The music industry considers free software an impediment to their marketing model. They would impose the limits of 100 year old mass production technology on music. Free software, which alows the user to treat music like any other file, prevents that kind of thing. The music industry will do everything in its power to make sure computing becomes less and less free until the only music you can get is streamed and pay per play. To get there, they make promisses and grant small easy gifts, and they are working on legislation to make free software impossible. They don't care about the effects this will have on other things, like news and public records, so long as they maintain control. People in obsolete news publishing empires kind of like that kind of thing themselves and co-operate.
One of the things they do is make sure that the "goodies" don't fall into free software. They and their friends are constantly inventing new formats and encryption schemes. When people actuall do break these schemes, as in the DeCSS case, they make sure it's against the law. The media players are all there, if they chose to use honest formats. The honest formats, such as ogg-vorbis, are royalty and patent free so they are also cheaper and should be chosen for ALL platforms if they were worried about the cost of software.
At the same time, they have to offer some kind of reward to those who would follow them into slavery. These gifts never amount to what free people can have, but big dubm companies can make some people feel special with small perks like "free" Napster subscriptions. The promisses are larger and less likely to apear as the demands become more constricting. The "heavenly jukebox" has been promissed for 10 years, but will never be. To get an idea of where this is going, see this page and start reading from " 'Lady Venus, if I may kiss this boy, so that he know it not, tomorrow I will present him with a pair of doves.'"
The promise and it's maker are dishonest, so is this deal.
There is only so long they can pull of their silly reactions. Eventually, the middle men in music will be eliminated. Radio and hard copy publishing are obsoleted in a reasonably networked world.
GWB: Someone tell me what this "ills" thing does , what it has to do with my web page and how come we can't keep it up. Is this some kind of computer AIDS? Will it make me look like Bob Dole? I can't aford stuff like this!
How about a film of of one of these trucks being disabled by terrorists on a road that always gets lots of traffic. The news crew can get lots of footage of dead people who were poisoned in their cars in rush hour when someone nails the truck with a shoulder fired missile. Great stuff, eh? Really stupid.
it won't stop the guy with a *van* full of materials that was stolen.
I also fail to see how can be practical at all. There all all sorts of bypasses besides the one you mentioned even if the remote kill is operationally sound. The only thing this will acomplish is making it so that only big dumb companies can carry hazmat.
There are plenty of holes in the stupid system to start off with. How will the system know the truck has been hijacked? Because it goes where it's not supposed to be? That sounds completely impractical for independent truckers. Besides that, a clever terrorist will know what materials are moved where by observing them. It would be easy enough to find a hazmat truck that goes to the wrong place and blow it up without ever bothering to hijack the thing. The biggest hole, of course, is the rail system that carries far greater hazards far closer to where people live and play. Anyone who wants to kill everyone in Baton Rouge, for example, has only to derail and destroy a train full of chlorine next to LSU while it passes by early one morning. This will save terrorist the trouble of dealing with a truck driver and turning off the stupid box.
All this kill switch is going to do is add costs to everyone else. It will eliminate independent truckers because they won't be able to use their turcks for hausing anything else. Eliminating competition imediatly raises costs. Then it will inconvenience the big dumb companies that will take the buisness and pass all of their costs on to all of us. Besides the big dumb overhead inherent in big dumb companies and the forced ineffiecent use of trucks, it will inevitably strand their drivers when those drivers get lost or suffer equipment failure. The big dumb company will then pass their costs off again. What a stupid waste this is!
"pressure on support system," What is that man talking about? I can not imagine a more difficult to maintain piece of crap than a Microsoft PC. XP, if it is not killed by a trojan or virus, collapses under it's own registry in a year. I'd love to see any "average" user try to rebuild their own windoze system. No, I take that back. Having worked for six weeks at a retail computer shop that shall remain NAMELESS, I know all about that. $75 wipe and reload was the answer for about 45% of the people who walked through the door with their broken PC. For many of them, the computer was not worth the cost of the repair. Microsft had failed them misserably. They are no more able to keep up with patching, anti-virus software, "updates" and all that pain than any of these "services" are able to band-aid a fatally flawed design and security model. The strain this kind of crappy software puts on organizations is well known, taking many times more support staff than ANY other system.
Free software is more than ready for the desktop. I use it everyday for all of my computing needs. It if far less trouble than any windoze system I 've ever fooled with. Red Hat, Knoppix even Debian do a much better job of configuring systems than Microsoft does, despite the hardware lock-in advantages they have.
I really care is when the average 30 year old business person can use it without out any more complaints then they have with Windows.
Well, I've got fewer complaints about free software than I do about Windoze. Just about any window manager kicks Windows ass, and that translates into real work perfomance. Multiple desktops and stability give free softwre users place keeping that M$'s pathetic GUI does not. Multiple projects can be opened on multiple desktops and kept that way till completion. On the Windoze interface, one screen must serve all. It's difficult to keep things segregated when you have to work on more than one project at a time and it all goes poof when you have to reboot in two days or so. That was in a fortune 500 company, with the best support available. Silly little problems, like sound cards that don't work or difficulty with clipboards pale in compairison to Windoze problems. I hate remembering how bad it was.
I won't be Windows free until I have a reliable tax program for linux. I still use quicken since I don't believe that gnucash is there yet.
I'm not familiar with GNU Cash's tax modules, but I do know that the IRS makes all the forms and manuals available as PDF's. I quit using Quicken when they pulled the boot sector DRM gaff right after an "upgrade" to another product reduced it's feature set. It was no more difficult for me to read the fine manuals and add the numbers for myself in a spreadsheet than it was to run Quicken. I imagine the government will adopt web forms in the future that require no specific software to present you with all they know so that you can punch an "I agree" button to be taxed.
Monitoring email volume is good. I'd like it if my ISP monitored activity and shut down machines that started blowing spam out. This simply makes people responsible for their computers.
The way my ISP, Cox, tried to do things is bad. They forced all trafic through their SMTP server. They had already blocked incoming mail, so you could not run a mail server on your own. The new policy keeps you from even being able to send you own mail. This sucks in many ways. The most important way it sucks is that they don't quote email that they can't deliver, not even for their business customers, nor do they provide an adequate time stamp. This leaves people clueless if a mail myseriously fails - you can't tell which of a long serries of messages with the same subject did not make it. Less obviously, it leaves you at the whim of your ISP. They can refuse to send mail to people they don't like and there's nothing you can do about it, short of exchanging shell accounts. This method makes an artificial distinction between "client" and "server" that has no place on a free internet.
So, you see, it's not so simple, not period by a long shot. I don't run shitty software that is liable to get trojans and I've never had this kind of problem. My ISP treats me like a peon and it sucks. I've been punished for other people's problems. Microsoft and Cox both sucks.
My brother in law told me that he did not care if others were using his computer as a DoS machine, spambot or anything like that so long as he could not tell. I was dumbfounded an otherwise reasonable person could care so little. I'd like his ISP to tell him about things like this by pulling the plug. I suspect most people are like him.
Yanking infected computers off the internet would do lots of good things for the world. It would be the fastest way to kill Microsoft and other inferior software. Nothing much will change until people have to pay for the problems they create.
If they're going to charge, why bill it as free software? I pay for media, books, instruction, tech support and help. I will not pay for bugfixes.
I don't pay for bugfixes either. The bugfix is just as free as the program. What you are paying for is someone to find out it's there, integrate it with the rest of your porgrams, tell you about it and offer it to you in a slick binary package. That's a service that's worth paying for, but I don't really have to thanks to the tremendous Debian community. Fedora looks like it's going to be a similar effort.
Free software will always be low or no cost. People are making and sharing it for their own best intersts. Anyone, given skill and time, can string together a distro. If Red Hat gets out of the free beer world, someone will carry on with their work. Society has shown again and again that it will support these efforts.
Now hardware vendors can blow off developing drivers for Linux. "Just download the wrapper and use the Win32 driver."
Yes, I hate the use of non-free drivers. They are buggy and don't get fixed or ported to new kernels. How Linuxant has managed to deal with the differnces between different versions of Windoze is beyond me. I got suckered into buying a wireless card with "Linux support". It tured out to have a binary module for a particular Red Hat kernel that was not easy to compile with my kernel version. It really sucked and I ended up just giving up.
If you think of this as a short term solution to the Microsoft monopoly problem you can smile. Hardware vendors can slip Linuxant specs on the side to make their card work. Linux ditributors can compile the wrapper to work with the correct kernel. What this means is that Microsoft can't punish hardware vendors for giving out information, because they won't know! The "careful dance" vendors have had to do is over. Wireless card makers won't have to worry about their card having "problems" on windoze platorms from the latest windoze "update". Once that happens, there will be no further need for the nasty windoze binaries. Hardware makers will then be able to compete on the basis of what their hardware does, not what M$ wants to "support".
That's why I use free software. I have no ideological problems with closes source software.
It's really more a question of morals than ideology. Closed source is a form of deception and is suseptable to abuse that creates very real practical problems. It starts with the NDA between the developer and the company, but it ends with the company selling you stuff you don't need, did not ask for or already owned. Free software is the solution to these kinds of problems. If you are willing to put up with those kinds of problems when free alternatives are available, oh well.
Now, if you are have no problem with "closes" source, you must not have any problems paying for software. If this is true, why would you have a problem paying someone to collect free software for you? Checking licenses, keeping binaries up to the latest available and serving it out is a usefull service. As free software is usually superior to it's non free alternatives, the end result is better software for you. Why not pay for it? I bill for my time, how about you?
No, free software does indeed have an owner. That owner's copyright is what stops people from coopting it into non-free software.
I'd rather my software be "owned" by an author that likes the GPL than some nasty salesman like Steve Balmer. How about you?
Sorry, my bad. I've been getting things done with Debina for the last year of so. My last Red Hat was 7.2. I replaced it when I learned how to make Debian print. The whole subscription game was a turn off and it was easier to keep Debian up, so I never bothered though I knew they moved the price around.
Free Software is not about getting something for nothing. It's about not getting screwed over by software owners. That's acomplished by having a large body of ownerless software that does what you need, but can't be used to screw end users. Something for nothing is what comes of upgrade cycles, release dates and other comercial software nonsense.
It looks as if Red Hat is tipping its fedora to the Debian way. They will, I'm sure, continue to put quality free software out, but they are going to leave it to other people to distribute it. In fact, lots of great Red Hat tools have been finding their way into Debian already and it did not cost Red Hat a dime. Fedora will give you your free beer and keep you in the Red Hat family. Red Hat, it seems, is going to rely on you. Go make it happen.
If the extra $38 breaks your bank, go with Fedora or Debian. It should not be very hard to move your simple needs to either. You could totally screw yourself trying to get anything done with M$. You might just be better off taking the extra charge and enjoying better service.
If you move to Fedora, that's beter than the money you were paying. They were losing money on the services you were using. A happy move to Fedora would be good for Red Hat's reputation and it will keep you familiar with how to get things done the Red Hat way. Is there anything more to a software Brand than that?
no one should be surprised when the computer buying cools down in a year or so. Why? Because you only need so many PCs.
If PCs were all there were to it, that would be true. Real services are still needed out there. Many people are STILL running on paper. Paperless billing, records keeping and research are relativly new and cost effective. Not everyone has gone there yet. There's still plenty of growth space in real services, though the M$ Outlook will make you superman is tapped out.
then you can't access the XBox live settings pane anymore ( oops! ).
Free software won't keep you from Xbox Live, Microsoft will. They will kick you off Microsoft live if they detect mods of any type. Non free software is like that, oops. Go buy a Play Station instead of a M$ gimped, 700MHz PeeeCeeee if you really want to play games. Sony does a better job at Linux too, Go figure.
willing and able to serve the positively angelic IBM. Come and get me. After a year of un and under employment, I'm ready for anything right down to hell desk.
Microsoft is dead, all hail the true kings of order.
Though the portability of Linux is cook, one must ask why is there such an effort to install Linux on every possible device?
A cook is nice. Cookbooks are better.
People make free drivers because the stupid devices are everwhere but limited by software. It takes lots of capital to make semiconductor devices, so there are only a few companies that do. Because of this, almost all hardware uses one of a dozen chipsets made for that kind of device. This is why Knoppix fits on a single CD and recognizes thousands of devices. Once you get a free driver, many devices can be used and you don't have to go out and buy a new one because the vendor does not make a non-free driver for the next eXPensive OS from M$. There are enough people interested in free drivers to get them. The pace is picking up and the quality is very impressive. Device drivers are a showcase of the effieciency of free software development. Everyone wins when a device driver comes out.
Especially since virtually all such efforts result in a device less flexible, less reliable and harder to use than the original. (XBox?)
Now you are a real troll. Obviously an Xbox that both runs M$'s games AND free software is more felxible than an Xbox that only plays M$ games.
Usability based on installability is the achilles heel of Linux for the masses.
So is the ignorance you display, except it's much easier to hit than a tendon.
installing Linux by destroying a perfectly good AP is no more useful than installing it on a stapler.
A stapler does not do iptables, run configuration utilities over a web server or act as a meshpoint. More importantly, your stapler won't tell other people about your bank account, herpese medication and other stuff most people would like to keep to themselves.
Right now, a typical PC user without Linux is like an Astronaut without an accordian.
A typical comercial software user is much like a typical free software user, except they are $400 poorer, have no privacy, suffer frequent crashes, and have to buy all new hardware every three years. Oh wait, that's nothing like the typical Linux user.
t intruder, you don't get paid enough to write such drivel but you are not worth what you are paid.
But do we really need to have a story every day about every new piece of evidence that the patent system is screwed up?
If you don't care about internet software updating and maintaning that has a database, you don't care about this. That would mean you don't have a system like apt, up2date, ports or any other software version atomation on any of your computers. If that's the case, Slashdot does not have much to offer you and you should point your licensed copy of IE someplace else. If you care about free software, stupid software patents bother you because that's how propriatory software makers intend to kill their competition.
Most people imagined this system would be closed quickly. Changing Loudeye's contract was a really simple method and one I should have seen.
What, did Loudeye just forget to tell MIT about the problem? What did Loudeye's execs. expect would happen?
What you have witnessed is the death of a loophole. You have to imagine that the MIT super digital request play over traditional analog broadcast was legal a few weeks ago. The RIAA companies, being a racket, can change their terms at will They simply changed the terms and no one will ever get terms that work that way again.
there is no way to stay legally compliant with the RIAA and still listen to music
Oh sure there is. You just have to listen to what they want you to hear, not what you want to hear. It's all about maintaining a 100 year old distribution method. It has to come at the cost of your freedom of choice and is maintained by creating a scarcity of something as cheap as a song and dance. Digital technology, combined with ultra represive laws, can make things that much worse. Your government likes restricting what you hear as well, so the two are natural allies.
My mighty P133 may not be smooth, but it is hard to predict! 64MB ram, Sound Blaster, and this little script forever! Oh, yeah, don't forget a decent amp.
People only have so much free time in a day. If they begin spending 2-3 hours a day playing video games, that's 2-3 less hours they have for tv, music, reading, etc.
My reading time is before bed. The hit it takes is not so bad.
I can listen to music while gaming. Music is nice and I have a whole ancient computer dedicated to pumping it out to an even older stereo. I also enjoy music while doing other things like bike riding. Ogg files play nice on Open Zaurus. 64MB flash is cheap and plays an hour or so. Music is one of those things you can enjoy while doing other things. If only those idiots at the RIAA would spontaneously combust, the world would be a nicer place. Tauzin, I'm talking about you!
20% small? Dude, that's one in five people, equivalent to an entire demographic. Because that one in five is associated with trend setters, it's going to get worse fast.
The revolution was not televised and it's over. Broadcast TV sucks and something better has replaced it. I get my mail, news, entertainmet and much more on the net. Deal with it or die.
You can come up with a first name. Seymore? Richard?
Not many people are afraid of the gynocologist, however. I suggest you make yourself a dentist or proctologist, Dr. Max Payne, Dr.Ferral Hinds or something.
'You don't need perfect code to avoid security problems.'
IS NOT
'you can't rely on perfect code for security'
First, imperfect code is a security problem. M$ has many flaws and they know it each time they ship code. The kind of problems M$ has extends to poor design as well, so it would break even if it were perfect.
Second, Bill's statement implies that his company never will get better. That's something anyone familiar with M$'s history and hype knows, but it's kind of in-your-face for him to put it that way then blame the users again.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the things they do is make sure that the "goodies" don't fall into free software. They and their friends are constantly inventing new formats and encryption schemes. When people actuall do break these schemes, as in the DeCSS case, they make sure it's against the law. The media players are all there, if they chose to use honest formats. The honest formats, such as ogg-vorbis, are royalty and patent free so they are also cheaper and should be chosen for ALL platforms if they were worried about the cost of software.
At the same time, they have to offer some kind of reward to those who would follow them into slavery. These gifts never amount to what free people can have, but big dubm companies can make some people feel special with small perks like "free" Napster subscriptions. The promisses are larger and less likely to apear as the demands become more constricting. The "heavenly jukebox" has been promissed for 10 years, but will never be. To get an idea of where this is going, see this page and start reading from " 'Lady Venus, if I may kiss this boy, so that he know it not, tomorrow I will present him with a pair of doves.'"
The promise and it's maker are dishonest, so is this deal.
There is only so long they can pull of their silly reactions. Eventually, the middle men in music will be eliminated. Radio and hard copy publishing are obsoleted in a reasonably networked world.
Staff member: oh the irony.
How about a film of of one of these trucks being disabled by terrorists on a road that always gets lots of traffic. The news crew can get lots of footage of dead people who were poisoned in their cars in rush hour when someone nails the truck with a shoulder fired missile. Great stuff, eh? Really stupid.
I also fail to see how can be practical at all. There all all sorts of bypasses besides the one you mentioned even if the remote kill is operationally sound. The only thing this will acomplish is making it so that only big dumb companies can carry hazmat.
There are plenty of holes in the stupid system to start off with. How will the system know the truck has been hijacked? Because it goes where it's not supposed to be? That sounds completely impractical for independent truckers. Besides that, a clever terrorist will know what materials are moved where by observing them. It would be easy enough to find a hazmat truck that goes to the wrong place and blow it up without ever bothering to hijack the thing. The biggest hole, of course, is the rail system that carries far greater hazards far closer to where people live and play. Anyone who wants to kill everyone in Baton Rouge, for example, has only to derail and destroy a train full of chlorine next to LSU while it passes by early one morning. This will save terrorist the trouble of dealing with a truck driver and turning off the stupid box.
All this kill switch is going to do is add costs to everyone else. It will eliminate independent truckers because they won't be able to use their turcks for hausing anything else. Eliminating competition imediatly raises costs. Then it will inconvenience the big dumb companies that will take the buisness and pass all of their costs on to all of us. Besides the big dumb overhead inherent in big dumb companies and the forced ineffiecent use of trucks, it will inevitably strand their drivers when those drivers get lost or suffer equipment failure. The big dumb company will then pass their costs off again. What a stupid waste this is!
Free software is more than ready for the desktop. I use it everyday for all of my computing needs. It if far less trouble than any windoze system I 've ever fooled with. Red Hat, Knoppix even Debian do a much better job of configuring systems than Microsoft does, despite the hardware lock-in advantages they have.
I really care is when the average 30 year old business person can use it without out any more complaints then they have with Windows.
Well, I've got fewer complaints about free software than I do about Windoze. Just about any window manager kicks Windows ass, and that translates into real work perfomance. Multiple desktops and stability give free softwre users place keeping that M$'s pathetic GUI does not. Multiple projects can be opened on multiple desktops and kept that way till completion. On the Windoze interface, one screen must serve all. It's difficult to keep things segregated when you have to work on more than one project at a time and it all goes poof when you have to reboot in two days or so. That was in a fortune 500 company, with the best support available. Silly little problems, like sound cards that don't work or difficulty with clipboards pale in compairison to Windoze problems. I hate remembering how bad it was.
I won't be Windows free until I have a reliable tax program for linux. I still use quicken since I don't believe that gnucash is there yet.
I'm not familiar with GNU Cash's tax modules, but I do know that the IRS makes all the forms and manuals available as PDF's. I quit using Quicken when they pulled the boot sector DRM gaff right after an "upgrade" to another product reduced it's feature set. It was no more difficult for me to read the fine manuals and add the numbers for myself in a spreadsheet than it was to run Quicken. I imagine the government will adopt web forms in the future that require no specific software to present you with all they know so that you can punch an "I agree" button to be taxed.
The way my ISP, Cox, tried to do things is bad. They forced all trafic through their SMTP server. They had already blocked incoming mail, so you could not run a mail server on your own. The new policy keeps you from even being able to send you own mail. This sucks in many ways. The most important way it sucks is that they don't quote email that they can't deliver, not even for their business customers, nor do they provide an adequate time stamp. This leaves people clueless if a mail myseriously fails - you can't tell which of a long serries of messages with the same subject did not make it. Less obviously, it leaves you at the whim of your ISP. They can refuse to send mail to people they don't like and there's nothing you can do about it, short of exchanging shell accounts. This method makes an artificial distinction between "client" and "server" that has no place on a free internet.
So, you see, it's not so simple, not period by a long shot. I don't run shitty software that is liable to get trojans and I've never had this kind of problem. My ISP treats me like a peon and it sucks. I've been punished for other people's problems. Microsoft and Cox both sucks.
Yanking infected computers off the internet would do lots of good things for the world. It would be the fastest way to kill Microsoft and other inferior software. Nothing much will change until people have to pay for the problems they create.
I don't pay for bugfixes either. The bugfix is just as free as the program. What you are paying for is someone to find out it's there, integrate it with the rest of your porgrams, tell you about it and offer it to you in a slick binary package. That's a service that's worth paying for, but I don't really have to thanks to the tremendous Debian community. Fedora looks like it's going to be a similar effort.
Free software will always be low or no cost. People are making and sharing it for their own best intersts. Anyone, given skill and time, can string together a distro. If Red Hat gets out of the free beer world, someone will carry on with their work. Society has shown again and again that it will support these efforts.
Yes, I hate the use of non-free drivers. They are buggy and don't get fixed or ported to new kernels. How Linuxant has managed to deal with the differnces between different versions of Windoze is beyond me. I got suckered into buying a wireless card with "Linux support". It tured out to have a binary module for a particular Red Hat kernel that was not easy to compile with my kernel version. It really sucked and I ended up just giving up.
If you think of this as a short term solution to the Microsoft monopoly problem you can smile. Hardware vendors can slip Linuxant specs on the side to make their card work. Linux ditributors can compile the wrapper to work with the correct kernel. What this means is that Microsoft can't punish hardware vendors for giving out information, because they won't know! The "careful dance" vendors have had to do is over. Wireless card makers won't have to worry about their card having "problems" on windoze platorms from the latest windoze "update". Once that happens, there will be no further need for the nasty windoze binaries. Hardware makers will then be able to compete on the basis of what their hardware does, not what M$ wants to "support".
Congratulations to Linuxant.
Fuck you Microsoft, you are circumvented.
It's really more a question of morals than ideology. Closed source is a form of deception and is suseptable to abuse that creates very real practical problems. It starts with the NDA between the developer and the company, but it ends with the company selling you stuff you don't need, did not ask for or already owned. Free software is the solution to these kinds of problems. If you are willing to put up with those kinds of problems when free alternatives are available, oh well.
Now, if you are have no problem with "closes" source, you must not have any problems paying for software. If this is true, why would you have a problem paying someone to collect free software for you? Checking licenses, keeping binaries up to the latest available and serving it out is a usefull service. As free software is usually superior to it's non free alternatives, the end result is better software for you. Why not pay for it? I bill for my time, how about you?
No, free software does indeed have an owner. That owner's copyright is what stops people from coopting it into non-free software.
I'd rather my software be "owned" by an author that likes the GPL than some nasty salesman like Steve Balmer. How about you?
I think this is why Red Hat started Fedora.
It looks as if Red Hat is tipping its fedora to the Debian way. They will, I'm sure, continue to put quality free software out, but they are going to leave it to other people to distribute it. In fact, lots of great Red Hat tools have been finding their way into Debian already and it did not cost Red Hat a dime. Fedora will give you your free beer and keep you in the Red Hat family. Red Hat, it seems, is going to rely on you. Go make it happen.
$60*12 = $720/year
Enterprise, according to you, will cost:
2*379=$758/year.
If the extra $38 breaks your bank, go with Fedora or Debian. It should not be very hard to move your simple needs to either. You could totally screw yourself trying to get anything done with M$. You might just be better off taking the extra charge and enjoying better service.
If you move to Fedora, that's beter than the money you were paying. They were losing money on the services you were using. A happy move to Fedora would be good for Red Hat's reputation and it will keep you familiar with how to get things done the Red Hat way. Is there anything more to a software Brand than that?
If PCs were all there were to it, that would be true. Real services are still needed out there. Many people are STILL running on paper. Paperless billing, records keeping and research are relativly new and cost effective. Not everyone has gone there yet. There's still plenty of growth space in real services, though the M$ Outlook will make you superman is tapped out.
Give me more money, you bastard.
May your seed bear fruit in the belly of your woman.
Love,
Neal. (not the coyboy)
Free software won't keep you from Xbox Live, Microsoft will. They will kick you off Microsoft live if they detect mods of any type. Non free software is like that, oops. Go buy a Play Station instead of a M$ gimped, 700MHz PeeeCeeee if you really want to play games. Sony does a better job at Linux too, Go figure.
Microsoft is dead, all hail the true kings of order.
A cook is nice. Cookbooks are better.
People make free drivers because the stupid devices are everwhere but limited by software. It takes lots of capital to make semiconductor devices, so there are only a few companies that do. Because of this, almost all hardware uses one of a dozen chipsets made for that kind of device. This is why Knoppix fits on a single CD and recognizes thousands of devices. Once you get a free driver, many devices can be used and you don't have to go out and buy a new one because the vendor does not make a non-free driver for the next eXPensive OS from M$. There are enough people interested in free drivers to get them. The pace is picking up and the quality is very impressive. Device drivers are a showcase of the effieciency of free software development. Everyone wins when a device driver comes out.
Especially since virtually all such efforts result in a device less flexible, less reliable and harder to use than the original. (XBox?)
Now you are a real troll. Obviously an Xbox that both runs M$'s games AND free software is more felxible than an Xbox that only plays M$ games.
Usability based on installability is the achilles heel of Linux for the masses.
So is the ignorance you display, except it's much easier to hit than a tendon.
installing Linux by destroying a perfectly good AP is no more useful than installing it on a stapler.
A stapler does not do iptables, run configuration utilities over a web server or act as a meshpoint. More importantly, your stapler won't tell other people about your bank account, herpese medication and other stuff most people would like to keep to themselves.
Right now, a typical PC user without Linux is like an Astronaut without an accordian.
A typical comercial software user is much like a typical free software user, except they are $400 poorer, have no privacy, suffer frequent crashes, and have to buy all new hardware every three years. Oh wait, that's nothing like the typical Linux user.
t intruder, you don't get paid enough to write such drivel but you are not worth what you are paid.
If you don't care about internet software updating and maintaning that has a database, you don't care about this. That would mean you don't have a system like apt, up2date, ports or any other software version atomation on any of your computers. If that's the case, Slashdot does not have much to offer you and you should point your licensed copy of IE someplace else. If you care about free software, stupid software patents bother you because that's how propriatory software makers intend to kill their competition.
Most people imagined this system would be closed quickly. Changing Loudeye's contract was a really simple method and one I should have seen.
What, did Loudeye just forget to tell MIT about the problem? What did Loudeye's execs. expect would happen?
What you have witnessed is the death of a loophole. You have to imagine that the MIT super digital request play over traditional analog broadcast was legal a few weeks ago. The RIAA companies, being a racket, can change their terms at will They simply changed the terms and no one will ever get terms that work that way again.
there is no way to stay legally compliant with the RIAA and still listen to music
Oh sure there is. You just have to listen to what they want you to hear, not what you want to hear. It's all about maintaining a 100 year old distribution method. It has to come at the cost of your freedom of choice and is maintained by creating a scarcity of something as cheap as a song and dance. Digital technology, combined with ultra represive laws, can make things that much worse. Your government likes restricting what you hear as well, so the two are natural allies.
num_songs=`cat ogglist | wc -l`
echo $num_songs " songs on disk"
LOBOUND=1
HIBOUND=num_songs
RANDMAX=32767
count=1
until [ $count -gt $1 ]; do
BINUMBER=$(( $LOBOUND + ($HIBOUND * $RANDOM) / ($RANDMAX + 1) ))
echo $count " of " $1 " requested songs:"
NAME=`sed -n "$BINUMBER"p ogglist`
echo $NAME
ogg123 $NAME
count=`expr $count + 1`
done
My reading time is before bed. The hit it takes is not so bad.
I can listen to music while gaming. Music is nice and I have a whole ancient computer dedicated to pumping it out to an even older stereo. I also enjoy music while doing other things like bike riding. Ogg files play nice on Open Zaurus. 64MB flash is cheap and plays an hour or so. Music is one of those things you can enjoy while doing other things. If only those idiots at the RIAA would spontaneously combust, the world would be a nicer place. Tauzin, I'm talking about you!
The revolution was not televised and it's over. Broadcast TV sucks and something better has replaced it. I get my mail, news, entertainmet and much more on the net. Deal with it or die.
Not many people are afraid of the gynocologist, however. I suggest you make yourself a dentist or proctologist, Dr. Max Payne, Dr.Ferral Hinds or something.
IS NOT
'you can't rely on perfect code for security'
First, imperfect code is a security problem. M$ has many flaws and they know it each time they ship code. The kind of problems M$ has extends to poor design as well, so it would break even if it were perfect.
Second, Bill's statement implies that his company never will get better. That's something anyone familiar with M$'s history and hype knows, but it's kind of in-your-face for him to put it that way then blame the users again.
Get back in your hole, appologist troll.