The latest Google toolbar has a built-in popup blocker, among other cool features.
If he had any sofware choice, he'd be running Mozilla. If you are going to get busted for adding software to your computer, a toolbar is just as big a bust as anything else. The poor devil had better get back to work before his corporate task masters notice and revoke his "internet" privs altogether.
Not having to look at M$ crap is about the only good thing about being fired. That and the 15% bonus my former peers are going to get dividing my former salary. I hope my next employer has a clue. Working for idiots sucked.
Mistake geometric for exponential? Oh well, most hyperbole tends to infinite error. Judging the rest of the work by this error would be a non-sequitur. Try not to do that, OK? If you do, I'll sick my power functions on you.
I really would like to see some analysis on the negative effects (if at all) of copyright extensions on innovation.
Normalize for population. =:) We have a rising copyright registration rate. Does it keep up per capita? If not, what does that tell us about laws that are designed specifically to increase copyright restistration, if not promote art itself?
Sounds anal, but I had a lawyer who specialized in entertainment law suss it all out for me.
Yeah, ya, ya. Lawyers are not always good with math, but I expect better logic from you.
This study would be much more powerful it it were NORMALIZED FOR POPULATION, which also spurts in times of economic prosperity. It might make the other trends look smaller, but the 1992 turn around of registrations would look much bigger as the population has continued to grow. Really, what I expect to see is a decline in "innovation" per population with the rise of copyright power and big publisher lock in. All of us experience daily as media consolidation, the death of radio free, the death of independent movie theaters and the cumulative lack of diversity in popular culture perverse in an era of cheap communications. Kudos for all the hard work, I hope this helps.
For Total Information Awareness only data aquisition machines need to be able to get to the outside. Chances are these computers aren't PCs and definately aren't running Windows.
So when the data has been compiled and it's given to the big boss, what do you think it's going to be? The big boss is going to open some kind of Word doc or a Power Point presentation, "Osama-been-here-and-there". Even if it's done by SHTML, the browser cache will be harvested and sent on. Holes, man great big, gaping M$ holes for the most important information of all.
Show me how previous administrations favored other software vendors over Microsoft. It's not like the federal government suddenly switched from Linux to Microsoft when Bush took office.
Uhhhh, these big government single source contracts are new. Agencies used to make PC purchases like manilla folder purchases, a detail too small to worry about. Back then a decision to buy Microsoft on a Gateway could be shown to a best purchase due to M$ anti-competitive practices. Now that the US DoJ has proven those practices, we get these new big fat contracts? Nuts.
Have you ever worked for Government or are you just spouting off?
Your scenerio assumes information that sensitive is just freely available on a computer open to the internet. But classified information isn't transmitted lightly. Classified hard drives aren't on open networks and classified documents don't get emailed.
Who told you that? Did you consider that people actually write that clasified information to begin with? Yeah, these are normal people and they are going to be using normal computers, Microsoft now.
At least in nuclear power, safegaruds information guides have no clue. Eight months ago, it was considered OK to edit and store safegaurds information on a regular PC, so long as you disconected the network while you were working on the information. Safegaurds information is stuff like plutonium inventory. In paper form, it's supposed to be kept under lock and key and you are never supposed to leave it out on your desk while you go take a piss. Viruses like SirCam totaly obliterate the precatuions taken. I doubt the folks in Homland Security have much more of a clue than this.
Tell me how a Department of Homaland Security computer is going to have Total Information Awareness without being attached to a network. Tell me then what's going to keep that information from flowing through all the holes Microsoft is famous for.
The above statement seems to imply something ugly, when in fact MANY companies' largest customer is the federal government.
Government spending accounts for 25% of the US GDP. While this is stageringly large, the 75% of non compulsory spending is much bigger.
The ugly thing is that Microsoft provides the worst of all web services, yet seems to be favored by the current administration. It makes no sense whatsoever for Microsoft to be getting these contracts when IBM, Red Hat, Debian, Caldera (yes even brain dead SCO), HP, Sun and countless other good US firms can do the job better and cheaper. Tell me that the US government is the largest cusomer of all the above and that their products are well represented in federal spending and I might change my opinion. A vauge statement that nothing is wrong here does not do it.
For me, this just goes to show that Homeland Security has no clue.
'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.'...
Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity....
'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore --'
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing like that.'
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
The only "technical" advantage listed by Munich's consulting firm was:
Munich... uses 175 Windows applications for such tasks as managing police records, issuing permits and collecting taxes.... Linux... does not work well with Windows programs. Another layer of connection software is required, adding complexity. Unilog judged Microsoft's proposal -- to swap out all existing versions of Microsoft Windows and Office for the newest versions -- as cheaper and technically superior.
It seems that the only advantage Microsoft really had was that it worked, sometimes, with it's own software. Training was offered by both teams, implying no difference. Once those 175 applications are ported out of Windoze, what will Microsoft have to offer? Painful file formats? A single screen GUI, inferior networking, poor security, inferior stability and data loss are all hallmarks of Microsoft software. In six years, what's Microsoft going to do to try to win back the business?
Microsoft screwed their only advantages. They had a tremendous advantage in user familiarity and widespread use. The advantages this offered was supposed to be ease of information transfer and hardware compatibility. Instead of using that, they got greedy and broke interoperability to force upgrades. They also abused their deathgip on hardware manufacturers the same way to foce purchases of new equipment. With advantages like those, who needs flaws? Microsoft squandered money on anti-competitve behavior when it should have been fixing it's own software.
Free software has stuck itself right into these shorcomings. You can exchange data bewteen free programs though accepted standards. Why you can't get a hardware driver for the new Windoze, you can be sure the old one still works with free software. Free software is doing what Microsoft prommised to do but did not. That's not surprising because free software is made by people who have a job to do and they don't have an incentive to break things.
Software deals with ideas, and local developers will always understand complicated requirements better than those far away. Free software developers will be able to reach into the big fat free software grab bag and customize it. Sure, there's more competition. Play up your strengths and compete. Let India abscond with all the nasty closed source junk they want, it's obsolete.
To make the kind of higher level software companies want you need to know the task like an insider, that's something that's easier to get local and very difficult to spec out. A database without rules is just a database. I've got a couple of them. A database that knows suppliers, parts, shipping, FCR, and internal corporate organization is a tool that runs the company. Closed source software publishers, who often use offshore labor to make their inferior tools, have mistakenly advanced this argument against free software as "they don't know complex business applications." Bullshit. Small firms with knowlegeable people, sometimes laid of from the company in question, can do a much better job with customized software than those clowns in Redmond. IBM's service model fits this too and that's one of the reasons they are using free software. Software's function is not to move bytes and print forms, it's to make a business go.
BEGIN WEBSIDESTORY CODE v7.4.0 (no 1.0)-->
!-- COPYRIGHT 1997-2001 WEBSIDESTORY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. U.S.PATENT No. 6,393,479 B1. Privacy notice at: http://websidestory.com/privacy
Patented code? Oh well, at least they are running Linux. www.undp.org.af is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 behind a computer running Solaris 8. . Nothing says backward like Microsoft. Netaid and the spirit of the UNDP are encouraging. Knowledge penetrates where formerly there was naught but binary CDs! Who knows, now they are not Taliban Occupied, they might even get mirror sites.
I can get a 2.5TB disk array for about $12K, a kick-ass Linux file server with fiber channel for about $8K, and a bunch of touch-screen kiosks with CD burners for about $6K each.
You might have 2.5TB of music digitized in one place, but do you think music publishers have it? Part of Napster's power was the distributed digitizing effort. Simply locating all the music that was digitized and available on Napster could bankrupt a traditional publisher. It's doubtful a traditional music publisher would take digitizations from the public at large, so they are stuck, "digitally remastering" what they can when they can. It does not add up geometically like Napster did and it will cost them too much to do it.
This is why copyright is supposed to be for time limited. Music will go exticnt before big companies can get to it and the highest quality recordings will be lost. Fixing the laws so that work can be published freely within the lifetime it is produced would be a good start. This would destroy most of big music publishers and good riddance.
Much of the logic here falls into the traps set by traditional closed source software companies. The threaten the user with, "If you don't do what I say, you won't have any software." This statement from above:
With the Economist's recent news on how users expect more and more from IT, how is the Open Source community ever going to keep up? Who is going to pay for it?
Is grounded in this kind of faulty logic. You have heard it before as, "free software can never produce a working kernel" or "free software will never produce an easy to use interface."
First things first, free software is miles ahead of comercial software. The development tools are second to none and the quality of the most basic utilities is hard to beat. On top of this, many people and many companies have added many fine and easy to use desktop managers, productivty suits, browsers, email clients, databases and games. Well, OK, it's hard to match the good people at ID Software, but the rest is simply there.
Every single one of the devlopers of that software are finacially stable. How do I know that? It's easy, you can't really contribute to a project when you are not finacially stable. Trust me, you spend most of your time looking for a job when you don't have one you like. Commitments to software projects are generally too large to make under circumstances like that. There are as many ways of earning your keep as there are free software developers.
Two further things should be considered, that comercial software won't support you any better and just what kind of reward is deserved. If the statistical improbability of working directly for a closed source software develpment firm is not humbling enough, consider the fate of those who made Netscape, Word Perfect, Lotus and all the other firms destroyed like SCO. RMS made his living in part by developing modules for emacs that other people wanted. They paid him, he made it and gave it away. I doubt that any of us should expect more from our software. Yet many do manage to get more though CD sales, grants, and all the rest. A rubish old relative has a great phrase for this, "Take what it gives."
The power of free software is that so much of it's available. The free software developer can now meet just about any client needs. There's plenty of money to be made with it, and while you are making money off other people's labor why would you ever want to hoard your own? Only bad laws can stop free software from filling every software need there is. Enjoy it, take what you need and give what you can. Ideas work that way.
If I worked for RIAA, I would use P2P activity as a leading indicator of future sales. Reduced P2P activity means the current products are not very popular. When will they learn?
They know what gets traded on the networks and it terrifies them. The catalog is so much bigger than they could ever support at a physical store that the only way for them to survive is to eliminate the networks. They are obsolete, and will never wield the power of the "big hit" again. When people are free to share what they have and pick what they want, it turns out they have much broader tastes than any music mogul ever had.
When you stand back and look at things, you might start to wonder what the purpose of the recording industry is. For decasdes it was more about promoting a small subset of all music over all others to drive sales. That's not so much a matter of promoting that one song as it about supressing all other songs. The heavy rotation play from broadcast stations never were anything more than an obnoxious advertisement. Music sharing networks cut that out and alowed music to be chosen on grounds of taste an merit, criteria the music industry abandoned decades ago.
Does iTunes really do it for you? If so, I'm happy really I am. But it will NEVER match the collection brought forth by Napster or any other file sharing network. Dan Peng's story pokes brilliant fun at the inadequacies and he got it published by the morons as a success story for the RIAA:
Still, when I hear a timeless Beatles classic on the radio and then go home to look for it on Pressplay or ITunes and it isn't there, I tend to longingly eye the Kazaa icon that still sits on my desktop, beckoning me to return to piracy.
Can't get a Beatles song? A song from one of the most mercilessly comercialized bands in all history is not on iTunes? iTunes must blow!
No commercial company can measure up to the file sharing networks. They have lost the recordings, or just don't have money or resources to digitize them. The distributed effort of all music fans created a catalogue of all kinds of music you could never get in a store. That's what you get when you let music lovers share their stuff. Some of the newer music services are gettin good, but none match Napster yet. The comercial services don't stand a chance unless they figure out how to enlist the fans. It is this fundamental failure to make work available by the current "owners" that makes them obsolete, despite legal sucess beyond all reason. People will get around them sooner or later.
they are subject to various Federal laws, Department of Justice rules, and ethics rules. They are not permitted to provide legal advice to individual private citizens. This means that there is no attorney-client relationship between CCIPS and Slashdot readers, users, or moderators
Does this mean that DoJ ethics rules prevent them from acting in a way most other lawyers consider ethical?
Sure, that robots.txt should keep robots out of the entire NYT site. That's not how Google works, though. Google get's their rankings for the NYT from other sites that point too the NYT. I imagine they only archive a page when it reaches sufficient rank. This way, Google would never have to crawl though the NYT site. We can be sure that Google would be happy to drop NYT points and caches if they were asked to do that.
The New York Times wants Google to continue ranking their stories but they want Google to do them the special favor of only pointing to their registration page:
"We are working with Google to fix that problem--we're going to close it so when you click on a link it will take you to a registration page," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman at New York Times Digital,
If I were Google, I'd tell them such advertising services would cost them a great deal of money. That or simply drop the New York Times right into the bit bucket. It will cost Google programing time to make it happen and computing time to keep it going. If every site on the web required this kind of custom treatment, Google's task would be much more difficult and it might be easier for them to drop it.
Droping the NYT from Google is fine by me. People who don't understand the implications of digital publishing don't deserve readership. If they won't let librarians make digital coppies, libraries should drop them too. What's next, the New York Times sends cease and dissist orders to everyone who runs a proxy? It's like the NYT is trying to make their digital publication harder to share than their paper one was. A paper copy can be shared by an entire office and that's what a proxy does. A paper copy can be indexed and archived by a librarian, and Google did not even do that much. One day the paper version won't be available. If librarians can't keep their own coppies of the digital version for verification, the publication will have no credibility. If the New York Times wants to continue charging advertisers for eyballs, they had better remember that their credibility is bassed in part on widespread availability.
Why bother to shove your brother or sister out of the way when you could just login to the the machine with xforwarding? If you MUST have a pretty desktop, just xforward kdesktop and kicker. Nautilus can be used this way too. M$ is so clueless it's not even funy.
It's nice to know that kdm and gdm make the multiple xserver thing so easy. You probably aslo know that kicker and kdesktop both export nicely by xforwarding. Though I start most of my programs from the command line, it's nice to have the menue tree and graphical file browsers exported accross the network. This way, you can have your desktop or desktops wherever you happen to sit down. I love virtual workspaces, desktops and Xforwarding.
It's funny how M$ is so opposed to sharing that they won't implement something as nice as x forwarding through ssh. Everyone in the house can have a nice computer that way, because machines that are adequate terminals are cheap. Any old 100 MHz box makes a usable xterminal and everyone can log onto a faster computer and share it. With reasonable uptimes, you don't have to worry about slow startup because you never need to turn the thing off. The free software way, everyone has a computer they "own" but everyone else can use whatever you manage to set up and everyone also has a share of the nicest computer in the house at the same time. My wife and I use differnt programs on each of out computers at the same time with modest hardware and neither of us notices the other's resorce use. "Oh no," microsoft thinks, "then two people might use Word at the same time!", what could be worse? The Microsoft way forces one user at a time sharing but perversly - no privacy whatsoever because they promise to read your files in the EULA. Everyone else in the world offers reasonable tools, Microsft had better wise up. They can't keep the world ignorant forever.
Running alternative software can be a violation of policy and mean Real Trouble(tm) for military members.
Sure thing, software freedom is the last freedom you wory about when you sign your life away to the military.
That does not keep the software company making the software from using commonly accepted standards. Using some kind of ActiveX toy is a sure way to make your program not work right next year. Only an idiot would force them to use M$ junk.
Why only serve 90% when you could serve 100%?. 90% compatibility is obsurdly optomistic figure for Microsoft specific stuff anyway because Microsoft makes changes between their OS releases that force the upgrade train. Be sure that electronic voting in 2004 wont work on Windows 2000, NT or 9x. They will be lucky to get half of windoze users. If they would just make a standards complient site, anyone could use it.
As for security, hmph. It's hard to think of a computer company with a worse record. I imagine someone will make a "I vote you" virus that votes early and often for everyone.
Microsoft doesn't care if the consumer buys more games, they just care if the retail store buys more games.
If you don't, they won't. If people don't buy this thing, Microsoft eats the development costs and gets what it deserves for predatory dumping.
Ever notice how books top the bestseller list before they can be bought by the public? You know why? Because the people who BUY books are not consumers: They are bookstores.
Books, music and other mass produced media take their cues from primary markets like New York, LA, San Deigo and other large cities. Things that sell well there, for whatever reason, are assumed to sell well elsewhwere. Typically, what does not sell in a primary market gets dumped onto secondary markets later anyway, but they are not mass produced like things that are expected to sell. I'm not sure this applies to consumer electronics but it does not matter.
The worst thing that can happen to Microsoft is to develop a flop. Anytime anyone buys a M$ thingy, it's good for M$. Flops put big fat holes in the Microsoft hype machine and eat into their cash. Factories try to proctect themselves from flops with minimum purchases required to make a run. Retailers try to protect themselves with clauses about return of unsold mechanise. We can't know what pressure both sides put on Microsoft for the xbox, but we can make up our minds to buy honest wares and let dishonest people go out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
nice work! thank you.
What, like Gator? If something does not work with Mozilla, I don't need it.
If he had any sofware choice, he'd be running Mozilla. If you are going to get busted for adding software to your computer, a toolbar is just as big a bust as anything else. The poor devil had better get back to work before his corporate task masters notice and revoke his "internet" privs altogether.
Not having to look at M$ crap is about the only good thing about being fired. That and the 15% bonus my former peers are going to get dividing my former salary. I hope my next employer has a clue. Working for idiots sucked.
Mistake geometric for exponential? Oh well, most hyperbole tends to infinite error. Judging the rest of the work by this error would be a non-sequitur. Try not to do that, OK? If you do, I'll sick my power functions on you.
Normalize for population. =:) We have a rising copyright registration rate. Does it keep up per capita? If not, what does that tell us about laws that are designed specifically to increase copyright restistration, if not promote art itself?
Yeah, ya, ya. Lawyers are not always good with math, but I expect better logic from you.
This study would be much more powerful it it were NORMALIZED FOR POPULATION, which also spurts in times of economic prosperity. It might make the other trends look smaller, but the 1992 turn around of registrations would look much bigger as the population has continued to grow. Really, what I expect to see is a decline in "innovation" per population with the rise of copyright power and big publisher lock in. All of us experience daily as media consolidation, the death of radio free, the death of independent movie theaters and the cumulative lack of diversity in popular culture perverse in an era of cheap communications. Kudos for all the hard work, I hope this helps.
So when the data has been compiled and it's given to the big boss, what do you think it's going to be? The big boss is going to open some kind of Word doc or a Power Point presentation, "Osama-been-here-and-there". Even if it's done by SHTML, the browser cache will be harvested and sent on. Holes, man great big, gaping M$ holes for the most important information of all.
Uhhhh, these big government single source contracts are new. Agencies used to make PC purchases like manilla folder purchases, a detail too small to worry about. Back then a decision to buy Microsoft on a Gateway could be shown to a best purchase due to M$ anti-competitive practices. Now that the US DoJ has proven those practices, we get these new big fat contracts? Nuts.
Have you ever worked for Government or are you just spouting off?
Who told you that? Did you consider that people actually write that clasified information to begin with? Yeah, these are normal people and they are going to be using normal computers, Microsoft now.
At least in nuclear power, safegaruds information guides have no clue. Eight months ago, it was considered OK to edit and store safegaurds information on a regular PC, so long as you disconected the network while you were working on the information. Safegaurds information is stuff like plutonium inventory. In paper form, it's supposed to be kept under lock and key and you are never supposed to leave it out on your desk while you go take a piss. Viruses like SirCam totaly obliterate the precatuions taken. I doubt the folks in Homland Security have much more of a clue than this.
Tell me how a Department of Homaland Security computer is going to have Total Information Awareness without being attached to a network. Tell me then what's going to keep that information from flowing through all the holes Microsoft is famous for.
Government spending accounts for 25% of the US GDP. While this is stageringly large, the 75% of non compulsory spending is much bigger.
The ugly thing is that Microsoft provides the worst of all web services, yet seems to be favored by the current administration. It makes no sense whatsoever for Microsoft to be getting these contracts when IBM, Red Hat, Debian, Caldera (yes even brain dead SCO), HP, Sun and countless other good US firms can do the job better and cheaper. Tell me that the US government is the largest cusomer of all the above and that their products are well represented in federal spending and I might change my opinion. A vauge statement that nothing is wrong here does not do it.
For me, this just goes to show that Homeland Security has no clue.
'There are three stages in your reintegration,' said O'Brien. 'There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.' ...
Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity. ...
'You are ruling over us for our own good,' he said feebly. 'You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore --'
He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O'Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.
'That was stupid, Winston, stupid!' he said. 'You should know better than to say a thing like that.'
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
Munich ... uses 175 Windows applications for such tasks as managing police records, issuing permits and collecting taxes. ... Linux ... does not work well with Windows programs. Another layer of connection software is required, adding complexity. Unilog judged Microsoft's proposal -- to swap out all existing versions of Microsoft Windows and Office for the newest versions -- as cheaper and technically superior.
It seems that the only advantage Microsoft really had was that it worked, sometimes, with it's own software. Training was offered by both teams, implying no difference. Once those 175 applications are ported out of Windoze, what will Microsoft have to offer? Painful file formats? A single screen GUI, inferior networking, poor security, inferior stability and data loss are all hallmarks of Microsoft software. In six years, what's Microsoft going to do to try to win back the business?
Microsoft screwed their only advantages. They had a tremendous advantage in user familiarity and widespread use. The advantages this offered was supposed to be ease of information transfer and hardware compatibility. Instead of using that, they got greedy and broke interoperability to force upgrades. They also abused their deathgip on hardware manufacturers the same way to foce purchases of new equipment. With advantages like those, who needs flaws? Microsoft squandered money on anti-competitve behavior when it should have been fixing it's own software.
Free software has stuck itself right into these shorcomings. You can exchange data bewteen free programs though accepted standards. Why you can't get a hardware driver for the new Windoze, you can be sure the old one still works with free software. Free software is doing what Microsoft prommised to do but did not. That's not surprising because free software is made by people who have a job to do and they don't have an incentive to break things.
To make the kind of higher level software companies want you need to know the task like an insider, that's something that's easier to get local and very difficult to spec out. A database without rules is just a database. I've got a couple of them. A database that knows suppliers, parts, shipping, FCR, and internal corporate organization is a tool that runs the company. Closed source software publishers, who often use offshore labor to make their inferior tools, have mistakenly advanced this argument against free software as "they don't know complex business applications." Bullshit. Small firms with knowlegeable people, sometimes laid of from the company in question, can do a much better job with customized software than those clowns in Redmond. IBM's service model fits this too and that's one of the reasons they are using free software. Software's function is not to move bytes and print forms, it's to make a business go.
"!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN" "hmpro6.dtd""
"html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40""
From the Netaid page:
BEGIN WEBSIDESTORY CODE v7.4.0 (no 1.0)--> !-- COPYRIGHT 1997-2001 WEBSIDESTORY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. U.S.PATENT No. 6,393,479 B1. Privacy notice at: http://websidestory.com/privacy
Patented code? Oh well, at least they are running Linux. www.undp.org.af is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 behind a computer running Solaris 8. . Nothing says backward like Microsoft. Netaid and the spirit of the UNDP are encouraging. Knowledge penetrates where formerly there was naught but binary CDs! Who knows, now they are not Taliban Occupied, they might even get mirror sites.
You might have 2.5TB of music digitized in one place, but do you think music publishers have it? Part of Napster's power was the distributed digitizing effort. Simply locating all the music that was digitized and available on Napster could bankrupt a traditional publisher. It's doubtful a traditional music publisher would take digitizations from the public at large, so they are stuck, "digitally remastering" what they can when they can. It does not add up geometically like Napster did and it will cost them too much to do it.
This is why copyright is supposed to be for time limited. Music will go exticnt before big companies can get to it and the highest quality recordings will be lost. Fixing the laws so that work can be published freely within the lifetime it is produced would be a good start. This would destroy most of big music publishers and good riddance.
With the Economist's recent news on how users expect more and more from IT, how is the Open Source community ever going to keep up? Who is going to pay for it?
Is grounded in this kind of faulty logic. You have heard it before as, "free software can never produce a working kernel" or "free software will never produce an easy to use interface."
First things first, free software is miles ahead of comercial software. The development tools are second to none and the quality of the most basic utilities is hard to beat. On top of this, many people and many companies have added many fine and easy to use desktop managers, productivty suits, browsers, email clients, databases and games. Well, OK, it's hard to match the good people at ID Software, but the rest is simply there.
Every single one of the devlopers of that software are finacially stable. How do I know that? It's easy, you can't really contribute to a project when you are not finacially stable. Trust me, you spend most of your time looking for a job when you don't have one you like. Commitments to software projects are generally too large to make under circumstances like that. There are as many ways of earning your keep as there are free software developers.
Two further things should be considered, that comercial software won't support you any better and just what kind of reward is deserved. If the statistical improbability of working directly for a closed source software develpment firm is not humbling enough, consider the fate of those who made Netscape, Word Perfect, Lotus and all the other firms destroyed like SCO. RMS made his living in part by developing modules for emacs that other people wanted. They paid him, he made it and gave it away. I doubt that any of us should expect more from our software. Yet many do manage to get more though CD sales, grants, and all the rest. A rubish old relative has a great phrase for this, "Take what it gives."
The power of free software is that so much of it's available. The free software developer can now meet just about any client needs. There's plenty of money to be made with it, and while you are making money off other people's labor why would you ever want to hoard your own? Only bad laws can stop free software from filling every software need there is. Enjoy it, take what you need and give what you can. Ideas work that way.
They know what gets traded on the networks and it terrifies them. The catalog is so much bigger than they could ever support at a physical store that the only way for them to survive is to eliminate the networks. They are obsolete, and will never wield the power of the "big hit" again. When people are free to share what they have and pick what they want, it turns out they have much broader tastes than any music mogul ever had.
When you stand back and look at things, you might start to wonder what the purpose of the recording industry is. For decasdes it was more about promoting a small subset of all music over all others to drive sales. That's not so much a matter of promoting that one song as it about supressing all other songs. The heavy rotation play from broadcast stations never were anything more than an obnoxious advertisement. Music sharing networks cut that out and alowed music to be chosen on grounds of taste an merit, criteria the music industry abandoned decades ago.
Still, when I hear a timeless Beatles classic on the radio and then go home to look for it on Pressplay or ITunes and it isn't there, I tend to longingly eye the Kazaa icon that still sits on my desktop, beckoning me to return to piracy.
Can't get a Beatles song? A song from one of the most mercilessly comercialized bands in all history is not on iTunes? iTunes must blow!
No commercial company can measure up to the file sharing networks. They have lost the recordings, or just don't have money or resources to digitize them. The distributed effort of all music fans created a catalogue of all kinds of music you could never get in a store. That's what you get when you let music lovers share their stuff. Some of the newer music services are gettin good, but none match Napster yet. The comercial services don't stand a chance unless they figure out how to enlist the fans. It is this fundamental failure to make work available by the current "owners" that makes them obsolete, despite legal sucess beyond all reason. People will get around them sooner or later.
Does this mean that DoJ ethics rules prevent them from acting in a way most other lawyers consider ethical?
Can I be put in jail for being a smart-ass?
The New York Times wants Google to continue ranking their stories but they want Google to do them the special favor of only pointing to their registration page:
"We are working with Google to fix that problem--we're going to close it so when you click on a link it will take you to a registration page," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman at New York Times Digital,
If I were Google, I'd tell them such advertising services would cost them a great deal of money. That or simply drop the New York Times right into the bit bucket. It will cost Google programing time to make it happen and computing time to keep it going. If every site on the web required this kind of custom treatment, Google's task would be much more difficult and it might be easier for them to drop it.
Droping the NYT from Google is fine by me. People who don't understand the implications of digital publishing don't deserve readership. If they won't let librarians make digital coppies, libraries should drop them too. What's next, the New York Times sends cease and dissist orders to everyone who runs a proxy? It's like the NYT is trying to make their digital publication harder to share than their paper one was. A paper copy can be shared by an entire office and that's what a proxy does. A paper copy can be indexed and archived by a librarian, and Google did not even do that much. One day the paper version won't be available. If librarians can't keep their own coppies of the digital version for verification, the publication will have no credibility. If the New York Times wants to continue charging advertisers for eyballs, they had better remember that their credibility is bassed in part on widespread availability.
Why bother to shove your brother or sister out of the way when you could just login to the the machine with xforwarding? If you MUST have a pretty desktop, just xforward kdesktop and kicker. Nautilus can be used this way too. M$ is so clueless it's not even funy.
It's funny how M$ is so opposed to sharing that they won't implement something as nice as x forwarding through ssh. Everyone in the house can have a nice computer that way, because machines that are adequate terminals are cheap. Any old 100 MHz box makes a usable xterminal and everyone can log onto a faster computer and share it. With reasonable uptimes, you don't have to worry about slow startup because you never need to turn the thing off. The free software way, everyone has a computer they "own" but everyone else can use whatever you manage to set up and everyone also has a share of the nicest computer in the house at the same time. My wife and I use differnt programs on each of out computers at the same time with modest hardware and neither of us notices the other's resorce use. "Oh no," microsoft thinks, "then two people might use Word at the same time!", what could be worse? The Microsoft way forces one user at a time sharing but perversly - no privacy whatsoever because they promise to read your files in the EULA. Everyone else in the world offers reasonable tools, Microsft had better wise up. They can't keep the world ignorant forever.
Sure thing, software freedom is the last freedom you wory about when you sign your life away to the military.
That does not keep the software company making the software from using commonly accepted standards. Using some kind of ActiveX toy is a sure way to make your program not work right next year. Only an idiot would force them to use M$ junk.
As for security, hmph. It's hard to think of a computer company with a worse record. I imagine someone will make a "I vote you" virus that votes early and often for everyone.
If you don't, they won't. If people don't buy this thing, Microsoft eats the development costs and gets what it deserves for predatory dumping.
Ever notice how books top the bestseller list before they can be bought by the public? You know why? Because the people who BUY books are not consumers: They are bookstores.
Books, music and other mass produced media take their cues from primary markets like New York, LA, San Deigo and other large cities. Things that sell well there, for whatever reason, are assumed to sell well elsewhwere. Typically, what does not sell in a primary market gets dumped onto secondary markets later anyway, but they are not mass produced like things that are expected to sell. I'm not sure this applies to consumer electronics but it does not matter.
The worst thing that can happen to Microsoft is to develop a flop. Anytime anyone buys a M$ thingy, it's good for M$. Flops put big fat holes in the Microsoft hype machine and eat into their cash. Factories try to proctect themselves from flops with minimum purchases required to make a run. Retailers try to protect themselves with clauses about return of unsold mechanise. We can't know what pressure both sides put on Microsoft for the xbox, but we can make up our minds to buy honest wares and let dishonest people go out of business.