Windows XP, Office XP and Photoshop 7 would be out of copyright already. By year's end, Windows 2003 Server, Office 2003 and Photoshop CS as well. We're talking about fairly recent versions which would very serious competitors to themselves.
Reducing copyright to a period where the binaries will enter the public domain in useful form is the least that should be done. As it is, the public does not gain the intended benefit in return for the expensive protection of an exclusive franchise.
Would you say that those programs have not paid for themselves already?
Would you say that the M$ cartel does not deserve the same or greater punishment than the MAFIAA? The M$ monopoly has cost us all plenty. The indirect costs of bugs and poor security are orders of magnitude greater than the direct costs. Every year M$ is supported by government purchases and bad laws is another year of technical stagnation, crippled electronic commerce and intentional waste of hardware and electricity. What they have to offer as compensation is more harm than it's worth.
There's a good case to be made that compiled binaries should not be protected under copyright to begin with. Like piano player rolls, they are not human readable and are therefore not protected by copyright which is designed to protect artistic expression. Software is much more like a recipe than a poem, book or song. It's just a series of instructions for machine operation. Source code may deserve copyright protection but compiled binaries don't. This is good for society too because binaries without source code should be worth much less than source code. Machine operations that can't be changed to suit the purpose of the user and shared are not worth much.
Now you know why he thinks nothing good has happened since year 2000. Lots of good things happened in the free software world last year and every year going back to.... the very beginning. Non free software hit it's wall long ago.
Really though, anything automated like this that cannot be repeated should be designed to be testable as completely as possible, and should be tested several times in advance.
What makes you think they did not do this? They have been doing the same thing for years and you should expect they tested everything before hand this year too. You have to assume something changed between the last test and the actual firing.
for something as big as this I would expect no less than redundant computers. It's software for christ sakes.
The midnight timing makes this look like some kind of date roll over problem. Two identical computers would have the same problem. If it's really an OS issue, your laptop would have the same problem too.
The issue with Windoze is a lack of control. You don't know what changes when and can't ever be sure the system you qualify is the one you deploy. When things break, you never really know why and can't fix it even if you find the problem. Non free software is like that.
I'm after the ones that gave it a reasonable trial.
You had better bring a straight jacket with you. With all the reviews already available only crazy people are willing to torture themselves with it now. If they were not crazy going in, but were simply fooled by M$'s marketing billions, they will be very cranky after a few weeks.
Perhaps he should define his position more, and say something like "Open Source interfaces aren't creative" or "Gnome isn't creative," rather than paint a vast category of software
You can prove he's out of touch and misguided from first principles. Computers are general purpose machines. If you can make it do something in one system, you can make it do something in any. This has nothing to do with creativity, which can be applied regardless of tools. It just so happens that the best tools and best science comes from the free world. Unfettered peer review yields truth. Secrets and legal interference yields stagnation.
Ultimately, free software is more productive because the developer does not have to constantly deal with licensing issues and the intentional waste that generates. To parody the article, "If you find yourself talking to Martha Stewart, you know you are about as far away from computer innovation as possible outside of Redmond." The second tale he weaves does not undo the first - the LISP machine was destroyed by lawyers and idiots. It it's going to live again, it will have to be as free software because non free software won't really tolerate much beyond modified DOS. Free software's philosophy is sound because it is the philosophy of science in general. Secrets are the enemy of real science and an isolated scientist is dead in the water.
All he has to do to convince himself that evil still rules the non free softare world is look at the court proved story of ACPI. Every little detail of non free commercial software and hardware development is hobbled by M$. This has significant spill over into the free software world, but the closer you get to the beast the more shit you see. Then again, you can go from first principles and realize that a non disclosure agreement is an agreement to not help your peers when they need it, which makes you less of a friend than you could be.
It's a shame that the author's company has changed so drastically. It's hard to think of a more drastic contrast between Richard Stallman and Martha Stewart. Creative people I know who've worked with Martha think she's a self aggrandizing thief who sucks people for work and then claims it as her own for all profit possible. Her conviction for stock fraud involving a life science's company should disqualify her from advising anyone about science. Richard Stallman has taken all of his work and given it to the public for the broadest possible work. It's nice of the author to recognize RMS's lisp work, but he's clearly forgotten what RMS's greater work is all about. RMS chose Unix for the same reason the authors of CP/M and DOS and VMS and Windoze did, because it's what people knew and could work with. It was a means to an end, the creation of a free, software sharing community. The author would do better writing RMS a letter or two about this subject before he wastes money on Martha Stewart as a "life coach". The only thing worse than non free software is the conquest of medicine by the creators of non free software. Greed is not creative and the author is setting himself up for more serious abuse than being called a wimp.
The user has to get the openbsd server package now, but there's nothing easier than dragging and dropping files with Konqueror. You can also do Samba through Konqueror but it's slower than sftp. No SCP is required because Konqueror give the user a simple user password challenge and will remember the result. If you want to get fancy with backups, give them grsync.
If you consider the level of control free software gives vendors, validation should be easier than it is with non free software. Consider the nighmare of Windoze update and dll versioning as a counter example. A whole system like Red Hat will only have what you and Red Hat has to offer. You can be sure validation testing in the lab matches what's in the field. The amount of control over embedded systems is even greater. This inspires confidence and real validation testing reuse.
By the way, I removed your "Foe" designation the other day.
Too bad you did that. The guy is trying to waste your time with a grammar troll and is telling you to shut up, "[stop] preaching to the choir." That kind of thing should be ignored.
So, all I have to do to keep tabs on everyone at any online forum is post a few comments about Pirates of the Carabean and then sue them? What a wonderful way to wiretap the world, and you can claim you are doing it for the artists.
Don't worry, there's no way trolls like you can stink up the rise of linux. It's happening and there's nothing you can do to stop it. M$'s predictable failure to deliver has brought the tipping point here. Vista is neither selling nor working so vendors like Dell and people delivering IT have no choice but to look to free software and or Mac to get the job done and make a living. Hasta la Vista, Adolf Bitchtroll.
Since the telecom manufacturers have implemented the feature set(s) necessary to enable wiretapping---even in VoIP switched environments---secure communications are neither possible nor are they anyone's right.
Violating rights is always wasteful. Great expenses wasted on easily circumvented measures are a good sign rights are violated. When the victim must pay for the waste, the violation is double. There is no longer a need for central telcom companies and everything done to preserve them is wasteful. When those companies are used to violate people's privacy for political and business ends, constitutionally protected rights are violated.
Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access.
Not without a wiretap warrent, I hope. It's amazing what kind of cooperation a warrent will still get. So, this is a nice excuse if you don't think about it very long.
Secure communications are not just a Constitutionally protected right, they are a prerequisite for business.
So now we're going to have Certified for Windows Vista on things that have nothing to do with Vista?
You don't think the new digital restrictions are going to work with XP, do you? Changing formats are used to push hardware and hardware is used to push changed formats. Non free software has always worked this way. No one wants the Vista downgrade.
This issue can only be solved with good privacy legislation. The OS, ISP, vendors and others in the data food chain are all allowed to do things they should not. If the site is not encrypted, your ISP can make the same database and sell you out the same way Google might. If the site is encrypted, your OS knows what you type. Even if you only use free software, encrypted sites and proxies, you are at the mercy of credit and banking institutions each time you shop. It should be against the law to accumulate more information about your customers than you need to get the job done and against the law to sell that information.
The idiot lists these bad things about the internet:
Think of how many families will get to experience the friendly spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist propaganda, Nazi propaganda, exhortations, movie clips of cats playing the piano, advertising, advertising, and more advertising.
He forgot to mention his own article. Using free software and a brain that works, I see a lot less of the above than he does.
He also forgot all of the real and useful information available on the internet and how much cheaper it is to deliver that information that way than with dead trees.
In the real world, M$ is going to promise to fix those issues (again) but never deliver. That's what the developer revolt is about, people realize the promise is a lie. I think M$ has burnt the last of their trust this time. Everyone knows that IE8 is going to just like IE7 - late, insecure and full of broken promisses.
But yes, web developers are finally fed up with M$'s lack of attention to IE. They turned a M$ blog into a free for all complaint session, kind of like I just turned your fist post troll into a reasonable discussion.
Users of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) turned a blog post by a Microsoft Corp. program manager into a complaint free-for-all that took the company to task for not following through on browser upgrade promises and alienating Web developers.
So if they remove the 'killswitch', their software is nagware and designed to be copied. If they leave it in, they're treating their customers as thieves by default.
It's true AC, people who sell non free software despise their customers and treat them like theives. No matter how "nice" they make WGA, it's still parasitic software designed to call the customer a thief. Perhaps you can tell me something useful it does for the customer? I can't. Nor can I tell you what good M$'s EULA does the customer when it claims the right to revoke your software at anytime. M$ has always been insulting, WGA is just the means to carry out their long held intents. It is right to ridicule WGA, M$ and other non free software. Only free software treats the customer with the respect of a peer. Besides the general insult, non free software owners hide vital information, intentionally waste their customer's effort and often attach conditions of use to their software. The relationship is not service provider to customer it's master to slave, complete with coercion and mutual distrust. Now that there are whole distributions of free software, I don't know why people still use M$ junk.
Nagware is designed to be coppied and dumping is a usual M$ response to a competitive threat. They are desperate to keep people in their non free world, where they can sell eyeballs to vendors and every little useful thing to users again and again. Too bad they can't make it work as well as their other junk, say nothing of free software.
Windows XP, Office XP and Photoshop 7 would be out of copyright already. By year's end, Windows 2003 Server, Office 2003 and Photoshop CS as well. We're talking about fairly recent versions which would very serious competitors to themselves.
Reducing copyright to a period where the binaries will enter the public domain in useful form is the least that should be done. As it is, the public does not gain the intended benefit in return for the expensive protection of an exclusive franchise.
Would you say that those programs have not paid for themselves already?
Would you say that the M$ cartel does not deserve the same or greater punishment than the MAFIAA? The M$ monopoly has cost us all plenty. The indirect costs of bugs and poor security are orders of magnitude greater than the direct costs. Every year M$ is supported by government purchases and bad laws is another year of technical stagnation, crippled electronic commerce and intentional waste of hardware and electricity. What they have to offer as compensation is more harm than it's worth.
There's a good case to be made that compiled binaries should not be protected under copyright to begin with. Like piano player rolls, they are not human readable and are therefore not protected by copyright which is designed to protect artistic expression. Software is much more like a recipe than a poem, book or song. It's just a series of instructions for machine operation. Source code may deserve copyright protection but compiled binaries don't. This is good for society too because binaries without source code should be worth much less than source code. Machine operations that can't be changed to suit the purpose of the user and shared are not worth much.
Now you know why he thinks nothing good has happened since year 2000. Lots of good things happened in the free software world last year and every year going back to .... the very beginning. Non free software hit it's wall long ago.
Really though, anything automated like this that cannot be repeated should be designed to be testable as completely as possible, and should be tested several times in advance.
What makes you think they did not do this? They have been doing the same thing for years and you should expect they tested everything before hand this year too. You have to assume something changed between the last test and the actual firing.
for something as big as this I would expect no less than redundant computers. It's software for christ sakes.
The midnight timing makes this look like some kind of date roll over problem. Two identical computers would have the same problem. If it's really an OS issue, your laptop would have the same problem too.
The issue with Windoze is a lack of control. You don't know what changes when and can't ever be sure the system you qualify is the one you deploy. When things break, you never really know why and can't fix it even if you find the problem. Non free software is like that.
I'm after the ones that gave it a reasonable trial.
You had better bring a straight jacket with you. With all the reviews already available only crazy people are willing to torture themselves with it now. If they were not crazy going in, but were simply fooled by M$'s marketing billions, they will be very cranky after a few weeks.
Perhaps he should define his position more, and say something like "Open Source interfaces aren't creative" or "Gnome isn't creative," rather than paint a vast category of software
You can prove he's out of touch and misguided from first principles. Computers are general purpose machines. If you can make it do something in one system, you can make it do something in any. This has nothing to do with creativity, which can be applied regardless of tools. It just so happens that the best tools and best science comes from the free world. Unfettered peer review yields truth. Secrets and legal interference yields stagnation.
Ultimately, free software is more productive because the developer does not have to constantly deal with licensing issues and the intentional waste that generates. To parody the article, "If you find yourself talking to Martha Stewart, you know you are about as far away from computer innovation as possible outside of Redmond." The second tale he weaves does not undo the first - the LISP machine was destroyed by lawyers and idiots. It it's going to live again, it will have to be as free software because non free software won't really tolerate much beyond modified DOS. Free software's philosophy is sound because it is the philosophy of science in general. Secrets are the enemy of real science and an isolated scientist is dead in the water.
All he has to do to convince himself that evil still rules the non free softare world is look at the court proved story of ACPI. Every little detail of non free commercial software and hardware development is hobbled by M$. This has significant spill over into the free software world, but the closer you get to the beast the more shit you see. Then again, you can go from first principles and realize that a non disclosure agreement is an agreement to not help your peers when they need it, which makes you less of a friend than you could be.
It's a shame that the author's company has changed so drastically. It's hard to think of a more drastic contrast between Richard Stallman and Martha Stewart. Creative people I know who've worked with Martha think she's a self aggrandizing thief who sucks people for work and then claims it as her own for all profit possible. Her conviction for stock fraud involving a life science's company should disqualify her from advising anyone about science. Richard Stallman has taken all of his work and given it to the public for the broadest possible work. It's nice of the author to recognize RMS's lisp work, but he's clearly forgotten what RMS's greater work is all about. RMS chose Unix for the same reason the authors of CP/M and DOS and VMS and Windoze did, because it's what people knew and could work with. It was a means to an end, the creation of a free, software sharing community. The author would do better writing RMS a letter or two about this subject before he wastes money on Martha Stewart as a "life coach". The only thing worse than non free software is the conquest of medicine by the creators of non free software. Greed is not creative and the author is setting himself up for more serious abuse than being called a wimp.
The user has to get the openbsd server package now, but there's nothing easier than dragging and dropping files with Konqueror. You can also do Samba through Konqueror but it's slower than sftp. No SCP is required because Konqueror give the user a simple user password challenge and will remember the result. If you want to get fancy with backups, give them grsync.
New GE CT scanners use Red Hat Linux.
If you consider the level of control free software gives vendors, validation should be easier than it is with non free software. Consider the nighmare of Windoze update and dll versioning as a counter example. A whole system like Red Hat will only have what you and Red Hat has to offer. You can be sure validation testing in the lab matches what's in the field. The amount of control over embedded systems is even greater. This inspires confidence and real validation testing reuse.
I hit my LCD with a 280b pull all the time. Just the other day, I put ten rounds with my 9mm into it. It's still standing!
Stamp it Vista Ready.
Because they know their market? Obviously not.
By the way, I removed your "Foe" designation the other day.
Too bad you did that. The guy is trying to waste your time with a grammar troll and is telling you to shut up, "[stop] preaching to the choir." That kind of thing should be ignored.
So, all I have to do to keep tabs on everyone at any online forum is post a few comments about Pirates of the Carabean and then sue them? What a wonderful way to wiretap the world, and you can claim you are doing it for the artists.
Don't worry, there's no way trolls like you can stink up the rise of linux. It's happening and there's nothing you can do to stop it. M$'s predictable failure to deliver has brought the tipping point here. Vista is neither selling nor working so vendors like Dell and people delivering IT have no choice but to look to free software and or Mac to get the job done and make a living. Hasta la Vista, Adolf Bitchtroll.
M$ is losing it's temper with people laughing at Vista this way.
PS3 does it now with Linux, so M$ must promise to do it by 2010 with the next incarnation of Cairo.
Since the telecom manufacturers have implemented the feature set(s) necessary to enable wiretapping---even in VoIP switched environments---secure communications are neither possible nor are they anyone's right.
Violating rights is always wasteful. Great expenses wasted on easily circumvented measures are a good sign rights are violated. When the victim must pay for the waste, the violation is double. There is no longer a need for central telcom companies and everything done to preserve them is wasteful. When those companies are used to violate people's privacy for political and business ends, constitutionally protected rights are violated.
FTFA:
Not without a wiretap warrent, I hope. It's amazing what kind of cooperation a warrent will still get. So, this is a nice excuse if you don't think about it very long.
Secure communications are not just a Constitutionally protected right, they are a prerequisite for business.
So now we're going to have Certified for Windows Vista on things that have nothing to do with Vista?
You don't think the new digital restrictions are going to work with XP, do you? Changing formats are used to push hardware and hardware is used to push changed formats. Non free software has always worked this way. No one wants the Vista downgrade.
This issue can only be solved with good privacy legislation. The OS, ISP, vendors and others in the data food chain are all allowed to do things they should not. If the site is not encrypted, your ISP can make the same database and sell you out the same way Google might. If the site is encrypted, your OS knows what you type. Even if you only use free software, encrypted sites and proxies, you are at the mercy of credit and banking institutions each time you shop. It should be against the law to accumulate more information about your customers than you need to get the job done and against the law to sell that information.
The main obstacle to perpetual data availability is Gates.
The idiot lists these bad things about the internet:
He forgot to mention his own article. Using free software and a brain that works, I see a lot less of the above than he does.
He also forgot all of the real and useful information available on the internet and how much cheaper it is to deliver that information that way than with dead trees.
In the real world, M$ is going to promise to fix those issues (again) but never deliver. That's what the developer revolt is about, people realize the promise is a lie. I think M$ has burnt the last of their trust this time. Everyone knows that IE8 is going to just like IE7 - late, insecure and full of broken promisses.
Bill Gates might regret doing everything he could to make dual booting difficult. Ha ha.
But yes, web developers are finally fed up with M$'s lack of attention to IE. They turned a M$ blog into a free for all complaint session, kind of like I just turned your fist post troll into a reasonable discussion.
Ha ha.
So if they remove the 'killswitch', their software is nagware and designed to be copied. If they leave it in, they're treating their customers as thieves by default.
It's true AC, people who sell non free software despise their customers and treat them like theives. No matter how "nice" they make WGA, it's still parasitic software designed to call the customer a thief. Perhaps you can tell me something useful it does for the customer? I can't. Nor can I tell you what good M$'s EULA does the customer when it claims the right to revoke your software at anytime. M$ has always been insulting, WGA is just the means to carry out their long held intents. It is right to ridicule WGA, M$ and other non free software. Only free software treats the customer with the respect of a peer. Besides the general insult, non free software owners hide vital information, intentionally waste their customer's effort and often attach conditions of use to their software. The relationship is not service provider to customer it's master to slave, complete with coercion and mutual distrust. Now that there are whole distributions of free software, I don't know why people still use M$ junk.
Nagware is designed to be coppied and dumping is a usual M$ response to a competitive threat. They are desperate to keep people in their non free world, where they can sell eyeballs to vendors and every little useful thing to users again and again. Too bad they can't make it work as well as their other junk, say nothing of free software.