Microsoft is the king of free beer, but that's not enough anymore. Every version of Windoze has been easy to "pirate" and they have been giving it away to "decision makers" forever. That's why it's entrenched in business schools and many big dumb companies. What happened next was date rape and a big hang over. Few people will continue to be fooled when cheaper and better software is all around them.
Nothing short of complete software freedom will gain them much interest from the free software community. Who really wants to donate time or money to the people funding SCO and other nightmares? Even if they did free all of their code it's so tortured that it would take years to tame it and bring it up to par.
What do they have that's worth the effort? Who wants a single user, single screen GUI that's mixed up with low level floppy access? All the real rendering stuff belongs to Nvidia and ATI. Who wants Outlook? Word formats have already been decoded by Sun and friends. IE sucks. If M$ put their codebase up on Sourceforge tomorrow, there'd be an initial flurry of interest, but it would mostly be people looking to make migrating away from Windoze easier.
Much more easily than M$ or AOL? Sure, anyone dumb enough to still be running Windoze has zero expectation of privacy, security, dignity and stability regardless of services used. The rest of us can have end to end encryption via jabber and be more sure that we are not being keylogged.
Real security comes in steps and is a never ending process:
Know what you want to gaurd and only let people who need it use it.
Eliminate weak links, such as insecure OS access to such information.
Continue to monitor your important material and watch for unusual activity.
How very nice of you to take the time to flame your readers, and yourself. Oh, I know, you only post on Slashdot for profit.
Typical Capture Ha Ha from long ago. What do you know, even a Windoze using lamer can be loved. I'm sure that this kind or rooting has been automated for a long time. The screen shots are more than two years old.
Rapist prefer the Islamic model of female protection to convents, so rapists demand all women convert to Islam or lawsuits will fly. Nun's habits are much to hard to get inside of and the communal living makes it much harder to get at them alone. Islamic dress, by comparison, is much less restrictive and easier to abuse.
The author fails to grasp the GPL, BSD and confuses both with software patent issues. The GPL is not anti business as IBM, HP and many others can tell you. Microsoft and other companies do have something to worry about, but it's simple competition. It's shocking that a businessman does not understand that much. As for his license advice to programmers, he might do better with women's fashion, but I doubt it.
Technically, such plans cost more to administer than they are worth. That's why one stamp pays the post, regardless of destination. It's a cost that does not exist now and it's not something I want to pay for.
Socially, the smaller the transaction, the higher the margins can be. This is why bubble gum and soda makers are big earners.
Government intervention only makes the above worse.
You almost always see posts like "my XMHz computer with X MB of RAM runs application X very slowly.
No, in this and most other cases, the troll says something like this instead:
At work, we have about 400 Sony Vaio laptops with maxed-out RAM, and Firebird and Opera are too slow to use because they swap continuously...
My 233 MHz P2 with 64MB of ram renders the web just fine through KDE3.2 with a default Debian Sarge install. X seems to do just fine supporting all of that, so I still have no idea what you are talking about. What kind of hardware are you running 400 of that's more pathetic than mine?
I did not have to, but I did anyway. I mentioned specific window managers and applications that run well on a 90MHz P1 with 24MB of RAM under X.
Right, so anyways. Got any numbers? *Anything* other than foaming at the mouth?
No, and I don't know what you are talking about when you say "foaming at the mouth". You have my opinion that X works well enough for me with the applications I mentioned.
Running Xine, quake or anything else on my old computer is like my comparision above.
Well, no, you should not try that on a P90, but that's not X's fault. I doubt a svga version of quake or xine would work well either. The basic rendering system is what's OK. It delivers fonts and graphics good enough for most purposes. Text editors, email, reasonable web sites and Gimp all work well, so my 8 year old laptop is still useful.
I can't count how many times I hear on/. someone saying that X is too bulky, etc, etc. And here's Gosling saying (2 years ago) that X is headed in the direction of slim and lightweight.
People who complain about X being "bulky", "bloated" and all that are trolls. It was designed on slim hardware and designed flexibly.
The real test is to simply use it. Try Feather Linux or any of the other tiny distros out on some crufty old hardware and see for yourself. I've got a 90 MHz laptop that runs X just fine with 24MB of RAM thanks to Woody, fluxbox and other light applications. Gnome 1.4 also is snappy enough, though KDE is a little slow. X is not the problem if there is one! Feather runs even faster running testing and unstable Debian code and I suspect that two further years of going down Gosling's path is responsible. Of course newer hardware runs better and I don't have problems with things like xawtv, Xine or quake running with KDE or Window Maker on top of X.
From where I stand, I have no idea what people are talking about when they complain about X. They never say anything specific.
I have an amazing idea and I'm off to patent it. Its a web based front end for system updates, see, it scans the system to determine what updates are needed, then only presents them to the user in such a way that they can see what updates are critical and which are just general enhancements.
To get it passed, make some pictures. Take a screen shot of M$'s update notification and then add some preview buttons, a block diagram and other widgets. You might not be able to patent M$'s dinky notification, but you can keep them from improving it. That's what they are trying to do to Gnome's Pager.
And so did I. M$ is trying to patent all improvements to pagers. It's much quicker to paint shop than it is to code. This is one of the reasons that software patents are stupid to begin with: software is inherently an abstraction not an invention or even a discovery. The discovery is pure math. The invention is more like this, a UI enhancement that might be subject to copyright but only according to layout. A copyright on Gnome's layout with one or two tweaks would be rejected without thought. A patent of it should be rejected for the same reasons.
Microsoft is disgusting and the idiot who signed off on that patent needs a refresher course.
I wish a big-name American athlete (such as CJ Hunter) came up behind Twitter as he was bending over and shoved his massive cock into Twitter's anus.
They don't seem to be able to think of much other than that. Must be something about liking or working for M$. Cut, paste and dream of penis, anus and shit, what a life they must lead.
Don't these people have any confidence in the superiority of their skills, equipment and planning? How sorry can they get?
If I'm interested in a sport, I will want to see the full quality version. Sure, I'd love to read a blog or two, but what I'm really interested in is the event itself and I'll figure a way around M$NBC's stupid internet black out to get it.
If I were an athlete, I'd tell the IOC to shove it just as soon as my event was over and post whatever I wanted my family and friends to see.
Walk down the street in downtown Detroit counting $20 dollar bills and see how long it takes for you to get mugged. Then do the same on mainstreet in West Bumblefuck, Iowa (population 15, if'n Pastor Smith isn't out of town). Betcha you last longer in Iowa. In other words that time is probably dependant on how nasty the computing environment is.
Ah yes, but money does not turn a neighborhood into a slum like M$ makes a nasty computing environment. In real life, the more money a neighborhood has the nicer it looks. The more M$ you put on a network, the more run down it looks, the slower your network goes and the more likely you are to get jumped regardless of OS. Hardware firewalls are better at containing the ghetto than they are protecting it. Windows makes any network insecure and mostly pollutes the world when it's cracked.
This story seems to be a quest for the "Google scandal of the day" we've grown addicted to this month.
People not owned by large publishers can not win in press created by large publishers. Had the stock gone south, CBS would have printed more nonsense about Google's "arrogance."
The poor coverage of and derogatory treatment of free software in the "mainstream" media has done much to discredit large publishers in my eyes. CBS, M$NBC, ABC, look more like moving tabloids than news. The only thing worse than not knowing about something is to be sure about it and wrong.
no, software vendors take FOSS box cars off their tracks and present them as nitro dragsters. They are rarely "first" off the line, they just make more noise and are what the clueless hear first. At their very best, they take other people's ideas and make something functional like Netscape did. At their very worst, they act like Microsoft and plod along with all the crap they have cobbled together and have no hope of fixing.
Then I hope they can go after the Slashdot crapflooders and all the other assholes who make the "slashdot effect" happen with similar software. People who deploy tools like this are criminals, nothing more or less. It's like book burning.
you're repeating one of the best sellers of '76. 1776.
That message is worth repeating every twenty years. The sad part is when people have heard it, don't know how it works and think they can legislate and government spend themselves into prosperity. As Alan Greenspan once said, "the laws of supply and demand are not to be conned." The invisible hand slaps people who think they are smarter than it is.
Look at Microsoft's history of owning the PC distribution chain through *very* restrictive, secretive licensing deals with the major PC manufacturers. The market itself can be used against... the market.
Nonsense, no one has ever managed to conner a market for long, though they can cause great harm in the short term with government help. All of that restrictive cross licensing nightmare is a government creation. Without dead stupid IP laws, the markets would quickly correct problems like Microsoft. It's happening anyway, and M$ is running like a baby to Uncle Sam for DMCA and other help. There's a sucker market for shares in such greedy schemes, but it's always a loser and smart money goes with the flow.
Walk down the street in downtown Detroit counting $20 dollar bills and see how long it takes for you to get mugged. Then do the same on mainstreet in West Bumblefuck, Iowa (population 15, if'n Pastor Smith isn't out of town). Betcha you last longer in Iowa. In other words that time is probably dependant on how nasty the computing environment is.
Ah yes, but money does not turn a neighborhood into a slum like M$ makes a nasty computing environment. In real life, the more money a neighborhood has the nicer it looks. The more M$ you put on a network, the more run down it looks, the slower your network goes and the more likely you are to get jumped regardless of OS. Hardware firewalls are better at containing the ghetto than they are protecting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing short of complete software freedom will gain them much interest from the free software community. Who really wants to donate time or money to the people funding SCO and other nightmares? Even if they did free all of their code it's so tortured that it would take years to tame it and bring it up to par.
What do they have that's worth the effort? Who wants a single user, single screen GUI that's mixed up with low level floppy access? All the real rendering stuff belongs to Nvidia and ATI. Who wants Outlook? Word formats have already been decoded by Sun and friends. IE sucks. If M$ put their codebase up on Sourceforge tomorrow, there'd be an initial flurry of interest, but it would mostly be people looking to make migrating away from Windoze easier.
Much more easily than M$ or AOL? Sure, anyone dumb enough to still be running Windoze has zero expectation of privacy, security, dignity and stability regardless of services used. The rest of us can have end to end encryption via jabber and be more sure that we are not being keylogged.
Real security comes in steps and is a never ending process:
That is all.
Typical Capture Ha Ha from long ago. What do you know, even a Windoze using lamer can be loved. I'm sure that this kind or rooting has been automated for a long time. The screen shots are more than two years old.
How much would you like to bet that US and UK lawmakers will later point to Canadian deployment as proof?
Don't worry, I won't blame Canada.
Rapist prefer the Islamic model of female protection to convents, so rapists demand all women convert to Islam or lawsuits will fly. Nun's habits are much to hard to get inside of and the communal living makes it much harder to get at them alone. Islamic dress, by comparison, is much less restrictive and easier to abuse.
The author fails to grasp the GPL, BSD and confuses both with software patent issues. The GPL is not anti business as IBM, HP and many others can tell you. Microsoft and other companies do have something to worry about, but it's simple competition. It's shocking that a businessman does not understand that much. As for his license advice to programmers, he might do better with women's fashion, but I doubt it.
Socially, the smaller the transaction, the higher the margins can be. This is why bubble gum and soda makers are big earners.
Government intervention only makes the above worse.
No, in this and most other cases, the troll says something like this instead:
At work, we have about 400 Sony Vaio laptops with maxed-out RAM, and Firebird and Opera are too slow to use because they swap continuously ...
My 233 MHz P2 with 64MB of ram renders the web just fine through KDE3.2 with a default Debian Sarge install. X seems to do just fine supporting all of that, so I still have no idea what you are talking about. What kind of hardware are you running 400 of that's more pathetic than mine?
You know, AC, I think you are lying.
I did not have to, but I did anyway. I mentioned specific window managers and applications that run well on a 90MHz P1 with 24MB of RAM under X.
Right, so anyways. Got any numbers? *Anything* other than foaming at the mouth?
No, and I don't know what you are talking about when you say "foaming at the mouth". You have my opinion that X works well enough for me with the applications I mentioned.
Well, no, you should not try that on a P90, but that's not X's fault. I doubt a svga version of quake or xine would work well either. The basic rendering system is what's OK. It delivers fonts and graphics good enough for most purposes. Text editors, email, reasonable web sites and Gimp all work well, so my 8 year old laptop is still useful.
People who complain about X being "bulky", "bloated" and all that are trolls. It was designed on slim hardware and designed flexibly.
The real test is to simply use it. Try Feather Linux or any of the other tiny distros out on some crufty old hardware and see for yourself. I've got a 90 MHz laptop that runs X just fine with 24MB of RAM thanks to Woody, fluxbox and other light applications. Gnome 1.4 also is snappy enough, though KDE is a little slow. X is not the problem if there is one! Feather runs even faster running testing and unstable Debian code and I suspect that two further years of going down Gosling's path is responsible. Of course newer hardware runs better and I don't have problems with things like xawtv, Xine or quake running with KDE or Window Maker on top of X.
From where I stand, I have no idea what people are talking about when they complain about X. They never say anything specific.
To get it passed, make some pictures. Take a screen shot of M$'s update notification and then add some preview buttons, a block diagram and other widgets. You might not be able to patent M$'s dinky notification, but you can keep them from improving it. That's what they are trying to do to Gnome's Pager.
And so did I. M$ is trying to patent all improvements to pagers. It's much quicker to paint shop than it is to code. This is one of the reasons that software patents are stupid to begin with: software is inherently an abstraction not an invention or even a discovery. The discovery is pure math. The invention is more like this, a UI enhancement that might be subject to copyright but only according to layout. A copyright on Gnome's layout with one or two tweaks would be rejected without thought. A patent of it should be rejected for the same reasons.
Microsoft is disgusting and the idiot who signed off on that patent needs a refresher course.
Because they are incompetent they can be granted an exclusive license to thwart the competent? Sounds like the USPTO and M$, so you might be right.
I wish a big-name American athlete (such as CJ Hunter) came up behind Twitter as he was bending over and shoved his massive cock into Twitter's anus.
They don't seem to be able to think of much other than that. Must be something about liking or working for M$. Cut, paste and dream of penis, anus and shit, what a life they must lead.
If I'm interested in a sport, I will want to see the full quality version. Sure, I'd love to read a blog or two, but what I'm really interested in is the event itself and I'll figure a way around M$NBC's stupid internet black out to get it.
If I were an athlete, I'd tell the IOC to shove it just as soon as my event was over and post whatever I wanted my family and friends to see.
Ah yes, but money does not turn a neighborhood into a slum like M$ makes a nasty computing environment. In real life, the more money a neighborhood has the nicer it looks. The more M$ you put on a network, the more run down it looks, the slower your network goes and the more likely you are to get jumped regardless of OS. Hardware firewalls are better at containing the ghetto than they are protecting it. Windows makes any network insecure and mostly pollutes the world when it's cracked.
People not owned by large publishers can not win in press created by large publishers. Had the stock gone south, CBS would have printed more nonsense about Google's "arrogance."
The poor coverage of and derogatory treatment of free software in the "mainstream" media has done much to discredit large publishers in my eyes. CBS, M$NBC, ABC, look more like moving tabloids than news. The only thing worse than not knowing about something is to be sure about it and wrong.
Me too.
Then I hope they can go after the Slashdot crapflooders and all the other assholes who make the "slashdot effect" happen with similar software. People who deploy tools like this are criminals, nothing more or less. It's like book burning.
That message is worth repeating every twenty years. The sad part is when people have heard it, don't know how it works and think they can legislate and government spend themselves into prosperity. As Alan Greenspan once said, "the laws of supply and demand are not to be conned." The invisible hand slaps people who think they are smarter than it is.
Nonsense, no one has ever managed to conner a market for long, though they can cause great harm in the short term with government help. All of that restrictive cross licensing nightmare is a government creation. Without dead stupid IP laws, the markets would quickly correct problems like Microsoft. It's happening anyway, and M$ is running like a baby to Uncle Sam for DMCA and other help. There's a sucker market for shares in such greedy schemes, but it's always a loser and smart money goes with the flow.
Ah yes, but money does not turn a neighborhood into a slum like M$ makes a nasty computing environment. In real life, the more money a neighborhood has the nicer it looks. The more M$ you put on a network, the more run down it looks, the slower your network goes and the more likely you are to get jumped regardless of OS. Hardware firewalls are better at containing the ghetto than they are protecting it.