Here and now, Kpilot rocks. It syncs very well with Kontact and will move your notes for you. It moves all your attached notes too, such as appointment information and todo notes. I don't use it for email, but it also syncs with kmail. KDE is also working on a cell phone application so that all your database will belong to you. I've already used my old handspring to recover ancient contacts from a backup of previous syncs with Lookout. Syncing with Lookout had become a chronic pain two years ago and the Kpilot, Kontact combination is far superior to that old junk. You even needed to use a serial cradle for Windows 2000, yuck. KDE is indeed the Kool Desktop Environment.
Way cool things are coming with GPE, the Gnome Palmtop Environment. It's not quite ready for prime time on OpenZaurus yet, but it's beautiful and has the best handwriting recognition I've seen. Syncing software for that platform is in the works and already exists, I think, for Evolution. The further away from non free you get, the better things are.
They "ditch" IE, Ballmer comes with sweat running down his back and strikes a deal with the school, and maybe makes a million dollar donation. Everyone's happy, everyone's using IE again.
Oh sure, that's what it is, right. It's not like M$'s little browser has not slipped below the 90% mark for the general public. People are looking for a discount on IE, that's it, that's the ticket! No dissatisfaction here, everything is AOK for old Bill Gates. Really, it's all a money game. Any day now all sorts of people using Macs and Linux are going to just give up and go back to software much unchanged from 1995.
Those quotas exist because roaming profiles are being used.
M$'s roaming profiles suck. They move around all sorts of things they don't need to and stuff both local and remote hard drives by default. It's bandwith intensive but does not move all of the settings it should.
That's not a Firefox problem. I've seen the stupid thing blown up whole networks with nothing but M$ junk running.
Yeah, yeah, it's been done before but not as beautifully. The author drools over M$ tablets. Gnome Palmtop Environment has all of the things he mentions going for it. For all of his gushing and whining, you wonder why he did not just load a tablet with GPE so that he could have the "choice" he begs Jobs for. Other than sounding like an advert for M$, the man has made himself a beautiful tool.
... this just is a matter of having vision and a willingness to show people that things can be done differently. We do have to give Microsoft credit for making that effort. Their website makes information available for teachers who want to integrate Tablets into the classroom. I know we all like to bash Windows (and for many good reasons) but let us look objectively and give credit for what has been done well. I for one am praying that Tiger will correct some of the printing problems. Better support for EXIF info and sorting at the OS level would also be greatly appreciated. In all honesty, doesn't it seem that Apple should have been at the forefront of this? Isn't it time that Apple offers something to give us a choice? I know they say that the person who is at the cutting edge usually has bloody fingers, but PLEASE Mr. Jobs! We're all waiting...
What a crock of poorly written horse shit. "I for one", "in all honesty", "let us look objectively", give me a break. Who's not being objective? Why does he have to tell me he's being honest this time? It sounds all so familiar, as if made by the Apple Switcher PR firm. The Newton and Palm were way out in front of Mickey$oft on this and tablets weighted down with winblows are worthless, despite Mr. Gate's page trying to sell them to teachers as a paper / chalkboard substitute.
Nifty tool yes. A revolution that "a technology that will change how teachers interact with students how artists interact with their canvases, how people will communicate with each other?" I doubt it.
... my department *prefers* (i.e. insists) that I [use Outlook].
Won't it be nice when IT departments rate that piece of junk where it belongs. My University uses web mail, which works well enough though it forces me to use Mozilla rather than Konqueror. It takes time, but it looks like people are getting brave enough to suggest that Microsoft might not have all the answers to desktop computing and that their answers are really a problem.
I have an old laptop loaded with Debian Sarge. It's only a 233 MHz PII, but it's relatively secure and I can use it to ssh back to my cable box. You can get one for about $300 on ebay. The department is happy that I have a few tools they can't provide me.
If I were you, I'd use the Outlook just as they want and for nothing but school correspondence. It might last a little longer that way. Good luck.
They will find a way to make noting at Penn State work with Firefox. My bet is they slip something into the updates for them that starts spitting out error messages like Win3.1 did with DrDOS. They did not quit making IE for Apple because they were paranoid or no longer wanted the money, they did it because they projected their own behavior onto Apple.
create a 1 credit required gen-ed course on personal computer security. Students would thus be required to learn how to keep junk off their desktops one hour a week for a semester
That would be an incredible waste of time. A full undergraduate load is four courses, typically twelve credit hours. What you propose is close to ten percent of the student load and eight full credit hours over a student's career. If you added one or two computer science courses to that, you could have a minor. All of that to "support" Bill Gate's broken software? No thanks.
Most Universities have a one or two hour long course for students. There they can learn the wonders of anti-virus, pass phrases and a few other useless things that most people already know. That people still have problems with Winblows is not an indication of general ignorance so much as it's an indication that the thing they are using has problems. The Mac, Linux and Unix labs don't have problems, though the same people use them.
where I used to work only uses IE on their systems. They also used Windows 98.... During the hay day of blaster and myDoom and whatnot guess which department was the least affected by it all?
I'd have guessed any department using Macs, Linux, Solaris or some other form of Unix. Microsoft themselves declared Winblows 98 obsolete. I've seen hundreds of dead 98 and 95 computers. XP does not do much better.
A better solution would be to educate the students on where to get the free VirusScan software from the university and how to keep it up to date along with their Windows system.
You think people who can't install a simple browser are going to be able to find and use all the special crap it takes to keep Winblows alive on the web for more than four minutes? Right.
People keep telling me the sky is falling and I've yet to see it actually happen to my systems.
You get spam, right? 90% of that spam comes from Winblows infected computers. The same automatically installing malware is used for porn serving and porn dialing and credit card fraud.
If your system has not had to be reinstalled in the last year or two it's strictly because your IT department has shielded you. They can be providing firewalls, system updates and virus scanning of your email. Without those, your XP box is a sitting duck with a 4 minute half life.
Ghost image of the student machines so if they became screwed up it was a quick automated task to fix the problem.
You don't know that they did not do that. All you know is that the administrator tried to tell the student that winamp and firefox broke the computer and the administrator reinstalled the machine. We don't know how the reinstall was done or if the administrator really thought that's what broke his computers. I'd use Knoppix and partimage. The administrator might have just been trying to scare the student, which is almost as dumb as believing what he said.
"Just opening Internet Explorer results in about 3 minutes of closing popups" So why were you putting your head in the sand by installing two pieces of software that had nothing to do with the problem?... You using FireFox and Winamp aren't doing anything to help.... you should have downloaded AdAware and cleaned up the system...
Now there's a really bad idea. Firefox, I'm sure, spared him one day's worth of pop up garbage. Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy are best of breed but dangerous to apply. Many viruses, worms and malware contain suicide pills. When you try to eliminate them, they take you out. Indeed, one of them might have detected firefox and killed the system over it. On a machine that screwed up, Adaware is almost sure to kill it. Reimaging was the right thing to do. The whole thing is a windoze cluster fuck and the poor guy is just going to have to put up with it until the administrator figures things out on his own.
A power toy available from MS and the Nvidia drivers provide multiple desktop support; I've not used a non Nvidia card in years, so I can't comment on other manufacturers, but I'd expect their drivers to offer similar functionality.
My little brother had one of those in an old Dell 650 PIII. Performance was very poor, which is astonishing. Multiple desktops in the Linux world work well for hardware as modest as a 90 MHz PI and 16 MB of RAM, such as my old laptop.
The NT line is multi-user in that users are/can be completely separate. The Server line is truly multi-user in that you can have multiple users logged on to and using the machine simultaneously.
I've only seen this work with Magic Twin from Jetway. It did indeed use the windows API for it's time slicing, but required extensive hardware support. Worse, as far as I know, you still have to run things like IE and Outlook with root privs. At the same time, my old P90 works great as a card reader and I don't have any problems using it that way while my wife surfs the web with it using a ssh forwared browser from yet another computer. Windoze multiuser ability is anemic and adds nothing to the security of the system.
Don't use IE or Outlook/Outlook Express, use a firewall (as you should for any system), and you'll be fine - I have been for the 7+ years that I've owned a PC.
Why bother with windows at all? What does it offer that you can't find in the free software world? Why should I recommend it to anyone? What exactly are you trying to tell me, besides Winblows might not suck as badly as I think it does?
... a lot of malware requires user intervention to install, and there's nothing that Linux can do to prevent that.
Mac, Linux and Solaris operating experience contradicts that line of reasoning. Blame the user is a poor excuse when you could just adopt a sane networking and user privs model.
Looks like IE get burned by the very same 'feature' that allowed it to get 95% market share : integration with Windows and total access to stuff it shouldn't.
It's funny how KDE does not suffer the same kinds of problems despite having better "integration". Ease of use does not have to be a security nightmare. With Konqueror, I have access to sftp, ftp and other network shares as if they were local files, drag and drop easy with split screens and multiple tabs. Floppy and CD mounting are as easy as clicking icons on my desktop. What really burnt M$ was pumping money into marketing instead of fixing their broken junk. According to the closed source apologists, getting these new features is supposed to be as cheap and easy as looking at the free source code.
Now I look at IE (the rare time I need to open it for windowsupdate) and it just feels...dirty.
I feel the same way about the whole single desktop, single user, spyware loaded GUI. I just don't trust it and know that there are far better alternatives out there.
The students already knew, but they also know that they were going to have lame brained problems if they used an alternate browser. Having the computing department come out and say this is a big boots for them. Staff may also be relieved by this.
Sometimes, thanks to clueless professors, I've needed to use IE. I actually talked to two professors about using standards instead of cheap development tools that foist garbage on their students and would require expensive software and break in a year or two. It was like talking to a brick wall and they could care less. I was polite, and I can only hope that they remember me and think, "hmmm, that guy was right."
Having a University policy in place would be great. The line, "Use a standard browser" would no longer work. More importantly, stuff that does not work with Mozilla or Konqueror would get fixed and that would spare me a few trips to the library.
A policy like that would also be nice for the staff. Morons who think Microsoft is some kind of standard would get the message loud and clear. More importantly, this removes any kind of lingering FUD about the University not "supporting" alternate browsers. I'm sure the IT staff would love it too because they are the ones who get to spend the all nighters and who bear the embarrassment of turning off whole dorms and sections of campus when the next M$ born worm crawls through.
This kind of transition has been happening at my University but slowly. The student log in still has an advertisement for Microsoft software on the first page but all the public kiosks in the Union have been converted to Linux terminals running Mozilla. The continuing security dissaster is finally getting solved with something other than the blame the user game.
It's nice to hear some good news coming from Penn State.
If you worry about the RIAA the solution is simple; get interested in bands that *promote* your right to copy their live work... a hundred other, less famous acts I've haven't listened to yet.
This is going to become more common. As a recent Pew survey of musicians showed, most artists think of the internet as a way of getting their word out. 99.99% of artists have no real chance of landing on the RIAA monopoly push money train, regardless of merit. For them, you and I enjoying their music is pure promotion and about the only chance they have of their recordings becoming something that gets lost in the attic. Performance is demanding and few people have the inclination to tour for 30 years. Music is still a get it today because it will be gone tomorrow kind of thing.
The effectiveness of your method have yet to be determined, but the ethics are piss poor. Music publishers have been some of the largest p2p uploaders. While their obviously spoofed tracks failed, watermarked files did not and are very common. The movie industry can do the same thing. Then, various forms of mal and spy ware can report on people using platforms that are so easy to crack. In order for this method to work with bit torrent, the publisher must load the network first. The ethics of offering your own content up for trade and then bitching when people take it is left as an exercise.
It's not the content that they are worried about anyway, it's competition. Movie studios are nervous because they are not the exclusive providers of moving pictures anymore. Now anyone can make a movie and distribute it. This is something of a shock for an industry that naturally only had four or five members, was working on vertical integration and hoping to use DRM to hoplessly lock down distribution for themselves forever. Ha, ha, dumb fucks. Movie studios and the music industry know that their position in the world comes from having grasped and mastered obsolete technologies, and they are fighting their new competition before it is well known. The actual content, singing, stories, acting, lighting, beauty and bravado are as common as little theaters. The social implications of monoply story telling and song are also left as an exercise.
Finally, I have to complain about the use of the phrase, "intellectual property rights." "intellectual property" is vague, intentionally misleading and bad enough. But "rights" is even worse. No one has a right to a government granted exclusive franchise, which is what a patent, a copyright or a trademark is. That exclusive franchise can never reduce ideas to real property. No one can ever own a name, a song or an invention the same way they own a pencil. The notion that you have the same kind of ownership and rights to a song as you do a pencil is childishly asinine and that notion's promotion has tremendous social consequences. Song, names and ideas are easy to share and can be enjoyed by everyone at the same time. The people doing all the worrying are not "anyone else who has an interest in protecting their intellectual property rights online." Free software authors, photographers, authors, musicians and many others have the same rights and use the same laws but love bit torrent. The only term that can really tie together copyright, patents and trademark is "exclusive franchise" and that, not basic freedoms, are what movie and music publishers are trying to protect.
A movie studio is going to the supreme court in order to keep someone else from doing something? What's up with that? I thought that appeals of court decisions were to resolve issues where the law was missapplied and the government had violated someone's rights, not a place to beg the government to smash a software company that might be a threat to your revenue model. That cases like this are heard is an indication of how warped laws are by special interests who think the rest of us owe them a living.
my competitors still can't integrate my code into their code (unless they want to GPL their own code). They'd have to understand the solution in a clean room scenario, and re-implement it (something they can do with the binary, anyway). So it is not actually an instant handover to your competitor.
Joe's arguments in this direction fall on their face in no time at all with a little thought. If what he says is true, then Microsoft would NEVER have a feature deficit with any free software. A quick look at KDE, Gnome, Apache or GIMP shows how far behind they are. They don't have the money or manpower to use all the features and innovations that free software users take for granted. If they don't have the resources to do that, no one does.
Extra hurdles and extra expense will mean that only those who can afford the best patent attorney can get patents.
Some hurdles don't have to cost anything. Erecting the right hurdles and leveling the wrong ones is what needs to happen. Money is the wrong hurdle, because everyone pays taxes and deserves a fair hearing. Using the process as a "revenue center" is an outrage. Quality hurdles, and I don't mean grammar and spelling, are what we need.
The summary sounds like a well thought out and careful plan. Challenges of bogus patents are good for everyone and can be carried out by anyone practicing in any field. The quality is what I would expect from the IEEE.
I have only one problem, the requirement of "use judges and special masters." That's what we are supposed to have now. Picking them from industry could cement the current big company lock and make things much worse. The government is already supposed to be knowledgable and careful in it's grant of exclusive franchises. A mechanism to get useful information to the people who are actually making the calls is a great idea. Finding and hiring experts from every field is impractical. Granting expert power to "recognized experts" from big companies with conflicts of interest is a recipe for disaster.
*SIGH* when are all those...um...browser users going to realize that they should just switch to...umm...no...other browser?
Everytime there's an exploit in a relatively secure piece of software, some dork like cyranoVR is going to jump up and act like there's no difference between any software. At least that's what he seems to be implying.
Cyrano, why don't you suggest something positive? Dillo, which does not use scripting, and Konqueror 3.3.1 do not have this problem. If you love M$ and Winblows, why don't you tell people to avoid visiting their bank's pathetic javascript based, no-security, hacker owned website, while browsing porn? Oh, because some other exploit will get them? Or will the malicious site simply run a zero sized window, like Windoze lets them? As you say, Hmmmm.
Are telling me that I should move from one of the fine free web browsers available to some piece of crap like IE? It's hard to tell, because all you have done is whine about Slashdot readers. Of course that's all you can do because reality gets in the way of anything you might say directly.
Many is not all and the free browsers get fixed, so moving to a free browser on a free OS is a good idea. Users of non free software are indeed sick and tired of their computers not working. With all the holes in them, that's no surprise at all.
I tried this test again from another computer. Konqueror 3.3.1 still passed but Mozilla 1.7.3 got owned. I expect this will be fixed by the end of the week. Yawn. In the mean time, I'll be careful to avoid banks that use javascript while I browse porn and other malice with Mozilla. That happens all of never.
Yeah, as most others here have pointed out, that was not their fault.
But so what? Check out OpenZaurus' new Gnome Palm Embedded (GPE) environment. It uses the whole screen for Graffiti 1 type handwriting recognition. You just punch the little pencil and it starts working without taking any screen real estate. It's really fast because you don't make as many mistakes with such large characters, and that's what the stupid Xerox lawsuit tried to steal from everyone. There are significant problems with 3.5.2 or openzaurus, but graffiti 1 is working well and GPE is beautiful. I imagine their Evolution sync is first class.
Free software will soon replace Palm for me, 100%. I've been an Handspring Visor user for years and I still love the platform. I still don't have a replacement for their excellent calculator, which has constants and exponentiation up to 500 or so. I also love their datebook +. I also have to thank the Palm Source people for defeating Xerox in their greedy little grab. Still, I can see the writing on the wall. Today my Zaurus has better handwriting recognition than the Visor. As soon as I find as good a calculator and can sync my Zaurus with KDE's excellent Kontact is the day I don't need Palm Source's non free goodies. That day is very close.
This store was pretty blatant about it. Selling a $500 "Super Xbox" preinstalled with a modchip, upgraded hard drive and a few copied games on the hard drive. That's just asking for it.
Not if the games were actually paid for. In that case, the ESA just put a good customer in jail. What a bunch of assholes.
You should be fighting the "circumvention" line with everything you've got. There should be nothing wrong with fixing a computer so that it has a bigger hard drive or fixing a console so that it plays games more easily.
They sold lots of blatently pirated games and videos
Well, I can still cry that the Federal government is being used this way. You would think that the ESA could just go and bring a lawsuit against them and take the money that was due and some punishment and that would be that. The police could be called if the store refused to comply. This kind of "crime" does not merit police raids and resources the same way drug manufacturing and other crimes do.
Still, I'm glad that the crime in question was not simply selling a modified computer, with a bigger hard drive and different software on it. The ESA spokesman tried to make it sound like that was what was being enforced here and that would be a total waste of time and wrong.
It's BS like this that will keep me from ever buying an Xbox. I refuse to give people who act this way and lobby for such bogus copyright laws a single nickel. M$ and E$A, this means you. They make Sony and others look good.
Slashdot Mirror
Way cool things are coming with GPE, the Gnome Palmtop Environment. It's not quite ready for prime time on OpenZaurus yet, but it's beautiful and has the best handwriting recognition I've seen. Syncing software for that platform is in the works and already exists, I think, for Evolution. The further away from non free you get, the better things are.
Oh sure, that's what it is, right. It's not like M$'s little browser has not slipped below the 90% mark for the general public. People are looking for a discount on IE, that's it, that's the ticket! No dissatisfaction here, everything is AOK for old Bill Gates. Really, it's all a money game. Any day now all sorts of people using Macs and Linux are going to just give up and go back to software much unchanged from 1995.
And then, poor Steve Baller woke up.
M$'s roaming profiles suck. They move around all sorts of things they don't need to and stuff both local and remote hard drives by default. It's bandwith intensive but does not move all of the settings it should.
That's not a Firefox problem. I've seen the stupid thing blown up whole networks with nothing but M$ junk running.
What a crock of poorly written horse shit. "I for one", "in all honesty", "let us look objectively", give me a break. Who's not being objective? Why does he have to tell me he's being honest this time? It sounds all so familiar, as if made by the Apple Switcher PR firm. The Newton and Palm were way out in front of Mickey$oft on this and tablets weighted down with winblows are worthless, despite Mr. Gate's page trying to sell them to teachers as a paper / chalkboard substitute.
Nifty tool yes. A revolution that "a technology that will change how teachers interact with students how artists interact with their canvases, how people will communicate with each other?" I doubt it.
Won't it be nice when IT departments rate that piece of junk where it belongs. My University uses web mail, which works well enough though it forces me to use Mozilla rather than Konqueror. It takes time, but it looks like people are getting brave enough to suggest that Microsoft might not have all the answers to desktop computing and that their answers are really a problem.
I have an old laptop loaded with Debian Sarge. It's only a 233 MHz PII, but it's relatively secure and I can use it to ssh back to my cable box. You can get one for about $300 on ebay. The department is happy that I have a few tools they can't provide me.
If I were you, I'd use the Outlook just as they want and for nothing but school correspondence. It might last a little longer that way. Good luck.
They will find a way to make noting at Penn State work with Firefox. My bet is they slip something into the updates for them that starts spitting out error messages like Win3.1 did with DrDOS. They did not quit making IE for Apple because they were paranoid or no longer wanted the money, they did it because they projected their own behavior onto Apple.
That would be an incredible waste of time. A full undergraduate load is four courses, typically twelve credit hours. What you propose is close to ten percent of the student load and eight full credit hours over a student's career. If you added one or two computer science courses to that, you could have a minor. All of that to "support" Bill Gate's broken software? No thanks.
Most Universities have a one or two hour long course for students. There they can learn the wonders of anti-virus, pass phrases and a few other useless things that most people already know. That people still have problems with Winblows is not an indication of general ignorance so much as it's an indication that the thing they are using has problems. The Mac, Linux and Unix labs don't have problems, though the same people use them.
I'd have guessed any department using Macs, Linux, Solaris or some other form of Unix. Microsoft themselves declared Winblows 98 obsolete. I've seen hundreds of dead 98 and 95 computers. XP does not do much better.
A better solution would be to educate the students on where to get the free VirusScan software from the university and how to keep it up to date along with their Windows system.
You think people who can't install a simple browser are going to be able to find and use all the special crap it takes to keep Winblows alive on the web for more than four minutes? Right.
People keep telling me the sky is falling and I've yet to see it actually happen to my systems.
You get spam, right? 90% of that spam comes from Winblows infected computers. The same automatically installing malware is used for porn serving and porn dialing and credit card fraud.
If your system has not had to be reinstalled in the last year or two it's strictly because your IT department has shielded you. They can be providing firewalls, system updates and virus scanning of your email. Without those, your XP box is a sitting duck with a 4 minute half life.
You don't know that they did not do that. All you know is that the administrator tried to tell the student that winamp and firefox broke the computer and the administrator reinstalled the machine. We don't know how the reinstall was done or if the administrator really thought that's what broke his computers. I'd use Knoppix and partimage. The administrator might have just been trying to scare the student, which is almost as dumb as believing what he said.
"Just opening Internet Explorer results in about 3 minutes of closing popups" So why were you putting your head in the sand by installing two pieces of software that had nothing to do with the problem? ... You using FireFox and Winamp aren't doing anything to help. ... you should have downloaded AdAware and cleaned up the system ...
Now there's a really bad idea. Firefox, I'm sure, spared him one day's worth of pop up garbage. Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy are best of breed but dangerous to apply. Many viruses, worms and malware contain suicide pills. When you try to eliminate them, they take you out. Indeed, one of them might have detected firefox and killed the system over it. On a machine that screwed up, Adaware is almost sure to kill it. Reimaging was the right thing to do. The whole thing is a windoze cluster fuck and the poor guy is just going to have to put up with it until the administrator figures things out on his own.
My little brother had one of those in an old Dell 650 PIII. Performance was very poor, which is astonishing. Multiple desktops in the Linux world work well for hardware as modest as a 90 MHz PI and 16 MB of RAM, such as my old laptop.
The NT line is multi-user in that users are/can be completely separate. The Server line is truly multi-user in that you can have multiple users logged on to and using the machine simultaneously.
I've only seen this work with Magic Twin from Jetway. It did indeed use the windows API for it's time slicing, but required extensive hardware support. Worse, as far as I know, you still have to run things like IE and Outlook with root privs. At the same time, my old P90 works great as a card reader and I don't have any problems using it that way while my wife surfs the web with it using a ssh forwared browser from yet another computer. Windoze multiuser ability is anemic and adds nothing to the security of the system.
Don't use IE or Outlook/Outlook Express, use a firewall (as you should for any system), and you'll be fine - I have been for the 7+ years that I've owned a PC.
Why bother with windows at all? What does it offer that you can't find in the free software world? Why should I recommend it to anyone? What exactly are you trying to tell me, besides Winblows might not suck as badly as I think it does?
Mac, Linux and Solaris operating experience contradicts that line of reasoning. Blame the user is a poor excuse when you could just adopt a sane networking and user privs model.
It's funny how KDE does not suffer the same kinds of problems despite having better "integration". Ease of use does not have to be a security nightmare. With Konqueror, I have access to sftp, ftp and other network shares as if they were local files, drag and drop easy with split screens and multiple tabs. Floppy and CD mounting are as easy as clicking icons on my desktop. What really burnt M$ was pumping money into marketing instead of fixing their broken junk. According to the closed source apologists, getting these new features is supposed to be as cheap and easy as looking at the free source code.
Now I look at IE (the rare time I need to open it for windowsupdate) and it just feels...dirty.
I feel the same way about the whole single desktop, single user, spyware loaded GUI. I just don't trust it and know that there are far better alternatives out there.
Sometimes, thanks to clueless professors, I've needed to use IE. I actually talked to two professors about using standards instead of cheap development tools that foist garbage on their students and would require expensive software and break in a year or two. It was like talking to a brick wall and they could care less. I was polite, and I can only hope that they remember me and think, "hmmm, that guy was right."
Having a University policy in place would be great. The line, "Use a standard browser" would no longer work. More importantly, stuff that does not work with Mozilla or Konqueror would get fixed and that would spare me a few trips to the library.
A policy like that would also be nice for the staff. Morons who think Microsoft is some kind of standard would get the message loud and clear. More importantly, this removes any kind of lingering FUD about the University not "supporting" alternate browsers. I'm sure the IT staff would love it too because they are the ones who get to spend the all nighters and who bear the embarrassment of turning off whole dorms and sections of campus when the next M$ born worm crawls through.
This kind of transition has been happening at my University but slowly. The student log in still has an advertisement for Microsoft software on the first page but all the public kiosks in the Union have been converted to Linux terminals running Mozilla. The continuing security dissaster is finally getting solved with something other than the blame the user game.
It's nice to hear some good news coming from Penn State.
Wiki List which points to:
this
and that.
This is going to become more common. As a recent Pew survey of musicians showed, most artists think of the internet as a way of getting their word out. 99.99% of artists have no real chance of landing on the RIAA monopoly push money train, regardless of merit. For them, you and I enjoying their music is pure promotion and about the only chance they have of their recordings becoming something that gets lost in the attic. Performance is demanding and few people have the inclination to tour for 30 years. Music is still a get it today because it will be gone tomorrow kind of thing.
It's not the content that they are worried about anyway, it's competition. Movie studios are nervous because they are not the exclusive providers of moving pictures anymore. Now anyone can make a movie and distribute it. This is something of a shock for an industry that naturally only had four or five members, was working on vertical integration and hoping to use DRM to hoplessly lock down distribution for themselves forever. Ha, ha, dumb fucks. Movie studios and the music industry know that their position in the world comes from having grasped and mastered obsolete technologies, and they are fighting their new competition before it is well known. The actual content, singing, stories, acting, lighting, beauty and bravado are as common as little theaters. The social implications of monoply story telling and song are also left as an exercise.
Finally, I have to complain about the use of the phrase, "intellectual property rights." "intellectual property" is vague, intentionally misleading and bad enough. But "rights" is even worse. No one has a right to a government granted exclusive franchise, which is what a patent, a copyright or a trademark is. That exclusive franchise can never reduce ideas to real property. No one can ever own a name, a song or an invention the same way they own a pencil. The notion that you have the same kind of ownership and rights to a song as you do a pencil is childishly asinine and that notion's promotion has tremendous social consequences. Song, names and ideas are easy to share and can be enjoyed by everyone at the same time. The people doing all the worrying are not "anyone else who has an interest in protecting their intellectual property rights online." Free software authors, photographers, authors, musicians and many others have the same rights and use the same laws but love bit torrent. The only term that can really tie together copyright, patents and trademark is "exclusive franchise" and that, not basic freedoms, are what movie and music publishers are trying to protect.
Joe's arguments in this direction fall on their face in no time at all with a little thought. If what he says is true, then Microsoft would NEVER have a feature deficit with any free software. A quick look at KDE, Gnome, Apache or GIMP shows how far behind they are. They don't have the money or manpower to use all the features and innovations that free software users take for granted. If they don't have the resources to do that, no one does.
Or take a picture with their cell phone.
I am an AC dick. Who is Willy?
Some hurdles don't have to cost anything. Erecting the right hurdles and leveling the wrong ones is what needs to happen. Money is the wrong hurdle, because everyone pays taxes and deserves a fair hearing. Using the process as a "revenue center" is an outrage. Quality hurdles, and I don't mean grammar and spelling, are what we need.
The summary sounds like a well thought out and careful plan. Challenges of bogus patents are good for everyone and can be carried out by anyone practicing in any field. The quality is what I would expect from the IEEE.
I have only one problem, the requirement of "use judges and special masters." That's what we are supposed to have now. Picking them from industry could cement the current big company lock and make things much worse. The government is already supposed to be knowledgable and careful in it's grant of exclusive franchises. A mechanism to get useful information to the people who are actually making the calls is a great idea. Finding and hiring experts from every field is impractical. Granting expert power to "recognized experts" from big companies with conflicts of interest is a recipe for disaster.
Everytime there's an exploit in a relatively secure piece of software, some dork like cyranoVR is going to jump up and act like there's no difference between any software. At least that's what he seems to be implying.
Cyrano, why don't you suggest something positive? Dillo, which does not use scripting, and Konqueror 3.3.1 do not have this problem. If you love M$ and Winblows, why don't you tell people to avoid visiting their bank's pathetic javascript based, no-security, hacker owned website, while browsing porn? Oh, because some other exploit will get them? Or will the malicious site simply run a zero sized window, like Windoze lets them? As you say, Hmmmm.
Are telling me that I should move from one of the fine free web browsers available to some piece of crap like IE? It's hard to tell, because all you have done is whine about Slashdot readers. Of course that's all you can do because reality gets in the way of anything you might say directly.
Many is not all and the free browsers get fixed, so moving to a free browser on a free OS is a good idea. Users of non free software are indeed sick and tired of their computers not working. With all the holes in them, that's no surprise at all.
Yeah, as most others here have pointed out, that was not their fault.
But so what? Check out OpenZaurus' new Gnome Palm Embedded (GPE) environment. It uses the whole screen for Graffiti 1 type handwriting recognition. You just punch the little pencil and it starts working without taking any screen real estate. It's really fast because you don't make as many mistakes with such large characters, and that's what the stupid Xerox lawsuit tried to steal from everyone. There are significant problems with 3.5.2 or openzaurus, but graffiti 1 is working well and GPE is beautiful. I imagine their Evolution sync is first class.
Free software will soon replace Palm for me, 100%. I've been an Handspring Visor user for years and I still love the platform. I still don't have a replacement for their excellent calculator, which has constants and exponentiation up to 500 or so. I also love their datebook +. I also have to thank the Palm Source people for defeating Xerox in their greedy little grab. Still, I can see the writing on the wall. Today my Zaurus has better handwriting recognition than the Visor. As soon as I find as good a calculator and can sync my Zaurus with KDE's excellent Kontact is the day I don't need Palm Source's non free goodies. That day is very close.
Not if the games were actually paid for. In that case, the ESA just put a good customer in jail. What a bunch of assholes.
You should be fighting the "circumvention" line with everything you've got. There should be nothing wrong with fixing a computer so that it has a bigger hard drive or fixing a console so that it plays games more easily.
Well, I can still cry that the Federal government is being used this way. You would think that the ESA could just go and bring a lawsuit against them and take the money that was due and some punishment and that would be that. The police could be called if the store refused to comply. This kind of "crime" does not merit police raids and resources the same way drug manufacturing and other crimes do.
Still, I'm glad that the crime in question was not simply selling a modified computer, with a bigger hard drive and different software on it. The ESA spokesman tried to make it sound like that was what was being enforced here and that would be a total waste of time and wrong.
It's BS like this that will keep me from ever buying an Xbox. I refuse to give people who act this way and lobby for such bogus copyright laws a single nickel. M$ and E$A, this means you. They make Sony and others look good.