there's very little difference, legally speaking, between someone buying a web site from me and someone going into Wal-Mart and buying MS Office.
Do lawyers in TN make their clients pay sales taxes on their hours? Why should you? What's the difference between their consultancy and yours? In the end, both of you are advising and representing your clients. The only difference is that part of your representation is automated and lasts longer.
A casino, how original. Failing that, the bonehead governor thinks to tax custom software, which he does not at all understand. He's going to bring in about $0 for his efforts and the vested interests pushing the tax are in for a rude awakening.
The obvious way around this is free software. The independent coder will simply charge for his time to make the free software do what the client wants it to. The client can still keep the work to themselves if they want, even if it's GPL, because they are not distributing it. This will be harmful to people still clinging to the outmoded revenue model of charging for software.
Don't worry, Chicago will get it's silly casino. The governor is engaging in the age old bribe solicitation knows as "disastrous proposals". These kinds of proposals are usually suggested by members of a dying industry to check their new and innovative replacement. This disastrous proposal will probably be followed with others. He will ban the use of free software in government and place regulations on networks and will cost his government plenty of money. He'll then want a casino because it will give him more room for graft and he's too stupid to think of anything new.
I, for one, am glad they put in restrictions to keep people from camping in fragile areas. Some dumbass who pitches a tent on top of delicate alpine plants can ruin the scenery for everyone else for years until the plants can recover. That isn't a mindless restriction. It's a restriction that protects a public resource from morons who don't understand alpine biology.
Like you won't step on one by mistake? Make sure you don't leave footprints by covering your tracks, but don't disturb the sand while you are at it! I'm so glad enlightened people like you are looking out for the "public resource" by keeping the public out.
Your elitism is offensive and self defeating. You would deny others the chance you have been granted to learn about and appreciate nature. The people you so deny will remain so ignorant that they won't mind pulling crude oil, another "public resource", out of the ground where you like to camp.
Does anyone seriously think that the government, or anyone else, has an interest in what hiker X is doing on a trail that is traversed once a week at most?
Yes I do. Some government agencies would love to wire up the woods around some installations. This would be a great excuse.
At least we agree that a sensor network in the wood is impractical.
I wouldn't have a single objection if it was a voluntary system.
Show me a voluntary system paid for by tax dollars. The more elaborate the system, the greater the cost and the more likely it would be forced. After all, unless the rescue team is a volunteer organization, you are already paying for the service.
Every dinky camera system erected so far has been used in exactly the manner the foil hat people said it would be. Once the tool is paid for it will be abused by the state. The only way to prevent the abuse is to realize that the tool does not satisfy the stated goals and to not build it in the first place.
This kind of thing reeks of statism. Taken to it's extreme, you won't be allowed to walk in the woods without permission and careful monitoring. Your enjoyment of the woods takes a back seat to society's costs of your potential injuries. You don't own the woods because the state owns your hide by providing you with all of these nifty services. I already see signs about not being able so spend the night in areas and other mindless restrictions that assume the park belongs to the park service rather than the park service belongs to me.
It's for your own good, they say. Sure it is. Like cameras that give you speeding tickets, keep people from driving in Central London and can be used to track any political opponent are for my own good - too bad they have been proven useless for their stated purpose of crime prevention.
The devil is in the details. A system that would really be useful would also have to be very invasive. Even then the value will be negligible. The world is a large place and people are small in it.
The park rescue officer will complain that narrowing the search lowers his own risk of injury. The other way to lower that risk of injury is to not search at all. How many young men have died on wild goose chases? Does it all add up when you figure out how many people were actually saved?
The same group has another far worse article that tries to shift the bitterness and folly of outsourcing onto free software. They imply that free software will eliminate 85% of the worth of US business assets. Only Microsoft would equate a downturn of it's business with the complete destruction of the United States. Witness this foggy hyperbole:
In a widely quoted study, Baruch Lev of the Brookings Institution reported that in 1982, 62% of the market value of companies in the S & P 500 Index could be attributed to tangible assets, and only 38% to intangibles. By 1992, Lev noted, the ratio had essentially reversed: 32% of the assets for S & P companies were tangible, while 68% were intangible. A follow-up study by Brookings in 1998 reported that the asset ratio had shifted even more, with 85% of assets intangible, and only 15% tangible.
Followed by this:
Many U.S. firms are not only devaluing intellectual property via outsourcing, but are also embracing business strategies to devalue (and if necessary, eradicate) their competitor's intellectual property. Open source software, also described as free software, is the neutron bomb of IP. The strategy basically is this: businesses that make money selling hardware, selling programming services, selling hardware integration, etc. do not like being beholden to the software companies. In addition, they can increase products sales if accompanying or required software is free. So, major U.S. corporations are heavily investing in developing a widely available "free software inventory" that is open to anyone to use or customize at will. If customers only want to use free software, they will buy more hardware and services because there is no additional cost for software. Moreover, with no software costs, even hardware development, etc. becomes even cheaper. Active international campaigns (many sponsored by U.S. companies) have skyrocketed free software adoption around the world.
Let's start with the basics. In the 1990's the US stock market increased it's value by a factor of five in a speculative boom without any rational basis. It peaked out at about 1998 and a change in accounting made a scandal, with many big dumb companies listing "good will" as a multi-billion dollar asset. I defy the institute to give a numerical value to US patents and copyright instead of simple "intangibles". The stock market, which has taken considerable corrections in the last six years may still be overvalued due to the folly of outsourcing but the issues should not be confused.
Yes, having people in other countries do all your brain work is a massive mistake given the current IP insanity. It's bad in a free market with reasonable and temporary protections for real inventions with merit because foreigners will soon know your business better than you do. It's suicidal in the current US legal framework which is designed to hamper competition and has devalued real IP by elevating nonsense. If we live by our own laws, we will soon be excluded from many markets because our brains will quit working for us. Capitalism forces employers to train their future competition. Only government intervention could turn that force into something as suicidal as it is.
Now let's look at the mess that is software IP. Big dumb companies have been abusing software "IP" for a long time. Incidents of "fat line" patents, which describe no more than drawing a rectangle are notorious. As the institute gleefully notices, IP now includes business processes, algorithms and prohibitions of code that interacts with other patented code. It's a system only a big software company could love. The problem is not that free software is "stealing" well known algorithms from textbooks, the problem is that US IP laws are insane. The same laws, if enacted 100 years ago, would have given someone a patent on alphabetizing files.
Free software it the market place's desperate attempt to escape the nightmare Bill Gates helped create. Microsoft has created some value
Wireless is becoming a commodity and MS is ditching it while the getting out is good.
Did they ever contribute anything but rebranding? If not, it may be that there's just not enough money in the market to pay for a leac- hhhm, brand name.
I wish that the thing would sync with Korganizer and my Zaurus' PIM packages. I know, fat chance. Woof, Woof, I'll just keep entering my phone numbers in by hand each time I change cell phone providers and am forced to buy a new $UGLY_VERBing phone. The postman already knows what the dog it telling him.
He was a liar. I assume Cliff followed up with a phone call before obliterating this fax pest who knowingly violated another country's laws and preferences to try to earn a quick buck. The 800 number is already toast. Good riddance.
iotashan asked, "why are you bothering me, I don't want to buy your shit?"
spammer answered, "because we can."
iotashan asked, "what can I do to these worms?"
My phone call to them was what he did.
Nice work, io. The place I used to work got four or five of these stupid things a day. Finincial ruin onto spammers.
So, billions of dollars later, this is what we can expect from Total Information Awareness? I'll bet a nickle that this floated up their system from being automatically gathered off people's computers and web pages. Enough hits made it right! I want a refund, my privacy back and for those morons to quit thinking that they can prevent crimes by reading my email, browsing and text on my computer.
Steam tunnels, some big secret there! Anyone planning harm already has what they need to know. Anyone with feet, or access to records that were published before the BS blackout, can do whatever they want with the info.
All the MSDN blogs were laughing about the reporting on this. And the Slashdot hivemind--that means all you people out there who build your computing mindset based entirely out of Slashdot articles--proves itself ignorant and foolish-looking once again. The rational of us know better.
True, rational people don't listen to liars. Slashdot, CNN, your silly MSDN blogs only know what M$ tells them. Those who report it only look foolish to those who don't consider the ultimate source and how dishonest they have always been.
No one but M$ knows what their next release will be. Looking back, we can see that we should not listen to what M$ tells us it will be. Has Microsoft provided the level of system integration KDE provides yet? Has Microsoft built a "secure" system yet? It's supposed to be their most important project, but all is the same. Microsoft does not live up to their hype because they are too busy sabotaging their "competitors". The outrageous stream of troll posts right here are just another example of dishonesty and wasted resources.
The only thing you can be sure of is that M$ will continue to suck. They will continue to drive out and co-opt profitable third party development. They will continue restricting their user's behavior and choices.
Both NGSCB and Palladium are security projects, it's just that the DRM/RIAA/MPAA use of the tool is objectionable. IT does not mean that the technology is worthless or "evil".
No, "the technology" itself is not evil. It never is. Microsoft, however, is evil and will use every tool available to screw their users. The activities that M$ allows on "their" operating system have never been much and the list is shrinking. Palladium is just another tool M$ is making for the same old goals: enforce a lack of competition on their platform and maximize their revenues. Fortunately, other people understood just how evil commercial software could be and devised alternatives we all use everyday.
The irrony is in the business model. It won't work for advertisers, it won't work for the businesses trying to attract customers and it won't work for customers.
First, the advertising won't work. People who "don't mind" adverts are members of the MS victim class. Their computers are generally so owned, there's no telling what will actually be displayed. More importantly, these people are so barraged with adverts that yours will not be effective.
About the only thing the customer will notice is that they are being screwed a little more. Their web mail will display in a box with about as many characters as a digital wrist watch, or about half the size they are used to.
Businesses offering this service will soon notice that it pisses people off. There's only one thing worse for a business than not doing something and that's doing it wrong. The whole scam, "no spyware, no adware" is a lie. People will notice.
While the idea of free wireless Internet access is fun for the user, there's still the annoying fact that someone's paying for your bandwidth.... someone has to pay the bill. Why not advertisers?
Imagine you own a hotel and want people to stay there. Do you build wifi that pushes adverts on your customers or do you simply put in a few WAPs and share the network you have already built?
Someone else posting here worried about "unsavory" uses. The same arguments can be made about public phones and they are equally clueless. Anyone dumb enough to run spam, kiddie porn or whatever from a public hot spot will quickly be busted on their second visit.
Clients and other forms of "accountability" are bullshit designed to push adverts. They will all fall apart as soon as someone realizes it's in their best interest to not annoy their customers the way other do.
I run Opera, but I'm too cheap to pay for it.
Then I suggest you look at Konqueror 3.2 or a later version of Mozilla. You won't lose any features and you will get some of your screen back.
I hope ad-supported wireless access takes off. I wouldn't put my money in the companies, though...
I hope they don't. They will create the kind of distrust for free wifi that shareware creates for free software. That would be a shame and it would delay the roll out of real free wifi by diluting the competitive advantage of a sign saying "free wifi". A sign saying "wifi, no clients or adverts" will sell well, but it's long and expensive.
It's another World. I just can't understand why anyone would want to go to so much effort for so little reward. It's like scaling a craggy mountainside and getting to the top to find that there's no view!
I'd say he did not give the tool a fair chance. First, he used it on the wrong platform. Then he did not use it much before giving up. There are good reasons for making and using a free photo editor / paint program.
Gimp is free software and it works best on Linux and BSD, where the developers are and have better access to the works.
What exactly did the reviewer do? All he tells us is that he opened one image, drew one line and typed one bunch of text. I doubt he spent more than a day at it. Some mountain climb there.
The reason for making the GIMP is simple, it's free, won't go away and is flexible. Anyone with an itch can program it, as the makers of Scooby-Doo did. Hopefully, they will share that work back but they don't have to. Because the Gimp is free, I know that it will never die. I'll always be able to get a copy and it will always work as well as I remembered or better. Non-free software is rented at best and has a tendency to go away. The Gimp is a combination of other free software and bits and pieces can be pulled out to use in other places, like the Image Magic project.
The Gimp is a tool. Some people have made professional use of it and have gotten superb results. What you get out of a tool is a combination of your imagination and what you put into it. A person who's not used anything would be better off learning to do things with the Gimp. There are plenty of tools to take care of what the Gimp lacks and the Gimp does what it does way better than this reviewer saw in such a brief evaluation.
The main vehicle of the Klingon Language Institute is HolQeD, a quarterly journal. Each issue includes artwork, feature articles, and regular columns discussing Klingon linguistics, language, and culture. Member letters and replies support an atmosphere of mutual respect and open discussion. More than simply a newsletter, HolQeD is an academic journal utilizing blind peer review. It is registered with the Library of Congress, and catalogued by the Modern Language Association.
The question is, do you have to kill the current chief to become the chief of the KLI? Isn't that the Klingon version of peer review? Death sounds much worse than being spat on.
I'm surprised neo-conservatives haven't latched on to this idea: if you really want to keep a population from caring about its freedoms, make it easier for them to have sex.
Brave New World? That's a flimsy control scheme. Most people can distinguish between liberty and license. To control people this you you have to make them really stupid and ignorant, but then you don't get anything done.
Your optimism is discouraging. You seem to realize the smaller goals but fail to grasp the implications.
... net nanny software installed in American libraries. People have always found a way around it. I'm sure that some clever individuals will find a way to get around this Orwellian nonsense in no time.
Don't forget that most US institutions are going the same route. Major corporations have assigned passwords and hold the employee liable for any misconduct using their account regardless of the total lack of security of the underlying system, Windoze. Public terminals at Universities are quickly dissapering, replaced by terminals that require logins and passwords. You can hardly find wifi that does not demand some crappy client software anymore. If you know ways around these things, let me know. I hate having my activity tracked and stored in databases my federal government thinks they have a right to. While you are at it, you might tell me a way to avoid pharmacies and other stores indiscriminately sharing purchase information.
Also, with the millions and millions of people using the Internet in China, that's a lot of data being generated on what people are doing. How would they parse data of this magnitude?
The same way Carnivore parses the data. The burden is placed on the local provider, but control resides with the central authority. All communications are monitored locally for interesting tidbits which can be retrieved later. With enough processors distributed at enough choke points, you can monitor and parse everything.
This might slow down the spread of undesirable information, but won't stop it.
This is not so much about the consumption of information as it is about information creation. No organized opposition can exist if all communications are monitored this way. If you can't exchange information with your peers, you don't know what's true and what is not. If you don't know the truth, you can't tell it. Sure opposition is possible, it's just that much more difficult. Would you be willing to do anything if big brother might be watching? Yeah, they really want to instill the "Big Brother is Watching You" fear. It works and you can afford a little information being out there. Nothing new here. See 1984 again:
I don't see how enforcement of a license is "shameful" or "bullying", except from your peculiar point of view. I suppose you also believe that "sharing" copyrighted music is A-OK. Do you regularly shoplift at Wal-Mart as well?
Demanding software audits from public schools right before exams so that you can extort money from them is shameful and bullying. It's shameful to do anything but GIVE to schools. It's sick that anyone could get so twisted up in IP propaganda that they think such tactics are justified or even laudable. The real extortion is not the $300,000 or the five million dollars it cost to comply with the audit and "upgrade", it's the implied threat to all other schools, "If you don't please us and do as we say, we can and will screw you too." It's impossible for any organization to keep all of the records required to prove software "ownership" when you use M$ cruft. The costs are prohibitive and the evidence of "infringement" required to trigger a raid are laughably low. The effort itself is a waste of public funds as is use of non free software in general but that's what extortion is all about.
Don't worry, you can't fool all the people all the time. The BSA can spout whatever it likes, fools like you can quote it and even believe it, but their power is ebbing. Soon people will be able to look back and wonder how anyone could be so foolish as to have bought commercial software when free software worked as well. They will be disgusted if they are reminded of BSA public school raids and all the trouble caused.
I don't shoplift but that's a very funny analogy. Walmart has never demanded that I prove that I actually bought everything inside my house or been given a search warrent because I've been a customer. Walmart does not run advertisements begging people to falsely accuse their peers, employers even family of shoplifting. The propaganda war waged by the BSA has been successful in securing privileges for their industry that would be considered intolerable and unconstitutional elsewhere.
T'accuse: I think he's rather talking about you. You see, there is nothing more pathetic than someone who spends his every waking moment to spreading lies and FUD about anything, never mind Microsoft, with retarded gross generalizations like, "raiding public school systems and extorting $250,000 or more each time?"
Thanks for the opening, I love looking up liks like this. Here's where some of Microsoft's big bucks came from:
LA, 1998, $300,000, total cost to the district was five million dollars.
2001, Philidelphia $300,000 and a thoughtful analysis of the whole scam titled, "Microsoft to schools: Give us your lunch money!"
Want some more, bugni man? That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record. Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached and works as well or better over judicial extortion ware.
If the assholes worry about people like me pointing out their shameful behavior, they should refrain from it in the first place. I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.
Good of them to remember they did that! Too bad they don't mention it when they are talking about "pirates" who break the DMCA and say bad things about software patents.
... "net thugs" who roam the net making outrageous claims about Microsoft and its behavior, motives, etc in every public forum they find (none of which information they are privy to, little of which they have evidence for, and basically all of which I find personally offensive, not to mention incorrect
I suppose he's talking about the DoJ and others who read Microsoft's emails and other internal documents. You know, the one's that lead the US to convict Microsoft of being an abusive Monoploy, engaging in anti-competitive activity and all that? Stuff that was widely published and contained choice phrases like "knife the baby" and "cut off their oxygen". Maybe he is referring to people who have the nerve to say their shill group, the BSA, is immoral for raiding public school systems and extorting $250,000 or more each time? He might just be referring to everyone who's used Word and any other processor and can tell you that Word is inferior. Abusively pushing inferior goods and stealing from children, well, that is outrageous.
He hates blogs because people use them to tell the truth and to help increase the public memory beyond the 30 second sound bite of TV from one of 3 broadcasters. Sorry bud, the market for lemons and bullshit is over.
He's made his own to help promote the decrepit, inferior company he works for. He's lying just as surely as Microsoft agents who bomb Slashdot, Steve Barkto style, and those who pretend to be teachers at educational software shows. Adverts, astroturf and now blogs. What a waste of Microsoft money, they could be making programs that can compete.
The silly thing might make the "insane" uptime of 50 days yet. So long as all the M$ bots know better than to DoS it and IIS can keep it up. Oh, how it hurts to sell dog food.
Slashdot Mirror
Do lawyers in TN make their clients pay sales taxes on their hours? Why should you? What's the difference between their consultancy and yours? In the end, both of you are advising and representing your clients. The only difference is that part of your representation is automated and lasts longer.
The obvious way around this is free software. The independent coder will simply charge for his time to make the free software do what the client wants it to. The client can still keep the work to themselves if they want, even if it's GPL, because they are not distributing it. This will be harmful to people still clinging to the outmoded revenue model of charging for software.
Don't worry, Chicago will get it's silly casino. The governor is engaging in the age old bribe solicitation knows as "disastrous proposals". These kinds of proposals are usually suggested by members of a dying industry to check their new and innovative replacement. This disastrous proposal will probably be followed with others. He will ban the use of free software in government and place regulations on networks and will cost his government plenty of money. He'll then want a casino because it will give him more room for graft and he's too stupid to think of anything new.
Like you won't step on one by mistake? Make sure you don't leave footprints by covering your tracks, but don't disturb the sand while you are at it! I'm so glad enlightened people like you are looking out for the "public resource" by keeping the public out.
Your elitism is offensive and self defeating. You would deny others the chance you have been granted to learn about and appreciate nature. The people you so deny will remain so ignorant that they won't mind pulling crude oil, another "public resource", out of the ground where you like to camp.
Does anyone seriously think that the government, or anyone else, has an interest in what hiker X is doing on a trail that is traversed once a week at most?
Yes I do. Some government agencies would love to wire up the woods around some installations. This would be a great excuse.
At least we agree that a sensor network in the wood is impractical.
Because sacrificing your privacy might make his job a little easier. People who work for the state think everyone is owned by the state.
Show me a voluntary system paid for by tax dollars. The more elaborate the system, the greater the cost and the more likely it would be forced. After all, unless the rescue team is a volunteer organization, you are already paying for the service.
Every dinky camera system erected so far has been used in exactly the manner the foil hat people said it would be. Once the tool is paid for it will be abused by the state. The only way to prevent the abuse is to realize that the tool does not satisfy the stated goals and to not build it in the first place.
This kind of thing reeks of statism. Taken to it's extreme, you won't be allowed to walk in the woods without permission and careful monitoring. Your enjoyment of the woods takes a back seat to society's costs of your potential injuries. You don't own the woods because the state owns your hide by providing you with all of these nifty services. I already see signs about not being able so spend the night in areas and other mindless restrictions that assume the park belongs to the park service rather than the park service belongs to me.
It's for your own good, they say. Sure it is. Like cameras that give you speeding tickets, keep people from driving in Central London and can be used to track any political opponent are for my own good - too bad they have been proven useless for their stated purpose of crime prevention.
The devil is in the details. A system that would really be useful would also have to be very invasive. Even then the value will be negligible. The world is a large place and people are small in it.
The park rescue officer will complain that narrowing the search lowers his own risk of injury. The other way to lower that risk of injury is to not search at all. How many young men have died on wild goose chases? Does it all add up when you figure out how many people were actually saved?
Wired woods are not for me.
In a widely quoted study, Baruch Lev of the Brookings Institution reported that in 1982, 62% of the market value of companies in the S & P 500 Index could be attributed to tangible assets, and only 38% to intangibles. By 1992, Lev noted, the ratio had essentially reversed: 32% of the assets for S & P companies were tangible, while 68% were intangible. A follow-up study by Brookings in 1998 reported that the asset ratio had shifted even more, with 85% of assets intangible, and only 15% tangible.
Followed by this:
Many U.S. firms are not only devaluing intellectual property via outsourcing, but are also embracing business strategies to devalue (and if necessary, eradicate) their competitor's intellectual property. Open source software, also described as free software, is the neutron bomb of IP. The strategy basically is this: businesses that make money selling hardware, selling programming services, selling hardware integration, etc. do not like being beholden to the software companies. In addition, they can increase products sales if accompanying or required software is free. So, major U.S. corporations are heavily investing in developing a widely available "free software inventory" that is open to anyone to use or customize at will. If customers only want to use free software, they will buy more hardware and services because there is no additional cost for software. Moreover, with no software costs, even hardware development, etc. becomes even cheaper. Active international campaigns (many sponsored by U.S. companies) have skyrocketed free software adoption around the world.
Let's start with the basics. In the 1990's the US stock market increased it's value by a factor of five in a speculative boom without any rational basis. It peaked out at about 1998 and a change in accounting made a scandal, with many big dumb companies listing "good will" as a multi-billion dollar asset. I defy the institute to give a numerical value to US patents and copyright instead of simple "intangibles". The stock market, which has taken considerable corrections in the last six years may still be overvalued due to the folly of outsourcing but the issues should not be confused.
Yes, having people in other countries do all your brain work is a massive mistake given the current IP insanity. It's bad in a free market with reasonable and temporary protections for real inventions with merit because foreigners will soon know your business better than you do. It's suicidal in the current US legal framework which is designed to hamper competition and has devalued real IP by elevating nonsense. If we live by our own laws, we will soon be excluded from many markets because our brains will quit working for us. Capitalism forces employers to train their future competition. Only government intervention could turn that force into something as suicidal as it is.
Now let's look at the mess that is software IP. Big dumb companies have been abusing software "IP" for a long time. Incidents of "fat line" patents, which describe no more than drawing a rectangle are notorious. As the institute gleefully notices, IP now includes business processes, algorithms and prohibitions of code that interacts with other patented code. It's a system only a big software company could love. The problem is not that free software is "stealing" well known algorithms from textbooks, the problem is that US IP laws are insane. The same laws, if enacted 100 years ago, would have given someone a patent on alphabetizing files.
Free software it the market place's desperate attempt to escape the nightmare Bill Gates helped create. Microsoft has created some value
Did they ever contribute anything but rebranding? If not, it may be that there's just not enough money in the market to pay for a leac- hhhm, brand name.
iotashan asked, "why are you bothering me, I don't want to buy your shit?"
spammer answered, "because we can."
iotashan asked, "what can I do to these worms?"
My phone call to them was what he did.
Nice work, io. The place I used to work got four or five of these stupid things a day. Finincial ruin onto spammers.
True, rational people don't listen to liars. Slashdot, CNN, your silly MSDN blogs only know what M$ tells them. Those who report it only look foolish to those who don't consider the ultimate source and how dishonest they have always been.
No one but M$ knows what their next release will be. Looking back, we can see that we should not listen to what M$ tells us it will be. Has Microsoft provided the level of system integration KDE provides yet? Has Microsoft built a "secure" system yet? It's supposed to be their most important project, but all is the same. Microsoft does not live up to their hype because they are too busy sabotaging their "competitors". The outrageous stream of troll posts right here are just another example of dishonesty and wasted resources.
The only thing you can be sure of is that M$ will continue to suck. They will continue to drive out and co-opt profitable third party development. They will continue restricting their user's behavior and choices.
No, "the technology" itself is not evil. It never is. Microsoft, however, is evil and will use every tool available to screw their users. The activities that M$ allows on "their" operating system have never been much and the list is shrinking. Palladium is just another tool M$ is making for the same old goals: enforce a lack of competition on their platform and maximize their revenues. Fortunately, other people understood just how evil commercial software could be and devised alternatives we all use everyday.
First, the advertising won't work. People who "don't mind" adverts are members of the MS victim class. Their computers are generally so owned, there's no telling what will actually be displayed. More importantly, these people are so barraged with adverts that yours will not be effective.
About the only thing the customer will notice is that they are being screwed a little more. Their web mail will display in a box with about as many characters as a digital wrist watch, or about half the size they are used to.
Businesses offering this service will soon notice that it pisses people off. There's only one thing worse for a business than not doing something and that's doing it wrong. The whole scam, "no spyware, no adware" is a lie. People will notice.
Imagine you own a hotel and want people to stay there. Do you build wifi that pushes adverts on your customers or do you simply put in a few WAPs and share the network you have already built?
Someone else posting here worried about "unsavory" uses. The same arguments can be made about public phones and they are equally clueless. Anyone dumb enough to run spam, kiddie porn or whatever from a public hot spot will quickly be busted on their second visit.
Clients and other forms of "accountability" are bullshit designed to push adverts. They will all fall apart as soon as someone realizes it's in their best interest to not annoy their customers the way other do.
I run Opera, but I'm too cheap to pay for it.
Then I suggest you look at Konqueror 3.2 or a later version of Mozilla. You won't lose any features and you will get some of your screen back. I hope ad-supported wireless access takes off. I wouldn't put my money in the companies, though...
I hope they don't. They will create the kind of distrust for free wifi that shareware creates for free software. That would be a shame and it would delay the roll out of real free wifi by diluting the competitive advantage of a sign saying "free wifi". A sign saying "wifi, no clients or adverts" will sell well, but it's long and expensive.
It's another World. I just can't understand why anyone would want to go to so much effort for so little reward. It's like scaling a craggy mountainside and getting to the top to find that there's no view!
I'd say he did not give the tool a fair chance. First, he used it on the wrong platform. Then he did not use it much before giving up. There are good reasons for making and using a free photo editor / paint program.
Gimp is free software and it works best on Linux and BSD, where the developers are and have better access to the works.
What exactly did the reviewer do? All he tells us is that he opened one image, drew one line and typed one bunch of text. I doubt he spent more than a day at it. Some mountain climb there.
The reason for making the GIMP is simple, it's free, won't go away and is flexible. Anyone with an itch can program it, as the makers of Scooby-Doo did. Hopefully, they will share that work back but they don't have to. Because the Gimp is free, I know that it will never die. I'll always be able to get a copy and it will always work as well as I remembered or better. Non-free software is rented at best and has a tendency to go away. The Gimp is a combination of other free software and bits and pieces can be pulled out to use in other places, like the Image Magic project.
The Gimp is a tool. Some people have made professional use of it and have gotten superb results. What you get out of a tool is a combination of your imagination and what you put into it. A person who's not used anything would be better off learning to do things with the Gimp. There are plenty of tools to take care of what the Gimp lacks and the Gimp does what it does way better than this reviewer saw in such a brief evaluation.
The main vehicle of the Klingon Language Institute is HolQeD, a quarterly journal. Each issue includes artwork, feature articles, and regular columns discussing Klingon linguistics, language, and culture. Member letters and replies support an atmosphere of mutual respect and open discussion. More than simply a newsletter, HolQeD is an academic journal utilizing blind peer review. It is registered with the Library of Congress, and catalogued by the Modern Language Association.
The question is, do you have to kill the current chief to become the chief of the KLI? Isn't that the Klingon version of peer review? Death sounds much worse than being spat on.
Brave New World? That's a flimsy control scheme. Most people can distinguish between liberty and license. To control people this you you have to make them really stupid and ignorant, but then you don't get anything done.
Don't forget that most US institutions are going the same route. Major corporations have assigned passwords and hold the employee liable for any misconduct using their account regardless of the total lack of security of the underlying system, Windoze. Public terminals at Universities are quickly dissapering, replaced by terminals that require logins and passwords. You can hardly find wifi that does not demand some crappy client software anymore. If you know ways around these things, let me know. I hate having my activity tracked and stored in databases my federal government thinks they have a right to. While you are at it, you might tell me a way to avoid pharmacies and other stores indiscriminately sharing purchase information.
Also, with the millions and millions of people using the Internet in China, that's a lot of data being generated on what people are doing. How would they parse data of this magnitude?
The same way Carnivore parses the data. The burden is placed on the local provider, but control resides with the central authority. All communications are monitored locally for interesting tidbits which can be retrieved later. With enough processors distributed at enough choke points, you can monitor and parse everything.
This might slow down the spread of undesirable information, but won't stop it.
This is not so much about the consumption of information as it is about information creation. No organized opposition can exist if all communications are monitored this way. If you can't exchange information with your peers, you don't know what's true and what is not. If you don't know the truth, you can't tell it. Sure opposition is possible, it's just that much more difficult. Would you be willing to do anything if big brother might be watching? Yeah, they really want to instill the "Big Brother is Watching You" fear. It works and you can afford a little information being out there. Nothing new here. See 1984 again:
You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. ... [Goldstein's book] The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge -- a gradual spread of enlightenment -- ultimately a proletarian rebellion -- the overthrow of the Party. ... You understand well enough how the Party maintains itself in power. ... The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. ... One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. ... power is collective ... power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. ... 'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?' Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said. 'Exactly. By making him suffer. ... Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.
Nasty, eh?
Demanding software audits from public schools right before exams so that you can extort money from them is shameful and bullying. It's shameful to do anything but GIVE to schools. It's sick that anyone could get so twisted up in IP propaganda that they think such tactics are justified or even laudable. The real extortion is not the $300,000 or the five million dollars it cost to comply with the audit and "upgrade", it's the implied threat to all other schools, "If you don't please us and do as we say, we can and will screw you too." It's impossible for any organization to keep all of the records required to prove software "ownership" when you use M$ cruft. The costs are prohibitive and the evidence of "infringement" required to trigger a raid are laughably low. The effort itself is a waste of public funds as is use of non free software in general but that's what extortion is all about.
Don't worry, you can't fool all the people all the time. The BSA can spout whatever it likes, fools like you can quote it and even believe it, but their power is ebbing. Soon people will be able to look back and wonder how anyone could be so foolish as to have bought commercial software when free software worked as well. They will be disgusted if they are reminded of BSA public school raids and all the trouble caused.
I don't shoplift but that's a very funny analogy. Walmart has never demanded that I prove that I actually bought everything inside my house or been given a search warrent because I've been a customer. Walmart does not run advertisements begging people to falsely accuse their peers, employers even family of shoplifting. The propaganda war waged by the BSA has been successful in securing privileges for their industry that would be considered intolerable and unconstitutional elsewhere.
Thanks for the opening, I love looking up liks like this. Here's where some of Microsoft's big bucks came from:
Want some more, bugni man? That Microsoft has bullied cash strapped public schools over copying stupid stuff like M$ Word is a shameful matter of public record. Free software, of course, comes with no such strings attached and works as well or better over judicial extortion ware.
If the assholes worry about people like me pointing out their shameful behavior, they should refrain from it in the first place. I'm happy people like you and him are bothered by my little posts.
I suppose he's talking about the DoJ and others who read Microsoft's emails and other internal documents. You know, the one's that lead the US to convict Microsoft of being an abusive Monoploy, engaging in anti-competitive activity and all that? Stuff that was widely published and contained choice phrases like "knife the baby" and "cut off their oxygen". Maybe he is referring to people who have the nerve to say their shill group, the BSA, is immoral for raiding public school systems and extorting $250,000 or more each time? He might just be referring to everyone who's used Word and any other processor and can tell you that Word is inferior. Abusively pushing inferior goods and stealing from children, well, that is outrageous.
He hates blogs because people use them to tell the truth and to help increase the public memory beyond the 30 second sound bite of TV from one of 3 broadcasters. Sorry bud, the market for lemons and bullshit is over.
He's made his own to help promote the decrepit, inferior company he works for. He's lying just as surely as Microsoft agents who bomb Slashdot, Steve Barkto style, and those who pretend to be teachers at educational software shows. Adverts, astroturf and now blogs. What a waste of Microsoft money, they could be making programs that can compete.