Hear that sound? That's the iPod laughing itself to death.
So what sound does it make when you try to play an ogg file? The Iriver sounds great. How about the sound it makes when you try to upload your music to another computer for the 5th time? The Iriver does that without complaining, as far as I can tell. "Cool" That's the sound my wife made when I told her that some of the newer music players also acted like a photo album.
Just another example of how Apple just 'gets it' and others attempt to add the kitchen sink and clutter to make up for their design inadequacies.
They get what, exactly? I'm not so impressed, though I know a couple of very satisfied owners.
The H320 is cheaper and rocks. It has a 20GB drive, does USBFS on USB2 and plays ogg and other music formats. No pesky software or DRM got in the way of me moving my music onto it. I just made an entry for/dev/sda1 in/etc/fstab, plugged it into my laptop and coppied my music to it with Konqueror by sftp from my cable box. You can find it online for less than $300. Iriver also have a 40 GB model and a smaller 128 to 512 MB models that run off AAA batteries.
Apple may have pegged your demographic, Iriver is what I was looking for. It sounds great and I was willing to pay more to be free of Apple's DRM, regardless of how unintrusive you might think it is. Mine is going to my wife for Christmas and she's very intersted in the being able to show pictures of our three year old. She's also going to like being able to drag and drop her music, but everything we have is already on it.
Other people might appreciate Iriver's ability to record stereo directly to compressed format. Many cool concerts are going to be preserved with these.
The stock is higher now than it was when they started all this litigation in 2003.
Their revenues continue to tank and their losses are clearly not sustainable. They only brought in $120,000 last quarter which translates to less than half a milion dollars of revenue. Hamburger stands make more money and require much less of an investment than SCO's apparent worth. They have no product of value and should have an equivalent worth. Oh yeah, if a hamburger stand had losses SCO has, it would be obvious that the hamburger stand was run by a moron.
Isn't this a conflict of interest making the software that has the bugs and also selling the software that covers over those bugs
Yes it is a conflict of interest. It's typical.
If you read this carefully, you might conclude that Bill Gates has been fixing the things he breaks since he was in high school. He and his buddies broke the first computer they were allowed to use and then hired themselves out to fix it:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system.
This was Bill Gates answer to the shortage of computing resources that existed when he was growing up. He made himself root so that he could have all the resources he wanted, essentially a robbery. The overall model applies to the software he sells to this day, there will always be something wrong with it so that you want to buy the new one. I like the answer RMS came up with better: make your own toys.
Use and expand users so that you don't have to browse the web or read your email as root. Others should not be able to write your system files without asking you.
Obliterate the registry and separate binary from configuration files. It should not be easy for baddies to hide in a file that will keep your computer from booting if modified.
These are first steps, but they are not enough and you should not expect M$ to fix their problems. The only way to keep malware/spyware off your system is to own it and only get your software from trusted sources, such as Debian. Microsoft is so keen on DRM and pleasing others that they will never give you real ownership of any computer you put their software on. The ability to read your files and add/remove "components" without your permission is part of their EULA. If they can do it, so can others and the story will never end. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
The recent javascript vulnerabilities across a wide scope of browsers show that a flaw in the core protocols of the web can be shared in the varied implementations across different browsers.
That was one weak exploit and java is not free. The exploit required me to be browsing a dirtbag site while also doing something serious. More importantly, it did not work on my browser and I imagine it no longer works on ANY free browser. That's the end of that, no?
What you point to, however, is that complex spreadsheet functionality should be moved to a better platform/environment.
That's an interesting dream. I'm not sure it's a good idea though. Spreadsheets are designed to visualize data. When the data gets too large, it must be processed before you can visualize it, usually in a specific way. A spreadsheet, which displays every data point is not the best tool for the job. It's better to process the data outside of the sheet and reduce it first. Various batch programs and plugins do that job. When the job becomes routine, what you need it an entirely different program rather than a general spreadsheet. The best use for a spreadsheet is simple "what ifs" and quick graphing. It is a mistake to use them for complex tasks and large data sets.
Gnumeric does a nice job and it's my current favorite. If your dream surpasses my imagination, I recommend you work with it.
On page 13, the author repeats the Marketshare Myth of Browser Security. "Another temporary advantage of open source browsers is their small marketshare relative to Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows... This advantage would diminish in the long run as more clients begin using alternative open source browsers." This and other arguments like it are demonstrably false for three reasons:
Free browsers will never have monopoly marketshare. There are dozens of good browsers out there now. No one will ever have Microsoft's ability to shove the worst of class on the world again. If we restrict ourselves to Konqueror, Mozilla and others it's easy to see that no single browser will ever get more than 50% market share again.
Free browsers will never make the fundamental security errors that Microsoft will never fix. The author notices these reasons for better security but still makes this mistake. Increased market share will not make people run things as root and distros that do will simply lose marketshare.
Free Software has a proven security record in areas where it's THE target. IIS gets creamed even though it's a minority product while Apache does not. Microsoft mail products get hosed though the majority of the world's mail is sent with free and open software that does not get hosed.
The approach of "these advantages will go away" makes it look like you expect "I love you" style network instability from free software. That's not going to happen and we should not act like it will.
I notice that you leave out the potentially greatest problem: Very Complex Excel spreadsheets migration to OO.org.
Others have noted that this point is addressed. The author conservatively steers clear of such dissasters.
"Very Complex Excel" migration is a failure, even if you stick to M$. OLE and calls to other functions are each invitations to something not being on the next version of Winblows. Worse, M$ changes their scripting so you can be sure you will have work to do no matter what. I know a guy who was doing Nuclear Power Plant thermal balance calculations with a big nasty sheet. It even called the local high school to get weather information that was then used for regulatory purposes! The thing was a tremendous pain in his ass that needed constant upkeep and had all sorts of quirks that could give you wrong answers. He was using the wrong tool for the job and needed to replace it with proper and stable tools.
For normal sheets, OO, gnumeric and even kspread are doing a very good job with opening complex sheets. I've been very pleased lately when trying to open old cross section calculation sheets. I've seen my old graphs. They are doing about as well as M$ junk itself did with my older sheets. In the worst case, I've got the nasty old things on an http server, so I can go get them on a Winblows box and see them. A company could easily keep a few Winblows boxes or just use Xandros with it's excellent Crossover Office setup.
If the book is challenged on that point, then you will lose credibility.
I don't think so. The author said it would not work. He was being conservative but surely knows as well as I do how things are going.
You are joking, but you bring up the fundamental problems of accuracy and slander. The background checker defends himself:
If everyone knew everything about everyone else, or at least had access to such information, there would be less problems. Besides, why try and hide things, when it is becoming harder and harder to do so?
What he says is true, but that's not how the world and his company are working. The problem is that large government agencies and companies can get things wrong and that goes on to hurt without you having any idea much less a chance to defend yourself. A truly open system would be good, you should be able to tell who said what about you. What we have now is not very good at all, hence the $150 that can be charged.
Twitter, you've said some crazy things, but to pretend that the registry is more obscured than System V Init is over the fucking top.
Debian's system of human readable files and symlinks is a model of simplicity and transparency. Nothing could be easier than understanding exactly what is started and starting or stopping programs. Nothing is particularly difficult about reading the/etc/rc directories or typing, "/etc/init.d/program_name start|stop|restart" but there are plenty of runlevel editors and other GUI programs to help you out.
The registry has no set structure, so any vendor can add any mixed binary or text they want. It must be accessed though GUI tools or a hex editor. A single byte wrong will blue screen your whole computer, so it's not only obscure it's dangerous.
There is no difference in requirements to purchase a.com,.net, or.org domain...
Shhh! that's just the kind of bad idea you don't want the marketroids to get. Don't you know they would love their own little exclusive namespace that they could market as something "only responsible companies" can own and spam you from. Surely, most would cut a deal with vermin of their own kind so that they would pay "low prices" for such things and have everyone else subsidize it. Let's just ridicule such an idea as ".moron" space.
Hope they never figure it out the same way greed heads have figured out exclusive franchise electricity. Industrial users of electricity have everyone else pay way more money for monopoly produced electricity than they do. Politicians have managed to pipe meterless electricity into public housing. Those left are increasingly few and pay increasingly more. It's a bad analogy, but the spirit is the same, pay up sucker.
Others seem to have soundly thrashed you for gladly sucking down an increase after the fact without being asked, simply because the person charging the increase swears that you will pay less.
I'll just add to that that I DONT WANT A SILLY NET DOMAIN, but some dirtbag with really bad ideas stole and squatted on my org name.
Isnt this a conflict of interest making the software that has the bugs and also selling the software that covers over those bugs.
Yes.
If you read this carefully, you might conclude that Bill Gates has been fixing the things he breaks since he was in high school. He and his buddies broke the first computer they were allowed to use and then hired themselves out to fix it:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system.
This was Bill Gates answer to the shortage of computing resources that existed when he was growing up. He made himself root so that he could have all the resources he wanted, essentially a robbery. The overall model applies to the software he sells to this day, there will always be something wrong with it so that you want to buy the new one. I like the answer RMS came up with better: make your own toys.
Use and expand users so that you don't have to browse the web or read your email as root. Others should not be able to write your system files without asking you.
Obliterate the registry and separate binary from configuration files. It should not be easy for baddies to hide in a file that will keep your computer from booting if modified.
These are first steps, but they are not enough and you should not expect M$ to fix their problems. The only way to keep malware/spyware off your system is to own it and only get your software from trusted sources, such as Debian. Microsoft is so keen on DRM and pleasing others that they will never give you real ownership of any computer you put their software on. The ability to read your files and add/remove "components" without your permission is part of their EULA. If they can do it, so can others and the story will never end. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
So... what's changed to make it "safe" all of a sudden?
If they still make you turn everything off on take off and landing, nothing at all has changed. People with wifi built into their notbooks have been beaming signals around airplanes without even knowing they have the devices. So goes the world of the clueless.
Sure I'm angry. You acted like knoppix and other live CDs had problems, like their being "many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device," as if the average person was going to get a blue screen on boot or something. That's not true, regardless of a few classes of hardware by problem vendors. I get angry when people say things that are not at all true, especially when they are people like you who should know better.
Knoppix 3.7 doesn't recognize my GB eth0. Honestly, neither did Ubuntu, Mepis, or any other modern distro I've tried to run on it.
Yeah, that's the way it goes sometimes. Some silly hardware makers don't play ball and tell people how their hardware works. Some even go so far as to threaten and file suit against people who "reverse engineer" their hardware. How's anyone supposed to write drivers for that?
At the same time, anyone who's paid any attention knows that hardware that's useful soon finds free software drivers. There are very few pieces of hardware in my house that don't have free drivers, from scsi cards to dinky $40 cameras I never expected anyone to bother with. I'm not so sure that any of my older equipment has XP drivers and I know that the older drivers were not even stable together on the platforms they were made for.
Someone like you, who's been working with free software for five years, should know that. Had you simply said something like, "sometimes you need an X environment for windows," no one could complain. Why you would take the opportunity to say things that are not true about Knoppix is beyond me.
An audio player that meets your needs, but now that's not good enough.
That's not what I said. I said I wanted something that does not exist right now. I'm sure this is a fine player and I like that it has built in FM radio. If it has zero DRM built into, I'm really enthused. What did I just buy for my wife? A 20GB Iriver. It was smaller.
You want one that _only_ plays ogg? I'm a _huge_ fan and supporter of ogg, and you're really not helping any, please stop now.
Yes, I want a player that only supports ogg because it will be cheaper. What's wrong with that? Choice is good, right? Save your negativity for someone who boosts WMA only players.
Let's get back to the point: Do you port free software goodies to M$ or not? It's a simple question but the answer determines where you put your resources. Your easygoing double talk ignores the question and the consequences. You might not hate Microsoft, but you realize that Microsoft hates you and still can't simply say that helping M$ hurts everyone in free software? Let's go over a few things.
You see, that's the little secret of Free Software, most of the folks writing Free Software get paid to do so.
That's not true. Most free software is written by people who don't get paid a dime for it. They write it because it's going to solve a problem for them and it's easier to start with someone else's free pieces than it is to do anything else. Most of us have zero chance of working for anyone who would pay us for such things.
The reason that Microsoft comes into the discussion has very little to do with the "goals" of Free Software and everything to do with the fact that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.
Well that's true, but the way they are going about it is a potentially fatal pain for everyone and helping them is not the thing to do. Every dime that gets to M$ is a dime toward the next SCO style FUD lawsuit, lobby money for software patents, BSA raids, Apple switchers and other leagal and PR bullshit.
To develop M$ crap, you have to own it. I don't have much money, but I'm giving part of it to the Free Software Foundation each month so that they can fight off some of it. Why on earth would I spend my money on a M$ OS?
There are only two reasons to port things to M$: to promote free software or because you want life to be easier for yourself when you have to hold your nose and use Windoze.
Neither of them is valid anymore. Mozilla's got one covered and the other is just wrong. Because most things work better in the free software world, it's probably easier to join a free project to replace that one last program that's got you stuck on Windows.
Free software is prodigiously promoted by Mozilla, an effort that does have paid developers. A glimpse of a much better world can be seen through that project. If promotion is your goal, porting more is be a duplication of effort.
In short, your time and effort are better spend doing anything other than making Windows better. I'd rather people watch TV and drink beer.
Ogg support is very nice, but I hope this device can play other formats as well.... The key to success is multi format support.
I hope they offer models without MP3 support because I don't want to pay a license fee for a format I don't have. All my music is ogg encoded because, for a long time, it was difficult to get an mp3 encoder. I'm not about to re encode everything to yesterday's, technically inferior, non free format.
This CD is a nice demonstration of free software tools but it's no substitute for rebooting to a normal Linux system. SSH on windows is a bad joke and that eliminates 99% of this CD's utility. Knoppix is both a better tool for your own needs and as a demonstration of the power and beauty of free software.
... rebooting is awkward and inelegant. Don't go around killing your friends' uptimes just to run a few progs on your home machine.
That's funny when you consider that the awkwardness of Winblows is the whole reason to use this CD. When I have a guest, it's as easy to let them use my network as adduser. The guests don't have to be in my house either. Uptime? People like Steve Ballmer who aim for 60 days of uptime worry about that. I've gotten used to my power failing before my computers do. While it's nice to have good ssh clients, using them on a system that's notorious for auto installing keyloggers is foolish. Finally, when you use something like knoppix, you generally get as good or better performance as Windows gives loaded down as it usually is by utilities that fail to keep malware off.
there are still many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device.... the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver
Your hardware must be different from the hardware I see most of the time. I've seen Knoppix boot up AMD 64 systems and other cutting edge stuff without problems. A set that won't give at least 1024 by 768 resolution is rare and you can try to force better with "ctrl alt +" if the conservative setting is not good enough for you. This might not be good enough for playing games, but it's more than enough to show off the real work that can be done with two office suits and two excellent browsers. Others, such as Morphix, have game CDs if you want that. The only place a boot CD might have problems with hardware is wireless networking, but wrapper software can fix that. Hardware compatibility, by the way, is much easier than software compatibility. M$ can break this toy with a single Winblows update as they have broken people's X and unix connectivity in the past. As time goes by, your chances of everthing working will be greater with an old Knoppix than it will be with an old copy of this CD.
Knoppix and CDs like it are the easiest and most secure way to move files. Once booted, you can use Konqueror's built in sftp to drag and drop files across a split window. What could be easier than that? If you want quick, zip the files and boot with business card linux and use sftp from the command line.
Finally, there's nothing like running a live linux CD to show your buddy just how easy it is to get Linux. If there are problems, it's better they show up there than later.
I seriously think this is just another ploy to milk MSFT for money or a good contract. Not for IE, but for W2K3, Office, XP, etc.
I prefer to take what they said at face value because it's true and obvious.
Your conjecture is interesting but has no factual support and flies in the face of a few. The usual tactic for negotiation is to do a Linux replacement study, and most of those are not done so cynically as you suggest. People have been adopting Linux on the desktop. While IE's use is important to Microsoft as a lock in device, it's not nearly as important revenues for the OS and Office.
Microsoft has been high handed and their product quality has been poor. Despite a tremendous public relations effort, people know it and are moving to better and lest costly options.
The most interesting things happening for pen interfaces on Linux are in Java, things like Denim / Satin from Berkeley's GUIR or DigitalNote or Jarnal, but I'm not seeing anything for ink as digital ink w/ deferred handwriting recognition and shape recognition --
GPE's hadwriting recognition may interest you. You might also look into open slate.
Only if you are running familiar or OpenZaurus. GPE has excellent handwriting recognition. KPIM works almost exactly like Palm datebook +. Then you also have browsers, wifi, media players and other not considered "palm" programs.
I'm still using a Handspring Visor to organize my life, but I can see great advantages to newer platforms. With a little work, I'll master syncing with the Zaurus. If I do that and can find as good a calculator as the Visor has, that's it for the visor.
There's no way I'll find what I'm looking for in a Pocket PC running Microsoft crap. The last time I looked, those keyboardless things without decent hadwriting were a huge pain in the ass to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor do we need to worry about terrorists with nuclear weapons. What's a city or two in the long run? The two are roughly equivalent.
This is like worrying about that dust particle that almost hit me when I was walking out to my var Monday.
It's more like a bullet flying within three feet of you. No big deal, right?
So what sound does it make when you try to play an ogg file? The Iriver sounds great. How about the sound it makes when you try to upload your music to another computer for the 5th time? The Iriver does that without complaining, as far as I can tell. "Cool" That's the sound my wife made when I told her that some of the newer music players also acted like a photo album.
Think different? Nah, just think.
They get what, exactly? I'm not so impressed, though I know a couple of very satisfied owners.
The H320 is cheaper and rocks. It has a 20GB drive, does USBFS on USB2 and plays ogg and other music formats. No pesky software or DRM got in the way of me moving my music onto it. I just made an entry for /dev/sda1 in /etc/fstab, plugged it into my laptop and coppied my music to it with Konqueror by sftp from my cable box. You can find it online for less than $300. Iriver also have a 40 GB model and a smaller 128 to 512 MB models that run off AAA batteries.
Apple may have pegged your demographic, Iriver is what I was looking for. It sounds great and I was willing to pay more to be free of Apple's DRM, regardless of how unintrusive you might think it is. Mine is going to my wife for Christmas and she's very intersted in the being able to show pictures of our three year old. She's also going to like being able to drag and drop her music, but everything we have is already on it.
Other people might appreciate Iriver's ability to record stereo directly to compressed format. Many cool concerts are going to be preserved with these.
Their revenues continue to tank and their losses are clearly not sustainable. They only brought in $120,000 last quarter which translates to less than half a milion dollars of revenue. Hamburger stands make more money and require much less of an investment than SCO's apparent worth. They have no product of value and should have an equivalent worth. Oh yeah, if a hamburger stand had losses SCO has, it would be obvious that the hamburger stand was run by a moron.
Yes it is a conflict of interest. It's typical.
If you read this carefully, you might conclude that Bill Gates has been fixing the things he breaks since he was in high school. He and his buddies broke the first computer they were allowed to use and then hired themselves out to fix it:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system.
This was Bill Gates answer to the shortage of computing resources that existed when he was growing up. He made himself root so that he could have all the resources he wanted, essentially a robbery. The overall model applies to the software he sells to this day, there will always be something wrong with it so that you want to buy the new one. I like the answer RMS came up with better: make your own toys.
These are first steps, but they are not enough and you should not expect M$ to fix their problems. The only way to keep malware/spyware off your system is to own it and only get your software from trusted sources, such as Debian. Microsoft is so keen on DRM and pleasing others that they will never give you real ownership of any computer you put their software on. The ability to read your files and add/remove "components" without your permission is part of their EULA. If they can do it, so can others and the story will never end. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
That was one weak exploit and java is not free. The exploit required me to be browsing a dirtbag site while also doing something serious. More importantly, it did not work on my browser and I imagine it no longer works on ANY free browser. That's the end of that, no?
That's an interesting dream. I'm not sure it's a good idea though. Spreadsheets are designed to visualize data. When the data gets too large, it must be processed before you can visualize it, usually in a specific way. A spreadsheet, which displays every data point is not the best tool for the job. It's better to process the data outside of the sheet and reduce it first. Various batch programs and plugins do that job. When the job becomes routine, what you need it an entirely different program rather than a general spreadsheet. The best use for a spreadsheet is simple "what ifs" and quick graphing. It is a mistake to use them for complex tasks and large data sets.
Gnumeric does a nice job and it's my current favorite. If your dream surpasses my imagination, I recommend you work with it.
The approach of "these advantages will go away" makes it look like you expect "I love you" style network instability from free software. That's not going to happen and we should not act like it will.
Others have noted that this point is addressed. The author conservatively steers clear of such dissasters.
"Very Complex Excel" migration is a failure, even if you stick to M$. OLE and calls to other functions are each invitations to something not being on the next version of Winblows. Worse, M$ changes their scripting so you can be sure you will have work to do no matter what. I know a guy who was doing Nuclear Power Plant thermal balance calculations with a big nasty sheet. It even called the local high school to get weather information that was then used for regulatory purposes! The thing was a tremendous pain in his ass that needed constant upkeep and had all sorts of quirks that could give you wrong answers. He was using the wrong tool for the job and needed to replace it with proper and stable tools.
For normal sheets, OO, gnumeric and even kspread are doing a very good job with opening complex sheets. I've been very pleased lately when trying to open old cross section calculation sheets. I've seen my old graphs. They are doing about as well as M$ junk itself did with my older sheets. In the worst case, I've got the nasty old things on an http server, so I can go get them on a Winblows box and see them. A company could easily keep a few Winblows boxes or just use Xandros with it's excellent Crossover Office setup.
If the book is challenged on that point, then you will lose credibility.
I don't think so. The author said it would not work. He was being conservative but surely knows as well as I do how things are going.
If everyone knew everything about everyone else, or at least had access to such information, there would be less problems. Besides, why try and hide things, when it is becoming harder and harder to do so?
What he says is true, but that's not how the world and his company are working. The problem is that large government agencies and companies can get things wrong and that goes on to hurt without you having any idea much less a chance to defend yourself. A truly open system would be good, you should be able to tell who said what about you. What we have now is not very good at all, hence the $150 that can be charged.
Debian's system of human readable files and symlinks is a model of simplicity and transparency. Nothing could be easier than understanding exactly what is started and starting or stopping programs. Nothing is particularly difficult about reading the /etc/rc directories or typing, "/etc/init.d/program_name start|stop|restart" but there are plenty of runlevel editors and other GUI programs to help you out.
The registry has no set structure, so any vendor can add any mixed binary or text they want. It must be accessed though GUI tools or a hex editor. A single byte wrong will blue screen your whole computer, so it's not only obscure it's dangerous.
Shhh! that's just the kind of bad idea you don't want the marketroids to get. Don't you know they would love their own little exclusive namespace that they could market as something "only responsible companies" can own and spam you from. Surely, most would cut a deal with vermin of their own kind so that they would pay "low prices" for such things and have everyone else subsidize it. Let's just ridicule such an idea as ".moron" space.
Hope they never figure it out the same way greed heads have figured out exclusive franchise electricity. Industrial users of electricity have everyone else pay way more money for monopoly produced electricity than they do. Politicians have managed to pipe meterless electricity into public housing. Those left are increasingly few and pay increasingly more. It's a bad analogy, but the spirit is the same, pay up sucker.
I'll just add to that that I DONT WANT A SILLY NET DOMAIN, but some dirtbag with really bad ideas stole and squatted on my org name.
Yes.
If you read this carefully, you might conclude that Bill Gates has been fixing the things he breaks since he was in high school. He and his buddies broke the first computer they were allowed to use and then hired themselves out to fix it:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system.
This was Bill Gates answer to the shortage of computing resources that existed when he was growing up. He made himself root so that he could have all the resources he wanted, essentially a robbery. The overall model applies to the software he sells to this day, there will always be something wrong with it so that you want to buy the new one. I like the answer RMS came up with better: make your own toys.
These are first steps, but they are not enough and you should not expect M$ to fix their problems. The only way to keep malware/spyware off your system is to own it and only get your software from trusted sources, such as Debian. Microsoft is so keen on DRM and pleasing others that they will never give you real ownership of any computer you put their software on. The ability to read your files and add/remove "components" without your permission is part of their EULA. If they can do it, so can others and the story will never end. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
If they still make you turn everything off on take off and landing, nothing at all has changed. People with wifi built into their notbooks have been beaming signals around airplanes without even knowing they have the devices. So goes the world of the clueless.
Knoppix 3.7 doesn't recognize my GB eth0. Honestly, neither did Ubuntu, Mepis, or any other modern distro I've tried to run on it.
Yeah, that's the way it goes sometimes. Some silly hardware makers don't play ball and tell people how their hardware works. Some even go so far as to threaten and file suit against people who "reverse engineer" their hardware. How's anyone supposed to write drivers for that?
At the same time, anyone who's paid any attention knows that hardware that's useful soon finds free software drivers. There are very few pieces of hardware in my house that don't have free drivers, from scsi cards to dinky $40 cameras I never expected anyone to bother with. I'm not so sure that any of my older equipment has XP drivers and I know that the older drivers were not even stable together on the platforms they were made for.
Someone like you, who's been working with free software for five years, should know that. Had you simply said something like, "sometimes you need an X environment for windows," no one could complain. Why you would take the opportunity to say things that are not true about Knoppix is beyond me.
That's not what I said. I said I wanted something that does not exist right now. I'm sure this is a fine player and I like that it has built in FM radio. If it has zero DRM built into, I'm really enthused. What did I just buy for my wife? A 20GB Iriver. It was smaller.
You want one that _only_ plays ogg? I'm a _huge_ fan and supporter of ogg, and you're really not helping any, please stop now.
Yes, I want a player that only supports ogg because it will be cheaper. What's wrong with that? Choice is good, right? Save your negativity for someone who boosts WMA only players.
You see, that's the little secret of Free Software, most of the folks writing Free Software get paid to do so.
That's not true. Most free software is written by people who don't get paid a dime for it. They write it because it's going to solve a problem for them and it's easier to start with someone else's free pieces than it is to do anything else. Most of us have zero chance of working for anyone who would pay us for such things.
The reason that Microsoft comes into the discussion has very little to do with the "goals" of Free Software and everything to do with the fact that Microsoft is doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.
Well that's true, but the way they are going about it is a potentially fatal pain for everyone and helping them is not the thing to do. Every dime that gets to M$ is a dime toward the next SCO style FUD lawsuit, lobby money for software patents, BSA raids, Apple switchers and other leagal and PR bullshit.
To develop M$ crap, you have to own it. I don't have much money, but I'm giving part of it to the Free Software Foundation each month so that they can fight off some of it. Why on earth would I spend my money on a M$ OS?
There are only two reasons to port things to M$: to promote free software or because you want life to be easier for yourself when you have to hold your nose and use Windoze.
Neither of them is valid anymore. Mozilla's got one covered and the other is just wrong. Because most things work better in the free software world, it's probably easier to join a free project to replace that one last program that's got you stuck on Windows.
Free software is prodigiously promoted by Mozilla, an effort that does have paid developers. A glimpse of a much better world can be seen through that project. If promotion is your goal, porting more is be a duplication of effort.
In short, your time and effort are better spend doing anything other than making Windows better. I'd rather people watch TV and drink beer.
I hope they offer models without MP3 support because I don't want to pay a license fee for a format I don't have. All my music is ogg encoded because, for a long time, it was difficult to get an mp3 encoder. I'm not about to re encode everything to yesterday's, technically inferior, non free format.
That's funny when you consider that the awkwardness of Winblows is the whole reason to use this CD. When I have a guest, it's as easy to let them use my network as adduser. The guests don't have to be in my house either. Uptime? People like Steve Ballmer who aim for 60 days of uptime worry about that. I've gotten used to my power failing before my computers do. While it's nice to have good ssh clients, using them on a system that's notorious for auto installing keyloggers is foolish. Finally, when you use something like knoppix, you generally get as good or better performance as Windows gives loaded down as it usually is by utilities that fail to keep malware off.
there are still many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device. ... the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver
Your hardware must be different from the hardware I see most of the time. I've seen Knoppix boot up AMD 64 systems and other cutting edge stuff without problems. A set that won't give at least 1024 by 768 resolution is rare and you can try to force better with "ctrl alt +" if the conservative setting is not good enough for you. This might not be good enough for playing games, but it's more than enough to show off the real work that can be done with two office suits and two excellent browsers. Others, such as Morphix, have game CDs if you want that. The only place a boot CD might have problems with hardware is wireless networking, but wrapper software can fix that. Hardware compatibility, by the way, is much easier than software compatibility. M$ can break this toy with a single Winblows update as they have broken people's X and unix connectivity in the past. As time goes by, your chances of everthing working will be greater with an old Knoppix than it will be with an old copy of this CD.
Knoppix and CDs like it are the easiest and most secure way to move files. Once booted, you can use Konqueror's built in sftp to drag and drop files across a split window. What could be easier than that? If you want quick, zip the files and boot with business card linux and use sftp from the command line.
Finally, there's nothing like running a live linux CD to show your buddy just how easy it is to get Linux. If there are problems, it's better they show up there than later.
I prefer to take what they said at face value because it's true and obvious.
Your conjecture is interesting but has no factual support and flies in the face of a few. The usual tactic for negotiation is to do a Linux replacement study, and most of those are not done so cynically as you suggest. People have been adopting Linux on the desktop. While IE's use is important to Microsoft as a lock in device, it's not nearly as important revenues for the OS and Office.
Microsoft has been high handed and their product quality has been poor. Despite a tremendous public relations effort, people know it and are moving to better and lest costly options.
GPE's hadwriting recognition may interest you. You might also look into open slate.
Only if you are running familiar or OpenZaurus. GPE has excellent handwriting recognition. KPIM works almost exactly like Palm datebook +. Then you also have browsers, wifi, media players and other not considered "palm" programs.
I'm still using a Handspring Visor to organize my life, but I can see great advantages to newer platforms. With a little work, I'll master syncing with the Zaurus. If I do that and can find as good a calculator as the Visor has, that's it for the visor.
There's no way I'll find what I'm looking for in a Pocket PC running Microsoft crap. The last time I looked, those keyboardless things without decent hadwriting were a huge pain in the ass to use.