unlike previous "new versions" of Windows, this is not just a cosmetic overhaul but a complete redesign of the OS from the kernel up!
You realize, of course, Microsoft has said that about every "OS" they have released. With 2000 and XP, they had the "NT Technology" for you and promissed performance that was "like solid" and really 32 bit this time, half 64 bit if you were lucky. It was supposed to end the crashes if 98. 98 promissed you USB devices that worked and an end to the crashes of 95. 95 was touted as the most amazing thing in computing history, a 32 bit OS, the end of DOS and something that would end the crashes of Win31. The crashes never ended, but the list of promisses has grown. Nothing is new here. All hail the best windoze ever
Microsoft does not have the resources to rebuild Windows. No one does, and that's why free software works better than non free. Software without owners is rebuilt as often as someone wants it done.
I didn't know we were categorizing Photoshop, AutoCAD and all the other commercial software products that have no realistic free equivalents (not to mention all those thousands of vertical business apps used in the real world) as "entertainment" - and then blaiming DRM for our woes. But I guess that's a very convenient argument.
We? How many of you are there today?
The entertainment companies are new to the world of DRM. Non free software companies like M$ pioneered it and continue to hold false hopes to the gullible.
As long as you are talking about the "real" world, you should drop the distinction between free and non free except to note that the more free a thing is the better it is. If you don't think there are "realistic" equivalents for AutoCAD and Photoshop for Linux, you don't such things exist anywhere. Autodesk has been relatively static and is being outdone by several non free companies like Ansys and SolidWorks. You should also know that Novel, Red Hat and IBM offer plenty of vertical applications. While it is woeful that free alternatives either don't exist or are not better known, a realistic person is in no way tied to M$ and all of their non free problems. Hell, half of the "vertical applications" you talk about do nothing but navigate the dissaster Microsoft has created with it's crazy licensing, EULAs and registry.
The lack of free software in those places is again a case of legal nonsense. In the free world, GIMP does what Photoshop does, except where prevented by clueless or greedy device makers. Working with Autodesk formats is another minefield of patents and grief, and such things do a lot to discourage free software development. Think about it for one instant and you will realize that it's true. Free software has made a better compiler than you can find in the commercial world. Free software has also made better and easier to use GUIs than you will find in the commercial world. Can you think of any task between the two which is more difficult? Can you imagine anything but legal nonsense and sabotage holding any project back?
The non free companies are fighting as hard as they can, but they are losing. The smart ones are becoming free software companies.
In a lot of ways, free software has always been better Windows. My first use of Linux was Red Hat 5.x. Device support and installs were tricky, but having multiple desktops, GUI choices, system stability and compilers at no additional cost was much nicer than the Windows 95/98 available at the time. With the time it took to keep one or two Windows machines working, I could have six Linux machines that worked better and cost less. Free software has steadily improved since and is not only easy to install but vastly superior in all except vendor support. Even that is changing, with both ATI and Nvidia sharing specs and producing binary drivers for Linux.
Isn't it still hard to use, with much less applications available for it?
No, free software is not hard to use. At least my four year old girl does not think it's difficult.
The only applications missing from free software are those related to entertainment where big publishers have legal strangle holds on essential components. You have to use non-US software to watch DVDs, for example.
He wants to end the bloat at Microsoft and convert it into a lean and mean machine of productivity. [and happy coders at a perfect M$ would out compete free software]
You have confused cause and effect. People at Microsoft are unhappy because the non free software way is failing. There is no way it can be otherwise. The anger and backstabbing you see is typical of any failing company. Tiny mistakes, which make no difference in the long run, become sources of contention. Productivity will fall off geometrically now, but even a perfect effort would not save them from the overwhelming superiority of free software.
It has been said hundreds of times and I'll say it again, the non free way of making software is obsolete. The GNU debugger has more than 87 authors. Not even Microsoft can afford to lavish that kind of effort on a single program regardless of it's importance. The "unimportant" programs are the ones that give free software systems a polished finish Microsoft can't touch. Their best five years of effort to graft together terabytes of purchased code are producing the equivalent of one modest productivity package and a window manager on top of a decidedly second rate GUI and a disaster of an OS. The free software approach, in the mean time, has produced many better equivalents on top of a unified system that fits onto a single, live running and self installing CD, which is offered by hundreds of different groups.
They can't catch up. Missing Christmas sales will hurt them. It won't hurt them near as much as the embarrassment and loss of face. The game is over. Only hardware DRM can save them and that is unlikely without IBM and other cooperation. 2007 will be the year free software takes majority market share and the Microsoft monopoly will be history.
Ah, I think I'll wait and see the screen shots on my own monitor when I'm running Vista...
That's a very good idea. Sometime in 2007 the DoS will be over and the screenshots might be there. The only thing that's sure is it will still be a bad idea to attach a M$ run computer to the internet.
In the mean time, why don't you try out one of the nicer, free Window managers. Enlightenment, Gnome and KDE have all the eye candy you want without the M$ performance hit. You can run them on your current computer or the one you give yourself for Christmas.
Would you copy a car? It's not theft, large or small, no matter how often it's called that. It's a violation of a government granted exclusive franchise. The reasons those franchises were ever granted faded from reality long ago. The people making these laws deserve jail time, if anyone does.
Because other programs are crashing windows, we blame windows, even though its not always its fault.
Blaming windows is not irrational. Microsoft has a record of breaking other people's software. Many of the same programs run without a problem on other systems and an all Microsoft system is no more stable than one with better software installed on top. A user of Outlook, WMP and other disasters will have a buggy system.
Switching them to linux would require a huge amount of retraining, even though the differences may be purely cosmetic.
You would be better off moving to more consistent interfaces than waiting for Vista. Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, Window Maker and other interfaces have been much more consistent and reliable than Windows. Xandros is a nice way to move them. It mimics windows right down to the c prompt.
You might also point out that a company that publically threatens a distributor as large as Dell would think nothing of crushing a smaller "partner." Thanks to the anti-trust trial, such intimidation is http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=1884&a=24242 ,00.asp">public knowledge. Thanks also to the internet archive for keeping coppies.
See here for original story of the "delicate dance" vendors are expected to perform.
with XP I hardly ever experience a full OS crash and I leave my system up for weeks at a time.
Then:
my firefox install, which has been crashing quite frequently recently.
So which is it? XP stays up for weeks or crashes frequently?
if I were to try to switch the rest of my family over it would be a nightmare.
Let's shell over to the wife's box. Hmm, uptime 121 days. She sits there emailing and chatting with her web friends way more then she should.
Let's shell over to the 4 year old girl's box, the nicest in the house. Oh yeah, 11 days ago I put it down to use it's power chord for another computer. No pop ups or other nasties on that box. Do your kids get flooded unmentionable things?
If not having to do anything to keep the computer working well is a nightmare, I must be having a nightmare.
From the fine article:
Fry's had three FOSS computers on display, all low end boxes, and all with Linspire Linux pre-installed.
The neglected to mention that all those "low end boxes" were running circles around the expensive Windoze machines despite the tremendous effort lavished on every windoze computer to make it look "factory fresh". Running a retail windoze box is much like running a kiosk, you have to lock it down and never let it touch a network. Running a Linux computer might require a periodic wipe of the guest account if you are too lazy to configure it so it can't be screwed up. Other than that, you can let your customers do whatever they want. I run garbage hardware, but it routinely does better than my peer's windoze burdened hardware which cost much more and has processors two to ten times faster.
Being a high school dropout spammer stupid enough to use a jail phone to arrange a hit - Priceless!
Post Patriot Act, every phone is a jail phone.
That's not hard to change, reminds me of bad stuff
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 3, Informative
An example of how easy it is to change such limits can be found here. It's just a constant and entirely arbitrary.
Anyone who would want such a huge spreadsheet needs help. Typically, the problem is improper organization or lack of more appropriate tool. Better tools would be databases or batch processing of data streams. Help them early because the problem only gets worse with "advances" like this.
I've seen worse abuse of spreadsheets. The most God awful sheet I ever saw had tons of macros. They each got data from different sources, one still used a modem to call a local high school's weather station, and the results of each had to be "checked" by hand. That spreadsheet was part of the process used to set the local price of electricity. It had grown, like a cancer, for years. This is what happens without proper IT support. Far from being enabled and helped, the victim was lead down a path of inappropriate tools to a giant cluster.
Had the company used free software, they might not have had to fire their programmers. Someone convinced them that "computer programming was not a core business." That's true, but neither is accounting and the "off the shelf" solution they were sold instead will cost them many times more than their own staff. For all their money they could have had things that work right.
Vista will run just fine on a machine without any 3D card at all. It'll just automatically disable Aero. So, if you've got cutting edge hardware, vista will take advantage of it. If you don't, it won't. Where's the problem?
M$ is to make a scaling OS?!! Here I was, reading all of these big fat hardware requirements for Vista but they were all lies. Lies, I tell you! Thanks so much for putting me back in touch with reality.
So, Vista will run on my 233 Pentium II laptop? Will it look as good as Enlightenment? Somehow, I don't think so and there is your problem.
As the original poster said, moderation is good. The results can be beautiful without hogging resources.
I have to wonder how far Slashdot is going with the whole "linux is da bomb for the desktop!" ccrowd.
The average desktop does not run sendmail or anything other than simple mail clients that use their ISP's SMTP sever. Their ISP won't let them. There's a good chance that server will be running sendmail, so users of nicer distributions are thwarted twice by "security measures", but that's all a different issue. Yes, Exim under Debian was easy to set up and worked great for desktop users.
In any case, Linux desktop users are still far better off than Windoze users. Kmail, Evolution and Thunderbird are all much better packages than Outlook and other Windoze only mail clients. Even when a dozer bothers to look outside their start menu and gets Thunderbird or some other nice mail program Bill Gates wants to break, the dozer has only plugged one of hundreds of holes. Windoze has a half life of 12 minutes on any network, sooner or later the user suffers. When they do, they have to pull out their "original" software and then get hosed before they can finish downloading the patches. A free software user who's suffered some kind of failure will download a brand new CD image or do a net install and have the latest and greatest every time. Free software quality and diversity will prevent the kind of universal exploits of the Windoze world, regardless of "market share".
Imagine a high contrast, grainy filmed NYC residential street. A woman walks along and is approached by another.
Second Woman: Nice Purse!
Cut to a parking lot with a man getting out of his 1978 Monte Carlo. Another man sees him and approaches. Things are dirty, dark and gloomy.
Second Man: Nice car!
Flash Words: Would you copy a car? Would you copy a purse? Cut back to parking lot, things are looking brighter.
First Man: You really like it?
Second Man: Yeah, it rocks. Can I have one?
First Man: Sure, dude, it won't cost me much.
First Man takes his keys out of his pocket, pushes a button and makes a second car appear. Scene is now full color.
Flash Words: Of course you would copy a car if you could!
Cut to Street, things are looking brighter here too.
First Woman: I've got lots of these, have one.
First Woman reaches into her purse and pulls out an identical purse.
Second Woman: Cool, thanks a lot.
Both make big smiles at each other.
Flash Words: Sharing Is Good!
Cut back to parking lot. The second car shimmers oddly.
Second Man: Wow, thanks, that's really cool but it's not quite like the first one. What's up?
First Man: Oh, my car has DRM. I can only make five copies and the copies are not perfect. In fact, my own car has a limited life and I have to constantly pay to enjoy it. Sometimes it does not work at all.
Second Man: Bummer, dude, you got ripped off. Thanks anyway.
Run Words: You would not put up with restrictions on your car, would you?
Flash Words Separately: -DRM- -IS- -WRONG-
End with Words: Don't be owned. Share your culture.
My bandwidth is too valuable to waste on stuff I can just go and buy at a video store for about the same price
Ahhh, the paradox of greed. Others have pointed out that the download service costs more than the DVD, yet it will save the big publishers money. Oh yeah, once enough people are using DRM'd downloads, the DVD "hole" and your local store will be closed. Sorry, but you don't have a choice about it.
Did you mention competing movie makers? The MPAA has a plan for them too. First up is all digital movie theaters that won't allow local schedule changes, much less an independent movie to be shown. Oh, someone might use an inexpensive projector and a computer to show things, but that theater will never see the "major" movies again. Second, "consumer" electronics are on their way to being so non free you won't be able to project a movie without paying an outrageous royalty or suffering a serious degradation in quality. Those outside the loop won't be able to play on the common players, just like it is with DVDs today but worse.
Free software offers a way out of the mess, as long as Microsoft does not convince enough hardware makers that Paladium/NGFU, or whatever they call it now, is the way to go.
With hundreds of links on the page, nice big flash adds, and the text taking up a quarter width of the page, and split aroung an add, how can I help it.
Yeah, I run Konqueror with flash turned off to stop that. Anyting that actually needs something fancy is a right click, open with firefox button push away. Garbage like M$NBC loads much faster, but still needs a tab of it's own to hide the ugly.
Imagine the life of a M$IE user who can't easily turn off flash, has multiple adsservers installed and problems with popups to compliment all the intended spam. Unbearable browsing.
Wow, the author is a bigger ludite than I though. I should have guessed it from M$NBC.
During the presentations the faces of at least half the crowd were lit with the spooky reflection of the laptops open before them. Those without computers would periodically bow their heads to the palmtop shrine of the BlackBerry. Every speaker was competing with the distractions of e-mail, instant messaging, Web surfing, online bill paying, blogging and an Internet chat "back channel" where conferencees supplied snarky commentary on the speakers.... Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner.
What a small minded slam. How does he know that people are not googling for the author's articles or hitting wikipedia for terms they don't understand? Even the chatting with your peers can be useful and informative. It sure beats the hell out of whispering back and forth. People want to share and your friends have more pertinent information than anyone else. All this "spooky" talk about betrayal and badmouthing misses all the good things you can do with the tech at hand.
If I want to tune out of your speech, I'll leave in your face and go to a presentation that holds my interest. You should not be afraid of my cell phone or Zaurus. It's my time and you should respect my use of it, so long as I don't bother people sitting around me.
I'll wager that MS won't write the software needed, nor will any educational institution instruct people on how to use technology.... my phone should only ring when the call is from list X while I have it set this way, so that while I'm attending certain functions, only list X callers will interrupt my activities.
If M$ made it, would you trust it to work? M$ "Smart" phones have not been very smart.
In the mean time, I'm keeping the thing on. My duty to my pregnant wife and four year old girl are more important to me than what you think of my manners. Nokia has a ring tone or two that don't sound like a cell phone and are not nearly as obtrusive as the typical cell phone spam song defaults. The "meeting mode" works too, providing an ascending ring as does the choice of vibrate instead of ring. Doctors, first responders and many other people have even greater needs for constant contact than I do.
Most people should view other's loyalty to their friends and family as more important than most things in life and tolerate a few interruptions. People who talk about "crackberries" and think their particular talk is more important than God don't have their priorties in order.
Meetings are nice now and then, but electronic communications are making them less useful and less productive. If the Linux kernel, GNU, Gnome, KDE, can all be built online without regular meetings, what task can't be done this way?
It IS misguided and unethical to, say, republish someone's book on the Internet for free under the pretense that books should be free for everyone, or to believe in that stance. It has nothing to do with scientific papers and everything to do with the moral rights of an author.
Do you consider libraries immoral?
The whole purpose of copyright, if you have not read the constitution recently, is to encourage the useful arts and literature for the common good. That is, to increase the public domain by making publication more profitable than usual for a limited time by exclusivity. Exclusivity in itself was considered immoral by the constitution's authors and still has a bad taste, despite the efforts of large publishers to change your opinion.
You understand RMS less than you understand your own laws.
It's akin to saying that it's not unethical to steal TVs from shop windows, because TVs should be free.
Slashdot Mirror
By then, all my computers were running Linux.
XP has not spared any of my classmates from crashes or daily boots. The reliability is about as good as a well tuned windows 3.1.
You realize, of course, Microsoft has said that about every "OS" they have released. With 2000 and XP, they had the "NT Technology" for you and promissed performance that was "like solid" and really 32 bit this time, half 64 bit if you were lucky. It was supposed to end the crashes if 98. 98 promissed you USB devices that worked and an end to the crashes of 95. 95 was touted as the most amazing thing in computing history, a 32 bit OS, the end of DOS and something that would end the crashes of Win31. The crashes never ended, but the list of promisses has grown. Nothing is new here. All hail the best windoze ever
Microsoft does not have the resources to rebuild Windows. No one does, and that's why free software works better than non free. Software without owners is rebuilt as often as someone wants it done.
I didn't know we were categorizing Photoshop, AutoCAD and all the other commercial software products that have no realistic free equivalents (not to mention all those thousands of vertical business apps used in the real world) as "entertainment" - and then blaiming DRM for our woes. But I guess that's a very convenient argument.
We? How many of you are there today?
The entertainment companies are new to the world of DRM. Non free software companies like M$ pioneered it and continue to hold false hopes to the gullible.
As long as you are talking about the "real" world, you should drop the distinction between free and non free except to note that the more free a thing is the better it is. If you don't think there are "realistic" equivalents for AutoCAD and Photoshop for Linux, you don't such things exist anywhere. Autodesk has been relatively static and is being outdone by several non free companies like Ansys and SolidWorks. You should also know that Novel, Red Hat and IBM offer plenty of vertical applications. While it is woeful that free alternatives either don't exist or are not better known, a realistic person is in no way tied to M$ and all of their non free problems. Hell, half of the "vertical applications" you talk about do nothing but navigate the dissaster Microsoft has created with it's crazy licensing, EULAs and registry.
The lack of free software in those places is again a case of legal nonsense. In the free world, GIMP does what Photoshop does, except where prevented by clueless or greedy device makers. Working with Autodesk formats is another minefield of patents and grief, and such things do a lot to discourage free software development. Think about it for one instant and you will realize that it's true. Free software has made a better compiler than you can find in the commercial world. Free software has also made better and easier to use GUIs than you will find in the commercial world. Can you think of any task between the two which is more difficult? Can you imagine anything but legal nonsense and sabotage holding any project back?
The non free companies are fighting as hard as they can, but they are losing. The smart ones are becoming free software companies.
In a lot of ways, free software has always been better Windows. My first use of Linux was Red Hat 5.x. Device support and installs were tricky, but having multiple desktops, GUI choices, system stability and compilers at no additional cost was much nicer than the Windows 95/98 available at the time. With the time it took to keep one or two Windows machines working, I could have six Linux machines that worked better and cost less. Free software has steadily improved since and is not only easy to install but vastly superior in all except vendor support. Even that is changing, with both ATI and Nvidia sharing specs and producing binary drivers for Linux.
Isn't it still hard to use, with much less applications available for it?
No, free software is not hard to use. At least my four year old girl does not think it's difficult.
The only applications missing from free software are those related to entertainment where big publishers have legal strangle holds on essential components. You have to use non-US software to watch DVDs, for example.
You have confused cause and effect. People at Microsoft are unhappy because the non free software way is failing. There is no way it can be otherwise. The anger and backstabbing you see is typical of any failing company. Tiny mistakes, which make no difference in the long run, become sources of contention. Productivity will fall off geometrically now, but even a perfect effort would not save them from the overwhelming superiority of free software.
It has been said hundreds of times and I'll say it again, the non free way of making software is obsolete. The GNU debugger has more than 87 authors. Not even Microsoft can afford to lavish that kind of effort on a single program regardless of it's importance. The "unimportant" programs are the ones that give free software systems a polished finish Microsoft can't touch. Their best five years of effort to graft together terabytes of purchased code are producing the equivalent of one modest productivity package and a window manager on top of a decidedly second rate GUI and a disaster of an OS. The free software approach, in the mean time, has produced many better equivalents on top of a unified system that fits onto a single, live running and self installing CD, which is offered by hundreds of different groups.
They can't catch up. Missing Christmas sales will hurt them. It won't hurt them near as much as the embarrassment and loss of face. The game is over. Only hardware DRM can save them and that is unlikely without IBM and other cooperation. 2007 will be the year free software takes majority market share and the Microsoft monopoly will be history.
Good riddance.
That's a very good idea. Sometime in 2007 the DoS will be over and the screenshots might be there. The only thing that's sure is it will still be a bad idea to attach a M$ run computer to the internet.
In the mean time, why don't you try out one of the nicer, free Window managers. Enlightenment, Gnome and KDE have all the eye candy you want without the M$ performance hit. You can run them on your current computer or the one you give yourself for Christmas.
They will charge you for it this time! Some people might be fooled into trusting them because they are asking for even more.
Blaming windows is not irrational. Microsoft has a record of breaking other people's software. Many of the same programs run without a problem on other systems and an all Microsoft system is no more stable than one with better software installed on top. A user of Outlook, WMP and other disasters will have a buggy system.
Switching them to linux would require a huge amount of retraining, even though the differences may be purely cosmetic.
You would be better off moving to more consistent interfaces than waiting for Vista. Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, Window Maker and other interfaces have been much more consistent and reliable than Windows. Xandros is a nice way to move them. It mimics windows right down to the c prompt.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020321092752/http:/ /www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=1884&a=24242,00.as p
http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=1884&a=24242 ,00.asp">link
See here for original story of the "delicate dance" vendors are expected to perform.
with XP I hardly ever experience a full OS crash and I leave my system up for weeks at a time.
Then:
my firefox install, which has been crashing quite frequently recently.
So which is it? XP stays up for weeks or crashes frequently?
if I were to try to switch the rest of my family over it would be a nightmare.
Let's shell over to the wife's box. Hmm, uptime 121 days. She sits there emailing and chatting with her web friends way more then she should.
Let's shell over to the 4 year old girl's box, the nicest in the house. Oh yeah, 11 days ago I put it down to use it's power chord for another computer. No pop ups or other nasties on that box. Do your kids get flooded unmentionable things?
If not having to do anything to keep the computer working well is a nightmare, I must be having a nightmare.
From the fine article:
Fry's had three FOSS computers on display, all low end boxes, and all with Linspire Linux pre-installed.
The neglected to mention that all those "low end boxes" were running circles around the expensive Windoze machines despite the tremendous effort lavished on every windoze computer to make it look "factory fresh". Running a retail windoze box is much like running a kiosk, you have to lock it down and never let it touch a network. Running a Linux computer might require a periodic wipe of the guest account if you are too lazy to configure it so it can't be screwed up. Other than that, you can let your customers do whatever they want. I run garbage hardware, but it routinely does better than my peer's windoze burdened hardware which cost much more and has processors two to ten times faster.
Post Patriot Act, every phone is a jail phone.
Anyone who would want such a huge spreadsheet needs help. Typically, the problem is improper organization or lack of more appropriate tool. Better tools would be databases or batch processing of data streams. Help them early because the problem only gets worse with "advances" like this.
I've seen worse abuse of spreadsheets. The most God awful sheet I ever saw had tons of macros. They each got data from different sources, one still used a modem to call a local high school's weather station, and the results of each had to be "checked" by hand. That spreadsheet was part of the process used to set the local price of electricity. It had grown, like a cancer, for years. This is what happens without proper IT support. Far from being enabled and helped, the victim was lead down a path of inappropriate tools to a giant cluster.
Had the company used free software, they might not have had to fire their programmers. Someone convinced them that "computer programming was not a core business." That's true, but neither is accounting and the "off the shelf" solution they were sold instead will cost them many times more than their own staff. For all their money they could have had things that work right.
I hope they do.
M$ is to make a scaling OS?!! Here I was, reading all of these big fat hardware requirements for Vista but they were all lies. Lies, I tell you! Thanks so much for putting me back in touch with reality.
So, Vista will run on my 233 Pentium II laptop? Will it look as good as Enlightenment? Somehow, I don't think so and there is your problem.
As the original poster said, moderation is good. The results can be beautiful without hogging resources.
The average desktop does not run sendmail or anything other than simple mail clients that use their ISP's SMTP sever. Their ISP won't let them. There's a good chance that server will be running sendmail, so users of nicer distributions are thwarted twice by "security measures", but that's all a different issue. Yes, Exim under Debian was easy to set up and worked great for desktop users.
In any case, Linux desktop users are still far better off than Windoze users. Kmail, Evolution and Thunderbird are all much better packages than Outlook and other Windoze only mail clients. Even when a dozer bothers to look outside their start menu and gets Thunderbird or some other nice mail program Bill Gates wants to break, the dozer has only plugged one of hundreds of holes. Windoze has a half life of 12 minutes on any network, sooner or later the user suffers. When they do, they have to pull out their "original" software and then get hosed before they can finish downloading the patches. A free software user who's suffered some kind of failure will download a brand new CD image or do a net install and have the latest and greatest every time. Free software quality and diversity will prevent the kind of universal exploits of the Windoze world, regardless of "market share".
Second Woman: Nice Purse!
Cut to a parking lot with a man getting out of his 1978 Monte Carlo. Another man sees him and approaches. Things are dirty, dark and gloomy.
Second Man: Nice car!
Flash Words: Would you copy a car? Would you copy a purse? Cut back to parking lot, things are looking brighter.
First Man: You really like it?
Second Man: Yeah, it rocks. Can I have one?
First Man: Sure, dude, it won't cost me much.
First Man takes his keys out of his pocket, pushes a button and makes a second car appear. Scene is now full color.
Flash Words: Of course you would copy a car if you could!
Cut to Street, things are looking brighter here too.
First Woman: I've got lots of these, have one.
First Woman reaches into her purse and pulls out an identical purse.
Second Woman: Cool, thanks a lot.
Both make big smiles at each other.
Flash Words: Sharing Is Good!
Cut back to parking lot. The second car shimmers oddly.
Second Man: Wow, thanks, that's really cool but it's not quite like the first one. What's up?
First Man: Oh, my car has DRM. I can only make five copies and the copies are not perfect. In fact, my own car has a limited life and I have to constantly pay to enjoy it. Sometimes it does not work at all.
Second Man: Bummer, dude, you got ripped off. Thanks anyway.
Run Words: You would not put up with restrictions on your car, would you?
Flash Words Separately: -DRM- -IS- -WRONG-
End with Words: Don't be owned. Share your culture.
Ahhh, the paradox of greed. Others have pointed out that the download service costs more than the DVD, yet it will save the big publishers money. Oh yeah, once enough people are using DRM'd downloads, the DVD "hole" and your local store will be closed. Sorry, but you don't have a choice about it.
Did you mention competing movie makers? The MPAA has a plan for them too. First up is all digital movie theaters that won't allow local schedule changes, much less an independent movie to be shown. Oh, someone might use an inexpensive projector and a computer to show things, but that theater will never see the "major" movies again. Second, "consumer" electronics are on their way to being so non free you won't be able to project a movie without paying an outrageous royalty or suffering a serious degradation in quality. Those outside the loop won't be able to play on the common players, just like it is with DVDs today but worse.
Free software offers a way out of the mess, as long as Microsoft does not convince enough hardware makers that Paladium/NGFU, or whatever they call it now, is the way to go.
Yeah, I run Konqueror with flash turned off to stop that. Anyting that actually needs something fancy is a right click, open with firefox button push away. Garbage like M$NBC loads much faster, but still needs a tab of it's own to hide the ugly.
Imagine the life of a M$IE user who can't easily turn off flash, has multiple adsservers installed and problems with popups to compliment all the intended spam. Unbearable browsing.
During the presentations the faces of at least half the crowd were lit with the spooky reflection of the laptops open before them. Those without computers would periodically bow their heads to the palmtop shrine of the BlackBerry. Every speaker was competing with the distractions of e-mail, instant messaging, Web surfing, online bill paying, blogging and an Internet chat "back channel" where conferencees supplied snarky commentary on the speakers. ... Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner.
What a small minded slam. How does he know that people are not googling for the author's articles or hitting wikipedia for terms they don't understand? Even the chatting with your peers can be useful and informative. It sure beats the hell out of whispering back and forth. People want to share and your friends have more pertinent information than anyone else. All this "spooky" talk about betrayal and badmouthing misses all the good things you can do with the tech at hand.
If I want to tune out of your speech, I'll leave in your face and go to a presentation that holds my interest. You should not be afraid of my cell phone or Zaurus. It's my time and you should respect my use of it, so long as I don't bother people sitting around me.
If M$ made it, would you trust it to work? M$ "Smart" phones have not been very smart.
In the mean time, I'm keeping the thing on. My duty to my pregnant wife and four year old girl are more important to me than what you think of my manners. Nokia has a ring tone or two that don't sound like a cell phone and are not nearly as obtrusive as the typical cell phone spam song defaults. The "meeting mode" works too, providing an ascending ring as does the choice of vibrate instead of ring. Doctors, first responders and many other people have even greater needs for constant contact than I do.
Most people should view other's loyalty to their friends and family as more important than most things in life and tolerate a few interruptions. People who talk about "crackberries" and think their particular talk is more important than God don't have their priorties in order.
Meetings are nice now and then, but electronic communications are making them less useful and less productive. If the Linux kernel, GNU, Gnome, KDE, can all be built online without regular meetings, what task can't be done this way?
Do you consider libraries immoral?
The whole purpose of copyright, if you have not read the constitution recently, is to encourage the useful arts and literature for the common good. That is, to increase the public domain by making publication more profitable than usual for a limited time by exclusivity. Exclusivity in itself was considered immoral by the constitution's authors and still has a bad taste, despite the efforts of large publishers to change your opinion.
You understand RMS less than you understand your own laws.
It's akin to saying that it's not unethical to steal TVs from shop windows, because TVs should be free.
Ohhh, I see that I've been trolled.