So, now that you've used Mepis to push your old arch-nemesis' software aside, are you done with Aunt Betty's computer? Not bloody likely.... The job's not done until the end user's new environment is as comfortable and familiar as their old environment
I'm done with my wife, my neighbors and my four year old girl. I also help teach a class for newbies, which has plenty of Aunt Betty and I'm familiar with all the bogus issues and FUD. I can assure you that the new environment is more comfortable for them and soon becomes more familiar.
Most distros' idea of migration is a non-destructive partition sizer and Grub. Once you can boot both, you're on your own.... I can't figure out how to work MythTV, the remote control's dead, I can't find my documents, I have to re-enter all of my e-mail settings and I can't find the cheat sheet from the ISP, and that pretty Thomas Kincade screensaver is gone. Oh, and how do I get to the iTunes store?
Well, well, well, you seem to have done some research but I can easily refute most of the above and routinely help newbies get through the troubles that Bill Gates created. MythTV is an advanced topic and not really something most computer users are interested in. Where Windoze hides user documents is a real pain, but there are lots of good GUI tools to find them, much like you would use under Windoze itself if you wanted to really know. Xandros does a particularly good job of helping the Windoze refugee and provides links in a windows familiar desktop environment. Email and contact information are easy to migrate, despite Bill's best efforts to lock them up. ISP information is something the user has to enter whenever they move to a new computer or have to wipe and reload their broken Windoze PC. The same can be said for screensavers and every other customization done to Windoze, but can not be said of GNU/Linux, which is much easier to move from machine to machine. On the media front, I'll direct you to a record store, Magnatune, the internet archive's concert collection, and other sources of non DRM'd material. All of the things you mention are flaws that GNU/Linux does not share with Windoze and more reason to migrate sooner rather than later. Free utilities are superior in every case.
But ya got Bill Gates real good, didn't ya?
I'm not out to get Bill Gates, I'm out to keep him from screwing other people. When it's all done, he can sit around with his ill gotten $40,000,000,000. So long as he quits suing public schools, and trying to lock up computing, I'm happy. There's no chair throwing here.
I fail to see how a six year old CD could possibly contain all the drivers you need. I suppose what you say is true if you go and buy a new XP CD every year. It might also be true that your CD can connect to the internet and get what Bill Gates thinks is best for your hardware. That depends on it seeing your modem or network card and surviving the time on line without viral infection. Next year, you had better buy a Vista CD, and you will again be kissing a lot of hardware good bye the same way you had to toss out all your win98 drivers and win95 drivers and dos drivers, etc.
GNU/Linux distributions almost always have the 20MB it takes for all of the latest drivers, and that's more than enough for all but the newest of proprietary crap hardware. Live CDs automagically recognize all of the above without user intervention.
The beauty of the free software DIY project is that it worked. Anyone with a computer can now easily get, install and use free software. It may not bring about world peace and prosperity, but it will insure the flow of knowledge and DRM free communications which are good starting points. Non free software, on the other hand, exists by limiting user actions, communications and the spread of knowledge.
Here are some other, notable good starts for yourself and your children all of which are much better than what you can get from broadcast TV, which did not work so well:
Such things are not so silly anymore, now are they? Every human discovery comes from a dedicated and well educated person or team of people. People can and do all of the above things because they believe they can. The world needs mega tellers to balance it's continuing dissasters.
... part of the complexity comes from using your own terms and vocabulary that the average software user wouldn't understand.
That's true, you have to know your audience and simple terms are always better. "Free software" is a better term than FOSS, despite the ambiguity. Everyone likes "free," even if they don't understand what that means for software. Everyone knows what "distribution" is, though they might not have the foggiest idea where free software comes from. Though it's a mouthfull, everyone knows what "image manipulation" and "text editing" are all about. This is an advantage free software has over commercial software, where brand recognition is so important the user is forced to remember company names and three letter file extensions in order to start and use programs. Most free software advocates do take advantage of this fact.
It's not really an issue here. The author is addressing the technical community, which knows what free and open software is. He wants people to continue to port software to Windoze. I dissagree with his opinion, but that's another matter. I doubt Linux newbies are going to find their way to this essay.
We can summarize his argument with this single sentence:
The simplest and most effective way to increase FOSS use and adoption now is to push for the adoption by ordinary users, not of FOSS OSes
Which is no longer true. You can't give the user ease of use on a second rate and non free platform. It will always be harder to play Bill Gate's game on Windoze than it is to take advantage of free software on your own. Yet, people have done so with great success, but the free software world is now easier.
The best way to increase software freedom is to free vendors and users from Microsoft's dominance. When users see the technical community stand up for itself and say, "this is the best software for you on technical and moral grounds," people will believe it is so. Every time you service Windows, you say the opposite. It is now easier to set up free software and migrate users than it is to maintain Windoze ports and without those ports, the platform itself will continue to wither and die. Vendors are already breaking free, which is why you see so many Linux ports and drivers now. Keep sending the right message.
For free OS set up, give them Mepis, one of the easiest to run and install Linux distributions. It runs live with an "Install Me" button on the desktop, which walks the user through a GUI dual boot install. With that one set up the user gets all of the goodies, OO, Firefox, KDE, GIMP, and so on.
With things that easy, why bother with harder stuff? Installing each of those programs onto Windoze is actually more difficult, and that difficulty is compounded by the inherent instability and malice of the platform. Bill Gates breaks what he does not like in one way or another. When that happens, the user gets a bad impression of free software as "unofficial", "non-standard" and "unsupported." The "freedom from complexity" can not really be given on a non free platform.
The desirability of the OpenCD just goes to show what a weak platform Windows is to begin with. Out of the box, Windows is feature poor. You have to spend hundreds of dollars or make unauthorized copies and risk BSA raids to get what the OpenCD provides for free.
I have to admire the people who port to Windows, but it's not really the best way to give people freedom. They go through a lot of hard work to bring some comfort to Windows users. The choices and programs they bring to such users do show people that better things exist. Overall, the user is better off just using free software from the very beginning. You know what platform you use and why. What's easier for you and better for you really is better for others too. The people you help deserve to hear it.
The sharks seem to be circling each other: RIM, NTP, Visto, etc. Let them all sue each other out of existence, while the rest of us keep using our wireless E-mail based on standard protocols and standard servers.
These trashbags will shut down anyone. If you are making money, they will take it. If you are not they will shut you down so someone else can take it. If what people familiar with the case say is true, NTP never had a patent on a non obvious invention, they had a patent on obvious business methods. Such patents can be used on anyone who tries to do anything.
College students are especially conservative with wasting money on music.
Actually, university students have traditionally been one of the music industry's best markets. On average, they have more disposable money and time than they ever will. Most will have more money when they land the increasingly rare, "real" job but they will have much less time to keep up with music and will realize that the limited value of canned expression.
They are playing music and videos loud enough for other people to hear them! The shame of it all, sharing music. You would think music is a cultural unifier or way to express your feelings or something. Next thing you know, they will be making, recording and sharing their own music, which makes the pigopolists all scream and shout, " You dirty bad bunch of thieving pirates.
The Universities should demand proof via IP packets, the source of that proof via the student-spy, and then expel the student for misuse of the computer systems.
You are punishing the wrong person. Chances are, the student is unaware of the misuse of his own computer. The RIAA thinks they have a right to abuse your computer by deleting files and adding DRM without asking. Adding "network checker" is within their moral compass. Besides, the student in question is an authorized user of the network but the RIAA is not.
About ten years ago, I got my assorted MS certifications, taking 10 different tests at a cost of $1,000 total.
Would the equivalent tests be worth while today?
Being able to study and pass ten different tests probably reflects on my sometimes insane degree of focus, rather than full comprehension.
Like a degree, it also reflects your ability to do as you are told. The average Microsoft publication is so insulting I'm unable to read it for more than ten minutes. It's mostly shine on sales literature with push this and push that. Rarely do they explain basic principles or cite actual industry standards and reference application. Anyone who can deal with that and learn from it can digest just about anything on command.
Universities are concerned that they may legally fit in the legal definition of an ISP. If so, then they would have to obey the same laws as, say AOL and MSN.
Sooner or later, it will happen to them too because the TIA principle will be established. The novelty here is that this shit was not pushed through public universities first. Freedoms are usually taken from children first to condition them before they know better.
It's too bad the university administrations are not putting their weight behind CELA being a bad idea for anyone instead of worrying about their own costs. After all, the current expansion of CELA to AOL and M$N is a perfect example of how these kinds of laws grow.
The Federal government is getting way out of step with what people want. TIA and Carnivore were explicitly voted down by Congress, but continued as dark projects. Domestic spying was outlawed in the late 70's. The man who signed those laws thinks they have been broken. No one, outside of law enforcement, wants more domestic spying. I imagine there are plenty of people in law enforcement who also don't want their email and browsing watched and who think this is a perfect waste of time and money.
You need Vista PRC for that to work. Red Flag might do the same. In the mean time, I recommend you use a free OS instead so that you can chose for yourself.
I can't imagine how much money you would have to pay Mozilla and then each and every GNU/Linux distro to include a M$ search in their list of engines. Is there anyone besides Steve Ballmer's "brainwashed" kids who uses M$'s second rate search engine by choice?
The divide between free and non free software is so huge that the two cases should not be compared. You say:
The main difference between the IE7 search box and the Firefox and Opera search boxes is that the IE7 search box comes preloaded with only one search provider: MSN. Firefox and Opera both include a half-dozen or so providers when you install them.
That's admirable but it's only a small part of the software freedom you enjoy.
What is "preloaded" with Firefox is entirely up to the distro you are using. Any of the thousands of GNU/Linux distros can put whatever they want there. What the Mozilla foundation does is irrelevant and the issue is spurious. You have options, right down to making your own distribution. An easier option for larger organizations is custom package management. Because free software has no owner, you own your computer.
What is "preloaded" on a Windoze system is what Bill Gates wants. The user, ultimately, has no choice because user settings can be undone with any "update." When someone else owns your software, they own your computer.
The other kind of "preloading" is OS preloading by every major computer vendor, which is obnoxious. It's not easy to avoid the M$ tax and Paladium promisses to make it even more difficult. It's a good thing M$ is flexing their muscles on such a pointless but visible thing. Such things should make the EU anti-trust fine decisions quicker and easier. I'm looking forward to the EU taxing those morons $500,000,000/day.
Google now aims (moreso at least) to generate profit for its owners. But doing something that makes money for a company does not make it evil? Who does this hurt?
Has anybody thought to add a feature to firefox (or maybe an extension) whereby if a user misspells a domain name, it gives the option to correct the spelling?
The WP article is a complete troll. Google does more to help people find sites than any other search engine. Only a person with a crippled browser who also hates Google would try to find any site by typing the name as a URL anymore. Google also helps a lot of small sites earn money. Blaming them for the actions of dishonest people who take advantage of that money is stupid. You might as well blame Google when people defeat their search algorithms by google bombing and all of the terrible content on the internet you might run into by a poorly defined search criteria.
Most browsers have a goolge search bar. Some also have a dictionary.
A google search for "Bist Buy" returns exactly what you would want. The first thing displayed is the official Best Buy site and the second is a warning link, "Did you mean: best buy," which directs the user to the legitimate site.
It might be nice to embed that kind of service into the browser itself, but it's probably impractical. Google gets the right answer by constantly combing the entire internet and storing information on about half a million computers. Disambiguation is what search engines are all about, so why bother?
Typo-squatters and DNS registrars are to blame for typo-squatting. DNS registrars should be able to do a google search as easily as I did. They might also watch out for abuse. The problem is that some of them are active parts of the problem. They buy and sell names to the highest bidder and steal names when they can. Blaming Google makes about as much sense as blaming any other advertiser or the companies that pay for web advertisements, or the whole internet in the first place.
I've seen this story before and wish it would die. I would not be surprised if it was part of a M$ smear campaign designed to reduce Google's ad revenue and search engine market share. Google's not doing anything wrong and is one of the few advertising companies that does not suck life.
Yeah but people primarilly encounter CNN, BBC, MSNBC and the NY Times in a form that has little to do with their webpages.
That's less true everyday. The average US citizen spends no more than 15 minutes a day on news. That's an old figure from a journalism class I took, but it's not going to change much. As those 15 minutes are increasingly consumed online at work, other forms will dissapear. Here's a mainstream admission of that, just in case you need someone official and legitimate to tell you the obvious. Note also that the USA Today also failed to make the 100 top web sites. What's easier for you is easier for others too.
It's all a farce anyway, "mainstream" is something that may have existed in an era of 3 tv networks, but it's gone now. This article is more amusing than the above and is not so far from the truth.
Life in Indian call centers is bad enough to have been investigated by the people at Rotten.com. The article is well written, illustrated with photographs and dismal.
RMS does something very subtle that nobody in the mainstream press will bother to report... I fail to see how this can in any way, shape or form be seen as an "highly effective" protest.... Of course this is Slashdot...
Surprise, Slashdot is mainstream press. Slashdot is the 64th most visited site on the net. That's right behind the New York Times, which is 56th and more read than the Drudge Report, 75th. Only BBC, CNN, Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are more read news sources. Neither CBS nor ABC news make the top 100.
That's not a bad way to make money for the FSF. I'd pay for a signed copy of the GPL and some of his other essays. The documents would make a nice gift too. The only problem would be his ability to keep up with demand.
An eleven percent stock price fall has stunned Bill. Once bitten, twice shy, investors doubt Bill will ever share the wealth. Those investors might also have doubts about Vista as they scratch their heads and think twice about moving their own computers to the new same old, same old. From the article:
Shares in Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) slid more than 11 percent on Friday, their biggest drop in more than five years, after the software giant said earnings would be hurt by increased investments aimed at fending off rivals such as Google Inc.... The move shocked Wall Street, which had hoped to benefit from the company's biggest product releases in years, with its Vista operating system and Office 2007 scheduled for January.... "This is still a company that is extremely profitable. What people are worried about is whether that ever flows through... to the benefit of shareholders, or does the company spend that money," said Charles Di Bona, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
No doubt disspointing reviews of Vista and DRM'd content are part of the fizzle.
The long predicted downward spiral has begun. Employees are leaving for greener fields, product sucks and the competition is better. It will only get worse for them. They had their chance to fix things back when they promissed to take care of security four (five?) years ago. Instead of fixing, they wasted their time and energy with more anti competitive junk like Bitblocker, Paladium and lock box media. Their efforts to expand into the server market flopped and so will their efforts to expand into the kinds of services they derided back in 2000. Such a spiral could not have happened to a nicer company.
The Microsoft idiots thought they were going to come out swinging and are surprised that people are tired of being punched in the nose.
There's no reason a very low end I/O coprocessor can't easily decrypt/encrypt faster than the underlying physical media.
There's no avoiding the performance hit. The low end co-processor will still have to wait for the underlying physical media. Pre-fetching and other nice tricks are also faster without encryption. There's no way to make a sum of two times lower than the individual times. Such a performance hit for everything, like calc for example, is wasteful.
You could look at BitLocker as anti-Windows because it frustrates dual boot
True.
DRM is going to cost them their majority market share. The more they make things suck, the less people will want to use them. WMP 10 is an indicator of where things are going. Check out this satisfied customer's opinion of it:
Then Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) started harassing me and asking to connect to the internet to check for licenses where none had been needed before. The worst part of this "upgrade" is how it poisoned the whole system and crippled Media Player Classic too.
How much more can they make things suck? Firewalls you can't configure, entire volumes encrypted and media players that don't play. What do they have to offer?
Who's going to buy this shit?
Things have never looked better for free software.
If you have to buy a brand new computer to even start up Vista, can't you just install Linux on your old one?
Wouldn't it be nice if some big dumb monopoly would quit making performance robbing kludges that keep you from running free software on shiny new equipment? The fact that free software does more with less hardware does not make people want slow and old hardware when they can afford better.
This encryption technology also has the effect of frustrating the exchange of data needed in a dual boot system. "You could look at BitLocker as anti-Linux because it frustrates dual boot,"
No claims were made to universality or ability to turn the feature off nor are they required for this to frustrate dual booting. Like NTFS before, universality will come and every major OEM will make it very difficult to not do as M$ wants. In the mean time, it will make thing difficult for all the "enterprise" and "ultimate" editions all the leet little windoze users demand. Your boss is going to demand it, it will suck, then the OEMs will force it on you too. Nice eh?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm done with my wife, my neighbors and my four year old girl. I also help teach a class for newbies, which has plenty of Aunt Betty and I'm familiar with all the bogus issues and FUD. I can assure you that the new environment is more comfortable for them and soon becomes more familiar.
Most distros' idea of migration is a non-destructive partition sizer and Grub. Once you can boot both, you're on your own. ... I can't figure out how to work MythTV, the remote control's dead, I can't find my documents, I have to re-enter all of my e-mail settings and I can't find the cheat sheet from the ISP, and that pretty Thomas Kincade screensaver is gone. Oh, and how do I get to the iTunes store?
Well, well, well, you seem to have done some research but I can easily refute most of the above and routinely help newbies get through the troubles that Bill Gates created. MythTV is an advanced topic and not really something most computer users are interested in. Where Windoze hides user documents is a real pain, but there are lots of good GUI tools to find them, much like you would use under Windoze itself if you wanted to really know. Xandros does a particularly good job of helping the Windoze refugee and provides links in a windows familiar desktop environment. Email and contact information are easy to migrate, despite Bill's best efforts to lock them up. ISP information is something the user has to enter whenever they move to a new computer or have to wipe and reload their broken Windoze PC. The same can be said for screensavers and every other customization done to Windoze, but can not be said of GNU/Linux, which is much easier to move from machine to machine. On the media front, I'll direct you to a record store, Magnatune, the internet archive's concert collection, and other sources of non DRM'd material. All of the things you mention are flaws that GNU/Linux does not share with Windoze and more reason to migrate sooner rather than later. Free utilities are superior in every case.
But ya got Bill Gates real good, didn't ya?
I'm not out to get Bill Gates, I'm out to keep him from screwing other people. When it's all done, he can sit around with his ill gotten $40,000,000,000. So long as he quits suing public schools, and trying to lock up computing, I'm happy. There's no chair throwing here.
GNU/Linux distributions almost always have the 20MB it takes for all of the latest drivers, and that's more than enough for all but the newest of proprietary crap hardware. Live CDs automagically recognize all of the above without user intervention.
Here are some other, notable good starts for yourself and your children all of which are much better than what you can get from broadcast TV, which did not work so well:
Such things are not so silly anymore, now are they? Every human discovery comes from a dedicated and well educated person or team of people. People can and do all of the above things because they believe they can. The world needs mega tellers to balance it's continuing dissasters.
That's true, you have to know your audience and simple terms are always better. "Free software" is a better term than FOSS, despite the ambiguity. Everyone likes "free," even if they don't understand what that means for software. Everyone knows what "distribution" is, though they might not have the foggiest idea where free software comes from. Though it's a mouthfull, everyone knows what "image manipulation" and "text editing" are all about. This is an advantage free software has over commercial software, where brand recognition is so important the user is forced to remember company names and three letter file extensions in order to start and use programs. Most free software advocates do take advantage of this fact.
It's not really an issue here. The author is addressing the technical community, which knows what free and open software is. He wants people to continue to port software to Windoze. I dissagree with his opinion, but that's another matter. I doubt Linux newbies are going to find their way to this essay.
The simplest and most effective way to increase FOSS use and adoption now is to push for the adoption by ordinary users, not of FOSS OSes
Which is no longer true. You can't give the user ease of use on a second rate and non free platform. It will always be harder to play Bill Gate's game on Windoze than it is to take advantage of free software on your own. Yet, people have done so with great success, but the free software world is now easier.
The best way to increase software freedom is to free vendors and users from Microsoft's dominance. When users see the technical community stand up for itself and say, "this is the best software for you on technical and moral grounds," people will believe it is so. Every time you service Windows, you say the opposite. It is now easier to set up free software and migrate users than it is to maintain Windoze ports and without those ports, the platform itself will continue to wither and die. Vendors are already breaking free, which is why you see so many Linux ports and drivers now. Keep sending the right message.
For free OS set up, give them Mepis, one of the easiest to run and install Linux distributions. It runs live with an "Install Me" button on the desktop, which walks the user through a GUI dual boot install. With that one set up the user gets all of the goodies, OO, Firefox, KDE, GIMP, and so on.
With things that easy, why bother with harder stuff? Installing each of those programs onto Windoze is actually more difficult, and that difficulty is compounded by the inherent instability and malice of the platform. Bill Gates breaks what he does not like in one way or another. When that happens, the user gets a bad impression of free software as "unofficial", "non-standard" and "unsupported." The "freedom from complexity" can not really be given on a non free platform.
The desirability of the OpenCD just goes to show what a weak platform Windows is to begin with. Out of the box, Windows is feature poor. You have to spend hundreds of dollars or make unauthorized copies and risk BSA raids to get what the OpenCD provides for free.
I have to admire the people who port to Windows, but it's not really the best way to give people freedom. They go through a lot of hard work to bring some comfort to Windows users. The choices and programs they bring to such users do show people that better things exist. Overall, the user is better off just using free software from the very beginning. You know what platform you use and why. What's easier for you and better for you really is better for others too. The people you help deserve to hear it.
These trashbags will shut down anyone. If you are making money, they will take it. If you are not they will shut you down so someone else can take it. If what people familiar with the case say is true, NTP never had a patent on a non obvious invention, they had a patent on obvious business methods. Such patents can be used on anyone who tries to do anything.
Actually, university students have traditionally been one of the music industry's best markets. On average, they have more disposable money and time than they ever will. Most will have more money when they land the increasingly rare, "real" job but they will have much less time to keep up with music and will realize that the limited value of canned expression.
You are punishing the wrong person. Chances are, the student is unaware of the misuse of his own computer. The RIAA thinks they have a right to abuse your computer by deleting files and adding DRM without asking. Adding "network checker" is within their moral compass. Besides, the student in question is an authorized user of the network but the RIAA is not.
Would the equivalent tests be worth while today?
Being able to study and pass ten different tests probably reflects on my sometimes insane degree of focus, rather than full comprehension.
Like a degree, it also reflects your ability to do as you are told. The average Microsoft publication is so insulting I'm unable to read it for more than ten minutes. It's mostly shine on sales literature with push this and push that. Rarely do they explain basic principles or cite actual industry standards and reference application. Anyone who can deal with that and learn from it can digest just about anything on command.
Sooner or later, it will happen to them too because the TIA principle will be established. The novelty here is that this shit was not pushed through public universities first. Freedoms are usually taken from children first to condition them before they know better.
It's too bad the university administrations are not putting their weight behind CELA being a bad idea for anyone instead of worrying about their own costs. After all, the current expansion of CELA to AOL and M$N is a perfect example of how these kinds of laws grow.
The Federal government is getting way out of step with what people want. TIA and Carnivore were explicitly voted down by Congress, but continued as dark projects. Domestic spying was outlawed in the late 70's. The man who signed those laws thinks they have been broken. No one, outside of law enforcement, wants more domestic spying. I imagine there are plenty of people in law enforcement who also don't want their email and browsing watched and who think this is a perfect waste of time and money.
You need Vista PRC for that to work. Red Flag might do the same. In the mean time, I recommend you use a free OS instead so that you can chose for yourself.
I can't imagine how much money you would have to pay Mozilla and then each and every GNU/Linux distro to include a M$ search in their list of engines. Is there anyone besides Steve Ballmer's "brainwashed" kids who uses M$'s second rate search engine by choice?
The main difference between the IE7 search box and the Firefox and Opera search boxes is that the IE7 search box comes preloaded with only one search provider: MSN. Firefox and Opera both include a half-dozen or so providers when you install them.
That's admirable but it's only a small part of the software freedom you enjoy.
What is "preloaded" with Firefox is entirely up to the distro you are using. Any of the thousands of GNU/Linux distros can put whatever they want there. What the Mozilla foundation does is irrelevant and the issue is spurious. You have options, right down to making your own distribution. An easier option for larger organizations is custom package management. Because free software has no owner, you own your computer.
What is "preloaded" on a Windoze system is what Bill Gates wants. The user, ultimately, has no choice because user settings can be undone with any "update." When someone else owns your software, they own your computer.
The other kind of "preloading" is OS preloading by every major computer vendor, which is obnoxious. It's not easy to avoid the M$ tax and Paladium promisses to make it even more difficult. It's a good thing M$ is flexing their muscles on such a pointless but visible thing. Such things should make the EU anti-trust fine decisions quicker and easier. I'm looking forward to the EU taxing those morons $500,000,000/day.
Blaming Google for what other people do hurts Google. The article is a troll.
The WP article is a complete troll. Google does more to help people find sites than any other search engine. Only a person with a crippled browser who also hates Google would try to find any site by typing the name as a URL anymore. Google also helps a lot of small sites earn money. Blaming them for the actions of dishonest people who take advantage of that money is stupid. You might as well blame Google when people defeat their search algorithms by google bombing and all of the terrible content on the internet you might run into by a poorly defined search criteria.
Most browsers have a goolge search bar. Some also have a dictionary.
A google search for "Bist Buy" returns exactly what you would want. The first thing displayed is the official Best Buy site and the second is a warning link, "Did you mean: best buy ," which directs the user to the legitimate site.
It might be nice to embed that kind of service into the browser itself, but it's probably impractical. Google gets the right answer by constantly combing the entire internet and storing information on about half a million computers. Disambiguation is what search engines are all about, so why bother?
Typo-squatters and DNS registrars are to blame for typo-squatting. DNS registrars should be able to do a google search as easily as I did. They might also watch out for abuse. The problem is that some of them are active parts of the problem. They buy and sell names to the highest bidder and steal names when they can. Blaming Google makes about as much sense as blaming any other advertiser or the companies that pay for web advertisements, or the whole internet in the first place.
I've seen this story before and wish it would die. I would not be surprised if it was part of a M$ smear campaign designed to reduce Google's ad revenue and search engine market share. Google's not doing anything wrong and is one of the few advertising companies that does not suck life.
That's less true everyday. The average US citizen spends no more than 15 minutes a day on news. That's an old figure from a journalism class I took, but it's not going to change much. As those 15 minutes are increasingly consumed online at work, other forms will dissapear. Here's a mainstream admission of that, just in case you need someone official and legitimate to tell you the obvious. Note also that the USA Today also failed to make the 100 top web sites. What's easier for you is easier for others too.
It's all a farce anyway, "mainstream" is something that may have existed in an era of 3 tv networks, but it's gone now. This article is more amusing than the above and is not so far from the truth.
Surprise, Slashdot is mainstream press. Slashdot is the 64th most visited site on the net. That's right behind the New York Times, which is 56th and more read than the Drudge Report, 75th. Only BBC, CNN, Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are more read news sources. Neither CBS nor ABC news make the top 100.
Shares in Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) slid more than 11 percent on Friday, their biggest drop in more than five years, after the software giant said earnings would be hurt by increased investments aimed at fending off rivals such as Google Inc. ... The move shocked Wall Street, which had hoped to benefit from the company's biggest product releases in years, with its Vista operating system and Office 2007 scheduled for January. ... "This is still a company that is extremely profitable. What people are worried about is whether that ever flows through ... to the benefit of shareholders, or does the company spend that money," said Charles Di Bona, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
No doubt disspointing reviews of Vista and DRM'd content are part of the fizzle.
The long predicted downward spiral has begun. Employees are leaving for greener fields, product sucks and the competition is better. It will only get worse for them. They had their chance to fix things back when they promissed to take care of security four (five?) years ago. Instead of fixing, they wasted their time and energy with more anti competitive junk like Bitblocker, Paladium and lock box media. Their efforts to expand into the server market flopped and so will their efforts to expand into the kinds of services they derided back in 2000. Such a spiral could not have happened to a nicer company.
The Microsoft idiots thought they were going to come out swinging and are surprised that people are tired of being punched in the nose.
There's no avoiding the performance hit. The low end co-processor will still have to wait for the underlying physical media. Pre-fetching and other nice tricks are also faster without encryption. There's no way to make a sum of two times lower than the individual times. Such a performance hit for everything, like calc for example, is wasteful.
True.
DRM is going to cost them their majority market share. The more they make things suck, the less people will want to use them. WMP 10 is an indicator of where things are going. Check out this satisfied customer's opinion of it:
Then Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) started harassing me and asking to connect to the internet to check for licenses where none had been needed before. The worst part of this "upgrade" is how it poisoned the whole system and crippled Media Player Classic too.
How much more can they make things suck? Firewalls you can't configure, entire volumes encrypted and media players that don't play. What do they have to offer?
Who's going to buy this shit?
Things have never looked better for free software.
Wouldn't it be nice if some big dumb monopoly would quit making performance robbing kludges that keep you from running free software on shiny new equipment? The fact that free software does more with less hardware does not make people want slow and old hardware when they can afford better.
This encryption technology also has the effect of frustrating the exchange of data needed in a dual boot system. "You could look at BitLocker as anti-Linux because it frustrates dual boot,"
No claims were made to universality or ability to turn the feature off nor are they required for this to frustrate dual booting. Like NTFS before, universality will come and every major OEM will make it very difficult to not do as M$ wants. In the mean time, it will make thing difficult for all the "enterprise" and "ultimate" editions all the leet little windoze users demand. Your boss is going to demand it, it will suck, then the OEMs will force it on you too. Nice eh?