little to no evidence that shows that Linux is gaining popularity on desktop PCs, other than these "wishful thinking" articles from Linux company CEOs.
You are not looking hard enough. There's hardly a person in tech that has not heard of Linux and want to play with it if they have not already done so. Most people who give free software a real chance discover for themselves how good it is and don't go back, ever. There are lots of average people, like myself, who no longer have anything to do with M$ junk on their desktops.
The upgrade cost to Vista, for most companies, is effectively $0 because it comes with new PCs. Contrast this with yearly application updates for Photoshop, Quickbooks, anti-virus,, anti-spyware, et al. which can run thousands of dollars
Now I know you have your head up your ass because the above is self contradicting. The upgrade cost to Vista is the cost of Vista and everything else that has to be replaced for few real feature gains, like computers that work just fine. M$ Office division has a 70% profit to earnings ratio, do you think that comes from home sales? The cost of upgrading to Linux is much smaller.
"limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others."
I think they mean that it prohibits other formats. That is, of course, what a good specification does.
Even this generous interpretation is an exaggeration that reeks of M$'s characteristic dishonesty. Specifying a format for document exchange and archival will not keep anyone from using their favorite editor. They will simply have to copy that document into an editor that will save in the correct format. M$, of course, wants the more clueless lawmakers to arrive at your conclusion - that somehow this is giving a Sun an exclusive fromat franchise. As you pointed out, the standard is free for the taking, so M$ can quickly tack on the format translator and stick it into a Windoze update. Because the standard was developed in the open, M$ has only M$ to blame for their lack of product today.
An AC with his head up his ass, spews a bunch of Windoze centeric FUD out and asks:
Go ahead, enlighten us as to what is going to happen when 100 million people switch from 'Windoze'.
The same thing that's happened to the 5 million or so Mac users and the 5 million or so Linux users: Absolutely nothing bad. The system itself has reasonable defaults and give the user a clue. The system itself also has a way of getting that cool software, if it's not already loaded, without having to download it from some random spyware shop. Root passwords should not have to be entered often, so this should come as a shock to the user of a good distro. These systems are already out there and they already don't have Windoze type problems. The 12 minute windoze half life does not require user intervention. Anything is better than that.
desktop machines tend to be default-permit because desktop users are completely unwilling to deal with an alternative arrangement.
What you have seen is users rejecting poor [Windoze] implementation of privilege separation. My wife has no problems with a non root account on Mepis. It lets her run what she needs without being able to affect the system. The permissions are a little lose for my taste and the inclusion of non-free software like Macromedia Flash is a bad idea, but the restrictions are good enough. You don't have to annoy the user to keep bad things from happening.
The idea of only allowing 15 applications is not as good an idea as the usual pid uid system. First, each of those applications are actually a whole collection of programs so the problem is larger than stated. More important than that, the system for deciding what runs could itself be compromised and used against the user. This is exactly what happens in the admittedly dumb world of anti-virus. "Default Permit" is not really something that exist on unix systems. "Default Deny" as described by the author is something that will stagnate everything it touches and drive everyone crazy.
satellite work... They make cable companies look like emissaries of Heaven and the phone company like Knights of the Round Table.
Knights? More like robber barons. The only difference between them and incumbent telcos is that the incumbents are backed by government granted monopolies. The guys who did everything in their power to keep you from hooking a modem to your phone line are still overcharging you for their obsolete services. You won't find unilaterally changeable contracts outside of government protected business and there's a reason for it.
Is there anything that is being implemented to eliminate DDOS attacks altogether?
Two things are being done. First, the FBI is nailing inept perpetrators as they can. This is like trying to cure a flea infestation by pinching the fleas off your friend's back. The second, more effective thing is the replacement of Windoze. Without Windoze, there will be no botnet. If you are new here, I suggest you get one of the following to improve your computing experience and help stamp out the weakness that will destroy the net:
Mepis, auto configures and runs live off CD. If you like it, the "install me" button does it's business in 20 minutes.
Xandros, what's left of Correl Linux, even easier for Windoze refugees with as much of the look and feel as possible.
Debian Proper, harder than the others to set up but of much higher quality and easier to maintain.
With so many choices, there will never be Windoze type problems on free software. The exploits will not carry into more than 10% of the install base at a time. Go get some and take a bite out of crime.
The average user isn't a geek and while so many geeks can't understand this fact and rant how most people are clueless. This works both ways. How would you like it if every trip to the auto-mechanic you were chided for having certain tires, not using a particular brand/weight of motor oil, not being timely enough in getting a tune up, why didn't you change your own oil, your tire pressures too low?
I'd love it if cars were like software and the mechanic was a well meaning and exasperated free auto evangelist. The tires, oil and all that would be free and I'd only have to press a button to refresh them, if only I'd give up the inferior "big oil" brand that's so highly advertised. I know it would be difficult to see through the FUD and fog, but one day I'd be very happy. If you know of an automobile or any other physical object that works like software, please let me know.
Other than that, I completely agree with you. Everyone needs to be nice to their customers instead of acting like M$ Partners or Steve Balmer. Also, the only thing dumber than running Windoze is running Windoze on autopilot. The "upgrades" will burn you.
Setting up a nice new laptop from school showed me just how bad the Windoze world has gotten. The gave me a brand new Dell Inspiron 2200, which is about as fast as my best desktop machine. Being new, Mepis had some problems with the machine's power management, which I have yet to resolve. It won't go into hibernate. Silly me, I thought the Windozy ACPI software would fix things so I asked where the utilities were in the forrest of disorganized tabs. No luck, Windoze merely disabled the wifi without asking after taking forever to boot and run a stupid anti-virus tool that "scanned" every file one of the 40,000 useless files on the partition. I was able to turn wifi back on by forcing it to connect to my home wifi and turning it off that way. Acpid and wmacpi, which I just installed via apt-get, will probably work better. How can anyone stand to run that nasty single interface, security nightmare? What single advantage does it have that make it worth the trouble?
The big question is, will Microsoft release an out of cycle patch to fix the issue, or will be have a full month of PCs getting owned just because they visited the wrong URL using IE6?
They have to make sure they don't break the five or six of ten PCs that can actually fill out FEMA registration forms do they? That would nail one the only real advantage that platform has right now. They can break them in a week or two, so the patch that improves your net half life from 12 to 15 minutes will come. While M$ slaves and fanboys tank their master for this small relief, I'll add my voice to the many calling for FEMA to fix their site so hundreds of thousands of people don't have to break their computers.
It isn't compatibility with Microsoft that's at issue, but compatibility with business systems that are bulwharked with rivers of existing code. VBA code stuffed inside the gentle spreadsheet and word doc. There are cubic miles of it in banks. This must be managed, and it's a massive change.... nobody wants to push their existing business systems over a cliff...
What kind of M$ fantasy world are you living in? VB business systems? Bullshit. That kind of garbage is something co-ops do and it's never expected to last. You can nail 100% of it tomorrow and tell big dumb companies to use OpenOffice and it will be indistinguishable from any M$ "upgrade" where the new Office or the new VB or a new printer breaks everything anyway. The only difference will be that Open Office won't blow up with a new printer or other trivial changes and you will be able to share the pdfs with everyone and quit killing trees.
"At the time of my departure, MS was on track to outsource over 1,000 jobs a year to China," he [Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice president] said in a court declaration. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company has transferred some projects to China "in order to free up teams here for other work."
Other work, as in lawn work or waiting tables.
Welcome to software ownership. Ha, ha, ha. It does not feel so good when your master puts you on the outside, now does it?
why is this significant again? Companies offshore all the time.
If you work for Microsoft, it's very significant. You may soon be fired as your job is done by two or three competent Chinese slaves. This is simply an enlargement of their Chinese that will cost 1,000 employees their jobs.
If use Microsoft, you might be concerned by your software's origin. Microsoft proudly claims to be a US company. That's getting harder for them to say. A few years ago, Microsoft swore in court that releasing the source code to Windoze would represent a national security risk. They have since sold peeks at that software to China and the former KGB. They have set up places in India and China to actually write their "product". So, owned in the US but made and developed in China. Nice.
This exposes the non-free software end game: slavery. Microsoft is non-free software. You can't share it with your friends, study it, improve it or even run it as you please. They have the backing of US and just about every other country's laws. They are also working on hardware, mostly made in China, that does not allow you to run anything else. With China's co-operation, they will win. China is also non-free, in the worst of ways and this is why it's so cheap to get things done there. Now, very few benefit from Microsoft's ownership of software and the intentional waste of the upgrade train. As Microsoft fires it's own employees, you will see that the ultimately only one or two owners with zero tech knowledge will benefit as the rest of us are stripped of choice, privacy, freedom of press.
Microsoft has never been your friend and friends that help you by screwing others will always turn on you. It's been said before and I'll say it again. Companies have obligations to customers, employees and share holders. A company that screws any one of these will eventually screw all three. It's all part of believing that it's OK to screw people.
If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount.
This is wrong on two counts. First, a person can be available without a physical presence. Second, fixed hours are required for some jobs because you can not predict when others will have to get your input. The upshot is that where your work does not matter but when you are availabel does matter.
With good software, like gnome meeting, and hardware, I'm as good here as I am anywhere. If you don't understand what I'm saying, I can draw you a picture and email it. You can get me and however many other people you want together and all of our smiling faces can meet on the network. There are many jobs which require a physical presence - physical labor, maintenance, plant engineering, civil engineering, etc, but most does not really.
Because I can't predict when someone else will need me, "office hours" can not be done away with. Anyone who has to work with other people has to be available for quick problem solving. Questions that take a day to answer can stretch a five minute job to a week or more. Interestingly enough, such lack of accountability is easier to track through on line interaction tools than it is at a real office.
... as soon as the subject of current employees working from home comes up, it immediately gets dismissed...
This is a bummer. I looked up crossUSA right after reading the article. I really got excited when I saw a health care systems job, until I saw it involved moving out of state. The cost of living here is one of the lowest in the country, so I'm able to compete if only they would trust me to get the job done. I've got a cable connection and a cell phone, so I'm as easy to reach as anyone in an office and trust is not really required.
This kind of technology is not interesting to home users... The place it looks (IMHO) to be aimed at is ordinary user desktops in large corporations.
So how long before your ISP picks it up? Think of upload caps, port blocks and smtp jails as other "technologies" that piss users off and don't do anything for security.
How long will it be before my ISP is forced to^H^H^H^H^H^H implements this? I can see the reasoning now, "no normal user needs to be connected to more than six other computers at once. This will end virus propagation." Other success stories include upload caps, port blocks, forced smtp usage. The internet is looking more like broadcast and the post office every day.
I don't even bother to modify my network to let them in - I just tell them to sit by a window and inevitably they get all the bandwidth they need.
So, do you tell them to stand outside and wait for rain if they are thirsty?
What do you think you are gaining by this? Abuse of your network connection is far more likely to come from any of the 250,000,000 people who can see your gateway than the 25 who can see your WAP.
With the pager in E, you can actually *place* the window within the pager...
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now.
The E pager is very nice and I hope everything is just as good. It's been a long time since I've used fvwm, just as it had been a long time since I used E. I like E's real division between virtual desktops and screens, so you can have multiple pagers in E each with it's own desktop with multiple screens. I also like being able to drag and drop between the different pagers.
E also gets minimized viewers right too. It draws a thumbnail or an icon and grows to accommodate what you have open or scrolls, your choice. You can also turn off the borders, so nothing but the icon or thumbnail gets in front of your background image.
Theme transparency already rocks. Add that to animated backgrounds and you have something unmatched in the commercial world.
Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.
The first article is a good one at which to point someone who has never heard of Open Source.
Tim Gnatek disappoints by not once mentioning Knoppix, Mepis or Xandros, three easy and well known ways to introduce users to free and open software. There's nothing like booting a live CD on someone's dead Winblows computer to show them that nothing is wrong with the computer besides the software. All the "hard to use" FUD melts in the 60 seconds or so it takes to boot up. In the 20 minutes it takes to install, the user wonders why anyone would ever buy $500 worth of software in several boxes and CDs through innumerable reboots and "I agrees" Live CD are also less risky than the Open CD recommended.
I think that foreign workers are better trained for computer programming jobs is incorrect.
On average, they suck out loud. That's the impression I get from non-US graduate students at LSU. Six years ago, they were lucky to have seen as much as a toggle switch programming rig. That's not a bad exercise, but it's horribly dated, specific and impractical. What the vast majority of students myself and a friend had excelled in was creating the impression that they knew what they were doing, even if they lacked all clue.
Corporations want a guy who will take what they give them or else they get sent home.
Bingo, it works for school too and they learn fast or go home. That's why you will find good in the bad. If they have survived a US higher education, they are usually up to the task.
I am not afraid to compete against foreign workers.... I just want to compete on an even playing field.
That's a management problem, you can't win unless you are lucky enough to work for a clueful company.
You never hear Microsoft ask the government to allow immigration for foreign workers.
You don't know how to listen. M$ is one of many that continue to shriek about "a lack of qualified applicants" as they jettison engineers and build up places like Hyperbad. Google around for "permatemps" to see how they treat their own. The place is run by a man who has admitted he would otherwise have been in insurance, and has a published growth strategy of buying "loss leaders" to establish themselves in "mature" new technology. You might also look into their advocacy of the DMCA, which is an attack on education itself by making it against the law for you to tell people what you know about someone else is using to make a buck.
it's the only way that either of the two broadband providers in your area will give you an IP address. Trusted Network Connect is coming.
That's disturbing but I think I'll pass. One way around it is to use a gateway that does nothing else, much like the modem my ISP currently provides. If that gateway refuses to take input from free computers, I'll just have to stop giving my ISP my money. Non free networking is not worth having.
If a DRM framework is available to implement as free software, then how can people be prevented from modifying the software to leak the cleartext of the work and then using the modified software?
This is not free, but Open in it's worst sense. Sun is looking for free development and support of a really bad idea. Like all non-free software, it will only be free to it's owners.
As you note, there is no free DRM and you will have to give up control of your computer for DRM to actually work. DRM works by permitting or denying a copy of a file. If you are not the one granting permission for that copy or erasure, you are not the owner of your computer. The first program that has to be owned it the DRM system itself. It does not mater if you can compile the software yourself, the system must not allow you to exchange it or modify itself.
I've read the impassioned defense of trusted computing and I don't buy it. I don't need and don't trust a special piece of hardware on my computer to hold my keys and tell me if I can read or copy a file or process in memory. Those kinds of things are kernel functions. If my kernel is letting someone else look at my private keys, there's something wrong with my kernel or my configuration. When something is wrong with my kernel, I know there's a huge community of people ready willing and able to point it out and fix it. If a fritz chip does something wrong, I'm simply screwed until my vendor can fix it. If my vendor is malicious, I'm really screwed because I was dumb enough to let my vendor own my computer.
DRM is the biggest threat to the free press and free speech since the federal government started allocating radio spectrum. Your computer is the world's press - nothing is written or published without one. Don't let someone else take your keys away just so you can watch a silly movie or listen to some silly song.
But I guess the people that follow you around posting your bullshit with that prefab history are "M$ agents", eh?
Poorly paid loser or unemployed lunatic, take your pick. No one outside Redmond's pay has the time or inclination to post all the BS you do. Individual comments, tailored insultingly to each thing I post, it must cost a third world fortune.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not looking hard enough. There's hardly a person in tech that has not heard of Linux and want to play with it if they have not already done so. Most people who give free software a real chance discover for themselves how good it is and don't go back, ever. There are lots of average people, like myself, who no longer have anything to do with M$ junk on their desktops.
The upgrade cost to Vista, for most companies, is effectively $0 because it comes with new PCs. Contrast this with yearly application updates for Photoshop, Quickbooks, anti-virus,, anti-spyware, et al. which can run thousands of dollars
Now I know you have your head up your ass because the above is self contradicting. The upgrade cost to Vista is the cost of Vista and everything else that has to be replaced for few real feature gains, like computers that work just fine. M$ Office division has a 70% profit to earnings ratio, do you think that comes from home sales? The cost of upgrading to Linux is much smaller.
"limiting the document formats to the OpenOffice format is unnecessary, unfair and gives preferential treatment for specific vendor products, and prohibits others."
I think they mean that it prohibits other formats. That is, of course, what a good specification does.
Even this generous interpretation is an exaggeration that reeks of M$'s characteristic dishonesty. Specifying a format for document exchange and archival will not keep anyone from using their favorite editor. They will simply have to copy that document into an editor that will save in the correct format. M$, of course, wants the more clueless lawmakers to arrive at your conclusion - that somehow this is giving a Sun an exclusive fromat franchise. As you pointed out, the standard is free for the taking, so M$ can quickly tack on the format translator and stick it into a Windoze update. Because the standard was developed in the open, M$ has only M$ to blame for their lack of product today.
Go ahead, enlighten us as to what is going to happen when 100 million people switch from 'Windoze'.
The same thing that's happened to the 5 million or so Mac users and the 5 million or so Linux users: Absolutely nothing bad. The system itself has reasonable defaults and give the user a clue. The system itself also has a way of getting that cool software, if it's not already loaded, without having to download it from some random spyware shop. Root passwords should not have to be entered often, so this should come as a shock to the user of a good distro. These systems are already out there and they already don't have Windoze type problems. The 12 minute windoze half life does not require user intervention. Anything is better than that.
What you have seen is users rejecting poor [Windoze] implementation of privilege separation. My wife has no problems with a non root account on Mepis. It lets her run what she needs without being able to affect the system. The permissions are a little lose for my taste and the inclusion of non-free software like Macromedia Flash is a bad idea, but the restrictions are good enough. You don't have to annoy the user to keep bad things from happening.
The idea of only allowing 15 applications is not as good an idea as the usual pid uid system. First, each of those applications are actually a whole collection of programs so the problem is larger than stated. More important than that, the system for deciding what runs could itself be compromised and used against the user. This is exactly what happens in the admittedly dumb world of anti-virus. "Default Permit" is not really something that exist on unix systems. "Default Deny" as described by the author is something that will stagnate everything it touches and drive everyone crazy.
Knights? More like robber barons. The only difference between them and incumbent telcos is that the incumbents are backed by government granted monopolies. The guys who did everything in their power to keep you from hooking a modem to your phone line are still overcharging you for their obsolete services. You won't find unilaterally changeable contracts outside of government protected business and there's a reason for it.
Two things are being done. First, the FBI is nailing inept perpetrators as they can. This is like trying to cure a flea infestation by pinching the fleas off your friend's back. The second, more effective thing is the replacement of Windoze. Without Windoze, there will be no botnet. If you are new here, I suggest you get one of the following to improve your computing experience and help stamp out the weakness that will destroy the net:
With so many choices, there will never be Windoze type problems on free software. The exploits will not carry into more than 10% of the install base at a time. Go get some and take a bite out of crime.
This works both ways. How would you like it if every trip to the auto-mechanic you were chided for having certain tires, not using a particular brand/weight of motor oil, not being timely enough in getting a tune up, why didn't you change your own oil, your tire pressures too low?
I'd love it if cars were like software and the mechanic was a well meaning and exasperated free auto evangelist. The tires, oil and all that would be free and I'd only have to press a button to refresh them, if only I'd give up the inferior "big oil" brand that's so highly advertised. I know it would be difficult to see through the FUD and fog, but one day I'd be very happy. If you know of an automobile or any other physical object that works like software, please let me know.
Other than that, I completely agree with you. Everyone needs to be nice to their customers instead of acting like M$ Partners or Steve Balmer. Also, the only thing dumber than running Windoze is running Windoze on autopilot. The "upgrades" will burn you.
Setting up a nice new laptop from school showed me just how bad the Windoze world has gotten. The gave me a brand new Dell Inspiron 2200, which is about as fast as my best desktop machine. Being new, Mepis had some problems with the machine's power management, which I have yet to resolve. It won't go into hibernate. Silly me, I thought the Windozy ACPI software would fix things so I asked where the utilities were in the forrest of disorganized tabs. No luck, Windoze merely disabled the wifi without asking after taking forever to boot and run a stupid anti-virus tool that "scanned" every file one of the 40,000 useless files on the partition. I was able to turn wifi back on by forcing it to connect to my home wifi and turning it off that way. Acpid and wmacpi, which I just installed via apt-get, will probably work better. How can anyone stand to run that nasty single interface, security nightmare? What single advantage does it have that make it worth the trouble?
They have to make sure they don't break the five or six of ten PCs that can actually fill out FEMA registration forms do they? That would nail one the only real advantage that platform has right now. They can break them in a week or two, so the patch that improves your net half life from 12 to 15 minutes will come. While M$ slaves and fanboys tank their master for this small relief, I'll add my voice to the many calling for FEMA to fix their site so hundreds of thousands of people don't have to break their computers.
What kind of M$ fantasy world are you living in? VB business systems? Bullshit. That kind of garbage is something co-ops do and it's never expected to last. You can nail 100% of it tomorrow and tell big dumb companies to use OpenOffice and it will be indistinguishable from any M$ "upgrade" where the new Office or the new VB or a new printer breaks everything anyway. The only difference will be that Open Office won't blow up with a new printer or other trivial changes and you will be able to share the pdfs with everyone and quit killing trees.
From the article:
"At the time of my departure, MS was on track to outsource over 1,000 jobs a year to China," he [Kai-Fu Lee, a former vice president] said in a court declaration. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company has transferred some projects to China "in order to free up teams here for other work."
Other work, as in lawn work or waiting tables.
Welcome to software ownership. Ha, ha, ha. It does not feel so good when your master puts you on the outside, now does it?
If you work for Microsoft, it's very significant. You may soon be fired as your job is done by two or three competent Chinese slaves. This is simply an enlargement of their Chinese that will cost 1,000 employees their jobs.
If use Microsoft, you might be concerned by your software's origin. Microsoft proudly claims to be a US company. That's getting harder for them to say. A few years ago, Microsoft swore in court that releasing the source code to Windoze would represent a national security risk. They have since sold peeks at that software to China and the former KGB. They have set up places in India and China to actually write their "product". So, owned in the US but made and developed in China. Nice.
This exposes the non-free software end game: slavery. Microsoft is non-free software. You can't share it with your friends, study it, improve it or even run it as you please. They have the backing of US and just about every other country's laws. They are also working on hardware, mostly made in China, that does not allow you to run anything else. With China's co-operation, they will win. China is also non-free, in the worst of ways and this is why it's so cheap to get things done there. Now, very few benefit from Microsoft's ownership of software and the intentional waste of the upgrade train. As Microsoft fires it's own employees, you will see that the ultimately only one or two owners with zero tech knowledge will benefit as the rest of us are stripped of choice, privacy, freedom of press.
It's ugly, very ugly.
Further reading can be found GNU:
Microsoft has never been your friend and friends that help you by screwing others will always turn on you. It's been said before and I'll say it again. Companies have obligations to customers, employees and share holders. A company that screws any one of these will eventually screw all three. It's all part of believing that it's OK to screw people.
This is wrong on two counts. First, a person can be available without a physical presence. Second, fixed hours are required for some jobs because you can not predict when others will have to get your input. The upshot is that where your work does not matter but when you are availabel does matter.
With good software, like gnome meeting, and hardware, I'm as good here as I am anywhere. If you don't understand what I'm saying, I can draw you a picture and email it. You can get me and however many other people you want together and all of our smiling faces can meet on the network. There are many jobs which require a physical presence - physical labor, maintenance, plant engineering, civil engineering, etc, but most does not really.
Because I can't predict when someone else will need me, "office hours" can not be done away with. Anyone who has to work with other people has to be available for quick problem solving. Questions that take a day to answer can stretch a five minute job to a week or more. Interestingly enough, such lack of accountability is easier to track through on line interaction tools than it is at a real office.
This is a bummer. I looked up crossUSA right after reading the article. I really got excited when I saw a health care systems job, until I saw it involved moving out of state. The cost of living here is one of the lowest in the country, so I'm able to compete if only they would trust me to get the job done. I've got a cable connection and a cell phone, so I'm as easy to reach as anyone in an office and trust is not really required.
You might be tempted by $0.25, "unpopular" music that constitutes 99.999999999% of all music not hyped by the top 40 payola machine.
better stick with web radios
I'm not going anywhere near non free music distribution. I tip the piano player, I'm not giving anything to a dirt bag who thinks he owns him.
So how long before your ISP picks it up? Think of upload caps, port blocks and smtp jails as other "technologies" that piss users off and don't do anything for security.
Ugh, you are right.
How long will it be before my ISP is forced to^H^H^H^H^H^H implements this? I can see the reasoning now, "no normal user needs to be connected to more than six other computers at once. This will end virus propagation." Other success stories include upload caps, port blocks, forced smtp usage. The internet is looking more like broadcast and the post office every day.
So, do you tell them to stand outside and wait for rain if they are thirsty?
What do you think you are gaining by this? Abuse of your network connection is far more likely to come from any of the 250,000,000 people who can see your gateway than the 25 who can see your WAP.
Sure they do. It's a rare computer that won't run Linux. It's much more difficult to convince a user to run something else.
Oooh, just like you've been able to do in fvwm for 10+ years now.
The E pager is very nice and I hope everything is just as good. It's been a long time since I've used fvwm, just as it had been a long time since I used E. I like E's real division between virtual desktops and screens, so you can have multiple pagers in E each with it's own desktop with multiple screens. I also like being able to drag and drop between the different pagers.
E also gets minimized viewers right too. It draws a thumbnail or an icon and grows to accommodate what you have open or scrolls, your choice. You can also turn off the borders, so nothing but the icon or thumbnail gets in front of your background image.
Theme transparency already rocks. Add that to animated backgrounds and you have something unmatched in the commercial world.
Oh, and if you look at his benchmark results, fvwm is faster than E17 out of the box, too.
Like this benchmark?
It looks a little funny to me to, but it's a benchmark with both window managers on it.
Tim Gnatek disappoints by not once mentioning Knoppix, Mepis or Xandros, three easy and well known ways to introduce users to free and open software. There's nothing like booting a live CD on someone's dead Winblows computer to show them that nothing is wrong with the computer besides the software. All the "hard to use" FUD melts in the 60 seconds or so it takes to boot up. In the 20 minutes it takes to install, the user wonders why anyone would ever buy $500 worth of software in several boxes and CDs through innumerable reboots and "I agrees" Live CD are also less risky than the Open CD recommended.
On average, they suck out loud. That's the impression I get from non-US graduate students at LSU. Six years ago, they were lucky to have seen as much as a toggle switch programming rig. That's not a bad exercise, but it's horribly dated, specific and impractical. What the vast majority of students myself and a friend had excelled in was creating the impression that they knew what they were doing, even if they lacked all clue.
Corporations want a guy who will take what they give them or else they get sent home.
Bingo, it works for school too and they learn fast or go home. That's why you will find good in the bad. If they have survived a US higher education, they are usually up to the task.
I am not afraid to compete against foreign workers. ... I just want to compete on an even playing field.
That's a management problem, you can't win unless you are lucky enough to work for a clueful company.
You never hear Microsoft ask the government to allow immigration for foreign workers.
You don't know how to listen. M$ is one of many that continue to shriek about "a lack of qualified applicants" as they jettison engineers and build up places like Hyperbad. Google around for "permatemps" to see how they treat their own. The place is run by a man who has admitted he would otherwise have been in insurance, and has a published growth strategy of buying "loss leaders" to establish themselves in "mature" new technology. You might also look into their advocacy of the DMCA, which is an attack on education itself by making it against the law for you to tell people what you know about someone else is using to make a buck.
That's disturbing but I think I'll pass. One way around it is to use a gateway that does nothing else, much like the modem my ISP currently provides. If that gateway refuses to take input from free computers, I'll just have to stop giving my ISP my money. Non free networking is not worth having.
M$ behind everyone despite their intentions? What else is new?
This is not free, but Open in it's worst sense. Sun is looking for free development and support of a really bad idea. Like all non-free software, it will only be free to it's owners.
As you note, there is no free DRM and you will have to give up control of your computer for DRM to actually work. DRM works by permitting or denying a copy of a file. If you are not the one granting permission for that copy or erasure, you are not the owner of your computer. The first program that has to be owned it the DRM system itself. It does not mater if you can compile the software yourself, the system must not allow you to exchange it or modify itself.
I've read the impassioned defense of trusted computing and I don't buy it. I don't need and don't trust a special piece of hardware on my computer to hold my keys and tell me if I can read or copy a file or process in memory. Those kinds of things are kernel functions. If my kernel is letting someone else look at my private keys, there's something wrong with my kernel or my configuration. When something is wrong with my kernel, I know there's a huge community of people ready willing and able to point it out and fix it. If a fritz chip does something wrong, I'm simply screwed until my vendor can fix it. If my vendor is malicious, I'm really screwed because I was dumb enough to let my vendor own my computer.
DRM is the biggest threat to the free press and free speech since the federal government started allocating radio spectrum. Your computer is the world's press - nothing is written or published without one. Don't let someone else take your keys away just so you can watch a silly movie or listen to some silly song.
Poorly paid loser or unemployed lunatic, take your pick. No one outside Redmond's pay has the time or inclination to post all the BS you do. Individual comments, tailored insultingly to each thing I post, it must cost a third world fortune.