What a great appolgy you make. It would be OK if you kept your head crammed in your closed source fantasy world. Your oppinions about free software are way off.
"Defect #24013: There's a post-it note icon on Internet Explorer 6 that is mileading. It looks like the notes icon in Outlook 2000." A lot of them are probably design considerations.
The GUI is confusing and misleading, but 63,000 problems? Come on, how many icons and groupings can a default win2k have wrong? I doubt they have 10,000 help pages. The rest of those errors are clearly software bugs the user does not see till a BSOD, rooting or something else squirlly happens. This is why Windoze 2000 can't run more than a few days in a row. It's riddled.
I wouldn't these types of statistics too seriously
Me neither. Trust your observations to tell you that software simply sucks. The statistic happens to agree with those observations.
63,000 is a huge number, but you have to remember that Windows runs on a very broad range of machines. Not only that, but there are tons and tons of people running it who are supplying defect reports.
Balderdash! Windows2000 runs on intel 386. Wince runs on ARM. That's it. What do you think this is, free software that's compiled to specific x86 processor families, Motorola, ARM, Alpha, Spark and just about every other modern processor? No, this is the borg one size fits all. You will not be able to apt-get nice new win32 software ever, you will always be at the mercy of the service patch that requires you to give up hope of privacy.
There'll be a day when Linux has that many defects, if it doesn't already. All it takes is complexity.
Pull your head out of your closed source place please. Free software has fewer bugs and does more than any dinky windoze distro will ever. The complextiy you are thinking of is a legacy of all the dirty tricks M$ used over the years to kill of software rivals. That does not exist in free software and never will. This is why free software PCs don't have to be turned off until the power fails.
A better question is why someone hasn't just bought a few junk drives to mod and hide the 'active' drives.
If your modded drive does not move, what do you want to look at through the window?
I can imagine gluing a little ho scale figure to the moving drive arm. It would be very funny to see a crawling 1/80 scale Africa corpsman in there. You could tell people that he reads your data and keeps the pixi dust working. Of course, I would not put any of my priceless irreplacable works of true genious on that drive. No, that kind of thing I post to Slashdot.
Good luck keeping all that crap running. If you are using as much free software as you say you are, you know how much easier it is to maintain. Patches, rebuilds, stuff that just never works, ugh, what a pain. Someone needs to write a millspec for software, so you will be forced to buy better quality. This single source contract handed down by the big dogs as a one size fits all "solution" is a really bad sign of things to come. It reeks of disrespect and micromanagement. You have been handed your tools for the next six years, best for the job or not. Good luck. I get ill just thinking what you are going to get to deal with.
Six years locked into M$ nonsense, that purchase price is the least of the worries. Patches, daily reboots, systems that don't know the difference between root and private Gomer, Gator, Gomer's privatly installed games, spyware, scumware and outright banditware known as Microsoft. Microsoft shills themselves estimates keeping one of their, "older" computers costs 10,000/year in support. Yet here it is, the biggest single source I've ever heard of. Even Lockheed Martin has to bid for it's work. Shesh, did the RFQ state, "M$ only"?
I really feel for everyone who has to use and maintain this crap. Good luck.
Are you really advocating coroprate welfare for MicroShit?
Wow. And I thought that flood of money coming in from around the world might seep into the US economy some how.
If they really had all that money comming in, they would not need my tax money would they?
You're going to tell me that Microsoft keeps all its money in Swiss bank accounts now too, and only employees people from China.
They could tell you both of those things. It's not like it's going to their stockholders or employees. M$ is notorious for getting work done with perma-temps and engaging in other tight fisted nonsense. They are also working hard to replace everyone with offshore labor because starvation wages in India are much less than starvation wages in Redmond. That's unforgivable for a company that never paid a dividend till last year. But, you know, a company that screws it's custormers will also screw it's employees and stockholders.
The recently inked deal screws you and me too. Just when I thougt I'd escaped the M$ tax, Uncle Sam gives it back to me.
This is a thinlly disguised economic stimulus package, or they got robbed. Software merrit and pricing would never lead to a deal like that.
They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.
Indeed, I feel ill. What exactly does all that shit provide that free software does not? Vendor lock-in? Great.
The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them
Nuts. I've never heard of a non-clasified public purchase with a NDA. It's my half a billion dollars, I want the details. Only crooks who sell crap have to hide their details. You would think they would be happy to give anyone buying half a million computers a similar deal.
There's no excuse for buing into more Microshit right now. Computer hardware has been more than adequate for general purpose desktop computing for the last six years. If the software those computers came with is no longer up to the task, I suggest looking at alternate software. There are a few other good American companies that could use this kind of shot in the arm but would provide a much better product:
Red Hat has far superior server and desktop software and support.
Debian software quality and updating sheme are hard to beat. Yes, Star Office runs just fine on their stable distro.
We can be sure that Dell, Gateway, etc would be happy to work with any of the above software firms for this contract.
The fact of the matter is that the US Army took a half a million computer order and got themseves treated like some dinky midsized company with a thousand desktops. Next thing you know, they will be on the three year upgrade cycle. They did it because they were told to do it that way or they were incompetent. Either way, it's un-fucking-forgivable. They have a whole, ummm, Army of technically qualified people!
What SCO is doing, however, is attempted theft (although not in the conventional sense). They're trying to take the IP for themselves, so no one else can have it (at least without paying SCO). This is taking from someone. Not just making a copy for themselves without permission. This is theft, not copyright violation.
When you take work someone else did, claim it's "derivative" and then keep them from using it, you are indeed a theif. SCO would essentially be destroying the original copy for the author as well as violating the author's intent for the software to be free.
This approach can have massive benefits outside the United States--the country where most proprietary software originates--allowing greater price flexibility and a focus on specialized needs, Hall argued.
ZDNet generally sucks. It's doubtfull a free software advocate would really say that. Free software has the same massive benifits inside the US as it does outside the US. The Free Software Foundation is headquartered in the US, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens are US citezens. Chances are that Hall mentioned that some software makers in the US might not be happy if free and open software supplanted their eXPensive wares and ZDNet inflated it to that. Software developers, like other profesionals, have long transended national boundaries. Only a maddog would think that US citezens and businesses have something less to gain from free software than someone in the UK.
By the time Congress is through with it, it'll be "Copyright will last for 5 months. After that expires, the author must pay $50,000 to renew it, for another 150 years, or eternally, whichever's longer."
While you might have been making a joke, the concept of paying for copyright protection might not be a good idea. With a short enough durration and a high enough cost, established publishers can effectively block out new entrants. It would also castrate the GPL when developers have their code co-opted because they can't pay to maintain their copyright. Patent fees like this are how Wittle lost his patent on the jet engine, which was much more reasonable than our current schedule. Fees might look reasonable if you are sitting someplace with money. Most people can't afford them and they have a way of doing just what your joke implies.
Let's just roll back to a 14 year copyright protection. It's better to simply reduce the term so that anyone might publish an author's work within their lifetime. This maximizes the chances of useful works being published cheaply while they are relavant, while rewarding the author for publishing. 14 years was a good idea when publication was far more expensive and it's not a bad idea now. The GPL is still needed for 14 year copyrights because that's like 100 in software years. A hundred year copyright protected work might be widely published for the benifit of my great grandchildren and they probably won't want to read it.
I have no sympathy for those who are sued (assuming reasonable penalties). They break the law, they get caught, they get punished. I don't see anything wrong with that.
You expect them ot be reasonable? The last example of this was 4 students being sued for $97,000,000,000.00 for running a search engine. The RIAA settled for their life savings. I expect the next technical countermeasure to be download bots linked to M$ Lawsuit. The RIAA is evil, dummy, and everything they do should be regarded as such until they do something useful.
Hmmmm, I'd better get a patent on a method to discourage music sharing through judicial extortion. That way I'll get my fair share of all your life savings.
Be careful how copyright violation is defined or you will get sued trying to exercise your fair use rights. What constitutes a republication has been chipped away at to someting silly like $1,000 of value per work. Sharing your music collection once was not looked on as copyright violation, and you might be giving that right up just to be left alone with what was yours to begin with. Imagine how easy it would be for the RIAA to set up suck nodes to downoad enough copyrighted music to screw everyone out of their fair use rights. They would have the upload log to sue you because they did the downloading.
Once upon a time, people tape recorded their records into collections they shared with their friends. This was a great way to learn about good music that never made it onto local radio stations. The practice drove record sales despite industry opposition. Industry opposed the practice because it encouraged demand for all sorts of music and that's less profitable for distributors than artificial mega hits by one or two "artists". The making of such personal coppies was defended in the courts as "fair use". The coppies did NOT constitute republication. Issues of "recording quality" were brought up, but were unimportant to music fans because the tape recordings were as good as they could make on their own and better than FM radio. The RIAA vowed revenge.
The same struggle continues to this day despite technology that removes their reason to exist. The RIAA is doing everything they can to sell you what the think you want. They are taking advantage of new technology to lock up music tighter than ever and will use that technology to keep you from making music that might compete with them. If they have their way, recorded music will be such a scarce comodity that people will once again pay for each play. It's an amazing example of laws being made to encumber new technology. Music recording is now so easy that there really is no reason to have a Recording Industry Association. There's no reason to have centralized recording and music publishing. It is now easier to record music than it is to make it and recording studios should be as common as guitar heros. The RIAA, wants bring us back to the days of Edison's phonograph - poor quality recordings only a select few can make.
Some kind of ground rules for online sharing must be incorporated into "fair use". How many uploads constitutes a republication? Clearly me emailing a song to my mom is not a republication any more than me quoting the first amendment is a republication of the Constitution. Somewhere between that extreem and me setting up an anonymous ftp (not to vilify ftp) site lies fair use. It should be protected if copyright is really to promote the arts rather than a tool for control of popular culture.
There's no question that RMS resents the fact that Linus gets more credit than he deserves. ,
without quoting RMS. The rest of your post moves on to interesting Debian work with an unecessary insult to the Hurd. Don't like how the Hurd works? Go fix it. It's free, why complain about it?
RMS's concern over the confusion between the Linux kernel and all the other software that comes with it is grounded in free software advococy. Everything I've read from him, especially this last article, seeks to point out where free software comes from and why people make it. It's designed to combat the "intelectual property" propaganda machine that continues to spit out nonsense designed to devide people and keep them from co-operating. If you don't understand how free software is made and how well that way works, you are likely to surrender your rights to SCO. To frame this as personal resentment is missinformed.
And no, this isn't a troll, just a serious question.
The only question you actually asked was, "shouldn't it be BSD/GNU/Linux? " after wrongly asserting that parts of the Linux kernel are "BSD-licensed".
What I don't think you understand is what GNU is. GNU + Hurd has more functionality than most comercial operating systems do. GNU + Linux and other GPL'd software makes traditional comercial software unnecessary.
How much do you wanna bet that RMS is secretly hoping the SCO's suit against IBM prevails, so that no one will touch the Linux kernel with a ten foot pole.
That's a bad bet. If you read the article you would have seen him acutally saying, "We did our best to avoid ever copying Unix code, despite our basic premise that to prohibit copying of software is morally wrong." The immorality he's refering to is the intentional waste inflicted by preventing people from co-operating to solve problems. This is what free software is all about, the creation of software that can be used for any purpose, modified and shared without ever preventing others from doing the same. RMS would be extreemly anoyed if the last 10 years of work put into the Linux kernel were somehow co-opted by SCO and people were cut off from it.
If the world ever gets that dumb, Hurd, BSD and all other software, free and non-free, will be up for grabs. It's a situation only the greediest corporate droid or dedicated statist wants. The economic harm is inclaculable.
Not again, another stupid GNU confusion post. Please go read the article again and understand what he's saying about "intelectual property" public ignorance and the state of free software.
I use GNU tools on my XP box so should I call it GNU/Windows.
You might. If you use Apache, Mozilla, Open Office and X Windows instead of the default M$ software, you are using GNU more than anything else on that XP box. I'd suggest you go all the way and get rid of the last non-free tools and move to a system using Linux, BSD or Hurd. When you compare the codebase provided by M$ with that provided by GNU tools, your XP box might very well be considered a GNU/Windows computer.
Public ingorance about where free software comes from is why SCO FUD has what little effect it does have.
SCOs intent appears to be to widen the concept of a "derived work" to encompass eveything that behaves, looks or even smells like Unix.
This is what the Free Software Foundation is all about. SCO, M$ and friends continue their fight to own all ideas. It's what motivated RMS and others to create the free software movement in the early 80's. ATT tried to grab control of other people's work through the use of NDAs. SCO's suit is an audatious attempt to further extend ATT's land grab to independent works by anyone even vaugly familiar with OS concepts ATT develped. ATT was stupid then and lost. SCO is insane today, but they can get away with it if they can dumb down the world with talk of "intelectual property" instead of copyright, patents and trademarks and no one bothers to correct them.
RMS figured out this game years ago, which is why his article is dead on target. It's a good article to show anyone who's interested in free software, afraid of the SCO lawsuit, but only has the average 15 minutes to get their news. Show it to your boss if he asks. If your boss is really into the mess, show them the OSI detailed refutation. Stallman has been getting good about delivering his message in a clear and consise way.
If this guy is right, the establishmet robs you, again!
Kazaa is already an official distributor of viruses so sure, why not. When users want one, they pay a royalty fee. If they want to share files, the system forces the next person who wants to get it to also pay the fee.
Is this the best security/virus profit center ever or what? You trust that thing to bill you? Ha!
I don't have anything to do with M$, yet they have reached out and eliminated one of the major advantages of free software for me, decent mail agants, http and ftp programs. Now all I can do with my cable box is browse as if I were using shitty M$ software. There are so many ways M$ can abuse the anti-spam bandwagon, but they all end up in the same place, M$ being the only "server" of spam and other content.
They salvaged servers and other computer hardware and moved it into the protection of their homes.
Their foresight may have saved Iraq's only ISP. After Baghdad fell to coalition troops on April 9, the Information Ministry was vandalized and set ablaze. Internet cafes were ransacked. Looters ransacked warehouses containing millions of dollars of SCIS computer gear, according to Harif.
Hmmm, one guy takes gear to their house and it's "foresight" while others doing the same are called looters. I suppose it helps that Harif brought enough of it back for things to work. I imagine much of the stolen warehoused computers will be working too now. All around a good deal. People making use of equipment that would have sat in a warehouse forever should not be looked at in the same light as people breaking into hospitals and stealing airconditioning equipment. The fall of a totalitarian government is not easy.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like hitting your hand with a hammer. It feels so good when you stop.
"Defect #24013: There's a post-it note icon on Internet Explorer 6 that is mileading. It looks like the notes icon in Outlook 2000." A lot of them are probably design considerations.
The GUI is confusing and misleading, but 63,000 problems? Come on, how many icons and groupings can a default win2k have wrong? I doubt they have 10,000 help pages. The rest of those errors are clearly software bugs the user does not see till a BSOD, rooting or something else squirlly happens. This is why Windoze 2000 can't run more than a few days in a row. It's riddled.
I wouldn't these types of statistics too seriously
Me neither. Trust your observations to tell you that software simply sucks. The statistic happens to agree with those observations.
63,000 is a huge number, but you have to remember that Windows runs on a very broad range of machines. Not only that, but there are tons and tons of people running it who are supplying defect reports.
Balderdash! Windows2000 runs on intel 386. Wince runs on ARM. That's it. What do you think this is, free software that's compiled to specific x86 processor families, Motorola, ARM, Alpha, Spark and just about every other modern processor? No, this is the borg one size fits all. You will not be able to apt-get nice new win32 software ever, you will always be at the mercy of the service patch that requires you to give up hope of privacy.
There'll be a day when Linux has that many defects, if it doesn't already. All it takes is complexity.
Pull your head out of your closed source place please. Free software has fewer bugs and does more than any dinky windoze distro will ever. The complextiy you are thinking of is a legacy of all the dirty tricks M$ used over the years to kill of software rivals. That does not exist in free software and never will. This is why free software PCs don't have to be turned off until the power fails.
Did he also mention that data integrity was better on this pyramid than it was on the originals?
If your modded drive does not move, what do you want to look at through the window?
I can imagine gluing a little ho scale figure to the moving drive arm. It would be very funny to see a crawling 1/80 scale Africa corpsman in there. You could tell people that he reads your data and keeps the pixi dust working. Of course, I would not put any of my priceless irreplacable works of true genious on that drive. No, that kind of thing I post to Slashdot.
Must be an asshat at the crapfest, eh Zork? Is it fame bait when you address it to a single person instead of a whole group?
Good luck keeping all that crap running. If you are using as much free software as you say you are, you know how much easier it is to maintain. Patches, rebuilds, stuff that just never works, ugh, what a pain. Someone needs to write a millspec for software, so you will be forced to buy better quality. This single source contract handed down by the big dogs as a one size fits all "solution" is a really bad sign of things to come. It reeks of disrespect and micromanagement. You have been handed your tools for the next six years, best for the job or not. Good luck. I get ill just thinking what you are going to get to deal with.
Six years locked into M$ nonsense, that purchase price is the least of the worries. Patches, daily reboots, systems that don't know the difference between root and private Gomer, Gator, Gomer's privatly installed games, spyware, scumware and outright banditware known as Microsoft. Microsoft shills themselves estimates keeping one of their, "older" computers costs 10,000/year in support. Yet here it is, the biggest single source I've ever heard of. Even Lockheed Martin has to bid for it's work. Shesh, did the RFQ state, "M$ only"?
I really feel for everyone who has to use and maintain this crap. Good luck.
Wow. And I thought that flood of money coming in from around the world might seep into the US economy some how.
If they really had all that money comming in, they would not need my tax money would they?
You're going to tell me that Microsoft keeps all its money in Swiss bank accounts now too, and only employees people from China.
They could tell you both of those things. It's not like it's going to their stockholders or employees. M$ is notorious for getting work done with perma-temps and engaging in other tight fisted nonsense. They are also working hard to replace everyone with offshore labor because starvation wages in India are much less than starvation wages in Redmond. That's unforgivable for a company that never paid a dividend till last year. But, you know, a company that screws it's custormers will also screw it's employees and stockholders.
The recently inked deal screws you and me too. Just when I thougt I'd escaped the M$ tax, Uncle Sam gives it back to me.
They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.
Indeed, I feel ill. What exactly does all that shit provide that free software does not? Vendor lock-in? Great.
The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them
Nuts. I've never heard of a non-clasified public purchase with a NDA. It's my half a billion dollars, I want the details. Only crooks who sell crap have to hide their details. You would think they would be happy to give anyone buying half a million computers a similar deal.
There's no excuse for buing into more Microshit right now. Computer hardware has been more than adequate for general purpose desktop computing for the last six years. If the software those computers came with is no longer up to the task, I suggest looking at alternate software. There are a few other good American companies that could use this kind of shot in the arm but would provide a much better product:
We can be sure that Dell, Gateway, etc would be happy to work with any of the above software firms for this contract.
The fact of the matter is that the US Army took a half a million computer order and got themseves treated like some dinky midsized company with a thousand desktops. Next thing you know, they will be on the three year upgrade cycle. They did it because they were told to do it that way or they were incompetent. Either way, it's un-fucking-forgivable. They have a whole, ummm, Army of technically qualified people!
When you take work someone else did, claim it's "derivative" and then keep them from using it, you are indeed a theif. SCO would essentially be destroying the original copy for the author as well as violating the author's intent for the software to be free.
This approach can have massive benefits outside the United States--the country where most proprietary software originates--allowing greater price flexibility and a focus on specialized needs, Hall argued.
ZDNet generally sucks. It's doubtfull a free software advocate would really say that. Free software has the same massive benifits inside the US as it does outside the US. The Free Software Foundation is headquartered in the US, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens are US citezens. Chances are that Hall mentioned that some software makers in the US might not be happy if free and open software supplanted their eXPensive wares and ZDNet inflated it to that. Software developers, like other profesionals, have long transended national boundaries. Only a maddog would think that US citezens and businesses have something less to gain from free software than someone in the UK.
While you might have been making a joke, the concept of paying for copyright protection might not be a good idea. With a short enough durration and a high enough cost, established publishers can effectively block out new entrants. It would also castrate the GPL when developers have their code co-opted because they can't pay to maintain their copyright. Patent fees like this are how Wittle lost his patent on the jet engine, which was much more reasonable than our current schedule. Fees might look reasonable if you are sitting someplace with money. Most people can't afford them and they have a way of doing just what your joke implies.
Let's just roll back to a 14 year copyright protection. It's better to simply reduce the term so that anyone might publish an author's work within their lifetime. This maximizes the chances of useful works being published cheaply while they are relavant, while rewarding the author for publishing. 14 years was a good idea when publication was far more expensive and it's not a bad idea now. The GPL is still needed for 14 year copyrights because that's like 100 in software years. A hundred year copyright protected work might be widely published for the benifit of my great grandchildren and they probably won't want to read it.
You expect them ot be reasonable? The last example of this was 4 students being sued for $97,000,000,000.00 for running a search engine. The RIAA settled for their life savings. I expect the next technical countermeasure to be download bots linked to M$ Lawsuit. The RIAA is evil, dummy, and everything they do should be regarded as such until they do something useful.
Hmmmm, I'd better get a patent on a method to discourage music sharing through judicial extortion. That way I'll get my fair share of all your life savings.
Once upon a time, people tape recorded their records into collections they shared with their friends. This was a great way to learn about good music that never made it onto local radio stations. The practice drove record sales despite industry opposition. Industry opposed the practice because it encouraged demand for all sorts of music and that's less profitable for distributors than artificial mega hits by one or two "artists". The making of such personal coppies was defended in the courts as "fair use". The coppies did NOT constitute republication. Issues of "recording quality" were brought up, but were unimportant to music fans because the tape recordings were as good as they could make on their own and better than FM radio. The RIAA vowed revenge.
The same struggle continues to this day despite technology that removes their reason to exist. The RIAA is doing everything they can to sell you what the think you want. They are taking advantage of new technology to lock up music tighter than ever and will use that technology to keep you from making music that might compete with them. If they have their way, recorded music will be such a scarce comodity that people will once again pay for each play. It's an amazing example of laws being made to encumber new technology. Music recording is now so easy that there really is no reason to have a Recording Industry Association. There's no reason to have centralized recording and music publishing. It is now easier to record music than it is to make it and recording studios should be as common as guitar heros. The RIAA, wants bring us back to the days of Edison's phonograph - poor quality recordings only a select few can make.
Some kind of ground rules for online sharing must be incorporated into "fair use". How many uploads constitutes a republication? Clearly me emailing a song to my mom is not a republication any more than me quoting the first amendment is a republication of the Constitution. Somewhere between that extreem and me setting up an anonymous ftp (not to vilify ftp) site lies fair use. It should be protected if copyright is really to promote the arts rather than a tool for control of popular culture.
There's no question that RMS resents the fact that Linus gets more credit than he deserves. ,
without quoting RMS. The rest of your post moves on to interesting Debian work with an unecessary insult to the Hurd. Don't like how the Hurd works? Go fix it. It's free, why complain about it?
RMS's concern over the confusion between the Linux kernel and all the other software that comes with it is grounded in free software advococy. Everything I've read from him, especially this last article, seeks to point out where free software comes from and why people make it. It's designed to combat the "intelectual property" propaganda machine that continues to spit out nonsense designed to devide people and keep them from co-operating. If you don't understand how free software is made and how well that way works, you are likely to surrender your rights to SCO. To frame this as personal resentment is missinformed.
The only question you actually asked was, "shouldn't it be BSD/GNU/Linux? " after wrongly asserting that parts of the Linux kernel are "BSD-licensed".
What I don't think you understand is what GNU is. GNU + Hurd has more functionality than most comercial operating systems do. GNU + Linux and other GPL'd software makes traditional comercial software unnecessary.
That's a bad bet. If you read the article you would have seen him acutally saying, "We did our best to avoid ever copying Unix code, despite our basic premise that to prohibit copying of software is morally wrong." The immorality he's refering to is the intentional waste inflicted by preventing people from co-operating to solve problems. This is what free software is all about, the creation of software that can be used for any purpose, modified and shared without ever preventing others from doing the same. RMS would be extreemly anoyed if the last 10 years of work put into the Linux kernel were somehow co-opted by SCO and people were cut off from it.
If the world ever gets that dumb, Hurd, BSD and all other software, free and non-free, will be up for grabs. It's a situation only the greediest corporate droid or dedicated statist wants. The economic harm is inclaculable.
I use GNU tools on my XP box so should I call it GNU/Windows.
You might. If you use Apache, Mozilla, Open Office and X Windows instead of the default M$ software, you are using GNU more than anything else on that XP box. I'd suggest you go all the way and get rid of the last non-free tools and move to a system using Linux, BSD or Hurd. When you compare the codebase provided by M$ with that provided by GNU tools, your XP box might very well be considered a GNU/Windows computer.
Public ingorance about where free software comes from is why SCO FUD has what little effect it does have.
This is what the Free Software Foundation is all about. SCO, M$ and friends continue their fight to own all ideas. It's what motivated RMS and others to create the free software movement in the early 80's. ATT tried to grab control of other people's work through the use of NDAs. SCO's suit is an audatious attempt to further extend ATT's land grab to independent works by anyone even vaugly familiar with OS concepts ATT develped. ATT was stupid then and lost. SCO is insane today, but they can get away with it if they can dumb down the world with talk of "intelectual property" instead of copyright, patents and trademarks and no one bothers to correct them.
RMS figured out this game years ago, which is why his article is dead on target. It's a good article to show anyone who's interested in free software, afraid of the SCO lawsuit, but only has the average 15 minutes to get their news. Show it to your boss if he asks. If your boss is really into the mess, show them the OSI detailed refutation. Stallman has been getting good about delivering his message in a clear and consise way.
Kazaa is already an official distributor of viruses so sure, why not.
Is this the best security/virus profit center ever or what? You trust that thing to bill you? Ha!
Kazaa is already an official distributor of viruses so sure, why not. When users want one, they pay a royalty fee. If they want to share files, the system forces the next person who wants to get it to also pay the fee.
Is this the best security/virus profit center ever or what? You trust that thing to bill you? Ha!
I don't have anything to do with M$, yet they have reached out and eliminated one of the major advantages of free software for me, decent mail agants, http and ftp programs. Now all I can do with my cable box is browse as if I were using shitty M$ software. There are so many ways M$ can abuse the anti-spam bandwagon, but they all end up in the same place, M$ being the only "server" of spam and other content.
They try, but the only thing they seem to be good at is PR. Even there they are failing but at least they consistenly make the buzzwords.
In this instance, Microsoft has yet to forswear the use of spam themselves. Hotmail, AOL and M$N users will always suffer a barage of adverts.
Their foresight may have saved Iraq's only ISP. After Baghdad fell to coalition troops on April 9, the Information Ministry was vandalized and set ablaze. Internet cafes were ransacked. Looters ransacked warehouses containing millions of dollars of SCIS computer gear, according to Harif.
Hmmm, one guy takes gear to their house and it's "foresight" while others doing the same are called looters. I suppose it helps that Harif brought enough of it back for things to work. I imagine much of the stolen warehoused computers will be working too now. All around a good deal. People making use of equipment that would have sat in a warehouse forever should not be looked at in the same light as people breaking into hospitals and stealing airconditioning equipment. The fall of a totalitarian government is not easy.
"It is not very safe here today to say all the information," Harif said. ... And Carnivore is Everywhere!