...it looks to me like Microsoft was smart enough to use this experience to find and address their shortcomings.
I'm glad to hear that M$ has some sense. My wife and a good friend still use Hotmail. In the last year or so, the service has been degraded and I worried that it would become useless. They limited mailbox size and the service slowed down considerably. The obvious ineficiency of Windows must have been costing them a fortune. It's great that they have enough brains to put BSD back in charge. I hope they were able to locate the previous knowlegeble operators to guide the hoards of GUI button pressing folks that must have been required. Now I know, that no matter how dishonest M$ is, that they have the brains to save themselves a buck and will always be able to provide Hotmail to all my friends who's ISP won't let them run a real mailserver. Rejoice in the practicality of a liar.
Can you tell me just how they fixed any of their wonderful server "products"? Have they made it easier to tell what processes are required for a given task? Have they included secure shells for remote scriptable administration? Have they reduced the footprint from 900MB to some tens of MB? Or is this just Alpo with tap water added to simulate a saucy steak?
Yer living off dog food. It makes you shiny and clever too.
They continue to dominate because there are not reliable, transparent converters.
That's true! Not even new versions of Word are reliable converters of older Word formats. Strange how people continue to abuse themselves this way, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
If they were to adopt a document format where other companies software could edit documents created by Word, there would be little reason to stay with Office.
There's little reason to stay with office as it is, except Fear, Uncertianty and Doubt based on ignorance. Because M$ makes it so difficult to work their goofey word processor and because they continue to say it's so easy, people assume that the rest of the world's word processors are imposible to use. Ha!
Has anyone else noticed that Word produced PDF's are a bitch to print? Recently, I've filled out forms from four Universities. All of the forms that had M$ Word as a generator sploded Ghost script's print routines for a Red Hat 7.3 install. Using Abobe's free beer reader for Linux fixed on of set, but another just did not work until I finally broke down, booted over to M$ and installed the Win98 reader. One set of fonts were listed under document properties, but other fonts were actually used for printing. Errors seemed to have something to do with the Dingbat (can't remember the name now) font set. Has M$ managed to make Portable Document Files non portable? If this is intentional, and that's very Microsoft, Adobe should be pissed.
Microsoft takes orders from no one. Because of this, they will be used by no one.
No, really, figure out what's important. There are only two things I worry about preserving through a fire at home. Pictures and projects. The most important pictures, I give to relatives and people who'd like to look at them. The most important projects can be brought to another location, like your office or a safte deposit box. The best projects are things I'd like to share anyway, so once again publication rules. All the rest of it can go up in smoke.
For me, if it's not worth sharing, it's not worth worrying about. Bills, records, mass produced crap can all be replaced with a reasonable home insurance policy. If you've taken the trouble to present things to others, it's going to be some of your best work. Interestingly enough, publication aids survival.
By your same arguement, I haven't seen the support issues you're describing. Purchasing server grade hardware, server grade operating systems and server grade support, I haven't seen these BSOD's your talking about. Nor do I have any machines (or workflow issues) sitting idle because I can't access Microsoft's code.
I've seen "server grade" stuff BSOD when it was running M$'s "server grade" OS. It was a big shiny multi processor beast from Dell and very beautiful. The extra cost did not buy the company much and, gasp, it worked just like the non "server grade" stuff we all know and use. As Beavis once said, "It's amazing how mass produced objects are nearly identical."
It's all about perception, dude, don't tell me your shit don't stink.
I don't use or recomend shit. My hardware is cheap, my software is free yet it all works great.
And you've missed the point entirely.
I don't think so. You tried to tell me that buggy M$ junk was just as good as free software. Experience indicates otherwise, regardless of the hardware. You also implied that there was little difference between free and non free documentation. Again, that's false for all the reasons outlined in my last post.
Why not a phase aray and low earth orbit satilite system? It might cut down on the launch costs and your ping time. Aim, we don't need no stinking aim, it points itself. Go get it!
We've all encountered Samba, Sendmail, and Kernel panics too. We've encountered varying ways of bringing up Runlevels, frontends that configure stuff, but you don't know WHERE it configures 'em.
I'd have encountered SAMBA if I had any windoze machines, but I don't.
I've got exim instead of sendmail, so I don't really know if there's anything hard about sendmail. Exim is easy to configure and comes very well documented.
Kernel panic? Well, that has happened to me once or twice. Once on an overheating machine. Once on a machine where I screwed up by not knowing how to work lilo. Never on a reasonlable machine with a normal install of Debian or Red Hat. Ever.
In any case, there is no comparing the "problems" you have cited to M$ crap. When a piece of free software does not work there IS something you can do about it. If the man or info page fails you, unlikely, and a google search does not turn up an answer right away, you can always download and read the source code itself. I've never had to do that, ever, becuse man and info generally list where all the configuration files are and those are almost always well documented. What happens when some bogus M$ code pulls up the old blue screen of death? You reboot, look at MSDN, google, and what not. But you can never ever actually fix the problem because only one company sits on the source and you are at their mercy. They get around to it when they get around to it, sometimes that's never and that's why M$ boxes fail so often, are so easy to break into and cost so much to own and run.
Poor pot and kettle, they've been sitting in the smoke of propriatory software so long they can't see the light of day.
The interesting DMCA question is whether an access TPM to a copyrighted price sheet could be circumvented if the only thing extracted was the price data. I actually think the DMCA as written says such access IS illegal but that Congress has no Constutitional authority to pass such a law.
So the DCMA's anticircumvention clause protecting the layout extends to cover the facts contained in the layout from "cirumvention"? Like if I read the prices and typed them then posted them? Or if I built a script that did the same? Or even if I built a script that did the same and used the resulting site to generate ad revenue? How can you apply anti-circumvention protection to something that's not copyrighted to begin with? Sounds like a preposterous extention of layout protection, but you never can tell just how stupid the folks how came up with and held constitutional the DMCA can be.
I remember a time when the source code for some vulnerabilities was disclosed, but with errors. If you didn't know how to fix the error, you couldn't use the vulnerability. This way, it was kept OUT of the hands of script kiddies, but put INTO the hands of those with a clue on how to fix the problem.
Even if that were true, it would not have worked. How long does it take someone to fix the trivial error and post it back? Months? I think not.
I'd be willing to bet 95% of the break-ins on the internet are plain old script kiddies.
Here you are right, and M$ plays right into it. The whole closed software world encourages people to not understand what's going on inside their computer, and makes it impossible to secure even if you do have the skills and time. Worse, with M$'s planned obsolecense practices we all know that the average M$ box is built and rebuilt all the time from ancient "unpatched" CDs. Just ask this obviously self moderated loudmouth for example. So there you have it, a world full of broken and unfixable machines all serving a single company's bottom line at the expense of their owners and the rest of the world.
There was no need to add that payload to the exploit.
If you don't prove it, they will deny it. The ability to erase everything is the threat that all root exploits pose. It's about time the popular press understood the implications. God knows, M$ spends enough money denying the ability and on Astro turfing where people who suggest such things belong to the tin foil hat camp.
I hope this blows all the way up to and beyond CNN. I'm tired of people looking at me like I'm crosseyed when I tell them that IE is full of holes that alow others to look at your files and erase them. M$ can'nt buy the entire mass media forever.
All of these methods require one thing, however. Time. At least several decades warning.
Time is balanced with power. We need the power to get whatever solution where it needs to be in time to make a difference. More power yields less time. It also reduces the radius at which you must operate. With more power, you can make a trajectory difference closer to the sun.
Nuclear power in space is the best solution. Asside from proven rocket designs with higher specific impulses than chemical designs, nuclear can be used to power more exotic propulsion technologies. Where else are you going to get your mega watts? The whole effort should be co-ordinated with a push to colinize and exploit extra-terrestrial resources, and that is best accomplished with the portable power nuclear provides. More is better.
What I find funny is how the author thinks that because Apple doesn't have a DMCA-capable OS, that is going to miss out on the "next big thing".
I read him a little different than you did, it's not the next big thing, it's survival he's worried about. He has realized is that Apple as a creative platform is doomed if the "Content Cartel" has it's way. He understands that everyone loses when content can not be coppied because it perishes and we are all that much poorer in the future. He also tells us the currently proposed means of achieving the goal of copy protection also furthers goals of entrenched content providers by limiting the number of new entrants through propriatory formats, patents and the DCMA's anti-circumvention clause. What he's put together from all of those broad, bad for everyone laws and methods, is very specific bad news for a company like Apple who's market has primarily been the artisians that create in the first place. He has realized that Apple is getting put on the outside of the "copy enabled" world because Apple represents too large a source of likely competition to the Cartel.
It's hypocritical of Apple to wake up now after so many years of feeding the cartel that will eradicate them. For years Apple has been more expensive than other computer platforms because, in part, they were paying licensing fees for the privalidge of creating works of art in propriatory formats. The time to object was long ago when the deviding lines were made between those who could create and those who could not. By pushing its own patents and copyrights, Apple has strengthened the had that now threatens to crush it.
The obvious solution the author overlooked is free software and formats. He does not even mention them as he wallows in the "artist must be paid" logic that inevitably favors the cartel. From the Rosetta stone to VisiCalc, the authors were paid to create. The conditions the authors worked under were determined by the society they lived in. If we seek to screw others and think it's right to do so, we can expect to be screwed. When we seek to exclude, we create the conditions of our own exclusion.
That is the way. Never take away functionality before you have replaced it. Web browsing works better under Linux now than it does under Windows so you can kill that first. Games and all that can stay with the old doze machine, but you would be amazed at how much more stable windoze is when you don't let it see the internet. Rebuild the old box one more time and then let it die as it will. Then you can take your time learning how to do things in Linux like singing dancing and games.
This is how I got myself and my wife off Windoze. We have one windoze computer left and it's blind to the netword. We boot it every now and then to write CDs. We don't miss it, and it's lasted longer than any other windoze PC I've ever built. When we install something and that program breaks another, the blame is clear cut. My computers are stable and do the things we want. You don't need M$ only services.
Please reread Illusion of Spectrum Scarcity before you give the local Bells and a few other select jackasses their telcom monopoly back. Most of the airwaves are empty. If your old TV tunners 50 blank channels don't prove that to you, I'm not sure what will. If you are still unaware of new technology that can fix the problem, please read the above article.
People who invested their money in the Clinto Airwave Auction Scam took a big risk and should reap the consequences. Yeah, it sucks to lose but it happens all day long. Make a promise, keep a promise. Those big fat companies do not deserve a rescue as they stomped on others to get what they have.
Further regulation to protect these ineffient opperators will only preserve the problem. They did not build when the money was good. Now their technology is obsolete, paid for or not, it should be trashed to alow new entrants who will serve us better. That is how a free market works.
The New York Times Article is a troll on it's own, and has to be some kind of AP trash. "Oh the poor little telcos," they cry, "their problem is so hard and they are working so hard to fix it." The quotes about "robust competition" is a particularly bad joke. Clueless BS, all of it. There is no further technical reason to restrict radio transmisions.
Why? So you can compile programs and walk around with them and have access to all the free software goodness you might need. Oh yeah, it also makes sure that you own your handheld rather than donate it to the cause.
But if you are impatient, you could drop by Office Depot and buy an Zaurus today. I got one and like the form factor. I have not used it enough to really comment on it, but the interface is slick and works well enough. I liked my handspring visor's graphiti system, but I'm told that I'll get proficient with my thumbs on that keyboard. Having compact flash and SD interfaces rocks. Work out your program, what have you, on your laptop then drop it into compact flash and it's in your pocket.
One things for sure, I'de wait for a Linux port (if indeed there is none yet) before purchasing one of these. The WinCE and Pocket PC handwriting sucks eggs and the Windowz interface did NOT scale well at all. Hard to use big, impossible to use small, you gotta toss it out.
Microsoft said that their books were too difficult to understand and that they wouldn't let the government have direct access to all of the electronic data, even after a court order on the matter. Does this new breakout of information have something to do with Microsoft being slapped on the wrist by the SEC for accounting irregularities?
Post Enron, everyone's books are being scrutinized, especially companies like M$ where the potential for self dealing to inflate profits is large and employees are compensated with stocks and bonuses. Enron and others were busted, in part, for inflating their revenue streams with "trades" with other companies that hid costs and essentially double counted income. AOL played this game with advertisers and got slapped. Wold Com got busted at this and more serious accounting fraud. Microsoft's secret package deals with computer vendors have been proven predatory and anti-competitive. Some of them might prove to be fraudulent.
I don't trust M$'s statements. Like the difficulty M$ claimed to have seperating their browser from their OS, the book keeping problems were obviously a lie. Given the general level of dishonesty we see from M$, it's doubtful they have told the truth in these recent disclosures. How big are those other losses? How real are their poffits? It's hard to say, but it's very odd that they just keep beating "market expectations" in a down market. Conservative companies are just starting to switch from NT to win2k. Smart ones are dumping M$ altogether. How much of those proffits are "surplusses" from previous years? How much of it is really double and inside dealing? Only time will tell, but Microsoft is dead save bad laws and federal mandate.
Go back 10 years. Microsoft's main revenue drivers in 1992 were uh, Windows 3x and Office 4.3. Arguably Windows had pretty good market share but Office was still losing to Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect.
Ah yes, you are right, M$ has always acted that way. Windows '93 was essentially dumped onto the world using the DOS cash cow to support it. That would be a monopoly rent that was given to them by IBM's patents and stellar reputation for Business Machines. I remember Bill Gates admitting that "Piracy" made his crappy GUI dominant. They were able to leverage all the work put into DOS in their adverts, saying that Windows 3.x was a good bet thanks to all the DOS software out there. From there, a vendor lock was easy and so was the browser war. Today's little server war will be a tougher nut to crack, because M$ has pushed people beyond reasonable expectations and they are abandoning them.
M$ has made it's bed. Can you name one business partner M$ has ever had that does not regret it? The developers left first when it was apparent that no one but M$ can make money under M$. The users are following as they realize M$ software quality has never gotten any better and that it only gets worse as M$ finishes off all "rivals". Oh yeah, they also got wind of Palladium, and all the dirty EULA changes.
Now let's just go back 75 years or so. Remember how Standard Oil used it's monopoly on refining to achieve a monopoly on exloration and retail? Can you tell me how that's different from the hideous vertical monopoly on computing that M$ aims to achieve through Palladium and "trusted computing"? One difference is that the later is simply unAmerican as it will effectivly eliminate your first ammendment right to free speech. It will eliminate your means of uncensored electronic publishing, if they sucseed. Something tells me that they will fail as the world is not full of slaves, despite examples like yourself.
In order to enslave others, we must first enslave ourselves. It's an implicit concept, that if you can extort things from others and think that's OK, you must believe that it's OK for others to extort things from you if they can. The world does not have to be that way, you know.
Now, I know that virtually nobody on Slashdot has a job, or for the most part, even graduated from high school yet, but this *does* have real world applications.... I'd like to get a few for my store. I have PC's up front, all networked, running my POS systems.
Wow, it's been a while since I've worked a crappy retail position, so I did not think of that.
Anything that runs winCE can run free software. Just wait and the exact same hardware will be available with reasonable non propriatory crap on them. I'm sorry to hear that your current set up is such a pain. I advise you to look further than M$ for solutions. There are plenty of fine low footprint systems out there that have nothing to do with M$ and therefore are not a pain to use.
My guess is that MS... caters to people with an average IQ equal to that of a doorknob.
That's the kind of disrespect M$ is known for. They think they are so clever. I predict XBox like losses.
In any event, I think the option of voice communication will bring a whole new dimension to online gaming. It'll be intresting to see how it all plays out.
It might interfere with more important things... While you are screaming, "I've got a MIG at zero, a MIG at zero!" Aviator will type, "Shut up and die," and MIG will silently frag you before you can lift your right arm. With cable modem operators continuing to crimp their lines down to DSL and below, do you really want to waste your bandwith like that?
The choice will be:
Listen to a bunch of pussies.
Frag a bunch of pussies.
Change federal law to bring real competition back to high speed ISPs
It's hard to tell what X-Box players will do, but it's not going to be the third option.
Is Linux being used by goverments and large clients as a "bargaining chip" to gain consessions from M$?
Sure they do, how else do you think the US DoJ put to gether such a stunning setlement? Just think of all the "consessions" Japan will be able to wring with this. They might get to run their software as they please, look at snapshots of M$ source code, modify that code and share their modifications, Errr, wait a minute!
Ever thought that people elsewhere in the world would just have noticed that M$ is unstable, insecure, the EULA says they can look at your data and upload any old program they chose, and costs load of money too? They might have also noticed this little thing called free software that works better. Hmmmm, even M$'s own survey showed that people around the world both know about and think well of free software.
The damb cracked two years ago, what you are seeing now are chunks of M$ junk washed away in the flood. M$ is not dying, they are dead and don't know it. The fools are still openly planning stupid junk like Paladium, DRM and in general proving everyone's most paranoid dream about their intentions to be a underestimate. Germany, Japan, the EU, India, Wall Street, Bankers, IBM all have something in common.
...I'm surprised how much an afternoon hobby of some of us cost that company.
What cost? Bribes are always made with the expectation of greater returns. In any case M$ would not have a thing to worry about making them if they spent their research dollars on QC instead of stupid schemes to own all the world's computers and the information on them. If they did that, perhaps their "products" could compete with your hobby. Such is life, that greedy people never do well in the long run. As it is, they have ruined their reputation and this is what will cost them.
Wouldn't this be a problem if you had 2 groups of people doing this independently within radio range of each other? How unlikely is this in an urban area?
Too unlikely, I'm afraid. I'd love to chat with someone else setting a network of these babies up. We'd both gain much more than we'd lose by sharing resources.
The flames and insults I get for being a newbie are incredible.
I agree. You should see some of the flames I get posting here, except they are all from Microturds and others who have nothing better to do than troll slashdot. Those IRC twerps are nobodies. Copetent people ignore trolls and do their best to help out the ignorant. Don't let them make you run screaming into Bill Gates' waiting embrace.
I keep seeing Photoshop mentioned. I've yet to use all the features the GIMP has. Have you tried it? You might look into the win32 version of it the next time you feel compelled to buy an new photoshop. The authors don't claim it's a replacement for photoshop, but it does what I need.
Outlook is huge and I'm sorry that you have to use it. My little Handspring Visor showed me how many useful features Outlook is missing despite it's size.
I especially liked the section on retained rights like:
1. Authors/employers retain all proprietary rights in any process, procedure, or article of manufacture described in the Work.
4. In the case of a Work performed under a U.S. Government contract or grant, the IEEE recognizes that the U.S. Government has royalty-free permission to reproduce all or portions of the Work, and to authorize others to do so, for official U.S. Government purposes only, if the contract/grant so requires.
6. Although authors are permitted to re-use all or portions of the Work in other works, this does not include granting third-party requests for reprinting, republishing, or other types of re-use. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office must handle all such third-party requests.
How can these terms be used to keep you from publishing your work, as distinct from the formated work, in other papers? It looks like you still own your work, and may quote it verbatim. Am I missing something there? Why do they encourage folks to publish themselves on the web? I know that other journals and groups do try to keep you from publishing elsewhere. Do they all use the same language as seen in the IEEE form?
In the end, I have to admit that copyright transfer is a strange way of granting someone permision to publish your article and the potential for abuse is large.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad to hear that M$ has some sense. My wife and a good friend still use Hotmail. In the last year or so, the service has been degraded and I worried that it would become useless. They limited mailbox size and the service slowed down considerably. The obvious ineficiency of Windows must have been costing them a fortune. It's great that they have enough brains to put BSD back in charge. I hope they were able to locate the previous knowlegeble operators to guide the hoards of GUI button pressing folks that must have been required. Now I know, that no matter how dishonest M$ is, that they have the brains to save themselves a buck and will always be able to provide Hotmail to all my friends who's ISP won't let them run a real mailserver. Rejoice in the practicality of a liar.
Can you tell me just how they fixed any of their wonderful server "products"? Have they made it easier to tell what processes are required for a given task? Have they included secure shells for remote scriptable administration? Have they reduced the footprint from 900MB to some tens of MB? Or is this just Alpo with tap water added to simulate a saucy steak?
Yer living off dog food. It makes you shiny and clever too.
That's true! Not even new versions of Word are reliable converters of older Word formats. Strange how people continue to abuse themselves this way, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
If they were to adopt a document format where other companies software could edit documents created by Word, there would be little reason to stay with Office.
There's little reason to stay with office as it is, except Fear, Uncertianty and Doubt based on ignorance. Because M$ makes it so difficult to work their goofey word processor and because they continue to say it's so easy, people assume that the rest of the world's word processors are imposible to use. Ha!
Has anyone else noticed that Word produced PDF's are a bitch to print? Recently, I've filled out forms from four Universities. All of the forms that had M$ Word as a generator sploded Ghost script's print routines for a Red Hat 7.3 install. Using Abobe's free beer reader for Linux fixed on of set, but another just did not work until I finally broke down, booted over to M$ and installed the Win98 reader. One set of fonts were listed under document properties, but other fonts were actually used for printing. Errors seemed to have something to do with the Dingbat (can't remember the name now) font set. Has M$ managed to make Portable Document Files non portable? If this is intentional, and that's very Microsoft, Adobe should be pissed.
Microsoft takes orders from no one. Because of this, they will be used by no one.
For me, if it's not worth sharing, it's not worth worrying about. Bills, records, mass produced crap can all be replaced with a reasonable home insurance policy. If you've taken the trouble to present things to others, it's going to be some of your best work. Interestingly enough, publication aids survival.
I've seen "server grade" stuff BSOD when it was running M$'s "server grade" OS. It was a big shiny multi processor beast from Dell and very beautiful. The extra cost did not buy the company much and, gasp, it worked just like the non "server grade" stuff we all know and use. As Beavis once said, "It's amazing how mass produced objects are nearly identical."
It's all about perception, dude, don't tell me your shit don't stink.
I don't use or recomend shit. My hardware is cheap, my software is free yet it all works great.
And you've missed the point entirely.
I don't think so. You tried to tell me that buggy M$ junk was just as good as free software. Experience indicates otherwise, regardless of the hardware. You also implied that there was little difference between free and non free documentation. Again, that's false for all the reasons outlined in my last post.
Then make me a foe. :P
You will have to be uglier than that.
Why not a phase aray and low earth orbit satilite system? It might cut down on the launch costs and your ping time. Aim, we don't need no stinking aim, it points itself. Go get it!
I'd have encountered SAMBA if I had any windoze machines, but I don't.
I've got exim instead of sendmail, so I don't really know if there's anything hard about sendmail. Exim is easy to configure and comes very well documented.
Kernel panic? Well, that has happened to me once or twice. Once on an overheating machine. Once on a machine where I screwed up by not knowing how to work lilo. Never on a reasonlable machine with a normal install of Debian or Red Hat. Ever.
In any case, there is no comparing the "problems" you have cited to M$ crap. When a piece of free software does not work there IS something you can do about it. If the man or info page fails you, unlikely, and a google search does not turn up an answer right away, you can always download and read the source code itself. I've never had to do that, ever, becuse man and info generally list where all the configuration files are and those are almost always well documented. What happens when some bogus M$ code pulls up the old blue screen of death? You reboot, look at MSDN, google, and what not. But you can never ever actually fix the problem because only one company sits on the source and you are at their mercy. They get around to it when they get around to it, sometimes that's never and that's why M$ boxes fail so often, are so easy to break into and cost so much to own and run.
Poor pot and kettle, they've been sitting in the smoke of propriatory software so long they can't see the light of day.
So the DCMA's anticircumvention clause protecting the layout extends to cover the facts contained in the layout from "cirumvention"? Like if I read the prices and typed them then posted them? Or if I built a script that did the same? Or even if I built a script that did the same and used the resulting site to generate ad revenue? How can you apply anti-circumvention protection to something that's not copyrighted to begin with? Sounds like a preposterous extention of layout protection, but you never can tell just how stupid the folks how came up with and held constitutional the DMCA can be.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Meds must be one of those IE only things we are all beter off without.
Even if that were true, it would not have worked. How long does it take someone to fix the trivial error and post it back? Months? I think not.
I'd be willing to bet 95% of the break-ins on the internet are plain old script kiddies.
Here you are right, and M$ plays right into it. The whole closed software world encourages people to not understand what's going on inside their computer, and makes it impossible to secure even if you do have the skills and time. Worse, with M$'s planned obsolecense practices we all know that the average M$ box is built and rebuilt all the time from ancient "unpatched" CDs. Just ask this obviously self moderated loudmouth for example. So there you have it, a world full of broken and unfixable machines all serving a single company's bottom line at the expense of their owners and the rest of the world.
If you don't prove it, they will deny it. The ability to erase everything is the threat that all root exploits pose. It's about time the popular press understood the implications. God knows, M$ spends enough money denying the ability and on Astro turfing where people who suggest such things belong to the tin foil hat camp.
I hope this blows all the way up to and beyond CNN. I'm tired of people looking at me like I'm crosseyed when I tell them that IE is full of holes that alow others to look at your files and erase them. M$ can'nt buy the entire mass media forever.
All of these methods require one thing, however. Time. At least several decades warning.
Time is balanced with power. We need the power to get whatever solution where it needs to be in time to make a difference. More power yields less time. It also reduces the radius at which you must operate. With more power, you can make a trajectory difference closer to the sun.
Nuclear power in space is the best solution. Asside from proven rocket designs with higher specific impulses than chemical designs, nuclear can be used to power more exotic propulsion technologies. Where else are you going to get your mega watts? The whole effort should be co-ordinated with a push to colinize and exploit extra-terrestrial resources, and that is best accomplished with the portable power nuclear provides. More is better.
I read him a little different than you did, it's not the next big thing, it's survival he's worried about. He has realized is that Apple as a creative platform is doomed if the "Content Cartel" has it's way. He understands that everyone loses when content can not be coppied because it perishes and we are all that much poorer in the future. He also tells us the currently proposed means of achieving the goal of copy protection also furthers goals of entrenched content providers by limiting the number of new entrants through propriatory formats, patents and the DCMA's anti-circumvention clause. What he's put together from all of those broad, bad for everyone laws and methods, is very specific bad news for a company like Apple who's market has primarily been the artisians that create in the first place. He has realized that Apple is getting put on the outside of the "copy enabled" world because Apple represents too large a source of likely competition to the Cartel.
It's hypocritical of Apple to wake up now after so many years of feeding the cartel that will eradicate them. For years Apple has been more expensive than other computer platforms because, in part, they were paying licensing fees for the privalidge of creating works of art in propriatory formats. The time to object was long ago when the deviding lines were made between those who could create and those who could not. By pushing its own patents and copyrights, Apple has strengthened the had that now threatens to crush it.
The obvious solution the author overlooked is free software and formats. He does not even mention them as he wallows in the "artist must be paid" logic that inevitably favors the cartel. From the Rosetta stone to VisiCalc, the authors were paid to create. The conditions the authors worked under were determined by the society they lived in. If we seek to screw others and think it's right to do so, we can expect to be screwed. When we seek to exclude, we create the conditions of our own exclusion.
That is the way. Never take away functionality before you have replaced it. Web browsing works better under Linux now than it does under Windows so you can kill that first. Games and all that can stay with the old doze machine, but you would be amazed at how much more stable windoze is when you don't let it see the internet. Rebuild the old box one more time and then let it die as it will. Then you can take your time learning how to do things in Linux like singing dancing and games.
This is how I got myself and my wife off Windoze. We have one windoze computer left and it's blind to the netword. We boot it every now and then to write CDs. We don't miss it, and it's lasted longer than any other windoze PC I've ever built. When we install something and that program breaks another, the blame is clear cut. My computers are stable and do the things we want. You don't need M$ only services.
People who invested their money in the Clinto Airwave Auction Scam took a big risk and should reap the consequences. Yeah, it sucks to lose but it happens all day long. Make a promise, keep a promise. Those big fat companies do not deserve a rescue as they stomped on others to get what they have.
Further regulation to protect these ineffient opperators will only preserve the problem. They did not build when the money was good. Now their technology is obsolete, paid for or not, it should be trashed to alow new entrants who will serve us better. That is how a free market works.
The New York Times Article is a troll on it's own, and has to be some kind of AP trash. "Oh the poor little telcos," they cry, "their problem is so hard and they are working so hard to fix it." The quotes about "robust competition" is a particularly bad joke. Clueless BS, all of it. There is no further technical reason to restrict radio transmisions.
Why? So you can compile programs and walk around with them and have access to all the free software goodness you might need. Oh yeah, it also makes sure that you own your handheld rather than donate it to the cause.
But if you are impatient, you could drop by Office Depot and buy an Zaurus today. I got one and like the form factor. I have not used it enough to really comment on it, but the interface is slick and works well enough. I liked my handspring visor's graphiti system, but I'm told that I'll get proficient with my thumbs on that keyboard. Having compact flash and SD interfaces rocks. Work out your program, what have you, on your laptop then drop it into compact flash and it's in your pocket.
One things for sure, I'de wait for a Linux port (if indeed there is none yet) before purchasing one of these. The WinCE and Pocket PC handwriting sucks eggs and the Windowz interface did NOT scale well at all. Hard to use big, impossible to use small, you gotta toss it out.
Does this new breakout of information have something to do with Microsoft being slapped on the wrist by the SEC for accounting irregularities?
Post Enron, everyone's books are being scrutinized, especially companies like M$ where the potential for self dealing to inflate profits is large and employees are compensated with stocks and bonuses. Enron and others were busted, in part, for inflating their revenue streams with "trades" with other companies that hid costs and essentially double counted income. AOL played this game with advertisers and got slapped. Wold Com got busted at this and more serious accounting fraud. Microsoft's secret package deals with computer vendors have been proven predatory and anti-competitive. Some of them might prove to be fraudulent.
I don't trust M$'s statements. Like the difficulty M$ claimed to have seperating their browser from their OS, the book keeping problems were obviously a lie. Given the general level of dishonesty we see from M$, it's doubtful they have told the truth in these recent disclosures. How big are those other losses? How real are their poffits? It's hard to say, but it's very odd that they just keep beating "market expectations" in a down market. Conservative companies are just starting to switch from NT to win2k. Smart ones are dumping M$ altogether. How much of those proffits are "surplusses" from previous years? How much of it is really double and inside dealing? Only time will tell, but Microsoft is dead save bad laws and federal mandate.
Ah yes, you are right, M$ has always acted that way. Windows '93 was essentially dumped onto the world using the DOS cash cow to support it. That would be a monopoly rent that was given to them by IBM's patents and stellar reputation for Business Machines. I remember Bill Gates admitting that "Piracy" made his crappy GUI dominant. They were able to leverage all the work put into DOS in their adverts, saying that Windows 3.x was a good bet thanks to all the DOS software out there. From there, a vendor lock was easy and so was the browser war. Today's little server war will be a tougher nut to crack, because M$ has pushed people beyond reasonable expectations and they are abandoning them.
M$ has made it's bed. Can you name one business partner M$ has ever had that does not regret it? The developers left first when it was apparent that no one but M$ can make money under M$. The users are following as they realize M$ software quality has never gotten any better and that it only gets worse as M$ finishes off all "rivals". Oh yeah, they also got wind of Palladium, and all the dirty EULA changes.
Now let's just go back 75 years or so. Remember how Standard Oil used it's monopoly on refining to achieve a monopoly on exloration and retail? Can you tell me how that's different from the hideous vertical monopoly on computing that M$ aims to achieve through Palladium and "trusted computing"? One difference is that the later is simply unAmerican as it will effectivly eliminate your first ammendment right to free speech. It will eliminate your means of uncensored electronic publishing, if they sucseed. Something tells me that they will fail as the world is not full of slaves, despite examples like yourself.
In order to enslave others, we must first enslave ourselves. It's an implicit concept, that if you can extort things from others and think that's OK, you must believe that it's OK for others to extort things from you if they can. The world does not have to be that way, you know.
Wow, it's been a while since I've worked a crappy retail position, so I did not think of that.
Anything that runs winCE can run free software. Just wait and the exact same hardware will be available with reasonable non propriatory crap on them. I'm sorry to hear that your current set up is such a pain. I advise you to look further than M$ for solutions. There are plenty of fine low footprint systems out there that have nothing to do with M$ and therefore are not a pain to use.
My guess is that MS ... caters to people with an average IQ equal to that of a doorknob.
That's the kind of disrespect M$ is known for. They think they are so clever. I predict XBox like losses.
Did you just say, "I will work for food," or "Freshdirect puts food on my table."?
It might interfere with more important things ... While you are screaming, "I've got a MIG at zero, a MIG at zero!" Aviator will type, "Shut up and die," and MIG will silently frag you before you can lift your right arm. With cable modem operators continuing to crimp their lines down to DSL and below, do you really want to waste your bandwith like that?
It's hard to tell what X-Box players will do, but it's not going to be the third option.
from M$?
Sure they do, how else do you think the US DoJ put to gether such a stunning setlement? Just think of all the "consessions" Japan will be able to wring with this. They might get to run their software as they please, look at snapshots of M$ source code, modify that code and share their modifications, Errr, wait a minute!
Ever thought that people elsewhere in the world would just have noticed that M$ is unstable, insecure, the EULA says they can look at your data and upload any old program they chose, and costs load of money too? They might have also noticed this little thing called free software that works better. Hmmmm, even M$'s own survey showed that people around the world both know about and think well of free software.
The damb cracked two years ago, what you are seeing now are chunks of M$ junk washed away in the flood. M$ is not dying, they are dead and don't know it. The fools are still openly planning stupid junk like Paladium, DRM and in general proving everyone's most paranoid dream about their intentions to be a underestimate. Germany, Japan, the EU, India, Wall Street, Bankers, IBM all have something in common.
What cost? Bribes are always made with the expectation of greater returns. In any case M$ would not have a thing to worry about making them if they spent their research dollars on QC instead of stupid schemes to own all the world's computers and the information on them. If they did that, perhaps their "products" could compete with your hobby. Such is life, that greedy people never do well in the long run. As it is, they have ruined their reputation and this is what will cost them.
Sianaura, Bill.
Too unlikely, I'm afraid. I'd love to chat with someone else setting a network of these babies up. We'd both gain much more than we'd lose by sharing resources.
I agree. You should see some of the flames I get posting here, except they are all from Microturds and others who have nothing better to do than troll slashdot. Those IRC twerps are nobodies. Copetent people ignore trolls and do their best to help out the ignorant. Don't let them make you run screaming into Bill Gates' waiting embrace.
I keep seeing Photoshop mentioned. I've yet to use all the features the GIMP has. Have you tried it? You might look into the win32 version of it the next time you feel compelled to buy an new photoshop. The authors don't claim it's a replacement for photoshop, but it does what I need.
Outlook is huge and I'm sorry that you have to use it. My little Handspring Visor showed me how many useful features Outlook is missing despite it's size.
1. Authors/employers retain all proprietary rights in any process, procedure, or article of manufacture described in the Work.
4. In the case of a Work performed under a U.S. Government contract or grant, the IEEE recognizes that the U.S. Government has royalty-free permission to reproduce all or portions of the Work, and to authorize others to do so, for official U.S. Government purposes only, if the contract/grant so requires.
6. Although authors are permitted to re-use all or portions of the Work in other works, this does not include granting third-party requests for reprinting, republishing, or other types of re-use. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office must handle all such third-party requests.
How can these terms be used to keep you from publishing your work, as distinct from the formated work, in other papers? It looks like you still own your work, and may quote it verbatim. Am I missing something there? Why do they encourage folks to publish themselves on the web? I know that other journals and groups do try to keep you from publishing elsewhere. Do they all use the same language as seen in the IEEE form?
In the end, I have to admit that copyright transfer is a strange way of granting someone permision to publish your article and the potential for abuse is large.