Does anyone really (at the current moment) hold internet advertisers (or any advertisers for that matter) in higher esteem than "port masters" (whatever that is)?
The port master sees you to your slip and makes sure all things are well in the harbor, but I never mentioned such a person.
Advertising that supports content is useful. The first newspapers published in the US were advert funded. Advertising that exists for it's own sake or that is so obtursive that it's a denial of service attack, is evil. Billboards blot the sky to no useful purpose. Pop-up and blinking banners are attempts to force you to look at things you are not interested in. The makers of these blights would like you to group them in with legitimate publishers. Most people do and respect them all equally, even if they consider them one step above a circus barker. I consider them lower than circus barkers and relish them being associated with smut.
Imagine a law against unsolicited comercial email with stiff penalties for those who break it. Yes, you can track down spammers easier than you can file swappers. Nah, way too drastic. Let's just make it impossible to email each other instead with "white lists". S-T-U-P-I-D.
Here's hoping lots of sites don't want to pay the license fee and stop using popups.
It's not just the money, it's who's collecting. Anyone who wants to use a pop up having to bow down before the porn master who dreamed up the sleazy idea? Classic. I hope someone makes a big fuss and that it becomes common knowledge that advertisers are paying porn masters to be able to irritate you. Guilt by association and tribute! Suffer, you dick heads!
people have reached the point where they will view computing with mistrust until security can pretty much be guaranteed
It's wishful thinking to assume M$ DRM will give you any more security than current M$ crap. Going back to the days of dongles is no fix for Lookout and VBA problems.
It's not that people don't trust computers, they don't trust their software but get the two confused. That's easy to fix.
every year Microsoft is urging the hardware vendors to drop the legacy stuff.
And every year some poor dumb company has tried it and failed. The last example I can think of is a little all in one LCD from Gateway. It came with everything the average desktop user could want and it failed big time. Not even corporate types were dumb enough to shell out money for something so inflexible that it will have zero worth in a few years and zero prospects of working.
I'm not sure how this is different from efforts like that and these "appliances" that all failed so hard. Oh yeah, M$ will have their name on it so it will be trusted like winmodems. Best apliance ever. Ha! Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Anyone who wants an all in one, "I don't have to do a thing to it" computer is going to buy a Mac.
Compaq is in a position to lose lots of money? Good look, suckers.
You think it's a good thing. Just wait till you see what kind of picutres people will be sending you for fun. Somewhere around the fifth 1200x1600 "rubber man" you will turn that "feature" off.
Microsoft discovers Voice over IP and makes a microphone that nothing but clippy can use. Oh well, running VoIP without permission from the cable company will be forbidden if it's not already. It's amazing how a few vultures can wreck a good thing.
The prospects of this gloified apliance - zero. If you want a computer that does everything for you, you buy a mac. This computer, locked down, dumbed down and inflexible, is different from the other failed appliances by the things M$ learned from Xbox. It's going to bleed money just like previous appliances and the xbox.
I don't think any of Microsoft's programmers intentionally insert bugs into their shipping products... although... nah, it couldn't be.
It could be, now that M$ thinks of security as a "profit center".
Other than that, they have consistently ignored everyone else's advice about everything from email to security models. What sane person makes an email client that runs as root and automatically executes code sent to it? They were warned and ignored the warnings for whatever reason. There are many instances of pure negligence on Microsoft's part. We have all paid for it too.
These myths were invented for FUD. I've never heard anyone say, "You never have to upgrade" or "You get support forever". It is true that "upgrades" are a fundamentally different thing in the free world than they are in the closed source binary world. It also is true that the support you can get from board posts and google beats out Microsoft.
The summary does not understand the free software model at all. Free software works because people are willing to share their work to get a problem solved. This applies to "Enterprise" software too. The complexities of business planning will be tackled by those doing the planning the same way IT people tackled the problems of networking in the free software world. If sendmail, mozilla, network card drivers, compilers and all the other goodies available under free software don't convince you that accounting problems can be solved in the same way, nothing will. The author is without clue or dishonest.
Because the author did not understand free software, it's not surprising that he did not mention Debian. Though I give my $10/month to the FSF, I've yet to pay more than a few bucks for Debian CDs and apt-get upgrade is indeed a no cost service.
TCO must be lower. I read that 60% of US corporate capital expendatures has been on IT in the last few years. This is unsustainable. The next version of Windoze, which does essentially what the last version did but requires all new PCs is an not an acceptable answer to the failure of the current windoze machines to meet business needs. As Microsoft is unlikely to change, the software companies use will.
I'd call Graham Taylor a shill or dishonest, but that would be rude. It's possible that someone understood the benifits of free software last year and managed to get industry co-operation. It's unlikely that such a person would then advocate patents and refuse to work with established free software groups. It would be outrageous if such a person would be held up by any government agency as representative of free software organizations. That's what shills are for.
Let's see if we can think of a better term rather than simply bitch about the one that was used:
fruadulent
industry represntative
imposter
Potempkin
neophyte
mislead or dishonest (I like this one)
Anyone who's put much thought into the matter knows that patents on numerical algorithms, aka software, are bad for everyone.
Bruce's one page letter, the article you read, is a fine summary. Within it, in two or three paragraphs, he explains that software patents will be used to thwart free software development and restrain competition in software. How's that for a summary of a summary?
Those guys spend months learning how to switch buttons in proceedures trainers. If you don't know exactly where the buttons are and have the reflexes to push them in the right order, you might not have time to punch them. You don't just jump into someone else's capsule and fly it. The language barrier makes it so you can't even figure out what to push. If that capsule was designed to be operated by more than one man, they are lucky they made it back at all.
the button -- which, he joked, was being guarded carefully by Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin. "We don't think we did anything to cause that to happen,"..."They didn't do anything," MSNBC.com was told. "[They] just let the auto system control."
Sure thing, Captian Squiming Hatchblower. "It just blew." Could be, stranger things have happened. Wouldn't you know a software bug would be blamed when something unexpected happens on a capsule manned with one trained cosmonaut and two passengers who might be able to read Russian. Let's see them reproduce the error. Given the same inputs the computer will do the same thing everytime. M$NBC believes it, it must be true!
They walked away, it was a good landing button press or not button press.
Microsoft is well ahead there [microsoft.com]. They have been doing IPv6 stuff for years. Of course you still can't do anything with it and there is no DNS support and nobody seems to have a transition plan worth a damn, but you cannot blame Microsoft.
Sounds just like the "Jounaling filesystem" of NT 3.5. It was there in a half assed way, it did not work and no one used it. Way to be "ahead there" and innovative, M$! No, no one can blame them for that, no sir.
The author says, after 2 weeks of effort and 3 machines, "...the installation procedure is buggy and it might work or might not work for you."
A difficult/buggy install should not hold this software back if it's worth using. I had the same problem with win2k once. Damn thing's fdisk just would not work right. I only wasted two hours on known good hardware before I gave up and installed Red Hat on it. Vendors and OEMs can get the help they need, obviously.
OS/2 users should move down the upgrade train for this one. Those screens shots are beautiful. Nice and clean, ah. Ease of use. Did 1.0 even have Mozilla? That alone would justify the cost for your users. I imagine that this will run on the same old hardware too, whereas windblows whatever will only install on the latest and greatest and you might as well jump to free software at that rate.
Me, I'll just stick with free software that I can fix. Who'da thunk it? "Easy to use software" is not as easy to install as supposedly difficult software. I can get the same good clean looks from OLVWM, but I prefer the beauty of Window Maker. Debian's hardware compatibility is just as good or better, and what other OS can you get to run reasonably on a P90 with 24 MB of RAM these days? Then again, I don't have any OS/2 softare sitting around besides two ancient compilers I got from a dumpster.
Freedom net, Liberty net? Nah, state run stuff that's free as in beer but censorded is not very free. They have different notions of freedom than we do. Come to think of it, these days we have different notions of freedom than we do. Happy Cinco de Mayo, when you can't celebrate liberty you can always drink a beer to someone else's defeat.
These questions about drive mounts made me actually go read the article. Grrr, like tumbling and roatating windows even reasonable drive mounting would make up for the lost power of X, lost money to own it, or the humiliation of "submit" button EULAs. Blah, those idiots will never learn.
M$ mounts still look pathetic. Another poster says you still have the dreaded c:, despite the ability to use other drives as directories. I doubt you can set up a 50 MB root partition and have all go well from there, so intelligent disk management has not yet arived in Redmond. Nor has easy management arived. I count four non obvious interface level navigations and seven mouse click to change a mount. Editing/etc/fstab is trivial by compairison. They still have "My Documents" type stuff like "My Music", undoubtably placed someplace obtuse like "c:/windblows/users/defaultpeon/desktop/my documents/". File navagation? Some things never change.
--I don't mind Debian being Gnu/Linux in concept, but trying to make everyone else say Gnu/blah is just stupid.
KDE is not everyone. They are a company that has benifited extensively from GNU tools and the philosophy behind them. It's not much to ask them and folks like Red Hat to smile at the hand that feeds them. Stallman is intersted in forming and enlarging a community. That won't happen if people grab the tools but forget why they exist. He probably does not care how you are I say things, so long as we have gotten the word. KDE and others are in the best possition to understand and spread that word.
From the description, RMS enjoyed and appreciated the contributions the KDE folks are making and no one got their feathers ruffled.
Time for another job. Anyplace where most people have never heard of GNU and the others roll their eyes when you talk about it is no place to be. This is doubly true of such clueless companies that want to use free software. Rude places like that are doomed to fail. Other top signs you are fucked company:
CEO claims "best year ever" and orders those who made it so to be fired to "build on the best".
Blood money bonuses made up from your former co-worker's salary.
PHB wears an Armani suit or whatever is trendy and too expensive.
Management spins off core business instead of making it profitable.
Management does other stupid stuff that 2/3 of the empoyees think is wrong.
People say rude things about RMS, don't know anything about GNU and cling to their useless win32 CDs saying, "I'm a wintel kinda guy".
Man, I used to really respect RMS. Maybe I was just young and dumb. Yes, GNU has contributed some awesome code to the world, but why the hell does he enjoy going out of his way to be an asshole? The XFree guys aren't telling everyone Linux should be called GNU/Xfreenux. It's sad- RMS must have some big feelings of inadequacy to press the issue so hard and so often. I honestly feel bad for the guy...
You are still stupid, despite your age. There's nothing honest about writing "RMS is an asshole" on a free software news site.
For the benifit of those who might be confused by your sophestry, I can put down a few of your silly arguments. GNU/Linux works without xfree86 and GNU works withoug Linux too but Linux does not work without GNU. In the world of free software, you just can't do without GNU. Trade press that refers to all free software as "Linux" does a disservice to all other free software and is written either by people without a clue or comercial software shills. It's an oversimplification that can be avoided by being specific. I run Debian and Red Hat, two collections of free software based on the GNU project including the popular kernel Linux. I have also run OpenBSD. The tools from each migrate back and forth because all are free. There you go, nothing pretentious about that is there? I can even pronounce Linux like Linus Torvald says it, though I doubt anyone but you really cares.
the older the engineer is, the more likely he's been exposed to UNIX when he was young and working, and the more reluctant he would be willing to learn something new. Windows has only been popular for around 13 years (starting with 3.0 release in 1990)
Bzzzt, wrong. He's a retired Mechanical Engineer with very little Unix exposure. The bulk of his computing experience was converting a few routine flow calculations to BASIC to run under DOS. He took a Numercial Methods class in the 80's when PCs became affordable. They taught him FORTRAN, but he wrote and debugged all the code in BASIC at home then converted it to FORTRAN on a terminal. He also did a little C work, very little. His use of PCs has been continuous, however, and the other OS on the box I fixed up is windoze 98SE.
His interest in Linux was spurred when his other computer, also windoze, quit talking to the internet and performance issues we are all familiar with. Dual boot set up was a sinch and he now prefers the Linux side.
What's truly scary is that you're using that fact as the basis for your argument that free software is more than ready for the desktop. Muahahaha.
Yeah, M$ and their shills should be scared. Linux on the desktop works for all sorts of people.
For all we know, this is some outraged SCO user who's angry at SCO for using Linux. Bet ya a nickle the 138 "zombies" are M$ boxes. It would be hard to find that many working SCO computers tied to the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
The port master sees you to your slip and makes sure all things are well in the harbor, but I never mentioned such a person.
Advertising that supports content is useful. The first newspapers published in the US were advert funded. Advertising that exists for it's own sake or that is so obtursive that it's a denial of service attack, is evil. Billboards blot the sky to no useful purpose. Pop-up and blinking banners are attempts to force you to look at things you are not interested in. The makers of these blights would like you to group them in with legitimate publishers. Most people do and respect them all equally, even if they consider them one step above a circus barker. I consider them lower than circus barkers and relish them being associated with smut.
It all depends on how "trusted" your browser and speakers are. Lo, the true king of slime will collect his share from the porn master.
Imagine a law against unsolicited comercial email with stiff penalties for those who break it. Yes, you can track down spammers easier than you can file swappers. Nah, way too drastic. Let's just make it impossible to email each other instead with "white lists". S-T-U-P-I-D.
It's not just the money, it's who's collecting. Anyone who wants to use a pop up having to bow down before the porn master who dreamed up the sleazy idea? Classic. I hope someone makes a big fuss and that it becomes common knowledge that advertisers are paying porn masters to be able to irritate you. Guilt by association and tribute! Suffer, you dick heads!
It's wishful thinking to assume M$ DRM will give you any more security than current M$ crap. Going back to the days of dongles is no fix for Lookout and VBA problems.
It's not that people don't trust computers, they don't trust their software but get the two confused. That's easy to fix.
And every year some poor dumb company has tried it and failed. The last example I can think of is a little all in one LCD from Gateway. It came with everything the average desktop user could want and it failed big time. Not even corporate types were dumb enough to shell out money for something so inflexible that it will have zero worth in a few years and zero prospects of working.
I'm not sure how this is different from efforts like that and these "appliances" that all failed so hard. Oh yeah, M$ will have their name on it so it will be trusted like winmodems. Best apliance ever. Ha! Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Anyone who wants an all in one, "I don't have to do a thing to it" computer is going to buy a Mac.
Compaq is in a position to lose lots of money? Good look, suckers.
Microsoft discovers Voice over IP and makes a microphone that nothing but clippy can use. Oh well, running VoIP without permission from the cable company will be forbidden if it's not already. It's amazing how a few vultures can wreck a good thing.
The prospects of this gloified apliance - zero. If you want a computer that does everything for you, you buy a mac. This computer, locked down, dumbed down and inflexible, is different from the other failed appliances by the things M$ learned from Xbox. It's going to bleed money just like previous appliances and the xbox.
M$, you are toast.
It could be, now that M$ thinks of security as a "profit center".
Other than that, they have consistently ignored everyone else's advice about everything from email to security models. What sane person makes an email client that runs as root and automatically executes code sent to it? They were warned and ignored the warnings for whatever reason. There are many instances of pure negligence on Microsoft's part. We have all paid for it too.
why boxes at Microsoft were not patched against SQL Slammer. Do they sue themselves, fire the admin or simply replace the servers with free software?
The summary does not understand the free software model at all. Free software works because people are willing to share their work to get a problem solved. This applies to "Enterprise" software too. The complexities of business planning will be tackled by those doing the planning the same way IT people tackled the problems of networking in the free software world. If sendmail, mozilla, network card drivers, compilers and all the other goodies available under free software don't convince you that accounting problems can be solved in the same way, nothing will. The author is without clue or dishonest.
Because the author did not understand free software, it's not surprising that he did not mention Debian. Though I give my $10/month to the FSF, I've yet to pay more than a few bucks for Debian CDs and apt-get upgrade is indeed a no cost service.
TCO must be lower. I read that 60% of US corporate capital expendatures has been on IT in the last few years. This is unsustainable. The next version of Windoze, which does essentially what the last version did but requires all new PCs is an not an acceptable answer to the failure of the current windoze machines to meet business needs. As Microsoft is unlikely to change, the software companies use will.
Let's see if we can think of a better term rather than simply bitch about the one that was used:
Anyone who's put much thought into the matter knows that patents on numerical algorithms, aka software, are bad for everyone.
Bruce's one page letter, the article you read, is a fine summary. Within it, in two or three paragraphs, he explains that software patents will be used to thwart free software development and restrain competition in software. How's that for a summary of a summary?
Those guys spend months learning how to switch buttons in proceedures trainers. If you don't know exactly where the buttons are and have the reflexes to push them in the right order, you might not have time to punch them. You don't just jump into someone else's capsule and fly it. The language barrier makes it so you can't even figure out what to push. If that capsule was designed to be operated by more than one man, they are lucky they made it back at all.
What's Microsoft's excuse?
Sure thing, Captian Squiming Hatchblower. "It just blew." Could be, stranger things have happened. Wouldn't you know a software bug would be blamed when something unexpected happens on a capsule manned with one trained cosmonaut and two passengers who might be able to read Russian. Let's see them reproduce the error. Given the same inputs the computer will do the same thing everytime. M$NBC believes it, it must be true!
They walked away, it was a good landing button press or not button press.
Sounds just like the "Jounaling filesystem" of NT 3.5. It was there in a half assed way, it did not work and no one used it. Way to be "ahead there" and innovative, M$! No, no one can blame them for that, no sir.
A difficult/buggy install should not hold this software back if it's worth using. I had the same problem with win2k once. Damn thing's fdisk just would not work right. I only wasted two hours on known good hardware before I gave up and installed Red Hat on it. Vendors and OEMs can get the help they need, obviously.
OS/2 users should move down the upgrade train for this one. Those screens shots are beautiful. Nice and clean, ah. Ease of use. Did 1.0 even have Mozilla? That alone would justify the cost for your users. I imagine that this will run on the same old hardware too, whereas windblows whatever will only install on the latest and greatest and you might as well jump to free software at that rate.
Me, I'll just stick with free software that I can fix. Who'da thunk it? "Easy to use software" is not as easy to install as supposedly difficult software. I can get the same good clean looks from OLVWM, but I prefer the beauty of Window Maker. Debian's hardware compatibility is just as good or better, and what other OS can you get to run reasonably on a P90 with 24 MB of RAM these days? Then again, I don't have any OS/2 softare sitting around besides two ancient compilers I got from a dumpster.
The naked ones are sane?
Freedom net, Liberty net? Nah, state run stuff that's free as in beer but censorded is not very free. They have different notions of freedom than we do. Come to think of it, these days we have different notions of freedom than we do. Happy Cinco de Mayo, when you can't celebrate liberty you can always drink a beer to someone else's defeat.
M$ mounts still look pathetic. Another poster says you still have the dreaded c:, despite the ability to use other drives as directories. I doubt you can set up a 50 MB root partition and have all go well from there, so intelligent disk management has not yet arived in Redmond. Nor has easy management arived. I count four non obvious interface level navigations and seven mouse click to change a mount. Editing /etc/fstab is trivial by compairison. They still have "My Documents" type stuff like "My Music", undoubtably placed someplace obtuse like "c:/windblows/users/defaultpeon/desktop/my documents/". File navagation? Some things never change.
KDE is not everyone. They are a company that has benifited extensively from GNU tools and the philosophy behind them. It's not much to ask them and folks like Red Hat to smile at the hand that feeds them. Stallman is intersted in forming and enlarging a community. That won't happen if people grab the tools but forget why they exist. He probably does not care how you are I say things, so long as we have gotten the word. KDE and others are in the best possition to understand and spread that word.
From the description, RMS enjoyed and appreciated the contributions the KDE folks are making and no one got their feathers ruffled.
The above are all true stories.
You are still stupid, despite your age. There's nothing honest about writing "RMS is an asshole" on a free software news site.
For the benifit of those who might be confused by your sophestry, I can put down a few of your silly arguments. GNU/Linux works without xfree86 and GNU works withoug Linux too but Linux does not work without GNU. In the world of free software, you just can't do without GNU. Trade press that refers to all free software as "Linux" does a disservice to all other free software and is written either by people without a clue or comercial software shills. It's an oversimplification that can be avoided by being specific. I run Debian and Red Hat, two collections of free software based on the GNU project including the popular kernel Linux. I have also run OpenBSD. The tools from each migrate back and forth because all are free. There you go, nothing pretentious about that is there? I can even pronounce Linux like Linus Torvald says it, though I doubt anyone but you really cares.
Bzzzt, wrong. He's a retired Mechanical Engineer with very little Unix exposure. The bulk of his computing experience was converting a few routine flow calculations to BASIC to run under DOS. He took a Numercial Methods class in the 80's when PCs became affordable. They taught him FORTRAN, but he wrote and debugged all the code in BASIC at home then converted it to FORTRAN on a terminal. He also did a little C work, very little. His use of PCs has been continuous, however, and the other OS on the box I fixed up is windoze 98SE.
His interest in Linux was spurred when his other computer, also windoze, quit talking to the internet and performance issues we are all familiar with. Dual boot set up was a sinch and he now prefers the Linux side.
What's truly scary is that you're using that fact as the basis for your argument that free software is more than ready for the desktop. Muahahaha.
Yeah, M$ and their shills should be scared. Linux on the desktop works for all sorts of people.
For all we know, this is some outraged SCO user who's angry at SCO for using Linux. Bet ya a nickle the 138 "zombies" are M$ boxes. It would be hard to find that many working SCO computers tied to the internet.