... they have to back pedal and go to windows again for any reason its a failure for Linux and PHBs will hear about it.
Do you know anyone who moved their desktop to Linux and used it on a daily basis for any extended period of time that whent back to M$? How about large organizations. Do you see Lowes moving back? I never have and I don't.
There's nothing really to drive them there. Windoze has got games and fiercly propriatory hardware which are essentially toys: video junk, USB all in one nightmares and that kind of thing. All of it is buggy and NONE of it ever should have been used to run a business.
More important, there are significant issues for M$ to overcome once it happens. When you've been in free software land long enough, there's plenty of stuff you don't want to put up with ever again. "I agree", it's been years since I've had to press one of those buttons for anything more than a sigle paragraph like Knoppix has. Crashes, a peer's computer crashes on him once a day at work. It drives him nuts, but I'd wipe it. The single desktop interface and the difficulty of place keeping this and instability create. The pathetic networking tools. "Driver" issues. The list goes on an on.
Of course, only free software should be trusted for such a system. Their PDF forms online are a great start, but much more can be done.
Even higher praise for free software.
on
2003: Year of Apache
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· Score: 2, Insightful
MS's recent campagin of Total Cost Of Ownership does not factor well into this.
Microsoft's TCO campaign is a last ditch effort to maintain market share. It's mostly a lie, but it's damaging to them even if true.
Assume they are telling the truth. I know that it's hard to keep a straight face reading that, but think of what it means. WHERE TECHNICAL MERIT IS THE DECIDING FACTOR, FREE SOFTWARE IS OVERWHELMINGLY PREFERED DESPITE HIGHER COST. Most companies ask themselves what a failed web site will cost them. The answer generally dwarfs the cost of the sofware and it's upkeep.
Of course, we all know that it costs nothing to aquire free web servers and less to keep them up than their non free counterparts. That's just the way good software works.
The same thing is true on the desktop. Most small businesses with a brain have a reseller to help them out with technical issues. Free software, when adopted there, will prove both cheaper and more reliable. Small businesses that dabble with HPs and their own M$ based IT are wasting time that would better be spent on their real business. The reseller may appear more expensive up front than trundeling down to CompUSA, but he's not. Resellers that move to free software are going to enjoy cost, feature and performance advantages that the 2003 server fanboys can only dream of. The same can be said of larger IT shops that can afford to do IT themselves, like ummm IBM
Microsoft's FUD campaign is running out of steam. They have tried all of this before and people are no longer listening.
Your own ISP uses M$ junk So does access for less. That kind of software running a site makes me think the owners are clueless marketroids. Both of them look lucky to get 100 days of uptime. How reliable do you think their service will be?
Try something reputable like Power Hoster. They reputably resell time on networks like surf.net and pop.net as "cheap isp". I've used them and they mostly work. I imagine tht they work about as well as MSN ever did and that this is how any mom and pop outfit will work. AOL's network does work better, but use of a windoze only dial up client and the murder of Netscape drove me away from them after 8 years of service.
LexisNexis is usefull to some people, and in no way obstructs the availability of the raw records to the people who do not wish to pay them for it. Go fuck yourself.
Show it to me. Show me court records from your state. If they are on line, Google will pick them up and organize them by statute if nothing else. Lexis-Nexis, in exchange for electronic publication "rights" forbids the state from publishing elsewhere. It's one of those obsolete exclusive franchise ideas left over from dead tree publication. In an age of electronic networks, that kind of deal is theft of public information. Lexis-Nexis know better but will fight to keep their lucrative exclusive franchise. They will lose and I don't have any respect for their position..
There you go, I don't have to fuck myself, others do it for me.
It is publically accessable without tresspass. But it isnt archived, indexed, cross referenced and made easily searchable, and that costs money.
The gratification you and others get from punishing this "hacker" is small minded and cruel. It's bassed on a needless scarcity and private profiteering at the public expense. You will see that the larger crime is being commited by Lexis-Nexis.
Think, Dick, think, the answer has been demonstrated and the implications are clear. The lack of organization sounds a lot like the internet to me. Too bad states don't just put the electronic infromation they create on the web in raw form for anyone to ogranize as they see fit. It's comming and you will think of well organize and useful access to the law as a right.
People getting in the way of that availabilty are criminals. People who listen to them are just dicks.
access LexisNexis and then used them to make more than 3,000 searches in February 2002
The irony of going to jail for using a legal service begars description. In the future, when we have real networking and everyone takes access to case law for granted as a public right, the punishment our hacker faces today will look barbaric. "Were not public trails public property, recorded at the public expense?" they will ask, "How was it that you had to pay a private firm for reasonable access to the law?" What information, I wonder, did the New York Times have about their op-ed contributors that is not available from public phone books and the paper itself down at the local library. This case casts great shame on the New York Times and society in general.
Yet you, gantrep, say, "I feel that what he did is the analogue of theft and trespassing on a massive (albeit electronic) scale." Think about it some more. To me, what he got at was information that should be publically accessible without tresspass.
They can legally do anything the original copyright holder could do
And that's about nothing. If they manage to prove that the material was both infringing and unauthorized they might be able to take the vendor to court and then do something violent to the vendor's bank account.
What they did was pretend to be policemen because the above would not work. They dressed like policemen and they hired former policemen who knew how to play the part. In fact, it would be hard for a policeman to act like anything but a policeman, and one joyfully liberated from all normal lawful restraint. That's against the law and the way they acted might have violated the law even if they were really policemen. Let's look:
"A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature," Langley said. "Today he's Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he's Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he's something else. These people change their identity all the time. A picture's worth a thousand words."
Hmmm, bigots too, sounds like arbitrary enforment based on race. Bzzzzt.
"We notify them that continued sale would be a violation of civil and criminal codes. If they'd like to voluntarily turn the product over to us, we'll destroy it, and we agree we won't sue," he explained.
Extortion, theft, destruction of evidence, a real policeman would be put under the jail for that.
This is strong arm bullshit. What are they going to do to those who refuse to co-operate? How many pictures are they going to take before they start to feel silly and start breaking legs. They are out there in their silly jackets because they know they can't sue these vendors in any cost effective way. They can't find the factories so they have targeted the visable outlet. It's a waste of their time unless they start breaking some heads. We now see the RIAA for what they are: Thugs.
m5shiv asks if The enemy of my enemy is my friend?" He's looking at it wrong. A friend of freedom is a friend of mine. Free software is my friend and openly published standards are good for everyone. Microsoft hates both of those things and is not your friend. While you might think that IBM is doing this to hurt Microsoft, it's far more likely that IBM is doing this to help IBM. I mean, how embarsing it must have been for IBM to have their desktops messed with by I LOVE YOU, Code Red, SirCAM, SoBig, Mellisa, Blaster and all that.
Go Big Blue! It's about time for you to take back the innovation crown those monkeys in Redmond pretended to wear.
IBM's a large, large company with abundant resources in the area of software design.
Pththth-fit, wrong-o. The whole point of real openly published standards is to avoid the need for software design. While IBM has made real contributions to free code, this is a cost saving move.
...without losing much cross-platform compatibility.
If by "cross-platform" you mean it will run all the old Microsoft crap they paid for, they have already done that. Running legacy windoze was part of the Munich deal. No one has to lose anything to move to enjoy the blessings of software liberty. If you mean talk to whatever Bill Gates pulls out of his ass for next year, the answer will always be no. The question is now why would anyone want to try. Non-standard is about to die the misserable death it deserves and all applications and data will enjoy the real cross platform deployment that is the promise of SOFTware.
other large organizations with widescale Windows deployments, where a few lightly-customized Win2k images might be the most they can currently support.
The reason we are here is because no one can afford the costs and pitfalls of the uncustomized versions.
That's not a bad start, but it's better to liberate them completely. Most people won't really know the difference between windoze and a KDE desktop, but the Windoze desktop is less robust. Most people only care about email and web browsing. Any modern Linux distribution will give them that much better than Windoze does and last longer. Windows 2000 pro does not even come with a spell checker, how lame is that? Mozilla can provide a good browser and mail client on Win32, but it can't cover up all of the problems and sooner or later those problems will result in a dead pooter. Before it gets there, ActiveX and Windoze messaging will be hijacked to stream all sorts of nasty pop-ups. The worst break comes from installing Windoze Media player from Microsoft's download site. It eats all media files, comes with a EULA that makes any system behave like XP Home, forgets old codecs like Microsoft's own AVI that most digital cameras use for movies, then streams all sorts of crap at you, constantly. It's something the average porn site would be embarrased to do to a user. A free computer, on the other hand, is much harder to break.
If most people's expectation of software was to create "cooperation and community", RMS mmight be onto something here. But the truth is that most people and businesses want software that fulfills a particular need (or set of needs).
Non free software does not do what users want it to do, it's makers hold users in contempt and seek to demoralize everyone. Non-free really is evil when you think about it.
Which campaign of terror by the BSA do you need to be reminded of? Is it $250,000 lawsuits against public shool systems that had teachers install Microsoft Word from home so they could read crappy formats Microsoft pushed on central offices? Or do you need to remember the encouragement they have given disgruntled workers to fink of their employers for "stolen" software? How about the way laws are aranged so that the BSA can search your premisis with nothing more than hearsay and then charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars for the disruption if they find so much as one paint program with an expired "free trial period" even if no one is using it? Remember all of that now?
So how is it that the above is legal? It's because makers of text editors would convince you that sharing text editors is wrong. The BSA and it's contituant companies would try to convince you not only that it's wrong to share their work but that it's wrong to even try to understand it. They want you to think that you can't do what they do. At the same time they try to convince you that anyone who would try to do the same thing on their own is sinister and strange. It seems to be working. People are afraid to trust free software and have trouble understanding why it exists.
Free software exists to solve the needs of users. It does this in a way that comercial software can't: direct modification by those who would bother. The weight of imperical evidence now clearly shows that free software not only meets more user needs than comercial software, it meets them much better.
RMS undertood this clearly the first time he someone refused to share a piece of software with him. It was a printer driver with a bug that frustrated Stallman. The bug was bad enough, but the anti-social refusal to share the souce code for such a simple program was shocking. RMS rewarded the turd by rewriting the driver himself. It wasted his effort, but ultimately destroyed the anti-social work of the selfish programmer. As the most complex of applications are really nothing more than a combination of simple programs, there is no difference except scale between that programmer's refusal to share and Microsoft's empire of closed source junk. It was clear from the first NDA, which RMS refused to sign.
Stallman correctly understood that there was no limit on what kind of information people would try to hoad like source code. The primary benifit of electronic information is the ability to be coppied effortlessly and without cost to the author. It is the ultimate medium of sharing. Yet today we have people scrambling content of music and even books.
The difference between purposes of free and non free software expresses itself in very practical ways. The same people working on Digital Rights Denial are making software that does not do what I want it to. When I write a letter to my wife, I don't want the software I use to do anything but record and transmit what I wrote. I don't want that software to lock up my words in some kind of wierd format or database that I won't be able to read in a year or so. The purpose of non free formats and methods is to hold my work for ransom and continue to charge me money every two or three years so that I can read my own work and communicate with other people trapped in the world of propriatory junk. They understand what I want and use it against me. Free software, made by co-operative users, does exacly what the users want it to.
Just ask Bill Gates, the richest man on Earth. He's already given lots of money to the NAACP and set up whole schools and research intitutes in India. Surely, he has money for US white boys with merit?
Nah, the rest of us need to make him richer. How many times have our public shools had to shell out $250,000 at a time for "stealing" Microsoft Word? Keep paying suckers. Don't forget to "standardize" on windoze in your shcool system or business today! While forgein companies steal the same software and use the savings to undercut you with cheap US trained technical tallent, remember to register your software.
Thanks, Bill, you've really made the world a better place by advocating non-free software. Your band-aid generosity does not begin to cover the damage you have done to the US economy. Greed is not good and software hoarders can't even claim the satisftion of money any more.
If that's what you want to do, great. The problem is that you can't do much of that if your computer is broken. Surfing, I'm sure, is what the other people in his house want to do while he spends 11 hours a month making sure they can. Sad, sad.
The uptime on the computer I'm using is 25 days. That is the last time my house suffered a power failure. In those 25 days, I have not had a single problem with it or any of the other six computers that I have running. Time spend on them is used to make new toys, programs or simply surf and email. Sure, it took time to set up and figure out, but now it just works. With Knoppix, and the experienc gained, set up will be much easier on any new machine. I've never had a virus or worm and I've never lost data to hardware failure of any kind, though I have had more than one hard drive die. Debian stable is what it says it is.
But once you've installed Windows 2000 and set up things correctly, it normally stays running.
This is only true if you never turn the box on. If you do, it starts to break. If you make the mistake of hooking it up to a network, you will eXPerience all the problems our blogger did: Windoze updates that break things, viruses and worms that break even more if you don't get the updates and all manner of wierd and impossible to fix errors.
Actually Windows 95/98 is pretty much easily securable (can easily turn off all services)
OK, now you are a troll or an ignoramous. I've worked in small shops and fortune 500 companies and everywhere the story was the same. If it's hard for all of those people, the forest of tabs and checkboxes is hard for anyone. They all have been hit with network disabling and performance robbing shit because windoze is easy to break. Contrast this with "services" being reasonable and turned off by default and reading a few man pages and modifying a text file to turn them on for yourslelf.
Games, yeah that's true. So the average house might want to have a windoze box around. It's going to eat your time, but you will get a few hours of gaming in before you have to rebuild it. On second thought, you might just get a play station and hook it up to your network.
If free software wants to present itself as an alternative to Microsoft, it needs to act like an adult and provide quality software with service and attention to user needs. To say, as you do, "It's free, so live with it" is a cop-out.
What kind of crap is that? "act like an adult"? What's that supposed to mean. Free software meets my needs far better than comercial crap.
I can get anything I need to done at home with free software but work sucks. There I was handed a nice machine cloged with Windoze 2000 pro and nothing else. Mozilla and Open Office came to my rescue there, without me or my company having to shell out hundreds of dollars for Office and software that can print to pdf. Unfortuneately, they use some kind of Microshit email server that refuses to talk to anything but Lookout Express. The only way I get spell checking in my email is to cut and paste from OO or a Putty to my 486 gateway at home. Putty, perversly enough is faster. They use Windoze because they don't know any better and because of two legacy apps that could be replaced by one good database. The Windows experience is so poor it's not even funny. I can't believe people use this shit and pay money for it.
Free software rocks. If Abiword does not work for you, simply use Kword or OO which both work as well or better than Word. If I really ever have to type set something, I can always fall back to Word Perfect 8, Linux native that I've made work on Woody. People who typeset for a living simply use anything from the TeX family. There's always something else out there. Free software has general software for everyone that's good enough for most purposes and specialty software for any purpose that kicks comercial software over.
For example, I miss the graphing abilities of Excel; OpenCalc and Gnumeric simply don't compare.
That's it? That's the best you can come up with as a counter to the massive improvements to ease of use, user costs, stability and ease of upkeep of free software? Rudamentary graphing is available in both of those packages. If the pace of free software development of the past is a guide to the future, gnumeric will soon have every graph tool M$ has but they will all work they way they are supposed to. The average user, who you insultingly call "mundane", could care less anyway.
As you point out, Microsoft is equally guilty of indifference to users
I've yet to see a convincing display of free software indifference. It's hard to attach the word "guilt" to people who share their work without charge to the rest of the world. People who use free software are NOT getting screwed, they are running software the commercial world fails to deliver at any cost.
Linux has to grow or die: how can this be not true?
By being completely stupid? How does free software "grow"? How does it "die"? These are comercial software concepts that have no meaning in the free software world.
Today, as it was before there was commercial software, free software grows when someone scratches an itch. Someone takes code and makes it do what they want. The result is more free code. Comercial code, on the other hand, grows when a marketing department convinces a user that thier particular program meets the user's needs better than anything else available. It's a cancer that chokes and kills healthy growth. The ultimate expression of comercial software growth is Bill Gates insane "one computer one OS", dreams of world domination and advertising that claims Microsoft Office will make you superman. Comercial software grows at the expense of real user needs. Free software grows by meeting needs.
Free software never really dies. I've never heard of a program that met one person's needs that was not useful to another person, if for nothing other than a starting point to meet their own needs. As long as a single copy of any free software exists, it will be used. Chances are, that anyone using any free software will make it available and it will grow if something better does not exist. It's easy to share source code. Comercial software, on the other hand, dies all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with merit or need. Any comercial software company that does not have enough money to pay it's bills is finished. The source code is then hoarded as a valuable asset and generally bought for pennies on the dollar of it's development cost by a competitor who locks it up or destroys it.
Indeed, it can be said that the ultimate fate of comercial software is to conquer or die. This is Cringerly's mind set and it has nothing to do with free software.
The easy prediction for free software is that it will grow.
I am also a technoscenti, which means that my needs are quite different from those of most people.... "Free" software has created its own hierarchy of haves and have nots, based on technical prowess; the lords of free software turn up their noses and snort when confronted with needs of the commoners.
What planet do you live on? On my plannet there's a guy named Knopper who made a CD that runs and self configures on just about any computer without taking any hard drive space. Knoppix has two sets of replacements for the world's most popular software. It sets up with a KDE 3 desktop that has proved itself just as easy to learn and use as Windoze XP, but it also has Window Maker and other choices. Networking is autoconfigured and it comes with two browsers that block popups and have tabbed browsing. It also has a choice of superior email clients that are not liable to root your machine and come with spell checkers. If that's not enough for the average user then comercial software vendors, such as Microsoft have failed misserably. Because there's so much space on a CD, Mr. Knopper decided to put two office productivity suits in. The Open Office suite not only reads Microsoft's file formats, it comes with a database replacement for access. Microsoft charges lots of money for it's little productivity suite and charges even more for the "pro" version that has the database. Because users like choice, Knoppix also has KOffice, yet another productivity suite that's easy to use. Oh sure, Knoppix comes with power toys, like a compiler, GUI IDEs, disk and network management tools and other geeky things. All of this on one no cost CD that configures itself. Is that meeting the needs of "mundane users"?
I dare you to compare that with commercial offerings. Show me a "mundane user" who can wade through the multiple CD, floppy and reboot process that is a Windoze install. How much did that cost, $150? Oh sure, "the computer comes configured." That works great until Bill turns the upgrade crank two years later. Then the crap breaks and the user is stuck. Tell me a happy story about restore disks and I'll tell you a sad one about broken hard disks that screw it up. I don't even want to mention user data that gets lost in the process, unless said "mundane user" goes down to the computer store and spends about as much money as a working used computer costs. Hey, did that restore CD have an office suite? Nope, all your fave software is gone, sorry.
Let's sum up the differences for the works:
Free
little or no cost.
self configuring
works on any computer
easy to replace
Non-Free
$200 OS, $500 office suite, more $100s for decent music, photo editing, painting, star charting, whatever you really want to do
needs OS and hardware specific drivers that can confound experts
mated with a single computer via "product registration" for life
Who's meeting the needs of users again? Is it those nice people at Gator?
Free software will always be a meritocracy because everyone is free and invited to participate. The best of breed will always rise and users will always be served. When someone makes a cool toy or tool, everyone wins. The non-free world will always have powerful haves, who hoard their tricks, and helpless have-nots who beg for software. Always, that is, until it's apparent to everyone that free software fills every need beter than any marketroid wet dream of sales. You and Cringerly will get it soon enough. Until then, I wish you would shut up.
Sorry, anyone with an Inbox and a clue could tell you this.
Only Bill Gates knows for sure if the next Windoze "update" will turn M$ messaging back on so that it can't be turned off. Still, it's easy to predict a flood of IM "services" that are trojans offered as "free" downloads in banner ads. Pop goes the advert.
Ugh, the clueless world of non free. It only gets worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know anyone who moved their desktop to Linux and used it on a daily basis for any extended period of time that whent back to M$? How about large organizations. Do you see Lowes moving back? I never have and I don't.
There's nothing really to drive them there. Windoze has got games and fiercly propriatory hardware which are essentially toys: video junk, USB all in one nightmares and that kind of thing. All of it is buggy and NONE of it ever should have been used to run a business.
More important, there are significant issues for M$ to overcome once it happens. When you've been in free software land long enough, there's plenty of stuff you don't want to put up with ever again. "I agree", it's been years since I've had to press one of those buttons for anything more than a sigle paragraph like Knoppix has. Crashes, a peer's computer crashes on him once a day at work. It drives him nuts, but I'd wipe it. The single desktop interface and the difficulty of place keeping this and instability create. The pathetic networking tools. "Driver" issues. The list goes on an on.
This is what we think you owe us / we owe you.
Of course, only free software should be trusted for such a system. Their PDF forms online are a great start, but much more can be done.
Microsoft's TCO campaign is a last ditch effort to maintain market share. It's mostly a lie, but it's damaging to them even if true.
Assume they are telling the truth. I know that it's hard to keep a straight face reading that, but think of what it means. WHERE TECHNICAL MERIT IS THE DECIDING FACTOR, FREE SOFTWARE IS OVERWHELMINGLY PREFERED DESPITE HIGHER COST. Most companies ask themselves what a failed web site will cost them. The answer generally dwarfs the cost of the sofware and it's upkeep.
Of course, we all know that it costs nothing to aquire free web servers and less to keep them up than their non free counterparts. That's just the way good software works.
The same thing is true on the desktop. Most small businesses with a brain have a reseller to help them out with technical issues. Free software, when adopted there, will prove both cheaper and more reliable. Small businesses that dabble with HPs and their own M$ based IT are wasting time that would better be spent on their real business. The reseller may appear more expensive up front than trundeling down to CompUSA, but he's not. Resellers that move to free software are going to enjoy cost, feature and performance advantages that the 2003 server fanboys can only dream of. The same can be said of larger IT shops that can afford to do IT themselves, like ummm IBM
Microsoft's FUD campaign is running out of steam. They have tried all of this before and people are no longer listening.
Try something reputable like Power Hoster. They reputably resell time on networks like surf.net and pop.net as "cheap isp". I've used them and they mostly work. I imagine tht they work about as well as MSN ever did and that this is how any mom and pop outfit will work. AOL's network does work better, but use of a windoze only dial up client and the murder of Netscape drove me away from them after 8 years of service.
LexisNexis is usefull to some people, and in no way obstructs the availability of the raw records to the people who do not wish to pay them for it. Go fuck yourself.
Show it to me. Show me court records from your state. If they are on line, Google will pick them up and organize them by statute if nothing else. Lexis-Nexis, in exchange for electronic publication "rights" forbids the state from publishing elsewhere. It's one of those obsolete exclusive franchise ideas left over from dead tree publication. In an age of electronic networks, that kind of deal is theft of public information. Lexis-Nexis know better but will fight to keep their lucrative exclusive franchise. They will lose and I don't have any respect for their position..
There you go, I don't have to fuck myself, others do it for me.
It is publically accessable without tresspass. But it isnt archived, indexed, cross referenced and made easily searchable, and that costs money.
The gratification you and others get from punishing this "hacker" is small minded and cruel. It's bassed on a needless scarcity and private profiteering at the public expense. You will see that the larger crime is being commited by Lexis-Nexis.
Think, Dick, think, the answer has been demonstrated and the implications are clear. The lack of organization sounds a lot like the internet to me. Too bad states don't just put the electronic infromation they create on the web in raw form for anyone to ogranize as they see fit. It's comming and you will think of well organize and useful access to the law as a right.
People getting in the way of that availabilty are criminals. People who listen to them are just dicks.
The irony of going to jail for using a legal service begars description. In the future, when we have real networking and everyone takes access to case law for granted as a public right, the punishment our hacker faces today will look barbaric. "Were not public trails public property, recorded at the public expense?" they will ask, "How was it that you had to pay a private firm for reasonable access to the law?" What information, I wonder, did the New York Times have about their op-ed contributors that is not available from public phone books and the paper itself down at the local library. This case casts great shame on the New York Times and society in general.
Yet you, gantrep, say, "I feel that what he did is the analogue of theft and trespassing on a massive (albeit electronic) scale." Think about it some more. To me, what he got at was information that should be publically accessible without tresspass.
And that's about nothing. If they manage to prove that the material was both infringing and unauthorized they might be able to take the vendor to court and then do something violent to the vendor's bank account.
What they did was pretend to be policemen because the above would not work. They dressed like policemen and they hired former policemen who knew how to play the part. In fact, it would be hard for a policeman to act like anything but a policeman, and one joyfully liberated from all normal lawful restraint. That's against the law and the way they acted might have violated the law even if they were really policemen. Let's look:
"A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature," Langley said. "Today he's Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow he's Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that he's something else. These people change their identity all the time. A picture's worth a thousand words."
Hmmm, bigots too, sounds like arbitrary enforment based on race. Bzzzzt.
"We notify them that continued sale would be a violation of civil and criminal codes. If they'd like to voluntarily turn the product over to us, we'll destroy it, and we agree we won't sue," he explained.
Extortion, theft, destruction of evidence, a real policeman would be put under the jail for that.
This is strong arm bullshit. What are they going to do to those who refuse to co-operate? How many pictures are they going to take before they start to feel silly and start breaking legs. They are out there in their silly jackets because they know they can't sue these vendors in any cost effective way. They can't find the factories so they have targeted the visable outlet. It's a waste of their time unless they start breaking some heads. We now see the RIAA for what they are: Thugs.
Colision probablity is a strong function of velocity, cross section and shielding. It is a weak function of shape.
Go Big Blue! It's about time for you to take back the innovation crown those monkeys in Redmond pretended to wear.
Pththth-fit, wrong-o. The whole point of real openly published standards is to avoid the need for software design. While IBM has made real contributions to free code, this is a cost saving move.
If by "cross-platform" you mean it will run all the old Microsoft crap they paid for, they have already done that. Running legacy windoze was part of the Munich deal. No one has to lose anything to move to enjoy the blessings of software liberty. If you mean talk to whatever Bill Gates pulls out of his ass for next year, the answer will always be no. The question is now why would anyone want to try. Non-standard is about to die the misserable death it deserves and all applications and data will enjoy the real cross platform deployment that is the promise of SOFTware.
other large organizations with widescale Windows deployments, where a few lightly-customized Win2k images might be the most they can currently support.
The reason we are here is because no one can afford the costs and pitfalls of the uncustomized versions.
That's not a bad start, but it's better to liberate them completely. Most people won't really know the difference between windoze and a KDE desktop, but the Windoze desktop is less robust. Most people only care about email and web browsing. Any modern Linux distribution will give them that much better than Windoze does and last longer. Windows 2000 pro does not even come with a spell checker, how lame is that? Mozilla can provide a good browser and mail client on Win32, but it can't cover up all of the problems and sooner or later those problems will result in a dead pooter. Before it gets there, ActiveX and Windoze messaging will be hijacked to stream all sorts of nasty pop-ups. The worst break comes from installing Windoze Media player from Microsoft's download site. It eats all media files, comes with a EULA that makes any system behave like XP Home, forgets old codecs like Microsoft's own AVI that most digital cameras use for movies, then streams all sorts of crap at you, constantly. It's something the average porn site would be embarrased to do to a user. A free computer, on the other hand, is much harder to break.
Holy shit. What hole did you crawl out of?
Your grandmother. That's right, I'm your daddy! Now bite me.
Non free software does not do what users want it to do, it's makers hold users in contempt and seek to demoralize everyone. Non-free really is evil when you think about it.
Which campaign of terror by the BSA do you need to be reminded of? Is it $250,000 lawsuits against public shool systems that had teachers install Microsoft Word from home so they could read crappy formats Microsoft pushed on central offices? Or do you need to remember the encouragement they have given disgruntled workers to fink of their employers for "stolen" software? How about the way laws are aranged so that the BSA can search your premisis with nothing more than hearsay and then charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars for the disruption if they find so much as one paint program with an expired "free trial period" even if no one is using it? Remember all of that now?
So how is it that the above is legal? It's because makers of text editors would convince you that sharing text editors is wrong. The BSA and it's contituant companies would try to convince you not only that it's wrong to share their work but that it's wrong to even try to understand it. They want you to think that you can't do what they do. At the same time they try to convince you that anyone who would try to do the same thing on their own is sinister and strange. It seems to be working. People are afraid to trust free software and have trouble understanding why it exists.
Free software exists to solve the needs of users. It does this in a way that comercial software can't: direct modification by those who would bother. The weight of imperical evidence now clearly shows that free software not only meets more user needs than comercial software, it meets them much better.
RMS undertood this clearly the first time he someone refused to share a piece of software with him. It was a printer driver with a bug that frustrated Stallman. The bug was bad enough, but the anti-social refusal to share the souce code for such a simple program was shocking. RMS rewarded the turd by rewriting the driver himself. It wasted his effort, but ultimately destroyed the anti-social work of the selfish programmer. As the most complex of applications are really nothing more than a combination of simple programs, there is no difference except scale between that programmer's refusal to share and Microsoft's empire of closed source junk. It was clear from the first NDA, which RMS refused to sign.
Stallman correctly understood that there was no limit on what kind of information people would try to hoad like source code. The primary benifit of electronic information is the ability to be coppied effortlessly and without cost to the author. It is the ultimate medium of sharing. Yet today we have people scrambling content of music and even books.
The difference between purposes of free and non free software expresses itself in very practical ways. The same people working on Digital Rights Denial are making software that does not do what I want it to. When I write a letter to my wife, I don't want the software I use to do anything but record and transmit what I wrote. I don't want that software to lock up my words in some kind of wierd format or database that I won't be able to read in a year or so. The purpose of non free formats and methods is to hold my work for ransom and continue to charge me money every two or three years so that I can read my own work and communicate with other people trapped in the world of propriatory junk. They understand what I want and use it against me. Free software, made by co-operative users, does exacly what the users want it to.
Nah, the rest of us need to make him richer. How many times have our public shools had to shell out $250,000 at a time for "stealing" Microsoft Word? Keep paying suckers. Don't forget to "standardize" on windoze in your shcool system or business today! While forgein companies steal the same software and use the savings to undercut you with cheap US trained technical tallent, remember to register your software.
Thanks, Bill, you've really made the world a better place by advocating non-free software. Your band-aid generosity does not begin to cover the damage you have done to the US economy. Greed is not good and software hoarders can't even claim the satisftion of money any more.
The uptime on the computer I'm using is 25 days. That is the last time my house suffered a power failure. In those 25 days, I have not had a single problem with it or any of the other six computers that I have running. Time spend on them is used to make new toys, programs or simply surf and email. Sure, it took time to set up and figure out, but now it just works. With Knoppix, and the experienc gained, set up will be much easier on any new machine. I've never had a virus or worm and I've never lost data to hardware failure of any kind, though I have had more than one hard drive die. Debian stable is what it says it is.
This is only true if you never turn the box on. If you do, it starts to break. If you make the mistake of hooking it up to a network, you will eXPerience all the problems our blogger did: Windoze updates that break things, viruses and worms that break even more if you don't get the updates and all manner of wierd and impossible to fix errors.
Actually Windows 95/98 is pretty much easily securable (can easily turn off all services)
OK, now you are a troll or an ignoramous. I've worked in small shops and fortune 500 companies and everywhere the story was the same. If it's hard for all of those people, the forest of tabs and checkboxes is hard for anyone. They all have been hit with network disabling and performance robbing shit because windoze is easy to break. Contrast this with "services" being reasonable and turned off by default and reading a few man pages and modifying a text file to turn them on for yourslelf.
Games, yeah that's true. So the average house might want to have a windoze box around. It's going to eat your time, but you will get a few hours of gaming in before you have to rebuild it. On second thought, you might just get a play station and hook it up to your network.
What kind of crap is that? "act like an adult"? What's that supposed to mean. Free software meets my needs far better than comercial crap.
I can get anything I need to done at home with free software but work sucks. There I was handed a nice machine cloged with Windoze 2000 pro and nothing else. Mozilla and Open Office came to my rescue there, without me or my company having to shell out hundreds of dollars for Office and software that can print to pdf. Unfortuneately, they use some kind of Microshit email server that refuses to talk to anything but Lookout Express. The only way I get spell checking in my email is to cut and paste from OO or a Putty to my 486 gateway at home. Putty, perversly enough is faster. They use Windoze because they don't know any better and because of two legacy apps that could be replaced by one good database. The Windows experience is so poor it's not even funny. I can't believe people use this shit and pay money for it.
Free software rocks. If Abiword does not work for you, simply use Kword or OO which both work as well or better than Word. If I really ever have to type set something, I can always fall back to Word Perfect 8, Linux native that I've made work on Woody. People who typeset for a living simply use anything from the TeX family. There's always something else out there. Free software has general software for everyone that's good enough for most purposes and specialty software for any purpose that kicks comercial software over.
That's it? That's the best you can come up with as a counter to the massive improvements to ease of use, user costs, stability and ease of upkeep of free software? Rudamentary graphing is available in both of those packages. If the pace of free software development of the past is a guide to the future, gnumeric will soon have every graph tool M$ has but they will all work they way they are supposed to. The average user, who you insultingly call "mundane", could care less anyway.
As you point out, Microsoft is equally guilty of indifference to users
I've yet to see a convincing display of free software indifference. It's hard to attach the word "guilt" to people who share their work without charge to the rest of the world. People who use free software are NOT getting screwed, they are running software the commercial world fails to deliver at any cost.
By being completely stupid? How does free software "grow"? How does it "die"? These are comercial software concepts that have no meaning in the free software world.
Today, as it was before there was commercial software, free software grows when someone scratches an itch. Someone takes code and makes it do what they want. The result is more free code. Comercial code, on the other hand, grows when a marketing department convinces a user that thier particular program meets the user's needs better than anything else available. It's a cancer that chokes and kills healthy growth. The ultimate expression of comercial software growth is Bill Gates insane "one computer one OS", dreams of world domination and advertising that claims Microsoft Office will make you superman. Comercial software grows at the expense of real user needs. Free software grows by meeting needs.
Free software never really dies. I've never heard of a program that met one person's needs that was not useful to another person, if for nothing other than a starting point to meet their own needs. As long as a single copy of any free software exists, it will be used. Chances are, that anyone using any free software will make it available and it will grow if something better does not exist. It's easy to share source code. Comercial software, on the other hand, dies all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with merit or need. Any comercial software company that does not have enough money to pay it's bills is finished. The source code is then hoarded as a valuable asset and generally bought for pennies on the dollar of it's development cost by a competitor who locks it up or destroys it.
Indeed, it can be said that the ultimate fate of comercial software is to conquer or die. This is Cringerly's mind set and it has nothing to do with free software.
The easy prediction for free software is that it will grow.
What planet do you live on? On my plannet there's a guy named Knopper who made a CD that runs and self configures on just about any computer without taking any hard drive space. Knoppix has two sets of replacements for the world's most popular software. It sets up with a KDE 3 desktop that has proved itself just as easy to learn and use as Windoze XP, but it also has Window Maker and other choices. Networking is autoconfigured and it comes with two browsers that block popups and have tabbed browsing. It also has a choice of superior email clients that are not liable to root your machine and come with spell checkers. If that's not enough for the average user then comercial software vendors, such as Microsoft have failed misserably. Because there's so much space on a CD, Mr. Knopper decided to put two office productivity suits in. The Open Office suite not only reads Microsoft's file formats, it comes with a database replacement for access. Microsoft charges lots of money for it's little productivity suite and charges even more for the "pro" version that has the database. Because users like choice, Knoppix also has KOffice, yet another productivity suite that's easy to use. Oh sure, Knoppix comes with power toys, like a compiler, GUI IDEs, disk and network management tools and other geeky things. All of this on one no cost CD that configures itself. Is that meeting the needs of "mundane users"?
I dare you to compare that with commercial offerings. Show me a "mundane user" who can wade through the multiple CD, floppy and reboot process that is a Windoze install. How much did that cost, $150? Oh sure, "the computer comes configured." That works great until Bill turns the upgrade crank two years later. Then the crap breaks and the user is stuck. Tell me a happy story about restore disks and I'll tell you a sad one about broken hard disks that screw it up. I don't even want to mention user data that gets lost in the process, unless said "mundane user" goes down to the computer store and spends about as much money as a working used computer costs. Hey, did that restore CD have an office suite? Nope, all your fave software is gone, sorry.
Let's sum up the differences for the works:
Free
Non-Free
Who's meeting the needs of users again? Is it those nice people at Gator?
Free software will always be a meritocracy because everyone is free and invited to participate. The best of breed will always rise and users will always be served. When someone makes a cool toy or tool, everyone wins. The non-free world will always have powerful haves, who hoard their tricks, and helpless have-nots who beg for software. Always, that is, until it's apparent to everyone that free software fills every need beter than any marketroid wet dream of sales. You and Cringerly will get it soon enough. Until then, I wish you would shut up.
Only Bill Gates knows for sure if the next Windoze "update" will turn M$ messaging back on so that it can't be turned off. Still, it's easy to predict a flood of IM "services" that are trojans offered as "free" downloads in banner ads. Pop goes the advert.
Ugh, the clueless world of non free. It only gets worse.