Let the responses regarding Sven's support for every WiFi card on earth (as long as it's Oronoco) follow!
You can use ndis wrappers, but this is a simple alternative that works better for old laptops:
Bring old laptop to a good computer store.
Tell clerk you want to buy a wifi card that works with your laptop and will need to test them.
If clerk refuses your request or tells you you have to buy a card first, go back to step 1.
Ask if the store has normal and open wifi. A really good store will. If so, after inserting cards use ifconfig and ping to make sure things work.
Without wifi, you need to watch your kernel messages to see if the card is recognized and loaded. Informative messages should turn up in a file like/var/log/messages.
There you have it. No need to dig through "thousands of posts" for serial numbers and all that Windoze-like jazz. Linux, when you give it friendly equipment, just works. There's enough friendly equipment and stores that you don't need the other shit. Let them feel the pain instead of you.
I called their help center. After an hour or so of "escalating" my call betewen one cube and another in the Indian call center, I got the official response.
"Sir, I suggest you put the brick into your lap, very hard."
I don't really own an Xbox, but I consider that less than friendly advice. Nor do I see how it would help the brick dissipate heat.
If you mean virtual desktops as in those provided by VirtuaWin for windows or the pager applet that's in practically every Linux desktop environment, then yeah, those are useful.
Hey, what a nice workaround. It's amazing how random programmers can do a better job with windoze than Microsoft can. If Microsoft were free software, it might catch up to the Linux world in five to ten years. The question then would be why anyone would bother trying to fix all the underlying problems that give the system a 12 minute halflife on any network when they have a free system that works now.
That thing in E16, on the other hand, where you move the mouse to the edge and suddenly you get another desktop (without changing the pager..)... that's annoying as hell.
Increase your edge resistance and you will like it. Being able to slide programs off to the side without messing with a pager is very nice when it does not backfire often. Being able to move from one desktop to another quickly by mousing makes your desktop space more continuous feeling.
You might also look into other cool e16 features. Their pager has yet to be matched, with very fast movement of thumbnails from one space to another. Between that and iconboxes, all of your running programs are at easy reach. Compare that to M$'s shitty little icon bar which gives you lots of tiny icons that are impossible to tell apart and have no space to open.
VirtuaWin, btw, is stable, fast, and small. It may not offer fancy things like changing wallpapers on the other desktops, but is that really necessary?
No, but it's easy to implement so why not? Having different backgrounds for different desktops gives me one more visual clue to where I left my work.
As long as it has a long enough range, it could be useful to just take your mouse with you when you go away from the computer
You and I both know that this is yet another attempt to get around M$'s single screen interface. Because M$ has yet to make virtual desktops work, most people don't have it and suffer desktop congestion. A brave few have ventured into the expensive world of dual monitors, but they are still limited to the screen space and that's not enough for them. Others, such as Nvidia, have done the right thing and made virtual desktops but the last time I saw one it was slow and crash prone as you can expect anything M$ wants to be "first" with. This goofy mouse is just another attempt to gain useful space. On any system using X and a decent window manager, you can get a popup for your IM and email and it works. On Winblows, the pop up might not rise to the top and could be lost in the congestion if it did. That's the reason they made this thing.
What he's really saying is that you have to suppress all other acts to have the mega-stupid star sell millions of albums. Without a choke point, such as broadcast radio of the 20th century, there is no ability to focus pop culture and it drifts where it will.
This will be good for everyone but the current three monopoly publishers. Popular taste will do a better job of finding talent than payolla in the form of coke and whores. A more distributed music distribution system will be more competitive for artists and the money that now flows into a few hands will flow into many. The job will get done and people will still pay the piper.
For those that hate MS and buy and xbox to put Linux on it, these aren't customers who will later have an MS-centric media center.
But people who really want a cheap computer that runs Linux are going to buy a used one or something from WalMart for less than half the XBox price. Microsoft will tell this to their investors and your overpriced, very difficult to configure DRM'd M$Linux box will show up on their statistics as M$ owned.
The best way to make Microsoft lose money is to recommend hardware based on it's merits. Sony and Nintendo make better gaming consoles. Others make cheaper and better general purpose computers. Microsoft will lose $126 per unit if they manage to sell every single one. If they sell none, they lose their entire $470/$520 cost. Spending your $400 on something that works is what's best for you and worst for M$.
oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.
Not me, that's for sure. Smelly people because they are pathologically inconsiderate and a public health hazard.
For those too lazy or scared for their wimpy browser to click through, here's the relevant dope on Bill Gates:
The photo [a mug shot] also unintentionally captures classic Gates: completely wrecked hair, terrible looking clothes, generally slovenly appearance, and two glazed eyes staring out past thick glasses. This image changed very little over the bulk of Gates' career, with the shower taps running at much less frequency than the money taps. It should also be noted that this isn't some heaping of sour grapes from the gutter staring up at Bill's mountain of success; throughout the time he has been known in public, Bill's dedication to all-nighters and in-the-trenches energy ensured a number of high-profile press conferences and demonstrations where his lack of hygiene became as breathtaking as the product being demonstrated.
"Breathtaking", that's a nice way to say both he and his wares stink.
I'm going to take my daily bath now. That, brushing my teeth and applying anti-perspirent takes less than half an hour a day. It's also very cheap. I do it for the children and everyone else.
Come to think of it, I've never met a Linux user who did smell. Can we please bury this silly stereotype that Bill Gates has projected onto his enemies? It's almost as bad as a MSWord attachment to email.
Yeah, what a bunch of morons. This is a typical response of an entrenched cartel. "We've done nothing wrong, you are a bunch of theives. We're going to do it some more, fuck off."
That this is turning off music buyers is a growing story. It also points to their envisioned future.
If they want to be selling music they need to get their act together. Both Sony and EMI's stupid DRM fail to work with the leading portable music player, the IPod. Get it yet? Even if this shit had "worked" and not actually hosed the user's system, it would still be a "broken" CD because it does not do what customers want it to - transfer to a portable music player.
I suppose they can grunt and say, "What's the problem? Jus go use deh Itunes or WMP." Well, well, well where does that leave brick and mortar retailers? Out of luck, that's where. Nothing new there. Given their policy of RIAA only or no RIAA at all and other crappy anti-competitive practices of old, they have always hated retailers because they have an inherent loyalty to the actual music fan.
Oh yeah, they hate their artists too and I would not buy stock in any of them. That means they hate everyone.
In talking with a few non-technical family members, part of the reason that this rootkit business is making headway with non-techy folks is because it is clear, in non-technical terms, that their music cd is "breaking" their computer.... Now they have a reason to blame their random computer slowness and its abberant behaviour on a big corporate monolith
Yes that's true, and it's an anomaly that should be taken advantage of to promote free software and user control.
Sony is being made a scapegoat for the relative complexity of maintaining a secure and clean system.
What? I think you understand the issue less than your non technical friends.
The only difference between Sony's DRM and any other is that the popular press noticed and reported it. You seem to understand this, but not the implications and you underestimate your friends.
People really are angry for the right reasons. No one asks for DRM and no one selling computers or software ever tells them about it. What's sold are partial advantages of digital media. Less honest vendors promise all the advantages of digital media but actually deliver almost none of them other than portability. Cases like this show the real problem of all DRM: when you can't read and write files on your system but someone else can, that someone else owns your computer. They understand that WM / the new Napster, Ipod and others do the same kinds of things with more or less honesty about it.
Now's the time to pop in a copy of Mepis or some other good distro. The longer you wait, the more entangled in DRM trash your friends become and the more they have to lose. The demonstration is even more appropriate if your friend's computers are all crapped up.
I did this a while back with a 5 watt signal booster and a small antenna on the roof.
Soldering a longer antenna onto my tunecast 2 from Walmart made it cover most of my four bedroom house.
My radios are not cheap, though. You can get some very good tuners at thrift stores. Any digital tuner is good, though not expensive. Really cheap analog receivers are terrible and should be avoided. My wife's favorite little boom box, which she uses for CDs, does not work on FM at all anymore.
If you are really poor, you only have one room, so I'm not sure what the problem is.
Mepis on the go uses a CD for the OS and USB for your home. This way, you get a fat distribution and a big writable space. The penalty is speed, which Puppy overcomes.
It seems to me that if the government goes further down this path then even possessing works that aren't redistributable is going to be like playing with a loaded gun.
At the very least, it makes putting a copyright file on a network riskier, even if you have no intention of letting anyone else know about it. An easy and common example would be sharing music with yourself by sftp. They could claim it's an attempt to share with others.
The real endgame is to make the internet look like broadcast TV. Only a few will have the power to share anything. Running a server is already forbidden by your ISP, despite the fact that many commercial applications do just that and would not work otherwise. The big publishers are closer to getting their way every day and it makes me sick. So much for free press in this country.
Silver tongued, assie_a, agrees emphatically with the advice given:
Well no shit, sherlock. If a company feels that IM software (such as AIM or MSN) is a security risk, then of course they should consider Skype a security risk. It's called consistency.
Looking at the fine article and the reasons sited, Assie_a's silver might be lead. Better check the water cooler where you work, buddy.
Now let's talk consistency. The reasons for banning IM and Skype:
Skype is not standards-compliant, allowing it and any vulnerability to pass through corporate firewalls.
Skype's encryption is closed source and prone to man-in-the-middle attacks. There are also some unanswered questions about how well the keys are managed.
Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that have already banned the service.
Blah, blah, blah. The same things can be said for Windoze, IE, Outlook and other crap big dumb companies use every day. There is zero value added by closing IM, Skpe and other holes in the M$ strainer. There might be some truth to what they say if the company were using relatively secure and standards compliant free software to begin with. In that case, the non-free stuff would stick out like a sore thumb, but they would not be nearly so plagued with wormed out networks to begin with.
Then they have legal FUD.
Skype is undetectable, untraceable, and unauditable, putting organizations that are subject to compliance laws at risk.
The question of whether VoIP calls constitute a business record is a legal quagmire. Throwing Skype into the communications mix further clouds the issue.
Good GOD, do you realize that people have undetectable, untraceable, unauditable, risky conversations with their MOUTHS at big dumb companies every day? The horror and legal quagmire of verbal communications can not be understated! How dare you get around big brother's wire taps. It's off to the place that knows no darness for you. Make them suffer!
"The other is extreme programming-the concept where you might have two people working on a given piece of code and the idea is that two minds are better than one. Because you can find problems faster."
Treadwell said many teams within Microsoft rely on Scrum as a way to turn out quality software on time and in tune with user requirements.
and gentle reader, blowdart, notices The SQL Server product that's very late and has had to have features disabled.
Golly, Mr. Treadwell, just imagine if it were free software. Many eyes, shallow bugs, contributions from the user base, on and on. Oh yeah, that free stuff is why you have "extreme" programming methods and so much sweat. You will get there soon enough.
All laud the geniouses at Microsoft. One day, the great one at the top will get it and all will get it. Then, they might catch up and be useful again.
Anyone know offhand how they do the photo tagging? I use Picasa and do my tagging manually.... I think Picasa uses data files in each directory and some kind of central database.
I don't really know what pica or riya do but it would not take much. Most image formats have room in the image itself for tags. You can see and set them with editors like gimp or hexedit. The name itself, if unique, is enough for most databases and the information could easily fit into the picture. All of it seems creepy and invasive to me.
I organize with directory structure hand and serve the results myself on my cable modem. I like my methods of organization better than any robot's and ALL of my pictures are shared. Only a few people are interested in them, so they get what they need despite the cable company's obnoxious upload speed crimps. The result will always work and I don't have to worry about a non free database format going away.
It might sound tedious but it's not. I've got a photo album with family, friends, house, do and user directories. Anytime I photograph an event I make a labled directory like 2005_09_12_uncle_visit and stick everything in it with an index made by konqueror or igal. The directory is moved to an appropriate directory on the cable box and symlinked to others, including a big chron directory with everything organized by year. Movie files are tedious, because my tools do not automatically index them. Finding things is as easy as looking in the right place or time. Occasionally, I tar the whole thing and move it to another drive to ward off dissaster. The whole indexing process takes about five minutes more than simply dumping the files would. Automating the process might be nice, but I'd never trust some non free software to do it.
These services touches on issues of free and non free versions of the web. In a free web, people have the tools to do everything themselves and it's easy. In the non free web, things are hidden, difficult and what you can't do is used as leverage to gain information that should be private. In a world with companies like Choice Point, my method gives my friends what they want but not the spammers. My friends can recognize the people in the pictures I have and are not very interested in pictures of people they don't know. They can find what they are interested in about as easily as I can but there are no files with people's names and other identifying information on them. In the non free world, people teach someone else's database the names, addresses and faces of all their friends and family for the ability to point to some a page full of adverts that won't be there in a few years.
This is where a little bit of knowledge can be a bad thing.... If you do decide to DIY, I suggest you buy [fancy caps]
A lot of knowledge never makes up for bad judgement. It's broke, what you do won't make things worse. This is a case of little to lose and something to gain.
The board is dead or flaky because it has cheap caps. Do you think putting new cheap caps will be worse? The worst you can do is screw up the traces with a cheap soldering iron. Then your dead board remains dead and you move on.
Back in 2002, I fixed a board this way. The cheapest caps from a reputable dealer cost me less than $10 and the board still works. I had little to lose and some time. It was worth the time and money. It cost much less than buying a new motherboard. It has run continuously and still serves as an email spam filter and back up computer.
"I don't like it because our competition is selling the product for less than we are. That will cut into our profits. How do people expect me to keep fuel in my Hummer and my Lear jet in the air? It's not fair!"
I don't think you understand how the Microsoft Channel Provider system works. The largest part of that channel and collectively the largest retailer of Microsoft software is the humble mom and pop store. The big sellers get huge discounts while the small shops pay something very close to retail and manage to sell $400 software packages. The times are changing, it seems and Microsoft is slapping them in the face.
Historically, Microsoft pushed their software through the likes of Dell but supported it through a network of local shops. There is no real way for the "majors" to service all of the stuff they sell outside of contracting local firms to send to large businesses. Dell has no physical presence and people like Gateway who tried that lived to regret it. Places like ComUSA are a joke. Fixing M$ bugs and "making it work" in the real world has and still falls on everyone else. The dirty work of saving data files, wiping and reloading windoze has always gone to family members or local shops. It is there, at the local shop that people pay $99 for the retail version of Windoze because they lost or never had their "original" CD and don't want to buy a new computer.
Shaking up the channel network is the biggest change M$ has made to it's business model since dumping VB. I imagine they realize they won't be able to sell $400 packages which contain little more than a productivity suite and email client with a spell checker. They might also realize that computers are so cheap, people will just buy new ones (Good for me but not Earth friendly!) The local mom and pop store already makes next to nothing by selling the software and most of it on servicing it. This, however, will make them look like fools or thieves. Worse, it will legitimize those horrible spammers who sell pirated Windoze and further disintegrate what's left of the chain of trust that starts at Redmond and ends at the local store. It's a kick in the teeth to people who have already been treated poorly.
Microsoft is really a company whose business model ran out of steam and is flailing for a new one. Outside of the DRM lockdown nightmare world of "Trusted Computing" they have none. Free software now does everything M$ can and more better than M$. Good bye and good riddance.
While there are a bunch of iriver devices showing up on that page, watch out the devices are quirky. I bought my wife their 20GB jukebox for Christmas two years ago and we are both happy with it. About a year ago, I wanted to buy their newer 5gig device but found out they don't play ogg. Experiments with their cheaper devices were dissappointing to say the least. My experience matches newer versions of the same like this and this. USBfs did not work out of the box, so back to the store it moved.
I finally gave up and bought a cheap mp3 player and made a script of two to randomly copy oggs, convert it to wav and then to mp3. That works, but it's a pain.
Another workaround for people confined to their desks is to use an fm radio transmitter and your laptop. The cheap mp3 player has an fm radio, setting it to my tuner's frequency fixes the play problem. An antenna mod makes it easy enough to move around the room without too much loss of quality. When I need to be in the mood and on more than one computer, this is working OK for me.
I'm still waiting for a nice ogg player. One day soon, I'll try a Samsung and see how that goes.
If you plan to use the Lindows example, then you can't leave out the settlement they got from MS. Why did you leave that out?
I can leave out the settlement because it's secret and besides the point. The exact details, like most M$ contracts, are secret. For all you really know, Bill promissed not to break anyone's kneecaps. As someone else has pointed out, my original point was that M$ was going to bankrupt this student. Linspire lost millions of dollars in brand awareness by that name change, so you know they spent much more than any 22 year old could afford protecting themselves. That, as you requested, is exactly how M$ can bankrupt you and me to steal whatever you or I own of interest to them.
Lindows DID fight off MS, they still exist.
They lost the name game, and that's what this thread is all about. That they survived the loss of their name is nice but besides the point. The point is that M$ treats their developers and customers like shit.
Give me the exact procss MS could use to bankrupt someone in this case.
When you are a 22 year old, the first trip to the lawyer is more than you have. Chances are, you have school loans and are just getting by. Miss a bill or two and the late fees alone will screw you.
They don't own the trademark. If they take him to court, what would they claim?
The same thing they claimed against Lindows. Why don't you tell me that Lindows was OK because M$ did not own that word? Lindows can still use the name in Holland, if they want, but that goes to show you what kind of legal bills you can run into fighting a beast like M$. The bills can come at you from anywhere in the world. If a big company like Lindows could not fight off M$, what makes you think a 22 year old with a program he had not sold in a year could?
He signed away his rights to the name. What did he expect?
More lies, huge legal bills and going bankrupt for nothing. That's what he would have gotten if he fought. M$ would have just used another name and no one would have known better.
What a nice way to treat your customers, Bill. Wouldn't it have been nicer to have used some of your money to, you know, make a deal and pay him for the name. No, you and your boys would rather threaten and steal from the people buying your software and making things for your crappy OS. What a beautiful ecosystem.
His entire argument is that if you make changes to the source code, Red Hat support won't debug your modifications for you as part of their basic support package. I can do whatever the hell I want with GPL'd open source, short of refusing to share my changes when distributing binaries to other users.
Oh, but there's more. If your mods are excellent and usefull, they might be rolled into the upstream sources and officially "supported" by having others continue to mod and improve things for you. That's why programs like the GNU debugger have 87 authors, which is way more resources than any "traditional" company can afford to lavish on any program.
This is a typical Microsoft smear that should backfire every time. They take their perceived weaknesses and project them onto others. This form is more insulting than most. The unstated argument is, "When X grows up, they will be just like us in all the bad ways but lack our strengths." Everytime some M$ spokesvole says something like this, rest assured it's an admission they don't have something people really want, they are not going to provide it and someone else does it better.
I do not believe that businesses with a product that is related to Open Source will be, or are, the main driver of Open Source software development.
Who said that? Even the IBM rep quoted credited the developer community as a source of innovation. Did I miss something in the article or goof the summary?
People are getting it. I submitted this story because of it's friendly portrayal of free software by a mainstream news outlet. David talked to people who say most of what you say, ORiely, Thoughtstream and IBM. He had less time to understand and much less space to write about it, but I think he's got the right general ideas. I thought that was very cool for such a mainstream publication as the BBC. My title was something like, "BBC dispels Open Source Business Model FUD."
Slashdot Mirror
You can use ndis wrappers, but this is a simple alternative that works better for old laptops:
There you have it. No need to dig through "thousands of posts" for serial numbers and all that Windoze-like jazz. Linux, when you give it friendly equipment, just works. There's enough friendly equipment and stores that you don't need the other shit. Let them feel the pain instead of you.
"Sir, I suggest you put the brick into your lap, very hard."
I don't really own an Xbox, but I consider that less than friendly advice. Nor do I see how it would help the brick dissipate heat.
The DIY string is much better.
Hey, what a nice workaround. It's amazing how random programmers can do a better job with windoze than Microsoft can. If Microsoft were free software, it might catch up to the Linux world in five to ten years. The question then would be why anyone would bother trying to fix all the underlying problems that give the system a 12 minute halflife on any network when they have a free system that works now.
That thing in E16, on the other hand, where you move the mouse to the edge and suddenly you get another desktop (without changing the pager..)... that's annoying as hell.
Increase your edge resistance and you will like it. Being able to slide programs off to the side without messing with a pager is very nice when it does not backfire often. Being able to move from one desktop to another quickly by mousing makes your desktop space more continuous feeling.
You might also look into other cool e16 features. Their pager has yet to be matched, with very fast movement of thumbnails from one space to another. Between that and iconboxes, all of your running programs are at easy reach. Compare that to M$'s shitty little icon bar which gives you lots of tiny icons that are impossible to tell apart and have no space to open.
VirtuaWin, btw, is stable, fast, and small. It may not offer fancy things like changing wallpapers on the other desktops, but is that really necessary?
No, but it's easy to implement so why not? Having different backgrounds for different desktops gives me one more visual clue to where I left my work.
You and I both know that this is yet another attempt to get around M$'s single screen interface. Because M$ has yet to make virtual desktops work, most people don't have it and suffer desktop congestion. A brave few have ventured into the expensive world of dual monitors, but they are still limited to the screen space and that's not enough for them. Others, such as Nvidia, have done the right thing and made virtual desktops but the last time I saw one it was slow and crash prone as you can expect anything M$ wants to be "first" with. This goofy mouse is just another attempt to gain useful space. On any system using X and a decent window manager, you can get a popup for your IM and email and it works. On Winblows, the pop up might not rise to the top and could be lost in the congestion if it did. That's the reason they made this thing.
This will be good for everyone but the current three monopoly publishers. Popular taste will do a better job of finding talent than payolla in the form of coke and whores. A more distributed music distribution system will be more competitive for artists and the money that now flows into a few hands will flow into many. The job will get done and people will still pay the piper.
But people who really want a cheap computer that runs Linux are going to buy a used one or something from WalMart for less than half the XBox price. Microsoft will tell this to their investors and your overpriced, very difficult to configure DRM'd M$Linux box will show up on their statistics as M$ owned.
The best way to make Microsoft lose money is to recommend hardware based on it's merits. Sony and Nintendo make better gaming consoles. Others make cheaper and better general purpose computers. Microsoft will lose $126 per unit if they manage to sell every single one. If they sell none, they lose their entire $470/$520 cost. Spending your $400 on something that works is what's best for you and worst for M$.
Each one of those cables is hand painted by Bill Gates himself. That's got to be worth something, no?
Not me, that's for sure. Smelly people because they are pathologically inconsiderate and a public health hazard.
For those too lazy or scared for their wimpy browser to click through, here's the relevant dope on Bill Gates:
The photo [a mug shot] also unintentionally captures classic Gates: completely wrecked hair, terrible looking clothes, generally slovenly appearance, and two glazed eyes staring out past thick glasses. This image changed very little over the bulk of Gates' career, with the shower taps running at much less frequency than the money taps. It should also be noted that this isn't some heaping of sour grapes from the gutter staring up at Bill's mountain of success; throughout the time he has been known in public, Bill's dedication to all-nighters and in-the-trenches energy ensured a number of high-profile press conferences and demonstrations where his lack of hygiene became as breathtaking as the product being demonstrated.
"Breathtaking", that's a nice way to say both he and his wares stink.
I'm going to take my daily bath now. That, brushing my teeth and applying anti-perspirent takes less than half an hour a day. It's also very cheap. I do it for the children and everyone else.
Come to think of it, I've never met a Linux user who did smell. Can we please bury this silly stereotype that Bill Gates has projected onto his enemies? It's almost as bad as a MSWord attachment to email.
That this is turning off music buyers is a growing story. It also points to their envisioned future.
If they want to be selling music they need to get their act together. Both Sony and EMI's stupid DRM fail to work with the leading portable music player, the IPod. Get it yet? Even if this shit had "worked" and not actually hosed the user's system, it would still be a "broken" CD because it does not do what customers want it to - transfer to a portable music player.
I suppose they can grunt and say, "What's the problem? Jus go use deh Itunes or WMP." Well, well, well where does that leave brick and mortar retailers? Out of luck, that's where. Nothing new there. Given their policy of RIAA only or no RIAA at all and other crappy anti-competitive practices of old, they have always hated retailers because they have an inherent loyalty to the actual music fan.
Oh yeah, they hate their artists too and I would not buy stock in any of them. That means they hate everyone.
Yes that's true, and it's an anomaly that should be taken advantage of to promote free software and user control.
Sony is being made a scapegoat for the relative complexity of maintaining a secure and clean system.
What? I think you understand the issue less than your non technical friends.
The only difference between Sony's DRM and any other is that the popular press noticed and reported it. You seem to understand this, but not the implications and you underestimate your friends.
People really are angry for the right reasons. No one asks for DRM and no one selling computers or software ever tells them about it. What's sold are partial advantages of digital media. Less honest vendors promise all the advantages of digital media but actually deliver almost none of them other than portability. Cases like this show the real problem of all DRM: when you can't read and write files on your system but someone else can, that someone else owns your computer. They understand that WM / the new Napster, Ipod and others do the same kinds of things with more or less honesty about it.
Now's the time to pop in a copy of Mepis or some other good distro. The longer you wait, the more entangled in DRM trash your friends become and the more they have to lose. The demonstration is even more appropriate if your friend's computers are all crapped up.
Soldering a longer antenna onto my tunecast 2 from Walmart made it cover most of my four bedroom house.
My radios are not cheap, though. You can get some very good tuners at thrift stores. Any digital tuner is good, though not expensive. Really cheap analog receivers are terrible and should be avoided. My wife's favorite little boom box, which she uses for CDs, does not work on FM at all anymore.
If you are really poor, you only have one room, so I'm not sure what the problem is.
The more options you have, the better things are.
At the very least, it makes putting a copyright file on a network riskier, even if you have no intention of letting anyone else know about it. An easy and common example would be sharing music with yourself by sftp. They could claim it's an attempt to share with others.
The real endgame is to make the internet look like broadcast TV. Only a few will have the power to share anything. Running a server is already forbidden by your ISP, despite the fact that many commercial applications do just that and would not work otherwise. The big publishers are closer to getting their way every day and it makes me sick. So much for free press in this country.
Silver tongued, assie_a, agrees emphatically with the advice given:
Well no shit, sherlock. If a company feels that IM software (such as AIM or MSN) is a security risk, then of course they should consider Skype a security risk. It's called consistency.
Looking at the fine article and the reasons sited, Assie_a's silver might be lead. Better check the water cooler where you work, buddy.
Now let's talk consistency. The reasons for banning IM and Skype:
Blah, blah, blah. The same things can be said for Windoze, IE, Outlook and other crap big dumb companies use every day. There is zero value added by closing IM, Skpe and other holes in the M$ strainer. There might be some truth to what they say if the company were using relatively secure and standards compliant free software to begin with. In that case, the non-free stuff would stick out like a sore thumb, but they would not be nearly so plagued with wormed out networks to begin with.
Then they have legal FUD.
Good GOD, do you realize that people have undetectable, untraceable, unauditable, risky conversations with their MOUTHS at big dumb companies every day? The horror and legal quagmire of verbal communications can not be understated! How dare you get around big brother's wire taps. It's off to the place that knows no darness for you. Make them suffer!
Do people actually pay for advice like that?
"The other is extreme programming-the concept where you might have two people working on a given piece of code and the idea is that two minds are better than one. Because you can find problems faster."
Treadwell said many teams within Microsoft rely on Scrum as a way to turn out quality software on time and in tune with user requirements.
and gentle reader, blowdart, notices The SQL Server product that's very late and has had to have features disabled.
Golly, Mr. Treadwell, just imagine if it were free software. Many eyes, shallow bugs, contributions from the user base, on and on. Oh yeah, that free stuff is why you have "extreme" programming methods and so much sweat. You will get there soon enough.
All laud the geniouses at Microsoft. One day, the great one at the top will get it and all will get it. Then, they might catch up and be useful again.
I don't really know what pica or riya do but it would not take much. Most image formats have room in the image itself for tags. You can see and set them with editors like gimp or hexedit. The name itself, if unique, is enough for most databases and the information could easily fit into the picture. All of it seems creepy and invasive to me.
I organize with directory structure hand and serve the results myself on my cable modem. I like my methods of organization better than any robot's and ALL of my pictures are shared. Only a few people are interested in them, so they get what they need despite the cable company's obnoxious upload speed crimps. The result will always work and I don't have to worry about a non free database format going away.
It might sound tedious but it's not. I've got a photo album with family, friends, house, do and user directories. Anytime I photograph an event I make a labled directory like 2005_09_12_uncle_visit and stick everything in it with an index made by konqueror or igal. The directory is moved to an appropriate directory on the cable box and symlinked to others, including a big chron directory with everything organized by year. Movie files are tedious, because my tools do not automatically index them. Finding things is as easy as looking in the right place or time. Occasionally, I tar the whole thing and move it to another drive to ward off dissaster. The whole indexing process takes about five minutes more than simply dumping the files would. Automating the process might be nice, but I'd never trust some non free software to do it.
These services touches on issues of free and non free versions of the web. In a free web, people have the tools to do everything themselves and it's easy. In the non free web, things are hidden, difficult and what you can't do is used as leverage to gain information that should be private. In a world with companies like Choice Point, my method gives my friends what they want but not the spammers. My friends can recognize the people in the pictures I have and are not very interested in pictures of people they don't know. They can find what they are interested in about as easily as I can but there are no files with people's names and other identifying information on them. In the non free world, people teach someone else's database the names, addresses and faces of all their friends and family for the ability to point to some a page full of adverts that won't be there in a few years.
A lot of knowledge never makes up for bad judgement. It's broke, what you do won't make things worse. This is a case of little to lose and something to gain.
The board is dead or flaky because it has cheap caps. Do you think putting new cheap caps will be worse? The worst you can do is screw up the traces with a cheap soldering iron. Then your dead board remains dead and you move on.
Back in 2002, I fixed a board this way. The cheapest caps from a reputable dealer cost me less than $10 and the board still works. I had little to lose and some time. It was worth the time and money. It cost much less than buying a new motherboard. It has run continuously and still serves as an email spam filter and back up computer.
I don't think you understand how the Microsoft Channel Provider system works. The largest part of that channel and collectively the largest retailer of Microsoft software is the humble mom and pop store. The big sellers get huge discounts while the small shops pay something very close to retail and manage to sell $400 software packages. The times are changing, it seems and Microsoft is slapping them in the face.
Historically, Microsoft pushed their software through the likes of Dell but supported it through a network of local shops. There is no real way for the "majors" to service all of the stuff they sell outside of contracting local firms to send to large businesses. Dell has no physical presence and people like Gateway who tried that lived to regret it. Places like ComUSA are a joke. Fixing M$ bugs and "making it work" in the real world has and still falls on everyone else. The dirty work of saving data files, wiping and reloading windoze has always gone to family members or local shops. It is there, at the local shop that people pay $99 for the retail version of Windoze because they lost or never had their "original" CD and don't want to buy a new computer.
Shaking up the channel network is the biggest change M$ has made to it's business model since dumping VB. I imagine they realize they won't be able to sell $400 packages which contain little more than a productivity suite and email client with a spell checker. They might also realize that computers are so cheap, people will just buy new ones (Good for me but not Earth friendly!) The local mom and pop store already makes next to nothing by selling the software and most of it on servicing it. This, however, will make them look like fools or thieves. Worse, it will legitimize those horrible spammers who sell pirated Windoze and further disintegrate what's left of the chain of trust that starts at Redmond and ends at the local store. It's a kick in the teeth to people who have already been treated poorly.
Microsoft is really a company whose business model ran out of steam and is flailing for a new one. Outside of the DRM lockdown nightmare world of "Trusted Computing" they have none. Free software now does everything M$ can and more better than M$. Good bye and good riddance.
I finally gave up and bought a cheap mp3 player and made a script of two to randomly copy oggs, convert it to wav and then to mp3. That works, but it's a pain.
Another workaround for people confined to their desks is to use an fm radio transmitter and your laptop. The cheap mp3 player has an fm radio, setting it to my tuner's frequency fixes the play problem. An antenna mod makes it easy enough to move around the room without too much loss of quality. When I need to be in the mood and on more than one computer, this is working OK for me.
I'm still waiting for a nice ogg player. One day soon, I'll try a Samsung and see how that goes.
I can leave out the settlement because it's secret and besides the point. The exact details, like most M$ contracts, are secret. For all you really know, Bill promissed not to break anyone's kneecaps. As someone else has pointed out, my original point was that M$ was going to bankrupt this student. Linspire lost millions of dollars in brand awareness by that name change, so you know they spent much more than any 22 year old could afford protecting themselves. That, as you requested, is exactly how M$ can bankrupt you and me to steal whatever you or I own of interest to them.
Lindows DID fight off MS, they still exist.
They lost the name game, and that's what this thread is all about. That they survived the loss of their name is nice but besides the point. The point is that M$ treats their developers and customers like shit.
When you are a 22 year old, the first trip to the lawyer is more than you have. Chances are, you have school loans and are just getting by. Miss a bill or two and the late fees alone will screw you.
They don't own the trademark. If they take him to court, what would they claim?
The same thing they claimed against Lindows. Why don't you tell me that Lindows was OK because M$ did not own that word? Lindows can still use the name in Holland, if they want, but that goes to show you what kind of legal bills you can run into fighting a beast like M$. The bills can come at you from anywhere in the world. If a big company like Lindows could not fight off M$, what makes you think a 22 year old with a program he had not sold in a year could?
More lies, huge legal bills and going bankrupt for nothing. That's what he would have gotten if he fought. M$ would have just used another name and no one would have known better.
What a nice way to treat your customers, Bill. Wouldn't it have been nicer to have used some of your money to, you know, make a deal and pay him for the name. No, you and your boys would rather threaten and steal from the people buying your software and making things for your crappy OS. What a beautiful ecosystem.
Oh, but there's more. If your mods are excellent and usefull, they might be rolled into the upstream sources and officially "supported" by having others continue to mod and improve things for you. That's why programs like the GNU debugger have 87 authors, which is way more resources than any "traditional" company can afford to lavish on any program.
This is a typical Microsoft smear that should backfire every time. They take their perceived weaknesses and project them onto others. This form is more insulting than most. The unstated argument is, "When X grows up, they will be just like us in all the bad ways but lack our strengths." Everytime some M$ spokesvole says something like this, rest assured it's an admission they don't have something people really want, they are not going to provide it and someone else does it better.
Who said that? Even the IBM rep quoted credited the developer community as a source of innovation. Did I miss something in the article or goof the summary?
People are getting it. I submitted this story because of it's friendly portrayal of free software by a mainstream news outlet. David talked to people who say most of what you say, ORiely, Thoughtstream and IBM. He had less time to understand and much less space to write about it, but I think he's got the right general ideas. I thought that was very cool for such a mainstream publication as the BBC. My title was something like, "BBC dispels Open Source Business Model FUD."