older kernels and distributions that still support them. Debian Etch, for example, has a 2.4 kernel line. More often than not a better piece of hardware can be found to do the job. I you absolutely, positively must run that old 150 MHz Cyrix Media GX someone gave you, you can always install Woody but why bother when people are throwing away 1GHz P3s? A machine that's been running continuously will have been upgraded when needed. Free software makes that kind of thing as easy or easier than setting up a new box.
I use all sorts of old hardware that would be useless under non-free software. I've got a 90MHz P1 for a network gateway and storage appliance. My best laptop is a P3 and I still regularly use P1 and P2 models. My best desktop is a 1 GHz Athlon. I could use a little more storage space. Many of my desktops are still using 5 GB hard drives. I may go buy a $50 250 GB hard drive one day. In the mean time, I've saved thousands of dollars in software and hardware costs and gotten more function from it than I'd ever have with non free stuff.
Free software, as usual, has fewer problems than non free. The 2.6 kernel bugs are a non issue for most people.
There's a revolution in content going on. Between Amarok and the Internet Archive, free canned music has never been easier or richer. There's already good collaboration with other free efforts like Wikipedia, I'm looking forward to more to take mass culture back from RIAA flunkies. The non free players, hobbled with DRM, will never match the performance of the free players. This alone is sufficient incentive for people to migrate to free platforms. The whole package is greater than the sum of it's parts.
KDE is being ported to Winblows. When that happens, you will be able to run the world's best music manager on the world's least stable and least user friendly platform.
That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and every other fortune 500 company is doing.
Probably about three times as long as the 12 minute half life of your OS. Let me know if you can listen to anything after you wipe and reload XP.
I read the article and I'm still laughing.
"Giving away" songs that can be listened to 5 times, if you use the worst music player on the market (WMP) to bring back the buzz! Right. Trading advertising for music play, welcome back to broadcast dude. I'm thrilled, I really am. Bring me DRM, your music files are soooooo cooooool, I'm willing to let you own my computer.
I'd say, "How Intel outfoxed IBM, Apple, SGI, Compaq, HP, Dell and DEC. " This old story gets more true every day.
Apple's wrists are slit. Give it a year or so and Intel will extinguish them for their old palls in Redmond.