His bad history is just a straw man. He's derived it from the intentional confusion created by the Wintel press and others. Shame on him for wasting time perpetuating it instead of making his point.
As for his point, I did not see too much that's original or any pieces of concrete advice. The Open Source movement has never pushed the four software freedoms over "practical" matters and has always had a fuzzy philosophy based on economics above all else. Other than slapping around a strawman and GNU, I'm not sure what his point was. Mostly he thinks everyone should think like him and pretends that it's true. He does not have any positive advice like, "do this and things will be better for you." The author mostly belittles people with ideological motivation without understanding that motivation or it's importance for his own well being. He summarized in his four key points, here:
Paraphrase: The internet is expanding and that will push Open Source which is just another tool without inherent morals.
The view that there is a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving open source forward is simply false. The view that open source participants are idealistic Davids fighting against software Goliaths is also false. In fact, surveys of open source participants tend to bear this out.
Surveys don't bear this out. The average free software project is created by someone who just wants things to work and has no interest in monetary returns. Other surveys also bear out the importance of freedom for those who are using free software. The free software community has grown much larger in recent years and it still contains many people who are ideologically motivated. If he thinks their work is unimportant, I'd like to see him do without GNU's GCC, and other tools.
If he thinks that the movement will continue to grow without freedom, he's very wrong. The DMCA, software patents and other issues have a real ability to stop both free and open software dead. A very easy test of this is to look at licenses that are open but not free. An extreme example, and the limit of amoral "open software", is Microsoft's initiatives. This is really just an extension of the cross licensing cesspool which was created when a bunch of greed heads tried to scoop up the whole world of computing back in the 80's. Other less than free licenses form a spectrum that attracts more or less participation. Without software freedom, open source would quickly fall on it's face because no one wants to particpate in things that are owned and controlled by others.
The internet will continue to be pushed and expanded by government and major publishers with more or less freedom for it's end users. Free software will continue regardless.
If he thinks he can ignore the good advice the FSF offers, he's dead wrong about that too. I don't think they ever claimed to be the one and only driving force of free software. They understand that it's users writing software that gets the work done and that they can only do that if given the freedom they need. They are a loud and sensible voice for that freedom, and have created a very popular model, the GPL. Freedom is very important to a larger piece of the Open Source community than the author would like to realize.
So they've decided it doesn't make sense to continue development of a free (to us) piece of software on a platform that is in the decided minority when it comes to desktops. Makes sense to me.
Looked at from the "Works For Sure" side, this is a total defeat and surrender. If a Mac user wants to buy music online their choice no longer includes the decidedly second rate M$ players and music services. I don't see anyone mentioning this because no one takes the new Napster and it's kin seriously. WMP does not even work well on Windoze. The service itself was supposed to be a money maker and obviously it is a loser. It does not work for sure, it never worked everywhere and now they have dropped the only other major commercial OS.
You are right about them needing to focus on what's important. The whole M$ drive into your living room is an astounding flop. The Xbox is still a money loser and it's about to have it's ass handed to it. WMF playability is so poor that people just don't bother with videos and content provider must be desperate for a replacement. As mentioned above, their forray into the marvelous world of DRM'd music is not taking off despite massive "free trials" at universities because it sucks. While they poured all of that work and effort into rooting your living room, their core product is one big stagnant target. Even Michael Dell is selling Red Hat because people are fed up with Windoze.
Given the way they abused their position of trust when they owned the world of commodity computing, I hope they never recover. Bill Gates can take his money and enjoy his retirement while Microsoft sinks without a trace. I'll be happy when free software is shared rationally and the nightmare of public schools being sued for sharing binary coppies of weird format text editors is long forgoten. See you later M$.
How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span?
It's bigger than that, it's not going to rival something so big, it's going to be faster than most drives and you are so silly I wonder if you are that way intentionally. Let's quote the article:
For mobile PCs - particularly thin-and-light models that do not require the larger hard drive capacities - the technology could extend battery life because solid-state Flash designs would be far more efficient than hard disks. Hardware design, durability and performance - particularly the boot-up sequence - would also be improved.
Hard drives are not ideal in laptops. They are mechanically fragile and break when you drop them. The quickest way to extend battery life is to spin down your drive, but there are only a limited number of times you can spin them up before you burn the motor out. Laptop hard drives are typically slow, loud, hot and suck power. Most of my laptops have drives less than 16 GB, so I'd never see the difference.
The techniques to extend the life of flash drives are well known. You put files that are rewritten often onto a RAM disk. That's how palm computers work. My Handspring gets by with 4MB of memory and is a useful tool. My Zaurus does much more with it's 64MB and a 512MB SD flash card.
When your OS has adequate networking, you don't need to lug around all 500 GB of your music, photos and movies. If your OS has a 12 minute half life on any network, you might lug around an external drive. I leave mine at home tied to a cable modem. It's easier to sync that with everything.
The best laptop is just big enough for a keyboard, screen and network hookups and weighs less than three pounds. It's just fast enough to run your stuff without burning your lap and it does not have sound like a vacuum cleaner. It runs for at least four hours without a charge, ideally twelve, so you don't have to lug around a power brick. Flash drives are part of that laptop.
They are attractive as upgrades to my current laptops. At the predicted price of $90, it's cheaper than most laptop drives on the market. I'll be happy to drop half a pound of noise, heat and power drain from my current laptops when their eight year old drives start to fail.
I did a fairly extensive pilot of this at my previous company, with the assistance of Microsoft.... There is a *lot* of planning required to make this work well, but it does work.
What, exactly, were you trying to do? What were you trying to protect, from who and did this really do it? When you saw WLAN, is that wide area network or wireless local area network? If it's wireless, why is it you have to worry about that? How much did all of this cost and how many users did it cover?
I've got big doubts whenever someone puts Microsoft and security together. What good is an authenticated user when the OS underneath gets rooted and keylogged by an email or webpage view?
Nowhere have they established a causal link between the group that is stressed and the group that drinks, aside from what you'd expect from pretty random overlap. This has the smell of a bad study and results blown up to sound outrageous. The article reads like a bunch of observations about overlapping groups
TFA:
The poll by UK charity Developing Patient Partnerships showed more than a third of men and a quarter of women have a drink to cope with stress. Of the 1,000 people polled, 27% of men and 23% of women said they would light up a cigarette in such situations.
Was it really Windoze crapping out on them? It's hard to tell but the indicators are there. We only know what they told the poll and what a third of respondents told the poll was that their crashing computer was their problem. That was more than being fired, because most people are not fired. Other things, like the death of a loved one or crime did not make the list though they might create much greater problems for individuals because those things are rare. IT was more bothersome than listed commuting, though everyone has to commute and it's not fun. Notice that working longer hours, and greater demands from work did not make the top three though most people are doing that. There have been other studies that show that people would rather have their teeth pulled or pay Federal Taxes than fix their broken computer. As Bill Gates is who most people talk to when they turn on their computer at work, we can confidently say that Windoze is a great creator of stress. Bill should be ashamed to have made the top ten because he's nudged aside other common things like co-worker interaction, workplace noise and lack of privacy in the workplace and all the usual things that drive people to self destructive behavior like smoking and drinking.
The root cause of Windoze's power to annoy is that it's linked to number 2 and the user is helpless in a non free environment. If your computer craps out, you might just find yourself looking for another job and there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The computer spys on them and it does not work right and it can hurt them but they have to sit still and take it. Worse, the Wintel press always blames the user. Is there anything else more humiliating than being blamed for things you hate but not being able to do anything about it? The rest is speculation, but humiliated people have a tendency to engage in destructive behavior.
Are more people drinking and smoking? Women are, especially working women who have to use computers all day. Smoking is also one of the few work sanctioned ways to get away from the computer.
Is it killing people? Yes, smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the world. As more women smoke, their rates of lung and other cancer is catching up with men.
Is it all Bill's fault? No, but his help is something most can do without. His "sharp business practice" attitude has been an inspiration to assholes everywhere and his software is responsible for the answers to the above poll. I wonder how much of the "improved efficiency" of IT is due to outsoutsourcing, H1Bs and fewer people forced to do more work, which is more a function of tax structure than anything else. There's real efficiency in electronic records, but there's more with software that does not suck.
Bad Attitude from Lack of Understanding.
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 3, Informative
An article praising Bill Gates' infamous attempt to charge everyone for sending email and points to a page that requires Macromedia Flash? Well, it's good to know what the other half thinks, I suppose. This guy lacks a clue about the origin and motivation for spam and clearly does not understand why it's a problem that will grow.
His "Oh, it's not so bad," attitude is unfounded at best and what you might expect from M$ or the DMA as they promote, "legitimate" spam at worst. Spamhaus tells us that there's still a big problem, despite steps that most ISPs have taken. The problem will get worse again as the spammers learn to get around those mostly trivial steps. It won't take much effort to read configuration information on broken Windoze machines and make them point to the ISP's SMTP to send mail like the end user does. In the mean time, the botnet continues spew network clogging spam, and DDOS and we all get to pay the price in slow networks and broken computers. It's not enough to sit smug behind your spam filters while the average user gets creamed. The nasties are strengthened and encouraged by that kind of attitude and they can get still you with a DDoS or Distributed Mailbomb.
Flaws in Microsoft's operating system are what enables the nasties. They have to be corrected or avoided to fix the problem. Until then, the botnet will be both a weapon and profit center at everyone's expense. No, the answer is not "trusted" computing or mail servers that waste your time with MENSA puzzles and collect a penny for Bill. The answer is fixing what's broken. Email works despite it's great abuse by a few idiots.
The GPL is enforced like any other copyright and derives it's power from the same copyright laws used by some people to strip you of the four software freedoms.
From what I've read, contact is made with the suspected violator. Most violations are not intentional and everyone is made happy right away. If not, you have to do what other publishers do. This is how the FSF does it.
The free software foundation has plenty of good advice. Just Google for "gpl violation site:fsf.org" You will be taken to:
Broadcom have been doing it for years, and nobody gave a shit then.. why now? It's going to be hard to test the GPL in court when willful infringement has been ignored.
That's about as silly as saying that because no one cares about the GPL, all copyright is invalid. It would be nice if that were true, but it's not. Nor is it true that any one person ignoring a GPL violation invalidates the GPL as a license or the copyright laws it's based on.
The FSF has this to say about GPL violations:
The FSF acts on all GPL violations reported on FSF copyrighted code, and we offer assistance to any other copyright holder who wishes to do the same. But, we cannot act on our own if we do not hold copyright. Thus, be sure to find out who the copyright holders of the software are before reporting a violation.
Only the copyright holder can protect their work. There's nothing I can do if you don't care. If the use of your work to rob someone else of their rights bothers you, do something about it. There are lots of people willing to help. If you don't care, release it under another license. The GPL will continue to serve it's purpose regardless.
why would they want to keep the patent on that again, for other reasons than just appearing "evil"?
Because they ARE evil. All you have to do is read the article:
It also voiced concern that Microsoft would try to seek royalties from companies that sell and support Linux for using the technology, potentially posing a threat to the free software community. Under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, Linux cannot be distributed if it contains patented technology that requires royalty payments.
That's quite a spin for what I thought they were pantenting, long file names that have been in use since 1995. But it would make things more difficult. Right now all GNU/Linux distributions can easily read and write to fat, fat32 and NTFS. This is despite previous bogus patents on NTFS. It does not take much effort to see where they are going with this new set of bogus patents.
The US should be ashamed of this. For my own purposes I could care less, having migrated from Windoze eight years ago and having plenty of old knoppix CDs around. I also imagine that it will continue to be possible to get copies of the software from countries that don't have software patents. Linux distributors and newbs will have problems though. It makes honest people look like crooks. Honest people have a right to access their data with free software and should not have to jump through dirty hoops to do it. The USPTO sucks life.
Someone calling himself Dickhead, tells us Winders is secure and we are supposed to take his word for it over our own eXPerience and advice from security experts. Oh yeah, he points to a M$N article, like that's got credibility. This is an obvious case of moderation gaming.
Little troll, the facts are obvious and all your silly games are useless. There's a new M$ nasty every month, and it has a half life of 12 minutes on any network. People who don't use M$ junk don't have problems, people who do get popups and corrupted files and machines that don't boot. As much as you would like to blame the users, admins or anyone but Microsoft, the only thing people with computing problems have in common is Microsoft. Replace M$ with Apple, Sun, Linux or BSD and 99.9% of the problems vanish. It's not the users. It's not the people who have to fix Microsoft's problems, it's the software they use.
Don't give me any bull shit about how much people hate M$ or how M$'s popularity is the cause of all the problems. Sure, anyone who's used computers for more than a year or two knows that M$ sucks. It's the Quality, stupid. Most people have no clue about the ethical problems the company has. Yes, there are many people who actually hate M$. That's what you get when you sue public school systems, lie about competitors and do all that other "sharp" business crap. Only a small percentage of the population keeps up with that kind of thing, but a small percentage of many is a lot of people and sooner or later, everyone will know. Performance alone and broken promises are enough to make many people others without a clue hate M$. You can contrast this hatred with the love people have for about any other OS and see what a turd M$ really is.
In short, Microsoft has EARNED it's reputation and all the apologies in the world won't change a thing. After four years of "Security is job 1" and no real changes in system behavior, the public has had enough.
Geeks and Nerds sticking it to the man, is that what's wrong with Windoze? Is that who's running all of these porn and pill advertising spam serving botnets? I don't think so. Wouldn't a better way to stick it to Bill Gates be to cripple M$ corporate or it's "Partners" like CompUSA? Wouldn't people who really want to stick it to the "man" be attacking banks and institutions, you know, the one's who run LAMP without problems but get creamed running IIS.
The popularity argument is pure bullshit. Non Microsoft runs most of the web and anything that's mission critical. Those foolish enough to try making M$ do things live to regret it and it has nothing to do with popularity, Geeks and Nerds but everything to do with marketing and crappy software. Apple, Sun, Linux and every other kind of software works better and non have had the kind of automated worm problems M$ has.
From the above, you can imagine that the functionality and features excuse is also bogus. Operating systems robust enough to provide services over the network can also be made with pretty GUIs that are equally robust. There is nothing a Windoze user can do that I can't do better with free software and many things that I can do that they can't without lots of effort and money. I share my classwork with anyone who's interested and I share my music and movies with myself without any of the problems Windoze users suffer just connecting to a network, reading their email or browsing the web.
When is the big Linux worm coming? Never, thanks to the diversity of excellence that a truly free market for software provides. Free software writers also don't make the mistake of mixing content with executable code, unless they are copying someone else's bad implementation for compatibility sake. Still everyone makes mistakes but that still won't do to free software what it does to M$. As an example, imagine Firefox had a problem. It would get about 1/3 of GNU/Linux users. Why? because the rest of them are using other browsers and all of them can stop using the browser with a problem until it's resolved one or two days later. Because Free Software is all about code, binary problems don't automatically propagate across distributions. A Red Hat exploit might not work on Debian and probably won't on Gentoo and won't do anything to a BSD box. The Free Software fix is always easier too. When things go wrong on a free software box, the user downloads the latest and greatest to fix it. The worst case is a rebuild, which preserves all user data and takes less than 20 minutes. In the Windoze world, the user takes out their "original CDs" or blows a few hundred bucks at the computer store for software that's at least two years old and probably has the same problems. Things are much much more difficult for crackers outside of the M$ monoculture of binary crap.
I say we should stop with these rags from peoples first impression and go with a better one showing the differences and explaining their strong and week points and not give judgement of what is better.
When served a fat turd on bread and a roast beef sandwich, we should show the difference and explain the strong and week points without judging one better than the other.
Windows XP needs dozens of third party add-ons which cost hundreds of dollars before it's remotely useful. It does not even come with a spell checker, does it? M$ has been riding the heals of other people's work forever. Most of those other people got tired of it and started writing free software, so you that you can have everything you want on a single CD that auto configures itself, preserves your current OS and installs itself in 20 minutes or less.
They need to stop fighting it and embrace it... before it passes them by.
They know what they are doing and it's being done by DRM and stupid laws. The music industry knows CDs are dead and hates them but will take full propaganda advantage of the demise of the retail store. Record stores have always been shaky and shaken down business and it's very difficult to find an independent one today in the face of Virgin, Walmart and other RIAA dump sites. You could say the fix was already in but they will cry and blame it on the "pirates". The RIAA wants to own digital distribution the same way they owned physical media and radio broadcast. They will get there by making it impossible or illegal to listen to their music on a non-DRM encumbered system. Attempts to close "the analog hole" will make sure you can't even enjoy the public airwaves unless you submit to their will. The FCC and your government seem to be going along with this madness.
So, in the end, what are you going to chose - a free system without popular culture or a non free system with commercial crap? With Apple and M$ help, you won't have a choice on new hardware.
Sarcasm off. This technology is sure to be loved and abused as above. Like you, I doubt any real use can be made of the user's emotions and it will get things wrong, even if you do wire everyone up like a space rabbit. Oh yeah, your boss probably knows who Sefert is, even if you only post at home, though other abuses of technology.
I'm by no means a MS fanboy, but.. c'mon already. The man and his family has shown more support for worthwhile causes than I'm sure some small countries have. He just can't catch a break around here, can he?
You are either a fanboy or deluded.
Bill Gates can gain everyone's unabashed admiration if he simply stops acting like such an ass and mitigate the harm he's caused. He can:
Stop threatening public school systems with copyright lawsuits.
Dismantle the BSA, which does all the dirty work of the last item.
Stop paying people to lie about his perceived competitors through endless "Get the Facts" campaigns, rigged studies and other nonsense Microsoft is famous for.
GPL publish all the code he's bought, shelved and hosed over the years.
Do the same for what's left of some of the code he's demolished without purchasing, like OS/2, Word Perfect etc.
Stop trying to push his "consumer grade" software where it does not belong: Military, Government Archival, Medical Hardware, Public Infrastructure, etc. Strong arm tactics in Mass, the wake of hurricanes are appreciated for the bullying they are.
Try to convice others in Biotech the errors of his former philosophy and stop exporting bogus laws to those fields as well.
That's a short list but it would go a long way towards undoing the damage he's done to the world. The balance, would be close to his net contribution to society. As most people think he's done nothing more than purchase, resell and destroy, the balance may be negative. Industry insiders and those who have been on the receiving end of his Copyright Crusade (TM) know better than I do.
So you missed the bit that said, "Microsoft thus decided to test this premise by installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Pro 9.2, Mandrake 10, Linspire 4.5, Xandros Desktop 3.0, Fedora Core 3, Slackware 10.1, Knoppix 3.7; Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 out-of-the-box on older hardware to see what happened."
Actually, anyone understanding the above statement would realize that M$ compared their 5 year old pig with brand new Linux pigs. I know that Knoppix in 2001 booted and ran a full GUI on a Pentium I with 24MB of RAM, much lower than anything M$ even thought of trying with anything but WinCE. Most users would still consider Red Hat 6.0 a full desktop with more features than XP, and similar things can be said about every other Linux distro from 2001. Notice that Vista is absent from the above and the comparison is nothing more than the usual bullshit from Redmond.
Of course, there's no reason to use five year old software on Linux. Distributions like Damn Small and Feather use lower resource applications to deliver full GUI, office and multimedia functionality, "out of the box" to the average user. Debian, with a little effort can be configured the same way, which is how the developers made DSL and feather, but more can be added with ease until the user decides that performance has actually suffered.
The problem with the article isn't that they aren't comparing apples with apples, but that they're ignoring the fact that the oranges exist. If you aren't running desktop apps Linux will run well on small amounts of RAM - even less than the 64MB they quote as the minimum limit - and that similar apps aren't as readily available under the Windows OS.
Yeah, the Novel guy quoted in the article mentioned thin clients, which drove hardware requirements down further than the "out of the" box distros that M$ tried. This ignores the fact that other distros are just as easy to obtain and only marginally more difficult to configure. The software Knoppix, Mepis and others use to configure installs is free and will soon be everywhere.
Another gaping logical flaw, of course, is how OLD the M$ software actually is. Windows XP Pro was released in 2001. It's five years old. Had they tried a copy of Knoppix from five years ago, they would have found it works just fine on a Pentium I with 32MB of RAM. Knoppix from that time would drop down to Window Maker without user intervention if it thought KDE would be difficult to run. Most people would consider Window Maker's Next based GUI superior to M$'s, so not much is lost there. Knoppix would drop further down to TWM or command line on further hardware restrictions, which is technically running, though the average user might not be pleased. Microsoft is poised to release Vista, which might make "Legacy" all of your hardware the way XP did: By refusing to instal on some hardware and the obvious lack of third party hardware drivers.
How this is a typical M$ claim: No one else can duplicate the results, no one else wants to because there are easier ways to do what they do and the conclusions are stupid.
While I can run the "client software" on legacy hardware (whatever they define that as), I still can't run, with any decent performance, a fresh install of Windows XP Pro SP2 on my 386,
I think they were trying to define legacy hardware as a 400MHz PII with 64MB RAM and 2 GB hard disk, typical of computers built between 1998 and 1999. They claim this is the minimum needed to run an office suit and play audio and video under Linux "out of the box". It's also typical of third hand hardware on the way to the third world because Windows XP refuses to install on it.
So their comparison is Microsoft at it's finest. No one else will be able to verify it, it's silly and it's bullshit. Who else besides M$ and a handful of insane hackers could possibly make XP install and find find drivers for all the hardware you would find in 1999? Why would you want to go through all of that effort when it's much easier to run Linux "out of the box"? They mentioned that more memory helps and that's more true for Linux than it is for M$. I've happily used Debian on a PII laptop for more than a year now and I've had better performance and a greater choice of programs than my friends running XP on P4s given the same amount of memory. Linux performance with slightly newer hardware, 1 GHz Athlon with 512MB of RAM, blows them out of the water in every way. I imagine Vista will refuse to install on my Athlon.
First, air is pumped out of a large tank that is connected to one end of the wind tunnel, creating a vacuum inside the tank. Then a valve is opened between the tank and the wind tunnel, sucking a burst of air through the wind tunnel at high velocity. The short run time requires less expensive equipment, unlike the large compressors needed for other wind tunnels that pump air continuously.
I would have thought they could clean and polish by simply operating the thing, but no they have to do it with elbow grease. Remember that scene from the movie Heavy Metal, where aliens suck up two people from the Pentagon? That's one hell of a ride that ends with a bang.
It's nice to see them saving money, but we can only hope they don't send anyone in when the thing is primed.
Simply take the bare facts of a story, throw in some out-of-context quotes and counter-factual insinuations, and that boring story about some punk's criminal mischief is suddenly about the Man's insane overreaction to a harmless prank!
Got some facts to back up your description of said "punk"? I did not find any useful information in the article other than these accusations (bare, but not quite facts):
Student encouraged chat room members to visit school site and press F5.
Student said this would crash school site
Student set up website with link to school and same encouragement.
The reaction was for Canton City Prosecutor Frank Forchione to charge the student as a felon and throw him in jail saying, "Michael said it was a joke. We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke."
If the accusations and reaction are correct, we have petty mischief and a serious over reaction. The article also has the same prosecuter talking about a more serious violation that was treated as a misdemeanor.
I'm not sure what's out of context in the story summary either. How about some details, punk?
Slashdot Mirror
As for his point, I did not see too much that's original or any pieces of concrete advice. The Open Source movement has never pushed the four software freedoms over "practical" matters and has always had a fuzzy philosophy based on economics above all else. Other than slapping around a strawman and GNU, I'm not sure what his point was. Mostly he thinks everyone should think like him and pretends that it's true. He does not have any positive advice like, "do this and things will be better for you." The author mostly belittles people with ideological motivation without understanding that motivation or it's importance for his own well being. He summarized in his four key points, here:
Paraphrase: The internet is expanding and that will push Open Source which is just another tool without inherent morals.
The view that there is a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving open source forward is simply false. The view that open source participants are idealistic Davids fighting against software Goliaths is also false. In fact, surveys of open source participants tend to bear this out.
Surveys don't bear this out. The average free software project is created by someone who just wants things to work and has no interest in monetary returns. Other surveys also bear out the importance of freedom for those who are using free software. The free software community has grown much larger in recent years and it still contains many people who are ideologically motivated. If he thinks their work is unimportant, I'd like to see him do without GNU's GCC, and other tools.
If he thinks that the movement will continue to grow without freedom, he's very wrong. The DMCA, software patents and other issues have a real ability to stop both free and open software dead. A very easy test of this is to look at licenses that are open but not free. An extreme example, and the limit of amoral "open software", is Microsoft's initiatives. This is really just an extension of the cross licensing cesspool which was created when a bunch of greed heads tried to scoop up the whole world of computing back in the 80's. Other less than free licenses form a spectrum that attracts more or less participation. Without software freedom, open source would quickly fall on it's face because no one wants to particpate in things that are owned and controlled by others.
The internet will continue to be pushed and expanded by government and major publishers with more or less freedom for it's end users. Free software will continue regardless.
If he thinks he can ignore the good advice the FSF offers, he's dead wrong about that too. I don't think they ever claimed to be the one and only driving force of free software. They understand that it's users writing software that gets the work done and that they can only do that if given the freedom they need. They are a loud and sensible voice for that freedom, and have created a very popular model, the GPL. Freedom is very important to a larger piece of the Open Source community than the author would like to realize.
Looked at from the "Works For Sure" side, this is a total defeat and surrender. If a Mac user wants to buy music online their choice no longer includes the decidedly second rate M$ players and music services. I don't see anyone mentioning this because no one takes the new Napster and it's kin seriously. WMP does not even work well on Windoze. The service itself was supposed to be a money maker and obviously it is a loser. It does not work for sure, it never worked everywhere and now they have dropped the only other major commercial OS.
You are right about them needing to focus on what's important. The whole M$ drive into your living room is an astounding flop. The Xbox is still a money loser and it's about to have it's ass handed to it. WMF playability is so poor that people just don't bother with videos and content provider must be desperate for a replacement. As mentioned above, their forray into the marvelous world of DRM'd music is not taking off despite massive "free trials" at universities because it sucks. While they poured all of that work and effort into rooting your living room, their core product is one big stagnant target. Even Michael Dell is selling Red Hat because people are fed up with Windoze.
Given the way they abused their position of trust when they owned the world of commodity computing, I hope they never recover. Bill Gates can take his money and enjoy his retirement while Microsoft sinks without a trace. I'll be happy when free software is shared rationally and the nightmare of public schools being sued for sharing binary coppies of weird format text editors is long forgoten. See you later M$.
It's bigger than that, it's not going to rival something so big, it's going to be faster than most drives and you are so silly I wonder if you are that way intentionally. Let's quote the article:
For mobile PCs - particularly thin-and-light models that do not require the larger hard drive capacities - the technology could extend battery life because solid-state Flash designs would be far more efficient than hard disks. Hardware design, durability and performance - particularly the boot-up sequence - would also be improved.
Hard drives are not ideal in laptops. They are mechanically fragile and break when you drop them. The quickest way to extend battery life is to spin down your drive, but there are only a limited number of times you can spin them up before you burn the motor out. Laptop hard drives are typically slow, loud, hot and suck power. Most of my laptops have drives less than 16 GB, so I'd never see the difference.
The techniques to extend the life of flash drives are well known. You put files that are rewritten often onto a RAM disk. That's how palm computers work. My Handspring gets by with 4MB of memory and is a useful tool. My Zaurus does much more with it's 64MB and a 512MB SD flash card.
When your OS has adequate networking, you don't need to lug around all 500 GB of your music, photos and movies. If your OS has a 12 minute half life on any network, you might lug around an external drive. I leave mine at home tied to a cable modem. It's easier to sync that with everything.
The best laptop is just big enough for a keyboard, screen and network hookups and weighs less than three pounds. It's just fast enough to run your stuff without burning your lap and it does not have sound like a vacuum cleaner. It runs for at least four hours without a charge, ideally twelve, so you don't have to lug around a power brick. Flash drives are part of that laptop.
They are attractive as upgrades to my current laptops. At the predicted price of $90, it's cheaper than most laptop drives on the market. I'll be happy to drop half a pound of noise, heat and power drain from my current laptops when their eight year old drives start to fail.
What, exactly, were you trying to do? What were you trying to protect, from who and did this really do it? When you saw WLAN, is that wide area network or wireless local area network? If it's wireless, why is it you have to worry about that? How much did all of this cost and how many users did it cover?
I've got big doubts whenever someone puts Microsoft and security together. What good is an authenticated user when the OS underneath gets rooted and keylogged by an email or webpage view?
TFA:
The poll by UK charity Developing Patient Partnerships showed more than a third of men and a quarter of women have a drink to cope with stress. Of the 1,000 people polled, 27% of men and 23% of women said they would light up a cigarette in such situations.
Was it really Windoze crapping out on them? It's hard to tell but the indicators are there. We only know what they told the poll and what a third of respondents told the poll was that their crashing computer was their problem. That was more than being fired, because most people are not fired. Other things, like the death of a loved one or crime did not make the list though they might create much greater problems for individuals because those things are rare. IT was more bothersome than listed commuting, though everyone has to commute and it's not fun. Notice that working longer hours, and greater demands from work did not make the top three though most people are doing that. There have been other studies that show that people would rather have their teeth pulled or pay Federal Taxes than fix their broken computer. As Bill Gates is who most people talk to when they turn on their computer at work, we can confidently say that Windoze is a great creator of stress. Bill should be ashamed to have made the top ten because he's nudged aside other common things like co-worker interaction, workplace noise and lack of privacy in the workplace and all the usual things that drive people to self destructive behavior like smoking and drinking.
The root cause of Windoze's power to annoy is that it's linked to number 2 and the user is helpless in a non free environment. If your computer craps out, you might just find yourself looking for another job and there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The computer spys on them and it does not work right and it can hurt them but they have to sit still and take it. Worse, the Wintel press always blames the user. Is there anything else more humiliating than being blamed for things you hate but not being able to do anything about it? The rest is speculation, but humiliated people have a tendency to engage in destructive behavior.
Are more people drinking and smoking? Women are, especially working women who have to use computers all day. Smoking is also one of the few work sanctioned ways to get away from the computer.
Is it killing people? Yes, smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the world. As more women smoke, their rates of lung and other cancer is catching up with men.
Is it all Bill's fault? No, but his help is something most can do without. His "sharp business practice" attitude has been an inspiration to assholes everywhere and his software is responsible for the answers to the above poll. I wonder how much of the "improved efficiency" of IT is due to outsoutsourcing, H1Bs and fewer people forced to do more work, which is more a function of tax structure than anything else. There's real efficiency in electronic records, but there's more with software that does not suck.
His "Oh, it's not so bad," attitude is unfounded at best and what you might expect from M$ or the DMA as they promote, "legitimate" spam at worst. Spamhaus tells us that there's still a big problem, despite steps that most ISPs have taken. The problem will get worse again as the spammers learn to get around those mostly trivial steps. It won't take much effort to read configuration information on broken Windoze machines and make them point to the ISP's SMTP to send mail like the end user does. In the mean time, the botnet continues spew network clogging spam, and DDOS and we all get to pay the price in slow networks and broken computers. It's not enough to sit smug behind your spam filters while the average user gets creamed. The nasties are strengthened and encouraged by that kind of attitude and they can get still you with a DDoS or Distributed Mailbomb.
Flaws in Microsoft's operating system are what enables the nasties. They have to be corrected or avoided to fix the problem. Until then, the botnet will be both a weapon and profit center at everyone's expense. No, the answer is not "trusted" computing or mail servers that waste your time with MENSA puzzles and collect a penny for Bill. The answer is fixing what's broken. Email works despite it's great abuse by a few idiots.
The GPL is enforced like any other copyright and derives it's power from the same copyright laws used by some people to strip you of the four software freedoms.
From what I've read, contact is made with the suspected violator. Most violations are not intentional and everyone is made happy right away. If not, you have to do what other publishers do. This is how the FSF does it.
The free software foundation has plenty of good advice. Just Google for "gpl violation site:fsf.org" You will be taken to:
There would not be any confusion over the issue if there were not for a massive propaganda effort by people who prefer their power and wealth to your freedom.
Broadcom have been doing it for years, and nobody gave a shit then.. why now? It's going to be hard to test the GPL in court when willful infringement has been ignored.
That's about as silly as saying that because no one cares about the GPL, all copyright is invalid. It would be nice if that were true, but it's not. Nor is it true that any one person ignoring a GPL violation invalidates the GPL as a license or the copyright laws it's based on.
The FSF has this to say about GPL violations:
The FSF acts on all GPL violations reported on FSF copyrighted code, and we offer assistance to any other copyright holder who wishes to do the same. But, we cannot act on our own if we do not hold copyright. Thus, be sure to find out who the copyright holders of the software are before reporting a violation.
Only the copyright holder can protect their work. There's nothing I can do if you don't care. If the use of your work to rob someone else of their rights bothers you, do something about it. There are lots of people willing to help. If you don't care, release it under another license. The GPL will continue to serve it's purpose regardless.
That's one for each user, fantastic!
Because they ARE evil. All you have to do is read the article:
It also voiced concern that Microsoft would try to seek royalties from companies that sell and support Linux for using the technology, potentially posing a threat to the free software community. Under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, Linux cannot be distributed if it contains patented technology that requires royalty payments.
That's quite a spin for what I thought they were pantenting, long file names that have been in use since 1995. But it would make things more difficult. Right now all GNU/Linux distributions can easily read and write to fat, fat32 and NTFS. This is despite previous bogus patents on NTFS. It does not take much effort to see where they are going with this new set of bogus patents.
The US should be ashamed of this. For my own purposes I could care less, having migrated from Windoze eight years ago and having plenty of old knoppix CDs around. I also imagine that it will continue to be possible to get copies of the software from countries that don't have software patents. Linux distributors and newbs will have problems though. It makes honest people look like crooks. Honest people have a right to access their data with free software and should not have to jump through dirty hoops to do it. The USPTO sucks life.
Little troll, the facts are obvious and all your silly games are useless. There's a new M$ nasty every month, and it has a half life of 12 minutes on any network. People who don't use M$ junk don't have problems, people who do get popups and corrupted files and machines that don't boot. As much as you would like to blame the users, admins or anyone but Microsoft, the only thing people with computing problems have in common is Microsoft. Replace M$ with Apple, Sun, Linux or BSD and 99.9% of the problems vanish. It's not the users. It's not the people who have to fix Microsoft's problems, it's the software they use.
Don't give me any bull shit about how much people hate M$ or how M$'s popularity is the cause of all the problems. Sure, anyone who's used computers for more than a year or two knows that M$ sucks. It's the Quality, stupid. Most people have no clue about the ethical problems the company has. Yes, there are many people who actually hate M$. That's what you get when you sue public school systems, lie about competitors and do all that other "sharp" business crap. Only a small percentage of the population keeps up with that kind of thing, but a small percentage of many is a lot of people and sooner or later, everyone will know. Performance alone and broken promises are enough to make many people others without a clue hate M$. You can contrast this hatred with the love people have for about any other OS and see what a turd M$ really is.
In short, Microsoft has EARNED it's reputation and all the apologies in the world won't change a thing. After four years of "Security is job 1" and no real changes in system behavior, the public has had enough.
The popularity argument is pure bullshit. Non Microsoft runs most of the web and anything that's mission critical. Those foolish enough to try making M$ do things live to regret it and it has nothing to do with popularity, Geeks and Nerds but everything to do with marketing and crappy software. Apple, Sun, Linux and every other kind of software works better and non have had the kind of automated worm problems M$ has.
From the above, you can imagine that the functionality and features excuse is also bogus. Operating systems robust enough to provide services over the network can also be made with pretty GUIs that are equally robust. There is nothing a Windoze user can do that I can't do better with free software and many things that I can do that they can't without lots of effort and money. I share my classwork with anyone who's interested and I share my music and movies with myself without any of the problems Windoze users suffer just connecting to a network, reading their email or browsing the web.
When is the big Linux worm coming? Never, thanks to the diversity of excellence that a truly free market for software provides. Free software writers also don't make the mistake of mixing content with executable code, unless they are copying someone else's bad implementation for compatibility sake. Still everyone makes mistakes but that still won't do to free software what it does to M$. As an example, imagine Firefox had a problem. It would get about 1/3 of GNU/Linux users. Why? because the rest of them are using other browsers and all of them can stop using the browser with a problem until it's resolved one or two days later. Because Free Software is all about code, binary problems don't automatically propagate across distributions. A Red Hat exploit might not work on Debian and probably won't on Gentoo and won't do anything to a BSD box. The Free Software fix is always easier too. When things go wrong on a free software box, the user downloads the latest and greatest to fix it. The worst case is a rebuild, which preserves all user data and takes less than 20 minutes. In the Windoze world, the user takes out their "original CDs" or blows a few hundred bucks at the computer store for software that's at least two years old and probably has the same problems. Things are much much more difficult for crackers outside of the M$ monoculture of binary crap.
When served a fat turd on bread and a roast beef sandwich, we should show the difference and explain the strong and week points without judging one better than the other.
Windows XP needs dozens of third party add-ons which cost hundreds of dollars before it's remotely useful. It does not even come with a spell checker, does it? M$ has been riding the heals of other people's work forever. Most of those other people got tired of it and started writing free software, so you that you can have everything you want on a single CD that auto configures itself, preserves your current OS and installs itself in 20 minutes or less.
They know what they are doing and it's being done by DRM and stupid laws. The music industry knows CDs are dead and hates them but will take full propaganda advantage of the demise of the retail store. Record stores have always been shaky and shaken down business and it's very difficult to find an independent one today in the face of Virgin, Walmart and other RIAA dump sites. You could say the fix was already in but they will cry and blame it on the "pirates". The RIAA wants to own digital distribution the same way they owned physical media and radio broadcast. They will get there by making it impossible or illegal to listen to their music on a non-DRM encumbered system. Attempts to close "the analog hole" will make sure you can't even enjoy the public airwaves unless you submit to their will. The FCC and your government seem to be going along with this madness.
So, in the end, what are you going to chose - a free system without popular culture or a non free system with commercial crap? With Apple and M$ help, you won't have a choice on new hardware.
That's comforting but I doubt Bill Gates will fire himself.
I can't think of it not happening to them.
Thanks for the link. I love the fake applause and laughter they put onto that track. It's Quality to match their software.
Hi, this is your boss and I absolutely love this thing. If you don't like working here, you probably don't belong here. It's been said better, Sometimes the best solution to moral problems is to just fire all of the unhappy people.
Sarcasm off. This technology is sure to be loved and abused as above. Like you, I doubt any real use can be made of the user's emotions and it will get things wrong, even if you do wire everyone up like a space rabbit. Oh yeah, your boss probably knows who Sefert is, even if you only post at home, though other abuses of technology.
You are either a fanboy or deluded.
Bill Gates can gain everyone's unabashed admiration if he simply stops acting like such an ass and mitigate the harm he's caused. He can:
That's a short list but it would go a long way towards undoing the damage he's done to the world. The balance, would be close to his net contribution to society. As most people think he's done nothing more than purchase, resell and destroy, the balance may be negative. Industry insiders and those who have been on the receiving end of his Copyright Crusade (TM) know better than I do.
Actually, anyone understanding the above statement would realize that M$ compared their 5 year old pig with brand new Linux pigs. I know that Knoppix in 2001 booted and ran a full GUI on a Pentium I with 24MB of RAM, much lower than anything M$ even thought of trying with anything but WinCE. Most users would still consider Red Hat 6.0 a full desktop with more features than XP, and similar things can be said about every other Linux distro from 2001. Notice that Vista is absent from the above and the comparison is nothing more than the usual bullshit from Redmond.
Of course, there's no reason to use five year old software on Linux. Distributions like Damn Small and Feather use lower resource applications to deliver full GUI, office and multimedia functionality, "out of the box" to the average user. Debian, with a little effort can be configured the same way, which is how the developers made DSL and feather, but more can be added with ease until the user decides that performance has actually suffered.
Yeah, the Novel guy quoted in the article mentioned thin clients, which drove hardware requirements down further than the "out of the" box distros that M$ tried. This ignores the fact that other distros are just as easy to obtain and only marginally more difficult to configure. The software Knoppix, Mepis and others use to configure installs is free and will soon be everywhere.
Another gaping logical flaw, of course, is how OLD the M$ software actually is. Windows XP Pro was released in 2001. It's five years old. Had they tried a copy of Knoppix from five years ago, they would have found it works just fine on a Pentium I with 32MB of RAM. Knoppix from that time would drop down to Window Maker without user intervention if it thought KDE would be difficult to run. Most people would consider Window Maker's Next based GUI superior to M$'s, so not much is lost there. Knoppix would drop further down to TWM or command line on further hardware restrictions, which is technically running, though the average user might not be pleased. Microsoft is poised to release Vista, which might make "Legacy" all of your hardware the way XP did: By refusing to instal on some hardware and the obvious lack of third party hardware drivers.
How this is a typical M$ claim: No one else can duplicate the results, no one else wants to because there are easier ways to do what they do and the conclusions are stupid.
I think they were trying to define legacy hardware as a 400MHz PII with 64MB RAM and 2 GB hard disk, typical of computers built between 1998 and 1999. They claim this is the minimum needed to run an office suit and play audio and video under Linux "out of the box". It's also typical of third hand hardware on the way to the third world because Windows XP refuses to install on it.
So their comparison is Microsoft at it's finest. No one else will be able to verify it, it's silly and it's bullshit. Who else besides M$ and a handful of insane hackers could possibly make XP install and find find drivers for all the hardware you would find in 1999? Why would you want to go through all of that effort when it's much easier to run Linux "out of the box"? They mentioned that more memory helps and that's more true for Linux than it is for M$. I've happily used Debian on a PII laptop for more than a year now and I've had better performance and a greater choice of programs than my friends running XP on P4s given the same amount of memory. Linux performance with slightly newer hardware, 1 GHz Athlon with 512MB of RAM, blows them out of the water in every way. I imagine Vista will refuse to install on my Athlon.
First, air is pumped out of a large tank that is connected to one end of the wind tunnel, creating a vacuum inside the tank. Then a valve is opened between the tank and the wind tunnel, sucking a burst of air through the wind tunnel at high velocity. The short run time requires less expensive equipment, unlike the large compressors needed for other wind tunnels that pump air continuously.
I would have thought they could clean and polish by simply operating the thing, but no they have to do it with elbow grease. Remember that scene from the movie Heavy Metal, where aliens suck up two people from the Pentagon? That's one hell of a ride that ends with a bang.
It's nice to see them saving money, but we can only hope they don't send anyone in when the thing is primed.
Answer: You need a real OS.
Try Mepis and end those ugly reboots.
Got some facts to back up your description of said "punk"? I did not find any useful information in the article other than these accusations (bare, but not quite facts):
The reaction was for Canton City Prosecutor Frank Forchione to charge the student as a felon and throw him in jail saying, "Michael said it was a joke. We showed him how we deal with this kind of joke."
If the accusations and reaction are correct, we have petty mischief and a serious over reaction. The article also has the same prosecuter talking about a more serious violation that was treated as a misdemeanor.
I'm not sure what's out of context in the story summary either. How about some details, punk?