What a nice showcase of the difference between "open" and "free". From the article:
Under the sale, publicly announced Oct. 6, Check Point would own all Sourcefire's patents, source-code blueprints for its software and the expertise of employees....
Reinsch, a former Commerce Department undersecretary. "The most important case is where we're making an irrevocable technology transfer to a foreign party. Port operations raise security issues, but the ports are still in the United States."
Patents == Forever? What do they mean "irrevocable"?
Employees == Slaves.
Dude, you're moving to Israel! Maybee that's a stretch but the panel and the companies seem to think they own their employees. How insulting, but that's what a NDA is all about, isn't it?
Software freedom is important. Having the source code is useless if you don't have the legal right to compile it, change it and share it with your friends. Software patents, NDA's, closed source binaries keep you from doing what you want with your own computer. The DMCA will keep you from sharing what you know about someone else's stuff. What you find is that the "owner" holds the card you need. All the anti-competitive games people play have more serious consequences than meets the eye.
Lawmakers are more aware of the consequences of the laws they have written than you might give them credit for. US "Ownership" of whole categories of computer function is clearly the intent of much recent IP legislation. RIM's problems make sense, viewed through this lens. It won't due to have foreigners buy or otherwise enjoy that ownership. It makes me sick.
make your service look better by making someone elses look worse
That's what quality of service is all about and why putting intelligence in the network is stupid and wrong. No matter how fast your equipment gets, decisions take time that could better be spent just moving the data. No matter how good you make yourself look, you are never your best. Common carriers should never engage in net shaping other than routing around damage or pulling the plug on spambots and infected machines.
Napster made it's name by facilitating "piracy," sold out to the man and started selling heavily encumbered music, and is now dying for it.
My definition of "sell out" does not include what happened to Napster or MP3.com. Both companies were destroyed in court, with their investors loosing everything and then some. After essentially stealing the companies, the RIAA and friends went after the investors to punish them for putting their money forward, a first in copyright law abuse.
The new owners obviously have different dreams for Napster, which mostly end badly. A few months after the purchase, the new owners of MP3.com threw away terrabytes worth of wonderful content that had been built over the years.
I can envision a new industry, where artists sign with small labels or produce their own music, and sell DRM free music on the web, and have small batches of CDs pressed at reasonable prices to be sold at reasonable prices in stores of the brick and mortor and online varieties.
That was essentially MP3.com's model if you take out the brick and mortar. Anyone could put their music up to be found by preference matching. "People who like X also like Y1-Y10" was a powerful sales tool that matched musical tastes. Anyone could download DRM free mp3s. MP3.com would make and mail CD player compatible CD's on demand that also contained mp3s and could be ripped to any format. The price was much more reasonable than either Itunes or the New Napsters of the world. The MP3's were convenient and the physical archive was reassuring.
You can't copy the songs to an iPod. At least not without jumping through hoops.
You know, that would not matter if the Windoze media experience was anything like ITunes or Amarok. Who wants a $400 player when a $100 can do most of the same things? As it stands, you would be crazy to subject any player to WMP, much less an expensive one. Bill Gate's usual approach is working about as well as winmodems. WMP is a dissaster and everyone knows it.
There's plenty of blame to go around, though. Part of the dissaster is the absolute greed attack by the new owners of Napster and other crappy music services. They have been giving away players, music and months of service in their attempt to get new subscribers. People don't want it, and it's not only Microsoft's fault. Most people don't want music that dissapears if you don't pay monthly fees. Even if it worked, few people would go for it. Combine that with the hit and miss, but always second rate, quality of Works for Sure players and the never work nature of WMP and you have a steaming pile of shit that no one wants.
The whole melt down was predictable. It's easy to see, with so many greedy parties involved, that none of the stuff would work together. Each will be putting in their own little planned obsolescence or trump card over the others and none are co-operating. Napster blaming Microsoft is a little less predictable but the new owners seem to be more Hollywood bitches than M$ bitches. Racks of unsold Napster plans in stores is wholly predictable as are cheap music players that no one buys.
Here's the funny part, a free software user is better off than someone paying the full M$ ticket. Many cheap M$ players act as normal USB storage devices and can be loaded with any normal software. Amarok is a first rate player, providing random fill, play, lyrics, cover art and the whole nine yards. The only problem I have is converting over to crappy mp3 format for the cheap device, which M$ will do their damnest to keep from working with free software. At the same time, I have my no strings attached music, reasonable portability and great software. With MTP, the ease of moving files on and off is lessening, but it won't be long before the gphoto work is taken up and that issue will dissapear. Content, thanks to Magnatunes and the Internet Archive, is also better in the free world.
Believe me, the money I spend on music is now going to artists who don't mind me sharing their work. I want to see them live. I want their merchandise and I even want their CDs for the different versions that might be there.
Google is making it easy and profitable for people to engage in such behavior. The payments to AdSense participants are done via legal means (checks); hence Google has the ability to track down the offenders and sue them; and yet there has not been a single such case filed by Google for AdSense abuse.
You and the author are full of beans. The author claims that Google encourages wholesale plagiarism, which is nonsense. You are claiming Google has a way of detecting said plagiarism and knowingly profits from it. That's not just nonsense, it's libel.
I'd like to see you prove that Google is doing what you say. Go on, show me.
The author's experiment is interesting first hand expereince, but he needs to learn a few more lessons about web economy. Plagiarism is a problem that's always been around. It's not near as bad as the page rank manipulation schemes that people use to promote bogus content. "Whirlywinds" has probably been doing way more than paying desperate people $0.15/hour to cut and paste content. From this statement,
Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web.
I think the author has some thinking to do about what a free press is all about. I consider his article poorly researched and I'm happy there are better sources of original content out there on the unregulated net.
Blaming Google for other people's bad behavior is about as good as burning libraries for housing content you don't like. I have faith that Google is aware of the issues involved and will provide a fix soon enough. Google, despite lots of competition and attempted vandalism, is still the best search engine there is.
Oh yeah, you can keep your koolaid for all your other chair throwing friends who hate Google.
This only makes sense. I can't imagine anyone disagreeing, saying that you should use software with a license we're not familiar with, or to disregard the IP of open source authors.
Great, read the fine license, that's a fine idea. Read every one of the hundreds of pages behind every "I agree" or "I submit" buttons. Read every page of every SDK use license you use. Read the back of every bill you pay to a non free software company, it's likely to change every month. I hate doing that, so I no longer use non free software.
I've read the GPL and the FSF license summary pages. It took about an hour, once. Apt-get has never sent me an "I agree" button, so I've never had to read any of those. It's really easy because they say what they mean then mean what they say. The license stays the same for a decade.
FOSS licenses are less restrictive than non free licenses in every way.
FOSS is easier to acquire, own, and develop than non free.
The only unique legal issue regarding the use of free software is one dead lawsuit from SCO that was funded by Microsoft.
All software has problems with faults but Microsoft is by far the worst.
All software is threatened by bogus "IP" claims as anyone with a Blackberry can tell you.
That six chapters of nonsense is not worth reading. It's full of the same "get the facts" nonsense you've seen 100 times since Microsoft decided free software was the only remaining threat to market domination. You could read the original licenses or talk to a real lawyer in less time than it takes to read M$ BS. I can only hope the people of New Zealand did not pay for it.
I don't think they're using it as "generic" VM space. I think, based on the language, this is stuff that could be re-read from the HD if needed, like chunks of the application code.
That's just what everyone wants! Plug your fob full of precious data into Vista and it will fill it up with binary bullshit. If you thought pulling your fob out in 98SE, 2000 or XP was dangerous, just wait for Vista. Combine that with YET ANOTHER POWER MANAGEMENT SCHEME that will take your computer long past the traditional 14 day instability zone and you get devices filled with crap. What will be really funny is when it boots over and automatically clears all it's swap space.
Let's see, a Microsoft funded front company is looking for "partners" to spam cell phones? I can't wait till Bill passes on his shit list to these losers and all sorts of text message spam starts showing up on my cell phone by "accident". It will be easy to ignore because no one I know ever sends text messages.
At this point, it seems anyone who would care about Dell's Linux machines are nerds like us who already know, and are least likely to base a computer purchase off an ad anyway. Why would they spend money on promotion that would preach to a choir and go ignored by the masses?
You promote excellence to protect your reputation. No amount of collusion can keep Microsoft afloat forever and then Dell will need it's reputation.
"Dell recommends the use of Windows XP Professional"
Would you? You already know it's wrong, because you know that people who know computers want free software. You know all the benefits of free software, ease of use, features, security and stability that Microsoft has promissed since 1995 and never delivered. Free software has buried non free software performance. Outside of a minority of legacy encumbered users, could you recommend XP to anyone?
Do you understand the power and consequences of Dell's recommendation? People who don't know any better trust Michael Dell as a reasonable and impartial source of technical knowledge. For some reason, they view him as a person free to recommend the very best. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. As long as major vendors continue to recommend sub standard software, Microsoft will have money to sue public schools and promote the anti-social worldview that non free software requires. The cost of promoting Microsoft is an insecure future without privacy, a censored, non participatory internet and a slavish belief that sharing is wrong, you don't own your computer or your culture.
Your own actions have the same consequences. Everytime you use non free technology to share, you force your friends to chose between collaborating with you and their software freedom. Everytime you avoid conflict and conform to the "Windoze is good enough" message, you give Bill Gates and everything he stands for a vote of confidence. The future is what we make it today. If you free yourself and promote freedom, that is what you will have. If you surrender to NDAs and those who would put dongles on your hardware, that is what you will have.
Now the view/replay/record software must have some type of authentication, right?
Yes, some kind of activeX control or other dubious mechanism, which makes securing the computer impossible. The "security" in this case can the problem which makes all the other workarounds a useless waste of effort.
I have no clue as to how to control the cameras, or if this is really a possibility. Any advice or information is appreciated.
I'm not an expert, but I worked in a place that used to sell these Windozy systems. It made me cringe at the time and I'm not surprised to learn they are a virus magnet and easy to 0wn. I never learned to do the same things with free software, but I did learn a few things.
Camera control is usually silly. For the price of one tilt device, you can buy two or three normal cameras which provide better coverage.
If you have the time to roll your own system, look into xawtv and myth tv. The capture technology is well developed, so you should be able to capture streams and represent them with thumbnail images you serve on a page if you can't figure out how to transmit the moving pictures themselves.
If you don't need full motion, but can get away with 1/second frame grabs, you will spare yourself a lot of storage space and greatly simplify your task. Gcam is something that I've played with that works and is easy to customize. There are other projects around that look promising, such as webcam one, axis network one, or cam portal manager.
I realize you need full motion video for cameras monitoring stores during working hours and wish that I knew more. Motion picture media is one of those areas where fierce patent/greed issues abound. Good luck.
Isn't the camera traffic limited to known IP addresses/MAC addresses? Just lock it down to only accept traffic from those...
If only things were that easy. Give the questioner the benefit of the doubt and expect that obvious solutions have been tried.
The program inspecting the mac addresses itself could be exploited, if the questioner could run one... but he said he can't!
Because he can't, he's stuck sitting behind a hardware firewall that only allows traffic on ports required for servicing the camera. We can imagine he's been bright enough to try that and it did not work because the camera software itself has problems or some other service he can't identify or turn off does.
Not sure anyone cares much about OGG. sure, it's good, but not radically so. It doesn't really support much new, and it doesn't integrate well with current media player apps (yes, that's iTunes and the iPod).
I haven't heard anyone in my vicinity (university) ever talk about OGG at all. I take that as a hint.
OGG typically takes 2/3 of the space a comparable mp3 does and is free of licensing and patent problems. If you want compressed music you want OGG.
The Z5 is not one of them, despite ogg support. As an AC pointed out, it uses MTP, a crappy M$ transfer protocol, which is still a pain in the ass.
Works for Sure is starting to mean just the opposite for me. If you want to see a real flop, look at the New Napster and others trying to make a buck for Bill. There you will find billions of dollars worth of hints. People don't want DRM, they want stuff that works. WMP has a well deserved horrible reputation.
In the mean time, I'm stuck converting ogg to mp3 or keeping everything in both formats for my cheap portable music device. That's not too big a deal and I can wait.
The Itanium on the other hand was obsolete on it's launch. Even HP dumped it after killing their own better performing 64 bit processor for it and spending billions of dollars and ten years building it.
... code requires location services to check that both the tracker and the person being tracked can prove they are consenting adults.
Oh, how nice of them to keep their toys to themselves. I doubt that people wanting cell service are asked for their consent when the phone company or government agent tracks them. Tracking is creepy and not something customers are demanding. Code should require the phone companies to provide phones that can not be routinely tracked. Instead, the price of modern convenience is a loss of privacy. We are forced to pay for yet another tool for those in power to maintain their power and wealth and told it's "for the children".
of course it can run, and run well, on older hardware. The only question is what you have to give up to make it work well.
From the average user's standpoint, nothing is lost. DSL, the smallest of the batch discussed, has everything 99% of the population wants: web browsing, email, text editing and a spreadsheet. The versions of software used may be low resource, but they are not always low feature. Far more can be done with DSL than can be done with Windows alone. Windows + office is a resource hog that comes with no real light versions, unless you consider very old versions "light". The average user is in no position to find all the drivers required to install and configure an old version of Windows on a random computer, even if the user could buy the licenses required. DSL, on the other hand, pretty much autoconfigures itself with a single boot install. The richer distributions discussed provide features, such as tabbed browsing and multiple desktops, than Windows and Office do not. A small percentage of "power users" might feel confined by DSL but they probably have the hardware and knowledge required to use X termsinals.
If you go the extra step of configuring X terminals, as the author does, you lose absolutely nothing on the terminal. You get all the shiny features and speed without and sacrifice only local storage. If X terminal or net boot set up is too complicated, you can always do "ssh -X hostname" from the command line to get the same effect.
The list of things I'd have to give up to move to Windows is too long to compile in a reasonable period of time. My newest computer is a 1.4 GHz Athlon from the trash, which my 4 year old uses. The cost of outfitting my family's five or six computers with Windows in a way that would approach functionality is well over $1,000. Some of the things I'd lose in that transition are:
Rational and virus free networking.
Internet servicing: web, ssh and email, not to mention the half a dozen specialized editors I'd give up in the switch.
System stability. I hate having to boot computers. You don't want to know what I think about installing Windoze and I'm never going back to a system that requires periodic "clean" installs, registration and all that nonsense.
SANE and CUPS.
Software, software, software! Amarok, Juk, Noatun, command line music playing. Konqueror, Epiphany and other forms of tabbed browsing. Kontact, Evolution. KOffice and Gnome Office components.
There's plenty more and there's some that I could run on Windoze if I wanted to make that kind of extreme effort in time or money. I've got better things to do and better uses for my money than that.
Oh my, everything was fine until I got to this part. FUD much?
AC, show me Enlightenment on Windoze or any other window manager that gives me thirty virtual desktops, each thumbnailed for easy switching, without a performance hit.
Just as I thought I'd seen the bottom of the barrel around here another psychotic fanboy surprises me.
Yeah, yeah, and there's a cloud of AC morons that wastes their time with drivel like that. Name calling is M$'s only asset.
Now there's actually some FUD that Windows runs better on old hardware? Why is there even a debate at all?
Amazing someone would say something so stupid, isn't it? They pretended that distributions made for older hardware don't exist and removed XP's built in hardware install blocks to discover that, "If Linux was installed on an older system, such as an average PC of 1997, then the desktop performance falls below what is typically acceptable for a common user" and, "that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box." That looks like an admission that XP won't run on older hardware, even if you can get around the blocks they built in. Nothing new there. Everyone knows you need at least 128MB of memory just to boot XP and run one or two nondemanding applications. Because there are plenty of distributions that do run well with much less, me thinks they proved the Linux runs well perception valid without realizing what they were doing.
The perception has gained steam as Vista's specs leak out. What you have to remember while M$ touts XP as so light and cute is that it's fiver years old. At the time, XP obsoleted whole classes of computer hardware. It outright refused to install on PII and lead people to throw out lesser hardware. Considering what most people did with XP, this was a huge waste of money. Vista promisses much of the same.
This message typed using Debian Sarge and a PII laptop. Specifically, Konqueror 3.3.2 on Enlightenment 16 and a 233 MHz PII with 196 MB RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. 802.11b works just fine, thank you, and I had two sessions of Inkscape scalar vector drawing opened, 12 spare virtual desktops and I listened to music using Juk while I wrote. There's no version of Windoze that does all of that on any hardware.
If you want to pull ancient stuff out of a box, try Star Office 5.x for size, speed and features. It compares very well with the M$ Office that was out when it was produced.
If you want modern software, most of the functionality of Office can be found in DSL, that's why it's so amazing that it all fits in 50 MB. KDE's office suite has most of the same functionality with a much smaller footprint and others make even nicer programs. Abbiword and Kword are both good word processors. Gnumeric is a very good spreadsheet. Newer Open Office suits are only as bloated as Office itself was, that's why you can fit it onto a single CD like Knoppix or Mepis, which expands to a 2GB filesystem when you install it. I've run Open Office 1 on a P150 with 70 MB of RAM. Like the article says, it took time to start but it stayed up and worked well once you got it going. I also ran GIMP, Kontact, Kword and other programs on the same machine at the same time. It got a little slow, but the same level of use with Windoze 2000 would be impossible.
two 500MB drives, and it's amazing how much trouble it was installing Linux on it back when that meant RedHat 5 or 6.... there wasn't a convenient way to tell it where to fit packages.
Hmmm, that's tight, but I recall putting Red Hat 5.x onto a single 540 MB disk. Then, as now, judicious package selection is key when you are dealing with the full distributions. Today, I'd put/usr onto the second drive and everything else on the first. DSL, Puppy or any of the other sub 100 MB distributions mentioned in the article make this unnecessary.
Slashdot Mirror
or that he could find them.
Yeah, but that would be true
Now that they have violated the will of the US and it's ally, Microsoft, they are a threat to democracy.
Under the sale, publicly announced Oct. 6, Check Point would own all Sourcefire's patents, source-code blueprints for its software and the expertise of employees. ...
Reinsch, a former Commerce Department undersecretary. "The most important case is where we're making an irrevocable technology transfer to a foreign party. Port operations raise security issues, but the ports are still in the United States."
Patents == Forever? What do they mean "irrevocable"?
Employees == Slaves.
Dude, you're moving to Israel! Maybee that's a stretch but the panel and the companies seem to think they own their employees. How insulting, but that's what a NDA is all about, isn't it?
Software freedom is important. Having the source code is useless if you don't have the legal right to compile it, change it and share it with your friends. Software patents, NDA's, closed source binaries keep you from doing what you want with your own computer. The DMCA will keep you from sharing what you know about someone else's stuff. What you find is that the "owner" holds the card you need. All the anti-competitive games people play have more serious consequences than meets the eye.
Lawmakers are more aware of the consequences of the laws they have written than you might give them credit for. US "Ownership" of whole categories of computer function is clearly the intent of much recent IP legislation. RIM's problems make sense, viewed through this lens. It won't due to have foreigners buy or otherwise enjoy that ownership. It makes me sick.
That's what quality of service is all about and why putting intelligence in the network is stupid and wrong. No matter how fast your equipment gets, decisions take time that could better be spent just moving the data. No matter how good you make yourself look, you are never your best. Common carriers should never engage in net shaping other than routing around damage or pulling the plug on spambots and infected machines.
My definition of "sell out" does not include what happened to Napster or MP3.com. Both companies were destroyed in court, with their investors loosing everything and then some. After essentially stealing the companies, the RIAA and friends went after the investors to punish them for putting their money forward, a first in copyright law abuse.
The new owners obviously have different dreams for Napster, which mostly end badly. A few months after the purchase, the new owners of MP3.com threw away terrabytes worth of wonderful content that had been built over the years.
I can envision a new industry, where artists sign with small labels or produce their own music, and sell DRM free music on the web, and have small batches of CDs pressed at reasonable prices to be sold at reasonable prices in stores of the brick and mortor and online varieties.
That was essentially MP3.com's model if you take out the brick and mortar. Anyone could put their music up to be found by preference matching. "People who like X also like Y1-Y10" was a powerful sales tool that matched musical tastes. Anyone could download DRM free mp3s. MP3.com would make and mail CD player compatible CD's on demand that also contained mp3s and could be ripped to any format. The price was much more reasonable than either Itunes or the New Napsters of the world. The MP3's were convenient and the physical archive was reassuring.
Today, you have Magnatunes, the Internet Archive and many others stepping into the void.
You know, that would not matter if the Windoze media experience was anything like ITunes or Amarok. Who wants a $400 player when a $100 can do most of the same things? As it stands, you would be crazy to subject any player to WMP, much less an expensive one. Bill Gate's usual approach is working about as well as winmodems. WMP is a dissaster and everyone knows it.
There's plenty of blame to go around, though. Part of the dissaster is the absolute greed attack by the new owners of Napster and other crappy music services. They have been giving away players, music and months of service in their attempt to get new subscribers. People don't want it, and it's not only Microsoft's fault. Most people don't want music that dissapears if you don't pay monthly fees. Even if it worked, few people would go for it. Combine that with the hit and miss, but always second rate, quality of Works for Sure players and the never work nature of WMP and you have a steaming pile of shit that no one wants.
The whole melt down was predictable. It's easy to see, with so many greedy parties involved, that none of the stuff would work together. Each will be putting in their own little planned obsolescence or trump card over the others and none are co-operating. Napster blaming Microsoft is a little less predictable but the new owners seem to be more Hollywood bitches than M$ bitches. Racks of unsold Napster plans in stores is wholly predictable as are cheap music players that no one buys.
Here's the funny part, a free software user is better off than someone paying the full M$ ticket. Many cheap M$ players act as normal USB storage devices and can be loaded with any normal software. Amarok is a first rate player, providing random fill, play, lyrics, cover art and the whole nine yards. The only problem I have is converting over to crappy mp3 format for the cheap device, which M$ will do their damnest to keep from working with free software. At the same time, I have my no strings attached music, reasonable portability and great software. With MTP, the ease of moving files on and off is lessening, but it won't be long before the gphoto work is taken up and that issue will dissapear. Content, thanks to Magnatunes and the Internet Archive, is also better in the free world.
Believe me, the money I spend on music is now going to artists who don't mind me sharing their work. I want to see them live. I want their merchandise and I even want their CDs for the different versions that might be there.
You and the author are full of beans. The author claims that Google encourages wholesale plagiarism, which is nonsense. You are claiming Google has a way of detecting said plagiarism and knowingly profits from it. That's not just nonsense, it's libel.
I'd like to see you prove that Google is doing what you say. Go on, show me.
The author's experiment is interesting first hand expereince, but he needs to learn a few more lessons about web economy. Plagiarism is a problem that's always been around. It's not near as bad as the page rank manipulation schemes that people use to promote bogus content. "Whirlywinds" has probably been doing way more than paying desperate people $0.15/hour to cut and paste content. From this statement,
Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web.
I think the author has some thinking to do about what a free press is all about. I consider his article poorly researched and I'm happy there are better sources of original content out there on the unregulated net.
Blaming Google for other people's bad behavior is about as good as burning libraries for housing content you don't like. I have faith that Google is aware of the issues involved and will provide a fix soon enough. Google, despite lots of competition and attempted vandalism, is still the best search engine there is.
Oh yeah, you can keep your koolaid for all your other chair throwing friends who hate Google.
Great, read the fine license, that's a fine idea. Read every one of the hundreds of pages behind every "I agree" or "I submit" buttons. Read every page of every SDK use license you use. Read the back of every bill you pay to a non free software company, it's likely to change every month. I hate doing that, so I no longer use non free software.
I've read the GPL and the FSF license summary pages. It took about an hour, once. Apt-get has never sent me an "I agree" button, so I've never had to read any of those. It's really easy because they say what they mean then mean what they say. The license stays the same for a decade.
That six chapters of nonsense is not worth reading. It's full of the same "get the facts" nonsense you've seen 100 times since Microsoft decided free software was the only remaining threat to market domination. You could read the original licenses or talk to a real lawyer in less time than it takes to read M$ BS. I can only hope the people of New Zealand did not pay for it.
That's just what everyone wants! Plug your fob full of precious data into Vista and it will fill it up with binary bullshit. If you thought pulling your fob out in 98SE, 2000 or XP was dangerous, just wait for Vista. Combine that with YET ANOTHER POWER MANAGEMENT SCHEME that will take your computer long past the traditional 14 day instability zone and you get devices filled with crap. What will be really funny is when it boots over and automatically clears all it's swap space.
Great move guys!
You promote excellence to protect your reputation. No amount of collusion can keep Microsoft afloat forever and then Dell will need it's reputation.
"Dell recommends the use of Windows XP Professional"
Would you? You already know it's wrong, because you know that people who know computers want free software. You know all the benefits of free software, ease of use, features, security and stability that Microsoft has promissed since 1995 and never delivered. Free software has buried non free software performance. Outside of a minority of legacy encumbered users, could you recommend XP to anyone?
Do you understand the power and consequences of Dell's recommendation? People who don't know any better trust Michael Dell as a reasonable and impartial source of technical knowledge. For some reason, they view him as a person free to recommend the very best. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. As long as major vendors continue to recommend sub standard software, Microsoft will have money to sue public schools and promote the anti-social worldview that non free software requires. The cost of promoting Microsoft is an insecure future without privacy, a censored, non participatory internet and a slavish belief that sharing is wrong, you don't own your computer or your culture.
Your own actions have the same consequences. Everytime you use non free technology to share, you force your friends to chose between collaborating with you and their software freedom. Everytime you avoid conflict and conform to the "Windoze is good enough" message, you give Bill Gates and everything he stands for a vote of confidence. The future is what we make it today. If you free yourself and promote freedom, that is what you will have. If you surrender to NDAs and those who would put dongles on your hardware, that is what you will have.
Yes, some kind of activeX control or other dubious mechanism, which makes securing the computer impossible. The "security" in this case can the problem which makes all the other workarounds a useless waste of effort.
I'm not an expert, but I worked in a place that used to sell these Windozy systems. It made me cringe at the time and I'm not surprised to learn they are a virus magnet and easy to 0wn. I never learned to do the same things with free software, but I did learn a few things.
Camera control is usually silly. For the price of one tilt device, you can buy two or three normal cameras which provide better coverage.
If you have the time to roll your own system, look into xawtv and myth tv. The capture technology is well developed, so you should be able to capture streams and represent them with thumbnail images you serve on a page if you can't figure out how to transmit the moving pictures themselves.
If you don't need full motion, but can get away with 1/second frame grabs, you will spare yourself a lot of storage space and greatly simplify your task. Gcam is something that I've played with that works and is easy to customize. There are other projects around that look promising, such as webcam one, axis network one, or cam portal manager.
I realize you need full motion video for cameras monitoring stores during working hours and wish that I knew more. Motion picture media is one of those areas where fierce patent/greed issues abound. Good luck.
If only things were that easy. Give the questioner the benefit of the doubt and expect that obvious solutions have been tried.
The program inspecting the mac addresses itself could be exploited, if the questioner could run one ... but he said he can't!
Because he can't, he's stuck sitting behind a hardware firewall that only allows traffic on ports required for servicing the camera. We can imagine he's been bright enough to try that and it did not work because the camera software itself has problems or some other service he can't identify or turn off does.
OGG typically takes 2/3 of the space a comparable mp3 does and is free of licensing and patent problems. If you want compressed music you want OGG.
As for media player integration, I see things the other way. Most available devices don't integrate well with my choice of free media player. There are many that are harder to get that I'd like.
The Z5 is not one of them, despite ogg support. As an AC pointed out, it uses MTP, a crappy M$ transfer protocol, which is still a pain in the ass.
Works for Sure is starting to mean just the opposite for me. If you want to see a real flop, look at the New Napster and others trying to make a buck for Bill. There you will find billions of dollars worth of hints. People don't want DRM, they want stuff that works. WMP has a well deserved horrible reputation.
In the mean time, I'm stuck converting ogg to mp3 or keeping everything in both formats for my cheap portable music device. That's not too big a deal and I can wait.
Yes to a few yards. The only way to make a cell phone that is untrackable is to turn it off.
I'm told that does not work. If you really don't want to be tracked you have leave it behind.
That's kind of a weird comparison given the differences in innovation, demonstrated results and company attitudes.
IBM's Cell is a much more radical break from previous chips like Itanium, but the CES demo was reported to be very impressive. IBM has already released the SDK and openly published all specifications. The pace of development has been very rapid and people are predicting the replacement of Intel. The missing piece was a compiler to ease transition. It looks like that's coming along just fine.
The Itanium on the other hand was obsolete on it's launch. Even HP dumped it after killing their own better performing 64 bit processor for it and spending billions of dollars and ten years building it.
We can only wonder how things would have been if Intel had opened things up like IBM has, instead of making it so people have to figure things out on their own.
Oh, how nice of them to keep their toys to themselves. I doubt that people wanting cell service are asked for their consent when the phone company or government agent tracks them. Tracking is creepy and not something customers are demanding. Code should require the phone companies to provide phones that can not be routinely tracked. Instead, the price of modern convenience is a loss of privacy. We are forced to pay for yet another tool for those in power to maintain their power and wealth and told it's "for the children".
From the average user's standpoint, nothing is lost. DSL, the smallest of the batch discussed, has everything 99% of the population wants: web browsing, email, text editing and a spreadsheet. The versions of software used may be low resource, but they are not always low feature. Far more can be done with DSL than can be done with Windows alone. Windows + office is a resource hog that comes with no real light versions, unless you consider very old versions "light". The average user is in no position to find all the drivers required to install and configure an old version of Windows on a random computer, even if the user could buy the licenses required. DSL, on the other hand, pretty much autoconfigures itself with a single boot install. The richer distributions discussed provide features, such as tabbed browsing and multiple desktops, than Windows and Office do not. A small percentage of "power users" might feel confined by DSL but they probably have the hardware and knowledge required to use X termsinals.
If you go the extra step of configuring X terminals, as the author does, you lose absolutely nothing on the terminal. You get all the shiny features and speed without and sacrifice only local storage. If X terminal or net boot set up is too complicated, you can always do "ssh -X hostname" from the command line to get the same effect.
The list of things I'd have to give up to move to Windows is too long to compile in a reasonable period of time. My newest computer is a 1.4 GHz Athlon from the trash, which my 4 year old uses. The cost of outfitting my family's five or six computers with Windows in a way that would approach functionality is well over $1,000. Some of the things I'd lose in that transition are:
There's plenty more and there's some that I could run on Windoze if I wanted to make that kind of extreme effort in time or money. I've got better things to do and better uses for my money than that.
AC, show me Enlightenment on Windoze or any other window manager that gives me thirty virtual desktops, each thumbnailed for easy switching, without a performance hit.
Just as I thought I'd seen the bottom of the barrel around here another psychotic fanboy surprises me.
Yeah, yeah, and there's a cloud of AC morons that wastes their time with drivel like that. Name calling is M$'s only asset.
Amazing someone would say something so stupid, isn't it? They pretended that distributions made for older hardware don't exist and removed XP's built in hardware install blocks to discover that, "If Linux was installed on an older system, such as an average PC of 1997, then the desktop performance falls below what is typically acceptable for a common user" and, "that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box." That looks like an admission that XP won't run on older hardware, even if you can get around the blocks they built in. Nothing new there. Everyone knows you need at least 128MB of memory just to boot XP and run one or two nondemanding applications. Because there are plenty of distributions that do run well with much less, me thinks they proved the Linux runs well perception valid without realizing what they were doing.
The perception has gained steam as Vista's specs leak out. What you have to remember while M$ touts XP as so light and cute is that it's fiver years old. At the time, XP obsoleted whole classes of computer hardware. It outright refused to install on PII and lead people to throw out lesser hardware. Considering what most people did with XP, this was a huge waste of money. Vista promisses much of the same.
This message typed using Debian Sarge and a PII laptop. Specifically, Konqueror 3.3.2 on Enlightenment 16 and a 233 MHz PII with 196 MB RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. 802.11b works just fine, thank you, and I had two sessions of Inkscape scalar vector drawing opened, 12 spare virtual desktops and I listened to music using Juk while I wrote. There's no version of Windoze that does all of that on any hardware.
If you want to pull ancient stuff out of a box, try Star Office 5.x for size, speed and features. It compares very well with the M$ Office that was out when it was produced.
If you want modern software, most of the functionality of Office can be found in DSL, that's why it's so amazing that it all fits in 50 MB. KDE's office suite has most of the same functionality with a much smaller footprint and others make even nicer programs. Abbiword and Kword are both good word processors. Gnumeric is a very good spreadsheet. Newer Open Office suits are only as bloated as Office itself was, that's why you can fit it onto a single CD like Knoppix or Mepis, which expands to a 2GB filesystem when you install it. I've run Open Office 1 on a P150 with 70 MB of RAM. Like the article says, it took time to start but it stayed up and worked well once you got it going. I also ran GIMP, Kontact, Kword and other programs on the same machine at the same time. It got a little slow, but the same level of use with Windoze 2000 would be impossible.
Hmmm, that's tight, but I recall putting Red Hat 5.x onto a single 540 MB disk. Then, as now, judicious package selection is key when you are dealing with the full distributions. Today, I'd put /usr onto the second drive and everything else on the first. DSL, Puppy or any of the other sub 100 MB distributions mentioned in the article make this unnecessary.