The GPL covers much more than the Linux Kernel, but that does not forbid Microsoft from offering binary applications through rape buddies like Novell. As you noted, others have done as much and people do use the results. What you failed to notice is the costs of i386 only binary blobs. They make updating a bitch and lock you into softare that's as obsolete and hard to upgrade as Windows itself. Those problems only highlight the TCO problems of their own platform and customers know it.
The real problem for M$ is that no one needs them. If you must run M$ stuff, you are better off doing it through Wine, Dosbox, Qemu or others. Done right, M$ can't tell your installation from any other and will have a hard time sabotaging you the way they have repeatedly done to other competitors. By the time an organization has decided to run free software, M$ has been moved into "legacy" status. Current applications will be run in virtual environments until they are no longer needed. The move to GNU/Linux is driven by freedom. M$ is out until they give up and offer customers what customers really want.
Let's say this was a real gift. M$ comes in and does all the digitizing, pays for the bandwith and staffs the servers at offsite locations for zero charge and they don't demand exclusivity. That's not the real situation at all and this gift will cost us all more than $3 million and it will be exclusive for resource reasons if not M$ licensing. Even then, it's only a gift to the minority of the population that can read Silverlight and it will only be a gift until M$ takes it away. That's hardly a public archive. In reality, works placed in this format will be poorly used by a tiny minority of the population for a very limited time. The money would be better spent preserving works in free formats that everyone can use immediately and forever. Works will rot while M$ sets up this advert for non free content and software. It's not a gift, it's an imposition.
Web Site Comments looks like the appropriate place to tell them what you think of non free information and non free formats.
The LOC should not host works that can't be exactly reproduced for non commercial purposes. Rights holders who disagree with that can host content on their own dime and pay for their own advertising. At the very least, the copyright status of works on the LOC site should be unambiguous. Serving them that content with restrictions is a waste of everyone's time and money. Sooner or later, all of the work will have to be redone because non free formats are always flash in the pan. Non free content will violate everyone's rights and pocketbook in the mean time. There's no amount of equipment, software or money that M$ can come up with overcome the cost of giving them control of our national library. Our heritage and freedom is worth more than the $20 billion in cash they have.
Other people have told our Homeland Defenders lots of things but they don't seem to listen. Here is a good write up about the impracticality of binary liquids. Here is a story about stealing food from babies at the airport. Of course, arrest without charges, torture, baby killing, censorship and deploying foreign mercenaries against civilians is all bad, OK? It's not about defense it's about control and you, citizen, are the enemy.
We don't need an FCC because the entire spectrum should be liberated. Doing so would undo sixty years of damage done to world culture by government interference. The last mile problem would go away. The RIAA, MPAA MAFIAA companies and most of what people think of as "major" publishers would be forced to adapt or die. News and entertainment would live and die based on merit instead of payolla. Brainwashing through Faux News would be impossible. Companies that survive of billions of dollars in ad spending each month would collapse and markets for lemons would be much smaller. The US would once again have a free and competitive press and telco. Every other segment of the economy would benefit from having this kind of basic infrastructure function and the value is orders of magnitude greater than $200 billion. Only tyrants would oppose the move to open spectrum and it will take terrible tyranny to keep it from happening.
The "War on Terror" is looking more and more like a fight to impose the kind of laws required to preserve broadcasters, wiretappers and those who manufacture public opinion. The terrorist have not only won, they were in control all along. It is time to bring real democracy and freedom to the US.
The critical issues is forcing ethical behavior on government and companies. Even the most jaded big dumb company employee will admit that filtering the trivial details of their lives it's a waste of money. Most will also realize that such violations make it difficult for people to fight back against other violations. Domestic spying is already against the law. Anyone making use of public resources, such as ISPs using public spectrum or servitude, should be forced to obey the same privacy laws as government. It's not their network and it's not their data, it's yours and no one else has any business filtering and storing it.
Suppose the GM Ralph Nader investigation had found something nasty. US cars would not have airbags and a whole host of other public safety initiatives could have been crushed by ruining Nader before he got anywhere.
Companies today have much better ability to spy than they did forty years ago. Most people run non free software that gives it's owners the ability to read everything on your hard drive and their newest OS indexes and reports the contents. ISPs have been given the "right" to filter and read all of your email, though they have always had the ability. Government had demanded the ability to ask for any of that email and browsing on demand. You purchasing is indexed and sold to the highest bidder. Cell phones report your location and newer ones can record your conversations and filter them for key words while turned "off" and useless to the owner. There is very little the rich and the powerful can not find out about average people.
Yet all of that spy power is useless when it comes to real threats. Criminals can and to take countermeasures. All domestic spying is good for is harassing honest political and economic competition. That's nothing anyone wants to pay for.
The purpose of engagement is not to bring favorable change for the Chinese, it's to take advantage of non free labor. It cheapens our own morals, wrecks free industry and strengthens the hand of the oppressors. Refusal to engage brought an end to the Soviet Union. Trade with China coincides with the destruction of the US bill of rights and the rise of western surveillance societies that make Orwell's 1984 look quaint and inefficient.
Don't think so? The US now has blacklists, arrest without warrent, and supreme court justices that advocate torture. Our trade, money and jobs have not made them free, it has made us less free.
By the time people are able to exploit it we will have hopefully stopped burning hydrocarbons as an energy source. Nuclear energy can be much cleaner and there's lots more of it available. Battery powered transport will be better than smog making transport. Plastics, however, will always be useful.
Earth will only be one destination for this resource. A space based economy will be better able to exploit it and other resources.
The US you live in is payed for by corporations and rich guys. And you wonder why they end up with all the power?
Power makes money, not the other way around. Do you really think oil monopolies are natural? No, oil is just another tool for rich people to suck up more than their fair share. The people who own it are mostly the same people who won the civil war. That power made money which makes further power.
Please cut the crap with the "Just replace Windows with Linux it's better!" thing. This kind of crap will actually hurt Linux adoption overall.
There are times when that's true and times when it's not. Right now it's not true at all.
Get real now. GNU/Linux runs better than Vista. This is the way it always is when it's time for M$ to push the upgrade train, but Vista has topped them all. It runs like shit on what most people would consider a super computer and it blows away people's old non free software. The sad fact for M$ is that they can't give Vista away and it's hurting PC sales around the world. If a piece of hardware does not run under free software, just take it out because the whole computer won't run under Vista.
The old saw, "GNU/Linux makes a new computer out of trash and Windows makes trash out of a new computer," has never been more true. SP1 does not solve the problem and M$ is running scared of the truth.
There is no moral equivalence Real and Mozilla. When and if you ever have to pay anything for a copy of software provided by Mozilla, you can feel robbed. No sin committed by any non free software company will ever justify the practices of non free software companies. They were founded on fraud and exist by it. How is it that you can think otherwise?
The immoral nature of non free software means we should have less sympathy for the victim. Real has owners who use secrets against customers. Most non free software owners ship code with known problems at leave the users open to this kind of thing without batting an eye. The more reprehensible of non free software companies will deny a flaw exists when it's presented to them and beg the discoverer to keep quiet while they "fix" the problem... forever and then act angry when the flaw is revealed to the public. Worse, they have robbed the public domain and then backed stupid patent laws that prohibit free software authors from various methods and features. Why should anyone care when non free rules and behavior are turned on them? My patience for these parasites is exhausted.
Nor am I certain all of the purchasers are criminals. Legitimate purchasers of the exploit include people who make tools to detect and guard against the problem. Their existence may be repulsive but it is supported by the larger crime which is non free software.
Sure, it's called a botnet. The problem is that you already have three or four of them on your network so you don't have the terabytes you think you do.
I know it is hard to move from an email address you have had for years but the sooner you start the better off you will be. Things are only going to get worse.
Yes, DHS thinks you need combat squads on trains everyday. storystory. Keep pushing for regime change and democracy in the USA and we might see better spending of tax money.
Why would I trust a 22 year old PhD who cares? Because he's fucking brilliant and non biased that's why. Have a look at his brief bio or his publications. On top of all that, he has energy for Digg and Usenet.
Oh, but he thinks M$ sucks so you M$ fucktards have to smear him. Nice try, but it's just more reason to stay away from you and anything connected to M$.
The man is right, everything M$ does is designed to wreck their competition, and you don't have to be a genius to recognize that pattern.
Bill Gates is leaving M$ like DOS left Windoze. They are extensions of one another, delineation separation is a fool's errand. Continual promises of code rewrites and reinvention were nothing more than a PR stunt.
When you understand the purpose of M$'s PR stunts, you understand the purpose of a Yahoo purchase. Bill Gates and friends want nothing more than the extermination of all software they can't tax. The particulars are not as important as the big picture but it's obvious that every little warning and then some are true.
They removed a perfectly running FreeBSD from Hotmail and installed (first fake than real) Windows instead. You have seen the results.
Yes, while Hotmail stagnated Gmail has grown in both customer base and features that people like. Whenever M$ closes a door, people jump out of windows.
The impending destruction of Yahoo will suck for those working there but You Always have Other Options. Capital and brains are going to flow into established and new competitors.
The move could be a dissaster for M$ too. They don't have the cash to cover the move this time. If Yahoo becomes a money loser for them, M$ will have to sell it off of go down with it. The Hotmail dissaster showed that monopoly desktop ownership was not good enough to take over an online market. The rise of Firefox shows that they can't even hold onto the browser monopoly. M$ Live services is an attempt to grab the whole online kit and kaboodle and use it to reinforce the desktop hold. If it were anything else, they would not be pushing Silverlight and other M$ only formats still, but would do what Apple did. The harder they try to lock people in, the later M$ is to the party and the weaker they look everywhere.
Only IE7 enabled computers, Zune and Xbox will be able to squirt pictures, music and movies at Flicker which will then squirt them back on your loved ones as a self destructing Silverlight. The next world beater is going to be the M$ phune, which will exploit non standard protocols and bad spelling like iPhone never dared. Sounds fantastic, I know, so there will be many bugs in the transition but you can expect the final result to look just as good as Hotmail does now.
The Wow is Now. Like, I can't fucking believe it, wow.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL covers much more than the Linux Kernel, but that does not forbid Microsoft from offering binary applications through rape buddies like Novell. As you noted, others have done as much and people do use the results. What you failed to notice is the costs of i386 only binary blobs. They make updating a bitch and lock you into softare that's as obsolete and hard to upgrade as Windows itself. Those problems only highlight the TCO problems of their own platform and customers know it.
The real problem for M$ is that no one needs them. If you must run M$ stuff, you are better off doing it through Wine, Dosbox, Qemu or others. Done right, M$ can't tell your installation from any other and will have a hard time sabotaging you the way they have repeatedly done to other competitors. By the time an organization has decided to run free software, M$ has been moved into "legacy" status. Current applications will be run in virtual environments until they are no longer needed. The move to GNU/Linux is driven by freedom. M$ is out until they give up and offer customers what customers really want.
Falling. Why does Apple want to be like that again?
Let's say this was a real gift. M$ comes in and does all the digitizing, pays for the bandwith and staffs the servers at offsite locations for zero charge and they don't demand exclusivity. That's not the real situation at all and this gift will cost us all more than $3 million and it will be exclusive for resource reasons if not M$ licensing. Even then, it's only a gift to the minority of the population that can read Silverlight and it will only be a gift until M$ takes it away. That's hardly a public archive. In reality, works placed in this format will be poorly used by a tiny minority of the population for a very limited time. The money would be better spent preserving works in free formats that everyone can use immediately and forever. Works will rot while M$ sets up this advert for non free content and software. It's not a gift, it's an imposition.
Tell them what you think. Demand better. Point out obviously better alternatives.
Web Site Comments looks like the appropriate place to tell them what you think of non free information and non free formats.
The LOC should not host works that can't be exactly reproduced for non commercial purposes. Rights holders who disagree with that can host content on their own dime and pay for their own advertising. At the very least, the copyright status of works on the LOC site should be unambiguous. Serving them that content with restrictions is a waste of everyone's time and money. Sooner or later, all of the work will have to be redone because non free formats are always flash in the pan. Non free content will violate everyone's rights and pocketbook in the mean time. There's no amount of equipment, software or money that M$ can come up with overcome the cost of giving them control of our national library. Our heritage and freedom is worth more than the $20 billion in cash they have.
Other people have told our Homeland Defenders lots of things but they don't seem to listen. Here is a good write up about the impracticality of binary liquids. Here is a story about stealing food from babies at the airport. Of course, arrest without charges, torture, baby killing, censorship and deploying foreign mercenaries against civilians is all bad, OK? It's not about defense it's about control and you, citizen, are the enemy.
and farts to thunder. You really make more of this Windows thing than you should.
Clearly, there have never been any problmess working with Office users because M$ providead these great tools. -Drool-
We don't need an FCC because the entire spectrum should be liberated. Doing so would undo sixty years of damage done to world culture by government interference. The last mile problem would go away. The RIAA, MPAA MAFIAA companies and most of what people think of as "major" publishers would be forced to adapt or die. News and entertainment would live and die based on merit instead of payolla. Brainwashing through Faux News would be impossible. Companies that survive of billions of dollars in ad spending each month would collapse and markets for lemons would be much smaller. The US would once again have a free and competitive press and telco. Every other segment of the economy would benefit from having this kind of basic infrastructure function and the value is orders of magnitude greater than $200 billion. Only tyrants would oppose the move to open spectrum and it will take terrible tyranny to keep it from happening.
The "War on Terror" is looking more and more like a fight to impose the kind of laws required to preserve broadcasters, wiretappers and those who manufacture public opinion. The terrorist have not only won, they were in control all along. It is time to bring real democracy and freedom to the US.
The critical issues is forcing ethical behavior on government and companies. Even the most jaded big dumb company employee will admit that filtering the trivial details of their lives it's a waste of money. Most will also realize that such violations make it difficult for people to fight back against other violations. Domestic spying is already against the law. Anyone making use of public resources, such as ISPs using public spectrum or servitude, should be forced to obey the same privacy laws as government. It's not their network and it's not their data, it's yours and no one else has any business filtering and storing it.
Suppose the GM Ralph Nader investigation had found something nasty. US cars would not have airbags and a whole host of other public safety initiatives could have been crushed by ruining Nader before he got anywhere.
Companies today have much better ability to spy than they did forty years ago. Most people run non free software that gives it's owners the ability to read everything on your hard drive and their newest OS indexes and reports the contents. ISPs have been given the "right" to filter and read all of your email, though they have always had the ability. Government had demanded the ability to ask for any of that email and browsing on demand. You purchasing is indexed and sold to the highest bidder. Cell phones report your location and newer ones can record your conversations and filter them for key words while turned "off" and useless to the owner. There is very little the rich and the powerful can not find out about average people.
Yet all of that spy power is useless when it comes to real threats. Criminals can and to take countermeasures. All domestic spying is good for is harassing honest political and economic competition. That's nothing anyone wants to pay for.
The purpose of engagement is not to bring favorable change for the Chinese, it's to take advantage of non free labor. It cheapens our own morals, wrecks free industry and strengthens the hand of the oppressors. Refusal to engage brought an end to the Soviet Union. Trade with China coincides with the destruction of the US bill of rights and the rise of western surveillance societies that make Orwell's 1984 look quaint and inefficient.
Don't think so? The US now has blacklists, arrest without warrent, and supreme court justices that advocate torture. Our trade, money and jobs have not made them free, it has made us less free.
By the time people are able to exploit it we will have hopefully stopped burning hydrocarbons as an energy source. Nuclear energy can be much cleaner and there's lots more of it available. Battery powered transport will be better than smog making transport. Plastics, however, will always be useful.
Earth will only be one destination for this resource. A space based economy will be better able to exploit it and other resources.
The US you live in is payed for by corporations and rich guys. And you wonder why they end up with all the power?
Power makes money, not the other way around. Do you really think oil monopolies are natural? No, oil is just another tool for rich people to suck up more than their fair share. The people who own it are mostly the same people who won the civil war. That power made money which makes further power.
Please cut the crap with the "Just replace Windows with Linux it's better!" thing. This kind of crap will actually hurt Linux adoption overall.
There are times when that's true and times when it's not. Right now it's not true at all.
Get real now. GNU/Linux runs better than Vista. This is the way it always is when it's time for M$ to push the upgrade train, but Vista has topped them all. It runs like shit on what most people would consider a super computer and it blows away people's old non free software. The sad fact for M$ is that they can't give Vista away and it's hurting PC sales around the world. If a piece of hardware does not run under free software, just take it out because the whole computer won't run under Vista.
The old saw, "GNU/Linux makes a new computer out of trash and Windows makes trash out of a new computer," has never been more true. SP1 does not solve the problem and M$ is running scared of the truth.
There is no moral equivalence Real and Mozilla. When and if you ever have to pay anything for a copy of software provided by Mozilla, you can feel robbed. No sin committed by any non free software company will ever justify the practices of non free software companies. They were founded on fraud and exist by it. How is it that you can think otherwise?
The immoral nature of non free software means we should have less sympathy for the victim. Real has owners who use secrets against customers. Most non free software owners ship code with known problems at leave the users open to this kind of thing without batting an eye. The more reprehensible of non free software companies will deny a flaw exists when it's presented to them and beg the discoverer to keep quiet while they "fix" the problem ... forever and then act angry when the flaw is revealed to the public. Worse, they have robbed the public domain and then backed stupid patent laws that prohibit free software authors from various methods and features. Why should anyone care when non free rules and behavior are turned on them? My patience for these parasites is exhausted.
Nor am I certain all of the purchasers are criminals. Legitimate purchasers of the exploit include people who make tools to detect and guard against the problem. Their existence may be repulsive but it is supported by the larger crime which is non free software.
Sure, it's called a botnet. The problem is that you already have three or four of them on your network so you don't have the terabytes you think you do.
Hotmail should not be used because they will block any mail they feel like, regardless of your wishes. Yahoo and all M$ emails are this way. AOL was caught doing the same but apologized and reset that one policy.
I know it is hard to move from an email address you have had for years but the sooner you start the better off you will be. Things are only going to get worse.
As long as you are only sending email, you might as well have dial up. Broadband stagnation, aka censorship, brought to you by Comcast.
If I can't hear you, you must be a terrorist.
How crazy and stupid is this so called war on terror going to get before it's over? Can it please go the way of bell bottom pants?
Yes, DHS thinks you need combat squads on trains everyday. story story. Keep pushing for regime change and democracy in the USA and we might see better spending of tax money.
but Stallman has done good things for people. Your sense of shame should cover your evil.
Why would I trust a 22 year old PhD who cares? Because he's fucking brilliant and non biased that's why. Have a look at his brief bio or his publications. On top of all that, he has energy for Digg and Usenet.
Oh, but he thinks M$ sucks so you M$ fucktards have to smear him. Nice try, but it's just more reason to stay away from you and anything connected to M$.
The man is right, everything M$ does is designed to wreck their competition, and you don't have to be a genius to recognize that pattern.
Bill Gates is leaving M$ like DOS left Windoze. They are extensions of one another, delineation separation is a fool's errand. Continual promises of code rewrites and reinvention were nothing more than a PR stunt.
When you understand the purpose of M$'s PR stunts, you understand the purpose of a Yahoo purchase. Bill Gates and friends want nothing more than the extermination of all software they can't tax. The particulars are not as important as the big picture but it's obvious that every little warning and then some are true.
They removed a perfectly running FreeBSD from Hotmail and installed (first fake than real) Windows instead. You have seen the results.
Yes, while Hotmail stagnated Gmail has grown in both customer base and features that people like. Whenever M$ closes a door, people jump out of windows.
The impending destruction of Yahoo will suck for those working there but You Always have Other Options. Capital and brains are going to flow into established and new competitors.
The move could be a dissaster for M$ too. They don't have the cash to cover the move this time. If Yahoo becomes a money loser for them, M$ will have to sell it off of go down with it. The Hotmail dissaster showed that monopoly desktop ownership was not good enough to take over an online market. The rise of Firefox shows that they can't even hold onto the browser monopoly. M$ Live services is an attempt to grab the whole online kit and kaboodle and use it to reinforce the desktop hold. If it were anything else, they would not be pushing Silverlight and other M$ only formats still, but would do what Apple did. The harder they try to lock people in, the later M$ is to the party and the weaker they look everywhere.
Only IE7 enabled computers, Zune and Xbox will be able to squirt pictures, music and movies at Flicker which will then squirt them back on your loved ones as a self destructing Silverlight. The next world beater is going to be the M$ phune, which will exploit non standard protocols and bad spelling like iPhone never dared. Sounds fantastic, I know, so there will be many bugs in the transition but you can expect the final result to look just as good as Hotmail does now.
The Wow is Now. Like, I can't fucking believe it, wow.